Tag Archives: Joe Biden

Stupid Macho U.S. Electioneering Will Push Biden Into Doomed War

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Predictably, Joe Biden is being flayed by the Republicans over the killing of three U.S. troops in Jordan by Iraqi militants.

The Democrat president is slammed for being weak and a coward by his political opponents.

Donald Trump, his main Republican rival, mocked Biden as a “loser” and said the attacks on U.S. troops were because of the president’s “weakness and surrender”.

Nikki Haley, the other Republican vying for the presidential election this year, also taunted Biden for showing spinelessness toward Iran. She called for direct retaliation on the Islamic Republic “with the full force of American strength”. Logically, that could imply the use of nuclear weapons.

Unanimously across the mainstream U.S. political spectrum, it was assumed that Iran was ultimately responsible for the deadly attack on the U.S. military base on Sunday in Jordan where three military servicemen were killed and 34 were reportedly wounded, according to early reports.

The attack was claimed by Iraqi militants, the Kata’ib Hezbollah, as part of an umbrella group known as the Islamic Resistance. The militants are believed to be an alliance of militias based in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen. The latter two include Hezbollah and the Ansar Allah movement also known as the Houthis. All are allied with Iran. But each is understood to have its own agency in directing and executing operations.

These groups have carried out hundreds of attacks on U.S. and Israeli bases since October 7 when Israel launched its offensive on Gaza following the deadly raid on Israel by Hamas. The Yemenis bring a maritime dimension to the region-wide resistance with the ongoing targeting of U.S. and other ships in the Red Sea area.

Iran has denied that it was involved in the latest attack on the U.S. base in Jordan. Tehran also denies it is behind the Yemeni operations in the Red Sea.

Iran and the resistance groups say they are an anti-imperialist alliance that is united by opposition to the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza. These groups are not “Islamist” in the mold of Islamic State and its hardline Sunni (Wahhabi or Takfiri) offshoots. Far from it. The resistance groups were galvanized to defeat the Islamists which have been fomented and supported covertly by the United States for its regime change war in Syria. That proxy war was defeated after Russia intervened in 2015 in support of Syria.

The Americans are locked into a downward spiral created by their own flawed logic and cumulative imperialist occupation in the region.

Even President Biden has accused Iran of being responsible for the killing of the three U.S. military personnel. Biden vowed to respond at a time of “our choosing”.

So, Washington unquestioningly determines that Iran is the master culprit. That means the U.S. has committed itself to going after Tehran without any evidence or realistic understanding of where such a direction is leading. That is, how bad it could get for the Americans.

In a U.S. election year shaping up to be more fraught than ever, and with Biden facing dwindling poll numbers, the White House incumbent is highly susceptible to being goaded by Republican adversaries.

Trump has already been hammering Biden for being weak and frail. With the Middle East turning into a cauldron over the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, the Commander-in-Chief is cornered to show mettle. Biden is a hostage of stupid macho politics and bankrupt American imperialism. Diplomacy is simply not an option for the empire, according to its own logic and delusions.

After the deadly drone strike on the U.S. base in Jordan, Republican Senator Tom Cotton dialed up the revenge with the usual warmongering ranting and raving: “The only answer to these attacks must be devastating retaliation against Iran’s terrorist force… Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Biden’s inaction was the problem because it was emboldening enemies in the Middle East, saying: “The time to start taking this aggression seriously was long before more brave Americans lost their lives.”

How hilarious that Biden is scoffed at for being dovish. During his long career, he has been one of the most warmongering politicians in Washington. He backed the U.S.-led NATO wars in former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and presently in Ukraine. The only thing cowardly about Biden is that he is a craven tool of the military-industrial complex and a pathetic psychopath.

Biden is also known for his bad temper and macho knee-jerk character. We can be quite certain that the Republican taunts about his supposed pusillanimous policy in the Middle East will get his hackles up. Biden has already taken a reckless militarist position over supporting Israeli aggression. The shocking mass killing of over 26,000 Palestinian civilians under a brutal blockade of starvation has shocked the world and in particular Arab and Muslim people. And yet Biden has not paused in his “unwavering support” for Israel.

Biden has led U.S. imperialism out of the quagmire of Afghanistan into an even bigger quagmire in the Middle East. With the goading by his equally brainless political rivals, the Americans are plowing further into disaster.

With over 50 military bases strung across the Middle East in 10 countries and with over 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in the region, the Americans are sitting ducks for the resistance. The advent of drones and newer missile technology is a new realm of warfare the Americans have not adapted to with their land garrisons in remote deserts and gaudy warships.

The death of three U.S. troops has long been on the cards. The stupid American politicians think they are going to get revenge. They have no idea what is coming to them given the long history of U.S. aggression, provocation, and illegal occupation in the region. The support of Israel’s genocide, the heartrending scenes of children being torn apart by American bombs, the bombing of Yemen – the poorest Arab country – the crazed threats to Iran, the insufferable American arrogance, and decades of impunity are all now welling up in the Middle East.

The stupid American politicians are digging a hole for themselves and have no awareness of how to reverse it. Democrats, Republicans, Biden, Trump, and so on, they are all a ship of fools.

“Not Wanting” A Wider Middle East War, the U.S. Has Started One

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Dissident Voice

You have to hand it to the U.S. and its henchmen for brazenness.  In order to protect their client state Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the U.S., together with the UK, have in one week launched air and sea attacks on the Houthis in Yemen five times, referring to it as “self-defense” in their Orwellian lingo.  The ostensible reason being Yemen’s refusal to allow ships bound for Israel, which is committing genocide in Gaza, to enter the Red Sea, while permitting other ships to pass freely.

To any impartial observer, the Houthis should be lauded.  Yet, while the International Court of Justice considers the South African charge of genocide against Israel that is supported by overwhelming evidence, the U.S. and its allies have instigated a wider war throughout the Middle East while claiming they do not want such a war.  These settler colonial states want genocide and a much wider war because they have been set back on their heels by those they have mocked, provoked, and attacked – notably the Palestinians, Syrians, and Russians, among others.

While the criminalization of international law does not bode well for the ICJ’s upcoming ruling or its ability to stop Israeli’s genocide in Gaza, Michel Chossudovsky, of Global Research, as is his wont, has offered a superb analysis and suggestion for those who oppose such crimes: that Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter – “The fact that a person [e.g. Israeli, U.S. soldiers, pilots] acted pursuant to order of his [her] Government or of a superior does not relieve him [her] from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” – should be used to supplement the South African charges and appeal directly to the moral consciences of those asked to carry out acts of genocide. He writes:

Let us call upon Israeli and American soldiers and pilots “to abandon the battlefield”, as an act of refusal to participate in a criminal undertaking against the People of Gaza.  

South Africa’s legal procedure at the ICJ should be endorsed Worldwide. While it cannot be relied upon to put a rapid end to the genocide, it provides support and legitimacy to the “Disobey Unlawful Orders, Abandon the Battlefield”  campaign under Nuremberg Charter Principle IV.

While such an approach will not stop the continuing slaughter, it would remind the world that each person who participates in and supports it bears a heavy burden of guilt for their actions; that they are morally and legally culpable.  This appeal to the human heart and conscience, no matter what its practical effect, will at least add to the condemnation of a genocide happening in real time and full view of the world, even though no one will ever be prosecuted for such crimes since any real just use of international law has long disappeared.  Yet there is a edifying history of such conscientious objection to immoral war making, and though each person makes the decision in solitary witness, individual choices can inspire others and the solitary become solidary, as Albert Camus reminded us at the end of his short story, “The Artist at Work.”

With each passing day, it becomes more and more evident that Israel/U.S.A. and their allies do want a wider war.  Iran is their special focus, with Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen targets on the way.  Anyone who supports the genocide in Gaza, explicitly or through silence, bears responsibility for the conflagration to come.  There are no excuses.

And the facts show that it is axiomatic that waging war has been the modus operandi of the U.S./Israeli alliance for a long time.  Just as in early 2003 when the Bush administration said they were looking for a peaceful solution to their fake charges against Sadam Hussein with his alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” the Biden administration is lying, as the Bush administration lied about September 11, 2001 to launch its ongoing war on terror, starting in Afghanistan.  Without an expanded war, President Biden – aka the Democrats, since he will most probably not be the candidate – and his psychopathic partner Benjamin Netanyahu, will not survive.  It is bi-partisan war-mongering, of course, internationally and intramurally, since both U.S. political parties are controlled by the Israel Lobby and billionaire class that owns Congress and the “defense” industry that thrives on never-ending war to such an extent that even the notable independent candidate for the presidency, Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is running as an anti-war candidate, fully supports Israel which is tantamount to supporting Biden’s expanding war policy.

Biden and Netanyahu, who are always claiming after the fact that they were surprised by events or were fed bad advice by their underlings, are dumb scorpions. They are stupid but deadly.  And many people in the West, while perhaps decent people in their personal lives, are living in a fantasy world of “sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” in MLK, Jr.’s words, as the growing threat of a world war increases and insouciance reigns.

Neither the Israeli nor American government can allow themselves to be humiliated, U.S./NATO by the Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis by the Palestinians.  Like cornered criminals with lethal weapons, they will kill as many as they can on their way down, taking their revenge on the weakest first.

Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned.  They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence.  They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the moneyed elites whom allegedly they oppose while pocketing their cash and ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail.  They never see the storm coming, even as they create it.  Their incompetence or the perfidy of their enemies is the retort to all those “nut cases” who conjure up conspiracy theories or plain facts to explain their actions or lack thereof.  They are innocent.  Always innocent.  And they can’t understand why those they have long abused reach a point when they will no longer impetrate for mercy but will fight fiercely for their freedom.

All signs point to a major war on the horizon.  Both the U.S.A. and Israel have been shown to be rogue states with no desire to negotiate a peaceful world.  Believing in high-tech weapons and massive firepower, neither has learned the hard lesson that anti-colonial wars have historically been won by those with far less weapons but with a passionate desire to throw off the chains of their oppressors.  Vietnam is the text-book case, and there are many others.  Failure to learn is the name of their game.

The Zionist project for a Greater Israel is doomed to fail, but as it does, desperate men like Biden and Netanyahu are intent on launching desperate acts of war.  Exactly when and how this expanded war will blaze across the headlines is the question.  It has started, but I think it prudent to expect a black swan event sometime this year when all hell will break loose.  The genocide in Gaza is the first step, and the U.S./Israel, “not wanting” a wider war, have already started one.

(For an excellent history lesson on the Zionist oppression of Palestinians and the current genocide, listen to Max Blumenthal’s and Miko Peled’s impassioned talk – “Where is the War in Gaza Going? – delivered from the heart of darkness, Washington D.C.  Two Jewish men who know the difference between Zionism and Judaism and whose consciences are aflame with justice for the oppressed Palestinians.)

Biden’s Foreign Policy; the Biden Doctrine

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By Peter Van Buren

Source: WeMeantWell.com

Joe Biden ordered airstrikes on Iraq, against Iranian-backed militants, in retaliation for recent attacks by those militants that severely injured three American soldiers. Joe didn’t consult with Congress or anyone else before ordering the strikes, and no declaration of war exists of course. Yet no one believes the militias, following their spanking, will disappear or stop harming Americans.

That sums up the Biden Foreign Policy, call it a doctrine if you’d like: a series of geopolitically unsuccessful, inconsequential, mostly reactive unilateral actions, with no end game. Underlying it all is the sense that no one is particularly frightened, respectful or wary of American power anymore. Let’s see how this worked on a global scale over the last three bloody years.

The disastrous evacuation of Kabul in August 2021 should have warned all of us we were dealing with foreign policy amateurs. The rush for the last planes was an expected unexpected event. Yet the Biden administration did not quietly start the evacuation in February with high-value personnel, nor did it negotiate ahead of time for third country landing rights. Mistakes made as long ago as Vietnam evacuating locals who worked with us were clear, yet Biden did not kick start processing SIV visas for translators and others until literally the last flights were scheduled out. The entire evacuation appeared as an unplanned free fall, just “land some planes and see if that works.” No endgame really, simply a unilateral decision to cap the evacuation off at a certain point in time and declare it over no matter who was or was not saved.

Ukraine is some yellowed vision of cold war. The Biden plan was based on a Wonka-like act of imagination, that U.S. arms wielded by amateur fighters backed up by intelligence, space-based targeting, and special forces infiltrated on the ground would hastily defeat a determined opponent (See Afghanistan, failure of the same strategy, 2001-2003.) When the miracle cure strategy failed, there was no Plan B except to continue to pour arms in to a war that had no clear end game, that was not winnable, only sustainable. Meanwhile, Biden restrictions on domestic mining mean the United States is the largest purchaser of Russian enriched uranium. If the Russians are scared of American power they hide that well.

The results have not been better elsewhere. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine preceeded what one pundit described as “the 2023 brazen Chinese spy balloon’s uncontested trajectory over the United States, the recent Hamas invasion of Israel, the serial Iranian-fueled terrorist attacks on U.S. installations in Iraq and Syria, and the terrorist Houthis’ veritable absorption of the Red Sea. America’s enemies had become opportunistic, not deterred.” Biden took the bait at each open-ended opportunity, and now Joe is dangerously close to letting Gaza and Yemen spiral into a global conflict.

And so another “coalition” fight, this time in Ukraine with NATO, ended up a U.S. primary struggle. It is NATO mostly walking away from the meat of the Ukraine struggle, and the baby NATO coalition elsewhere of France, Italy, and others that was supposed to control the Red Sea breaking down. It is a thin gruel of happy talk about caring for civilians backed up by unlimited arms to Israel, handled so poorly diplomatically that the U.S. has inherited pariah status globally. The modern version of American power was demonstrated when Egypt snubbed Joe Biden’s visit over the mess in Gaza. The question of Palestine, always simmering, is now another major issue to divide Red and Blue and further polarize society. In addition to receiving $6 billion in frozen oil funds from Biden as a ransom for five American hostages, Iran controls the playbook, attacking with impunity via its proxies across Iraq, Syria, and southern Lebanon; Iran’s partners carried out more than 100 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea.  They decide if and when the 1:1 conflict with Israel goes regional, and the U.S. will be again forced to react. The Houthis, also Iran-backed, have dragged the U.S. into a broad promise to keep the Red Sea open to shipping, as the world rolls its eyes as Pax Americana once again looks like a punchline. Can anyone say we are still indispensable?

Another Biden foreign policy disaster has come home, literally, in the immigration crisis. For reasons too vague to enunciate, the Biden administration did away with any semblance of immigration law and flung open the southern border to anyone interested in wandering in. Already more than eight million illegal entrants have come across, with another quarter-million entering each month. As in Ukraine and elsewhere, there is no endgame. When will the border close? How much will caring for the millions cost (New York City has processed more than 160,000 migrants; some 70,000 remain in the city’s care. In Denver, caring for the new migrants has consumed 10 percent of the city’s budget)? The United States has now exceeded, both in real numbers and in percentages, all past numbers of non-native born American residents. What impact on our greater society will such an influx have, especially given how it is targeted at a handful of cities? Will the Russians ever surrender? What about the immigrants?

Three years ago, there was no war in Ukraine and certainly no U.S. military involvement in the Crimea and Donbas. Israel and Hamas existed in their tinder-like stasis condition, no brutal massacre of 1,600 Jews (30 of whom were Americans) and no invasion of Gaza. Campus protestors limited their protestations that they were not anti-Semitic in their hatred of Israel. Iran and the U.S. cooperated on fighting ISIS in Iraq, uneasy partners for certain but not shooting cousins as now. The Houthi struggle was confined within Yemen’s borders. On the positive side, efforts were being made to watch diplomacy bloom with North Korea, which instead is now test firing missiles aplomb once again. Biden has made no progress on China either to limit their opportunistic stance or reduce their hold over America economically. Biden has largely ignored most of Africa and South America as well as the world’s most populous democracy (and nuclear power) India. It is impossible to call it progress and all too easy to call it sadly the Biden Doctrine.

The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse

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Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous. 

Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator. 

“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one.  We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you.  The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”

The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”

While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. 

As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.” 

He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza. 

Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.

And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.

“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank. 

When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”

He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.

Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.  

Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military. 

While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.

In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.

“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”

Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:

At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.

He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018. 

An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:

A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.”

[….]

A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”

Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.

[….]

McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.

Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.

In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”

McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it. McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority —  an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu. 

The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.

The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.  

The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7. 

Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.

Biden, Israel’s accomplice in Gaza, pretends to be a bystander

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While the White House claims to be “frustrated” with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, US support for the carnage continues.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

On October 15th, President Biden took umbrage at a suggestion that his administration could not back both the Ukraine proxy war and Israel’s assault on Gaza at the same time.

 “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation… in the history of the world,” Biden told CBS News. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”

Three months and well over 20,000 defenseless Palestinians slain later, the self-declared leader of the most powerful nation in the history of world now claims to be a helpless bystander.

According to four US officials, Biden is “increasingly frustrated” and “losing his patience” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected “most of the administration’s recent requests related to the war in Gaza,” Axios reports. “The situation sucks and we are stuck,” one official complained. “The president’s patience is running out.” Another official fumes that “there is immense frustration” in the Oval Office. According to Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen: “At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger. They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.”

Van Hollen is correct that the administration is getting slapped in the face by Israel. But he omits that Biden is a willing scene partner in a barely disguised performance: pretending to be up in arms about Israel’s genocidal conduct while doing everything he can to support it.

As Likud parliamentarian Danny Danon explained last month, any US demand of Israel’s military is perfunctory. “They didn’t agree to a ground invasion — we invaded,” Danon said. “They didn’t agree to [attacking] Al-Shifa hospital — we ignored their request. They wanted a pause without hostages — we didn’t accept that. We have no American ultimatum. There is no deadline from the US.”

The US not only imposes no conditions on its support for Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza, but has twice bypassed Congress to expedite weapons for it. After all, this administration professes to have “no red lines” when it comes to Israeli aggression, and is fronted by a president who has declared that there is “no possibility” of a ceasefire.

While Biden and his aides now pretend to have their hands tied, their instrumental role is undeniable. “Biden is president of the United States, still the most powerful country in the world by almost every measure and a country without whose support Israel has no future,” former US diplomat Patrick Theros writes. “A firm public demand to cease and desist immediately would have enormous domestic political repercussions in Israel — far less in the United States. Biden would not have to publicly threaten to cut off weapons deliveries; a few words delivered in private to Netanyahu and a few members of his war cabinet would probably suffice.”

“If you want to use your leverage, use your leverage,” former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy says of Biden’s stance. “You’ve chosen to give Israel a blank check.”

That choice continues. In meetings with Israeli officials on Nov. 30th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed his counterparts that they had “weeks, not months” to “wrap up combat operations at the current level of intensity,” US officials later told the New York Times. Upon a return visit to Israel this week, Blinken again touted his push for what he called “the phased transition of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.” That “transition” to a “lower-intensity phase,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said on Sunday, “is coming here very, very soon.”

But away from the news cameras, the posture changes. A senior US official now explains to the Washington Post that it’s in fact “pointless to urge them [the Israelis] to change.” Accordingly, “Washington’s priority has now shifted to tolerating Israel’s high-intensity operation throughout January, while insisting instead that it downgrade the tempo in February.”

In other words, the US has decided to tolerate Israel’s genocidal tempo in Gaza as normal. From Washington’s point of view, saving thousands of Palestinian lives from murder at the hands of US-supplied weaponry would be pointless.

Biden is so committed to continuing the Gaza slaughter that he has even expanded the war zone to Yemen. In a statement announcing his authorization of US strikes last week, Biden declared that he was acting to protect “freedom of navigation” and the “free flow of international commerce.” Since mid-November, the group that controls most of Yemen, Ansar Allah (misleadingly known in the US as the Houthis), has been targeting commercial ships – primarily those with Israeli links – passing through the Red Sea in a bid to compel the Israeli government to halt its assault on Gaza. By contrast with Israel’s operations, which has an official death toll of 23,000 and counting, Ansar Allah has not killed anyone. It even lost at least ten fighters in a US counterattack on December 31st. As Biden noted, Ansar Allah’s main impact has been to threaten “weeks of delays in product shipping times.” (Others estimate that the delay time can in fact be counted in days).

As in Gaza, the ultimate targets of US aggression in Yemen are civilians. While the Pentagon claims to be targeting Ansar Allah’s military capabilities, the “greater risk from the air attacks is likely borne by ordinary Yemenis,” the New York Times notes. This risk to ordinary Yemenis is consistent with longstanding US policy, specifically the current Biden team’s 2015 decision under President Obama to green-light the Saudi-led war on Yemen that has caused the ensuing humanitarian crisis. Around 21 million Yemenis – two-thirds of the country – rely on aid for survival, while more than four million are internally displaced.

In facing “one of the world’s worst humanitarian calamities,” the Times adds, Yemen faces “a dubious distinction now shared by Gaza.” Given its critical support for Israel’s assault, the US therefore has the dubious distinction of fueling two of the world’s worst humanitarian calamities.

Because of Israel’s blockade and military assault, the risk of famine in Gaza is “growing by the day,” Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official now warns. “As ground operations move southwards, aerial bombardments have intensified in areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety.” For Gaza’s civilians – more than 90% of them displaced — “dignified human life is a near impossibility.”

According to one anonymous official with Israel’s occupation authority for Gaza (COGAT), the lack of dignity for Palestinians in Gaza is a genetic trait. “There is no hunger in Gaza,” the official told Haaretz. “…There were stockpiles of food in Gaza. Don’t forget that this is an Arab, Gazan population whose DNA is to hoard, certainly when it comes to food.”

It is apparently in the White House DNA to share its Israeli client’s avowed bigotry. In a statement Sunday night, President Biden marked “100 days of captivity” for the Israeli hostages in Gaza. Biden’s emotional message failed to even mention the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, wounded, and displaced under US-backed Israeli assault over that same period.

“No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100,” Biden said of the hostages. By refusing to acknowledge them, Biden is affirming via omission that he believes the exact opposite — and in fact infinitely worse — for Gaza’s two million Palestinian hostages. After 100 days of genocide, the people of Gaza are fated to endure continued atrocities as a direct result of US policy, no matter the Biden team’s ongoing effort to pretend otherwise.

Biden and Netanyahu Agree on Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The agreement, which has been arranged through National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in the White House and Israel’s President Benjamin Netanyahu, is that poor countries with corrupt leaders will be bribed to accept forced immigrants from Gaza so as to cleanse it in order to carry out settlement of Jews into that area, after Gaza’s post-war reconstruction, which will be done by the Governments of Israel and U.S., by paying contractors from both countries to ‘make the desert bloom’ there for the incoming Jews.

On January 3rd, the Times of Israel — which was founded by the late gambling casino mega-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who had been the chief donor to the political careers of both Netanyahu and Trump, and so the newspaper that he created has well-connected sources inside Israel’s Government — headlined “Israeli officials said in talks with Congo, others on taking in Gaza emigrants”, and reported:

The Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister-site Zman Yisrael reports that Israeli officials have held clandestine talks with the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants.

“Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others,” a senior source in the security cabinet tells Shalom Yerushalmi.

Yerushalmi quotes Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel saying at the Knesset yesterday: “At the end of the war Hamas rule will collapse, there are no municipal authorities, the civilian population will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. There will be no work, and 60% of Gaza’s agricultural land will become security buffer zones.”

Saying education to hatred will continue in Gaza and further attacks on Israel are only a matter of time, she added: “The Gaza problem is not just our problem. The world should support humanitarian emigration, because that’s the only solution I know.”

Yesterday Washington panned far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir for advocating the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza.

“This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

This is consistent with the news earlier regarding both Biden and Netanyahu, that Netanyahu will be ethnically cleansing Gaza while Biden will give lip-service to criticizing it but will continue to set no conditions upon the U.S. Government’s supplying of weapons and of military intelligence to Israel’s forces to carry out the ethnic cleansing there. Both Netanyahu and Biden, meanwhile, will be arm-twisting at the U.N. General Assembly to gain approval for the forced-resettled-in-Africa Gazans to receive aid from U.N. agencies, in order to keep down the refugees’ maintenance-costs in those countries, sufficiently so as to avoid rebellions by those receiving countries’ publics that might result from tax-increases for those receiving Governments to pay for those immigrants who will have become relocated there.

As I reported earlier, the previous plan by both Netanyahu and Biden was to expel the 2.3 million Gazans to either Egypt or Jordan, but on October 16th and 17th both of those Governments refused to participate. This is what has now led to the negotiations with the Governments of “the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants.” If the Biden and Netanyahu team cannot find lands to cooperate, then whatever Gazans survive the bombardments and siege might be simply starved to death, in which case the end-result will be a genocide against the Gazans, instead of merely an ethnic cleansing of them. So: the current plan might not be the final plan, the final solution to the Gazan problem.

When Yemen Does It It’s Terrorism, When The US Does It It’s “The Rules-Based Order”

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We are ruled by murderous tyrants. By nuclear-armed thugs who would rather starve civilians to protect the continuation of an active genocide than allow peace to get a word in edgewise. 

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

The Biden administration has officially re-designated Ansarallah — the dominant force in Yemen also known as the Houthis — as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity. 

The White House claims the designation is an appropriate response to the group’s attacks on US military vessels and commercial ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, saying those attacks “fit the textbook definition of terrorism.” Ansarallah claims its actions “adhere to the provisions of Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” since it is only enforcing a blockade geared toward ceasing the ongoing Israeli destruction of Gaza.

One of the most heinous acts committed by the Trump administration was its designation of Ansarallah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT), both of which imposed sanctions that critics warned would plunge Yemen’s aid-dependent population into even greater levels of starvation than they were already experiencing by restricting the aid that would be allowed in. One of the Biden administration’s only decent foreign policy decisions has been the reversal of that sadistic move, and now that reversal is being partially rolled back, though thankfully only with the SDGT listing and not the more deadly and consequential FTO designation.

In a new article for Antiwar about this latest development, Dave Decamp explains that as much as the Biden White House goes to great lengths insisting that it’s going to issue exemptions to ensure that its sanctions don’t harm the already struggling Yemeni people, “history has shown that sanctions scare away international companies and banks from doing business with the targeted nations or entities and cause shortages of medicine, food, and other basic goods.” DeCamp also notes that US and British airstrikes on Yemen have already forced some aid groups to suspend services to the country.

So the US empire is going to be imposing sanctions on a nation that’s still trying to recover from the devastation caused by the US-backed Saudi blockade that contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths between 2015 and 2022. All in response to the de facto government of that very same country imposing its own blockade with the goal of preventing a genocide.

That’s right kids: when Yemen sets up a blockade to try and stop an active genocide, that’s terrorism, but when the US empire imposes a blockade to secure its geostrategic interests in the middle east, why that’s just the rules-based international order in action.

It just says so much about how the US empire sees itself that it can impose blockades and starvation sanctions at will upon nations like Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria and North Korea for refusing to bow to its dictates, but when Yemen imposes a blockade for infinitely more worthy and noble reasons it gets branded an act of terrorism. The managers of the globe-spanning empire loosely centralized around Washington literally believe the world is theirs to rule as they will, and that anyone who opposes its rulings is an outlaw.

What this shows us is that the “rules-based international order” the US and its allies claim to uphold is not based on rules at all; it’s based on power, which is the ability to control and impose your will on other people. The “rules” apply only to the enemies of the empire because they are not rules at all: they are narratives used to justify efforts to bend the global population to its will.

We are ruled by murderous tyrants. By nuclear-armed thugs who would rather starve civilians to protect the continuation of an active genocide than allow peace to get a word in edgewise. Our world can never know health as long as these monsters remain in charge.

In Gaza genocide, US defends Israel’s ‘aura of power’

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As South Africa accuses Israel of genocide, the Biden administration endorses Israel’s bid to sow “fear” in Gaza’s defenseless civilians.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Days after South Africa filed a motion to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, the Biden administration responded with indignation. The allegation, White House spokesperson John Kirby declared, is “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

South Africa’s 84-page submission is in fact exhaustive in its documentation of Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza and Israeli leaders’ open intention to carry it out. By contrast to this detailed intervention, Israel’s chief sponsor in Washington openly admits that it still refuses even minimal scrutiny of the extermination campaign that it is funding and arming.

Nearly three months into an Israeli assault that has relied on billions of dollars in US weaponry, the Biden administration has still “conducted no formal assessment of whether Israel is violating international humanitarian law,” Politico reports. While going out of its way to avoid this assessment, the Biden administration has gone around Congressional review to transfer $147.5 million in artillery shells and other gear to Israel – the second time it has invoked emergency powers to do so.

A senior administration official insists to Politico that there is nothing to worry about: “If you just look at what Israel is doing, they aren’t systematically targeting civilians.” Even if that were true, which it clearly is not, what is indisputable is that Israel is systematically killing civilians. As even President Biden blurted out last month, Israel is carrying out “indiscriminate bombing,” an unambiguous war crime. For this reason, the New York Times reports, when Biden offered that “not… scripted comment,” his blunder “sent aides scrambling to explain.”

How the White House is now scrambling to explain its view that Israel is not committing genocide or even violations of humanitarian law is even more revealing. According to Politico: “The U.S. came to that conclusion in part after looking at press reports and conversations with Israeli officials about their military operations.” Absent from the Biden administration’s list of source material is its own intelligence, which recently found that almost half of the munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza have been indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that have predictably murdered countless civilians in their homes and shelters.

Instead, the US is only relying on “press reports” – but clearly not those documented in South Africa’s ICJ submission, which collects Israeli leaders’ genocidal rhetoric in nine pages of chilling detail (p. 59-67). That leaves “conversations with Israeli officials” – who, unsurprisingly, are not keen to admit that they are the 21st century’s worst war criminals.

Israel’s bombing campaign is accompanied by an unprecedented blockade that deprives Gaza of vital aid. According to Arif Husain, the chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program, “80% of the people [globally], or four out of five people, in famine or a catastrophic type of hunger are in Gaza right now.”

At the White House podium, Kirby said that he is “not aware of any kind of formal assessment being done by the United States government to analyze the compliance with international law by our partner Israel.” And given that Kirby has previously stated that the White House has “no red lines” when it comes to Israel’s conduct, that will remain the case. “We have not seen anything that would convince us that we need to take a different approach in terms of trying to help Israel defend itself,” he said.

But just as the US is fully aware that its partner Israel is committing genocide, the US is also aware that Israel’s professed “right to self-defense” against occupied territory has nothing to do with self-defense. Biden administration officials have admitted as much to one of their most reliable media mouthpiece since Oct. 7th, the New York Times. “The Americans say Israel’s forceful response… reflects the importance that it places on re-establishing deterrence against attacks from adversaries in the region,” the Times reported in November. “The Israeli military’s aura of power was shaken by the Oct. 7 attack, the officials say.”

To restore Israel’s shaken “aura of power,” therefore, the empathetic Americans have given Israel a free pass to slaughter more than 22,000 defenseless civilians, all while pushing the two million survivors into famine and desperation.

This imperative of “deterrence” – establishing a monopoly on violence against occupied Palestinians and regional neighbors – has guided Israeli strategy since its inception.

As a divisional military commander in 1967, future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon voiced concern that Israel was losing its “deterrence capability,” which he defined as “our main weapon – the fear of us.”

In 1988, one month into the first Intifada, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted that his policy of brutalizing demonstrating Palestinians was successfully employing Israel’s main weapon of fear. “The use of force, including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population’s fear of the Israel Defense Forces,” Rabin said.

When Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, a three-week long assault that killed 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, in the Gaza Strip, Israel wielded the same weapon. According the New York Times, Israeli officials were guided by a “larger concern”: that their “enemies are less afraid of it than they once were or should be.” Therefore, the Times reported, “Israeli leaders are calculating that a display of power in Gaza could fix that,” using slain Palestinians civilians to “re-establish Israeli deterrence.”

The same imperative applies to Israel’s current extermination campaign in Gaza. In calling for “a war of unprecedented magnitude” on Gaza, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett explained in October that “Israel’s future depends not on pity from the world, but on fear in the hearts of our enemies.”

In a new account of the Biden administration’s dealings with Israel, the New York Times again confirms that Israel seeks to preserve its monopoly on state terror. In Gaza, the Times explains, “strategically, Israel does not mind too much if the rest of the world thinks it is willing to go overboard with overwhelming force.” After all, Israel has spent more than a “half century… fostering the image of invincibility, an image shattered on Oct. 7. Israeli leaders want to reestablish the deterrence that was lost.”

Israel indeed need not mind that the world opposes its genocidal campaign when the world’s top superpower gives it free rein to “go overboard with overwhelming force” – the Times’ artful euphemism for state terror.

The White House continues to make this endorsement clear, even as it occasionally feigns concern about the civilian toll. According to the Times, “there is no serious discussion within the Biden administration about cutting Israel off or putting conditions on security aid.” The only “real debate” concerns “the language to use and how hard to push,” on marginal tactical issues. But no matter how many more civilians die, “no one inside is really pressing for a dramatic policy shift like suspending weapons supplies to Israel — if for no other reason than they understand the president is not willing to do so.”

Israel undoubtedly appreciates Biden’s unwillingness to stop the genocide. As Israel’s former US ambassador Michael Oren explains, Israel was “dependent on the United States,” after Oct. 7th. “And that meant they have a say in things.” The White House’s main contribution, Oren adds, is that “Biden has not used the two most obvious tools available to him to force Israel’s hand, namely the flow of U.S. arms to Israel and the U.S. veto at the U.N. Security Council that protects Israel from international sanctions.” According to White House insiders, while Biden and Netanyahu “are not truly friends,” both “understand each other’s politics and their mutual dependence at this point.”

Biden and Netanyahu’s mutual dependence only means that Israel must occasionally temper its savagery to meet US public relations needs. According to Times, Netanyahu “agreed to let humanitarian aid into Gaza as a condition for Mr. Biden visiting” Israel after Oct. 7th. In other words, Netanyahu let a trickle of humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza death camp solely for the political benefit that a Biden visit could offer him. The Times offers this revelation in passing without further comment. In the view of the Times and its Biden administration sources, it is perfectly reasonable for Israel to block vital supplies to Gaza just to extract a gesture of US political support for its extermination campaign there.

In a recent opinion article for The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu described his “three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza” as follows: “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”

But Netanyahu’s vision of “peace” is predicated on exterminating his Palestinian neighbors in Gaza. Along with its bombing campaign and starvation siege, Israeli officials have openly called for ethnic cleansing. “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich recently told Israeli Army Radio. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.” According to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu has informed cabinet members that: “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.”

Any serious “prerequisite for peace” therefore requires the inverse of Netanyahu’s strategy: the Israeli government must be demilitarized and Israeli society must be deradicalized. The same applies for the Biden administration, which is so radicalized that it openly flaunts its support for what South Africa calls “the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza,” all to help defend Israel’s “aura of power.”