Gerald
Sussman
A
flurry of commentary has followed Joe Biden’s decision to invoke his
presidential privilege in issuing a “full and unconditional pardon” to his son,
Hunter Biden, who faced prison time for filing false tax statements, tax
evasion, and carrying an unregistered gun.
Leading Democrats, including Senator
Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and California Governor Gavin Newsom, came out in
opposition to Biden’s nepotistic act, and a former Bernie Sanders adviser saw
it as “a big fuck you” to the Democratic Party for forcing him to withdraw from
the presidential race.
Commenting
in CounterPunch on December 6, Melvin Goodman criticized the hypocrisy
of the Democrats who, on the one hand, questioned Biden’s moral turpitude and,
on the other, failed to point out the president’s major crimes in material,
political, and diplomatic support for the Israeli genocide. Goodman, I believe,
is correct in this specific critique, but his larger claim about “president’s
admirable and ethical 50-year political career” is quite dubious. Going back to
his years in the Senate and as vice president and president, Biden, among his
many other acts of bad judgement, has had a long history of being a
warmongering chicken hawk defender of US imperial power.
Although
he initially held back support for the Gulf War in 1990-1991, he expressed
regret for that decision and took hawkish positions on every US invasion
thereafter. Even on occasions where he first expressed reservations about US
intervention, he always came around to supporting the military option. An extensive
research article on Biden’s political career found that he backed “the
constant bombing of Iraq, [promoted] regime change as official policy, and
[used] economic sanctions to ‘cripple’ the country.”
Biden’s
support for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011,
and Syria in 2014 opened up the region for US bombing, ground intervention,
massive deaths of civilians, displacement of millions of refugees, and
permanent instability. In large part, these attacks were gratuitous acts of
support for Israel, cynically arming the forces of ISIS and Al Qaeda, as in
Syria, in efforts to bring down the Assad government in Damascus, which finally
succeeded on December 8, 2024. The radical Islamic group that claimed victory
in Syria, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham is referred to the mainstream media as merely a
“rebel” group, even as the US government still lists it as a “terrorist
organization.” Not a problem, as long as they’re our terrorists.
In
support of the 78-day bombing of Syria in 1999, causing the deaths of more than
2,000 civilians, Biden called for “a Japanese-German-style occupation” of the
country, a mindset that points to his predilection for fascist-style reactions
(consider Gaza) to perceived enemies. There is nothing inconsistent with his
defense of empire and his crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank.
To
recognize Israel as an extension of US power in the Middle East is to
understand how genocide is just another one of the tools the US has employed
against recalcitrant nations and movements. Vietnam was the prime example, but
only one in which the mass slaughter of civilians has been a central part of US
strategy to break the back of struggles for national liberation.
If
George W. Bush is the principal 21st century architect of forever wars in the
Middle East, the credit for the disaster in Ukraine and moving the doomsday
clock to 90 seconds before midnight (the moment the world ends in nuclear
conflagration), the closest it’s ever been, belongs to Joe Biden. In 2014, as
Obama’s vice president with the informal portfolio for handling Ukraine, for
which he was a “super-hawk,” Biden helped to design the regime change
policy of taking Viktor Yanukovych out of power in Kiev. Unhappy with
Yanukovych’s ties to Russia, Biden and his main operative, the undersecretary
of state for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, engineered his ouster with
active encouragement and material support for what became the Maidan protests
in 2014.
As
Ivan Katchanovski has noted, however, the peaceful protests during the “Orange
Revolution” in 2004-2005, which, with direct US involvement denied
Yanukovych the presidency, were upgraded in the 2014 Maidan street
demonstrations with violent interventions by multiple neo-Nazi organization
(Right Sector and Svoboda) snipers that shot protesters and riot police
(Berkut) from their positions in nearby buildings and the Hotel Ukraina,
turning the plaza into a bloodbath. After the neo-Nazi firebombing of
government buildings, Yanukovych was forced to resign and flee from Kiev in
February 2014.
Already
weeks before, Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine were already hand-picking
his replacement, Petro (“Chocolate King”) Poroshenko, who had been an active
informant at the US Embassy. Poroshenko, who would serve as Washington’s
puppet president, was aligned with the US-backed “Our Ukraine” faction in the
government. At the same time, Nuland also picked the new neoliberal, pro-EU
Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be prime minister.
For
his support of Poroshenko as president, Biden, like a traditional mafia boss,
expected personal favors in return. One was allowing his son Hunter Biden to
serve on the board of the Ukraine’s largest energy company, Burisma. For this,
young Biden, along with an adviser to then secretary of state John Kerry,
neither with any experience in Ukraine or in the energy sector, received,
according to a congressional report, $1 million per year for doing
virtually nothing except as acting as totems for US backing. In fact, Biden
junior never even travelled to Ukraine. This was clearly a payoff for the
service that Biden senior had delivered in the overthrow of the Yanukovych
government and the installation of the coup government, two months earlier.
The
only cog in the wheel was that a widely-recognized independent-minded
prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was in the process of investigating the
crooked Burisma Holdings company and its billionaire owner Mykola Zlochevsky
too studiously. In a series of phone calls between vice president Biden and
Poroshenko, as documented by a French podcast, Les Crises, Biden clearly bribed
the then Ukrainian president into firing Shokin in exchange for receiving a
US-backed IMF loan of $1 billion. Indeed, Biden openly bragged about how, like
a “wild west” sheriff, he gave Poroshenko six hours to respond. The mainstream
media saw no problem with the vice president consorting with a corrupt oligarch
or in playing a proconsul role in US imperial politics.
Biden’s
imperial outlooks, drawn from Washington’s and the mainstream media’s
commitments to maintaining US hegemony in the world, has placed him among the
world’s leading war criminals, alongside those, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon,
who led the genocide in Vietnam, where millions of people were bombed, gassed,
maimed, and disfigured by chemical weapons. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians
and Russians have been killed with American indiscriminate weapons of mass
murder under Biden’s command. He is also the effective commander in chief of
the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and the mass murder of women and
children. Given his political history, a modern restaging of the Nuremberg
trials would certainly include Joe Biden on the docket.
Pardoning
his son clearly reflects his belief, shared with Trump, that presidents and
their families are above the law. Only days after the initial shock at Biden’s
wanton disregard for what the public widely sees as the corruption of his
office and the precedent he has set, leading Democrats began making apologies
for his “just being a dad.” What will the Supreme Court draw from his behavior
when it comes to Trump acting above the law?
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