{"id":276300,"date":"2024-10-07T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=276300"},"modified":"2024-10-03T07:36:41","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T06:36:41","slug":"bidens-israel-policy-has-led-us-to-the-brink-of-war-on-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/10\/bidens-israel-policy-has-led-us-to-the-brink-of-war-on-iran\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden\u2019s Israel Policy Has Led Us to the Brink of War on Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo credit: CODEPINK<\/p><\/div>\n

2 Oct 2024 –<\/em> On October 1, Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel in\u00a0response to Israel\u2019s recent assassinations of leaders of its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), Hezbollah and Hamas. There are\u00a0conflicting<\/a>\u00a0reports about how many of the missiles struck their targets and if there were any deaths.\u00a0But Israel is now considering a counterattack that could propel it into an all-out war with Iran, with the U.S. in tow.<\/p>\n

For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K.,\u00a0France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite Joe Biden\u2019s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump\u2019s violation of the treaty as\u00a0leverage<\/a>\u00a0to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.<\/p>\n

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran\u2019s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the UN General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran\u2019s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.<\/p>\n

President Pezeshkian\u2019s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a\u00a0press conference<\/a>\u00a0on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. \u201cVis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,\u201d he said. \u201cWe do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s create a situation where we can co-exist,\u201d said Pezeshkian. \u201cLet\u2019s try to resolve tensions through dialogue\u2026We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.\u201d He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel\u2019s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.<\/p>\n

Pezeshkian reiterated Iran\u2019s desire for peace in his speech at the UN General Assembly.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,\u201d he said. \u201cOthers have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. response to Iran\u2019s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran.<\/p>\n

That includes a\u00a0new order<\/a>\u00a0for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the opposition.<\/p>\n

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the UN Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt\u2019s cease-fire negotiations to provide\u00a0diplomatic cover<\/a>\u00a0for unrestricted genocide.<\/p>\n

Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing\u00a0against<\/a>\u00a0war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney\u00a0balked<\/a>\u00a0at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard\u00a0warned him<\/a>\u00a0that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the \u201ccakewalk\u201d the neocons had\u00a0promised<\/a>\u00a0it would be.<\/p>\n

But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries\u2019 war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a\u00a0war with Iran<\/a>, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.<\/p>\n

Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden\u2019s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq\u00a0warn<\/a>\u00a0that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.<\/p>\n

So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi\u00a0wrote in<\/a>\u00a0Responsible Statecraft, \u201cIf U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration\u2019s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America\u2019s most core security interest here \u2014 avoiding war.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Medea Benjamin is cofounder of <\/em>CODEPINK for Peace<\/em><\/a>, and author of several books, including <\/em>Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of<\/em> Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of<\/em> War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict<\/a>, available from OR Books in November 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 Oct 2024 – Iran has been trying to avoid such a war and signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the US, U.K.,\u00a0France, Germany, Russia, China and the EU. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018. Now, Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the US into war with Iran.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":276301,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[2197,87,865,3339,742,88,2369,2097,767,475,85,70,481],"class_list":["post-276300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-biden","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hezbollah","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-jcpoa","tag-lebanon","tag-middle-east","tag-netanyahu","tag-palestine-israel","tag-usa","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276300"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276303,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276300\/revisions\/276303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}