DNC oblivious to nuclear nightmare

August 20 2024 – “Hotties for Harris” pose at the DNC in Chicago

An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.

Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies

In 2016, when I still used Facebook, I had combative exchanges with Americans and Brits who could not fathom, other than as misogyny, how anyone could fail to see Hillary Clinton as a superior candidate for US president than Donald Trump. Not all were stupid. Just ill informed and angry. Few Britons and fewer Americans pay much heed to foreign policy, and few saw or cared that Clinton’s declared intent to impose on Syria a No Fly Zones policy which had reduced Libya from Africa’s richest country to failed state was not only as unlawful as it was lethally and deceitfully arrogant. It was also, in a Syria where Russian warplanes operated at the behest of its elected government, a recipe for WW3.

That same myopia now infuses the 2024 Democratic National Convention, as noted in two pieces today. One, The DNC Fiddles While the World Burns, is by Medea Benjamin and Nicholas J. S. Davies, described by its Naked Capitalism hosts as:

the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022. Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

The other, on the WSWS site of the Socialist Equality Party, begins:

Behind silence over foreign policy at DNC, Democrats prepare escalation of global war

The most striking aspect of the Democratic National Convention, which is currently underway in Chicago, is the absence of any discussion of the foreign policy of either the Biden administration or a future Harris administration, despite the fact that the United States is currently engaged in a war against Russia and preparing for a potential war with China.

The Democratic Party, and not just “Genocide Joe,” is fully culpable in the genocide in Gaza, which has officially killed 40,000 people, and could have killed as many as 200,000 people. Aside from a few insincere and hypocritical references to a “ceasefire,” the genocide has not been mentioned by the various officials who are dripping in the blood of the Palestinian people.

So too with the escalating US-NATO war against Russia and the preparations for war against China. Neither former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, nor vice presidential candidate Tim Walz made any reference to US policy regarding Russia or China. Biden briefly alluded to the US war with Russia and trade war with China in just a single paragraph.

But as the Democratic National Convention was taking place, US armored vehicles were crossing over Russia’s border as part of a NATO-backed offensive by Ukraine inside Russian territory. On Wednesday, Ukraine launched a salvo of drones at the Russian capital of Moscow, one of the largest direct attacks on Moscow since the war began.

On Tuesday, the day Obama addressed the convention, the New York Times reported that the Biden administration has adopted a new nuclear strategy document that would significantly expand the number of deployed US nuclear weapons, further driving up the already exorbitant costs of a nuclear modernization program estimated at $6 trillion.

“Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat” ran the headline of the Times article. Behind the backs of the American people, the Biden administration has authorized a new strategy that directs “US forces to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea,” according to the Times.

The complete lack of discussion of US foreign policy at the Democratic convention is even more striking considering that the platform adopted on the first day of the convention includes major changes in language related to nuclear policy compared to that adopted four years ago.

The 2020 platform condemned the Trump administration for building new nuclear weapons and pledged to expand nuclear non-proliferation treaties. It also stated, “Democrats are committed to strengthening the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, maintaining the moratorium on explosive nuclear weapons testing, advocating for the ratification of the UN Arms Trade Treaty and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and extending New START.”

However, all of this language is absent from the 2024 platform, which instead pledges to vastly expand the US nuclear arsenal …

Read the full piece on Wizwoz …

For their part Benjamin and Davies have this to say:

The DNC Fiddles While the World Burns

 An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.

Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome “issues,” which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We ❤️ Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.

In the real world, the most explosive flashpoint right now is the Middle East, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leapt to their feet in 23 ¹ standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.

In the week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the US into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.

Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza, and Biden and Congress’s willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so, always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, a war to degrade Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.

To achieve its goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. But failing to respond strongly to these assassinations would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.

The assassinations in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the U.S. into the war. Could Iran find a way to strike Israel that would not provoke a U.S. response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the moment to actually fight a seemingly unavoidable war with the U.S. and Israel?

This is an incredibly dangerous moment, but a ceasefire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The U.S. has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the only professional diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed ceasefire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the talks before responding to the assassinations.

Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised ceasefire proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree to. But Israel has always rejected any proposal for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent ceasefire. Could Biden have sent Burns just to stall, so that a new war wouldn’t spoil the Dems’ party in Chicago?

The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000 lb bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which it uses to systematically smash living children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.

Meanwhile the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see the writing on the wall, and are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.

But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the west, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion toward Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the early weeks of the Russian invasion ….

Read the full piece at Naked Capitalism …

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1. 23 is surely a misprint. Most sources put the stand-and-clap count at 54.