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Democrats Release Insanely Hawkish Middle East Policy Platform

by | Aug 22, 2024

Celebrity progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris “is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza” at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. There is literally no evidentiary basis anywhere for this assertion. She made it up.

Kamala Harris is not “working tirelessly” to do anything at this time besides become the next president. Her own staff are saying she is opposed to an arms embargo on Israel and won’t consider cutting or conditioning military aid, which is the only way the Israeli government can be effectively forced to stop sabotaging a peace deal so that the US-backed genocide can finally end. Saying you’ll continue pouring military explosives into a regime that is using those military explosives to conduct regular massacres of civilians is the exact opposite of working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire.

“This is false, it’s propaganda, and it’s making people misunderstand the issue,” Current Affairs’ Nathan Robinson said of AOC’s statement. “The Biden administration could have imposed a ceasefire anytime it wanted to. The only reason there isn’t one is that Biden has made sure Israel has no incentive to agree to one.”

As we deal with this crap, the DNC has approved a 2024 party platform whose section on the middle east is so surprisingly hawkish that it largely reads like it could have been written by some of Washington’s most war-horny Republicans. It repeatedly calls its support for Israel and the continuation of arms shipments thereto “ironclad”. It criticizes Trump as having been too soft on Iran, for god’s sake.

After boasting about the Biden administration’s bombing campaign against the “Iranian-linked Houthi forces” in Yemen, its “precision airstrikes on key Iranian-linked targets,” and its success in neutralizing Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel after Israel assassinated multiple Iranian military officials in Syria, the platform says that this “stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency.”

Then they literally attack Trump for not going to war with Iran:

In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.

The “national security team” who suffered “confusion and concern” when Trump opted not to wade into a middle eastern war of unfathomable horror includes psychopathic war criminal John Bolton, who was reportedly “devastated” when Trump called off a deadly military assault on Iran in retaliation for its shooting down the aforementioned (unmanned) surveillance aircraft.

When you’re siding with John Bolton on whether to bomb Iran, you’re as insanely hawkish as it gets.

“President Biden and Vice President Harris believe a strong, secure, and democratic Israel is vital to the interests of the United States,” the platform reads. “Their commitment to Israel’s security, its qualitative military edge, its right to defend itself, and the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding is ironclad.”

The 2016 Memorandum of Understanding is the agreement by which the United States agrees to continue sending Israel $3.8 billion a year to spend on weapons.

This comes as Kamala Harris’ current and former staff members report that not only will the vice president refuse to cut or condition military support to Israel, she will also refuse to re-enter the Iran deal to ease tensions in the region. The Times of Israel cites congressman Brad Schneider saying he was told by the Harris campaign’s Jewish outreach chief that “the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee would oppose a return to the Iran nuclear deal.”

The Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was one of the only decent foreign policy moves made by the Obama administration, and killing it was one of the nastiest things Trump did as president — along with his other recklessly hawkish actions against Iran like implementing starvation sanctions and assassinating Soleimani. But rather than pledging to re-enter the Obama era of de-escalation and detente with Iran, the Democrats are attacking Trump for not fighting a war with Iran while pledging ironclad support for the nation that’s doing everything it can to get that war started.

So yeah, that’s the Democratic Party for you. Vote for them and you get a nicer-looking mask on the blood-spattered face of the US war machine. It’ll kill just as many middle eastern kids as the Republicans will, but it will kill them under the presidency of a woman of color with “she/her” in her Twitter bio.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Medium.com.
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  • Caitlin Johnstone

    Caitlin Johnstone is a reader-supported independent journalist from Melbourne, Australia. Her political writings can be found on Medium and on her Facebook page, facebook.com/CaitlinAJohnstone.

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