A day after the military geniuses who make up Hamas tried blowing up one of their own hospitals with a failed rocket launch, then tried blaming it on Israel – a lie dutifully picked up by much of the international press – President Joe Biden landed in Tel Aviv.

Now, I have always endeavored in my columns to be eristic, but never arbitrary, so credit where credit is due; Biden is to be commended for visiting Israel during her time of need, for standing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying the right things, and pledging American support. He is especially correct in offering military support, in particular the Iron Dome air defense missiles that will help shield the nation from the continuing rocket attacks, and precision guided munitions Israel requires to help minimize civilian casualties while dislodging an enemy that surrounds itself with civilians. He has also directed the deployment of two aircraft carriers to the region to help dissuade any further external interference. Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak followed suit shortly thereafter and made many of the same assurances. All good stuff.

But there are clouds gathering, threatening to dim the bright communion the civilized world is currently sharing with the Israeli people. Biden failed – again – to mention the elephant in the room: Iran. He was a little too quick, and uncreative, in pledging humanitarian aid to Gaza, which the bitter realities on the ground will amount to providing food and bandages to Hamas gunmen. And he couldn’t help himself from admonishing the Israelis to avoid the “mistakes” America made following September 11th.

To be clear, the president wasn’t offering helpful tactical lessons, advising the IDF to examine the specific military blunders (and there were many) made while the U.S. figured out how to fight a new kind of war. Nor was he cautioning against the biggest mistake America made – i.e., not allowing the military to do the job right, with a defined end goal of victory. No, his implicit warning was for the Israelis to use restraint.

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Restraint? After watching Hamas terrorists rampage through villages slaughtering people and torturing children – torturing children – I’d say Israel has displayed remarkable restraint.

Look, the Israelis get it. They understand fully that whatever international goodwill they enjoy is tenuous, only one or two salacious and irresponsibly reported stories fed by Hamas to a pliant international media eager for a headline painting Israel as the inhuman aggressor from evaporating. More to the point, the PR problem aside, Israel is not going to deliberately target civilians, women and children. They are a civilized, western-oriented nation that believes in the rules. But civilians will die, especially since Hamas sees fit to embed themselves in schools, hospitals and apartment buildings, and uses women and children as human shields. For western leaders to council Israelis to be sure to minimize civilian deaths is on the order of rebuking a firefighter entering an inferno for subjecting the building to water damage.

We have already seen the propaganda lengths Hamas will stoop to with the whole hospital strike lie. The U.S. State Department, to its credit, restrained from jumping on the bandwagon, and waited a couple hours for the evidence to be reviewed in order to make an accurate statement – that everything pointed to the blast not being the doing of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Most of the international media exhibited no such restraint, and only began to reluctantly pull back on the story about a day later. This is the kind of thing we can expect as the war commences in earnest.

I believe the president meant what he said, and that his intentions are just and honorable. But it will become harder for Biden in the coming weeks, as the emotional shock fades and the grim realities of a brutal war drag on, to stick to his commitments, as he faces growing pressure from the left. Meanwhile, the nominally Republican-led House of Representatives – which should be in position to hold the president’s feet to the fire on those commitments – can’t even get around to figuring out who their leader is. Lamentable foreign policy decisions by the administration – from the disastrous flight from Afghanistan, to the blind pursuit of an Iran nuclear deal, to the degradation of our military preparedness – all contributed significantly to the state the world finds itself in now. And the clown show that is playing out in the lower chamber of Congress is not helping one bit.

Britain’s greatest living writer, the playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, recently wrote: “we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilsation and barbarism.” Indeed. And in this monumental moment for civilization, the one body that ought to be best positioned to keep the most powerful country in the world focused on the task at hand looks as dysfunctional as an unsupervised playground.

The GOP needs to get its you-know-what together, pick a speaker, and start proving they can govern if they want to be in a position to hold Biden to his word on Israel, if they want to help steer the U.S. toward maintaining civilized western order and if they ever want to govern again.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.