The United States is run by insane imbeciles.
Biden flies to Israel and like a dog to its master does huggies and kissie poo's with the most thuggish, corrupt and polarizing figure in the region. Bibi is even loathed by one half of his own country. Huggies from POTUS should be doled out like mana. But, I guess punks have an instinctive affinity for one another.
As if the optics weren't bad enough, the sonics were even worse. "As long as the United States stands -- and it will stand forever -- we will not let you ever be alone" intoned Biden. And to wrap up: "...the United States stands with you. We'll walk beside you in those dark days, we'll walk beside you in those good days to come."
The United States will stand forever? Really? To a people who have outlasted the Egyptian, Babylonian, Roman and Holy Roman empires, that must have sounded like a childish brag. It is certainly hubristic. It is one thing to say that, with God's help, may we last forever. It is quite another to announce point blank that we will. Compared to Biden's "forever," Hitler's One Thousand Year Reich almost sounds humble. At any rate, hubris is a form of insanity and when our leaders give the slip that they have lost grip on reality, we ought to at least take note.
But back to the point, has an American president ever given an unconditional commitment to stand by a foreign nation forever? For that was the unmistakable import of Biden's foolish palaver.
There are some, who thinking they are savy realists will cynically say that Biden's commitment was "just rhetoric." Actually... diplomacy is the art of evasion. The whole point of diplomacy is NOT to commit one's nation to any one course of action and certainly not to another nation. The last time that rule was flaunted with lock-step commitments, the result was a Great War.
If Biden was playing to a home-grown audience, he was downright derelict in his duty to represent the country to the audience of other nations.
In fact, Biden proved himself to be nothing but a minion. It was nauseating to watch him regurgitate the Likud's narrative.
What is fundamentally at issue here is the implementation of a "two-state solution." That was the basis for the original partition of Palestine in 1948. That basis was reaffirmed in 1974 by UN Resolution 194. That is official United States policy. So what did Biden say?
Speaking of a "resolution" to the crisis, he said, "for me that means a two state solution."
For me????? For me????? He speaks for the fucking United States, not for himself. He couldn't even manage to read the riot act to a state that is dependent on U.S. financial largesse and military assistance.
Other than stating his personal preference, the only thing he called for was (a) the destruction of Hamas (which was duly elected) and (b) for Palestinians to live in conditions of peace and dignity. Say what?
The issue is statehood. In calling for conditions of peace and dignity, Biden was in fact accepting Israel's current apratheid policy of denying statehood to Palestinians. Biden just prefers that the conditions in the apartheid enclaves be secure, peaceable and provide enough goodies to the inhabitants as will keep them quiescent.
That is not going to work; and that means that the only other solutions are: (a) continued repressive occupation or (b) forcible relocation (aka ethnic cleansing). At best, if we are all lucky, that will only push another generation of Palestinians into unquenchable rage and push Israeli's into a war-induced state of permanent psychosis.
I do not place all the blame on Israel for the impasse. The Palestinians have been equally intransigent. But in 1982 and then in 2017 the PLO and then Hamas accepted in principle the idea of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders. THAT is the goal of U.S. policy and THAT is what Biden should have seized the occasion to insist upon.
Instead Biden seized the occasion to let out more of his inner punk. Oh yes. Democrats might want to ignore it, but his constant snaps and snarls are there for all to see. As when during a 2020 town meeting he called a questioner a "damned liar" and challenged him to a push-up contest. Or when, denouncing the defund-the-police movement, he shouted into the mic, "there's NO PLACE!! in this country NO PLACE!!! for endangering the lives of law enforcement NO PLACE, NONE, NEVER, PERIOD!!!!! This supposedly avuncular Joe has a pronounced tendency to punch his message through. This punctuated yelling at you, is a form of threat and intimidation. So, when it came to Hezbollah, it was hardly surprising that Biden's message was a pounding "DON'T!... DON'T... DON'T."
Biden may get away badgering Anita Hill, challenging overweight blue collar workers and shouting down reporters, but if he thinks this display of gerontological toughness impresses Hezbollah, he is gerontologically deranged.
But perhaps this too was just another rhetorical display designed to make Lindsay Graham happy. Alas, we are not on Capitol Hill but rather in a region that is on the edge of a possible conflagration.
Having just announced that two carriers groups were heading to the region, Biden was clearly threatening Hezbollah with American military retaliation. In other words, he was committing the United States to involvement if and when Hezbollah should decide to do whatever Biden didn't want it to do.
Brilliant! Hand the trigger to Hezbollah which now gets to call the shot on whether U.S. troops get involved. That is the stupidest thing a nation can do. Should Hezbollah act against Israel then the U.S. can (a) humiliatingly retreat from Biden's "DON'T DON'T DON'T" or (b) venture into the maelstrom.
Biden's DON'Ts would have better been directed against Israel, which only hours before his arrival had bombed an airport and Syria and various border locations in Lebanon. Why is Israel poking a hornets nest? Hezbolla had nothing to do with the massacre on Oct 5th. Biden might recall, that contrary to MSM's propaganda, the last time the IDF took on Hezbollah, the IDF got creamed.
As it will if it undertakes a ground assault into Gaza. There are 300 miles of tunnels in Gaza. Let's do a Biden. 300!!! 300!!!! 300!!! So we'are talking about a two-tiered Stalingrad. Urban warfare on the surface and urban warfare in 300 miles of underground tunnels.
That is one bloody clusterfuck waiting to happen. Israel's only "solution" is to create a desert of rubble and call it victory. Suppose that "works" and that it works without provoking Hezbolah. Then what?
Assuming that the approximately 1 million youth of Gaza accept occupation quiescently, Israel has NO plans for administering, controlling, feeding, and taking care of the 2.5 million huddled into half the space. No plans for preventing starvation, or controlling outbreaks of disease or insuring that the sewage system works.
Genocide is not limited to the drama of gas chambers. Engineering conditions that will result in mass deaths qualifies just as well.
So the most the "Most Powerful Country on Urth" can wrangle out of Israel is an agreement not to prevent humanitarian assistance (paid for and provided by others) from crossing into Gaza from a single point on the Egyptian border?
Whatever side one wants to take in this matter, Israel's retaliatory rage is not a winning policy. It avenges an appalling act of murderous terror but it fails to address the underlying problem which being underlying will perist. And so, Israel's policy ends up being no more than murderous madness. And it is to this madness that our punk-imbecile president has committed the United States "forever."
As Israel cuts the electricity to Gaza, so the U.S. mass media apparatus cuts the light of information to the dumbed down American public. Gaza is not a separate country. Israel has prevented it from becoming a sovereign state. So then, what is Gaza's status? It is occupied territory and under long established international law Israel and Israel alone is responsible for the welfare of the inhabitants of the occupied territory. Allowing truckloads of water bottles, band-aids, and powdered milk to cross the border does not qualify as insuring the welfare of the population. And yet the craven American press treats Biden's "gaining" this pathetic "concession" as some great diplomatic feat on our part and humanitarian gesture by Israel. Shameful.
Equally nauseating was Biden's blather about a "pathway" and "framework" for peace. The one offer the Likud can't bear to accept is the peace of a two-state solution. They have resorted to every artifice to avoid building on Hamas' acceptance of 1967 borders. It is a gross distortion say that Biden is "standing by" Israel. He is supporting an extremist party within Israel -- a party that calls Palestinians "animals."
What is truly dismal, is that U.S. political class is so utterly brainwashed by the narrative of an extremist party in Israel that no one in any position of authority thinks of dancing to other than Bibi's tune. Oh, I am sure there are some wonky people in the State Department or in think tanks that will point out how disastrous all this is, but they have no influence. Unfortunately, mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States are not using their influence to read some sanity into U.S. policy.
It will be a bloody miracle if this does not blow up in our faces, at which point the U.S., which has already lost its proxy war in the Ukraine will be faced with another unwinable war in the Middle East. Oh joy.
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