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Biden Administration mismanagement – or worse – from day one of the latest Israeli multi-front war in the Middle East has led us to where we are today, at the brink of an all-out regional war with some 40,000 US troops and multiple US military bases in the region with targets on their back.
Biden’s blank check to Israel after the attacks of October 7, 2023, to launch multiple wars against its neighbors and carry out the mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has drawn the US right into the middle of a bubbling cauldron of WWIII. And rather than take a sober look at actual US national security interests, Biden and his neocon incompetents are busy adding fuel to the fire hanging on to the pipe dream that they could do what they failed to do so many times before: remake the Middle East in their neocon image.
According to an article in Politico this past week, while Biden Administration officials publicly urged restraint and a reduction in violence, they privately were working with the Israeli government to encourage a widening of Israel’s military operations to include its northern neighbor, Lebanon. Two top Biden Administration officials, Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift Israel’s military focus from the already-flattened Gaza northward to Lebanon.
As Politico reports:
Behind the scenes, Hochstein, McGurk and other top U.S. national security officials are describing Israel’s Lebanon operations as a history-defining moment — one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.
Where have we heard this kind of “let’s do war to re-shape the Middle East” argument before? As Wikileaks reminds us, appearing before the US Congress in 2002 and urging the US to attack Iraq, Netanyahu himself promised that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
Yeah, Bibi. How’d that work out for us?
So why is it that 22 years later senior US officials are echoing Netanyahu’s bogus 2002 lies to draw the US into another “history-defining” catastrophe in the Middle East? For Hochstein it might be that he is not the unbiased “honest broker” we need to keep us out of unnecessary war. After all, as the New York Times reminds us, Hochstein was born in Israel, had/has Israeli citizenship, and even served in the Israeli Defense Forces!
Now he is serving as President Biden’s top advisor for the Middle East – a position where it is critical to bring no personal biases to the table.
This should not automatically disqualify him from the position, of course, but just as with concerns over Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken’s Ukrainian background, neocons pushing for war in the “old country” from which they should have left old allegiances behind should raise a few eyebrows.
McGurk is similarly compromised, as he is another Victoria Nuland/Zelig-like character who has spent his career weaseling into Republican and Democratic Administrations as an “expert,” while his actual expertise comprises solely his adherence to the neocon ideology of all war all the time. He was on board for Bush’s “remaking of the Middle East” to Obama’s fake “Arab Spring to remake the Middle East” to Trump’s “trash the Iran deal to remake the Middle East.”
The guy is a loser who has been wrong his whole career, with a trail of failures that would sink a normal person. But like the Energizer Bunny he just keeps on ticking and ticking toward yet another disaster.
As Politico goes on to note, the Hochstein/McGurk plan to urge Israeli attacks on Lebanon was not widely accepted among actual experts in the Administration:
The decision to focus on Hezbollah sparked division within the U.S. government, drawing opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.
Of course there is built into the Politico article the assumption that Hochstein and McGurk were at all concerned about “dragging American forces” into Israel’s regional war. In fact, their intent was the opposite. They no doubt yearned to draw the US government into Israel’s regional war.
Which brings us to where we are today, with the Biden Administration committing more US weapons systems and more US military personnel to serve on the ground in Israel in its war against Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. All at once. How’s that for neocon ambition?
As Pentagon Press Secretary Patrick Ryder announced today:
At the direction of the President, @SecDef authorized the deployment of a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery and associated crew of U.S. military personnel to Israel to help bolster Israel's air defenses. Full statement:https://t.co/iP8QhG7pTZ
— Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder (@PentagonPresSec) October 13, 2024
With today’s news that Lebanon successfully counter-attacked Israel – hitting an Israeli military base and taking out dozens of IDF soldiers – it appears certain that President Biden and his neocon-dominated foreign policy team are setting up US military members to be killed in Israel to manufacture consent for a full-on US war against all of Israel’s enemies in the region.
They want American soldiers killed in Israel because they know the enormous propaganda value, particularly among a US population that is increasingly against US involvement in Israel’s wars and in favor of ending them instead.
With Kamala tanking in the eyes of a voting public increasingly unappetized by wilted word salads, an old-fashioned war might be just what the Biden brigades are cooking up to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
With their track record of failure, it is time for those of us who are sane to be very, very worried.
This is going to get really bad really fast if we cannot get the attention of a slumbering – or worse – Congress.
