President Joe Biden's foreign policies have been atrocious, particularly with regard to Iran, and while Biden is certainly responsible for his failed policies, there is another who also shoulders a great deal of blame -- National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
Now, following a misguided prisoner exchange deal with Iran and the Iran-backed Hamas attacks on Israel, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is calling for the "immediate removal" and resignation of Sullivan from his influential post in Biden's White House, according to Breitbart.
On Friday, Sen. Blackburn sent a letter to President Biden "to demand the immediate removal of Jake Sullivan as your National Security Advisor. Mr. Sullivan has routinely misled the entire government about the status of security threats around the world."
She noted how just about a week prior to the horrific Hamas terror attacks in Israel, Sullivan had essentially bragged about how "the Middle East is quieter today than it has been in two decades" -- only for that claim to be grievously disproven in short order.
"Sullivan has been dead wrong on how to engage with Iran since his first day as National Security Advisor. His policies of appeasement toward Iran have only emboldened the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism," Blackburn continued and pointed out how Sullivan had also been intimately involved in the failed 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
She accused Sullivan of acting to "reinstitute many of the mistakes from the failed" deal and wrote, "Easing sanctions against Iran and refusing to enforce others is not an effective solution, and this attack is clear evidence of that fact."
"Sullivan’s deleterious mistakes with respect to Iran and Iran-backed Hamas only build on his earlier involvement in the administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. There, we stood by and watched the Taliban take over the country in less than two weeks," Blackburn added. "We cannot have someone with his notable history of poor decision-making, and lack of critical insights, as the most senior advisor to the President on our nation’s security matters. Continuing to do so is misguided."
"America is better than a feckless foreign policy that emboldens terrorists and rogue regimes," Sen. Blackburn told Breitbart. "We have been gravely misled by ‘experts’ who have been dead wrong, especially on Middle East policy. It’s time to clean shop -- starting with Jake Sullivan."
In a post to social media to share that Breitbart report, the senator wrote, "Jake Sullivan has been a foreign policy disaster. He botched the Afghanistan withdrawal, was involved in the failed Iran nuclear deal, and has eased sanctions on Iran while not enforcing others. I am calling for his immediate removal."
The Tennessee conservative also spoke to Fox News about her demand for Sullivan to resign from his National Security Adviser role, and said bluntly, "He has not served this country or the president well, and I think it is time for him to go."
"When you look at what happened with the first Iran deal, when you look at what has happened with the second Iran deal, when you look at the easing of sanctions that has allowed Iran to up their oil sales," Blackburn added, "the advice that he has given the president has not served the American people or our security well."
As for the current lack of any direct evidence linking Iran to the Hamas attacks on Israel, Sen. Blackburn said, "What we know is that Iran is the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism. What we know is that Iran uses their proxies, and they supply upwards of 90% of the budget of Hamas and Hezbollah. Those are things that we know."
"We know that Iran, the ayatollah, came out and said that getting rid of Israel -- I'm paraphrasing, of course -- that this was important to their initiatives, and they have said many times that their number one target was Israel," the senator noted and also called for the $6 billion in sanctioned Iranian funds that were unfrozen as part of a prisoner swap to be immediately refrozen and denied to Iran, given how money is fungible and those funds will allow Iran to support even more terrorism and regional unrest.
While it seems highly doubtful that President Biden will listen to Sen. Blackburn and fire or force the resignation of Sullivan as his key adviser, it is something that needs to be done, and we can only hope that Biden will receive a similar message in that regard from other voices that he is more amenable to listening to.
