Two wild post-Gaza invasion stories from Team WIN THE MORNING this week, first, that the US Senate is looking at a peacekeeping force in Gaza "after it falls".
Talks are underway to establish a multinational force in Gaza after Israel uproots Hamas, two senators confirmed Wednesday, the clearest sign yet that the U.S. and its partners are seriously weighing deploying foreign troops to the enclave.
Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told POLITICO that there’s early, closed-door diplomacy over establishing a peacekeeping force in Gaza, though it was not likely to include American troops.
“There are ongoing conversations regarding the possible composition of an international force,” Van Hollen said, refusing to go into specific detail. “They are very preliminary and fragile.”
“I do think it’d be important to have some kind of multinational force in Gaza as a transition to whatever comes next,” he continued.
Hamas, the militant group that killed 1,4000 people in Israel on Oct. 7, has ruled Gaza for more than 15 years. Israel launched a retaliatory military operation after the attack to end Hamas’ rule, including a massive bombing campaign, ground invasion and siege that has killed more than 8,000 people.
The National Security Council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bloomberg News first reported that the United States and Israel were in discussions about establishing a peacekeeping force to maintain order in the enclave. In a statement to Bloomberg, NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson denied that “sending U.S. troops” to be part of the coalition was under discussion.
Blumenthal said the congressional delegation that he traveled with to Israel last month discussed the possibility of having Saudi Arabian troops in the force. He noted, however, that he hadn’t heard of U.S. troops heading to Gaza as part of the deliberations.
“There certainly has been discussion with the Saudi about their being part of some international peacekeeping force if only to provide resources, and, longer term, supporting Palestinian leadership and a separate state, obviously. Reconstruction of Gaza will require a vast amount of resources, which the Saudis potentially could help provide,” he said.
“I’m not sure how active the conversation is about U.S. troops,” Blumenthal continued. “I would think that maybe an international force could be mustered without U.S. troops.”
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who traveled to the Middle East with Blumenthal, said lawmakers discussed with Israeli officials how aid and security would be administered in Gaza after the war. He said he favored the idea of a multinational force, but said sensitivities in the region to U.S. troops would prevent them from being a major part of any such force.
“It’s got to be credible, it’s got to provide security, and it has to involve the surrounding states that believe in a two-state solution,” Cardin said.
I can't believe for a moment that there would be any GOP support for a single US soldier as part of said Gaza peacekeeping force, especially in an election year. If the Bonesaw Boys in Riyadh want to handle it, well, we've certainly provided enough weapons to the House of Saud for a force, but all of this seems...pretty damn grim, even for the pragmatism of Senate Dems.
On the other hand, that brings us to story two, where the White House doesn't seem to think Netanyahu is going to survive politically anyway, and they're probably right.
Joe Biden and top aides have discussed the likelihood that Benjamin Netanyahu’s political days are numbered — and the president has conveyed that sentiment to the Israeli prime minister in a recent conversation.
The topic of Netanyahu’s short political shelf life has come up in recent White House meetings involving Biden, according to two senior administration officials. That has included discussions that have taken place since Biden’s trip to Israel, where he met with Netanyahu.
Biden has gone so far as to suggest to Netanyahu that he should think about lessons he would share with his eventual successor, the two administration officials added.
A current U.S. official and a former U.S. official both confirmed that the administration believes Netanyahu has limited time left in office. The current official said the expectation internally was that the Israeli PM would likely last a matter of months, or at least until the early fighting phase of Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip was over, though all four officials noted the sheer unpredictability of Israeli politics.
“There’s going to have to be a reckoning within Israeli society about what happened,” said the official who, like others, was granted anonymity to detail private conversations. “Ultimately, the buck stops on the prime minister’s desk.”
The administration’s dimming view of Netanyahu’s political future comes as the president and his foreign policy team try to work with, and diplomatically steer, the Israeli leader as his country pursues a complicated and bloody confrontation with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza and attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
This of course all depends on how the Gaza ground invasion goes. If things get as bad as I think they will, the backlash could end Netanyahu's war government quickly.
But if the US gets sucked into Yet Another Middle East Quagmire™ all bets are off, and it's not Netanyahu's political shelf life we'll be talking about, but Biden's.
Luckily Biden is smarter than that, and so are the people surrounding him on foreign policy. Biden's decades of foreign policy experience in the Senate is exactly what we need now.
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