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Stan and Priti Gulati Cox, Blocking the Aid Trucks, Letting the Tanks Roll

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As I write this, more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and, as Aya Batrawy reported for NPR, thousands more are “unaccounted for — either missing under the rubble, buried hastily in side streets, or decomposing in areas that can’t be safely reached.” Significant numbers of the dead are women and children, and aid for those living, thanks to an Israeli blockade, is barely entering that 25-mile strip of land. Yet the future promises mass famine, grotesque disease, and death, death, death for even more Palestinian civilians, most of them refugees who have done nothing to deserve such a fate, as TomDispatch regulars Stan and Priti Gulati Cox suggest all too vividly today.

Now, the Biden administration has finally decided to act. And no, I don’t mean forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wildly right-wing government to reverse course, even though his military remains significantly dependent on American armaments (which our president until recently swore never to stop delivering). Admittedly, President Biden recently claimed he might consider limiting those arms deliveries if, against his wishes, Netanyahu were to send the Israeli military into the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians are (barely) sheltered. Nor do I mean opening Gaza to sufficient aid. Instead, President Biden has ordered the U.S. military to build a floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza with a causeway to the shore. From there, aid would theoretically be delivered to that embattled land.

Forget that it will take weeks, if not months, to build such a structure, and that not enough aid could possibly be transferred to Gaza via that single pier to matter greatly. Focus instead on one thing: the Israelis, as the Coxes note today, have already radically cut the number of supply trucks entering Gaza, so remind me, how in the world will the supplies from that pier even be delivered once they hit land? As Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden administration senior aid official and now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy group, put it recently: “You need drivers that don’t exist, trucks that don’t exist feeding into a distribution system that doesn’t exist.”

So, as planning for that pier proceeds, madness and horror reign in Gaza and the strangeness of it all remains hard to take in. As New York Times reporters Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt wrote recently, “It is rare for the United States to try to provide such services for people who are being bombed with tacit U.S. support.” Now, let the Coxes take you deeper into the world of horror that is Gaza today. Tom

Armed by Washington, Israel Trashes the Genocide Convention

Stop Treating Gaza Like a Natural Disaster

It’s been almost two months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of subsistence. So let’s look back and ask (1) how Israel has responded to its "orders," and (2) how hard the Biden administration has pushed Israel to abide by those orders. Spoiler alert: the short answers are (1) not well and (2) not very.

The American government has provided most of the armaments and targeting technologies being used to kill Gazans by the thousands while turning many of the rest of them into refugees by destroying their homes, offices, schools, and hospitals. Nor did the Biden administration threaten to withdraw that support when Israel blocked shipments of crucial food and fuel to the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip. It also keeps vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions that would hold Israel accountable. And President Biden, despite an increasing amount of rhetorical shuffling, continues to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), even though they have ignored the International Court’s orders and continue committing atrocities.

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William Astore, Cutting the Pentagon Down to Size

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It’s one of the stranger phenomena on this planet. By 2023, the U.S. was estimated to spend more money on its “defense budget” than the next 10 countries combined. Yes, the next 10! And yet, whether you’re talking about Korea and Vietnam in the last century, or Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other places involved in what came to be known as the “war on terror” in this one, the U.S. hasn’t won a conflict of any significance (or even insignificance) in recent memory.

Take, for example, Somalia. As Nick Turse reports at the Intercept, the U.S. has been involved in a conflict with what became al-Shabab, a local branch of al-Qaeda, since its special operations forces were first dispatched there in 2002. In the years that followed, conventional troops and air power were added to the mix. In 2007, the U.S. military made its first air strike there and at least 280 air attacks and commando raids on al-Shabab have followed. The result, as Turse notes: “Last year, deaths in Somalia from Islamist violence hit a record high of 7,643 — triple the number in 2020… [including] a 22% rise in fatalities from terrorism in Somalia from 2022 to 2023,” while “violence has increasingly bled across the border into Kenya.”

And that’s about as close to success as the war on terror gets. Meanwhile, last year Congress responded (as always) by passing a record Pentagon budget of $886 billion on its way, it seems, to the trillion-dollar mark in the foreseeable future. Quite a record, all in all, when it comes to squandering your tax dollars on the military-industrial-congressional complex. But let retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore fill you in on what it would now mean (and would have meant once upon a time) to cut that budget in a significant fashion — and then, of course, dream on. Tom

Daring to “Look a Sacred Cow in the Teeth”

Military Spending and National (In)Security

In an age when American presidents routinely boast of having the world’s finest military, where nearly trillion-dollar war budgets are now a new version of routine, let me bring up one vitally important but seldom mentioned fact: making major cuts to military spending would increase U.S. national security.

Why? Because real national security can neither be measured nor safeguarded solely by military power (especially the might of a military that hasn't won a major war since 1945). Economic vitality matters so much more, as does the availability and affordability of health care, education, housing, and other crucial aspects of life unrelated to weaponry and war. Add to that the importance of a Congress responsive to the needs of the working poor, the hungry and the homeless among us. And don't forget that the moral fabric of our nation should be based not on a military eternally ready to make war but on a determination to uphold international law and defend human rights. It’s high time for America to put aside its conveniently generic “rules-based order” anchored in imperial imperatives and face its real problems. A frank look in the mirror is what’s most needed here.

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Rebecca Gordon, My “Children” Say They Won’t Vote for Biden

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Let me start with my own news. At almost 80, I’ve decided not to run for president. I know it’s a shock and, if the presidency were largely a morning or even an afternoon job, I might actually consider it. But 24 hours a day, with crises endlessly multiplying in a world truly on edge (and seemingly at the edge as well)? No, I don’t think so. At this age, I find that I already tire out more quickly than I once did. And assuming I won (which I suspect I might), I would be 84 in my final year in office, which I find worrisome. Yes, an 84-year-old or even an 86-year-old could prove to be a perfectly competent, even exceptional president, but is it really something you want to bet your bottom dollar on?

I have a strange feeling that this country deserves someone younger in the White House than Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or me. I mean, comedian Bill Maher even suggested that Joe Biden could prove to be the “Ruth Bader Ginsberg of the presidency.” How true! After all, when Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961 at age 70, having had a stroke in office that affected his speech, he was the oldest president in our history. When Ronald Reagan left at 77 in 1989, setting a new age record, he might even have had dementia.

Now, we face two men, both of whom would set remarkable age records for that office and both of whom are already often fumbling with words when they speak extemporaneously (though admittedly each always did some of that, even in his better years). Still, only one of them represents a danger beyond compare should he enter the White House a second time and that, of course, is The Donald. In that context, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon explore the strange and potentially all too ominous presidential race of 2024. Tom

Trump Showed Us Who He Is the First Time Around

Trump 2.0 Would Be Even Worse

Recently my partner and I had brunch with some old comrades, folks I first met in the 1996 fight to stop the state of California from outlawing affirmative action. Sadly, we lost that one and, almost three decades later, we continue to lose affirmative action programs thanks to a Supreme Court rearranged or, more accurately, deranged by one Donald J. Trump.

It was pure joy to hang out with them and remember that political struggle during which, as my partner and I like to say, we taught a generation of young people to ask, “Can you kick in a dollar to help with the campaign?” For a couple of old white lesbians who, in the words of a beloved Catherine Koetter poster, "forgot to have children," those still-committed organizers and activists are the closest thing to offspring we’ve got. And their kids, including one now in college, who were willing to hang out with their parents’ old buddies, are the closest we’ll ever have to grandchildren. 

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