J.D. Vance sometimes talks like a non-interventionist, but most of his foreign policy positions don’t match his rhetoric. The other day, he was talking about foreign conflicts and he said, “Sometimes, it is just none of our business and we ought to stay out of it.” That is a reasonable and defensible position, and I agree with it, but that can’t be squared with Vance’s own support for the war in Gaza and his calls for Israel to “finish the job.” If ever there were a time for the U.S. to “stay out of it,” it is when a U.S. client is waging a monstrous war that kills tens of thousands of civilians while they also create a man-made famine.
U.S. weapons and support have been essential to Israel’s military campaign, so it’s not as if we can pretend that the U.S. hasn’t enabled the horrors in Gaza. The only involvement that the U.S. should have here is to use its leverage to press for a lasting ceasefire and to stop the slaughter and starvation. Instead Vance wants to “let them prosecute this war the way they see fit.” Well, this is how the Israeli government has chosen to prosecute the war, according to the account of two American surgeons that went to Gaza to help treat victims of the war:
We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.
One of the surgeons, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, also spoke to CBS News this week about what he had seen:
And the civilian casualties, he said, are almost exclusively children. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said. “I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week… missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there’s sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice.”
“You’re saying that children in Gaza are being shot by snipers?” asked Smith.
“Definitively,” said Dr. Perlmutter.
The U.S. should have no part in such atrocities. Vance believes otherwise.
Supporting this war is profoundly wrong and it is harmful to American interests. It is exactly the sort of war that a principled non-interventionist would denounce and fight to end. Vance doesn’t do that. He has no problem with it and thinks the only problem with Biden’s policy is that it doesn’t provide Israel with enough support. He makes all the same excuses for the Israeli government’s war crimes and crimes against humanity that you would expect to hear from the most zealous hardliners.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
