Tim Kaine sees a parallel between Donald Trump’s boneheaded plan to turn Gaza into a Middle East playground for the rich and famous and the “disastrous decision” made by President Eisenhower in 1954 to get the U.S. involved in France’s colonial war in Vietnam.
And we all remember how that one turned out.
“After the French lost a battle to the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, for some reason, the U.S. decided that we would take over the colonial project in Indochina, and it was a disaster over the course of 20 years for the Americans and Vietnamese, both in lives and talent and treasure,” said Sen. Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a conference call with reporters on Thursday.
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I can see the comparison: because Israel-Gaza is as close to a colonial relationship as you’re going to get in the 21st century.
It was bad enough when you had the Israelis trying to bomb Gaza back to the Stone Age as the official response to the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Now, it’s the U.S. – i.e. “we” – acting as the colonizers, with Trump’s harebrained scheme to, in effect, steal 141 square miles of Gaza, a territory roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C., with a 25-mile strip of Mediterranean coastline, so that it can be redeveloped with hotels and resorts.
To achieve this theft, we would have to relocate Gaza’s 2.1 million residents, and if you haven’t already thought this through, no, it’s not likely that they’re all going to sit back and take having their land stolen from them so that White people can make money without a fight.
Our intelligence estimate puts Hamas at roughly 20,000 fighters worldwide; we follow through with this plain dumb idea of turning Gaza into a playground for White elites, and their recruiting base increases 100-fold.
Go through with this, and rest assured, we’ll be there as long as we were in Vietnam, and it almost certainly will end the same way that one did.
“It would be a massive mistake,” said Kaine, who called Trump’s real-estate development plan “a non-starter.”
“The allies the United States has in the region, we have good, strong alliances with Egypt and Jordan, they both rejected this plan,” Kaine said. “We’ve been trying to get the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel. They pour cold water on the idea. But after mentioning it once, the president has returned to it a number of times.”
Because our president fancies himself a developer.
It’s one thing for him to file for bankruptcy multiple times on failed casino projects.
The cost for the moral bankruptcy of his idiotic Gaza plan could make Vietnam look like a walk in the park.
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Chris Graham
