It is deeply disappointing that Dick Cheney is able to leave his house without being pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables. On Sept. 6, the former Vice President, a notorious supporter and facilitator of torture, wiretapping, and graft, announced that he was casting his vote for Kamala Harris. Harris, for her part, excitedly accepted the endorsement of a man who left office with 13% approval, and welcomed the support of “Republicans for Harris” — a group that counts among its members numerous ex officials from the second Bush’s administrations and the Reagan administrations. This reconciling of old political grievances has the most breathless cheerleaders in American media beside themselves with glee, but do not be fooled. For the actual direction of Democratic politics in this country, it is a grim portent of the future to come.
In general, the Harris campaign has attempted to project a pragmatic bipartisan image of the Vice President — a woman who is working to stop Trump, a dangerous man unfit for office, from taking power again. In the abstract, this seems like a decent, if uninspiring, campaign strategy. The race is tight, and Harris needs every advantage she can get to beat Trump. Trump has undoubtedly brought an air of chaos to the executive branch and to the politics of this country, which upsets not only Democrats, but also the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. It is no surprise that Harris, a candidate fielding many of Biden’s same campaign staffers, would embrace his same promise of a return to “stability and normalcy.”
Unfortunately, “stability and normalcy” is looking dicier than ever.
Biden is facilitating the rise of regional war in the Middle East. Israel, living large on vast American military support facilitated by the most deferential man to ever serve as President of the United States, has learned that there are no red lines for them. Most recently, Israel has disregarded the presidential pushover by invading Lebanon, provoking a volley of missiles from Iran. Though almost all were intercepted by Israel’s U.S.-funded defense system, they appear set on a counterattack on Iran’s oil production facilities, and Biden doesn’t seem prepared to stop them now. A regional war is right around the corner, and few in government or media are concerned. This is a disaster in the making. It is clear that without changes in U.S. foreign policy, the conflict will continue to spiral and slaughter more innocent lives.
In the same way that Democrats so quickly abandoned their feigned concerns about “kids in cages” as soon as they realized that pushing back on fascist right-wing narratives on immigration would require some effort, the Democrats have now readily accepted the support of the ghouls that orchestrated the Iraq war, when told it might bump Harris’s chances a little. The Iraq war was a mistake, which killed almost a million people, and the people who zealously ginned the U.S. into that conflict should be made into pariahs, not platformed and commended by presidential contenders. George W. Bush shouldn’t be getting softball questions about his painting, he should be in prison.
With the increasingly pressing possibility of war in the Middle East, it is reckless and stupid to welcome the perpetrators of America’s great crime in that region as political allies. Now more than ever, the world needs American leaders who are willing to say that the Iraq war was an unjust mistake, and that peace in the Middle East is not built by America-backed regime change, but rather by diplomacy and de-escalation. It is time to confront the politicians and writers who eagerly lied about weapons of mass destruction and the necessity of regime change, and forge a new conversation about American foreign policy that rejects their jingoism, greed, and bloodthirstiness, before the whole world is on fire.
