An appendix to the letter cited U.S. laws and Administration policies that prohibited the transferring of weapons likely to be used in war crimes, and Spoljaric urged Biden to withhold weapons “that should not be used in densely populated areas, in light of their devastating humanitarian impacts.” She warned Biden that failing to “uphold minimum standards of humanity” would be a “moral defeat” that “future generations are unlikely to forgive us for failing to avert.”
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Two years after Spoljaric’s letter, President Donald J. Trump ordered the U.S. military to join Israel in attacking Iran. Some former senior officials in the Biden Administration told me that, in certain ways, the war in Iran was an extension of the Gaza conflict. Iran had been central to Biden’s thinking about the Middle East, several top advisers said. He’d feared that any public pressure the U.S. put on Israel—any “daylight” between the allies—could invite attacks by Iran or its Lebanese client, Hezbollah. The U.S. would then be compelled to defend Israel in a regional conflagration. Brett McGurk, Biden’s White House coördinator for the Middle East and probably his most influential adviser, championed this position, arguing that rock-solid support for Israel would help contain Iran, whose proxies killed three U.S. soldiers in the region during the first months of the Gaza conflict.
At the same time, the Biden Administration’s staunch public backing of Israel during the Gaza war had created what Philip Gordon, the national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, described to me as a “moral hazard”—it had invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to expand the battle into a regional one. Even though Biden and his advisers privately told Netanyahu many times not to provoke Iran, the Israelis repeatedly blindsided the Americans by doing exactly that: a January, 2024, strike on Damascus killed five senior Iranian military advisers; an April, 2024, strike on an Iranian diplomatic mission in Syria killed more than a dozen; a July, 2024, strike in Tehran assassinated a top Hamas political leader; a September, 2024, operation in Lebanon detonated explosives planted in thousands of walkie-talkies and pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters; a subsequent air strike killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
I suppose in that sense this article is thorough proof the latter camp’s strategy was catastrophic in exactly the way the former camp was warning it would be…
I mean you’d think that. Instead the latter camp has decided that it was the voters fault, for not showing up for Harris, when she famously and repeatedly said she would do nothing fundamentally different than Biden. It breaks the brain, in many ways, because the camp making the argument around electorallism was also the one insisting on the least electorally viable strategy; and vehemently. And I think in some ways that becomes the crux of it, in that it reveals a deep cynicism in the apologist camp, that it was never really about stopping a genocide or even about getting Biden elected, because those things were one and the same, and critically, enough voices were making that known at the time they really can’t make any excuses for not knowing that a failure to hold Israel accountable would result in an electoral loss for Biden.
The goal of apologists was never to get Biden elected or harm reduction, but rather, to protect an approach to electoral and government. For the apologists, it was about them, and those they associate their identity with, it was about protecting how they choose to govern from critique. And we saw that very clearly with how Schumers and Jefferies decided, and through media were supported in doing so, a “lay down, play dead” approach to politics while in the minority position. And since then, its only become more and more apparent as we’ve progressed into the mid-terms, and consistently, almost half of Democrats are willing to just “go along to get along” with whatever horrendous thing the Republicans want to get through in congress. Simultaneously, we’re also seeing an uprising from within the party in the form of the wave of socialists coming into power post '24. This is paired with some fairly insane degrees of hand-wringing on the part of “third way Democrats”, who make up the core of the apologetics movement.
I mean its plain as day now. And I guess as one of the most vocal members of the anti-apologist camp, I would say it was as plain as day then. But we’re still somehow having the conversation.