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.”
…
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.
lol. Of course it’s Biden’s fault. What isn’t? I heard that son of a bitch personally invented suffering, starvation, disease, and death.
Low effort, reductive and lazy comment.
Isreal has been aggressive assholes my entire life. Biden was only president for 4 years.
Why do you think this makes Biden look better or less culpable? That makes his choices look even worse…?
Pick a president, any president since they annihilated people to dig out space for Isreal. Why just one?
Because the current genocide is literally a culmination of all of the worst parts of that history and it was obvious during Biden’s presidency that this was so.
Don’t play games with this by trying to imply that because bad things have happened in the past that the current Palestinian Genocide isn’t a world historic awful event.
Get out of here with your ‘whataboutism’ I won’t stand for such a lazy method of diverting a nuanced, critical analysis of what has led to this.
Yes, what is happening now is a product of history and the choices of leaders, we all know this, now can you be an adult about this please?
Why’s Trump not responsible for his time in office before Biden then? Surely he wasn’t talking peace with the guy. He gave them everything they wanted and more.
Isreal has been aggressive assholes my entire life. Trump was only president for 4 years.
See how dumb is that argument?
It works for any president going back to when they geenocided the first time. Why pick one?
because it is the one where the full scale accelerated genocide started and now it is continuing during Trump. Trump criminal decisions will also affect the next administration and should be talked about even after he is out
I’m sure the pre 2022 victims appreciate your sentiment
Yep, it’s true. Biden and his idiot goons, like the joyful and unconditional Israel genocide supporter, “couldn’t think of anything I’d do differently, oh, but have a Republican in my cabinet,” Kamala Cheney, helped Trump win. Those same useful idiots are the ones that would boast their No King’s protests selfies on major social media platforms and then clapped like seals in NPC admiration for an actual king. Anyone that buried their head for decrepit Biden or his coronated donor-picked corporate warcrimes Dick Cheney-praising shill should just go join MAGA, cause they have the same intelligence-levels and morals as most of them, if not less.
Its just a bunch of c/politics posts from 2024…
What do you mean?
It was intended to be a bit tongue in cheek, but even before the onset of the genocide, and especially after after October 7th, there was an extremely polarizing debate on lemmy with regards to Biden (and Harris), their role in enabling and furthering the genocide and supporting Israel, and the impact this was having on the Democrats ability to maintain power in the 2024 election.
The discussion pooled into two camps, one critical of the administration and their response, arguing that it was hurting their ability to stop Trump in the upcoming election, and the second, argued that criticism of the administration would decrease support for them, and that to stop Trump, you needed to support Biden (or Harris) regardless of their performance or role in enabling the genocide.
Obviously the article focuses squarely on the period before the genocide, but this discussion started here long ago, and was made more salient by the events of the day.
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.
Also don’t forget obama which allowed isrsel to have 800 millions additional aid anually for 10 years
Fuck trump vote socialists only fuck dems
