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JOE BIDEN CHOSE THIS CATASTROPHIC PATH EVERY STEP OF THE WAY  
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Matthew Duss
October 7, 2024
The New Republic
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_ What’s happening in the Middle East was enabled by a president
with ideological priors, aides who failed to push back, and a
cheerleading media establishment. _

President Joe Biden speaks at a news conference following the NATO
Summit in Washington, July 11, 2024., Susan Walsh/AP

 

There’s a 23-year-old quote from Benjamin Netanyahu in _The New
York Times_
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I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Reached on the evening of
September 11, 2001, the then-former prime minister was asked what the
terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers and killed almost
3,000 people meant for relations between the United States and Israel.
“It’s very good,” he said. Then he quickly edited himself:
“Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.”

He may have been rude and insensitive, but he was also being
uncharacteristically honest. Like any demagogue, Netanyahu knew
instinctively that enormous pain could be easily transformed into
permission. 

In addition to providing Israel’s then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
a freer hand in crushing the second intifada, Netanyahu also saw
America’s trauma as an opportunity to achieve a wider set of
regional security goals. As Congress was considering the Iraq
invasion, he came to the United States to lend his support. “If you
take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have
enormous positive reverberations on the region,” he assured a
congressional committee
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September 2002.

It didn’t. 

Obviously, the U.S. didn’t invade Iraq because Netanyahu told it to.
He was one of many self-styled foreign policy experts who supported
it, a list that includes our current president, who to this day has
never adequately accounted for his own key role as chair of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee in enabling the war, sheltering behind the
transparently nonsensical claim that he was misled by President George
W. Bush.  

The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, were an abominable crime. The
Israeli government had both the right and responsibility to protect
its people. Biden was right to respond with support and solidarity. 

It was also right to expect him, at some point over the last year, to
pivot to real pressure to end the war and save human lives. 

He never did.   

It’s unclear yet whether the consequences of Israel’s
post–October 7 war will be as bad as the Iraq War. They very well
might, but one thing already clear is that both catastrophes were
enabled in part by a U.S. president with strong ideological biases, a
confidence in his own judgment as unshakeable as it was unjustified,
advisers unwilling or unable to push back effectively, and an elite
media establishment with an overtly militarist bent and a shockingly
callous disregard for Arab lives, far more interested in
editorializing about college student chants than about sitting U.S.
senators—that is, people with actual power—urging Israel to
“flatten” Gaza. (It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of
the bigotry still underlying our foreign policy discourse that, amid
the flood of anti-Palestinian invective issuing from members of
Congress, the only censure the U.S. House managed to pass was of its
one Palestinian American member.)   

It was obvious from early on in this war that Biden administration
officials either did not understand, or just refused to acknowledge,
what they were dealing with. As the public statements from Israeli
leaders (collected as evidence in South Africa’s brief charging
Israel with the crime of genocide), combined with the staggering
amount of destruction
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onto the 2.3 million people trapped within an area about twice the
size of Washington, D.C [[link removed]].,
show, Israel’s concept of “self-defense” includes
the intentional infliction of civilian suffering
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A memo from a defense attaché at the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv
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November made this clear barely a month into the war. Israel’s
strategy, the attaché wrote, is “deliberately causing massive
destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers” in Gaza,
targeting houses, bridges, and roads, and causing massive civilian
casualties. Israel’s approach, he concluded, clearly violated
“international treaties and laws of war.” Israeli military conduct
over the past year has repeatedly and consistently proven that
analysis correct. 

And the people in this administration know it. Early this year a
senior official described to me the administration’s efforts to
convince the Israeli government to loosen its onerous aid restrictions
into Gaza. The Israeli public was still in a vengeful mood and felt
that all Gazans should be made to suffer, he said, and the Israeli
government, deeply embarrassed by its failure to prevent the worst
attack in Israel’s history and frantic to direct the public’s
anger elsewhere, was still very happy to oblige. 

“It’s a kind of sickness,” he said.  

In late September, ProPublica reported
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken had overruled the determinations of
USAID and the State Department’s own refugees bureau—the two
divisions of the U.S. government most directly responsible for
assessing such situations, both of which had concluded that Israel was
restricting humanitarian aid, which under U.S. law should trigger a
suspension of military aid. Seeking to downplay the story, Blinken
told an interviewer the following day that it was “actually pretty
typical” to look at different reports then “put out our own
report,” an impressively disingenuous answer that requires one to
ignore that the American reports of violations agreed with analyses by
virtually every humanitarian aid agency and human rights organization
in the world. What was typical was the administration’s decision to
overrule them in favor of the voices advocating for the seemingly
easier political path of just continuing to send the bombs.  

In public the Biden administration seemed to be watching a completely
different war, pretending not to see the mounting atrocities that
everyone in the world with a smartphone could plainly see, offering
occasional kind words for international law and the protection of
civilians with all the heft of the “thoughts and prayers” offered
by Republican members of Congress after school shootings. On the
ground, Biden deferred to Israeli preferences and practices in almost
all cases, no matter the clear humanitarian impact. The mass killing
and displacement of civilians, which would be condemned in the
harshest possible terms were it being done by an adversary, and in
fact has been so condemned when done by Russia in Ukraine, has been
treated like the weather. Simply nothing to be done. Pass the
ammunition. 

In retrospect, the most honest and accurate rendering of Biden’s
policy was found in his remarks to donors
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December, in which he assured them that, while his administration
would continue seeking to build a broader regional security
architecture, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than
protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.” If he was
willing to constrain Israel at all, it was mainly in preventing the
war from spreading beyond Gaza. This was perhaps his true and only red
line for many months. Israel would be free to turn Gaza into a killing
field, provided it didn’t escalate regionally. Yet today, Netanyahu
is rolling over that red line too in Lebanon, and possibly soon in
Iran, to the exultation of all of those who have been most
stupendously and consistently wrong about the region over the past 20
years. 

And why shouldn’t he? By taking the option of suspending military
aid off the table, Biden signaled from the outset that his red lines
were meaningless. His stubborn refusal to impose any costs on
Netanyahu (except for a token suspension of a few shipments of bombs
that was quickly superseded by massive deliveries of new weapons) is
what all but ensured that his May cease-fire proposal
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wither and die. The story that is now being crafted through friendly
journalists is that Biden tried his best but his effort to bring the
war to an end was ultimately frustrated by Netanyahu’s shenanigans.
But Biden wasn’t hoodwinked by Netanyahu any more than he was by
George W. Bush when he chose to back the Iraq War. He chose this path,
and stayed on it despite constant warnings of exactly where it was
leading. Having done so, when he exits the White House, he and his
team will leave this world a more dangerous and lawless place,
America’s credibility more broken, the so-called “rules-based
order” even more “so-called” than when he entered. 

“The costs of these new rules of war” that Biden has co-authored
in Gaza, wrote
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Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, “will be paid with
the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S.
responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new
rules, and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be
forgotten.”

Making sure this is not forgotten is part of the task now. The
architects of this policy will tell themselves, each other, and us
that they did their best, that they made the least bad of the bad
choices that confronted them. Those of us who work in this community
don’t have to believe that. Over the past year, so many of my
colleagues both inside and outside government have regularly confessed
private anger with Biden’s policy. We’ve been at conferences and
workshops together. Gaza has come up repeatedly, the bone in the
throat of any discussion we try to have about America’s future role
in the world. At one recent such gathering, participants were asked an
open-ended question of what specific actions we would recommend a
Harris administration take in the first 100 days. Variations on
“Stop sending arms to Israel” were an overwhelming favorite. This
should not be surprising, as polls show
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supermajority
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Democrats share this view. 

It’s not easy for foreign policy professionals to acknowledge any of
this, given that many are carefully positioning themselves for jobs in
a new administration. There’s probably no more abused word in this
city than _accountability,_ but it’s one we must consider amid
this still-unfolding disaster. The support that Washington’s policy
community has given to this catastrophic war is a symptom of our own
sickness. We get to decide if we want to be part of the cure. 

_Matthew Duss @mattduss is executive vice president at the Center for
International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Senator
Bernie Sanders._

* Israel-Gaza War
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* Joe Biden
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* US History and Accountability; US And Israeli War Crimes; Death
Toll in Palestine;
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