January 29, 2024
With their families now notified, the Pentagon has released the names of the three American soldiers killed in Jordan yesterday. Army Reserve soldiers Sergeant William Jerome Rivers, 46, Specialist Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, and Specialist Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, all from Georgia, were assigned to support Operation Inherent Resolve, charged with helping regional partners defeat the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, or ISIS, to promote stability in the region.
At a press conference today with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke of the three lost soldiers, the many wounded, and their family and friends. “Every day we have our men and women in uniform around the world who are putting their lives on the line for our security, for our freedom,” he said. “I am as always humbled by their courage and their sacrifice.”
Blinken reiterated the administration’s determination to keep the Hamas-Israel war from spreading, a signal that the administration will respond to this attack but not go to the extremes right-wing hawks have demanded. “From the outset, we have been clear in warning that anyone looking to take advantage of conflict in the Middle East and try to expand it: Don’t do it,” Blinken said. “[W]e do not seek conflict with Iran, we do not seek war with Iran, but we have and we will continue to defend our personnel and to take every action necessary to do that, including responding very vigorously to the attack that just took place.”
The secretary reiterated that the administration is “very, very actively pursuing” efforts to get the hostages currently held by Hamas released—including as many as six Americans—and create an extended pause in fighting to get aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Its larger goal, he said, is “putting a durable end to the cycle of violence that we’ve seen in the region for generation after generation” and to achieve “an integrated Israel with relations with all of its neighbors, security commitments, assurances that it needs to make sure that it can move forward in peace and security; a Palestinian Authority that’s reformed, and a clear pathway to a Palestinian state.”
Such a plan, Blinken said, would promote security by creating a more integrated region with normalized relations between countries and “where the question of the rights of Palestinians is finally answered.” Stoltenberg responded by thanking Blinken for his “tireless diplomacy…to prevent further escalation of the war in Gaza, your efforts to alleviate human suffering, and your hard work towards a peaceful resolution.”
Over the weekend, officials from the U.S., Israel, Egypt, and Qatar meeting in Paris, France, created a blueprint for a six-week pause in the war while Hamas releases the hostages taken on October 7 in exchange for a much greater number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails. The prime minister and foreign minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani, traveled from Paris to Washington, D.C., where he met with Blinken.
David Rothkopf noted today in The Daily Beast that such a plan would end the death and destruction in Gaza and enable Israel to begin a healing process. It would create room to rebuild new leadership for the Palestinians and move Israel toward “the new elections and new government it so desperately needs and deserves.”
Qatar is taking the proposal to Hamas.
Blinken and Stoltenberg both talked as well about NATO and its “unwavering support for Ukraine.” NATO has grown stronger in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and NATO allies and partners have provided more than $110 billion in total aid for Ukraine while the U.S. has provided about $75 billion, Blinken noted (the U.S. has contributed by far the most in military aid).
But the U.S., which has provided key support for NATO and Ukraine, is suddenly faltering as extremist Republicans in the House are refusing to pass a supplemental measure to provide more funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and to secure the southern border of the U.S.
Blinken again urged Congress to pass the funding.
“Without it, simply put, everything that Ukrainians achieved and that we’ve helped them achieve will be in jeopardy,” Blinken said. “And…we’re going to be sending a strong and wrong message to all of our adversaries that we are not serious about the defense of freedom, the defense of democracy. And it will simply reinforce for Vladimir Putin that he can somehow outlast Ukraine and outlast us.”
Stoltenberg agreed. “It would be a tragedy for the Ukrainians if President Putin wins, but it will also make the world more dangerous and us, all of us, more insecure. It will embolden other authoritarian leaders—not only Putin…but also North Korea, Iran, and China—to use force. Today it’s Ukraine; tomorrow it could be Taiwan. So therefore it is in our interests to ensure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent nation.”
Biden appears to have ramped up aid to Ukraine slowly to keep Putin from being able to claim he was at war with the U.S. and to keep him from mounting a full-blown response to such a threat, but as David Frum put it in The Atlantic, Biden “overestimated the time available to keep aid flowing to Ukraine because he underestimated the servility of House Republicans to Trump’s anti-Ukraine animus.” Frum explained: “[T]he background political reality is that Donald Trump is an enemy of Ukraine and an admirer of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. As Trump has neared renomination, his party—especially in the House of Representatives—has surrendered to his pro-Putin pressure.”
Back in early November, then a brand new House speaker, Mike Johnson (R-LA) told Senate Republicans that he supported aid to Ukraine but would not deliver it without money for security on the southern border of the U.S. Such a measure was crucial to U.S. security, he and other Republicans insisted, and they hyped the dangers of current immigration policy.
A bipartisan group of Senate negotiators went to work to hammer out such a measure, but once it got close to completion, Trump stepped in to stop the deal, intending to run on fears of immigration in 2024. Republicans are falling into line behind Trump, putting the border deal, as well as more funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, at risk.
Meanwhile, the extremist Republicans are in the awkward position of insisting that the United States is in terrible danger from a border crisis but that they don’t want to solve that crisis for almost a year, waiting until 2025 when they expect Trump to be in office.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/29/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-jordan-updates
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/us/politics/hostage-deal-cease-fire-hamas-gaza.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gaza-ceasefire-deal-is-the-only-way-to-avoid-wider-war
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/republicans-betrayal-israel-ukraine-aid/677254/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/romney-trump-immigration-border-senate
Thank you.
Documenting the hypocrisy of the house GQP fanatics is important. It seems even some of the mass media has stumbled across the story. Hopefully with enough pressure, they will finally do their jobs.
This evening I caught a news show on which a reporter was asking T**** supporters if they would rather have four years of a dictator or four years of Biden: each responded that they'd rather have the dictator. It was beyond incredible, watching these simpletons with their smiling approvals of the Orange Skidmark. Democracy is in the balance, and we have so many uneducated fools. If you wear a MAGA hat, you are, by definition, an idiot.