{"id":1345887,"date":"2023-11-22T07:05:08","date_gmt":"2023-11-22T07:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=305612"},"modified":"2023-11-22T07:05:08","modified_gmt":"2023-11-22T07:05:08","slug":"biden-and-the-washington-post-combine-to-argue-for-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/11\/22\/biden-and-the-washington-post-combine-to-argue-for-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden and the Washington Post Combine to Argue for War"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain<\/p><\/div>\n

David Ignatius, the Washington Post<\/i>\u2019s national security columnist, has been an apologist for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency for the past several decades.\u00a0 In the past, he has defended the CIA\u2019s political assassination program as well as its torture and abuse program.\u00a0 He never condemned the CIA training of death squads in Central America and never deplored the Phoenix program during the Vietnam War, when the CIA ran a paramilitary campaign of interrogation, torture, and assassination that targeted many innocent victims.\u00a0 Now, he has a new client\u2014the Israeli Defense Forces\u2014and the IDF couldn\u2019t have a better stenographer than David Ignatius.<\/p>\n

Following last week\u2019s briefings from the IDF, Ignatius reported on November 19 that the Gaza War was \u201cmoving into a new phase that will require fewer troops and much less bombing\u201d that should \u201cresult in fewer Palestinian casualties.\u201d\u00a0 This will shock the Palestinian civilians who have been tortuously making their way to South Gaza only to meet more aerial bombardment and death.\u00a0 \u201cMilitarily,\u201d according to Ignatius, the \u201cIsraeli campaign against Hamas has been relentless and successful.\u201d \u00a0 This outrageous statement is belied by the absence of evidence regarding the so-called command and control center under the Al-Shifa hospital compound, let alone any success against the Hamas leadership or overall Hamas forces.<\/p>\n

The only Israeli losses, according to Ignatius, are in the information war, which is a callous and cynical way to look at the indecent toll to civilians, particularly the children of Gaza each and every day.\u00a0 More Palestinian children have been killed in the past several weeks than the 3,000 children killed in all the world\u2019s major conflicts\u2014involving two dozen countries\u2014during the year 2022.\u00a0 Nevertheless, Israeli military spokesmen credit the IDF with taking \u201call feasible precautions” to \u201cmitigate harm\u201d to civilians\u2026and Ignatius agrees.<\/p>\n

There is ample and mounting evidence of the war crimes of the IDF, but Ignatius refers to the Israeli forces as \u201cthoughtful, professional soldiers.\u201d\u00a0 He is \u201cimpressed by their skill and dedication.\u201d\u00a0 His only criticism of the Israelis is their lack of \u201ca clear conception of \u2018the day after.\u2019\u201d He adds that the Israelis have \u201cno consensus about next steps,\u201d as if any country knows what it will do following all-out war.\u00a0 Think of the United States in the context of two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan without any idea of what victory would look like, let alone what four different administrations would do if it had been achieved.<\/p>\n

Ignatius concedes that he is looking at the Gaza War \u201clargely through Israeli eyes,\u201d and, as a result, credits the IDF with trying to \u201cseparate Hamas from the civilian population, a classic precept of counterinsurgency warfare.\u201d\u00a0 But Israel is not fighting a counterinsurgency war; it is\u00a0 fighting a horrific counter-value and counter-force war that is annihilating the civilian population and infrastructure.\u00a0 Ignatius credits the Israelis with having \u201cdropped leaflets, issued warnings, made phone calls,\u201d but this is a cynical deceit that too many Israeli spokesmen have sold to U.S. news networks on a regular basis.\u00a0 The fact is that Palestinians have nowhere to go, and are being killed in record numbers, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his \u201cwar cabinet\u201d have no problem with this.<\/p>\n

Finally, Ignatius credits the Israelis with \u201cembracing a tactic the CIA has used effectively during the war in Ukraine\u2014declassifying intelligence and pushing it into the public domain.\u201d\u00a0 The problem with that tactic is the simple fact that the Israelis have no credibility in the international community because of their deceit and disinformation ever since the War of Independence in 1948, when the Israelis drove 700,00 Palestinians out of Israel.\u00a0 In a future column, I will trace the series of Israeli lies that have never been sufficiently challenged by the mainstream media, let alone by U.S. administrations.<\/p>\n

To add to the Post<\/i>\u2019s calumny, it carried an oped by President Biden on 19 November as well.\u00a0 Biden is creating a serious political problem for himself on the domestic front by defending Israel\u2019s \u201ccollective punishment\u201d of the Palestinians, which an international and domestic audience is finally beginning to question.\u00a0 Biden has been trying to have it both ways since the war started by traveling to Israel and taking credit for cautioning the Israelis to temper their tactics, but returning to Washington to approve billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry to \u201csharpen Israel\u2019s qualitative military edge.\u201d\u00a0 In so doing, he has compromised his stance against Russian terrorism of a Ukrainian population, which is no different than Israeli terrorism against the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

Once again, Biden refers to himself as the \u201cfirst American president to [travel to Israel] during wartime,\u201d which is a peculiar way to proclaim his support for Netanyahu\u2019s brutal and horrific campaign.\u00a0 Biden writes that there can be \u201cno forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza,\u201d which is exactly what the Israelis are trying to impose.\u00a0 His response to the extreme violence of the Israeli military and the settlers on the West Bank against innocent Palestinians is to state that the United States is \u201cprepared to take our own steps, including issuing visa bans against extremists attacking civilians in the West Bank.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m sure that this will be treated with laughter from the racists in the Netanyahu cabinet.<\/p>\n

Finally, Biden takes credit for preventing the conflict \u201cfrom spreading and escalating further\u201d by sending U.S. carrier groups to the region to \u201cenhance deterrence.\u201d\u00a0 The Middle East has been a briar patch for the United States for the past fifty years, and one more U.S. effort to pull Israeli chestnuts from the fire won\u2019t help to \u201cpivot\u201d U.S. forces from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific, which President Obama and Vice President Biden promised 12 years ago.\u00a0 In truth, Biden is simply the latest American president to ignore the misery of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank at the hands of Israelis.\u00a0 Instead of challenging Israel\u2019s brutal occupation, Biden is justifying and supporting the violence of Israeli policy.<\/p>\n

The post Biden and the Washington Post Combine to Argue for War<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Ignatius, the Washington Post\u2019s national security columnist, has been an apologist for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency for the past several decades.\u00a0 In the past, he has defended the CIA\u2019s political assassination program as well as its torture and abuse program.\u00a0 He never condemned the CIA training of death squads in Central America and never deplored the Phoenix program during the Vietnam War, when the CIA ran a paramilitary campaign of interrogation, torture, and assassination that targeted many innocent victims.\u00a0 Now, he has a new client\u2014the Israeli Defense Forces\u2014and the IDF couldn\u2019t have a better stenographer than David Ignatius. \u00a0 More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Biden and the Washington Post Combine to Argue for War<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":200,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,266],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345887"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/200"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1345887"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1345889,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345887\/revisions\/1345889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1345887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1345887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1345887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}