White House–curated stories of performative outrage and feigned helplessness provided cover for an administration arming death on an industrial scale.
by Adam Johnson and Othman Ali
Part 3 - Can’t vs. Won’t
One example of this faulty logic is in New York Times opinion columnist Roger Cohen’s September 30, 2024, analysis, “Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War.” In the piece, Cohen writes, “The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel, notably in the form of military aid that involved a $15 billion package signed this year by President Biden. But an ironclad alliance with Israel built around strategic and domestic political considerations, as well as the shared values of two democracies, means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut—let alone cut off—the flow of arms.”
This is simply Cohen saying Biden won’t cut off Israel, because he agrees with what Israel is doing. Why then, one is compelled to ask, does the headline say Biden “Can’t Stop a Middle East War” when Cohen, himself, just made clear it’s not a matter of can’t but won’t?
In The Washington Post’s “White House frustrated by Israel’s onslaught but sees few options,” the reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb acknowledges that the limits on Biden are self-imposed, but reduces this view that the decision to not cut off arms as a choice he is making to one held by “critics of the Biden administration, including many Arab and Muslim Americans.” Abutaleb writes, “But administration officials and advisers say the levers the United States theoretically has over Israel, such as conditioning military aid on making the military campaign more targeted, are nonstarters, partly because they would be so politically unpopular in any administration and partly because, aides say, Biden himself has a personal attachment to Israel.”
Again, one is compelled to ask, why is the headline that the White House “sees few options,” rather than “Biden chooses not to rein in Israel”? The “few options” were not imposed on the White House by some outside force; this involves a choice—according to the Post itself—that the Biden administration made. But this fact is downplayed or obscured.
The most popular promoter of this illogic is Biden ally Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, who pops into several Helpless Biden articles to reassure the reader that Biden is, in fact, unable to really stop Israel even if he wanted to. Miller, who once referred to himself as “Israel’s lawyer,” told The Washington Post in a piece published on April 6, “The influence of any outside party—even one that has theoretically on paper an enormous amount of influence on Israel—is limited.” The Post caps off the piece with Miller saying he “sees little way out for the administration.” Six months later, Miller would tell The New York Times’ Michael D. Shear, “The gap between what Biden hoped to achieve and what ultimately he was forced to encounter is as wide as the Grand Canyon,” without any explanation as to why or how this makes sense.
In his own long-form apologia explaining the intractable reality of Helpless Biden in Foreign Policy magazine, Miller again concedes that Biden does have significant influence, writing, “It’s not that the Biden administration lacks leverage on Israel. The president has many tools in his arsenal, such as conditioning or restricting U.S. military assistance to Israel; introducing or supporting a United Nations Security Council resolution that is critical of its policies in Gaza.” But Miller goes on to insist that Biden can’t use it, because “the president’s deep emotional commitment to the idea, security, and people of Israel honed over decades; the United States’ domestic political landscape, where the Republican Party has emerged as the ‘Israel-can-do-no-wrong’ party, and a policy fixated on a cease-fire that required the agreement of both Israel and Hamas.”
But Hamas agreed to the basic outline of the US ceasefire offer at the beginning of the conflict. The holdout has always been Israel, which will not—according to its own officials—stop until “total victory,” regardless of the fate of the Israeli hostages. So the last point is a non sequitur, bordering on falsehood, and the first two arguments—that Biden loves Israel and Republicans could potentially criticize Biden for forcing Israel to end its campaign—are, again, not reasons why he can’t restrain Israel; they’re reasons why he won’t.
Time and again, the conflation of “can’t” and “won’t” informs White House–curated narratives. It’s unclear why editors continue to allow anonymous aides and Biden allies to launder their responsibility with self-serving claims of powerlessness. Reporters and opinion columnists ignore conflicts of interest from those who have every reason to absolve themselves and their administration of moral and social responsibility for war crimes in Gaza, providing officials with the space to describe a Helpless Biden who couldn’t change things even if he wanted to.
The reader is constantly told that Biden is supporting everything Israel does, but doesn’t really want to. In one March 2024 Washington Post article, “based on interviews with 20 administration officials and outside advisers,” Abutaleb and John Hudson explain to readers “how Biden, more than five months after the Oct. 7 attacks, has found himself deeply entangled in a war he does not want.”
If Biden doesn’t “want” the “war,” then why does he continue to back it? What does it mean for the most powerful person on earth to “not want’ something” but to support it for over five months? That Biden advisers would run to the press and detail how much Biden—and by extension themselves—secretly don’t want a deeply unpopular war that has killed tens of thousands of children is nonsensical and self-serving. Yet it’s a conceit that’s widely taken at face value by US media.
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