PATRICK LAWRENCE: Lost & Fearful in The Middle East
February 7, 2024
The Biden regime wanders in a funhouse of its own making.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arriving in Cairo on Feb. 6. (State Department, Chuck Kennedy)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
Of all the amateurish moments to arise as the Biden regime conducts its foreign policy, the White House’s official statement as B1–B bombers let loose over Iraq and Syria last Friday may be the taker of the cake.
As the ordnance fell on 85 targets in seven locations, many of them outposts of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, our addled president felt compelled to insist, “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.”
How many times have we heard this since these latest operations in Iraq, Syria and Yemen began? Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, has said the same thing in the same words. Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, has, too. So has Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser. So has John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman.
Once we are finished counting, we can consider the astounding stupidity that has led the Biden regime into this impossible contradiction. Reflecting the president’s compulsive support for Israel over the whole of his political life, the U.S. has incautiously stayed with the Zionist state as it seeks to widen the war all the way to Iran by way of Lebanon and Syria.
Now, as the war runs straight up to the Islamic Republic’s borders, Biden and his people take to insisting they do not want that wider war the Israelis are bent on provoking.
I honestly cannot think of other occasions in the history of American foreign policy that match this one for its sheer… what? … the sheer botch of it. There must be some, or many given America’s conduct these past seven decades, but they do not come readily to mind.
Escalation, to take the most obvious problem, is not the right way to deescalate. You cannot begin bombing other nations — illegally, let’s not forget — while killing noncombatants in the process (as the Iraqis and Syrians have charged), and tell them in simultaneous statements that you do not wish to provoke conflict.
Well, you can, but you cannot expect to be taken seriously.
‘Illusory Truth Effect’
B-1B bombers taking off from Dyess Air Force Base in Texas on Feb. 2 with targets in Iraq in Syria. (video still, Wikimedia Commons)
I start to think the Biden administration now resorts to one of the propagandist’s cardinal rules: Say something nonsensical often enough and people, even intelligent people, will begin to believe it. Psychologists have called this the illusory truth effect since researchers at Villanova and Temple universities discovered this common vulnerability among us in the late–1970s.
The reiteration effect has long worked on Americans, diabolically enough. But one of Joe Biden’s most fundamental failings is his assumption that he can sell abroad the sort of nonsense he has sold Americans for 50–odd years. I do not exaggerate when I suggest this misapprehension is one of the core defects of the Man from Scranton’s foreign policies.
A second, related problem merits brief consideration. To insist that the U.S. does not seek a region-wide war while bombing other nations amounts to asking others not to retaliate. It is to say, in effect, “We want to restore our failed deterrence policy. Please let us deter you.” Alastair Crooke, in a well-reasoned piece published last Friday, calls this “a form of militarized psychotherapy.”
This amounts to a gamble only a nation on its back foot would take. The Biden regime is likely to win it with the Iranians, who continue to abide by a longstanding policy of “strategic patience,” as Muhammad Sahimi, a prominent commentator on Iranian affairs, argued in a piece published Saturday in The Floutist.
But the Yemeni Houthis attacking ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden have already signaled they have no intention of changing course. Other groups active in Iraq and Syria are likely to follow the Houthis’ lead: It will persist, not desist, in my read.
I take the administration at its word when it insists it does not want another war on its hands, even if it seems to have no idea how to avoid the risk of starting one. It is simply too overexposed across the Middle East — too many bases, too burdened with a hardware-heavy war machine, musclebound, and altogether too vulnerable.
All the recent attacks on U.S. ships, ground facilities and personnel have unexpectedly exposed this weakness. And this brings us to what most fundamentally motivates Biden and the instant peaceniks who faithfully repeat what he says. (Or does he faithfully repeat what they tell him to say?)
What we have heard this past week is an implicit confession of fear at the top of America’s foreign policy cliques. If these people have bungled policy to an extent that may be unprecedented in the postwar decades, as suggested above, they find themselves, in consequence, utterly lost and afraid in the funhouse of their making.
History’s clock just chimed again, if I am right about this.
Israel’s Control Over Washington
Biden with pilots of Marine One on Jan. 21. (White House, Adam Schultz)
Straight off the top, anyone who still traffics in a two-state solution featuring an independent Palestine is at this point unable to face reality and discouraging others from doing so.
No such entity is any longer possible — nor was one, in my view, ever desirable. The Israelis, in any event, will never agree to an independent Palestine: The Netanyahu regime makes this clear every chance it gets.
What is this “reshaping the Palestinian Authority” all about? What does such a project even mean? Who will do the reshaping? Into what? And out of what? The PA at this point droops under its own sclerosis and corruption. Who is going to put it in charge of Gaza — by what mechanism? How is a “demilitarized Palestinian state” — Friedman’s phrase — to bear responsibility for its national security?
As to the Saudis, there seems to me nothing in these three tracks that has any chance of drawing them into formal relations with Israel. There has been too much desecration and murder these past four months for Washington — “the power trying to stitch it all together” — to come anywhere near reaching the end of this “track.”
Tom Friedman’s name for the “strategic thinking” pencil-sketched here is “a Biden Doctrine.” Let us suppress our splutters and leave our Tom to the grandiosity he prefers. There are several realities to consider as we assess these proposals.
One, at issue in these various tracks are geopolitical power and empire management, nothing more. What is the intent of the policy supposedly now in formation? Tell me it is anything other than the creation of a puppet regime comprised of malleable compradors in a hopelessly fragmented “Palestine.” Tell me execution of the policy the Times outlines will not entail a festival of bribery and coercion across the region.
Two, and related to the first point, there is no more place in this “strategic thinking” for any kind of Palestinian democracy or freedom than there is in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
Read the Times’ copy, listen to the quoted sources: Where in any of it do Palestinians breathe or walk around or have anything to say? Shame on these two reporters, their columnist colleague, their editors and every source they cite: They participate in the same dehumanization that has defined American policy on the Palestine question for decades.
Do you think Palestinians and those who support their cause do not see these things? Do you think they do not read these policies in outline as essentially unserious?
I am convinced the Times’ reports accurately reflect an effort in Washington to find a way forward out of the utter mess Biden and his people have made for themselves. But to call what is apparently afoot a Biden Doctrine is to put lipstick on a pig.
These people seem to have no clue how to devise a genuinely useful policy. Fear, after all, inhibits all thought of innovation.
The Gaza crisis is a text in which we can read that genuine diplomacy, based on knowledge of the perspectives of others, will come to define our century more than mere power. It tells us, too, that Washington, as of now, has neither the intention nor ability to live and act well in this new time.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/07/p ... ddle-east/
******
Democrats and the Mediocre Black Misleaders
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 07 Feb 2024
Joe Biden and Symone Sanders Townsend in 2020 (Photo: Matt Rourke/Associated Press)
The Democrats offer nothing but fake opposition and the duopoly is splitting. The chosen Black spokespeople are predictably hacks who get paid to spout meaningless drivel.
“There are people who say, ‘We would like choice.’ To those people I say yes but now is not the time. Like I would like to be a size 6. Ok but that means I got to go to the gym. That means I can’t eat them oreos at night. That means I probably need to not put no sugar in my coffee.”
Symone Sanders Townsend , MSNBC
“Those folks who were in bondage, the progeny of the folks who picked cotton, now those folks won’t be picking cotton, but will be picking presidents.”
Jaime Harrison , Democratic National Committee Chair
The Democratic Party shows its contempt for the Black voters they depend upon in a myriad of ways. They talk a good game and pretend to do what Black people want while also engaging in duopoly treachery, falsely pointing to republicans as the obstacle to doing what the people want. “But Trump!”, will be their most popular expression in 2024. This year will present numerous occasions for patronizing treachery against the people whose support they need the most.
One would think that as Joe Biden struggles to reach an approval rating that would ensure re-election success that he and the rest of the party establishment would choose better people to represent them in the group most likely to vote for democrats. They don’t because they are on the horns of a dilemma. They don’t really want to be too closely identified with Black people, the group they need most. They also can’t be in conflict with the oligarchs who make all of the political decisions in the country. The end result is a parade of foolishness meant to keep Black people in support of a party that actively works against their interests.
In 2024 democrats put the South Carolina primary first, pushing it past New Hampshire, where they didn’t even bother with a primary campaign. As in the rest of the south, registered democrats in South Carolina are usually Black. The decision to have an early contest in a southern state is politically sound but nothing comes out of it for Black people except photo ops with the likes of Congressman James Clyburn, a leader of the congressional establishment who has been falsely portrayed as an independent actor, a kingmaker.
It is true that Biden recently won in South Carolina overwhelmingly with 96% of the vote, but with only a 4% turnout of registered voters. One can hardly blame those who chose to stay home. He had no credible competition and the fix, as they say, was in. But that doesn’t excuse the likes of Jaime Harrison from using one of the most trite and offensive stump speech lines about picking cotton and picking presidents.
Not to be outdone, Symone Sanders, once a press secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, and an adviser to Biden’s 2020 campaign, who then moved on to work for Vice President Kamala Harris, added to the tomfoolery by telling viewers that wanting to have a choice other than Biden is akin to going on a diet.
The quadrennial election process is a grifter’s dream come true. The democrats throw money around to anyone who is willing to repeat the party line, and if the grifters in question are Black, they lower the standard even further. The electoral propagandists don’t need to be smart or offer anything new. In fact, that is the last thing their patrons want. Any skills or intelligence go out the window and we are left with sad analogies about picking cotton. Doing otherwise would rock the political boat and expose the fakery that is rife in American politics.
Of course, this is a difficult moment as the ruling classes are openly splitting on key issues. The Democratic Party is saddled with an unpopular president and a discredited former president who is still managing to lead in the polls. Democrats gave away the store as the saying goes in coming up with an immigration bill that republicans demanded. The border wall, which liberals were supposed to revile, was back yet again, along with other measures intended to stem the flow of asylum seekers at the southern border. Republicans were on board until Donald Trump told them to scuttle the bill, and scuttle it they did.
Republicans held military spending for Ukraine and for Israel hostage, claiming they would give billions of dollars more if they got the border bill they wanted. But Trump spoke and the wheeling and dealing fell apart. Enter Symone Sanders Townsend . “In a world where the U.S. doesn’t fund Ukraine, Taiwan & Israel as well as provide $$ needed for border security…more people will die, Putin will win, the Chinese government will follow Putin’s lead and America is no longer a reliable partner.” This sort of word salad is all that is left of what passes for Black leadership. The misleaders are even worse than they used to be.
Hoping for a better class of party hacks is a loser’s game but they must be exposed nonetheless. It is vital for Black people to see what kind of games are being played against them. Democrats offer nothing but quieter Trumpism and that is why a Black media personality like Sanders Townsend will make silly statements about Russia and China. It is what she is being paid to do after all and the people doing the paying are scoundrels and hacks themselves.
https://blackagendareport.com/index.php ... misleaders
