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By Debra Sweet
I read a lot of commentary and condemnation in the liberal press of Biden's fist bump with MBS, who runs the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Most of the criticism, which is justified, centered on the hypocrisy of Biden saying he would make Saudi Arabia a pariah for the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi and then looking jovial while meeting with MBS to get on with business.
Some critics mention that the Kingdom regularly publicly beheads political opponents or kidnaps rivals, and that it's a rigid theocracy where it's illegal to profess anything but Islam. Fewer of them criticize the 7-year genocidal war on the world's poorest country, Yemen, carried on with the full backing of the U.S. 400,000+ have died there, including by starvation and cholera as well as by U.S.-provided bombs and targeting services, but that war notably was not mentioned by Biden either, at least not in public.
Lots of mass media said Biden went to "beg" Saudi Arabia to make more oil available, to lower prices and make him more popular. Others pointed out more hypocrisy from a president who said addressing climate change was a top priority.
All this may be true... but meeting with a bunch of regional tyrants, autocrats and war criminals in Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf is not about promoting peace. Biden went to the region to remind his regional allies who is boss. "We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran," he said, while meeting with Israel and the Gulf state rulers to fine-tune their air attacks on Iran's territory, leadership and aircraft, including drones.
We were right in opposing Trump's assassination of Iranian general Qassim Soleimani in 2020, and all his threats and provocations against Iran, his moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and dehumanizing of the Palestinians and sucking up to the Gulf States.
But check this out:
In Israel Biden was asked if he would use force against Iran to stop it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He answered, “If that was the last resort, yes.”
The New York Times called Biden’s statement a more direct and explicit U.S. threat than previous U.S. presidents had ever delivered.
It's not just Biden -- or Trump. The Republicans, now a completely fascist party, and the Democrats, with their history of war crimes and actual use of nuclear weapons, endanger the planet. As the first piece linked to below says, we must "have the moral courage and intellectual integrity to face what all this shows about the actual nature of the Democrats and what they’re actually all about: A party of war crimes and crimes against humanity."
The system behind the unending wars, the disastrous climate crisis, the death of children from starvation and disease every day -- that of capitalism-imperialism -- is responsible for the threats to humanity and the planet. And we have the responsibility to change it.
For more, in depth:
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