Photograph Source: David Lienemann Public Domain
A flurry of commentary has followed Joe Bidens decision to invoke his presidential privilege in issuing a full and unconditional pardon to his son, Hunter Biden, who faced prison time for filing false tax statements, tax evasion, and carrying an unregistered gun. Leading Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and California Governor Gavin Newsom, came out in opposition to Bidens nepotistic act, and a former Bernie Sanders adviser saw it as a big fuck you to the Democratic Party for forcing him to withdraw from the presidential race.
Commenting in CounterPunch on December 6, Melvin Goodman criticized the hypocrisy of the Democrats who, on the one hand, questioned Bidens moral turpitude and, on the other, failed to point out the presidents major crimes in material, political, and diplomatic support for the Israeli genocide. Goodman, I believe, in correct in this specific critique, but his larger claim about presidents admirable and ethical 50-year political career is quite dubious. Going back to his years in the Senate and as vice president and president, Biden, among his many other acts of bad judgement, has had a long history of being a warmongering chicken hawk defender of US imperial power.
Although he initially held back support for the Gulf War in 1990-1991, he expressed regret for that decision and took hawkish positions on every US invasion thereafter. Even on occasions where he first expressed reservations about US intervention, he always came around to supporting the military option. An extensive research article on Bidens political career found that he backed the constant bombing of Iraq, [promoted] regime change as official policy, and [used] economic sanctions to cripple the country.
Bidens support for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2014 opened up the region for US bombing, ground intervention, massive deaths of civilians, displacement of millions of refugees, and permanent instability. In large part, these attacks were gratuitous acts of support for Israel, cynically arming the forces of ISIS and Al Qaeda, as in Syria, in efforts to bring down the Assad government in Damascus, which finally succeeded on December 8, 2024. The radical Islamic group that claimed victory in Syria, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham is referred to the mainstream media as merely a rebel group, even as the US government still lists it as a terrorist organization. Not a problem, as long as theyre our terrorists.
In support of the 78-day bombing of Syria in 1999, causing the deaths of more than 2,000 civilians, Biden called for a Japanese-German-style occupation of the country, a mindset that points to his predilection for fascist-style reactions (consider Gaza) to perceived enemies. There is nothing inconsistent with his defense of empire and his crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank.
To recognize Israel as an extension of US power in the Middle East is to understand how genocide is just another one of the tools the US has employed against recalcitrant nations and movements. Vietnam was the prime example, but only one in which the mass slaughter of civilians has been a central part of US strategy to break the back of struggles for national liberation.
If George W. Bush is the principal 21st century architect of forever wars in the Middle East, the credit for the disaster in Ukraine and moving the doomsday clock to 90 seconds before midnight (the moment the world ends in nuclear conflagration), the closest its ever been, belongs to Joe Biden. In 2014, as Obamas vice president with the informal portfolio for handling Ukraine, for which he was a super-hawk, Biden helped to design the regime change policy of taking Viktor Yanukovych out of power in Kiev. Unhappy with Yanukovychs ties to Russia, Biden and his main operative, the undersecretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, engineered his ouster with active encouragement and material support for what became the Maidan protests in 2014.
As Ivan Katchanovski has noted, however, the peaceful protests during the Orange Revolution in 2004-2005, which, with direct US involvement denied Yanukovych the presidency, were upgraded in the 2014 Maidan street demonstrations with violent interventions by multiple neo-Nazi organization (Right Sector and Svoboda) snipers that shot protesters and riot police (Berkut) from their positions in nearby buildings and the Hotel Ukraina, turning the plaza into a bloodbath. After the neo-Nazi firebombing of government buildings, Yanukovych was forced to resign and flee from Kiev in February 2014.
Already weeks before, Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine were already hand-picking his replacement, Petro (Chocolate King) Poroshenko, who had been an active informant at the US Embassy. Poroshenko, who would serve as Washingtons puppet president, was aligned with the US-backed Our Ukraine faction in the government. At the same time, Nuland also picked the new neoliberal, pro-EU Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be prime minister.
For his support of Poroshenko as president, Biden, like a traditional mafia boss, expected personal favors in return. One was allowing his son Hunter Biden to serve on the board of the Ukraines largest energy company, Burisma. For this, young Biden, along with an adviser to then secretary of state John Kerry, neither with any experience in Ukraine or in the energy sector, received, according to a congressional report, $1 million per year for doing virtually nothing except as acting as totems for US backing. In fact, Biden junior never even travelled to Ukraine. This was clearly a payoff for the service that Biden senior had delivered in the overthrow of the Yanukovych government and the installation of the coup government, two months earlier.
The only cog in the wheel was that a widely-recognized independent-minded prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was in the process of investigating the crooked Burisma Holdings company and its billionaire owner Mykola Zlochevsky too studiously. In a series of phone calls between vice president Biden and Poroshenko, as documented by a French podcast, Les Crises, Biden clearly bribed the then Ukrainian president into firing Shokin in exchange for receiving a US-backed IMF loan of $1 billion. Indeed, Biden openly bragged about how, like a wild west sheriff, he gave Poroshenko six hours to respond. The mainstream media saw no problem with the vice president consorting with a corrupt oligarch or in playing a proconsul role in US imperial politics.
Bidens imperial outlooks, drawn from Washingtons and the mainstream medias commitments to maintaining US hegemony in the world, has placed him among the worlds leading war criminals, alongside those, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, who led the genocide in Vietnam, where millions of people were bombed, gassed, maimed, and disfigured by chemical weapons. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have been killed with American indiscriminate weapons of mass murder under Bidens command. He is also the effective commander in chief of the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and the mass murder of women and children. Given his political history, a modern restaging of the Nuremberg trials would certainly include Joe Biden on the docket.
Pardoning his son clearly reflects his belief, shared with Trump, that presidents and their families are above the law. Only days after the initial shock at Bidens wanton disregard for what the public widely sees as the corruption of his office and the precedent he has set, leading Democrats began making apologies for his just being a dad. What will the Supreme Court draw from his behavior when it comes to Trump acting above the law?
