The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s ApocalypseJoe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.
(Reproduced in full at the botttom of this post)
Sloan Bashinsky
Thank you, Chris, I think every Democrat and all school children in America should be required to read what you wrote about Joe Biden, much of which was news to this Independent.Instead of being in bed with Israel, Biden should be doing all he can to stop the invasion from Mexico. Yet yesterday, the all-wise U.S. Supreme Court ruled Texas had no right to line its southern border with razor wire, after the wall Donald Trump had promised Mexico would pay for, which got Trump elected in 2016, didn’t get paid for by Mexico, and most of it didn’t get built.
If I were president, I would ban American travel to Mexico, money being sent from America to people in Mexico, and Mexican products and services from entering America, until Mexico stops the invasion from it into America.
I would bring the troops home and put them on America’s southern border to repel the invasion as peacefully as possible.
I would put American soldiers, armed to the teeth, in American public lower, middle and high schools, to protect school children from domestic terrorists armed to the teeth with guns protected by the National Rifle Association, gun lovers, and the United States Supreme Court, none of whom ever once considered Amendment 2’s right of the citizens to bear arms is predicated on a well regulated militia to carry those arms.
As for how I would deal with the war in Palestine, which will continue for so long as Israel is there, it’s biblical, I abandon Israel altogether, and give Israel the choice of stop fighting in Palestine, because it ran out of American ammunition, or use its nukes against its Islamic enemies and make Palestine uninhabitable, and there is no holy land for Judaism, Christendom and Islam to squabble over.
To attempt to head off that dystopia, I release all of UFO files, hoping that so jangles the thinking, hopes and dreams of every person and government and political party and religion on this planet, that they all put aside their personal squabbles and unite against the sum of their greatest fears, which heretofore they had ignored or not even believed they had.
In that way, Israel’s best friend Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, and their lemmings all get chopped off at the groin.
Alan H Torok
This is a remarkably disgusting and ignorant comment!?
Sloan Bashinsky
Disgusting topic, ignorance is in the eye of the beholder.
Daedalus
Kinda sounds like you want an 'Iron Curtain'. How American.Sloan BashinskyThe Iron Curtain didn’t allow people to leave the Soviet Union and go somewhere else, as well as it kept people from going into the Soviet Union. America doesn’t need any more immigrants, from anywhere, but its southern border is a real problem and has been for a good while, and that’s because Mexico has not been inclined to do anything about it. So, let Mexico trade with other countries, and see how much it misses American dollars, and maybe Mexico will decide to stop the flood through and from it to the America southern border.
On the other side of that “fence,” America has many internal troubles, which it needs to give its full attention, and one way to help America do that is stop immigration, and another way is to stop America's foreign military excursions. And, the way things are going with the political/religious landscape in America, it looks to me that the time is coming when the US Military will be needed inside of America to try to keep it from going into another civil war. It’s so much easier to hold forth about something awful going on across an ocean than is to roll up the sleeves and deal with bad shit going on inside America.
DaedalusYou bring up another point. I certainly agree that stopping foreign military excursions would be a good thing. However, the creation of that military in the first place causes a problem that's been evident for over 2,000 years. The problem of the 'returning military'.
First, you train youngsters to follow orders and hate 'the other' so that they can more easily kill fellow humans. Next you set them loose on 'others' halfway around the world. But, when they return home, you reap the results of your ill-conceived plan. The result (as Greece and Rome found out) is that your 'republic' often becomes a dictatorship, and that leads to the same distinctly authoritarian division between those that take and those that give orders. This submerges any vestige of an egalitarian (democratic) ethic. Such a situation created the American Revolution (among a few others). The 'United States' were States that found common cause against the authoritarian British Crown. That's what made 'America', not hatred of 'the Other'. The hate-filled Pilgrims made cause with the peace-loving Quakers.Are you, perhaps, a former military minion?Sloan BashinskyNever served in the military, and was spared by what seemed a miracle at the time from being drafted during the Vietnam war. That any country feels it needs a military, or uses its military against another country, speaks to the devolution of humanity, in my opinion. Yet most countries, including America, have a military, so I say put it to use defending America from the southern invasion, defending children in public schools, and defending America from insurrection.
In a different sense, I am very much a soldier, and I have fought many battles in many wars, but the weapons were, and remain, words spoken and written. The chain of command I serve is vast beyond human comprehension, and although some religions think or believe they have a grasp on it, it is unfathomable and cannot be comprehended in human ways, but its workings can be seen at times and acknowledged.
I have participated in many public forums or places: churches, government meetings, face to face, and in many online forums. Sometimes I receive a like or attaboy, but mostly slings and arrows.
If you are not familiar with it, I suggest you read THE SPEAR OF DESTINY, by Trevor Ravenscroft, which is about Hiter and his inner circle, how they became so powerful, and some people with special abilities who opposed them and reported to the Allied Command.
Humanity is really messed up. Palestine is really messed up. America is really messed up. Just about every place is really messed up, while some places are less messed up.
I live in Birmingham, Alabama, which once was one of the seats of white supremacy in America, but today Birmingham is a blue city surrounded by seas or red.
I’m 81 years old and I don’t figure I will be around long enough to see America end up like Great Britain, Rome, Greece and the Persian empires. But I think that is where America is headed and I see no way to avoid it, which leaves for each person living in America to do the next right thing, so to speak.
A Court far above any human court observes all of those proceedings, and in that Court we all are on trial.
"The Death of Israel" - A talk Given by Chris Hedges at The Islamic Society of Central New JerseyThis is a talk I gave on Jan. 18 to a largely Muslim audience of several hundred people at The Islamic Society of Central New Jersey.
Sloan Bashinsky
What’s going on in Gaza is horriific, but I have to wonder, Chris, are you trying to get more paid subscriptions to your Substack newsletter, which might cease to exist, if there were no wars for you to analyze and dissect? I have to wonder if your paid subscription$ increased after you began covering the October 7 attack and its aftermath? If so, do you donate your war profits to the beleaguered people of Gaza?
PITA Contrarian
Well said ...
Ya see, it's just too risky to stand with "we the people" of the U.S. working class ...
Athena1Elucidate the Mechanisms of Act
I've lived in or near the poverty line my entire adult life. People like me are legion. While I can forgive with relative ease, I don't forget. Y'all shoulda expected us.
:)
Sloan Bashinsky
I’m curious who someone like you voted for president in 2016 and 2020? Or there wasn’t a candidate you wanted to vote for and you didn’t vote?
Athena1Elucidate the Mechanisms of Act
Boring troll is boring.
Sloan Bashinsky
It’s been a long time since I was accused of being boring:-).
Athena1Elucidate the Mechanisms of Act
Well, get used to it.
Sloan Bashinsky
It will take a lot more people than you for me to get used to being called boring. Based on lots of angry replies to comments I have made at Chris’s place, I ain’t boring. Whats’ boring for me is people using fake names and still not answering questions, such as, who’d you vote for in 2016 and 2020? :-)
Carl RetterSloan: Your petty and unwarranted criticism of Chris Hedges reveals your illiteracy about his life and work and is a sad attempt to elevate yourself by diminishing someone else.In fact, Hedges speeches and writings and prison teaching provide star light in a dark world from his compassion and courage.Sloan BashinskyAgreed, and I think Chris should go to Gaza and ask the people there what they now think about Hamas?And I think Chris then needs to turn his attention to the bizarre freak shows going on inside his own disintegrating county.Athena1Elucidate the Mechanisms of Act…Boring trolls are boring.Sloan BashinskyYour definition of troll is someone who disagrees with you and Chris Hedges? Someone who disturbs your perspective, comfort zone, etc.? Looks to me Chris has started his own religion and this forum is its church and a lot of people, including me, pay to attend daily services here.Athena1Elucidate the Mechanisms of Act…Boring troll is still boring.Sloan BashinskyI’ve been reading Chris about 3 months, watching him over and over give Hamas a free pass all that time. He really ought to know better. I’ve said that many times here, and that the people running Hamas and Israel should all be hanged. And Joe Biden, too, for helping Israel do what Hamas wanted Israel to do in Gaza.
Julio Santos
Sloan and whom did you vote for?Sloan Bashinsky
Joe Biden, instead of Donald Trump. The first time I voted for a major party candidate, and maybe the last.
The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s ApocalypseBlood Brothers - by Mr. Fish
Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.
In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous.
Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of otherdraconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayalof the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.
“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one. We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you. The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”
The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”
While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.
As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.”
He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza.
Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.
And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.
“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank.
When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”
He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.
Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.
Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military.
While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.
In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.
“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”
Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:
At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.
He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018.
An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:
A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.”
[....]
A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”
Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.
[....]
McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.
Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.
In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”
McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it. McGurk proposeddenying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority — an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu.
The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.
The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.
The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn't care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7.
Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.
Here’s what Donald Trump and his lemmings are chasing after:
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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