BIDEN'S BIBI PROBLEMLessons from America’s anti-war past and a way out for today’s president
In late 1967, the growing movement within the Democratic Party against the war in South Vietnam was looking for a leader to take on President Lyndon Johnson, who was increasing the number of troops in the war and intensifying the daily bombing. We now know from the available scholarship that Johnson, in his determination to do what Jack Kennedy had failed to do—force the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong in the South to give in to American fire power and seek a settlement on terms that would make his re-election inevitable—had steadfastly refused to halt American bombing, even for a few days, in response to hints from Hanoi about a possible ceasefire. Hanoi was insisting that there could be no talks as long as the bombing continued. I had disclosed elements of the bombing, the intensity of which was little known, as a correspondent for the Associated Press in the Pentagon. My critical reporting on the war eventually led the AP editors, facing pressure from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, to offer me a reassignment that they knew I would reject. And so in late 1967 I was researching a book—that is to say, I was unemployed—when I was approached by a prominent critic of the war and told that Senator Robert Kennedy of New York was unlikely to challenge Johnson in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries. The growing anti-war movement in America, which I supported—South Vietnam was by then little more than a killing field with nearly 500,000 American troops at war—had finally found a senior Democrat in the Senate willing to take on Johnson. It was Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota. Like many moderate politicians from the Upper Midwest, he was a critic of communism but also dead set against the Vietnam War. Would I be willing to serve as the senator’s press secretary and speech writer? I knew many in the Senate who were against the war, but, like most in America, knew little about McCarthy, who was a very quiet member of the important Foreign Relations Committee. At the time, when there was nothing less rewarding than being a freelancer with no regular paydays, and I agreed to go meet McCarthy. A meeting had already been set up for the next day. (I have written previously about this experience here.) The senator was a most attractive fellow—he’d been a good athlete in college and was fit and obviously very intelligent. But the meeting was a total flop. He came across as someone who had been dragooned into running against Johnson and sure as hell could care less about a press operation, or me. I gave him a packet of my clips, which he accepted but never glanced at, and the only thing he knew about me was that Mary McGrory, then a brilliant Washington columnist and a friend and neighbor of mine, had urged him to hire me. After a few moments of chit-chat, he said, “You’ll do,” and got up to usher me out of his office. Later that day I told Mary that she was throwing me to the wolves, and there was no way I would go to work for the diffident senator. She urged me to fly to New York the next day and listen to McCarthy’s first speech as a declared challenger to Lyndon Johnson. I did so, and it turned out that the bored senator I had met the day before was profound and totally courageous. During the campaign, McCarthy declared the war in Vietnam to be “immoral” in its disastrous impact on the innocent civilians who were being murdered by American bombs. I had never heard a senior politician in Washington talk about that war in terms of morality. And then he went on to say that the war also violated the Constitution. I was smitten and went to work for McCarthy, who turned out to like that I knew things about the war and how to work hard. Soon and for months afterward I was often his only aide on trips around the country. I learned much about how the Senate and the American intelligence community worked. A terrific staff was assembled for his campaign in New Hampshire, and he did not back down in his criticism of the war and the president. He drew almost as many votes in the Democratic primary on March 12 as Johnson. Less than three weeks later the president announced he would not stand for re-election. There is a lesson in the clarity of McCarthy’s purpose for President Joe Biden, who like much of the world responded with rage and a desire for payback at the horror that Hamas inflicted on October 7. Hamas’s carefully planned kidnapping of IDF hostages was accompanied by widespread sexual attacks and the murder of undefended Israeli families living and farming in their small collectives within a few miles of the border. The initial attack left the border open, and hundreds of Gaza residents joined members of Hamas in the siege and hostage taking. At this point, with Israel now in its sixth month of bombing and ground assaults in Gaza, with a mounting civilian death toll as America and the world watch in anger, Biden will have difficulty winning re-election unless he retracts his initial justified support for a stricken Israel. He must stand up to Netanyahu and tell him that the United States cannot continue to supply funding, bombs, and other munitions to Israel until, at minimum, there is a ceasefire that could open the door to substantive talks with what is left of the Hamas leadership. Netanyahu’s avowed goal of destroying all of Hamas, including its leadership, in four to six weeks of continued warfare is incompatible with the constant terror and despair of the population still alive in Gaza. Few wars, justified or not, have ended because of the suffering of an enemy’s population. Russia’s twenty million deaths in World War II tell us that. When one side’s military is dominant, as Israel’s is in Gaza, and the people there suffer greatly, the losing party either surrenders or is annihilated. I consulted with an experienced American expert who believes that Netanyahu is obligated at this point to offer Hamas reasonable terms for surrender. He said the major elements should be: —Surrender of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his staff to the Israeli forces. —Referral of the Hamas leadership to the International Criminal Court for trial. —Full disarmament of Hamas. —Release of all hostages in Hamas’s control and a full accounting of those who died in captivity. —Unrestricted humanitarian relief. —Restoration of self-government in Gaza with supervised elections. —Allow passage through borders of aid for reconstruction. Is Netanyahu likely to offer such terms? The record suggests not. On October 7, the prime minister was in the middle of a widely publicized criminal trial on fraud, breach of trust, and bribery charges that, according to Israeli media, he was destined to lose and face potentially more than a decade in jail. His administration was repeatedly warned by its intelligence services, and America’s, that Hamas had been training for months for a cross-border attack on a group of lightly defended kibbutzim a few miles away in southern Israel, with a goal of seizing IDF soldiers as hostages from a lightly defended nearby intelligence unit. That mission turned into the carnage that horrified Israel and the world. The IDF’s failure to respond to the intelligence was Netanyahu’s fault, in the sense that the buck always stops at the top. He did initially acknowledge his failure and publicly promised a thorough investigation. Such an inquiry has not yet taken place, and at this point seems irrelevant. It was his decision to go to general quarters in response, and not to focus on the arrest and prosecution of Sinwar and others in control of Hamas. The prime minister, with no known resistance from Washington, chose instead to order an all-out air and ground assault on Gaza; the precedent was the decision of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to respond to the 9/11 attacks by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda by going to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Would a different Israeli leader have chosen to focus on the security failures of the IDF, while also ordering a manhunt for Sinwar and other Hamas leaders? Was Netanyahu’s pending trial, and the specter of spending the rest of his life in prison, a factor in what was to come? These questions were little asked at the start of the war and are largely irrelevant now. Netanyahu’s determination to fight and kill or capture all in Hamas and to hell with what Washington thinks has been known for many months, although it’s constantly being rediscovered by the Washington press corps. He is intent on expanding Israeli military and political domination throughout Gaza and the West Bank, and in this he has the blessing of the Israeli public and many of Israel’s supporters in America. Mention of the remaining Israeli hostages has essentially disappeared from Bibi’s most recent statements, in part, so I have been told, because current intelligence estimates of surviving hostages have been dwindling. There are specific estimates known to the involved intelligence communities, but neither Washington nor Tel Aviv has publicly disclosed them. In a recent interview with Politico/Bild in Germany, Netanyahu was at his most comfortable and direct. He dismissed Biden’s suddenly increased concern about the killings in Gaza and reaffirmed that Israel’s next move would be an all-out attack on Rafah, where more than one million starving and ill Palestinians are huddled, in tents, in ruins, and in the open, far from airborne drops of MREs. “We’ll go there. We are not going to leave them [Hamas],” he said. “We’ve destroyed three quarters of Hamas’s fighting terrorism battalions and we’re close to finishing the last part.” He did not explain how that estimate of Hamas’s numbers was obtained, and he dismissed the idea of a ceasefire during the holy month of Ramadan, which began last weekend. He said that while he would “like to see another hostage release” he did not see any “breakthrough in the negotiations.” The release of hostages was once the dominant reason for the talks. How this will end is unknown. And it is very scary. |