Caitlin Johnstone
Politico has an obnoxiously propagandistic and deceitful article out titled “Biden approaches limits of influence on Israel,” yet another in the mountain of imperial media spin pieces that have come out over the last year trying to wash this administration’s hands of its criminality by portraying it as an innocent, passive witness to the US-backed atrocities and military brinkmanship we’ve been seeing in the middle east.
Politico’s Jonathan Lemire and Robbie Gramer report, completely falsely, that Biden may be unable to stop “what his administration has spent a year trying to prevent: regional war.” They falsely assert that the Biden administration now has “far less say in shaping events,” because “Netanyahu and his government have consistently ignored American counsel as to how to prosecute the war in Gaza.”
These are just lies. They’re lying.
As many have correctly pointed out over the last year, US presidents absolutely do have the power to stop Israeli warmongering dead in its tracks by threatening to terminate the military support Israel depends on, and past presidents have exercised this power. An Israeli air force official admitted last month that the atrocities we’ve been seeing in Gaza for an entire year could only be sustained for a few months without US support.
An arms embargo or the threat thereof would have stopped this long ago. Israeli warmongering isn’t getting worse and worse because the Biden administration can’t control Israel, it’s getting worse and worse because the Biden administration knowingly refuses to make use of the control that it has.
We saw this illustrated in a recent exchange at a State Department press conference. State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller was asked by reporter Tom Bateman about accusations that “you have simply not used leverage to get what you want,” citing Ronald Reagan’s well-documented phone call to the Israeli prime minister during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 — which stopped the assault instantly.
“So there have been a number of times over the course of this conflict where direct US intervention with the government of Israel has led them to take steps that they were not previously doing — to take steps when it comes to humanitarian access, to take steps with regards to the shape of their military operations,” Miller replied, adding, “I’m not going to speak to all those publicly. Some of them have been reported over time.”
This is actually a rather damning admission by Miller, because it shows that Biden has been exerting some influence over Israel, which means what we’ve been seeing from Israel is more or less what the Biden administration wants to happen. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be happening.
The other day Miller let the words “We’ve never wanted to see a diplomatic resolution with Hamas” escape from his lips while dodging pointed questions from reporter Prem Thakker, a position which of course makes all this administration’s talk about ceasefire negotiations completely meaningless.
Despite the nonstop churn of White House press releases disguised as news stories in the mainstream media about how “angry” and “frustrated” Biden is with Netanyahu and how powerless he is to divert Israel off the war path, this administration is just as responsible for these wars as Netanyahu himself. These are US wars. These are Biden’s wars.
Another article from Politico titled “US officials quietly backed Israel’s military push against Hezbollah” reports that White House officials Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk “told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah,” supposedly “to convince the group to engage in diplomatic talks to end the conflict.”
Got that? This same outlet which told us the Biden administration supports Israel’s warmongering in Lebanon is simultaneously publishing articles about how powerless Biden is to rein in Israel’s warmongering.
Absolutely pathetic. No matter how much you might despise the mainstream press, it’s not enough.