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Honestly, can you believe that Hamas's devastating October 7th attack on Israel and that country's initial military response to it occurred well over a year ago? Or that, for the last 14 months, the Gaza Strip -- and it's not called a "strip" for nothing, being only 25 miles long and, at most, seven miles wide -- has become an all too literal hell on Earth? Only the other day, the Israeli military, back campaigning in northern Gaza, reportedly managed to kill at least 50 children in an attack on a refugee camp, while UNICEF's executive director recently warned that all the people -- yes, everyone! -- now remaining in that area, particularly children, are "at imminent risk of dying." And that's not just from the fighting but from disease and famine, since the Israelis are letting very little food into that area or the Strip as a whole. (And were I to write this a week or two from now, count on one thing: I'd have a whole new set of nightmares to cite.)
Oh, and don't forget the recent attack on a polio vaccination center in northern Gaza that wounded at least six people, including four children, while the car of a UNICEF official involved in that polio program also came under attack, or the grim damage done to a local hospital. In short, each time you think it can't get worse, it does and, one year-plus later, it's estimated that 1.9 million Palestinians, or 90% of the population, has been displaced, at least 66% of the buildings -- mosques, churches, schools, housing of all sorts -- have sustained some damage, and all too many of them are now pure rubble.
And don't forget that much of that damage has been done with weaponry the Biden administration has shipped to Israel, including devastating 2,000-pound bombs that can take out whole city blocks. And worse yet, what happened to Gaza now seems to be repeating itself in Lebanon, where more than 1.2 million people have already been displaced from their homes. But let me not go on with this seemingly unending tale of horror. Instead, let TomDispatch regular Juan Cole (whose Informed Comment website is, to my mind, a daily must-read and whose latest book is, all too appropriately, Gaza Yet Stands) consider just how our country and specifically the Biden administration contributed to this ongoing horror in a big-time fashion. Tom
What Rough Beast?
President Biden's Gaza Policy Leaves the Middle East in Flames
By Juan Cole
President Joe Biden has now joined the ranks of Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush as a president whose Middle East policy crashed and burned spectacularly. Unlike Carter, who was stymied by the Iranian hostage crisis, or Bush, who faced a popular Iraqi resistance movement, Biden's woes weren't inflicted by an enemy. Quite the opposite, it was this country's putative partner, the Israeli government, that implicated the president in its still ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as its disproportionate attacks on Lebanon and Iran, for which Biden steadfastly declined to impose the slightest penalties. Instead, he's continued to arm the Israelis to the teeth.
Israel's total war on Palestinian civilians, in turn, significantly reduced enthusiasm for Biden among youth and minorities at home, helping usher him out of office. It also created electoral obstacles for Kamala Harris's presidential bid. By his insistence on impunity for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has left the Middle East in flames and the U.S. and the world distinctly in peril.
During his first three years in office, his administration wielded the tools of diplomacy in the Middle East. Donald Trump's sanctions against the Houthis in Yemen had imperiled the civilian population there by denying them humanitarian aid and gasoline to drive to the market for food. Biden lifted those sanctions and sponsored continued negotiations between those in power in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and in the neighboring Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. Only relatively small contingents of American troops remained in Syria and Iraq to help with the mopping-up operations against the so-called Islamic State terrorist organization.
Pushing Iran into the Arms of China and Russia
Danger signals nonetheless soon began flashing bright red among friend and foe alike in the region, as Biden's team quickly squandered an opportunity to restore the 2015 "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action," or JCPOA, between the U.N. Security Council and the Iranian regime in Tehran, which Trump had so tellingly trashed. Between 2015 and 2019, that deal had successfully kept Iran's civilian nuclear enrichment program purely civilian, closing off the four most plausible pathways to a nuclear weapon.
In those years, the Iranians had, in fact, mothballed 80% of their nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. While the U.N. Security Council lifted economic sanctions on that country, Republicans in Congress refused to halt unilateral American sanctions, which applied to third parties as well. European investors had to jump through hoops to invest in Iran while avoiding Treasury Department fines. As a result, a disappointed Iranian leadership went unrewarded for its careful compliance with the JCPOA.
Then, in May 2018, Trump stabbed the Iranians in the back, withdrawing the U.S. from the JCPOA and slapping the most severe economic sanctions ever applied by one country to another in peacetime on Iran. It essentially added up to an invisible blockade of the Iranian economy, even interfering with ordinary commerce like that country's oil sales. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of having convinced the gullible Trump to take such a step, which led Iran's petroleum exports to plummet over the next three years. Trump even designated the Iranian National Bank a terrorist organization, again with potentially crippling consequences for the entire economy.
In revenge, Iran went back to enriching uranium to high levels and building more centrifuges, though without actually producing weapons-grade material. To this day, its civilian nuclear program remains a form of "the Japan option," an attempt at deterrence by making it clear that it does not want a bomb but that, if it feels sufficiently threatened, it can build a nuclear weapon relatively quickly.
As soon as Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, the centrist Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declared that the JCPOA could be restored by the two leaders virtually by fiat. And Biden's foreign policy team initially appeared to consider negotiations to reinstate the treaty, only to ultimately retain Trump's outrageous sanctions as "leverage," demanding that Iran return to compliance with the JCPOA before the two sides could talk.
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