Yves here. The article provides a sobering picture of how disconnected Democratic Party insiders are from the dangerous conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and their misunderstanding of America’s deteriorating posture and military reach. There is one sour note in this article. It takes a recent report in the Washington Post, that Ukraine and Russia have been discussing ending their energy conflict. Both Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zarakhova and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed it. Mostly, these “talks” were low-level emotions.
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies, authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of the Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022. Medea Benjamin is the founder of CODEPINK for Peace.and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real and Political History of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas JS Davies is a freelance journalist, CODEPINK researcher and author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
DNC delegates unfurl a banner during Biden’s speech at the DNC. Photo credit: Esam Boraey
An Orwellian disconnect dominates the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the conference hall alone, protected in other countries behind thousands of armed police, few delegates seem to realize that their country is on the verge of getting involved in major wars with Russia and Iran, which may escalate. The Third World War.
Inside the hall, the mass killings in the Middle East and Ukraine are considered only “issues” of concern, which “the largest military force in the history of the world” can deal with. Guests who unfurled a banner reading “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech Monday night were quickly heckled by DNC officials, who ordered other guests to use “We ❤️ Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.
In the real world, the most explosive place right now is the Middle East, where US weapons and Israeli forces are killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the behest of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. However, in July, Democrats and Republicans jumped to their feet in 23 weeks to applaud Netanyahu’s fiery speech to a joint session of Congress.
A week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval of a $20 billion arms sale to Israel, which will close the US from relations with the Israeli military for years to come.
Netanyahu’s willingness to continue killing without restraint in Gaza, and the willingness of Biden and Congress to continue giving him the weapons to do so, always risked igniting a wider war, but this crisis has reached a new peak. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to drag America into a war with Iran, a war to humiliate Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority it destroyed in Gaza.
To achieve its goal of creating a wider war, Israel killed Fuad Shukr, the commander of Hezbollah, in Beirut, and the political leader of Hamas and the chief negotiator of the ceasefire, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the killings, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They don’t want war with Israel and the United States, and they’ve been holding back during this whole massacre in Gaza. But failure to respond strongly to these killings will encourage Israel to continue attacking Iran and its allies.
The massacres in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the US into the war. Can Iran find a way to hit Israel that won’t provoke a US response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the time to fight the seemingly inevitable war with the US and Israel?
This is a very dangerous time, but a ceasefire in Gaza can solve this problem. The US has sent CIA Director William Burns, the only professional strategist in the Biden cabinet, to the Middle East to renew ceasefire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the outcome of the talks before responding to the killing.
Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised disarmament proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree on. But Israel has consistently rejected any offer to temporarily halt its offensive in Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent end to it. Had Biden sent Burns to stop, so that a new fight would not damage the Dems party in Chicago?
The United States has always had the option of suspending arms shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to implement that measure, except for the suspension of one shipment of 2,000 lb bombs in May, after it sent Israel 14,000 of the dreaded weapons, which are used to smash children and living families into unrecognizable pieces. flesh and bone.
Meanwhile, the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, when Ukraine attacked the Russian region of Kursk. Some analysts believe this is a prelude to an even more dangerous attack by Ukraine on the Russian-owned Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukrainian leaders see the writing on the wall, and are ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.
But Ukraine’s recent accession to Russia, while applauded by most in the west, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree to identify the other’s electrical infrastructure, with the hope that this would lead to broader negotiations. But after the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the first weeks of the Russian invasion.
President Zelenskyy is still in power three months after the end of his term, and he is a big fan of Israel. Will he take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and do something provocative enough to draw US and NATO forces into the potential nuclear war with Russia that Biden has promised to avoid?
A 2023 study by the US Army War College found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia would result in as many US deaths every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and concluded that such a war would need to be repeated. to join the army in the United States.
While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine are burning in storms of US and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan continues unabated, the entire planet is moving towards a catastrophic increase in temperature, ecosystem collapse and mass extinction. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la world about America’s responsibility in that crisis as well.
Under the smart climate plan that Obama sold to the world in Copenhagen and Paris, Americans’ CO2 emissions per capita have doubled that of our Chinese, British and European neighbors, while US oil and gas production has risen to record levels.
The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe forced the hands of the Doomsday clock to 90 seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the oil industry and the military and industrial sectors. After an election year, the focus is on what the two parties do not agree on, the principles of corruption that they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.
President Biden recently said he “runs the world.” No oligarchic American politician will agree to “run the world” to the brink of nuclear war and mass extinction, but the tens of thousands of Americans marching in the streets of Chicago and the millions of other Americans who support them understand that this is what Biden, Trump and their neighbors are doing.
The people inside the assembly hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the people on the streets. Therein lies the real hope, perhaps the only hope, for America’s future.
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