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**OCTOBER 18, 2023**
On the Prospect website
* Luke Goldstein: Hamas's use of crypto
-and
the bipartisan backlash
* David Dayen: How NIH creates government-funded billionaires
* Harold Meyerson to DSA: Comrades, I quit.
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Fishing in Troubled Waters
Biden's fraught Mideast diplomacy
Joe Biden, a famously risk-averse politician, has never taken a bigger
risk than his mission to Israel.
If everything breaks just right, Biden could head off an Israeli
invasion and occupation of Gaza, averting thousands more civilian
casualties and a costly and inconclusive Israeli "victory." He could
begin the process of getting Israeli hostages returned; head off the
risks of a regional war; get the process of Saudi normalization with
Israel back on track; and expedite the urgently needed departure of
Benjamin Netanyahu.
Just to list these goals, all of which are interconnected, is to remind
ourselves of all the ways the mission could go wrong. In the Mideast,
events have a way of spinning out of control.
Biden has already had to forgo his planned meeting in Jordan with
Jordan's King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. It was the Arab side that
canceled.
"There is no use in talking now about anything except stopping the war,"
Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi said on state television.
Reporters were told that Biden would now speak with these leaders from
his flight back to Washington, a lame second-best. He could have done
that from the Oval Office.
Biden's risky calculation, in flying to Israel, is that by even more
closely identifying the United States with Israel's agony and needed
security, he increases his leverage on Netanyahu to avoid further
blunders and civilian suffering in Gaza. Israel has already agreed to
let humanitarian relief into Gaza, via Egypt, but that depends on
Egypt's cooperation, yet another stumbling block.
And of course, the need for humanitarian relief is itself the
consequence of Israel's blockade and bombardment. It's weird for the
U.S. to be endorsing both the attacks and relief of the suffering caused
by the attacks.
We don't know exactly what Biden and his advisers have said privately.
We do know that Israel's occupying force was militarily ready to
invade several days ago, but the invasion keeps being postponed,
presumably at U.S. request. But publicly, Biden stands with Israel, more
than ever in today's meeting with Netanyahu
.
Here's the bind. If Israel does invade and occupy Gaza, even in a
truncated manner, U.S. fingerprints will be on the deed. It's one
thing for the U.S. to support Israel's security and share Israel's
anguish, as Biden has vividly done. It's something else entirely to be
identified with a Gaza invasion because Biden failed to stop it.
Even if the invasion doesn't go forward, what then? By standing down
and looking either indecisive or like a pawn of Biden, Netanyahu would
want something significant in return. But it's far from clear what
Biden can deliver.
Biden can help facilitate the beginning of a process leading to the safe
return of hostages, but the best case is that this will take weeks or
months of negotiation over a trade for Palestinian terrorists in Israeli
prisons. Biden can double down on pressure in Iran to keep Hezbollah
from invading Israel's northern border, but Biden presumably is
already doing that.
More likely, Biden would have to make Israel even more of a full-blown
U.S. protectorate, including a commitment for unprecedented direct U.S.
military involvement in the event of a regional war, and hope that this
acts as a deterrent.
The best case for Biden, both as a diplomat and as a candidate for
re-election in 2024, is that he avoids a diplomatic and military fiasco.
Anything that looks like success will be long in coming. This is not the
stuff of a Nobel Peace Prize.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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Cracks in the Blockchain Eight
After Hamas boosted its finances with crypto funding, over 100 members
of Congress urged a crackdown on crypto money laundering, including two
notoriously pro-crypto representatives. BY LUKE GOLDSTEIN
The NIH's 'How to Become a Billionaire' Program
An obscure company affiliated with a former NIH employee is offered the
exclusive license for a government-funded cancer drug. BY DAVID DAYEN
The Divisions in DSA
And why, after 48 years in the organization, I'm quitting. BY HAROLD
MEYERSON
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