The Biden administration wants you to know that you shouldn’t take any of the president’s warnings to Israel seriously:
The White House denied on Tuesday that President Biden had set any “red lines” for Israel in its campaign against Hamas in Gaza but warned again that Israel should not attack the city of Rafah, the southernmost city in the enclave, without protections for more than a million people sheltering there.
“The president didn’t make any declarations or pronouncements or announcements,” said Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, referring to an interview Mr. Biden gave over the weekend in which he was asked whether he had a “red line” Israel should not cross in its prosecution of the war.
It isn’t surprising that the administration has backtracked on this, but the speed with which they run away from a fight with Netanyahu is still remarkable. Many observers have commented on the abject weakness of the administration in its management of the relationship with Israel during this war, and this is one of the clearest examples of that weakness that we have seen to date. It is hard to think of many other examples where an American president has tolerated the open contempt and defiance of a client government to the degree that Biden has over the last five months.
At the moment when the U.S. should be hardening its position and intensifying pressure on its destructive client, the official line from the White House is that there are no red lines at all. Even when the president says there are red lines and uses that exact language, his advisers rush to clarify that he didn’t mean it. Sullivan was also quick to dismiss reports that the president might be considering conditioning aid, adding that “reports that purport to describe the president’s thinking are uninformed speculation.” The administration is deathly afraid of imposing penalties on Israel no matter what happens. It appears that their cowardice is limitless.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
The Red Line is more imaginary than the Pot Of Gold at the end of the Rainbow. Biden will give Israel all the aid it wants even if he says he disagrees with some of the things it does. Trump is more honest about this and won’t say there are any red lines. He says what he means about Israel.
wag the dog
“ US President Joe Biden doesn’t seek to interfere with the will of the Israeli people on holding elections, the White House says.”
But Israel and the Israeli lobby …
As I’ve been saying all along. Yet people keep babbling about, “all the President needs to do is…” – except he’s NOT going to do ANY of that.
So why keep talking about it? I’ll tell you why: because people can’t bring themselves to say that the only solution to this crisis is for Israel to be militarily defeated on the battlefield by the Axis of Resistance and for Zionists to be driven from Palestine the way Palestinians were driven in 1948.
That’s what needs to happen and that’s what’s going to happen.
Exactly right. And let no one be fooled by the political theatre that Biden would be asymptotically less insane or microscopically more moderate than the rest of his genocidal administration, Sullivan, Blinken en the despicably rotten lot of them. Those red lines are indeed as non-existent as these sinister cynics’ grip on basic human values or sense of morality.
Right the heck on AB!
The only “red line” is the line that runs down the middle of Biden’s brain. Let’s face it, he is an idiot. Which makes me an idiot for voting for him in 2020.
The Red Lines are set in the Rule of Law in our Republic and International Law. Biden does NOT set the Red Lines, Sullivan knows that, but forgets what country he represents. Israel is a FAILED State as a Democracy, it is a Religious, Terrorist, Zionist State, without rules or laws. America, our Republic has no Constitutional Right to defend Israel, in fact it’s obligation is to STOP sending lethal weapons and money.
Not much can be expected from a marionette.