As President Biden tries to decide how to handle the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, what do you think is the factor weighing most on his mind? Answer: Tuesday, November 5.
That is the day the United States holds presidential elections to determine whether Biden – or his Republican opponent, Donald Trump – will control the White House. And it appears to be very close, meaning that under America’s electoral college system, everything could rest on just thousands of votes in a handful of swing states.
Two of those nail-biters are Michigan and Pennsylvania, which have relatively large numbers of Muslim voters – voters who would normally be expected to vote for the Democratic candidate.
But if thousands of these voters, angry about the situation in Gaza, stay home, it could cost Biden the White House.
Risk
So it would be naive to think that this has nothing to do with Biden’s decision last week to cancel the promised delivery of Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) to Israel.
This was ostensibly because President Netanyahu’s expansion of his campaign to include the bombing of Rafah would endanger the lives of an unscrupulous number of Palestinians.
It made headlines the way Biden would have wanted. Yet it could cause the deaths of more innocents in Gaza. JDAMs are guidance kits that convert ‘dumb bombs’ into precisely guided ‘smart bombs’, allowing the user to avoid what is euphemistically called ‘collateral damage’.
US President Joe Biden responds to questions from reporters as he leaves St. Edmond’s Roman Catholic Church in Rehoboth Beach after attending Mass on Sunday
However, in terms of electoral effect in Michigan and Pennsylvania, President Biden, as some have noted, sees a “two-state solution” that has nothing to do with the future of the Middle East.
As bitter and all-consuming as this issue is for some of the American public (especially younger voters), ultimately, as former US Speaker Tip O’Neill said: All politics is local. And few of those purely domestic considerations count more in America than the cost of refueling your car. In other words, the price of gasoline.
This explains the otherwise inexplicable in terms of the pressure the Biden administration has put on Ukraine to stop its highly successful drone attacks on oil refineries and storage facilities in Russia.
Strategy
Last month, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Ukraine that “those attacks could have a domino effect on the global energy situation.” This so pleased the Putin regime that it promoted Austin’s comments through the Tass news agency.
As American military historian Phillips O’Brien noted, ‘It is difficult to think of anything stranger that an American Secretary of Defense could say. [But] in a sense it was fair, in that Austin admitted that the US government’s policies in an election year were determined by the price of oil.”
As he also noted, attacking the enemy’s oil facilities was an essential part of its strategy whenever the US itself conducted military campaigns, not least during the Second World War. This certainly applies to the course of the Russian campaign against Ukraine, which has consistently focused on energy infrastructure.
Smoke rises after an explosion in northern Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, pictured on May 12, 2024
The Financial Times, which in March revealed the pressure Washington was putting on Ukraine to stop its attacks on Russian refineries, went on to note that “oil prices have risen by about 15 percent this year, pushing up fuel costs as the U.S. president Joe Biden starts. his campaign for re-election’.
Bob McNally, a former White House energy adviser, told the newspaper: “Nothing frightens a sitting American president more than a rise in pump prices during an election year.”
Yes, but there is something particularly absurd in complaining about Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil industry, while Kiev is doing exactly what Western sanctions policy was supposed to achieve but failed to do.
Increase
And just as blocking the supply of JDAMs to the Israeli military could only achieve the opposite of its purported justification, the Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries are not in fact the reason for a global increase in oil prices.
As the US magazine Foreign Affairs noted: ‘Washington’s criticism is misplaced: attacks on oil refineries will not have the effect US officials fear.
“These strikes reduce Russia’s ability to convert its oil into useful products; they have no influence on the amount of oil the country can extract or export. In effect, with less domestic refining capacity, Russia will be forced to export more of its crude, not less, causing global prices to fall rather than rise.”
So not only do Biden’s election-based decisions in Gaza and Ukraine run counter to the interests of countries the US labels as allies in the war, they also don’t make sense on their own terms.
They certainly don’t impress America’s allies, while they only please their enemies.
AFTER PRICE TOAST, BEWARE OF RIP-OFF TEA…
A scandal! That’s what locals in Port Talbot say about the prices charged at Remo’s cafe, with stunning views of Aberavon beach. As the Mail reported on Saturday, the charge that most outraged visitors was the £4 for ‘two slices of toast’.
I believe that the manager, Mr. Difrancesco, should be able to ask whatever he wants, since no one is obliged to have breakfast at Remo.
I did find his justification strange: “We only serve hand-cut slices of fresh bread from a local bakery, toasted and buttered with real salted butter.”
What, unlike unreal salted butter? And as any chef will tell you, the freshest butter is generally unsalted, because the salt is used as a preservative. This is one of the reasons why salted butter is often cheaper (easier for supermarkets to store for longer periods of time). Additionally, the salt can mask the taste of lower-quality butter.
The Mail also reported that a cup of tea at the South Wales cafe costs £3.10. I wonder if this includes Earl Gray, because as a so-called premium product it is a time-honored rip-off.
I learned this from my grandfather, a tea merchant, who told me that the best tea came from the tops of the leaves. The lower in the plant, the lower the quality.
To disguise the tastelessness of the lowest quality tea, one trick was to add bergamot flavoring. That’s your Earl Grey, the fancy name designed to trick consumers into thinking it’s a superior brew.
And my grandfather thought tea bags (as opposed to leaves) were an abomination: not real tea at all. I bet you don’t get real tea at Remo besides ‘toast buttered with real salted butter’.