Probes uncomfortable questions ... Reading Ahmed’s book, you get the sense that there was something grimly inevitable about Biden’s support for genocide ... Both chilling and familiar ... Ahmed provides a particularly effective account of the administration’s failure to dislodge Israel’s systematic restrictions on food, medicine, and other aid.
In his indispensable new book, Crossing the Red Line, the journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed shows how we got here ... Offers a glimpse into just how entangled the Biden White House was with lobbyists and donors who wanted to ensure that Israel enjoyed a free hand ... Captures the absurdity of American officials who typically comported themselves with superpower swagger.
A deeply reported account of White House and State Department decision-making ... Where the book falls slightly short is in its reluctance to explicitly prescribe legal or political accountability ... Nevertheless, Crossing the Red Line offers a vital, sobering diagnostic of how American power operates behind closed doors ... Ahmed is all about showing and not telling. But what he shows to us throughout this book is that liberal hand-wringing, equivocation, and performative self-recrimination in practice functioned as a filibuster so Israel could do their dirty work.
Distinguishes itself among its peers by relying on extensive interviews with people who directly participated in or witnessed the U.S. policy process ... Offers a much-needed performance review of several foreign policy elites intent on returning to power, making it especially timely ... A remarkable, first-of-its-kind account of some of the greatest moral failures in recent U.S. foreign policy ... Ahmed does not shy away from identifying trends or drawing critical conclusions, yet his journalistic discipline will make the book difficult for even Washington power players to ignore.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed has been one of the most well-sourced journalists documenting this process ... Crossing the Red Line presents itself as a comprehensive account of the United States' involvement in the war. But it falls short of its potential. Like many reporters immersed in a specific issue, Ahmed sometimes misses the forest for the trees.
A withering account of the Biden administration’s response to the war in Gaza ... The author depicts the administration’s approach as both inhumane—with some officials overtly dismissive of Palestinian death tolls—and shockingly inept ... It's a highly incriminating report.
Ahmed’s robustly reported first book scrutinizes the Biden administration’s response to the war in Gaza ... A detailed, damning assessment of President Biden’s response to the war in Gaza.
