Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Grading Biden on the Israel-Hamas War

"Anyone who could be advocating for Israel now is seriously sick. And if Biden
doesn’t change his stance soon, he’ll lose the election. At least Michigan."

One question is what more could Biden do which could change Netanyahu's behavior and which wouldn't endanger more Biden votes elsewhere.
That is the question they could pose to the people of Michigan. Then, of course, talk it through. It's a terribly rotten kettle of fish.

[...]

For a crisis with so many moving parts, the U.S. president has fared pretty well.
By Steven Simon, the professor of practice in Middle Eastern studies at the Jackson School of International Relations,
University of Washington, and Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

[...]

Could the Biden administration have forced Israel to embrace a more permanent ceasefire, as many have urged Biden to do? What threats might it have used? A halt to U.S. military assistance would have sparked a firestorm in Washington, destroyed Biden’s demonstrated influence on Israel’s crisis response, and pushed Israel to rely on less precise weapons, leading to more civilian deaths—and all likely without changing Israel’s actions.

Imposing conditions on Israel’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons is another option being raised not just by progressive Democrats but by a few more centrist ones as well, though the latter group is so far just asking questions and requesting information rather than pressing for restrictions. Such an approach would have to involve looking at individual weapons: how they are deployed, what are legitimate military targets, and whether Israel has carefully calibrated the impact on civilians in the area. This seems almost impossible in the middle of an active warzone and in any event likely would not alter Israel’s operations.

Should the United States have withdrawn military support for Israel in other ways, such as by redeploying the carriers in the eastern Mediterranean, the U.S. destroyer in the Red Sea, and the U.S. X-band air defense radar installation in Israel’s Negev desert? Doing so would undermine the U.S. objective of deterring Hezbollah and Iran from escalating the conflict and likely trigger an Israeli preemptive war against Lebanon. Such a step would, in effect, play into Iranian hands and undermine, not strengthen, deterrence.

Recalling the U.S. Marine expeditionary force whose missions include embassy and country evacuations, hostage rescue, and other special operations would undermine U.S. readiness for any number of contingencies. Voting against Israel in the United Nations can be guaranteed not to move Israel’s needle one bit. The administration might have considered using U.S. forces to protect aid convoys entering Gaza against Israeli wishes, but this would pose risks that would truly be incalculable.

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As the Israeli ground campaign now renews, so do the greatest challenges for the Biden administration’s policies. The United States cannot prevent Israel from resuming military action in northern Gaza or the more worrisome unfolding of a major military campaign to root out Hamas’s infrastructure and kill its leadership in the south .. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/30/israel-gaza-war-cease-fire-biden-south-push/ . With nearly half of Gaza’s population displaced into the south and disease and lack of necessities taking their toll, a massive ground campaign in densely populated areas there would be disastrous. Indeed, when comparing pre-Oct. 7 Israel-Hamas conflicts with the appalling Palestinian death toll of the past month and a half, it’s clear that Israel is being far less discriminating this time around and has expanded its rules of engagement in attacking Hamas targets embedded in or near civilian areas.

The question is whether Biden can, through pressure and persuasion, reshape Israel’s thinking and create the requisite time and space not just for safe zones but for reliable channels to deliver humanitarian assistance. Having had Israel’s back over the past 50-plus days, the U.S. president is in a position to wield influence over what may well be the most important juncture in Israel’s war against Hamas. Still, Biden must be realistic: Stopping Israel from dealing Hamas’s military capacity a death blow was never in the cards.

[Likewise, i'd still guess "dealing Hamas’s military capacity a death blow was never in the cards" either.
That's one terrible thought i have still hanging over the images of the Zionists massive revenge effort.]

The other issue is how to bring the Israelis around on the elusive question of an endgame in Gaza. Privately, the Biden administration has been hammering the Israelis to think this through, though Netanyahu has been reluctant to engage largely because of the demands of his extreme right-wing coalition partners.

Blinken has already laid out publicly a number of “nos” for post-conflict Gaza, including no reduction in territory, no forced relocation of Gazans, and no use of Gaza as a platform for launching terror attacks. We still have no idea how Israel sees the future, other than the certainty of some Israeli presence and perhaps buffer zones until some new reality that can guarantee Israel’s security could be established. But who does Israel envision governing Gaza? And what will Gaza’s relationship to the West Bank be? Biden has called for renewed negotiations for a two-state solution. Both that issue and the future of Gaza will ultimately depend on whether and how the war reshapes Israeli and Palestinian politics.

Uncertainties abound—hardly an unusual state of affairs in the middle of a major Middle East conflict. Yet despite all of the criticism and the grim death toll among Palestinians and Israelis, and given the constraints and things beyond his control, Biden has fared pretty well so far in preserving U.S. interests and preventing matters from getting worse. For a crisis with so many moving parts, that is no small achievement.

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