That sentence is the sixth paragraph in a news article headlining a US drone strike in Baghdad. In “central Baghdad,” actually. That would be the capital city of Iraq, a country nominally friendly to the US.
Ben Samuel’s article doesn’t elaborate more on the comment that US armed forces have been engaging in military combat in both Iraq and Syria on a “near daily” basis since October 2023. Near daily back-and-forth attacks for over three months?
The US Republican Party is currently primarily a squabbling cult. So we can scarcely expect the Republican-dominated House to do anything substantial on oversight on these “near daily tit-for-tat attacks” involving American forces. But we should expect much more from the Democratic Senate. And, to be fair, Democratic Senators and some House members have been pushing back vocally against the US supplying Israel weapons to carry on its current appalling war against civilians in Gaza.
And this is far away from Iraq, Syria, and Israel. But when are we going to have an authoritative official investigation of the Nord Stream pipelines sabotage in September 2022? Hopefully sometime this century. Seymour Hersh’s report (2) based on a single source which he took to be credible that the Biden Administration itself did the deed still seems to be the most credible explanation, though it has not been otherwise confirmed.
Sweden just announced it had closed its official investigation of the event, which was a crime under international law. Theoretically, it could have been an accident. But the likelihood of that is somewhat less than the chance that this week’s Taylor Swift Super Bowl conspiracy theories are true. Sweden decided “that the case does not fall under its jurisdiction.” (3) Germany and Denmark still officially have ongoing investigations.
Joe Biden and the Ghosts of Triangulators Past
The dismal news about “near daily tit-for-tat attacks” since last October is another side reminder of how much stuck in the past Joe Biden still is.
Biden’s Administration has been more left-liberal than the Obama Administration on most issues. Biden’s “industrial policy” initiative with the Green New Deal, the significant public infrastructure investments, and his Administration’s policies on labor organizing and antitrust enforcement are distinctly more progressive than Obama’s. Biden has also actively defended Social Security politically, while Obama stunningly tried to cut back both Social Security and Medicare, two extremely popular and vitally necessary parts of the Democratic Party’s political heritage.
But in foreign policy, Biden is sticking with the liberal-interventionist and let-Netanyahu-run-loose-while-we-support-him-anyway policies that Obama followed. His policy still is to unconditionally support Israel’s appalling war in Gaza with weapons, financial aid, and bombs. The mild rhetorical distancing and the essentially symbolic sanctions against a few violent settlers so far seem to be nothing but window-dressing. Even worse, the US is now pursuing military operations in several countries in support of Israel, thus cooperating with Netanyahu’s standing goal to get the US to wage a full-on war against Iran.
But even the Obama Administration negotiated a practical nuclear-arms control agreement with Iran, which Trump cancelled and Biden didn’t bother to renew when he had the chance. Now with the US involved in proxy wars with Iran (“near daily tit-for-tat attacks between hardline Iran-backed armed groups and U.S. forces stationed in the region since the Gaza war began in October”), a return to the arms-control agreements seems exceptionally unlikely. And the threat of Iranian nukes has been the main argument that Netanyahu has used to encourage a direct US war against Iran.
The NATO expansion policies began under the Clinton Administration and continued through Cheney-Bush. And now we are in a new Cold War with Russia even as the official American policy is that containing China is now the prime US strategic goal. Nuclear disarmament is effectively invisible in the Biden foreign policy. Confront Russia, back Israel no matter what, and pursue confrontations with China are the kind of great-power imperialist orientation that Biden has advocated for his whole career.
Boosting the Republicans’ xenophobia strategy
The only time I heard Biden speak live and in person was in 2014 at a Netroots Nation convention. Just as he started the speech, he was greeted by a brief protest against the Obama Administration’s restrictive immigration policies. Biden basically supports hardline anti-immigration policy, even if he doesn’t advertise it with the demonstrative xenophobia and racism the Trumpistas use. The ugly reality is that the Shrub Bush Administration had a distinctly more liberal and practical immigration policy than Obama or Biden, even though the Republican Party was already radicalized to the point that Bush’s immigration proposals weren’t taken seriously by Congressional Republicans.
Biden did a decent job in opening reelection campaign by framing the Presidential election as a democracy-vs.-autocracy contest. It’s the right framing for the Democrats, because the Trumpistas are riding the John C. Calhoun Insurrectionist Express right now.
But “Democracy” isn’t an abstraction to be idealized and romanticized. Democracy as a campaign issue is a very real practical concern in itself. But it also has to be democracy for something: for protecting voting access, for defending abortion rights, for more and better labor unions, for adequate health care, for affordable housing, for a livable minimum wage, for addressing the climate crisis, for peace. And on the latter, not for peace in the abstract but for reducing nuclear weapons, for ending Israel’s war against Gaza civilians and US support for it, for peaceful coexistence with Russia, for a practical and just peace in Ukraine without war dragging on for decades.
And, certainly, for a decent immigration policy. The German Nazis literally used American segregation laws and immigration restrictions at the time as models for the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935. Going back to being a model for autocrats and slimebag racists is not the direction the US should go with its immigration laws.
But anti-immigrant hysteria currently looks to be Trump’s leading issue for the 2024 campaign, just as it is for the far-right parties in the European Parliament elections and various national elections this year. The far-right Identitarians in Germany and Austria are promoting the Great Replacement Theory that is also a central part of Trumpista ideology. And framing matters.
Biden is failing spectacularly here on the politics of immigration. Even though he obviously prefers a largely restrictive immigration policy that is unpractical in many ways, boosting the Republican-identarian framing of the issue by yammering about a “flood” of immigrants from Latin America, an “invasion,” regaining “control of the border” and yadda, yadda - is morally and also politically a disastrous approach.
The immigration issue in the United States when viewed as a whole would be enough to send Jesus’ Good Samaritan to go looking for a cave where he could live out the rest of his life as an ascetic hermit. Immigration is very much a net positive for the US, including “undocumented” immigration. The truth is that undocumented immigration has been part of the US system for decades, one that works to provide employers with a supply of lower-skilled workers that are just plain not available from solely native-born Americans, but also easier to bully, cheat, and manipulate because of their unauthorized immigration status.
Decently reforming the US immigration system requires talking about the reality of immigration, not mimicking Republican hate propaganda. And the Democrats have let the issue drag on for so long that related phenomena are piling on top of each other. The bipartisan neoliberal policy that took a big leap forward in the US with the NAFTA free-trade treaty not only unnecessarily encouraged export of US manufacturing jobs. It also demonstrably undercut the Mexican agricultural market in favor of US agricultural production that relies on - guess what? - undocumented immigrant labor. That alone increased immigration from Mexico.
Then there is the political destabilization to which the US is chronically committed in Latin America that disrupts countries and increases civil violence, which in turn produces lots of refugees. The Obama Administration’s support for the 2009 coup in Honduras under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (4) itself contributed to destabilizing Honduras but also other Central American countries. (5)
Then, there are guns and drugs. The insane US policy especially in the last two decades of flooding the country with small arms easily obtainable by almost anyone has been a major contributor to increasing violence by drug cartels in Mexico because they are able to get lots more weapons from the US than they once did. Even more significant to drug cartel activity is the enormous market for illegal drugs in the US, far and away the biggest in the Western Hemisphere. And the War on Drugs that has been going on since the Nixon Administration - a lifetime for most American now living - has been spectacularly unsuccessful in reducing that market.
The gun-proliferation policy and the punitive War on Drugs approach are huge contributor to violence and political instability in Mexico, Central America, and South America, as well. Serious restrictions on the possession and sale of small arms in the United States, a nationwide shift to a treatment-oriented approach to drug addiction, and better control of irresponsible marketing by Big Pharma would not only have huge health and safety benefits in the US itself. They would also reduce violence in a major way in Mexico and Central America and remove a big part of the current incentive for people to flee their home countries for the United States.
The only way to get there is for politicians to directly address those issues and that requires pushing back directly against xenophobic Republican narratives. And that means not ducking-and-covering when Republicans say this is soft-on-crime nonsense and use arguments like:
The consensus is A), we must take back the streets. It doesn’t matter whether or not the person that is accosting your son or daughter or my son or daughter, my wife, your husband, my mother, your parents, it doesn’t matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth. It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to become socialized into the fabric of society. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of society. The end result is they’re about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons. (my emphasis)A black thug is about to bash your mama’s head in!!! Yes, Republicans do talk like this. Oh, wait - that was Joe Biden in 1993. (6)
This is an example what came to be known as Democratic “triangulation” politics in the 1990s: trying to co-opt Republican issues by adopting Republican framing. George Lakoff has been warning the Democrats for years that this reinforces the Republican framing without building a distinct and more constructive Democratic narrative.
Our recent article, The Framing of Immigration, was about issues that are outside the frame of the “immigration problem” but are crucial to understanding immigration. The “immigration problem” frame points the finger at immigrants and administrative agencies as being “the problem.” This grossly oversimplifies a hugely complex set of issues involving the suppression of wages in the US economy and the “cheap labor trap” for workers here; the failure to crack down on illegal employers; the economic and political conditions that force immigrants to leave and the role US foreign policy has had in creating or perpetuating these conditions; the major contributions immigrants make to our economy without gratitude or proper recognition; and the humanitarian crisis caused by economic and political refugees. (7) [my emphasis]The recent attempt by the Biden Administration to get the Republicans to approve additional funding for Ukraine by combining it with a reactionary, xenophobic Republican “border” bill is a sad example of this failed approach. Sam Seder this week has been ripping the Democrats for that and specifically for foolishly and irresponsibly adopting Republican framing. Here’s an example (8):
In this somewhat longer version, he and Emma Vigeland elaborate at more length about what a political disaster Biden’s immigration politics are looking to be. (9) This also deals in a broader sense with the chronic Democratic “triangulation” nonsense:
Digby tries to take a somewhat more optimistic view:
Agreeing to a set of cruel changes to the law and massive new funding for the border made the Republicans blink. Now they suddenly want to wait until the election to fix what they previously characterized as an existential crisis. All Trump and his MAGA sycophants are left with is this bizarre refrain that a president has magical powers to close the border yet refuses to use them. ...
The GOP's antics this week are the real gift to the Democrats. Republicans made utter fools of themselves — again — proving once more that they are inept and dysfunctional. Not only did the Senate Republicans abruptly decide not to vote for the GOP Holy Grail of a bill on Donald Trump's orders, but the House produced one of the biggest clown shows they've staged since they won the majority (and that's saying something.) Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., put the vote to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the floor late Tuesday . . . and he didn't have the votes. (10) [my emphasis]
She’s describing the short-term political game that is playing out. But she seems to really be reaching to hope that the disastrously bad Democratic framing on immigration won’t do too much harm to the Dems politically:
I happen to think that this border bill is a draconian nightmare and I can't say that I'm sorry to see it fail. I understand that the Republicans were holding the fate of Europe hostage with their need to appease Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin by abandoning Ukraine, so I can see why the Democrats were willing to negotiate as they did. But giving in to hostage demands is never a good idea and it wasn't this time either.But the Democrats shouldn’t be gambling on Republican incompetence when it comes to the Republicans’’ key demagogic issue of immigration.
But I do have to wonder if Joe Biden has some preternatural gift for seeing through GOP posturing in these situations. As I've noted before, back in 2011 he inserted himself into a negotiation with the Republicans by giving in to their demands for cuts to Social Security and they ended up walking away from that deal in a similar fashion to their refusal this week to take yes for an answer on this border bill. Is it possible that Dark Brandon saw this one coming too? [my emphasis]
And, unfortunately, Biden is giving us a lot of reason to thing he basically does support a hardline, cruel, irresponsible immigration policy. Even if he’s not quite so fond of the performative sadism that Trump and Greg Abbott are on the issue.
The Democrats can’t win a decent immigration reform if they don’t directly challenge the Republican immigration policies. And, yes, pushing back against this racially-charge demagoguery is part of fighting for democracy and the rule of law.
It wouldn’t hurt the Democrats to drag the Good Samaritan out of his hermit’s cave on this issue. But they also need to be clear in telling voters: The sleazy Republicans are lying to you about this issue.
Notes:
(1) Samuels, Ben (2024): U.S. Drone Strike in Baghdad Kills High-ranking Iranian-backed Militia Commander. Haaretz 02/07/2024.
(2) How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. Seymour Hersh Substack 02/08/2023. (Accessed: 2024-08-02).
(3) Sweden closes probe into Nord Stream pipeline blast. Aljazeera 02/07/2024.
(4) Johnston, Jake (2017): How Pentagon Officials May Have [sic!] Encouraged a 2009 Coup in Honduras. The Intercept 08/29/2017.
(5) McGovern, Jim [US Congressman] (2019): US Intervention helped Destabilize Central America — Now, We Have a Moral Obligation to Help. Medium 08/08/2019.
(6) Kaczynski, Andrew (2019): Biden in 1993 speech pushing crime bill warned of ‘predators on our streets’ who were ‘beyond the pale’. CNN Politics 03/07/2024.
(7) Lakoff, George & Ferguson, Sam (2006): The Framing of lmmigration. Rockridge Institute 05/28/2006.
(8) Biden’s Immigration Deal Fiasco Is Way Worse Than You Thought. The Majority Report YouTube channel 02/07/2024. (Accessed: 2024-08-02).
(9) Schumer's Right-Wing Immigration Pivot Is A Total Disaster. The Majority Report YouTube channel 02/08/2024. (Accessed: 2024-08-02).
(10) Parton, Heather Digby (2024): Republicans royally botch their one election year play. Salon 02/07/2024.
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