A Rock And A Very Hard Place

-by Patrick Toomey

This must-read Chris Hedges piece crystallizes the dilemma that any informed person of humane instincts must face in looking at the 2024 election. These three opening paragraphs make it clear that the donkey is sliding down a dangerous moral precipice as it openly aligns itself with stated Likud policy:

Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt. The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran.

The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to "militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region."

The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing.

I’d like to think that Hedges is engaging in hyperbole. After watching Anthony Blinken on Face the Nation on Sunday morning, it appears to me, sadly, that Hedges is not doing so.

QUESTION: Have you asked the Israeli Government to delay in order to give you more time to broker the release of these hostages?

SECRETARY BLINKEN: First, step back for a second because it’s important to remember what happened— it’s incredible how quickly that gets lost— because it was only a couple of weeks ago that Hamas invaded Israel with its terrorist fighters and slaughtered— and I use that word very deliberately— slaughtered so many people.

QUESTION: Right.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: Again, men, women, young children, babies, old people, you name it. And they continue to rain rockets down on Israel. When I was there a few days ago, we were in the— we had to take shelter a couple of times because of incoming rockets from Hamas.

QUESTION: Understood.

SECRETARY BLINKEN: So my point is this: No country— no country— can be expected to tolerate this, to live with this. And as we’ve said from the start, Israel has both the right and even the obligation not only to defend itself but to try to make sure that, to the best of its ability, this can’t happen again.

So we’ve talked to the Israelis about what they’re planning. We give them our best advice. It’s important, as we’ve said, not only what they do but how they do it, particularly when it comes to making sure that civilians are as protected as they possibly can be in this crossfire of Hamas’s making.

But in terms of what we’re talking to Israel about in their– with regard to their military operations, it really is focused on both how they do it and how best to achieve the results that they seek. (Emphasis added)

The overall tenor of these comments— most notably the closing sentence— could not be more clear. In diplomat-speak, the U.S. Secretary of State, on national TV, gave Bibi Netanyahu a blank check to conduct an invasion of Gaza as he and the IDF see fit. Our leading diplomat openly and unabashedly put the full faith and credit of our government behind a campaign of de facto ethnic cleansing.

At present, our political system appears to be bound and determined to give us the same sorry selections for president it gave us in 2020. In Battle of the Addled II, one party will give us a twice impeached and four times indicted fraudster who attempted to incite insurrection. The other party will give us a career-long mediocrity who, in 2002, helped greenlight the invasion of Iraq as Senate Foreign Relations Chair and whose administration is openly greenlighting the invasion of Gaza now.

I gave up on the prospect of presidential third party candidates after my experiences as one of the Nader 95,000 in Florida in 2000. Even if I were inclined in that direction, RFK Jr. is not worthy of discussion. Cornel West co-authored a WSJ op-ed piece that supported DeSantis’ educational policies, and West recently proudly accepted a maximum donation from Harlan Crow.

I happily cast my first presidential vote for Carter in 1976. By 1980, I voted for John Anderson (after volunteering for Ted Kennedy in the Democratic primaries). I recall being depressed by the two major party nominees then. In hindsight, I should have steeled myself for many upcoming negative future choices. This looming “choice” may prove to be the worst one I will face in 12 presidential elections.

In closing, the other equally disturbing aspect to this voluntarily chosen moral and policy failure is the repeated reference to the U.S. response to 9/11 as offering some sort of policy template for Israel now. Our military forces invaded one country that had something to do with 9/11 and another country that our government knew had nothing to with 9/11. Those twin invasions squandered trillions of dollars, led to countless deaths and untold destruction, and ended in abject failure. Any policymaker who views those invasions with anything other than revulsion and regret should not be in a position of authority.

Thirteen progressive Democrats have brought a resolution calling for a cease-fire in this conflict. While this effort is praise-worthy, it will accomplish little. The party’s left is essentially powerless to stop the imperatives of the national security state, even when the donkey holds the presidency.

Our electoral system is in a very bad place now.