Pundits and protestors are drawing parallels between Joe Biden and Lyndon B Johnson – another liberal presidency doomed by an ugly war. In so many ways, Gaza is not Vietnam. America has no boots on the ground; no draft if it did. Yet the analogy builds in three troubling steps.
One: Biden owns the Middle East conflict even as he denounces the casualties. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times notes that in January, the Israelis dropped a US-made bomb from a US-made plane on a US-relief group in a war supported by the US. “How can that not come back to Biden?” Kristof concludes that the President, for all his anti-war instincts, remains a die-hard Zionist, reluctant even to cut ties with an alleged crook like Netanyahu (there is reportedly a photo of the President on the prime minister’s desk inscribed: “Bibi, I love you but I don’t agree with a damn thing you have to say.”)
