The bombing of Rafah has begun. Prospects for a permanent ceasefire are near non-existent, Netanyahu making it clear once more today that he will not accept a permanent ceasefire under any circumstances. We can reasonably expect that deaths in Gaza, and demonstrations in the U.S., will again soar.
And, of course, I haven’t gotten to the really bad part yet: Biden is at best even in the polls with an avowed authoritarian sociopath and we’re in the fight of our lives to keep our democracy.
I support the peaceful demonstrators, who represent the overwhelming majority of protesters, and their aim of stopping the slaughter in Gaza. At the same time, I fear the potential that low-information, undecided voters will be carpet bombed by cable news with reports of chaos on the campuses and in the streets. You know the rest — 1968, party split over war, Chicago, narrow election loss. A sociopath takes power.
How the fuck did we get here? With the rush of events — Gaza, the ever-present fascist MAGA threat, the trump trials — I haven’t really reflected on this until recently. I can’t really offer any answers at this point, but the more I thought about it the more questions I had.
For example, why is Antony Blinken Secretary of State? Why did Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Bret McGurk essentially adopt the absurd Kushner peace plan — the Abraham Accords — as the Biden administration policy? A policy that at its core believed Saudi Arabia and other Arab states could be bribed and cajoled (principally with U.S. dollars and security guarantees) into some kind of peace with Israel that left the Palestinians out in the cold. A policy so delusional that Netanyahu embraced it with the fervor one might expect given his avowed objective of retaining and expanding Israeli control of the West Bank.
I won’t do a deep dive on Blinken. I don’t think it’s necessary. He backed the Iraq War. It was a huge mistake, a “big fucking deal” as Joe might say. An embarrassing number of Democrats supported it, although less than a majority of congressional democrats. Obama beat Hillary in 2008 due in no small part to the fact that Hillary had backed the bush/cheney travesty, and Obama had not.
Just consider, if there is one issue in this nation today that unites left and right, The Squad and MAGA, it’s that the Iraq War was completely fucked up, the biggest U.S. foreign policy blunder since Vietnam. We who opposed the Iraq War, and the majority of congressional democrats who voted against it, have been vindicated in a way we rarely see in our politics: even the other side agrees we were right.
So why the fuck is Iraq War miscreant Antony Blinken Secretary of State? Blinken not only got Iraq wrong, he backed the Libya misadventure in 2011. So did Jake Sullivan. You know who didn’t? Joe Biden. After Iraq, Joe argued in 2011 that Qaddafi was bad, like Saddam, but was preferable to the chaotic and combustible forces that might be unleashed if we deposed him by force. Joe had learned the lesson of Iraq. Antony, alas, had not.
Our principled opposition to the Iraq War, and the decision by the Obama administration to extract ourselves from the Iraq morass, is unquestionably the greatest achievement of Democratic foreign policy in our lifetimes. And yet our Secretary of State is Antony Blinken.
It’s like Jimmy Carter nominating Robert McNamara for secretary of defense in 1976.
Thomas Friedman, among others, has posited that Hamas acted when they did because of fear and dismay that Blinken et al would consummate or progress significantly towards an expansion of the Abraham Accords, thereby throwing the Palestinians to the wolves. This weird adoption by Biden and Blinken of Trump policies was the source of much of the State Department discontent we’ve read about. The concern expressed by many at State was that the expansion of the Abraham Accords was gas on the fire of unrest in the West Bank and Gaza. Their fears were ignored by Blinken.
It has been widely reported, particularly by Haaretz, that IDF forces formerly assigned to the Gaza border were being moved to the West Bank in the months preceding October 7, in support of Netanyahu’s increasingly aggressive expansion in the West Bank. As we now know, the Gaza border was almost undefended on October 7, and the IDF didn’t arrive until hours after it was essentially too late.
We knew what Netanyahu was doing. We knew his actions in the West Bank were directly contrary to U.S. and Biden administration policy. We knew that IDF forces were being redeployed from the Gaza border to the West Bank. But we did nothing more than issue the usual pro forma statements to the effect that the expansion of West Bank settlements was contrary to U.S. policy. We once again deferred to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Givr and the racist faction of the Israeli government.
Again, it was not only predictable that Netanyahu’s rapacious West Bank policies could only inflame Palestinian fury, it was predicted by many in the State Department. Again, the counsels of West Bank de-escalation emanating from the State Department were ignored by Blinken. Netanyahu and his racist ministers had their green light.
We knew Netanyahu was cynically facilitating funding for Hamas through Qatar because he feared that the Palestinian Authority would be too credible a peace partner were they to assume control in Gaza. And so he provided support to Hamas in furtherance of his stated policy of opposing an independent Palestinian state. The Qatari payments, while ostensibly a secret, have been widely known and discussed in the Israeli news media for years. Netanyahu’s cynical and ultimately tragic miscalculation has been widely discussed in Israeli and U.S. media. Why didn’t the U.S. object to funding an organization we had designated a terrorist organization? Why did we again acquiesce to the monstrously incompetent Netanyahu? As recently as just weeks before October 7 the Israeli government was reaffirming to Qatar its support for funding Gaza. Did Biden or Blinken have an opinion on this moronic and perverted stratagem?
Why is Blinken or any other backer of the Iraq War serving at the highest levels of foreign policy in a Democratic administration? Does anyone remember the government jobs graced by McNamara or Rusk or Bundy or Rostow after Vietnam? No, because there were none. If you fucked up Vietnam, you were out. So why is getting Iraq wrong virtually a must-have on the curriculum vitae of Biden’s most senior foreign policy advisors?
I’m not saying Blinken is a neocon, but he’s neocon adjacent. His appointment was welcomed by neocons who make a living savaging Democratic foreign policy. Blinken, almost uniquely among Biden cabinet officers, is largely exempt from the withering disdain of Fox and the WSJ, and the rest of the neocon media organs. Blinken is their favorite Democratic foreign policy figure.
Why did Joe Biden make it a point to embrace not only Israel but Netanyahu? Why did he so ham-handedly dismiss early reports of massive civilian casualties in Gaza? Why did he trust that Netanyahu would not exploit unconditional U.S. support to give free rein to his worst impulses?
Where were we on the left? Who was our preferred nominee for Secretary of State? Seriously, who was it? I don’t even know. Were we all content with Blinken? I know I wasn’t. I know there were many on the left similarly dismayed that Blinken, a compulsive interventionist, was nominated. But it’s not like there was any real, organized pushback from the left.
Why is Antony Blinken secretary of state? Why has Elliott Abrams been nominated by Biden for a post in his administration? Elliott freakin’ Abrams, neocon extraordinaire.
The term “the Blob” was coined by Obama advisor Ben Rhodes to describe the permanent but fluid D.C. foreign policy establishment in which Iraq War fuck-ups are welcome and neocons can shift from republican to democrat administrations without apparent resistance. Blinken is a member in good standing of The Blob. So are Biden appointees Victoria Nuland and the aforementioned Elliott Abrams.
Really, what the fuck is going on here?
We know a lot about what’s being said at the State Department but the White House is of course more opaque. Last November and December, was anyone in the White House painting for the President a picture of the political perils of sub-contracting our Middle East policy to Netanyahu? Were they advising him of the potential that some significant part of the Democratic base would recoil in horror at Netanyahu’s slaughter in Gaza? Did any political advisor in the White House say “gee, this could be a real fucking finger in the eye of our base right before an election”?
My guess is that Biden knew the risk he was taking as far back as last October, and he didn’t need his staff to tell him. He knew Netanyahu would go berserk, he knew it would cause a political turmoil on the left, and he knew this war wouldn’t end as long as Netanyahu remained in power.
Biden was in a pickle. Someone was going to get a finger in the eye. It was a choice of the left wing of our party or the megadonors who concentrate their contributions on the Israel/Palestine issue. They’d lobbied for Blinken and Sullivan and McGurk just for this eventuality, just to be sure Biden would have Netanyahu’s back no matter what. They would have been most displeased to learn that Biden wouldn’t let Netanyahu out of the cage.
Why are neocons and fellow travelers in this administration? Why did they endorse and pursue The Kushner Policy? Why did we adopt a set of policies that furthered Netanyahu’s desire to inflame the region by communicating so unambiguously to the Palestinians that Israel and the U.S. were luring Saudi Arabia and the butcher MBS into a deal that would leave the Palestinians stateless and wretched forever?
How the fuck did we get here? I still don’t know. But why is Antony Blinken Secretary of State?