For the latest examples, look at where two of the most disastrous foreign policy officials from the Biden administration just landed, write Edward Ahmed Mitchell and Ismail Allison.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan conferring with President Joe Biden in March 2023 aboard Air Force One. (White House/ Adam Schultz)
By Edward Ahmed Mitchell and Ismail Allison
Common Dreams
If a worker consistently and completely fails at a job, he or she should not receive a promotion, a pay raise, or a pat on the back. Sooner or later, that worker should receive a termination notice.
This is especially true of workers who engage in unethical behavior on the job. Almost any worker who violates office rules, defrauds their employer, or hurts their customers risks not only termination, but potential lawsuits and criminal charges.
Yet a small sector of workers in the U.S. do not face such consequences for such mistakes or misconduct on the job. Some people, no matter how badly they fail at their job or how many disasters they create on their job, can keep their positions or even move on to even better jobs.
Who are these special people who can “fail up” again and again?
Outgoing White House officials.
No matter how disastrously they perform in office, departing White House officials from any administration can usually find cushy new jobs at lobbying outfits, hedge funds, media outlets, or major colleges and universities.
For the latest example of this pattern, look no further than where two of the most prominent and disastrous foreign policy officials from the Biden administration just landed.
President Biden’s former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his former National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk, left the White House when the Trump administration took over in January. Since then, both Sullivan and McGurk have obtained prestigious positions at some of America’s most respected universities.
Without any hint of irony, the Harvard Kennedy School recently appointed Sullivan to serve as its first-ever “Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order.” He has also just been appointed a senior fellow at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.
Meanwhile, McGurk joined the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the end of last month as a senior fellow (he also, predictably, joined a hedge fund).
In a moral and rational society, neither Sullivan nor McGurk would be able to land such jobs after leaving behind a trail of death and destruction stretching halfway around the world.
The Withdrawal From Afghanistan
Take Sullivan. He personally spent months presiding over planning for the U.S. military’s phased troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Remember how well that ended? Vietnam-like images of U.S. diplomats scrambling to evacuate the embassy. Panicking Afghans overwhelming U.S. military bases and falling off of airplanes. The killing of 13 American soldiers and hundreds of Afghans at Abbey Gate.
U.S. soldiers carrying the remains of fellow service members killed in the Kabul airport attack at Abbey Gate, Aug. 27, 2021. (Mark Andries/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
The Pentagon, which often reported to President Joe Biden through Sullivan, capped the Afghan withdrawal disaster off by launching a drone strike on a supposed ISIS car bomber who turned out to be a well-known humanitarian aid worker returning home to his family. The attack killed 10 civilians, including children who were outside and visible to drone operators when they fired on them. Under Sullivan’s leadership, no one faced any accountability for this war crime.
Ensuring War Crimes in Gaza
Both Sullivan and McGurk also played critical roles in ensuring U.S. financial, military and diplomatic support for the Israeli government’s war crimes against the people of Gaza.
When asked in 2023 if Israel’s targeting of civilian infrastructure in Gaza constituted a war crime, Sullivan attributed such reports to the “fog of war.”
In November 2023, when the Israeli government was carrying out the defense minister’s pledge to block all food, fuel, water to everyone in Gaza because they were fighting “human animals,” McGurk endorsed the illegal collective punishment of an entire civilian population by saying that if all the hostages were released, humanitarian aid would be allowed in.
According to reporting by The Atlantic, McGurk would push back against colleagues concerned by civilian casualties in Gaza by “invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration,” an operation that cost the lives of 9,000 Iraqi civilians.
Biden conferring with McGurk in the Oval Office on Oct. 10, 2023. (White House/Adam Schultz)
During a May 2024 press briefing, Sullivan denied that what was going on in Gaza was a genocide and in 2025 he went on to preposterously say that Biden’s policies saved lives in Gaza.
In addition to their rhetorical support for war crimes in Gaza, Sullivan and McGurk helped develop and execute the policy that led to massive arms shipments to the Netanyahu government.
In April 2024, the Biden administration approved a shipment of $17 billion in unconditional military aid to the Israeli government. The administration also approved a shipment of over $20 million worth of fighter jets and other military equipment in August 2024. In one of their final acts, the administration approved an $8 billion dollar arms deal with Israel in January 2025.
By overseeing arms shipments to the Israeli government long after it was well-established that American weapons had been used in the commission of war crimes by Israeli forces, Sullivan and McGurk brazenly violated federal laws, including the Leahy Law, Section 6201, and Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act.
To be very clear, McGurk and Sullivan were not civil servants carrying out orders. They were political appointees who developed, advocated, and executed disastrous, deadly and illegal decisions.
Harvard and the University of New Hampshire’s decisions to reward McGurk and Sullivan with prestigious appointments represent the worst example of failing up. The appointments also show a callous, arguably racist disregard for the countless Palestinian Americans whose family members were victims of the White House’s policies.
Everyone knows that if these two officials had enabled the slaughter of 40,000 blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans instead of 40,000 mostly Muslim people of color, Harvard and UNH would never hire them.
Starting with Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, it’s time for White House officials to face the same treatment that most other Americans would face for sparking disasters on the job.
Edward Ahmed Mitchell is a civil rights attorney who serves as the national deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States.
Ismail Allison serves as Communications Coordinator at Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Ah, yes. Job security through MICIMATT. The Rs tend to go for the MICI part and the Ds for MATT. But since the neolibs and neocons have become openly allied, reciprocity in employment for elites should now be expected across the letter spectrum.
Great for them. For the rest of the U.S. and the world, not so much. Though of course there will always be opportunities for maids, guards, and cannon fodder.
“If a worker consistently and completely fails at a job, he or she should not receive a promotion, a pay raise, or a pat on the back. Sooner or later, that worker should receive a termination notice.”
Indeed. And if a worker consistently and completely succeeds in meeting the needs and desires of the owners of the country (not to be mistaken with the “rabble” who work for the company or buy its products), do they not then get promoted and asked to teach the next generation of “leaders” how to succeed as they did? I submit that the two persons mentioned in the article were very very successful in delivering results exactly as the true owners of our democratic republic desired in their tenures.
If we survive long enough for the war crimes tribunals to start, “I was just doing my job” will not save these people’s hides. Both red and blue. I hope I live to witness it. The universities will not escape either. Nor will the corporate owned press. Karma is a tough cookie.
It’s maddening to see someone like Sullivan be handed a position at Harvard or any University. He, along with Blinken and Nuland, should be castigated from society instead of glorified. Washington DC has been in moral decline for over 3 decades, and there is no indication that a course reversal is coming.
Why? What do you think Harvard is and does?
Well, I guess we now know why the quality of life in the collective West continues to decline year after year. It’s following the quality of the Western leadership class. It’s exactly the same in Europe. And a quick glance at Canada, the UK and Australia shows the same level of leader competence, none. Perhaps this banality arises from a culture based on the mythology of exceptionalism. Look how well that is working in Israel. If the East is rising and the West sinking, this is certainly one reason why.
“Legends in their own minds”; “the best and the brightest” have led us into one disastrous forever war after another from Vietnam, through the idiot wars of the Middle East and Ukraine, and now to the nadir of humanity with a war of genocide in Gaza. Exceptionals in the lead in each case. It seems that that being exceptional in the US and the collective West means being exceptionally bad, and being rewarded for it. BTW, Victoria Nuland is now a professor at Columbia University. The rot starts with the educational system.
Ahh! My first reaction to these illustrious appointments. Zionists!The fraternity!
I was not aware of Sullivan’s involvement in the Afghanistan withdrawal, but I would still place most of the blame for the debacle on the U.S. Army generals who had actual command over the entire process.
Nothing about the mountains of bodies Sullivan sent into a Ukrainian meat grinder to weaken Russia? Or the US-directed strikes on Russia that could have resulted in a nuclear exchange? Sullivan and Blinken together brought the world closer to armageddon than anyone in history. I’m getting tired of people letting nuclear brinksmanship off the hook just because the behavior hasn’t been codified as a crime.
A demented President (Biden) playing with WWIII, along with his advisors, for four years in Ukraine and continuing the horror in Gaza
lead to the rational decision to swap him out as soon as possible with a dictator wanna be, and that now leaves us with an authoritarian problem.
It’s a bumpy ride but with some luck, we’ll come out better.
“Everyone knows that if these two officials had enabled the slaughter of 40,000 blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans instead of 40,000 mostly Muslim people of color, Harvard and UNH would never hire them.”
Nah. They could slaughter white Serbs and white ethnic Russians by the thousands and still get hired into the Ivies. The establishment bends over backwards for intellects, bureaucrats, and scholars who are professional liars and courtiers for the global American empire and Zio aggression regardless of the color or ethnicity of their victims. Any independent people who strike fear in the paranoid land-grabbing Zios or stand in the way of Washington imperialists will be attacked without much compunction.
Yep.
Perhaps these universities don’t regard supporting and defending Israel’s war on Gaza as failure at all. I wouldn’t use the term myself: they’ve been faithfully implementing a longstanding US policy of backing Israel in whatever it does. I condemn them for that; I’d hardly call their efforts a failure. Would that they had failed!
Sorry CD, and your Identity based politics. But if the oligarchs wanted to kill “40,000 blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans” , exactly the same thing would have happened. The rich and the powerful do not kill based on hair color. But they do kill for profit. In their philosophy where profits matter more than people, anyone can die for a dime.
First, notice the obvious racism, that assumes that every European looks Swedish. Uhhh? Where the heck did this come from? Obviously not from someone who’s ever been to Europe, or at least outside of Stockholm? Ever hear of Italy? Or the Spanish Empire that colonized America? The racism just drips from this bizarre assumption that all Europeans are blonde and blue-eyed. But, you know, those people all look alike.
Secondly, the European elites have never had any problems with mass slaughter of Europeans. Never. Europeans enslaving other Europeans, or slaughtering Europeans, for their own personal wealth is the standard tale of European history and European values. European history is full of mass slaughter of Europeans, and usually by other Europeans in a war the Elites thought the mass slaughter was grand idea sure to be profitable.
Dear CD… the reason you are always on the losing side is that you believe in fictions and myths. When the enemy you think you are fighting is only your own delusion, then you are unlikely to strike a winning blow.
Extremely well stated.
The notion that blood-soaked war-mongering neo-con/lib ghouls care the slightest bit about the race of their victims is preposterous.
I also don’t get the obsession with hair and eye color as denoting what a proper European is. Even the Nazis didn’t particularly care about that, given that none of their leaders fit that archetype and that they were more than happy to kill blonde-haired blue-eyed Scandinavians who didn’t get with the program.
I’m sorry, but how out of it does one have to be to imagine that the White House is some pinacle of power in America. The headline expresses surprise that one does not only fall down from The Eagles Nest, but everyone knows that The Eagles Nest is not the peak.
It is very obvious that there are powers in America higher than the White House. And by that I mean the President, not some lowly aide. The very choice of the candidate in the election last time was not made in or by the White House. It was the Democrat Oligarchs, under the cool-sounding name of mega-donors, who called the shot on that important question. And which have undoubtedly been calling all the important decisions for the Dems since Obama.
So, what this headline actually reports is that a couple of mid-level functionaries who showed their loyalty to their Higher Bosses have been rewarded by the connections of those Higher Bosses with new jobs. And this is a surprise to whom?
Yes Democrats, this is exactly what you voted for. Democrats love this stuff, and to Democrats, this is the way the world should always work. Loyal service in killing people who don’t matter (to them or the Rich) in service of the Rich is rewarded with well paying positions. Welcome to the Democratic Party. What did you think this is, a democracy?