https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/17/biden-as-lame-duck/

Biden as Lame Duck

Will He End the Wars?

Eve Ottenberg November 17, 2024

Right now, it’s still up to Joe “All War, All the Time” Biden to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. He has the power to do so, and to pretend that he doesn’t is arrant nonsense. But, but, you object, what about Bibi Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin? Well, they won’t. The former without an actual ultimatum from the white house and the latter because he knows very well the so-called president in Kiev is Washington’s puppet.

Both men have powerful incentives to continue the two bloodiest slaughters the planet has seen in quite some time. Netanyahu’s political survival is at stake: when he ends the Gaza carnage, even to rescue the hostages, the right-wing maniacs in his coalition will topple it, leaving him out of power and at the mercy of the Israeli courts. Maimonides may have said that the greatest mitzvah is redeeming captives, but for Netanyahu it appears to be endless killing, because that pauses his legal jeopardy. Putin’s incentives to continue the industrial warfare that has wiped out a generation of Ukrainian men are far less personal, involving, as they do, Russia’s security and protecting it from a rabid Ukraine in NATO. That is first and foremost the Russian issue: Ukraine must NEVER join NATO. Of course, there’s also ending the butchery of Russian-speakers in the Donbass. The Kremlin leader knows very well that the west tricked him with the Minsk Accords, because French and German bigwigs said so, and thus is unlikely to fall for such phony shenanigans again. He also doubtless has little interest in a “frozen conflict” that, like the Minsk ruse, merely gives Kiev time to rearm.

In a profound way, Biden created both of these ghastly tragedies, so he, more than anyone on the planet, has a duty to resolve them. True, Joe “Bibi’s Enabler” Biden did not cause the murder spree on October 7. But there are limits to how much retaliation can be forgiven while maintaining a few shreds of human decency. Those limits were long, long ago passed. Unlike Ronald “Red Lines” Reagan, who slammed his foot down with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin during the Lebanon War in the 1980s, basically demanding “you end this, or else,” and who MEANT it, Biden has quite inanely given the Israeli prime minister a blank check. This has been catastrophic for Palestinians and is fast cementing Israel’s position as a pariah state among nations. In other words, it’s a fiasco.

Recognizing American weaknesses, other world powers – China and Russia – have offered to mediate. Beijing worked with Palestinian factions, while Moscow announced its eagerness to broker peace between Israel and Iran. These developments, buried in the U.S. media, signal the non-western world’s alarm at a prospective regional war and horror at what Israel has inflicted on Gazans. But Washington fatuously ignores all this and just keeps buzzing along like some deranged bomber plane on autopilot (possibly due partly to Biden’s decrepitude), making an appalling situation worse. Because make no mistake: a Gaza ceasefire leads to a Hezbollah ceasefire leads to an Iranian one. Netanyahu knows this very well. Biden knows it too. What have they done? Blithely blown past multiple opportunities for peace in order to continue the depraved bloodletting.

Regarding the Ukrainian abattoir, Biden’s responsibility is, if anything, even more direct. On November 5, journalist Leonid Ragozin tweeted a damning litany of Biden’s provocations: “The year-long brinkmanship that eventually resulted in Russia’s full-out aggression began with Biden’s arrival in the white house and Zelensky’s simultaneous – and very obviously coordinated – U-turn on peace talks with Russia. The attack on Medvedchuk, loud campaigns for NATO membership and for the derailing of Nord Stream, the law on the de-occupation of Crimea – all of that happened in January-February 2021 and resulted in Putin deploying troops on the Ukrainian border in March the same year.

The policy of confronting Russia and crossing its strategic redlines…resulted in: Immense suffering for Ukraine and a military defeat looming…Putin’s army becoming the world’s most experienced and combat ready…Massive human rights violations in Ukraine [by the Zelensky regime].” And thus Biden led us to the most dangerous standoff with a nuclear power since the Cuban missile crisis.

When Biden was Obama’s vice president with the Ukraine portfolio, Russia invaded Ukraine. A year into Biden’s presidency, Russia invaded Ukraine. Anyone spot a pattern here? Hello? Imperial aggression and arrogance lead to – you got it – war. And Biden’s all about imperial aggression and arrogance. We ALL have the receipts to prove it, most glaringly two invasions, both on his watch and hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainian soldiers. And now that Kamala Harris lost the presidency to Donald Trump, Biden promises yet another $6 billion to that bottomless pit in Kiev. This, while rumors fly that NATO chieftain Mark Rutte fulminated idiotically that if Trump dares to abandon Ukraine, he, Rutte will boot the U.S. out of NATO. Is that a promise? I certainly hope so. As Armchair Warlord tweeted, “be still, my heart.”

Meanwhile Biden rushes in his last few presidential weeks to push the U.S further into the maelstrom, presumably to tie Trump’s hands as tightly as possible. The Wall Street Journal reported November 9 that Biden has just approved delivering to Ukraine some 500 anti-aircraft missiles for systems including NASAMS and Patriots. Even worse, and confirming the direst fears of those of us who are fatalists, on November 8 came tidings of el jefe okaying U.S. military contractors operating openly in Ukraine. This lame duck ain’t ending anything; he’s ESCALATING. No wonder Biden’s far-right adversaries try to divine what kompromat, exactly, do the Ukrainians have on him?

But the ride on this lugubrious merry-go-round is about to end: we will bid Biden adieu, so will the rest of the world, with a sigh of relief. So will a mountain of Ukrainian corpses – that good deal, as Senator Lindsay “The Mortician” Graham so obscenely dubbed the Ukrainian charnel house, because the cadavers weren’t American. Engender chaos, mayhem and soak the world in blood, Graham’s fine with that, because it supposedly weakened Russia. I’ve got news for the senator with his clueless and wicked policies – it didn’t. It turned Russia into probably the most formidable military force on the planet.

So I guess the question answers itself: Will blood-stained Biden use this lame-duck interregnum to end either of the wars he finances to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars? Not likely. Not unless God Almighty personally tells him to cut it out, pronto. Because I can’t think of a soul on Earth who could swerve this president off his path of destruction and death, though just maybe the vanity of the accolade “peacemaker” in his legacy could do the trick. After all, who really wants to go down in history with their most notable accomplishment being mass murder? Bad enough he’s the president who created a unified Eurasian wall against the empire he believes is so exceptional, a Biden-built reality to which we now have one bleak choice – adapt or perish. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony – future historians dating the abrupt U.S. imperial decline to the president who boasted “America Is Back!”

With those three words, Joe Biden opened a Pandora’s box of color revolutions, coups, regime change, proxy wars and meddling in foreign elections. Not that it had ever entirely shut, mind you, but he threw it wide, wide open. “America Is Back!” Biden crowed when elected, and the rest of the world, excluding Europe, groaned. And now as we hopefully step away from combat with nuclear-armed Russia, we can tentatively assert, “it could have been worse.”

How? He could have okayed those long-range missile strikes into Russia that we all know would have spelled curtains for everybody, including him. After all, he green-lit every other weapon system he originally swore never to use. But something, a glimmer of sanity and self-preservation and, perhaps, love for the country whose resources he so wildly squanders abroad, stayed his hand and prevented global incineration.  I don’t know about you, but I’m hoping his legacy isn’t outright radioactive.