Joe Biden: Hoist on His Own War-like Petard
As the November presidential election edges closer the choices are both unpalatable
Joe Biden is in a trap of his own making.
Listening to the advice of the neoliberal National Security “brain trust” he foolishly installed in the State Department and at the National Security Council at the start of his presidency, he followed their ignorant advice and lined up solidly behind Israel when it responded to the Oct. 7 Hamas break-out of the prison camp of Gaza to attack Jewish settlements and military posts outside the wall that has caged in 2.3 million Palestinians for decades.
Not only did Biden offer the Israeli military full backing for its collective-punishment war on Gaza, including supplying all manner of weapons and delivery systems to carry out the most extreme example of total destruction of densely populated urban society since World War II, but he had the US veto every single international effort to have the mass slaughter called off.
Now there is mounting pressure inside the US, for Biden to halt the Israeli genocide by cutting off all US military aid to Israel. This pressure is coming from a broad spectrum of the Democratic electorate, including from large numbers of American Jews who are furious to see Israel adopting not just the tactics but even the dehumanizing language used by the Nazis in their extermination campaign against European Jews.
This has put Biden in an awkward position. He needs every Democratic vote this November, which is predicted to be extremely close like in 2020, in both total votes and the electoral college tally. In an effort to address the growing anger among Democrats and independent voters at his support for Israel’s continued slaughter of Gazan civilians (two-thirds of the 32,000 known killed Palestinians in Gaza have been women and children and many more have been old men), Biden has told Israel’s leadership not to attack the southern Gaza city of Rafa, where over a million Gazans — more than half the total population of the occupied territory — have fled after being advised by Israel that it is where they would be safe. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blown off Biden’s request, saying that Israel will not be swayed from attacking that last city to crush what is left of the Hamas forces.
Biden could certainly, in his role as US Commander in Chief, prevent that ultimate slaughterfest by warning Netanyahu that any attack on Rafa would mean an immediate cutoff of all military aid and any us diplomatic cover for Israel. But at this point Biden, with his unquestioning backing of Israel to date (not to mention his push for vastly. more military aid for Ukraine — more on that later), has lost so much support from a large part of his voter base, that Netanyahu could conceivably appeal directly to Trump and the Republicans in an end-run of the president and ask them to pass vote him the military aid that he needs, joining AIPAC funded Democrats to assemble a veto-proof two-thirds majority vote. Biden would then be on the wrong side of history but also be exposed as a weak leader.
For Netanyahu, it’s a no-lose proposition. He faces enough opposition at home over the fate of the 100 or so hostages from the Oct. 7 Hamas attack as well as for the slow and ineffective IDF initial response to it, not to mention, with charges of corruption he faces that could end up sending him to jail. This means that he needs to keep the current war on Gaza going to keep himself in his protected position as Prime Minister. Attacking Rafa over Biden’s objection actually helps him.
Meanwhile, he likely figures, if Biden looks weak, it will boost the odds for Trump, a supporter of Netanyahu, of winning back the White House,
Biden’s best hope at this point, would be to pressure Netanyahu and Hamas to agree to a long cease-fire, so that significant aid could flow into Gaza and the killing of Palestinians could stop, at least for a while. But what reason do either Hamas or Netanyahu have to agree to such a thing? Hamas won’t free the remaining hostages without Israel’s agreeing to pull out its troops from Gaza. Those hostages, estimated by US intelligence services to number about 100, are its only defense against an all-out final assault by Israel. And Netanyahu, for his part, cannot allow a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza, as that would leave most of Israelis demanding his head for allowing the Hamas attack in the first place and then ending up after all this fighting, killing and loss with Israel still not in control of Gaza, with the hostages still not freed, and with and Israel now viewed as a pariah state by most of the rest of the world.
Faced with that mess in Palestine, Biden is also in trouble in Eastern Europe. His campaign for tens of billions of dollars in aid, including increasingly advanced weaponry, for Ukrainian forces fighting Russia is not all that popular in the US anymore. With Russian President Putin threatening the use of nuclear weapons if any US or NATO troops enter Ukraine to aid in fighting Russian troops (as French President Macron has foolishly proposed), Americans who a year or two ago were were sticking Ukrainian flags on their lawns and posters of the flag on fences and “Stand with Ukraine” on walls, are now getting edgy about the risk of nuclear war, and those.signs and flags have become much less common. That fear grows as it becomes increasingly clear that Ukraine’s military is not as big a challenge to Russian forces as it has been portrayed by the US government and by media reports that have seemed more like government propaganda than genuine journalism. The vaunted US Abrams tanks shipped to Ukraine, once described as being virtually invincible, are being taken out by Russian rockets grenades and new tactics, as are US supplied anti-aircraft weapons like Patriot missile mobile launchers.
The US strategy of backing a long war against Russia to bleed that country and weaken its military is foundering on the growing unwillingness of Ukrainians to support that goal by dying or being maimned by the hundreds of thousands themselves. Europe is flooded with Russians of draft age or younger who are worried about a planned lowering of the draft age if they stay in their home country, and as well as older men currently fighting the Russians who are less and less willing to keep fighting indefinitely without being replaced at the front.
It doesn’t bode well for Ukraine’s continued resistance to Russian forces that the Ukrainian military and civilian police are reportedly resorting to dragooning young and even middle-aged men off the streets of Ukraine and putting them in uniform against their will.
Here again, Biden has blundered into a trap of his own making by listening to his vainglorious advisors like Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and the just departed Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland — two of them, Blinken and Nuland, prep school kids, and all of them with Ivy League Credentials but no military record at all. They are what former New York Times veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges contemptuously calls “Pimps of War.”
It’s getting pretty late in the game with the presidential campaign down to the two presumptive candidates, Biden and Trump (barring the actuarial tables weighing in with a not so surprising life-threatening heart attack or stroke or two), starting to campaign head-top-head, with Israeli war on Gaza heading for a cataclysmic mass slaughter of innocents and a likely explosion of violence in the Middle East, and with Biden and the puppet states of NATO continuing to increase their threats against Russia despite the risk that going too far could unleash nuclear war.
Remember, it’s not wrapping themselves in the flag that is the last first result of a desperate political scoundrel, but rather going to war.
Americans will have to start weighing at the odds: Should they support a candidate who could ignite a nuclear war over the issue of Russia’s occupation of part of Ukraine rather than press for a negotiated solution to that now ten-year old conflict? Or should they vote for a candidate who says he would press for a negotiated solution, ending the fighting in return for Russia keeping the territory it has conquered (all off which historically was a part of the Russian and Soviet Empire for over three centuries, by the way), and who says he will end that war by pushing for a compromise settlement?
On Gaza the choice is more difficult. Biden has shown he won’t, or can’t stop an IDF “final solution” to the conflict with an all out assault on Rafa. But Trump, who has been largely silent about that one-sided war, has lately called for “peace in the Middle East” In an interview on Fox, said he favored a cease-fire.” That’s not much different from Biden’s nambly-pamby prescription.
Very thoughtful, Dave. I think the only possible nit-pick I have with you is Trump's ability to get a veto-proof majority in Congress to override Biden --- AND, Biden has some "wiggle room" between a PUBLIC out and out cut-off and doing what he's doing now. I predict that he will get Netanyahu to agree to a temporary cease fire and Hamas will slow walk the release of hostages and that will create a momentum to not start up the war again. But of course this is an example of the "wish being father to the thought" and based on nothing more than hope. There is also the pressure inside Israel to make the hostages a higher priority than revenge.