Don't Let Democrats Whitewash What They Did on Gaza Once Trump Is in Office
A man pushes a bicycle as he walks amid building rubble near Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital on April 3, 2024. Photo by AFP via Getty Images
During the last Trump presidency, the same people – then former Obama officials – suggested they had learned their lesson from Yemen.
In November 2018, following more than three years in which Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates turned Yemen into a slaughterhouse, a group of Barack Obama-era foreign-policy practitioners demanded an end to US support for a conscience-shocking war. Even though they were out of power, they had a mechanism to make a difference. Sen. Bernie Sanders had introduced a congressional resolution to stop US military assistance for the assault on Yemen, and it garnered significant bipartisan support in both Congressional chambers. So these former senior officials lent their voices to the cause through an open letter.
Yes, they conceded, many of the signatories of their letter "worked on [Yemen and Middle East] issues… some directly, others less so" under Obama. And it was under Obama that the US began providing "some intelligence, refueling, and logistical assistance to the Saudi-led coalition." But the Trump White House had "doubled down on support for the Saudi leadership's prosecution of the war, while removing restrictions we had put in place."
A "skyrocket[ing]" increase in civilian casualties was on grisly display. The Saudis were bombing "markets, weddings, and school buses." Their US-supported coalition was preventing "critical food and medical supplies from reaching the Yemeni people." Famine was imminent for millions of innocent Yemenis. And the United States, to the horror of these former officials, was "remain[ing] complicit." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had even "reportedly overruled professionals in the State Department" in order to posture as if the US had gotten Saudi Arabia and the UAE to reduce civilian harm. "[T]he time has come for us to end our support for and involvement in this brutal conflict," they intoned.
Signatories to that 2018 letter included Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Avril Haines, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Samantha Power, and Jon Finer. Little more than two years later, they would return to power as Joe Biden's secretary of state, national security adviser, director of national intelligence, UN ambassador, USAID director, and deputy national security adviser, respectively. And beginning in October 2023, they supported a different Middle East partner's campaign of devastation, weaponized famine, and conscience-shocking assaults on helpless people.
Biden is joined by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan during the UN General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2024. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Even before Vice President Kamala Harris lost Tuesday's election, leftists on the internet posted darkly about whether liberals would react to a Trump victory by discovering their opposition to the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the broader Middle East war spiraling out from it. Posts like those turned my thoughts to that 2018 Yemen letter, issued so earnestly by those who mumbled through their complicity but suggested that they had learned their lesson.
While grace ought to be extended to those who seek to correct their mistakes, the horror of these past 13 months has made it clear that the senior Biden officials who signed that letter, in fact, learned nothing. We shouldn't bother listening should they find themselves roused to speak against any escalation of the combination of genocide and regional war that Trump pursues or tolerates.
As in Yemen, So Too in Gaza
The 2018 open letter contains some disturbing templates when read in light of the current Middle East carnage.
When the signatories paused to acknowledge their administration's role in backing the war, they emphasized the "restrictions" and "conditional support" Obama allegedly placed on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as if to justify their actions. In 2024, that sounds uncomfortably like the parade of quotes from anonymous US officials about Biden pressuring Benjamin Netanyahu behind closed doors to not kill so many civilians, to let more aid into Gaza, to not expand the war into Lebanon, to limit the bombing of Iran. In both wars, the astronomic death tolls made their claims of the US operating as a check rather than a facilitator sound perverse.
The 2018 letter also interrupted what passed for contrition by asserting that US support for the Yemen war addressed a "legitimate threat" – the missiles the Houthis placed on the Saudi border, Iran’s sponsorship of the Houthis – thereby suggesting that the Obama administration had been right to support the Saudi-led war. That echoes the way Biden accepted Netanyahu's contention that the bloodshed of Oct. 7 justified a widespread war. In both cases, the "restricted" war that they claimed to be backing bore no resemblance to the reality on the ground. There was only the indiscriminate war the Saudis and Emiratis pursued, much as there has only been the indiscriminate war the Israelis are pursuing. And in both cases, clear-eyed observers recognized early on that neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel were interested in restraint, particularly not with the US continuing to provide material support.
The litany of horribles the Obama/Biden officials decried in Yemen certainly manifested in Gaza. Israel has bombed markets, wedding halls, and schools (if perhaps not school buses), to say nothing of hospitals and, of course, residential buildings, much as Saudi Arabia did in Yemen. It is bracing to read the 2018 denouncement of the Saudis for blocking "critical food and medical supplies" when, earlier this week, UNRWA commissioner Phillippe Lazzarini stated that US-backed Israel is only letting 30 trucks of life-sustaining provisions into Gaza daily, some 6% of pre-Oct. 7 commercial traffic. And the Obama/Biden officials nauseatingly owe Pompeo an apology for swiping at his censorship of State Department professionals over Yemen: ProPublica reported that Blinken did the same thing when State and USAID officials assessed that Israel was blocking aid to Gaza.