Will it work?
An interesting thought experiment from Brian Beutler in his newsletter today:
President Biden has been buffeted by attacks on his Middle East policy for the past two weeks, but enjoyed a brief reprieve on Thursday in the form of welcome criticism from Ari Fleischer, an immense cynic and warmonger who gained infamy as chief spokesman for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
“When [President Biden] said that Israelis should not be consumed by rage? Who the hell does he think he is?” Fleischer cried bitterly on Fox News. “I sat in on every summit meeting with foreign leaders when they came to the U.S. after 9/11 and met with President [George W.] Bush—not one said to Bush the Americans shouldn’t be consumed with rage. Instead they just came to support us.”
It’s worth stipulating a few things before we consider why Fleischer’s input was valuable (though he surely did not intend it to be):
-First, Biden’s plea to the Israeli people wasn’t to let go of their rage, but to not let rage shape their response to the Hamas pogrom of October 7.
-Second, by attacking Biden in this way, Fleischer adopted an implicit position either that Israel should let rage be its guide, or that ministering to a grieving people not to lash out vengefully and ineffectively is wrong in principle. In other words, his view is self-discrediting no matter its intended meaning.
-Third, the idea here isn’t just to devise Middle East policy through negative domestic polarization. “If Ari Fleischer is owned we must be doing things right,” is a logically and morally infirm way to think about policy, and in any case, right-wing goons like Fleischer will attack U.S. Middle East policy, whatever it is, when the president is a Democrat.But we don’t need to assume Biden’s on the right track just because Fleischer played mad at him. Fleischer helped us (or at least he helped me) see past a barrage of good- and bad-faith Biden criticism with an unwitting thought experiment: What if one or more of those heads-of-state had tried to make American citizens and our leaders respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks shrewdly instead of ruthlessly?
A pincer movement of left-wing critics and right-wing hawks and opportunists has encircled Biden at a precarious moment, but I think, given real political constraints (not polling data but, e.g., Israeli politics, and the U.S. Congress, and its veto powers) he has so far done quite well.
Still he and and all of his critics and everyone else would benefit from thinking through what we’d say today in hindsight if some respected U.S. ally had appealed to us the way Biden appealed to Israelis and Benjamin Netanyahu—supportive publicly, but with caveats, hinting at a more aggressive diplomatic effort behind the scenes to nudge us off the path to flailing wars of retribution.
The unsatisfying answer, as with most alternate history, is that it depends. If it had worked, events would’ve played out much differently, and the person who beat back the neoconservatives would be a hero, underappreciated only because our catastrophic response to 9/11 would never have happened.
If it had not worked, on the other hand, I think people looking back would still appreciate their prescience. (We can see now in our public reassessments of Iraq and Afghanistan war skeptics that the leaders of the post-9/11 period who didn’t fall in line behind Bush have fared the best historically.) But their legacy would turn just at least in part whether they changed their relationship with the United States when it became clear Bush had decided on a course of indiscriminate violence. Did they pay lip service to justice, or did they seek it in earnest?
That hypothetical should (among so many other things) be on Biden’s mind today.
The critique at the heart of Biden’s diplomatic efforts is that invading Gaza without a next-stage plan for withdrawal, and for its humane future, would resemble the mistakes the U.S. made after September 11.
But I think a similar insight applies to Israel supporters in American politics, particularly in the Democratic Party, which will drive U.S. policy in the coming weeks and months, and whose supporters don’t carry a desire for unconstrained violence in their bloodstream. Much has already been made (more than is strictly wise) of the fact that surveys find public opinion in the U.S. on the side of support for Israel. As much support as Biden has provided or more. I think a more nuanced reading of the data is that the public wants the U.S. to support an Israeli counteroffensive but can be easily nudged into revealing that their views will likely change if the current approach leads to quagmire and mass death in Gaza.
This hints at the ultimate danger of poll-driven politics—that leaders will chase volatile public opinion into the moral abyss. It was nothing if not public opinion that spooked early aughts Democrats into supporting the invasion of Iraq, when with a little imagination they (like Barack Obama and Barbara Lee) could’ve seen disaster coming and staked out war opposition early, when doing so was hard.
What will Biden and his political allies do if and when Israel invades Gaza without an achievable objective and it becomes an endless disaster? What happens when the polling turns? If they don’t know how to answer the question, it’s an argument for following their consciences now. (Of course, for many Democrats, that would change nothing. They’re following their consciences already.)
But it’s something I hope Biden has pondered deeply.
The best journalism I’ve read on this basic conundrum—a very difficult subject to report out, to be sure—suggests both that Israel is on the precipice of disaster 1, and that a better, more defensible alternative is available. What does he do if Israel doesn’t embrace it?
What is his plan if Netanyahu, who brought what’s left of Israel’s democracy to its knees to keep himself out of prison, rolls the dice with wrecking the whole global order to keep his prime ministership? Will he change U.S. policy in any way? Is America obligated to blindly support a foreign government, even one with Israel’s unique and tragic history, if its people choose as their leader a person who is as corrupt as Donald Trump and bloodthirsty as Dick Cheney? I would not want to gamble my presidency, my party, my country’s standing in the world on the impulse and selfishness of a person like him.
1 –Prior to this month I had not read a Thomas Friedman column in many years; his work was honestly laughing stock in my peer group, in part because of his views on globalization and the Iraq war (remember “suck on this”?), and because of his tendency to write in cliche and mixed metaphor. But circumstance has made his realm of genuine reportorial expertise more salient, and that’s reflected in his recent output.
I don’t have the answer to that either and basically I’m just hoping that the Israeli people decide to get rid of Netanyahu and try to turn the page. The polling suggests that they see him for the self-absorbed failure he is right now. 80% want him to take responsibility for what happened and he is refusing to do so.
Asked who they would vote for had elections been held today, the poll again gave abysmal grades to the current coalition — 43 seats compared to their current 64 — with Gantz’s party alone soaring to 40 seats from its current 12..
They may be rallying around the flag but they are not rallying around Netanyahu and his party.
I’m not sure that it was rage that drove the American response after 9/11. The neocons who used the rage and pain of Americans to fulfill their long-held ambitions to institute a “Pax Americana” could have been marginalized if the president had been a stronger, smarter man with a mind of his own. Instead, not unlike Trump, he clung to shallow tropes like “I got capital and I’m gonna use it” to initiate a war that lasted 20 years and from which we are still feeling the ramifications. He didn’t have the tools to fight them off and he loved dressing up in soldier costumes and calling himself a “wartime president.” (He did make it a policy not to grotesquely degrade Muslims and Islam, which is more than anyone can say for Donald Trump.)
In Israel, Netanyahu is driving this himself for his own political survival and I get the sense that the Israeli people see through this. Maybe that means they will have cooler heads than we had. Let’s hope so.