Will the Biden Administration listen or will we have more wars—maybe nuclear?
On Tuesday, January 3, 204, a small group waved signs on Honolulu’s busy Beretania Street in front of the Hawaii State Capitol to commemorate the sixth year since the citizens of Hawaii were informed by text messages that there was an incoming nuclear missile. The phone alert said, “This is not a practice.” People in Hawaii dived into man-holes on the street, headed into their homes or into other places like caves. 20 minutes later, the State of Hawaii Emergency Management System issued an apology for a systems operator pushing the wrong button.But the drill made real to the people of Hawaii how close our world is to a nuclear attack.I don’t want to take the focus from the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Gaza…but in Asia and parts of the Middle East, the Biden administration is doing equally dangerous actions as is the support of Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The Biden administration is ignoring warnings and red lines from China, North Korea, Iran and Lebanon just as the administration blew off warnings from Russia about US military war games on its borders and the invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, red lines that Russia warned the U.S. about for decades.
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China has admonished the U.S. that Taiwan is a part of China, as the Biden administration continues down its warpath begun by the Obama and Trump administrations. The “One China” policy initiated by the Nixon administration 40 years ago has been torpedoed by relentless military weapons sales and visits of senior State and military U.S. officials to Taiwan. The Chinese response to each visit of these officials to Taiwan is an armada of 40+ Chinese jet fighters flying very close to the air defense zone of Taiwan. The Chinese consider the South China Sea as their “front yard,” while the U.S. considers the entire Pacific Ocean as its “back yard.”
Again, this week, the North Korea government warned South Korea and the U.S. to end their war practice along the DMZ with North Korea. The North Korean government was particularly upset over the war drills calling for the “decapitation” of the leader of North Korea, Kim Jung Un, an overt call for the assassination of the country’s leader.
In the Middle East, the Biden administration knew that the Israeli drone strike in Beirut, Lebanon, on January 3, 2024 that killed a part of the leadership of Hamas would not go unanswered. The U.S. knew that Hezbollah had said that if any Hamas leaders were killed by Israel while the leaders were in Lebanon, there would be retaliation. Yet the Biden administration either gave Israel the green light to conduct the assassination or turned a blind-eye to the shared intelligence about the planned assassination.
The apparent ISIS attack rather than a probable Israeli drone strike on January 3, 2024, which killed 103 and wounded 141 at a commemoration of Iranian General Soleimani underscores another hot spot in the Middle East. Soleimani was assassinated four years ago by a Trump drone strike on the Iranian general who was in Iraq helping the Iraqi government battle ISIS. As the Biden administration well knows should it give the green light for Israeli drones to attack Iranian installations, this drone strike would not go unanswered by Iran.
The Biden administration has not listened to members of its own government officials, another of whom resigned January 3, 2024, much less the 70 % of the American people who urge the U.S. to put pressure on the Israeli government to stop its genocide of Gaza.
The Biden administration is playing with fire–and with the threat of the use of nuclear weapons–in its dangerous policies on Gaza, the Middle East and Northeast Asia.
Diplomacy and dialogue on issues in these regions must prevail.
Threats of war mongering must end.
It is up to us as citizens to save ourselves and our planet from nuclear extinction from inexplicable political decisions by our “leaders.”
CEASEFIRE NOW–EVERYWHERE!
Ann Wright is a 29-year U.S. Army/Army Reserves veteran, a retired U.S. Army colonel and retired U.S. State Department official, known for her outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. She is a member of the Veterans For Peace Advisory Board. She received the State Department Award for Heroism in 1997, after helping to evacuate several thousand people during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She is most noted for having been one of three State Department officials to publicly resign in direct protest of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Wright was also a passenger on the Challenger 1, which along with the Mavi Marmara, was part of the 2010 Gaza flotilla. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book Dissent: Voices of Conscience. She has written frequently on rape in the military.
