An appendix to the letter cited U.S. laws and Administration policies that prohibited the transferring of weapons likely to be used in war crimes, and Spoljaric urged Biden to withhold weapons “that should not be used in densely populated areas, in light of their devastating humanitarian impacts.” She warned Biden that failing to “uphold minimum standards of humanity” would be a “moral defeat” that “future generations are unlikely to forgive us for failing to avert.”
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Two years after Spoljaric’s letter, President Donald J. Trump ordered the U.S. military to join Israel in attacking Iran. Some former senior officials in the Biden Administration told me that, in certain ways, the war in Iran was an extension of the Gaza conflict. Iran had been central to Biden’s thinking about the Middle East, several top advisers said. He’d feared that any public pressure the U.S. put on Israel—any “daylight” between the allies—could invite attacks by Iran or its Lebanese client, Hezbollah. The U.S. would then be compelled to defend Israel in a regional conflagration. Brett McGurk, Biden’s White House coördinator for the Middle East and probably his most influential adviser, championed this position, arguing that rock-solid support for Israel would help contain Iran, whose proxies killed three U.S. soldiers in the region during the first months of the Gaza conflict.
At the same time, the Biden Administration’s staunch public backing of Israel during the Gaza war had created what Philip Gordon, the national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, described to me as a “moral hazard”—it had invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to expand the battle into a regional one. Even though Biden and his advisers privately told Netanyahu many times not to provoke Iran, the Israelis repeatedly blindsided the Americans by doing exactly that: a January, 2024, strike on Damascus killed five senior Iranian military advisers; an April, 2024, strike on an Iranian diplomatic mission in Syria killed more than a dozen; a July, 2024, strike in Tehran assassinated a top Hamas political leader; a September, 2024, operation in Lebanon detonated explosives planted in thousands of walkie-talkies and pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters; a subsequent air strike killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
And then we elected the great savior that stopped it cold…
Is the only response you have to this a snarky remark about how Trump is worse? That is pathetic.
Of course Trump is worse, for Palestinians, for Americans, for everyone, now sit down and read the damn article.
That people are people are going on about ‘genocide Joe’ when at the very least he didn’t actively start a war with Iran and intentionally look to destroy whole civilizations is pretty pathetic as I see it.
Stop trying to change the topic of the conversation.
Of course Trump is worse, for Palestinians, for Americans, for everyone
Consider including this critical context in the post body if you’re going to post such a questionable headline, otherwise people will rightly jump in to flag glaring issues suggestive of m/disinformation
No, I do not need to coddle centrists who kneejerk respond to every criticism of Biden, especially with regards to the Palestinian Genocide, with a thought terminating “Well Trump is worse so stop complaining, this is YOUR FAULT” in which they assume incorrectly that I did not vote for Harris.
I am not the one tearing down the nuance and intelligence of the conversation about this.
Putting up things attacking Biden who hasn’t been in office for a year and change when we have a fascist who actually starting throwing bombs and missiles comes off as ‘all this shit is actually Biden’s fault’. Hell, the current lunatic is still trying to blame Biden for high gas when he started another middle east war. This kind of thing plays right into that narrative.
How dare you imply two years is too long to hold people accountable for facilitating Genocide, shame on you.
There is no “lets just move on from this” as world geopolitics are now almost entirely ensnared in the consequences of this and will be so for decades.
Biden is a central character in the history of our future.
I mean yeah I agree with this but genuenly who gives a fuck? Biden hasn’t been president for almost two years now. He committed a genocide, the Democrats before him committed this genocide, Trump committed this genocide, and the next corporate Democrat will probrally be no different.
Biden isn’t special nor is Trump, none of these people are special
This is one of the most important geopolitical events in our lifetimes, your dismissal of it not being worth the time to discuss this critically is absurd as the consequences of this will reverberate for the rest of our lives.
Refuse to understand this past and you will be hopeless at understanding the future.
Ok then why not talk about the genocide happening right now? The genocide is still ongoing so it seems odd to specifically mention the genocide two years ago. I mean this isn’t about the total genocide or the entire history of the genocide (which started in 1948) but specifically the genocide two years ago.
No, if you actually read the article you would see that it explains how things have led up to this current moment in Israel and how the failure to deal with the root problem of the Palestinian Genocide and bring an end to the ethnic cleansing has continued to grow the problem since Biden’s presidency into the Iran War which is threatening to genuinely become World War 3.
The article does talk about Trump, under the framing that Trump is essentially an incompetent fascist who accelerated and scaled up the process, if you take that as an endorsement of Trump or an attempt to reduce blame on him or Stephen Miller for this Genocide of Palestinians than you are way too defensive of your views and need to step back and realize you are being triggered by a phantom you are projecting yourself.
Also, you are behaving like a child to suggest that talking about a Genocide that was occurring 2 years ago is some absurd stretch of our focus and attention to something so far back in time it is no longer relevant. Are you like 8 years old or something and 2 years is a quarter of your life to you?
Yes, Trump is a literal fascist, nobody is debating that in this conversation.
