( Tomdispatch.com ) – 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.

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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.

Perhaps the Iranian public got the message that Biden was determined to be as hostile as Trump. Certainly, in the next round of voting in the summer of 2021, they swung behind hardliner Ebrahim Raisi. And despite occasional modest diplomatic forays since then, relations have been in a dumpster for the remainder of Biden’s term, with most of Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions still in place. And once again, as in the Trump years, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has lobbied Biden hard to cease all negotiations with Tehran.

Iran, which might have been drawn into the Western camp, has instead become a hostage to Beijing. Starting in 2019, China accepted smuggled Iranian petroleum at a substantial price discount. Then, when the Ukraine War broke out and Biden imposed maximum sanctions on the Russian Federation, Moscow and Tehran found themselves pushed ever closer.

Now, the two countries plan to sign a “strategic partnership agreement,” while, in July 2023, Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, cementing the alliances with both China and Russia into which it had been so vigorously pushed by Washington. Iran also became a definite asset for Russia in its Ukraine War, providing Vladimir Putin with crucial weaponry. In short, Biden’s hardline policy toward Tehran ultimately harmed his major foreign policy initiative, of defeating Moscow.

Passionate Intensity

Biden’s team also pursued the strategy worked out by Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner of trying to wheedle or strong-arm Arab states into making a separate peace with Israel, while throwing the stateless Palestinians under the bus. They managed to defame the Bible by naming their agreements — initially among Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Israel — the “Abraham Accords,” though they were actually thinly veiled arms deals. Underlying such a strategy lurked the possibility of creating a military bloc, involving Israel and significant parts of the Arab world, to isolate and ultimately overthrow the government of Iran. The Arab signatories all sought the economic benefits of trade and investment with Israel as well as U.S. security promises, benefiting American arms manufacturers with their orders. Had Biden instead made a full-court press for Palestinian rights, he might have created optimism rather than despair.

Sudan was also soon blackmailed into joining the accords. A popular revolution there overthrew the decades-long dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir on April 11, 2019. Its civilian and military wings then entered into a tenuous cohabitation, with the civilians pressing the generals to return to their barracks. Civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and the chairman of the Transitional Military Council, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, signed onto the Abraham Accords in January 2021 both to get Sudan removed from the U.S. list of terrorist nations and to begin repairing its economy.

In the end, that represented pure economic blackmail, a policy continued by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. A 2022 poll showed that more than 74% of Sudanese rejected any normalization with Israel. Instead of attempting to bolster budding Sudanese democracy, the Biden administration continued to resort to backdoor deals with that junta in the interests of America’s main geopolitical client in the Middle East (while Sudan itself fell into a catastrophic civil war).

Blinken also made it a personal mission to rope Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords. Unlike the two other Gulf states committed to the treaty, however, Saudi Arabia has a largely pro-Palestinian Muslim population in the millions and a peace treaty with Israel might have fomented unrest among them. While Mohammed Bin Salman, the fickle crown prince who ran much of the show in that country, continued to vacillate on the issue, his father, King Salman, repeatedly made it clear that “Palestine is our number one issue,” and that there will be no recognition of Israel without an ironclad path to a Palestinian state (a longstanding Saudi position).  

Nonetheless, the Biden foreign policy team continued pressuring Riyadh to normalize relations with Israel, even as the Gaza War grew ever more devastating and the Saudi public daily saw images of women and children being shredded by American-supplied bombs and drones. In an opinion poll released last January, 78% of Saudis said that they felt psychologically stressed by the Gaza War, while nearly every one of them lambasted the U.S. response as “bad” or “very bad,” and  57% believed there was now no possibility of making peace with Israel. 

Things Fall Apart, the Center Cannot Hold

The security guarantees the U.S. gave the United Arab Emirates under the Abraham Accords emboldened its leader, Mohamed Bin Zayed (MBZ), in his quest to create an informal empire stretching from Yemen to Sudan and even all the way to Libya.  In April 2023, however, Sudan’s conventional army and the country’s special operations Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fell to fighting one another, as the generals that led them competed for power. The country then devolved into a horror show of a civil war, with half of its 50 million people now facing starvation and at least 62,000 already slaughtered. The brutal RSF fighters are nonetheless backed by the Emirates (lovingly dubbed “little Sparta” by the Pentagon). And in these years, President Biden has proven impotent when it came to reining in America’s “Abraham Accords” darling. In fact, he only recently hosted MBZ at the White House and a Rose Garden that’s seen more genocidaires than most administrations.

The Israeli and U.S. response to the gruesome Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, can fairly be said to have entirely undone all of Biden’s diplomatic work in the region. While the United States and some other Western governments viewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s never-ending devastation of Gaza and his country’s deployment of American 2,000-pound bombs against residential complexes as forced on him by Hamas’s alleged tactic of using civilians as “human shields,” virtually no one in the global South agreed. Even some European Union states and Israeli journalists dissented.

South Africa brought a case against Israel at the International Criminal Court charging it with genocide, which the Court found “plausible” in January, issuing the equivalent of a preliminary injunction against the Netanyahu government. Israel, of course, ignored it and has simply continued the devastation there (and now in Lebanon as well). Somehow, Biden seemed unaware that the government of extremists formed by Netanyahu in late 2022 was anything but the Israel of the 1960 film Exodus, with a blue-eyed Paul Newman as the protagonist. It was instead a witch’s brew of virulent ethnonationalism and religious apocalypticism.

Worse yet, Netanyahu used the cover of his Gaza atrocities to expand the war further. He deliberately bombed an Iranian diplomatic facility (considered Iranian soil under international law) in the Syrian capital of Damascus last spring. Iran later responded with a rocket barrage. Netanyahu went on attempting to get Tehran’s goat, aware that if he could turn his conflict into an actual war with Iran, American jingoists would give him even more knee-jerk support.

In the process, he had Ismail Haniyeh, his chief, if indirect, civilian Hamas negotiating partner, assassinated in Iran’s capital of Tehran on the occasion of the inauguration of a new president there. He then launched a terrorist onslaught of booby-trapped pager bombs against an Iran-allied group, Hezbollah, in Lebanon before invading that country and subjecting significant parts of it to a Gaza-style bombardment, as a response to Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel in support of Gaza. Such provocations led to yet another Iranian missile barrage against Israel on October 1st to which Israel replied with attacks on Iranian military facilities. Biden was reduced to pleading with Iran to be reasonable in response, while declining to demand any similar restraint from Israel.

The Blood-Dimmed Tide

And here’s the truth of the matter: President Biden could undoubtedly have halted Netanyahu’s total war on Palestinian civilians at any point in 2024, given Israel’s dependence on U.S. ammunition and arms. Instead, his gung-ho support of the insupportable in Gaza has helped turn the Middle East into a genuine powder keg, which he is bequeathing to his successor. Crucial Red Sea and Suez Canal maritime trade has already been partially paralyzed, thanks to rocket attacks launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in support of the people of Gaza, adding inflation and supply-chain difficulties to the global economy.

Biden then restored sanctions on the Houthis, harming Yemeni civilians, while allowing Netanyahu to go on butchering Gazan civilians.  Lebanon, already a basket case, with a ruined port, a bankrupt national bank, no president, and a third of its population below the poverty line, now faces a wholesale reduction to fourth-world misery. More than a million Lebanese have had to flee their homes in that small country and the conflict will undoubtedly contribute to Europe’s immigration crisis.

Consider it a distinct irony, then, that, rather than allying with Israel against Iran, most Arab publics have significantly raised their estimation of Tehran. Even long-time American ally Turkey and U.S. partner Egypt have felt threatened by the extremist Netanyahu government and its Napoleonic ambitions, and have begun warming to one another and exploring better relations with Tehran.

Nativist Shiite militias in Iraq rained down rockets on bases in that country hosting U.S. troops, but ranged even further afield, targeting American soldiers in Jordan and killing Israeli troops in Israel itself. They pledged to come to the aid of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The Iraqi parliament recognized such militias in 2016 as the equivalent of a national guard. Iraq’s outraged Shiites even finally convinced Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani to kick the last U.S. troops out of that country by 2026. 

In the end, Biden’s unfaltering bear hug of Benjamin Netanyahu ensured that even the last vestiges of the George W. Bush administration’s neoconservative project of reshaping the Middle East to America’s and Israel’s advantage have now gone down the drain. Washington continues to send ever more bombs and sophisticated weaponry to a Middle East in flames and, with Donald Trump set to take office in January, such dangerous arms deals will likely only multiply.

Consider it a genuine first-class nightmare.

Copyright 2024 Juan Cole

Via Tomdispatch.com

A week before the US elections I warned that Biden and Harris’s refusal for months to force a ceasefire on Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah—backed by a weapons embargo if Israel does not accept it—would cause Kamala Harris to lose the elections to Donald Trump.

Q.E.D.

In Hebrew, the equivalent acronym is:

מ.ש.ל – מה שצריך להוכיח [M.Š.L – Ma shetzarikh lehochee’ach]

It wasn’t just Muslim and Arab Americans staying home or voting 3^rd party. Massive swaths of the center-left electorate are sickened by the ongoing massacres in Gaza and Lebanon.  To a lesser degree, they are also appalled by our continued support and weapons deliveries to fund a seemingly “war-with-no-end” in Ukraine instead of focusing on economic and bread-and-butter issues which the average American really cares about.

Both these bloody conflicts are continuing solely because they are financed and green-lighted by the Biden Administration. The thousands of Americans who stayed home or voted for Trump saw the US pouring billions of dollars into sustaining and keeping alive these bloody conflicts instead of using our superpower status and economic leverage to end these conflicts.

So Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black. She lost because she and her party represented war mongering and war profiteering rather than helping the average American improve their health care, their paycheck, and their job prospects.

“QED,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, IbisPaint, Clip2Comic, 2024.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who boldly supports a weapons embargo, pointed to this utter failure in his scathing letter today to the Democratic Party leadership, saying:

 Today…we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among other countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.

Today, we are left to ponder the “what ifs”: what if Biden and Harris forced a compromise on Putin and Zelensky in Ukraine? What if they stopped financing an unending, bloody conflict which Ukraine has no chance of winning anyway, and brokered a peace agreement between the two countries?!

More importantly, what if Biden and Harris—by threatening a weapons embargo on Israel — had ended the killing of tens of thousands of women and children (as of Aug. 15, 2024, per the United Nations, most of Gaza’s 40,000 killed are women and children), stopped the siege and the starvation – and brought home safely the hundred or so Israeli hostages? What if they had used that same leverage to really start a process—which admittedly will be difficult—to end the apartheid and occupation in the Israel-Palestine space?

While we will never know for certain, in all likelihood the Democrats would have prevailed—both in the Presidential and Congressional elections—and we would not be punished with the frightening prospect of President Trump.

Reprinted from The Times of Israel with the author’s permission.

Clinton came to Michigan and said,

“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died, I get that.”

“But if you lived in one of those kibbutzim in Israel, right next to Gaza, where the people there were the most pro-friendship with Palestine, most pro-two state solution of any of the Israeli communities … and Hamas butchered them.”

He said, he’d been asked, “Yeah but look how many people you’ve killed in retaliation, so how many people is enough to kill to punish them for the terrible things they did?”

“Well, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m not keeping score that way. It isn’t how many we’ve had to kill. Because Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians, they’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.”

Clinton’s callous and morally stupid words explain how a majority of Americans can close their eyes to a year of Israeli genocide. He, and they, should read my new book, Gaza yet Stands. Clinton makes it sound as though the Palestinians have no legitimate grievances, even though 70 percent of families in Gaza had been driven out of their homes by the Israelis and made penniless refugees, while Israelis stole all their land and property.

The argument Clinton made is that the killing of hundreds of civilians by al-Qassam Brigades cadres on October 7, 2023, justifies the high rate of civilian deaths in Israel’s war on the people of Gaza. Indeed, October 7 is fetishized so that it authorizes anything and everything.

That assertion is not true. For a non-state actor like the paramilitary of Hamas to kill civilians for political purposes is terrorism. It is an ugly crime that certainly merits punishment. Moreover, Clinton’s assumption that Israeli actions in Gaza are mainly directed at Hamas militants is not in evidence.

United Nations officials have their hair on fire, shouting at the top of their lungs that the entire population of Gaza is at risk of death. That is over 2 million people on the verge of extinction, as though everyone in Houston, Texas, were to be killed. Mass death on that scale is not and cannot be a war aim. Public health specialists are saying that when it is all over as many as 300,000 people in Gaza will have been killed by the Israelis. Now the UN officials are saying it could be seven times that.

There is nothing in International Humanitarian Law that authorizes a disproportionate military response just because the enemy killed civilians. Ironically, it was Judaism that most famously enshrined the principle of proportionality, in Exodus 21:23–25. Although “an eye for an eye” sounds brutal today, the prescription was intended to forestall victims from taking two eyes for one eye. The God of Exodus would frown on taking 150,000 eyes for 550.

The denial of the applicability of the principle of proportionality on the emotional grounds that civilians were killed who were nice people is, to put it bluntly, the first step toward justifying genocide.

The Rome Statute makes it clear, drawing on the Geneva Conventions enacted after World War II, that you can’t kill large number of civilians with no legitimate military purpose, and you can’t destroy civilian infrastructure (“objects”) not connected to a military objective. The response has to be proportional to the initial attack.

Clinton’s glib repetition of the canard that Israel is only trying to kill Hamas militants and can’t get at them except by killing tens of thousands of civilians fails on many grounds. Clinton assumes that all Israeli military actions in Gaza have been legitimate and directed at fighting Hamas. But UN investigations have brought into question whether some of the large numbers of 2,000 pound bombs Israel dropped on Gaza, obliterating entire apartment buildings and neighborhoods, had any discernible military targets.

“Eyeless in Gaza,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

The physicians who served in Gaza as volunteers maintain that Israeli soldiers deliberately shot children. American surgeon Mark Perlmutter saw children shot twice. “No child,” he observes, “gets shot twice by mistake.”

Even the announced Israeli goal of killing all 37,000 militants in Gaza is not a normal military objective. Typically you try to defeat the enemy and take the rest captive or drive them to demobilize, not kill them all. The October 7 operation involved 4,000 cadres, not 37,000. It was a tightly held secret except among those who actually launched it. The other 33,000 people Israel is trying to kill may not even have known about it in advance, much less participated in it.

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevy announced in October that Hamas has been defeated.

Ordinarily, such a pronouncement by the army chief of staff would indicate that the war is over, not that hundreds of civilians should continue to be killed every week.

Some 18 million men served in the German army of the Nazi government. Between 4 and 5 million were killed by the Allies. The victors didn’t make it a goal to kill all 18 million. Prominent West Germans such as Nobel-prize-winning author Günter Grass had been enlisted men in the Nazi army. In 1957, 77 percent of the senior officials in the West German Ministry of Justice were former members of the National Socialist Party. The Nazi military personnel were much, much worse than Hamas, and even they were not dealt with as Israel says it wants to deal with the Hamas paramilitary.

The “human shield” argument also holds no water. The high civilian death toll doesn’t come from killing shields. Israeli rules of engagement allow 15 to 20 civilian deaths per militant killed. Israel uses a computer program to track suspected militants, droning them to death only when they go home at night, making sure to kill their family members, friends and neighbors. The militants could have been killed out in the open. Their families were not shielding them. The families were deliberately targeted along with the militants.

Those are not the rules of engagement of a civilized country. NATO has cut off military cooperation with Israel during this past year because NATO rules of engagement, like those of the US military, require the minimization of civilian casualties, an endeavor in which the current Israeli authorities have no interest.

The point is not that anyone is, in Clinton’s horrid phrase, “keeping score.” It is that a disproportionate military response that kills 38 of the enemy for every one of your deaths is unethical and illegal. Generals were tried at Nuremberg and executed for that sort of thing.

We don’t have to guess whether Israeli officials and officers are ordering a disproportionate response in places like Lebanon. They have a whole military doctrine mandating it.

Ultimately, Clinton’s remarks are a form of unfaced racism on his part. Israeli kibbutzim are white people, whose deaths are to be mourned. The 42,000 dead Palestinians are brown people, mere statistics, whose deaths, while unfortunate, are necessary so that white people can feel safe — which is what really matters. It is the same logic Clinton used, as president in 1996, when he spoke of African-American “superpredators.

And no, no one “has to forgive” him, and they won’t. I’m not a political scientist or an Americanist, and I have no idea whatsoever what will happen in Michigan –with its large Arab and Muslim American population — next Tuesday on election day. But Clinton seems to me to be trying to lose it for the Democrats. Worse than their electoral impact, those words from a former president point to a deep malaise in the American soul, an inability to feel viscerally the deaths of 17,000 brown children, a classification of them not as people with mothers, fathers, siblings and futures, but as an inconvenience to be swept under the rug.

Well, it turns out that I’ve met a fair number of those undecided voters in person, going door to door canvassing in eastern Pennsylvania, where, it’s fair to say, the 2024 election may be decided. They’re real people, with perfectly real everyday concerns. They have families living in pleasant suburbs in and around Easton, Bethlehem, and Allentown, their neatly tended lawns a mix of grass, crabgrass, and dandelions, and older model SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks in their driveways. And I’d dare you to knock on one of their doors and, when someone answers, say, “So, who the hell are you?”

I get it: they’re easy to demonize, especially if you’re a liberal or leftist news junkie living on the Upper West Side of New York or in Takoma Park, Maryland, or Cambridge, Massachusetts; you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, or Politico; and your Monday nights are built around watching Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart. I’m not surprised if, like Anne Enright, the novelist from University College Dublin, writing for “On the Election” in the New York Review of Books, you vent your pent-up frustration over undecideds who are “lonely and sometimes pathetically grandiose.” It upsets Enright to be “watching twelve billion election dollars chase down a few thousand anxious minds in Pennsylvania.” Can’t they just make up those minds of theirs?

To my mind, the forehead-slapping awe at those undecided in this presidential election took its purest form in a commentary by comedian and satirist Lewis Black on a recent episode of The Daily Show:

“We still have no idea who the fuck is gonna win! And that’s all thanks to one very special group of morons… Oh yes, undecided voters: the same people you see at the ice cream shop asking for 12 mini spoon samples. It’s a $3 cone, asshole! How is anyone still undecided in this election? … This election still comes down to winning over a few dozen Pennsylvanians with carbon monoxide poisoning. Now, don’t get me wrong. Maybe these undecided voters aren’t stupid. Maybe they have a good reason for being idiots.”

But one Sunday afternoon, while crisscrossing several blocks in a neighborhood of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, knocking on perhaps 40 front doors over several hours, I had the opportunity to talk to a number of those very undecideds. Out of the 40 homes curated from lists of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents — those who had, in fact, voted in recent elections — about half of them were home and came to the door. And of those 20, maybe half a dozen told me that they hadn’t yet decided who they were going to vote for or if they planned to vote at all.

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As a start, it turns out, a number of them haven’t really been following the news. According to research by the campaigns, many of them work two jobs. They don’t get the Times or the Post. Many, in fact, don’t even get the local paper. They know who’s running, but while they seemingly know a fair amount about Donald Trump, they know a lot less about Kamala Harris. They didn’t watch the two conventions on TV or even get around to watching the presidential debate between Harris and Trump. And, by the way, that puts them among the majority of Americans: an estimated 67 million people watched that event on September 10th, while 158 million people voted in 2020 and an additional 81 million eligible voters who didn’t cast a ballot back then missed it or skipped it.

My sense, from the voters I talked to — totally unscientific, yes, but backed up by some polling and research — is that voters who say they’re undecided have largely tuned out politics in these years. Maybe that’s because they’ve long come to believe that all politicians are corrupt or feckless; or maybe it’s because they’ve been around long enough to have concluded that “things never change” and that their own lives are only marginally affected by whoever’s in office; maybe it’s because with kids, a job (or two), caring for older parents or relatives with special needs, and struggling to make ends meet, they just don’t have space in their lives for “the news”; or maybe they just didn’t care to share their thoughts with a stranger at their door. Whatever the reasoning, not a single undecided voter I spoke to rejected the message I was carrying or pushed back hard against the idea that maybe Harris deserves a genuine look.

And they’re still up for grabs. The lead story in the October 22nd New York Times was headlined: “Battle is Fierce for Sliver of Pie: Undecided Votes.” Its subhead: “Election Could Hinge on People Who Aren’t ‘Super Political.’”

Harris Chipping Away at Undecideds?

So, how many are there? With the polls showing a razor-thin difference between Harris and Trump among those who have indeed made up their minds, it’s hard to pin down exactly how many people may still be undecided. By some measure, since early summer, things may have been moving toward the Democrats when evaluating undecided voters. According to a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll and analysis, before President Biden quit the race the number of undecideds was just 3%. But when he quit, that number jumped to 9%, reflecting the fact that Harris was an unknown quantity to many Americans. According to PBS, that number shrank after the September debate, as potential voters, women in particular, learned more about Harris, especially over the abortion rights issue. The New York Times reported that the Trump campaign has found that the number of undecideds has fallen from around 10% in August to perhaps 5% today.

And according to Newsweek, citing an Emerson College survey of undecided voters, in recent weeks those voters have been breaking Harris’s way by an almost 2-1 margin. “Emerson College polling, conducted between October 14 and 16,” that magazine reported, “shows that among undecided voters who chose who they would vote for in the past week or month, 60 percent opted for the Democratic vice president, while 36 percent opted for Republican former President Donald Trump.”

It’s impossible, of course, to determine precisely how many voters are actually undecided. Some surveys put the number at about 13%, others at just 3% or so. A Times/Siena survey found that, in the “swing states” alone, the undecideds are 3.7%, or 1.2 million potential voters. Whatever their numbers, in an election in which polls have consistently recorded essentially a swing-state dead heat between Harris and Trump, even that tiny number might be enough to tilt the final result. However, undecided voters could also simply decide to sit out the election (as many analysts suggest they might do) or, if their votes split evenly, have no effect at all on the final tally.

In addition to partisan voters, and those enthusiastic about one candidate or the other, there are those characterized as “swing voters,” “low-information voters,” or simply infrequent voters. All of those categories can reasonably be imagined as “persuadable,” though the cost-benefit ratio involved in efforts to reach them and get them to the polls could be prohibitive. A pair of professors and election specialists, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques, writing for Time, argue that so-called swing voters — “who do lean towards one candidate but are open to voting for the alternative” — will be critical on November 5th. And surprisingly enough, swing voters (including undecideds) may add up to as much as 15% of the current electorate, according to a Times/Siena poll that the two authors cite.

Unfortunately, Harris may not be helping herself, given how she’s running her campaign. At its start, she benefited enormously from a skyrocketing burst of enthusiasm triggered by President Biden’s decision to drop out. His age, seeming infirmity, and catastrophically bad debate performance against Trump cast a pall of depression over many Democratic organizations and activists, and it seemed Trump then had a path toward a clear victory. But Harris’s emergence, her emphasis on “joy” and optimism (and Tim Walz’s effective use of the term “weird” to describe the GOP ticket) touched off a swell of — yes! — optimism. According to Forbes, when Biden was the Democratic candidate, just 30% of Democrats claimed to be enthusiastic about voting in November versus 59% of Trump supporters. By early September, however, 68% of Harris supporters expressed enthusiasm against just 60% of Trump backers.

Since then, however, some have argued that her campaign has been lackluster, her speeches too carefully scripted and vetted, too cautious and repetitive, dampening some of the enthusiasm that erupted over the summer. As Robert Kuttner wrote in “Harris and the Enthusiasm Gap” for The American Prospect, “Interviews and focus groups keep quoting undecided or Trump-leaning voters as saying that they don’t really know what Harris stands for. Could that be because her own message is blurred?”

Still, Harris has maintained a slight but consistent lead over Trump in national polls ever since the Democratic convention and has lately scheduled a burst of interviews on 60 Minutes, Fox News, “The View,” Stephen Colbert’s late show, the popular women’s podcast “Call Her Daddy,” Univision, and a CNN town hall.

The Turnout Imperative

By all accounts, the Democratic ground game — canvassing, phone banking, text banking, postcard writing, local candidate rallies, tables at local events, and more — has been far superior to the GOP’s. Even when taking into account efforts like Elon Musk’s supposed army of paid volunteers, Harris’s on-the-ground efforts are three times the size of Trump’s, according to the Washington Post: “She boasts more staff, more volunteers, a larger surrogate operation, more digital advertising, a more sophisticated smartphone-based organizing program and extra money for extraneous bells and whistles typically reserved for corporate product launches and professional sports championships.”

In eastern Pennsylvania, as I saw, local and out-of-state unions are going all-out in canvassing, voter registration, and GOTV drives. When I visited Democratic headquarters in Easton, Pennsylvania, in early October, its large meeting hall was filled with what looked like a hundred union volunteers in matching T-shirts from Local 1199 SEIU (Service Employees International Union), who had traveled to Easton from Newark, New Jersey.

That area, part of Northampton County, just north of the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, is a mostly working-class region of 320,000 people, increasingly diverse and still bearing the mark of a fading heavy manufacturing base. (Billy Joel’s 1982 anthem, “Allentown” — like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” — is an ode to what Allentown once was and what it was becoming: “Well, we’re living here in Allentown/And they’re closing all the factories down/Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time/Filling out forms, standing in line.”) For the Harris campaign, it’s a vital area.

In a feature story on the 2024 campaigns in Northampton County, the Washington Post noted that the county has voted for the winner in almost every election for a century:

“The battle over voters in Northampton County reflects some of the biggest themes and tensions running through the presidential contest all across America less than three weeks from Election Day. Strategists view Pennsylvania as perhaps the most important swing state on the map this year and believe its 19 electoral college votes could be the tipping point. Northampton is an unusual cross-section of the country — one of 26 ‘pivot’ counties nationwide that backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.”

If you’re not from one of the swing states, much of the presidential campaign has undoubtedly gone largely unnoticed, since electioneering and campaign ads are targeted and often particularly designed for the states, cities, and communities that are most in play. If you live in a place like Allentown or Bethlehem, on the other hand, you’ve been inundated. “I’m a Pennsylvania native and have been through many election cycles in a state that is no stranger to high-profile competitive campaigns, but I haven’t seen anything like what is playing out here this fall,” Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, told the Times. “I share a laugh with my mailman when he drops off our mail because of the size of the pile of mailers he brings each day, and I’m getting used to evenings and weekends full of knocks on my door.”

The Harris campaign, especially, has gone high tech and there are a host of phone apps and websites that have emerged in recent election cycles to apply technology to local campaigning. Many of them, like Reach, allow canvassers and campaigners to chat with each other, keep track of voter conversations and results from door-knocking and phone banking, while updating information as it’s collected, and maintaining a file on which voters are interested, say, in volunteering or making a donation.

When canvassing myself in Bethlehem, I used Minivan, another popular phone app from NGP, which describes itself as “the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive political campaigns and organizations, nonprofits, municipalities and other groups.” Through it, activists can “access an integrated platform of the best fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, digital and social networking products.” Even for the uninitiated (like me) Minivan is simple to use. After visiting a voter on a neighborhood walking tour, it’s easy to report whether that voter is home or away, record notes on your conversation, and enter other data that’s instantly synced into the system for follow-up.

Reach, Minivan, and other systems (including the progressive donation site ActBlue) can be accessed through Mobilize.us, which claims to have connected 5.5 million volunteers to local political actions nationwide. (That, too, for a novice like me, was blessedly easy to use.) Saying that it provides “the most powerful tools for organizing,” Mobilize.us can link any volunteer with “single-shift events,” recurring events, virtual events (like Zoom programs), in-person events (like rallies, speeches, and debates), and phone call campaigns to legislative offices.

In Pennsylvania, as in many parts of the country, voting is already underway. It’s far too early to make sense of what’s known so far, but it’s at least encouraging for Harris partisans that, of the more than one million mail-in ballots already returned, 62% came from Democrats and just 29% from Republicans. Even in Northampton County, hardly a Democratic Party bulwark, mail-in ballots are running about two to one in favor of the Democrats. And canvassers like me, the phalanx from 1199 SEIU, made sure that every voter we spoke to knew how to cast their votes early or by mail.

At this point, of course, it’s just fingers crossed and keep ringing those doorbells until November 5th, since the one thing none of us can afford is a Project 2025 version of a Trump presidency.

Copyright 2024 Bob Dreyfuss

Via Tomdispatch.com

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is disrupting the Biden attempt to prevent a regional war.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The Biden administration’s approach to the Middle East crisis that erupted in the wake of October 7, 2023 is on the brink of collapse. Israel’s aggressive maneuvers, coupled with Iran’s growing involvement, are pushing the region toward a full-scale war, one that the Biden administration ostensibly hoped to avoid.

Initially, the administration calculated that U.S. interests could survive the Gaza conflict on its own, but the risk of being drawn into a broader war with untold consequences has loomed larger. Biden’s calculated ploy to restrain Israel, especially regarding Lebanon, by offering support for its Gaza actions, now seems like a failed effort to prevent an even larger conflict. Washington’s attempts to rein in Israel, including diplomatic missions to Egypt and Qatar, have failed to shift Israeli policy. Despite repeatedly sending key figures like the CIA director and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to broker peace, the United States has been left looking complicit, supplying weapons even as Israel continues its incursions. Biden, for all his efforts to distance America from the widening chaos, can no longer escape the charge that his administration bears responsibility for enabling Israel’s unchecked escalation.

Washington is now viewed as an accomplice in the region’s unfolding chaos. Biden’s reluctance to push for a ceasefire in Gaza became more untenable by the day. By June, the so-called Biden-backed peace plan emerged, supported by Hamas and begrudgingly accepted by Israel, only for Netanyahu to shift the goalposts, ignoring U.S. requests to steer clear of Egypt’s Rafah border. Instead, Israel occupied the Philadelphi corridor, violating the Camp David Accords. The U.S. response? More military aid to Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, seems to have secured Washington’s tacit approval to target Hezbollah in Lebanon, escalating a conflict that is spiraling out of control. The results have been devastating. Booby-trapped devices detonated in everyday locations such as homes and hospitals, killing civilians, including children and medical staff. The assault displaced thousands from their homes along the Lebanon border, yet Israel’s appetite for aggression appears far from sated.

While nominally approving only a “limited” strike on Lebanon, the United States has repeated a troubling historical pattern. In 1982, Ariel Sharon promised limited Israeli operations in southern Lebanon, only for Israeli forces to advance to Beirut, laying siege to the city. Israel remained an occupying force until it was driven out in 1989 by Hezbollah.

Despite months of diplomatic wrangling, President Biden has been unable to compel Netanyahu to honor the comprehensive ceasefire agreement it accepted back in June. That plan, a phased approach to ending the Gaza conflict, remains in limbo as the war grinds on. Biden’s inability to assert control over the situation only deepens the crisis, casting doubt on U.S. influence in the region.

“Invading Lebanon,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

Ironically, the greatest threat to U.S. strategy in the Middle East hasn’t come from Iran, but from its closest ally, Israel. In the chaotic days following the October 7 attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pushed for a large-scale offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. President Biden intervened, urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shelve those plans and concentrate on Hamas. This scenario played out repeatedly, with Biden’s administration trying to restrain Israel from escalating the conflict beyond Gaza. But for Israel, Gaza was not the strategic prize it desired. Finding himself in a tricky position, Netanyahu now needs a decisive “win” to rebuild the credibility of the country’s national security apparatus, shattered by the failures of October 7. Facing potential investigations over those failures, he is desperately looking for a way to salvage his political standing.

The United States has found itself caught in the middle, struggling to manage an ally determined to shift the focus of the conflict. Netanyahu’s push for a military victory beyond Gaza threatens to drag Washington into a broader regional war, complicating Biden’s Middle East strategy and challenging America’s long-term interests in the region. Israel claims that Hezbollah is making life unbearable for its citizens, forcing many to abandon their homes for hotels. Even the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, despite his anger over Israeli attacks, had one consistent message: a ceasefire in Lebanon could only happen if there was a deal on Gaza. It’s a sentiment that even many Israelis agree with, with some finding Hezbollah’s former leader more reliable than their own prime minister.

But there’s a catch: Netanyahu is determined to separate any resolution in Lebanon from Gaza. On the surface, this latest military escalation seems focused on securing Israel’s northern border. But beneath it lies something far more calculated: Netanyahu’s long-standing ambition for a broader conflict.

This isn’t the first time he’s maneuvered global powers toward war. He convinced the Bush administration to topple Saddam Hussein on flimsy grounds and later persuaded Donald Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear deal. Now, Netanyahu wants a war with Iran, knowing that the United States would be obligated to defend Israel.

When Israel assassinated an Iranian official with whom they’d been negotiating, it crossed a dangerous line. Though Iran didn’t respond directly, Hezbollah did. Netanyahu’s gamble is clear: provoke enough conflict, and Washington will have no choice but to step in. It’s a risky game, one with global consequences. Israel appears unlikely to show restraint in the current conflict, and the Biden administration is caught in a difficult bind. Yet President Biden seems hesitant to use the leverage the United States holds to keep Israel from escalating further. His administration now hopes that Hezbollah and Iran might seek an understanding to de-escalate the tensions along Israel’s northern border. But with the Israeli government unlikely to compromise, that hope feels increasingly fragile.

Imran Khalid is a geostrategic analyst and columnist on international affairs. His work has been widely published by prestigious international news organizations and publications.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite Joe Biden’s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump’s violation of the treaty as leverage to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.

Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the UN General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran’s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.

President Pezeshkian’s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a press conference on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. “Vis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,” he said. “We do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.”

On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors. 

“Let’s create a situation where we can co-exist,” said Pezeshkian. “Let’s try to resolve tensions through dialogue…We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.” He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.

Pezeshkian reiterated Iran’s desire for peace in his speech at the UN General Assembly.

“Yahoo-Tank,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

“I am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,” he said. “Others have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”

The U.S. response to Iran’s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran. 

That includes a new order for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the opposition. 

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the UN Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt’s cease-fire negotiations to provide diplomatic cover for unrestricted genocide.

Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing against war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney balked at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons. 

When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard warned him that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the “cakewalk” the neocons had promised it would be.

But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries’ war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.

Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.

Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.

So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here — avoiding war.”

Via Code Pink

David Muir and Linsey Davis did good jobs as moderators, with Muir being persistent on issues such as January 6 and his criminal record. Unlike earlier presidential debates, they “fact-checked” Trump four times. It was surprising how often Muir “yielded the floor” to Trump’s outbursts when he he let Harris successfully bait him. Muir allowed Trump to go on about his grievances, and maybe he allowed the interruptions, because he knew Trump would make a fool of himself every time he opened his mouth. There was no bias, but good tough journalistic questions based on Trump’s own public record. Some of Don’s answers made him appear more deranged than ever. Maybe the pressure has finally gotten to him.

Listening to Trump’s voice for more than half the time is exhausting and soul-killing, even with the relief brought by Harris’s sanity. The lies come so fast and furious that it’s hard to keep up, and impossible to address and debunk each one in the time allowed for rebuttal. That’s the basis of his gaslighting strategy. Trump hogged more than his allotted time, while CNN fact checked him at least 30 times. Some lies are subjective.

Some of Trump’s melt-down lines included:

-Blaming Harris and Joe Biden for the Ukraine war, which was the result of his buddy Vladimir Putin’s greed for territory.

-Saying that Harris, who on many issues is on the center-right, is a “Marxist.”

-Monstrously claiming Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pet dogs and cats in Springfield, OH — led to an instant fact-check by Davis. Trump said, “A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

– Trump claims no inflation occurred during his presidency. But note that his disastrous handing of the COVID epidemic led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and was deflationary. His blaming of Biden-Harris, for inflation — saying “people can’t buy cereal and eggs, because they destroyed the economy.” — ignores that after COVID there was high inflation in every country in the world as the economy came back to life.

-On abortion he claims his second term, “Will be great for women’s reproductive rights.” Then he shifted gears to put about the falsehood that Biden-Harris want to allow abortions in the 9^th month, and then execute newborns with under a “radical” Democratic policy. He lied the governor of West Virginia and VP candidate Tim Walz both OK’d executing newborns. Then he crowed, “I got Roe v. Wade (back) into the states.” That’s how he spins his selection of three SCOTUS justices who were chosen only to overturn Roe v. Wade. He said, “Everyone wanted the vote sent back to the states. The people vote, not the Court. I give tremendous credit to those six Justices.” But then Muir pointed out the illegality of killing babies in all 50 states. And almost no one wanted the abortion issue sent back to the states; ( 62% of Americans said then and say now that abortion should be legal under almost all conditions.

-When Harris discussed her plan for creating an “opportunity economy” to uplift America’s middle class, Trump replied that he has a “concept” of a plan, and doesn’t need it now because he’s not president yet. Then he claimed the Wharton School of Economics (U-Penn) professors love his economic plan, though he admittedly he doesn’t have one.

-Regarding a health care plan Trump said, after nearly a decade and a half of trashing Obamacare, “I have concepts of a plan.”

When Harris pointed out he invited trade wars with the tariffs on China, while also selling US chips to China to help improve their military, he said, “We hardly make chips anymore.” (Tell that to Nvidia.)  Then the recurring all-night theme of immigration and border security was re-introduced in every answer Trump gave to any and all questions. It’s his favorite subject that plays well at his rallies, but this wasn’t one of them. He claims immigrants are ruining our economy, and every answer came back to immigration fears.

Regarding his abandonment of NATO, Trump claimed, “I got 28 countries to pay up.”  That was delivered in response to one of Harris’ fishing tactics to anger when she waxed eloquently about the importance of the European Alliance, and using it to protect Europe from further aggression by Vladimir Putin.

The contrast of the candidates was a stark illustration of darkness and light. Harris pointed out that Trump, “Uses race to divide the American people. We have so much more in common than what separates us.” She called out his gross history of racism by initiating the “birther lies” about Barack Obama, how started as a landlord being investigated and fined, because he refused to rent to Black families, and how he called for execution of the Central Park Five, who were exonerated. No boxes were left unchecked.

MSNBC: “Watch the first Trump-Harris presidential debate in 3 minutes”

Even though Harris repeatedly got the better of him, Trump could still win the election. This is because of the antiquated Electoral College, which was created to appease Southern plantation owners, at the beginning of our nation’s history; and still serves the interest of racist Americans. A vote in Nebraska negates two or more votes in California. At least a third of the country desperately wants to believe anything Trump says, even though he melted down regressively as the night went on.

Taylor Swift’s formal endorsement of Harris — a possibility Republicans were apoplectic over leading up to last year’s Super Bowl. But the popular vote is meaningless in a presidential election. Most handicappers say the election will hinge on the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona. A third of the country desperately wants to believe anything Trump says; but there’s comfort in knowing the MAGA echo chamber isn’t at all dominant. The issue is getting the sane majority registered and to the polls to literally save American Democracy.

On Gaza, Harris said, “Well, let’s understand how we got here. On Oct. 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization, slaughtered 1,200 Israelis. Many of them young people who were simply attending a concert. Women were horribly raped. And so absolutely, I said then, I say now, Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal and we need the hostages out. And so we will continue to work around the clock on that. Work around the clock also understanding that we must chart a course for a two-state solution. And in that solution, there must be security for the Israeli people and Israel and in equal measure for the Palestinians. But the one thing I will assure you always, I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel. But we must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza, where the Palestinians have security, self-determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve.”

But that isn’t how we got there. The Israelis expelled 250,000 Palestinians to Gaza in 1948 from their homes in what became southern Israel, making Gaza a big refugee camp. The population has grown to 2.2 million. They detached from Gaza its agricultural lands and left it cut off from its markets. From 1967 the Israelis came after the Palestinians in Gaza again and occupied them. In 2007 they slapped an economic siege on the Gaza Strip, imposing 55% unemployment and causing children to be malnourished. So Hamas committed horrific terrorism on civilians on October 7 last year, for which there can be no justification. But if it had only attacked the Israeli military it might have had grounds in international law, which permits resistance groups to fight foreign military occupation. Harris left out the Nakbah or Palestinian displacement by Israel, and the long decades of military occupation and siege, so she made the story impossible to understand.

She is much better than Biden in at least expressing some empathy for the tens of thousands of innocent civilians Israel has killed in Gaza. But empathy, while better than nothing, won’t stop the killing, which is daily and directly enabled by US supply of weapons and ammunition (the Israelis ran out months ago).

The cease-fire deal she is touting does not exist. It was just a cheap trick pulled on Biden by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to giving him breathing space to continue the war, Netanyahu has constantly tacked on new conditions, most recently his occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor south of Rafah, which he knows Hamas (and even Egypt) will never agree to.

There is no two-state solution to be had, and politicians should start being honest about it. Gaza is rubble and there are hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters in the Palestinian West Bank. Where would you put a state?

Trump’s response was to say that the war would not have happened on his watch because he starved Iran of money. That assertion is not true and it isn’t a policy. It is just a narcissistic boast that he can magically control the world. He can’t.

As usual, what he said is arrant nonsense. The CIA assesses that Hamas did not tell Iran it was planning Oct. 7. Iran had nothing to do with it.

Further, Biden has kept all the Trump sanctions on Iran, which is not a good thing. It puts the US on a war footing with Iran. Washington tries to interfere in Iran’s normal commerce such as selling its oil. There are no grounds in international law for this behavior. The US has even sanctioned the Iranian national bank, making all economic transactions with Iran a form of terrorism, including sending food or medicine. It is unprecedented to call the national bank of a country a terrorist organization.

Trump has no policies, just insults, such as that Harris hates Israel and even hates Arabs because her hatred of Israel will get Arabs killed. I couldn’t follow the argument because of that arrant nonsense thing.

CNN: “Watch the full Second Presidential Debate Hosted by ABC”

Afghanistan was the other country in the greater Middle East that came up.

Harris expressed her agreement with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan, noting that four presidents had sought to withdraw, but he was the first to do so, saving the $300 million a day that the fruitless war was costing taxpayers. She said that “And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”

Harris blamed the debacle of the withdrawal on the “weak deal” negotiated directly with the Taliban by Don Trump, which she implied rather detracted from his reputation as a deal-maker. She said he by-passed the Afghan government and as part of his deal he released 5,000 Taliban terrorists. She expressed outrage that he would invite the Taliban to Camp David.

Harris is correct about the cost of the Afghanistan War, which came to $2.313 trillion over 21 years. That is $110 billion a year. Divided by 365, it comes to $301 million per day. Although al-Qaeda plotted the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan, it is not clear that they told the Taliban what they were planning, and it was kind of odd that Afghanistan, rather than the al-Qaeda network, should have been thought the danger to the U.S.

I’d say her account was accurate regarding the favorability of the deal Trump proposed to the Taliban. It is also true that Trump really wanted out of Afghanistan and kept telling his generals to get out, and they slow-rolled him. In some ways the story shows that on this issue Biden and Trump agreed. It isn’t for sure that Biden could have gotten a better deal than Trump on withdrawal. As for leaving the Afghan government out of the negotiations, that was weird. But given the way it collapsed and its top leaders were implicated in large-scale theft, it is not obvious that if Trump had included them in the talks, they could have obtained more favorable terms.

I don’t agree with her allegation that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.” I think the 800 US troops at Tanf in southeast Syria are in a war zone and that they are actively still fighting al-Qaeda, but also Shiite militias. Although the 2,500 US troops in Iraq are now classified as trainers, they do appear to be providing back up to the Iraqi Army in mopping up operations against ISIL in northern Iraq.

But the statement is also a little misleading because so many U.S. military interventions are aerial. The U.S. has been bombing Yemen regularly because the Houthis have been targeting container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea in support of the people of Gaza. You can’t just make this mini-war disappear because there are no boots on the ground. The US routinely bombs the al-Shabab extremist fundamentalist movement in Somalia.

In fact, in the past year the US has also bombed Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria in reprisal for their attacks on bases housing US troops in those two countries. The Shiite militias struck at the US in Iraq, Syria and Jordan in an effort to punish it for its heavy support to the Israeli total war on Gaza. When you are actively bombing Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Iraq you can’t be said to be entirely at peace.

“Prize Fight,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Trump boasted that in the 18 months after his deal with the Taliban, no US troops were killed in Afghanistan. This is true, but it is because he promised to get out of Afghanistan shortly if the Taliban ceased the attacks.

Trump said that the leader of the Taliban is “Abdul.” He was probably referring to the Taliban political chief in 2020, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Abdul is not a name on its own. It means “servant of” and is followed by a name of God. Abdul-Ghani means “servant of the All-Sufficient” (that is, God does not need anything because his essence is intrinsically rich). Baradar signed the deal for a complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 2020.

Biden essentially followed the Trump treaty, though he delayed the promised US withdrawal from April 2021 to August. Although Trump is correct that the withdrawal was done chaotically, he was the one who guaranteed that it would be by his pledge to completely withdraw by a date certain. Trump’s claim that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is ridiculous.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – One of the nation’s best-known Black Republicans is former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the twenty-first century (and perhaps ever), no African American woman rose higher in Republican politics than Rice, who served as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and then his secretary of state, both firsts. Like her or not, agree with her politics or not, she brought significant experience, knowledge, and professionalism to those positions.

Donald Trump’s first public words about Rice date back to 2006 when he labeled her with a vile term. In a speech before 8,000 people in New York City, he said, “Condoleezza Rice, she’s a lovely woman, but I think she’s a bitch. She goes around to other countries and other nations, negotiates with their leaders, comes back, and nothing ever happens.” There was no justification for Trump using such repulsive language other than his own toxic petulance and racist misogyny against Black women.

His vulgarity and sexism toward Rice foreshadowed a political future of hateful attacks on women — particularly women of color — with whom he disagrees. That incident provides some context for a recent New York Times report that, in private, Trump has referred repeatedly to Vice President Kamala Harris, his most formidable challenger for the 2024 presidential race, as a “bitch.” His campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung shamelessly and unbelievably stated that, when it comes to the person many would view as the most profane president ever, “That is not language President Trump has used to describe Kamala.” In fact, Trump’s longstanding and fixed sense of patriarchy and the cruel slurs against women that go with it are well documented. 

The stunning upheaval in the 2024 presidential race has, in fact, brought into sharp focus Trump’s longstanding animosity toward and war against Black women. President Joe Biden’s June 21st decision to drop out of that race propelled Harris to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, which means Trump now faces the one opponent who not only threatens his return to office, but also triggers his worse racist and sexist behavior.

Trump Goes After Harris and Other Black Women

In her first weeks running for president, he has publicly called Kamala Harris “dumb as a rock,” “nasty,” a “bum,” and “real garbage.” In front of thousands of his followers, he has deliberately and repeatedly mispronounced her name, claiming, “I don’t care” when called out on it. At his rallies, some of his supporters can be seen wearing and selling T-shirts that say, “Joe and the Ho Must Go,” or some variation on that, deplorable mantras that date back to 2020. Neither Trump nor his campaign have ever denounced such unacceptable activities. His effort and that of many MAGA adherents to “other” Harris is not just meant to humiliate her but degrade and dehumanize her as well. 

Nor is this one-off focused on Harris. Trump has done the same to other Black women and women of color for decades. Before, during, and after his presidency, he specifically targeted Black women with a kind of venom he rarely aimed at white women or men.

He’s gone after Black women, whether elected and appointed officials (Republican or Democrat), journalists, athletes, prosecutors, or celebrities. Here are just a few examples of his loathing:

• Former Representative Mia Love (R-UT): “Mia Love gave me no love and she lost. Too bad. Sorry about that Mia.”

• Former Apprentice contestant and then Trump’s White House director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison Omarosa Manigault Newman: “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”

• Four congressional women of color — Representatives Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI): “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came?”

• CNN journalist Abby Phillips: “What a stupid question that is. What a stupid question. But I watch you a lot — you ask a lot of stupid questions.”

• CNN reporter April Ryan: “April Ryan… You talk about somebody that’s a loser. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing… She’s very nasty.”

• Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA): “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”

• MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid: “Who the hell is Joy-Ann Reid? Never met her, she knows ZERO about me, has NO talent, and truly doesn’t have the ‘it’ factor needed for success in showbiz.”

The examples of Trump’s enraged responses to Black women who criticize or call out his lies, ineptitude, insecurities, and ignorance are endless. He is also fully aware that his attacks put targets on the backs of those women. In fact, that may be exactly the point.

While the journalists and celebrities that he goes after are part of his bullying approach to life, with some added racist and sexist spice, he clearly feels most threatened by Black people and Black women in particular who could send him to prison. Georgia Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and Washington, D.C., District Judge Tanya Chutkan have all felt the pressure of Trump’s inflammatory wrath as they oversaw legal cases attempting to hold him accountable for his criminal behavior. They have all experienced countless death threats since taking on his cases. In addition to referring to them as “racists,” “animal,” “rabid,” “liars,” and worse, he also called Willis and James “Peekaboo,” a nickname he has yet to explain but that seems awfully close to the racist slur “jigaboo.” It’s an obvious dog whistle similar to his calling them and others prosecuting him “riggers,” which, of course, rhymes with the “N-word” and which he normally spells out in caps in social posts to make sure it gets attention.

His attacks on Judge Chutkan led to the arrest of a woman in Texas who threatened to murder her and a swatting attack on her home, bringing the police to her house in response to a false report of a shooting there. Chutkan is attempting to move forward with the case against Trump in Washington, D.C., although there will clearly not be a trial before the November election. If Trump loses the election, the case will likely go forward with the strong possibility that he’ll be convicted and punished. If he wins, he’ll undoubtedly order the Justice Department to drop it.

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While Black leaders in politics, the media, women’s groups, and community organizations consistently denounced Trump for his chauvinist attacks, there was dead silence from his best-known Black women supporters. MAGA devotees like far-right commentator Candace Owens, social media celebrities like (the late) Diamond and Silk, conservative abortion extremist Reverend Alveda King, and others said nary a word as he raged and ranted.   

A Record of Exclusive Hiring

Notably, in his businesses and during his presidency, very, very few Black individuals were either in Trump’s employ or in his inner circle. In his White House, only three Black women held high political or staff positions: the briefly tenured Manigault Newman, the briefly acting Surgeon General Sylvia Trent-Adams (from April 2017 to September 2017), and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official Lynne Patton.

Only Patton worked for Trump for any period of time. Prior to 2016, she worked for the Trump Organization and the Eric Trump Foundation for at least a decade, eventually becoming a “Trump family senior aide.” After taking office, Trump appointed her administrator of HUD Region II under Secretary Ben Carson. Like Carson, she had no background or expertise in housing policy, yet was put in charge of hundreds of thousands of public housing units in New York and New Jersey. She made excuses for Trump’s unsuccessful effort to cut millions of dollars from the New York Housing Authority budget that could have led to a potential 40% rent increase for public housing residents.

She was scandal-ridden throughout his tenure, caught, for instance, misrepresenting her education background on her government résumé, implying that she had attended and graduated from Quinnipiac University School of Law and Yale University when she hadn’t. She dropped out of Quinnipiac and only took summer classes at Yale. When caught, she responded: “Lots of people list schools they didn’t finish.”

Her most notorious scandal occurred on February 27, 2019, when she volunteered to be a political prop for then-Representative Mark Meadows at a congressional hearing. To repudiate the testimony of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who was accusing him of being racist, among other charges, Meadows had Patton stand silently behind him while he ludicrously stated that Trump couldn’t be racist because Patton had worked for him and she was a descendant of slaves.

Like other White House staff under Trump, Patton repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, which doesn’t allow federal employees in the executive branch to engage in political partisanship. She was first warned by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) in September 2019 but continued her transgressions. She and other Trump staffers broke the law, but the Trump administration did little to enforce it. However, when Biden came into office, the OSC did apply the rule of law. In response, Patton was forced to admit her violations and reached a settlement. She was fined $1,000 and banned from holding any federal government position for four years. And yet she still remains loyal to Trump.

Following his recent disastrous interview appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump’s campaign issued a statement claiming that Trump, who slung insults, spewed endless lies, refused to answer questions, and hurried off early, was the victim of  “unhinged and unprofessional commentary.”  His most noted unbalanced remark — and there were plenty of them — was his contention that Kamala Harris had only in recent years “happened to turn Black.”

At the Republican National Convention, where African Americans were only three percent of the attendees, eight speakers were Black, seven of them men. The only Black woman given a prime speaking spot was rapper and model Amber Rose, whose Trump-loving father converted her to support him. Rather than include an elected official, state party leader, or conservative scholar, Trump selected someone who fulfilled his gendered view of Black women as either spectacles or subservient.

Trump’s Gendered and Racist Policies

It’s not just Trump’s hateful words but the policies and initiatives he pushed while in office that harmed Black women as well as millions of other Americans. Much of what he’s done and is planning to do is laid out in policy proposals detailed in the Heritage Foundation’s racially discriminating Project 2025 report, written by many of Trump’s former officials and those aligned with him. These include policies relating to abortion rights, education, criminal justice, civil rights, and healthcare access, among many other concerns.

In addition, Black women have been disproportionately suffering from the abortion bans implemented since the significantly Trump-built conservative Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade in 2022. According to the Democratic National Committee, “More than half of Black women of reproductive age now live in states with abortion bans in effect or with threats to abortion access.” Close to seven million Black women, ages 15 to 49, reside in those states. Worse yet, Project 2025 advocates a nationwide ban on abortion for a future Trump administration. He himself has become increasingly coy in addressing such an electorally damaging issue by deferring to whatever states want to do, fearing otherwise that he might lose a majority of women voters, but not wanting to anger the Christian nationalist extremists in his base.

That same Trumpified Supreme Court also ended affirmative action at colleges and universities. In 2023, it ruled that colleges and universities can no longer consider race in admissions. As yet, it’s not clear whether acceptance rates have fallen, particularly at elite schools. What is clear, thanks to the ruling, is that many colleges and universities have cut or dramatically redefined hundreds of scholarships worth millions of dollars that were previously targeted for Black and Latino students. This particularly hurts Black women students (who attend college in disproportionate numbers compared to young Black men).

Black women voters have responded in kind to Trump. In 2016, he won about 6% of the Black vote overall, but there was a stunning gender gap. While he gained about 14% of Black male votes, 98% of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton. Four years later, in 2020, Trump garnered about 8% of the overall Black vote, but only 5% of Black women.

Black Support for Harris Swells Despite Trump

Given those numbers (and his sexism), it’s clear why Trump has focused his “Black outreach” on Black men. However, the wedge he seeks to build may not be as stable as he imagines. Not only have Black women rallied behind the Harris-Walz ticket, but it appears that Black male voters are shifting as well. In a poll conducted in late July by the Howard University polling service, the Howard Initiative on Public Opinion (HIPO), of which I’m a member, we found 96% of Black women and 93% of Black men expressing their intention to vote for Harris. Meanwhile, a Zoom gathering of 40,000 Black men voicing their support and suggestions only days after Harris was rising to become the nominee suggested that the Trump campaign’s hope for an irreversible gender split among Black voters wasn’t on target.

As New York Times columnist Charles Blow noted, Trump is the “totem” of contemporary patriarchy. He is also the embodiment of what Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey terms “misogynoir,” the marriage of misogyny and racism.

Certainly, he dreads with every fiber in his body the rise of Harris and the intensity of her support, and also the organizing might of Black women voters. In Georgia, in 2021, it was the on-the-ground mobilization of Black women that led to the defeat of Trump’s preferred Senate candidates and the victories of senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

Count on one thing: Donald Trump is now running scared. What he assumed barely a month ago would be an essentially uncontested victory has been transformed into his worst nightmare: facing a smart, confident, younger Black woman who has stolen his momentum and whose possible victory in November would be a defeat from which he could never recover.

Copyright 2024 Clarence Lusane

Via Tomdispatch.com