Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee in November’s presidential election, thankfully. He is not withdrawing because he’s being held responsible for enabling war crimes against the Palestinian people (though a recent poll does have nearly 40 percent of Americans saying they’re less likely to vote for him thanks to his handling of the war). Yet it’s impossible to extricate the collapse in public faith in the Biden campaign from the “uncommitted” movement for Gaza. They were the first people to refuse him their votes, and defections from within the president’s base hollowed out his support well in advance of the debate.
The Democrats and their presumptive nominee Kamala Harris are faced with a choice: On the one hand, they can continue Biden’s monstrous support for Netanyahu, the brutal IDF, and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That would help allow the party to cover for Biden and put a positive spin on a smooth handoff, even though we all know this would mainly benefit the embittered president himself and his small coterie of loyalists. Such a choice would confirm that the institutional rot that allowed the current situation to develop still characterizes the party.
And do you know how many American lives are being saved by letting Israel fight Iran as a proxy rather than letting it fall and having to deal with the headache afterwards?
Israel is a strategic asset in a larger war, and a lot of people are clearly missing that concept because they don’t think the US and Iran are actually at war with each other. It’s the same reason why the embargo of Cuba still exists.
Geopolitics is complicated, and most of it is not out in the open for the public to see.
Wow, what an argument. Look the other way and prop up the genocidal apartheid state because otherwise we might have to use blood in addition to treasure to defend imperial interests in the Middle East. Just…wow.
What reason is that exactly?
I mean, yea. You think the world is some happy go lucky place where people don’t fight each other?
The US dropped two nuclear bombs on civilians in Japan to end a war quickly, and despite the backlash they’d kill civilians again in a heartbeat if it was beneficial to America. The number of civilians that died from the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 shows that very clearly. The current Palestinian death toll is less than 10% of that 20 year conflict, and it was done by Americans directly.
Cuba is being used as a pawn by other countries to threaten the US, the same as it was during the cold war. Russia and China didn’t write off $40 billion dollars for free over the last decade.
Umm…lol no. I think the world is run by military forces and their obedient governments.
Vaporize civilians for peace!
If by America you mean imperial warmaking and profits then yes, “they” have, would, and will continue.
This point is really confusing but…yay America?
Wow what a take. Other countries support Cuba, so the USA gets to perpetuate invasions, assassination attempts, terrorism and eternal economic warfare. The Cubans have no autonomy but also they brought this on themselves.
What happened the next day?
There would certainly be peace the day after a nuclear apocalypse too
Oddly enough, there wasn’t after the bombing of Pearl harbor.
Tit for tat. Sorry our tat was bigger.
Ahh, of course, I forgot that might makes right
I don’t recall ever saying that.
I apologized our boom was bigger. It was genuine. Should never have happened.
I would, however, argue that a blow designed to end combat is more ethical than one intended to wound and mame.
If you want to compare casualties then you need to compare the same periods. The average monthly casualties for the period we had data was far higher than the war on Iraq. Which is kind of to be expected since we were there for 10 years. It’s also a much larger country with more people exposed to proportionally larger forces fighting.
So let’s do this the right way. According to the Iraqi Body Count project around 200,000 civilians were killed. Or 0.8 percent of civilians in Iraq. In Gaza that number is 2 percent. More than double. And that’s just the bodies that made it to a morgue while the health ministry was still capable of accurately counting bodies. Estimates of people who are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble are in the six figure range. So let’s be generous and set the total at 100,000, so 60k under rubble, far below the estimates. That’s 5 percent of the civilian population dead.
This is not a road you want to go down. Any analysis beyond the most shallow reflects extremely poorly on Israel.
Percentage of the total population is a bad stat, a dead person regardless of how many people you started with.
The point I was trying to make is that the US is clearly okay with killing civilians.
Right. Those two ratios are clearly the mark of countries with the same attitude towards civilian deaths.
If you only murder one person, does it not matter?
Death percentages do not matter to the families involved.
Ahh yes we’re all in hell so why not commit a little genocide? As a treat!
All I’m saying is that the US citizenry was almost totally fine with the civilian deaths after 9/11, there were only a handful of protests in the US and a lot more support for that war than not (at the time).
If they had attacked and killed 1000 Americans on Oct 7th, there would be far more dead Palestinians, and zero university encampments.
Dude, I don’t think you understood my comment.
If politicians/corporate media came out and said, it’s unfortunate but there’s too much money, power, assets on the line, we have to let Israel’ genocide continue and we have to continue to support them for X, Y, and Z reason I’d actually feel respected.
My understanding is that those groups have regularly dismissed any evidence that the genocide is happening, they’ve claimed protests by student and university faculty are stupid and due to them being brainwashed, and most-improtantly they’ve claimed anyone that doesn’t support Israel hates Jews.
Can you please respond with a slightly better understanding of my comment? Please ask if something’s not clear.
Do you even care how their lies erode the trust Americans could/should have in there leaders and institutions?
They CAN’T come out and say it or it turns into a real war rather than a background proxy war and that ends up causing more problems. The world is not a nice place, there are a lot of people (and governments) out to try to gain an advantage, including the US itself.
The Truth can be extremely offensive, and offending certain people can be dangerous. Some things need to remain a secret, or at least somewhat hidden, even from the American people.
American people don’t want to know how much their individual life is valued at for example. The government makes that decision every single day when it sets regulations or funds various programs, but people would be extremely pissed off to find out. That doesn’t help people, and it doesn’t help the government, so they bury that information under piles of statistics.
Gotta admit, it’s interesting how I specifically mentioned politicians and media networks and you responded by alluding to a vague “government” entity that seemingly acts on its own.
In my mind, the government is just a name for the politicians people elected. It’s like saying corporations seek profit like they have feelings and desires or something, and not like they’re falling explicit laws and instructions set forth by politicians, which again are human beings that we’ve specifically elected.
That said, at least you answered my question, albeit without ever actually considering it
SA would like a word.