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Biden’s Apocalyptic Middle East Failure: an Autopsy
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.
Nov 11, 2024
U.S. 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 Vice President 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 United Nations 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.
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.
Biden’s hardline policy toward Tehran ultimately harmed his major foreign policy initiative, of defeating Moscow.
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 Russian President 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.
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.
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’ 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.
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.
South Africa brought a case against Israel at the International Criminal Court charging it with genocide, which the Court said was "plausibly brought" 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 1 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.
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'Across the Board, We Need Peace,' Says UN Chief as War Rages in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine
"We need peace in Ukraine," U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, speaking before Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Oct 24, 2024
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking in Russia on Thursday, called for peace in Ukraine and "across the board" as wars also rage in Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan.
Guterres spoke before Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders from "BRICS Plus" countries gathering in Kazan, a city roughly 500 miles east of Moscow.
"Across the board, we need peace," Guterres said.
"We need peace in Ukraine," he added. "A just peace in line with the U.N. Charter, international law, and U.N. General Assembly resolutions."
After the speech, Guterres renewed his call for a cease-fire in Lebanon and Gaza.
"We need a cease-fire in Lebanon—as we need a cease-fire in Gaza and the immediate release of all hostages," he wrote on social media. "Escalation after escalation is leading to the unimaginable for the people of the region."
We need a ceasefire in Lebanon – as we need a ceasefire in Gaza and the immediate release of all hostages.
Escalation after escalation is leading to the unimaginable for the people of the region. pic.twitter.com/YhwLkSbXzV
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) October 24, 2024
Putin presided over the closing ceremonies of the BRICS conference on Thursday, saying the group provided a counterbalance to the "perverse methods" of the West. Brazil, Russia, India, and China formed the group in the 2000s, with South Africa joining in 2010; BRICS recently expanded to include a number of other developing countries.
The conference drew the largest gathering of international diplomats into Russia since Putin's forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, escalating a conflict that had begun in 2014.
Ukraine's foreign ministry criticized Guterres for attending the conference and noted that he did not attend Ukraine's global peace summit in Switzerland in June.
"This is a wrong choice that does not advance the cause of peace," according to the ministry's social media account. "It only damages the U.N.'s reputation."
Guterres has repeatedly called for a cease-fire in Gaza in the last year. The Israeli government declared him persona non grata earlier this month, barring him from entering the country on the grounds that he had not strongly condemned an Iranian barrage of missiles into Israel—an accusation Guterres denied, saying he did forcefully condemn the Iranian attack.
For U.N. Day, celebrated annually on October 24, Guterres issued a video statement calling for the world's nations to keep the "beacon of hope" that is the U.N. "shining."
The U.N. has had only limited success in stopping or slowing the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan, which are among many dozens of conflicts across the world and have brought mass death and destruction.
The total number of Ukrainians and Russians who've died since February 2022 has reached roughly one million, The Wall Street Journalreported last month.
In Gaza, more than 42,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces in roughly the last year, following the Hamas-led October 7 attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis. More than 2,500 people have been killed by Israeli forces in Lebanon over the same period, including 1,900 in the escalation that's occurred in the last five weeks, according to Lebanon's health ministry. Dozens of Israelis have also died in that conflict.
A U.N. official said last month that the death toll in Sudan, which has been ravaged by civil war since April 2023, is at least 20,000 and could be much higher. The country is facing the prospect of a large-scale famine, with Save the Children on Tuesday raising the alarm that conditions there are worsening.
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'Intolerable and Alarming': Proportion of Women Killed in War Doubled in 2023
"Women continue to pay the price of the wars of men," said one U.N. official.
Oct 23, 2024
The proportion of women killed in wars doubled last year compared with 2022 figures, with women comprising 4 out of every 10 conflict zone deaths around the world, according to a report published Tuesday by the United Nations.
U.N. Women, the agency behind the report, also found that cases of conflict-related sexual violence verified by the world body increased by 50% in 2023.
"These increases in deaths during war and in violence against women are taking place against a backdrop of increasing blatant disregard of international law designed to protect women and children during war," U.N. Women said.
"For example," the agency continued, "women in war zones are also increasingly suffering from restricted access to healthcare. Every day, 500 women and girls in conflict-affected countries die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. By the end of 2023, 180 women were giving birth every day in war-torn Gaza—most without necessities or medical care."
Earlier this year, the U.N. Security Council released a report estimating that 33,433 civilians including at least 13,337 women were killed in conflict zones around the world in 2023, a 72% increase from the previous year.
The vast bulk of these deaths occurred in Gaza, from which Hamas launched the deadliest-ever attack on a single day against Israel on October 7, 2023. The report states Hamas militants killed at least 280 women that day while abducting at least 90 other women and 36 children. The publication does not say how many Israeli women or children were killed by so-called "friendly fire" that day or under Israel's Hannibal Directive, which authorizes fratricide to prevent Israelis from falling into enemy hands.
Since October 7, more than 152,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed or wounded, including more than 10,000 people who are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. According to Gaza and international officials, more than 5,000 women and 10,000 children were killed in the embattled coastal enclave between October 7 and the end of 2023.
Israel is on trial for alleged acts of genocide at the International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza.
The report details the dire situation in Sudan, "which already had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world before the outbreak of the armed conflict in April 2023," and where "2.64 million women and girls of reproductive age are now in need of urgent assistance, including 260,000 pregnant women."
"Amid reports of widespread sexual violence, most victims were unable to access the necessary medical care during the first 72 hours after being raped, including post-exposure prophylaxis or emergency contraception, and the United Nations received reports of victims of rape having been denied an abortion because it was outside of the timeline allowed for by law," the publication notes.
The new report also notes "a lack of overall progress on women's full, equal, and meaningful participation in peace processes."
"Preliminary data from the analysis of over 50 processes indicate that in 2023, on average, women made up only 9.6% of negotiators, 13.7% of mediators, and 26.6% of signatories to peace agreements and cease-fire agreements," the publication states. "The data show little progress over the past decade. None of the peace agreements reached in 2023 included a women's group or representative as a signatory."
U.N. Women Executive Director Sima Bahous lamented that "women continue to pay the price of the wars of men."
"This is happening in the context of a larger war on women," she continued. "The deliberate targeting of women's rights is not unique to conflict-affected countries but is even more lethal in those settings."
"We are witnessing the weaponization of gender equality on many fronts," Bahous added. "If we do not stand up and demand change, the consequences will be felt for decades, and peace will remain elusive."
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