Sure, whatever

Israel policy fodder for Trump

Watch for this to appear in Trump ads and speeches.

Jad Haidar is a US Marine Corps veteran who enlisted after 9/11. He was awarded a Purple Heart after he was twice hit by an IED, suffering severe concussions and a traumatic brain injury, in Iraq. For years, he’s required daily assistance due to his debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder.

He’s now stranded in Lebanon, unsure of if he and his family will get out.

Haidar is among 7,000 Americans who have sought information from the US about leaving Lebanon amid Israel’s strikes across the country.

[...]

The US Embassy in Beirut on Sept. 27 said it was not evacuating US citizens and suggested those looking to leave the country book and pay for a commercial flight. On Wednesday, the State Department said it organized a flight from Beirut to Istanbul that carried around 100 Americans and their family members. Haidar was not on that flight, but he says he was told by State Department officials they were trying to get him on a plane to Istanbul on Thursday. He would be on his own once there. They have yet to provide more details, and regardless, Haidar says he feels “abandoned” and disappointed in how he’s been treated by his own government.

[...]

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who represents Haidar, in an Instagram video, called it a “disgrace” that her team has had “to call and beg” the State Department to help get Haidar and more than 140 people in her district out of Lebanon. “We need to do better. We knew this was going to happen. We had no plans to get Americans out.”

  Zeteo

And would Trump suddenly be on Tlaib's side?  If it wins him votes, he would.  He just wouldn't mention the part about Tlaib.  Only that the Biden administration is stranding American Marines and their families.

And, this...

And I don't doubt it for a second.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Pathetic Blinken "answer"

As Mehdi Hassan might say: Don't stop asking until he answers.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 08:55 am:

UPDATE 09/27/2024:

I'm gonna need some more explanation

WTF?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 02:45 pm:

Furious protesters interrupted Blinken as he began his testimony before the Democratic-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There were shouts that he has "blood on his hands," and Blinken flinched from a protester who approached him from behind waving a sign that said "criminal" before security officers carried her out of the room.

Blinken reiterated the support of President Joe Biden's administration for Israel, but insisted it was focused on easing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

  MSN

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) expressed support on Monday for the International Criminal Court in its request for arrest warrants of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoev Gallant, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and others for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

"The ICC prosecutor is right to take these actions. These arrest warrants may or may not be carried out, but it is imperative that the global community uphold international law, Sanders said in a statement. "Without these standards of decency and morality, this planet may rapidly descend into anarchy, never-ending wars, and barbarism."

  Detroit Free Press

Love you, Bernie. But we may already be there.

Jim Jordan is a horrible person

A former acting CIA director has admitted to Congress that he organized the letter that falsely portrayed Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation in an effort to influence the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden and that he did so at the direction of current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a letter released Thursday by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan.

The extraordinary admission by career intelligence officer Michael J. Morell provides stunning evidence that the now-infamous letter from 51 security officials in October 2020 was not an organic intelligence community initiative but rather a political dirty trick originating with Blinken and the Biden campaign.

Jordan sent a letter demanding Blinken answer a series of questions about Morell's stunning testimony, as lawmakers weighed the enormity of America's top diplomat being willing to accuse a nuclear-armed superpower of interfering in the 2020 election without evidence. That letter included major snippets of Morell's testimony.

  Just the News

Jim Jordan’s Hunter Biden investigation is failing badly, so he and his fellow House Republicans are trying to invent evidence to give them justification for investigating President Biden, but Democrats caught them in the act and provided the nation with the truth, as the GOP’s Hunter Biden investigations are going nowhere.

[...]

Jordan and House Judiciary Republicans got caught editing witness interviews to smear the Sec. of State and push their Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

  Politicus USA

Jordan released a statement on Thursday claiming that during “a transcribed interview with Michael Morell, a former Deputy Director of the CIA,” Morell revealed that [Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was then working for the Biden campaign,] helped to orchestrate a letter signed by dozens of national security officials casting doubt on the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

[...]

Jordan’s claims of Blinken’s involvement in the Hunter Biden letter quickly sparked headlines across the media.

[...]

Democrats hit back at that accusation and published a segment of the transcript of Morell’s testimony to underscore their claim.

“In an effort to smear Secretary Blinken and sensationalize a three-year-old tabloid story, Jim Jordan has released cherry-picked excerpts of a transcribed interview. To be clear, no part of that interview demonstrates that Tony Blinken or any other Biden campaign official asked Mike Morell to write a letter about Hunter Biden’s laptop,” said a Judiciary Committee spokesman in a statement for the Democrats.

“At no point during his interview did Mr. Morell testify that Secretary Blinken directed or asked him to write any letters. Instead, Mr. Morell testified that Mr. Blinken sought his advice, as many others have.”

[...]

The statement [...] included a copy of the transcript from Morell’s interview before the committee.

  MSN

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Now that you mention it...

So the US government is now Susan Collins

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday criticized a decision by Israel’s government to recognize at least nine settlements in the West Bank as part of Israel, saying such a move worsens tensions with the Palestinians.

Blinken, in a statement, said the moves to legally authorize such settlements, which had previously been identified as illegal communities, “exacerbate tensions and undermine the prospects for a negotiated two-state solution.”

“We are deeply troubled by Israel’s decision yesterday to advance reportedly nearly 10,000 settlement units and to begin a process to retroactively legalize nine outposts in the West Bank that were previously illegal under Israeli law,” Blinken said in the statement.

  The Hill

And the Israeli government is quaking in its boots. We have let them get away with aggression toward Palestine to the verge of destroying that country altogether for decades. Being "deeply troubled" is fucking bullshit.

“As I have previously stated, anything that takes us away from the vision of two states for two peoples is detrimental to Israel’s long-term security, its identity as a Jewish and democratic state, and to our vision of equal measures of security, freedom, prosperity, and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians alike,” the statement continued. “We call on all parties to avoid additional actions that can further escalate tensions in the region and to take practical steps that can improve the well-being of the Palestinian people.”

Blah, blah, blah. The Middle East policy equivalent of thoughts and prayers for mass killing victims in the US. Total worthless bullshit. Fooling no one.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Blinken and Austin in Ukraine

A US official said Joe Biden would on Monday formally nominate Bridget Brink as US ambassador to Ukraine, a post that had remained vacant for more than two years. Brink, a career foreign service officer, has been US ambassador to Slovakia since 2019.

  Guardian

Pop quiz: Which Republican asshole will be the first to block the nomination?

Is it just me, or does it seem inappropriate for Blinken and Austin to be wearing big smiles?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

America's brutal destruction of Afghanistan

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., secured a vote Thursday on President Joe Biden’s refusal to release to the Afghan central bank $9.4 billion of its own foreign reserves. It marked the first-ever vote on the White House’s lethal policy of asset denial that’s causing the displacement, starvation, and death of millions of Afghans.

[...]

Jayapal’s provision, drafted with Rep. Jesús García, D-Ill., would require the secretary of the Treasury to provide Congress with an assessment of the humanitarian suffering caused by U.S. sanctions on Afghanistan and its confiscation of the country’s foreign-held money.

[...]

As the Taliban neared Kabul last summer, Secretary of State Tony Blinken blocked the outflow of Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves, and he hasn’t lifted a finger since then. The U.S. had spent nearly 20 years building an Afghan central banking system that was independent of the government and, despite fearmongering by a number of Democrats and Republicans, still operates without interference from the Taliban.

“These are not American taxpayer funds,” said Shah Mehrabi, a member of the central bank’s board and a professor of economics at Montgomery College, arguing for the release of Afghanistan’s reserves. “People are under the illusion that these are United States funds. These funds belong to Afghanistan. ."

[...]

Jayapal introduced her measure as an amendment to a gigantic anti-China bill that would subsidize the U.S. semiconductor and other industries with hundreds of billions of dollars and ratchet up military activities in the Indo-Pacific region. The House of Representatives passed the legislation — called the America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength, or COMPETES, Act — on Friday. But the House rejected Jayapal’s amendment with 175 yes and 255 no votes, as 44 Democrats joined Republicans against the measure.

  The Intercept

Of course. Actually, I'm surprised it got 175 yes votes.

If you missed it, check out this Bulwark interview with George Packer, and/or read his Atlantic article: The Betrayal.

Another bad move

Secretary of State Antony Blinken held his first call with the embattled interim President of Venezuela Juan Guaidó on Tuesday, where he said the U.S. is working with allies to push for a democratic transition in the country and provide humanitarian assistance.

[...]

The call reinforces the Biden administration’s decision to continue recognizing Guaidó as the interim president, despite the European Union announcing in January it was downgrading the Venezuelan opposition leader’s status to “privileged interlocutor.”

Guaidó’s status stems from the 2015 Venezuelan elections when the opposition gained control of the legislature over the ruling party of President Nicolás Maduro.

  The Hill

But he's not the president. Biden himself needs to be in conversation with Maduro.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Assessing a Biden administration's possibilities

The Democrats’ victory in the general election was made possible by the horrifying death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic and the criminal recklessness of the Trump administration, rather than an enthusiastic embrace of Biden’s policies, ideas, or his nearly half-centurylong record in public office. For millions of voters, this was not a choice between Biden and Trump — it was a referendum on Trump, and Biden’s name on the ballot was a stand-in for “No!”

[...]

Biden’s win was not a decisive victory born of the politics of the party establishment, no matter how hard that establishment wants to claim it. If anything, it showed that millions of Americans, including large numbers of progressives and young voters, were willing to put their own political principles and preferences aside in an effort to ensure Trump would be defeated.

[...]

Throughout the past two electoral cycles in particular, Democratic Party elites have openly embraced the principle that waging war against the left is crucial to maintaining their grip on power. They engaged in systematic red-baiting against Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020. They railed against Medicare for All, supported massive corporate bailouts and giveaways, and backed bloated Pentagon budgets. While attacking the left, Democratic Party leaders have steadily embraced George W. Bush and other imperial Republicans as part of their imagined coalition of adults in the room. The past four years of Trump have brought remarkable public clarity to one of the most pernicious aspects of the two-party system: The traditional elites of the Democratic and Republican parties have more affection for each other than they do for the ordinary people whose fates they love to wield as rhetorical ornaments in their campaign speeches.

[...]

We know that there are more than 73 million people who watched the open corruption, gross incompetence, spiteful and dangerous policymaking, and the constant encouragement of racist violence and hatred overseen by this administration and chose to endorse it with their votes for four more years of Trump. The whole world can see how the Republican Party morphed almost overnight into one gigantic campaign rally celebrating the most insane directives and lies of a notorious charlatan who boasts of his mastery of bankruptcies. But Trump did not alter the ideological core of the Republican Party, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has frequently lamented while nostalgically dreaming of the golden era of Bush’s murderous eight years. If anything, Trump’s reign has quite dramatically exposed the GOP for what it really is and has always been.

[...]

We have also seen a great unmasking of the institutional Democratic Party. [...] We heard time and again the very Democratic Party politicians who warned us that Trump had been compromised by a hostile foreign power and represented the gravest danger to our Democratic system in history vote to give expanded and sweeping military and surveillance powers to that very president.

[...]

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s brief stint as a candidate mostly consisted of spending enormous amounts of money smearing Sanders in a relentless campaign of paid advertising and the peddling of scurrilous “oppo research.” Hillary Clinton continued to relitigate the 2016 primaries, including through a strategically timed release of a hagiography of her masquerading as a Hulu documentary. Biden and other candidates, prominently Pete Buttigieg, deployed red-baiting and frequently invoked decades-old comments Sanders made about the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro, just as Clinton had used the Nicaraguan Sandinistas of the 1980s and Cuba of the 1960s in her attacks against Sanders in 2016.

[...]

After Sanders won the Nevada caucus with overwhelming union worker, youth, immigrant, and Latino backing, MSNBC host Chris Matthews compared the victory to the Nazi invasion of France. Chuck Todd quoted a conservative writer who compared the online supporters of Sanders, a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors, to Nazi “Brownshirts.” The campaign to push Biden on the electorate also included high stakes, behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Barack Obama, Clinton, and other elite Democratic figures, and the simultaneous withdrawal of other establishment candidates who issued hurried endorsements of Biden on the eve of Super Tuesday.

[...]

The establishment camp of the Democratic Party and its online minions projected the myth that securing the votes of Republicans was a crucial necessity to beat Trump. They amplified the message that choosing Sanders would lose this vital demographic and ensure a Trump victory. It was always a fraud. Trump actually increased his share of Republican voters in the election versus 2016.

[...]

The dirty truth is that neoconservatives felt at home with the establishment Democratic Party, particularly on matters of national security policy, long before Trump came to power. More than a decade ago, as President-elect Obama and Biden built their national security and foreign policy teams from 2008 to 2009, they stacked their administration with Democratic hawks and cruise missile liberals and kept George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates in charge of the Pentagon. Conservative Republicans heaped praise on their appointments. Karl Rove called their Cabinet “reassuring,” and Boot, a neoconservative writer and former McCain campaign staffer, beamed about the foreign policy team: “I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain.”

[...]

Obama and Biden dramatically expanded U.S. drone strikes, including systematic strikes in new countries. They initiated a secret bombing campaign in Yemen in late 2009 that eventually metastasized into the genocidal Saudi-led scorched-earth war that continues to this day. They facilitated regime change in Libya, surged troops in Afghanistan, and imposed or tightened deadly economic sanctions in a variety of nations. The Obama-Biden administration developed an almost clinical process for compiling kill lists and then sentencing people to death through a Frankenstein extralegal system of unofficial judges, juries, and executioners. Among their kills were several U.S. citizens, including a teenager who was never accused of any crime. Obama openly rejected calls to hold CIA torturers accountable and failed to close Guantánamo. No, Biden and the institutional Democratic Party didn’t need to convince these Never Trump Republicans to join their cause in 2020. They were already there.

[...]

Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is a well-known interventionist who backed the disastrous regime-change war in Libya, advocated for more military action in Syria, and, while serving in the Obama administration, supported the criminally brutal war in Yemen and arming Saudi Arabia. In 2015, it was Blinken who announced that the Obama-Biden administration was bolstering its support to the Saudis specifically for their war in Yemen. “We have expedited weapons deliveries, we have increased our intelligence-sharing, and we have established a joint coordination planning cell in the Saudi operation center,” Blinken said during a visit to Riyadh in April 2015.

[...]

The nominee for director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, was a key player in developing the Obama administration’s global assassination program. She was a prominent defender of Gina Haspel, a central player in the CIA’s kidnap and torture program, and supported her nomination by Trump to serve as CIA director. Haines was reportedly so central to the drone assassination program that she would at times be awoken in the middle of the night to help decide whether to kill someone on the other side of the world with a Reaper or Predator drone. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s pick for national security adviser, is a Clinton acolyte who was a central player in the Obama-Biden Libya regime-change war and a well-known proponent of U.S. militarism.

[...]

Among the reported frontrunners to take the helm of the CIA is Bush’s former national security briefer Michael Morell. Like Haspel, Morell is career CIA and has defended the post-9/11 use of kidnapping and torture. He was also a major proponent of drone strikes and defended Haspel’s role in the destruction of CIA torture tapes. In the aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, Morell sought to place some of the blame on internet and communications companies “building encryption without keys” following Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency spying. “That is all, at the end of the day, back in Snowden’s lap, in my view,” Morell said.

[...]

Biden has yet to name a nominee for defense secretary, but former Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy has been repeatedly floated as a top candidate and enthusiastically promoted in D.C. foreign policy circles as the perfect candidate to become the first woman to serve in the post. Flournoy, a Clinton supporter, was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. After leaving the Obama administration in 2012, Flournoy — a notorious hawk who backed the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen and pushed for Obama to intervene in Libya — has worked for a variety of military consulting ventures. Among them was WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm she co-founded with Blinken to assist corporations in winning lucrative government contracts.

[...]

Flournoy also serves on the board of military and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Among other unsavory projects, Booz has provided services to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman since 2015 when it aided him in his brutal campaign to consolidate his power. It also trained the Saudi navy, which enforced a catastrophic blockade of Yemen. [...] Flournoy joined a gaggle of mostly neocons at the notorious Project for the New American Century in criticizing the Bush administration for not being militaristic enough in its foreign policy and arguing for an increase in ground troops in the Middle East. [...] Flournoy has long had fans among the neoconservative camp, and Paul Wolfowitz and Kristol publicly campaigned for her to take over as defense secretary under Obama in 2012.

[...]

There are undoubtedly foreign policy areas in which the Biden administration will correct Trump’s egregious actions, particularly in the case of the Iran nuclear deal, which Sullivan played a key role in crafting. But there are also areas in which Biden could prove more hawkish than Trump, particularly on North Korea, Afghanistan, and the question of troop deployments. In all the beltway scuttlebutt around Biden’s Cabinet, there is no mention of open critics of U.S. war-making being considered for any key national security positions. This is not an oversight. This is how the business of protecting the militarized myth of American exceptionalism is performed by the establishment Democratic Party.

[...]

[Biden] is the epitome of the bipartisan D.C. foreign policy establishment.

  Jeremy Scahill

Biden's expected Secretary of State

While Mike Pompeo has remained a domestic politician throughout his tenure as secretary of state, giving the lion’s share of his interviews to conservative radio stations in the midwest, for example, Blinken is very much a born internationalist.

He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar and play football (soccer). [...] Before entering the White House under Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with US officials, foreign diplomats and journalists.

[...]

All those contacts and the urbane bilingual charm will be targeted at soothing the frayed nerves of western allies, reassuring them that the US is back as a conventional team player. The foreign policy priorities in the first days of a Biden administration will be rejoining treaties and agreements that Donald Trump left.

[...]

News of his expected nomination was quickly welcomed by Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ chief foreign policy adviser.

“This is a good choice. Tony has the strong confidence of the president-elect and the knowledge and experience for the important work of rebuilding US diplomacy,” Duss wrote on Twitter.

“It will also be a new and great thing to have a top diplomat who has regularly engaged with progressive grassroots.”

[...]

Those who know Blinken well insist that his commitment to human rights is genuine and rooted in experience. He is the stepson of a Holocaust survivor and worked in the Clinton White House on the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.

[...]

After working in Bill Clinton’s national security council, he became Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser in the Senate in 2002, as staff director on the foreign relations committee, and worked on Biden’s failed presidential bid in 2008.

After Obama picked Biden as vice-president, Blinken returned to the White House as his national security adviser.

[...]

In the last two years of the Obama administration, Blinken served as deputy secretary of state. His return in the top job then is the embodiment of continuity. But in recent interviews, he has acknowledged the mistakes and regrets of the Obama era.

On the decision not to intervene in any significant way in Syria (a decision Blinken opposed), he told CBS News: “We failed to prevent a horrific loss of life. We failed to prevent massive displacement … something I will take with me for the rest of my days.”

He also signed an open letter with other former Obama officials in 2018, acknowledging that the initial support they gave to the Saudi war in Yemen had not succeeded in limiting or ending the war and had mutated into a blank check under the Trump administration, resulting in devastating civilian casualties. A Biden administration is expected to cut off military involvement in the conflict.

  Guardian

One problem (and it's a problem in both Republican and Democratic administrations):

Blinken has been adamant about the Biden administration’s commitment to Israel’s security and said military support would not be made dependent on Israel’s policy decisions.

[...]

The policy struggles will eventually rise to the fore but Blinken – who at 58 arrives at the state department as the father of two young children – is likely to begin with an extended honeymoon simply by not being Pompeo and having the stated desire to lead the US back towards leadership on the world stage on global issues like Covid, climate and non-proliferation.

As long as they don't try to shove foreign leaders aside to resume a stranglehold on all global issue decisions. The one thing that has been positive about Trump's reign of terror is that America's outsized role in global affairs has been pared back to something more equitable for other countries.

Also, I hope they quickly reinstate the good civil servants who left or were driven out of the State Department by Trump.