SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
jake sullivan
Biden Greenlights 'Racist' and 'Sociopathic' $8B Arms Sale to Israel
Multiple human rights organizations and international bodies have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza
Jan 04, 2025
The administration of US President Joe Biden announced on Saturday an arms sale to Israel valued at $8 billion, just ahead of President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House.
Biden has repeatedly rejected calls to suspend military backing for Israel because of the number of civilians killed during the war in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 45,000 people in Gaza, primarily women and children.
The sale includes medium-range air-to-air missiles, 155mm projectile artillery shells for long-range targeting, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 500-pound bombs, and more.
Human rights groups, former State Department officials, and Democratic lawmakers have urged the Biden administration to halt arms sales to Israel, citing violations of US laws, including the Leahy Law, as well as international laws and human rights.
The Leahy Law, named after former Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the US to withhold military assistance from foreign military or law enforcement units if there is credible evidence of human rights violations.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s most significant Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called Biden’s new $8 billion arms deal “racist” and “sociopathic.”
Multiple human rights organizations and international bodies have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for committing war crimes.
The US is, by far, the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.
CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said on Saturday:
“We strongly condemn the Biden administration for its unbelievable and criminal decision to send another $8 billion worth of American weapons to the government of indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu instead of using American leverage to force an end to the genocide in Gaza.
“Only racists who do not view people of color as equally human, and sociopaths who delight in funding mass slaughter, could send Netanyahu even more bombs while his government openly kidnaps doctors, destroys hospitals, and exterminates the last survivors in northern Gaza.
“If President Biden is actually the person who approved this new $8 billion arms sale, then he is a war criminal who belongs in a cell at The Hague alongside Netanyahu. But if Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk, Jake Sullivan, and other aides are making these unconscionable decisions as shadow presidents, then anyone with a conscience in the administration should speak up now about their abuses of power.”
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US accounted for 69% of Israel's imports of major conventional arms between 2019 and 2023.
On the other hand, incoming President-elect Donald Trump has also pledged unwavering support for Israel and has never committed to supporting an independent Palestinian state.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden's New Weapons Deal With Saudi Arabia's Prince Bonesaw
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
Aug 16, 2024
Perhaps we should be grateful that it took President Biden over four years to fully abandon his campaign pledge to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia, eroding the promise bit by bit before finally announcing at the end of the day on Friday, August 9, that the administration would resume sales of offensive air-to-ground munitions to the Kingdom.
In reality, the ban was merely the last vestige of a long-abandoned policy to isolate and sanction Saudi Arabia for its various, gruesome atrocities and abuses both at home and abroad. In its place, the Biden administration’s courtiers doubled down on their embrace of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS), offering up a never-ending basket of concessions and goodies, as the golden ticket for continued U.S. primacy in the Middle East, come what may to everyone and everything else.
What follows will be their rush to the finish line, bestowing on the prince the biggest prize of all — an unprecedented U.S. security guarantee — before the clock runs out on Joe Biden’s presidency.
Cutting off the biggest U.S. weapons purchaser in the world carried well-understood costs of its own, upsetting not only U.S. defense companies deprived of the Saudi cash cow, but also encouraging MBS to retaliate by flaunting closer ties with China and Russia. And so just a few months into the first year of the Biden administration, his national security team walked back the arms embargo, clarifying that they only intended to block “offensive” weapons, not “defensive” ones.
Queries from members of Congress about the distinction between these terms went unanswered. Soon, billions in weapons were flowing, paving the way for a further mending of relations with the Saudi ruler, culminating in the now infamous July 2022 Biden/MBS “fist bump” in Jeddah.
Once the Biden team announced that it too would follow Trump’s lead to make adding Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords its number one Middle East foreign policy priority, any lingering concerns about rewarding the Kingdom with new military support despite its widespread horrors in Yemen and at home, or fueling its further belligerence in the region, were swept under the desert sands.
Coupled with national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s open admission of his secondary priorities — cheap oil and keeping China out of the region — the only answer to MBS’s “jump” was to ask “how high?” MBS turned to a hardball game of reverse leverage, not only refusing to open his oil spigot to relieve global oil prices ahead of the 2022 November primaries despite Biden’s pleas, but prominently hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping in a multiday red carpet affair, announcing China would build a civilian nuclear plant and support missile development in the country, and refusing to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
And so it was time for the Biden team to bow to MBS’s wishes. The first major concession was to grant the Crown Prince immunity from U.S. prosecution, squashing several lawsuits against him for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the attempted murder of Saad Aljabri, and the targeted harassment and attacks against Al-Jazeera journalist Ghada Oueiss. The next was for the Biden team to secure the ultimate prize in the Saudi bucket list: a NATO Article 5 treaty level U.S. security guarantee for the Kingdom. Efforts by the Biden team to woo the Crown Prince with a mere aerial security umbrella was not sufficient to persuade him; only a bilateral, treaty level guarantee would work, he made clear.
The Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, and the nine months of relentless Israeli bombardment and starvation of Gaza’s civilian population that it precipitated, upended these plans. A humiliated Sullivan, who only days before the cataclysmic assault pronounced that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in two decades now” and boasted that “the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced,” was forced to shelve the plans for a Saudi/Israeli peace agreement.
Even MBS could not dare to openly endorse Israel in the face of near universal Saudi sympathy for Palestinian suffering.
While a largely AIPAC-funded Congress would likely have supported a U.S. security guarantee for Saudi Arabia in exchange for its joining the Abraham Accords, without this, ratification of a treaty level commitment would be a very hard sell. The Biden team is now considering the idea of delinking the security guarantee, as well as poaching China’s development of the civilian nuclear plant, from normalization with Israel in a “less for less” deal.
Under a proposed “Strategic Alliance Agreement” the U.S. would commit to helping defend Saudi Arabia if it were attacked, in exchange for Saudi granting Washington access to Saudi territory and airspace, prohibiting China from building bases in the Kingdom or pursuing security cooperation with it, and signing a parallel “Defense Cooperation Agreement,” to boost weapons sales, intelligence sharing and strategic planning on terrorism and Iran.
Such a move strips away the cover of “regional peace for Israel” as the motivation for the Saudi security guarantee, more nakedly exposing the underlying motivations driving the Biden team: a stale but cemented worldview that U.S. interests require military hegemony in the Middle East, alongside cheap oil and defense industry profits. It’s hard to discount the siren call of personal profiteering for Biden officials, who will no doubt consider multi-million payouts from the UAE and Saudi, even if they’re not as lucrative as the billions in take-home by Trump officials Stephen Mnuchin and Jared Kushner. (Recall also that Secretary Blinken’s WestExec Advisors, whose client list Secretary Blinken has never disclosed, is now partly owned by Teneo, a firm that works for the MBS controlled Saudi public investment fund.)
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East — from the mass slaughters of civilians and perpetual war-footings, encouraging destabilizing bellicosity, entrapping our country in zero-sum military conflicts, and undermining U.S. global standing as a credible force for human rights and democracy — remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
With the clock ticking on the expiration of the Biden term as the Gaza war rages on, it’s doubtful that the administration will be able to deliver any expansion of the Abraham Accords or a security agreement for MBS. It’s not even clear MBS will accept these rewards, saving them for the next round of haggling with a new administration. For now, we’ll just have to hope that “Mr. Bonesaw” will show more sense than the Biden administration and avoid any new wars in the region.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Failed US Military Pier Offered 'Humanitarian Gloss' as Israel Starved Gaza
"The entire operation was a failed exercise in public relations by the Biden administration," said one observer.
Jul 12, 2024
After failing to re-anchor its "humanitarian pier" in Gaza, the Pentagon said Thursday that the much-ballyhooed project—which critics dismissed as a "public relations ploy" that did next to nothing to stop the deadly starvation spreading in the besieged Palestinian enclave—would shut down indefinitely.
Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said U.S. troops had failed to reconnect the floating Trident Pier to Gaza's shore due to "technical and weather-related issues," according toThe Washington Post.
The $320 million project—which consists of a floating offshore barge and 1,800-foot causeway to the shore—was touted as eventually being able to accommodate up to 150 aid trucks per day. Instead, it facilitated the shipment of the equivalent of about a single day's worth of prewar food deliveries while operating for a total of less than three weeks.
"As a pier, it's shutting down. As a metaphor, it will live forever," said Tom Philpott, a senior researcher at Johns Hopkins University's Center for a Livable Future.
Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, welcomed the project's demise.
"The U.S. pier was never supposed to work. It was designed to give a humanitarian gloss to [U.S. President Joe] Biden's pro-genocide policy in Gaza," he said on social media. "Good riddance to this failed PR stunt."
However, during a Thursday press conference, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan defended the pier, arguing that it "has made a difference in trying to deal with the heartbreaking humanitarian situation in Gaza."
"I see any result that produces more food, more humanitarian goods getting to the people of Gaza, as a success," he asserted. "It is additive. It is something additional that otherwise would not have gotten there when it got there. And that is a good thing."
Even if the pier had achieved its expected capacity, it would still have been far fewer than the prewar daily mean of more than 500 truckloads that U.S. and United Nations officials said are required to meet the needs of a population facing critical shortages of food, water, medicine, and other lifesaving supplies.
The pier was in operation for only about 20 days in May before it broke apart during stormy conditions. The structure was subsequently repaired, but then was dismantled just a week after reopening in June due to more rough seas.
It is also likely that the pier was used for military purposes during the June raid by Israel Defense Forces troops, who killed or wounded hundreds of Palestinians—including many women and children—during the rescue of four Israelis kidnapped by Hamas militants on October 7.
"It seems clear that the entire operation was a failed exercise in public relations by the Biden administration, which has sat on its hands while the extremist Netanyahu cabinet, full of the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, has half-starved or in some instances whole-starved the Palestinians of Gaza," Middle East expert Juan Cole wrote Friday, referring to the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
At least dozens of Palestinians, mostly children, have died in Gaza due to a lack of food, water, and medical treatment. Palestinian and international agencies say that Israel's 280-day war on Gaza has left at least 137,500 people dead, maimed, or missing; around 90% of the embattled strip's population forcibly displaced; and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians starving.
"A U.S. administration has to have an answer when reporters ask it why it is allowing Palestinian children to become emaciated, and the pier was an attempted answer," Cole added. "The other possibility was for the Biden administration to man up and just tell Netanyahu and his rogues' gallery cabinet that they cannot starve innocent civilians as part of their campaign against Hamas, and that if they do not cut it out there will be hell to pay. But Biden is in the tank for the Israeli government."
U.N. experts and others have called Israel's forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza "a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine."
The International Court of Justice—which is weighing whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza—has ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts in the embattled enclave, to "immediately halt" its offensive in Rafah, and to stop blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza in the face of worsening "famine and starvation." Israel is accused of flouting all three ICJ orders.
Meanwhile, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan accused top Israeli officials of using "starvation as a weapon of war" and "extermination" in his May application for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan is also seeking to arrest three Hamas leaders for alleged crimes including extermination and rape.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular