Friday, April 19, 2024
Lights out around 10, PS at 12:30 and again at 1:00. Awake at 1:00. LOn again at 2:13. PS at 4:14 and LOn again 'for the duration' but I dozed off at some point and woke up again at 7:15.
A Year Ago today. [In bed around 10:30, up at 7 in a brain fog,, half-dreaming of Dad and his friend Art in Florida. 38℉, high of 45℉, 0.15" of rain expected today, E wind at 14 mph, gusts up to 30 mph, wind chills from 29 to 38℉ today, sunrose at 6:03, sunset at 7:39, 13+35.
]VA this morning. Pelvic floor muscle therapy with Jennifer Garrison
5 a.m., last morning fire of the season?
Pain, etc. I took 1300 mg. of Tylenol at bedtime, Geri applied Lidocaine patches to both shoulders, and I covered my right hand and wrist with Diclofenac. I was without a lot of pain at the first 2 pit stops. At 4:15, some pain in both shoulders and significantly more in the right wrist and hand. . . By 1 p.m., I am experiencing quite a bit of pain in both shoulders, as usual in the chest muscle below the ACJ.
I have not worn my compression socks for several days because I cant get them on and off, if at all, without tremendous strain and more pain. Yesterday and today, I have strapped on compression wraps on my lower legs but they don't provide any compression to my feet, which look like overstuffed sausages, or much compression of my lower legs.
I'm grateful to be sitting here at 1:25 a.m. with my laptop on my lap, not in significant pain and able to type with both hands.
Israel has attacked Isfahan, Iran.
With a friend like Israel, who needs enemies? From Nicholas Kristof's column in this morning's NYTimes, "How Biden Lost His Way in Gaza."
Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign — and it could get worse if Gaza cascades into a full-blown famine or violent anarchy, or if a wider war breaks out involving Iran or Lebanon. An apparent Israeli strike on a military base in central Iran early Friday underscored the danger of a bigger and more damaging conflict that could draw in the United States.
Consider just one example of America’s fingerprints on this war under Biden’s leadership. In January, the Israeli military dropped a bomb on a compound in Gaza used by the International Rescue Committee, a much-respected American aid organization that is supported in part by American tax dollars. The International Rescue Committee says that the near-fatal strike was caused by a 1,000-pound American-made bomb, dropped from an American-made F-16 fighter jet. And when an American-made aircraft drops an American-made bomb on an American aid group in an American-supported war, how can that not come back to Biden?
“Biden owns that,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden and Obama administration official who now runs Refugees International, another aid group. “They’ve provided the matériel that sustains the war. They provided political support that sustains the war. They provided the diplomatic cover at the U.N. that sustains the war.”
This is not Biden’s war in the way that Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson’s war or that Iraq was Bush’s war. Biden has not sent American troops, and he has not directed this war. He is clearly uncomfortable with the civilian toll of this war and wishes Israel was conducting it with more restraint — yet he continues to underwrite it. His rhetoric has become more critical, but his actions so far have not changed significantly.
“Is this the war Biden would want?” Konyndyk asked. “No. But is this the war Biden is materially supporting? Yes. And so in that sense, it’s his war.”
It was Ukraine that Biden wanted as his war. Not that he wanted any war at all, but Ukraine was his opportunity to stand up and uphold the “rules-based international order” against an enemy that violated international law, bombed infrastructure and sought to make all Ukrainians pay. But it is the war in Gaza that Biden has saddled himself with, with its “indiscriminate” bombing — as he himself described it in December — leaving him and America looking to much of the world like hypocrites.
. . .
Biden had many crucial decisions to make in the weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, but perhaps none were more consequential than this: how to manage his relationship with Netanyahu as the war in Gaza got underway. How much should he defer to Netanyahu, how much should he embrace him, how much should he impose consequences when Netanyahu ignored his suggestions of restraint? Biden had choices, and as Indyk correctly observed, Biden thought that the best way to move Netanyahu was with an arm on his shoulder. That was, I believe, the first of Biden’s miscalculations. . . .
Diplomacy is a mix of carrots and sticks, but until recently Biden seemed to offer Netanyahu nothing but armloads of carrots. And Netanyahu kept on taking the gifts while ignoring Biden’s warnings. “Netanyahu seemed to take enormous pleasure in sticking his finger in Biden’s eye at every opportunity,” noted Menachem Rosensaft, a Cornell law professor and general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress.
Biden’s efforts to persuade Netanyahu to allow more aid trucks into Gaza were, at least until recently, so ineffectual that the White House had to drop food from planes. In 1948, the United States organized the Berlin Airlift to overcome Soviet obstructionism; that meant confronting our adversary and constituted a show of strength. In 2024, the United States was reduced to organizing the Gaza airlift to get around the intransigence of our longtime aid recipient; that reflected Biden’s failure to confront our ally and amounted to a show of weakness.
Instead of organizing an airdrop (which has killed some people when aid fell on them), Biden had an opportunity to do something much more substantial to avert starvation. In December the United Nations Security Council tried to set up a U.N. system to inspect trucks entering Gaza rather than letting them get stuck in the Israeli inspection bottleneck. Reports were already coming in of catastrophic starvation in Gaza, yet the Biden administration effectively blocked this alternative by watering it down to nothing, according to people close to the negotiations. The upshot: Children starved to death.
The administration also tolerated a ferocious crackdown and land grab by Israeli West Bank settlers who operate with the backing of Netanyahu’s extremist cabinet. The United Nations reports that almost 5,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been injured since Oct. 7 in confrontations with Israeli troops and settlers, who periodically steal Palestinians’ sheep or drive them from their homes. By the U.N.’s count, 451 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank in this period, including 112 children (nine Israelis were killed in the West Bank during this time). Then last month, Israel announced the largest seizure of West Bank land since the Oslo peace accords in 1993. It was a slap in the face of Biden, who has mostly turned the other cheek.
For me, watching as I reported from Israel and the West Bank, it felt ineffably sad, like a rerun of the invasion of Iraq: the delusions about a quick victory, the disregard for civilian lives, the lack of a local partner to establish order, the excessive optimism about outcomes. Another parallel with Iraq was the support for this war from Biden, who had similarly supported the Iraq war. “I do not believe this is a rush to war,” he had said in 2002, underscoring how history rhymes. “I believe it is a march to peace and security.”
As time went on and Israel leveled entire neighborhoods and killed large numbers of women, children and aid workers, Biden became more critical of Israel. But while his rhetoric changed, his policies didn’t — and he repeatedly allowed his calls for restraint to be ignored. Indeed, in the first months of the war, Biden’s first serious move to impose accountability wasn’t aimed at Netanyahu but at UNRWA, the United Nations agency working desperately to prevent famine in Gaza.
It now appears that while Biden was too slow to confront Netanyahu for killing Gazan children, he acted too hastily against the U.N. agency trying to save Gazan children. “We contributed,” Van Hollen noted, “to punishing over two million civilians who relied on UNRWA.”
Those of Biden’s generation sometimes complain that younger critics of Israel lack historical perspective and don’t appreciate the threats that Jews have faced, the unremitting determination of Israel’s enemies to destroy it and the difficulty of prosecuting a war where Hamas hides among civilians. Fair enough. All true.
But parallel arguments of naïveté were lodged against young critics of the Iraq and Vietnam wars. Supporters of the Vietnam War were shaped by memories of appeasement in the run-up to World War II and argued that it was imperative to stand up to the global tide of Communism. They were frustrated — correctly in many cases — that young leftists were soft on Communism and especially Maoism and didn’t understand the brutishness of the enemy. The war’s backers in the White House and the Pentagon acknowledged the suffering in Vietnam but argued that it was important to be tough-minded and keep perspective: With a little more effort it would be possible to uproot the enemy and score a decisive victory that would lay the groundwork for a better future. Listening to doves and showing restraint, they argued, would merely signal weakness and allow national dominoes to fall, resulting in a huge setback for freedom and democracy.
In retrospect, the backers of the Vietnam War didn’t understand the power of nationalism and vastly exaggerated the ability of even a powerful army to eradicate a homegrown enemy with nationalist credentials, while they were myopic about the human cost of their strategy and didn’t ask essential questions about its morality. Today it is the critics of the Vietnam and Iraq wars who have been largely validated. They may have known less history, but they possessed keener empathy.
Another parallel with the Vietnam War that worries some Democrats: The 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was the site of chaotic antiwar protests that were mishandled and damaged the tentire party at a time it needed to signal unity. That fall the presidential election went, by less than one percentage point, to the Republican Richard Nixon.
Oh, and where will the Democratic convention be held this year? Chicago, again.
The Biden administration called for moral clarity after the atrocities of Oct. 7, and that was appropriate. But moral clarity cannot be like a pair of glasses we put on and take off. Our shared humanity means recognizing that all children’s lives have equal value. If your heart breaks for victims on only one side of the Israel-Gaza border, then your failure is not of geopolitics but of humanity. If you care about the human rights of only Israelis or only Palestinians, then you don’t actually care about human rights.
Another way of putting it: The more than 1,000 children in Gaza who are now amputees, their suffering is partly on us.
. . .
Still, it remains unclear how much has changed. Israel seems more cooperative about getting aid across the border into Gaza, but the United Nations emphasizes that what matters is aid being delivered over those last few miles to people who are starving. Disputes about aid are likely to continue, in part because more than two-thirds of Jewish Israelis oppose allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza, according to an opinion poll in February.
I copied so much of this essay because it's the best I have read about what has been wrong about America's policies toward Israel and Bibi Netanyahu and how the blame for this falls directly on Joe Biden. It started visuallywith that unnecesary flight to Israel and the historic hug on the tarmac. It continued with the images of Gaza City looking like Berlin in 1845, of babies in incubators in hospitals without power, of civilians in donkey carts fleeing death and destruction from the IDF, and of starving mobs surrounding trucks carrying food. Biden, Blinken, Austin, the American arms industry that has profitted so much, and all Americans have blood on our hands. I am pleased that Kristof mentions the overshadowed war against Palestinians that Israel is waging against Palestinians in the West Bank and that he reminds us of our culpability for all the lives lost and shattered in Vietnam, so much more blood on our hands, on my naȉve hands.
LTMW shortly after dawn I see a lone wild turkey strutting past our bird feeders, then 10 minutes later another solo turkey, presumably toms.
Plumber here for slow drain in the bathtub and leak in the valve to outdoor faucet in front of the house.
