War-Monger Biden Is Losing the 2024 Election Before It Starts

Can’t ‘go big’ on what Americans need because he’s blown it all on guns and bombs

One of Israel”s US-provided killing machines, the F-16. The ISF also flies

f-15s and F-35s against Gazans. (military photo)

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President Biden seems to be following the behavior of a long list of presidents before him:  When heading towards a tough election, start a war, or if you have one going already, escalate it. But he hasn’t learned the lesson many of them including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, offered, all of whom started or expanded wars in hopes of recovering lost support, only to make things worse for themselves.

Typically, what such presidents hope for is that when American troops start dying or getting captured, the public will “rally ‘round the flag,” and then when the election comes, they’ll vote not for the president but for the commander-in-chief which is them. Often that hope is dashed.

This time, true to form, the strategy is not working out for “Genocide Joe,” as the tens of thousands of protesters were calling him at the huge  Israel Gaza War protest in Washington on Jan. 13.

Biden has been upping the conflict rhetoric against Russia, against Iran, and against China too, rather incredibly, considering that those would all be major wars, even if it were with just one of those countries. But he and his war cabinet, especially National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are threatening all three with war talk and aggressive moves like providing advanced weapons and targeting assistance to Ukraine even as that country strikes deep inside Russia with some of that US gear,  

Meanwhile Biden, as if that isn’t enough war talk, Biden has upped the ante in Yemen, which the US used to fight with drone strikes and by providing weapons, planes and satellite targeting assistance to Saudi Arabia. But now it’s US itself that is conducting the air strikes (along with the UK). And don’t forget Iraq, where Biden ha US planes blast a Hamas leader in his office in Baghdad with a rocket and he’s also got US planes and Tomahawk missiles striking allegedly Iran-backedf militant bases oinm Iraq, where they have apparently killed as many as 150 Iranians or Iranian-backed forces. This has led the Iraqi government to call fort all US forces to get out of their country. 

What Biden in his senescence hasn’t realized is that the US public is souring on its long love affair with US militarism. 

It took a massive draft to create a real ani-war movement in the late 1960s and ‘70s.  When American kids (like myself in 1967 as i turned 18),looked at the war in Vietnam, and saw that it was a poor peasant country that in no way, shape or form was a threat to the US, it wasn’t long before “Hell No! We won’t go!” became a popular chant, and not just for draft-age young men but for the women who loved them, and eventually many of their parents too. 

When Nixon ended the draft in January 1973 as growing calls for his impeachment pressed in upon him, if had the desired effect of dampening that anti-war passion, but it didn’t lead to a turnaround in his personal political fortunes. He resigned on Aug. 8, 1974 after hearing from Congressional leaders of his own party that he would be impeached, convicted, removed from office and then indicted for his crimes unless he voluntarily quit.

There were times when public support for an embattled president would surge again a bit, as when Reagan was waging a proxy war against the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua or when President George W. Bush and his consigliere Vice President Dick Cheney  decided to launch a war against Iraq based on the ludicrous claim that that country posed an existential “sweapons of mass destruction” threat to the US. But such blips in improved support usually turned south quickly when the going got sticky and when Americans began to learn the truth about such claims.

Now however, we are seeing something entirely new: a large and growing anti-war movement that is in defense of a largely Muslim Arab population of Palestinians being slaughtered by the US protectorate of Israel, largely with the use of US-supplied fighter bombers and US bombs and large howitzers. 

To Biden’s and his aides’ astonishment, the anger over this president’s bloody war-mongering  policies, and over the incredible costs they entail to the US, is causing his re-election campaign founder, with the latest polls showing him with the popular support of only 37% of the voting-age public, and showing him being down by five percent in a head-to-head election contest with Donald Trump. (That figure is no abberation, and probably reflects the latest Times-Siena College poll showing that only a third of American voters support Biden’s “handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict.")

This was after Biden, acting the tough guy, decided that an attack by a Iranian-backed militia group operating out of Iraq which had slipped an attack drone past the defenses of a hitherto unknown (to Americans!) US base over the border in neighboring Jordon innocuously called “Tower 22”, killing three US soldiers and injuring 40 called for a blitz on Iran-backed militias based in Syria and Iraq.

I suspect more Americans were incensed to learn that the US was operating a secret military base in Jordan that was directing US attacks in Syria than were in favor of attacking targets inside Iraq in response.  

I know that was my reaction. 

As the Associated Press reported on Jan. 29: 

The base began as a Jordanian outpost watching the border, then saw an increased U.S. presence there after American forces entered Syria in late 2015. The small installation includes U.S. engineering, aviation, logistics and security troops with about 350 U.S. Army and Air Force personnel deployed there.

The base’s location offers a site for American forces to infiltrate and quietly leave Syria. A small American garrison at al-Tanf in Syria is just 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Tower 22. That base is along a Syrian highway leading into Iraq and ultimately Mosul, once a prominent base of the Islamic State group. It’s also a potential weapons shipment route over the road for Iran.

U.S. troops long have used Jordan, a kingdom bordering Iraq, Israel, the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, Saudi Arabia and Syria, as a basing point. Some 3,000 American troops typically are stationed across Jordan.

I would say it’s a fair bet that if Biden keeps pursuing a 2024 nomintion he is going to lose his re-election bid whether he ends up facing Trump (as seems increasingly likely), or even Nikki Haley. And if he does lose, it will because of his militarism, his unwillingness to challenge Congress by spending money on what Americans need, while expending what political capital he has, and pushing the limits of his authority to add ever more military spending to the bloated US 2024 Fiscal Year National Security budget of $2.3 trillion. 

Most Americans have never heard that astonishing figure, which is compiled annually by the green eyeshade folks at the War Resisters League. But people know that an incredible amount of money — pretty much all of their taxes, and then a whole lot of federal borrowing — is going to, not “defense,” since anyone but the most paranoid math challenged and information-lacking person knows that there is no country in the world that actually threatens the US in any existential way,  but to war, spying (including on us), fomenting coups and wars, and funding proxy wars. And we are getting sick of it. 

Many Americans are also getting sick of our tax money being used to finance the slaughter of 11,500 children (so far) in Gaza, and to amp up the mutual carnage in Ukraine, where the operative goal of Biden policy appears to be basically to encourage dragging out a war that will be fought to the last Ukrainian in order to bleed and weaken Russia.” 

Biden has gotten himself so deep into what Pete Seeger called ‘The Big Muddy” of global violence and military spending at home  that it may be too late for him to turn that battleship around. 

The only hope may be that nature takes a look at the actuarial table for 81 year-old American males and decades to take its course, so that someone younger and wiser can step in as the Democratic candidate in November. Hopefully that person will say, “Whoa, what’s all this war spending?  This is overwhelmingly the most powerful country in the world. We’re the ones who should be taking the first step at tamping all the competitive militarism down.”

That could shake up the election mightily!