The terrorist Iranian regime’s recent unprecedented attack on Israel, which involved 185 drones, 36 cruise missiles, and 110 surface-to-surface missiles, constitutes a clear act of belligerence, an act of war, under international law. be.
Of course, Iranian proxies across the Middle East, including Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Yemen-based Houthis, have committed countless acts of war against Israel. I’ve been there. However, last weekend was completely different. For the first time since fanatical Islamists overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and took power in 1979, Iran launched such an attack directly from its own soil.
The regime’s attack on the Jewish state has become abundantly clear, a tactical failure in which 99% of Iran’s various projectiles were successfully intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces and the US-led multinational coalition. No one can deny the role of the Iranian regime as the “head of the snake” in the Middle East turmoil. Nor can anyone now deny the regime’s genocidal intentions. It turns out that when they shout “death to Israel” in the streets of Tehran, they mean it. (Incidentally, they are also chanting “Death to America.”)
The obvious question: How? Iran drops hundreds of offensive weapons from its own territory against other sovereign states, especially those that are closely aligned with the United States and interconnected with the broader Western order. How did we get to a place where we can be so bold and not fear any repercussions? ?
The answer is both troubling and obvious. The Middle East “realignment” relentlessly pursued by President Joe Biden and his predecessor Barack Obama has led us here. Under Obama and Biden’s foreign policy principles, it is a feature, not a bug, that Iran has become so emboldened that it feels comfortable waging an aggressive war against Israel in such brazen fashion.
Immersed in pseudo-academic theories such as post-colonialism and surrounded by left-wing ideologues who blame America and Western civilization for global collective sins, Obama sought to redraw the map of the Middle East. On the one hand, he sought to thwart Israel, the region’s only outpost of Western civilization, and America’s traditional Sunni Arab allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. On the other hand, he supported the political Islam of these countries’ natural enemies, Iran, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The apotheosis of Obama and Biden’s Middle East “realignment” was 2015’s horrifying Iran nuclear deal, a celestial sprinkling of irony by failed novelist-turned-Obama White House parachute Ben Rhodes. It was filtered through an “echo chamber” to a skeptical American public. PR campaign. In 2016, President Obama secretly delivered $400 million worth of cash to the mullahs in wooden pallets on the same day the nuclear deal went into effect. Most recently, the Biden administration offered a whopping $6 billion in return for five Americans who were illegally detained just weeks before the October 7 Iranian-led Hamas pogrom. They agreed to contribute. And just last month, Biden approved $10 billion in new sanctions waivers. For Iran.
There are countless other examples. But it’s all in service of the Obama-Biden principles of punishing America’s allies and rewarding its enemies in the Middle East.
Just as bad, the Iranian regime has also demonstrated its ability to penetrate and exploit America’s corridors of power. Last September, Semaphore scooped emails revealing an Iranian regime-backed intelligence operation attempting to influence senior government agencies, think tanks, and academic institutions. US Institutions Who is at the center of it all? Robert Malley was President Obama’s chief negotiator on the 2015 nuclear deal and is Biden’s now-suspended special envoy for Iran. Most recently, Iranian journalist Vahid Beheshti revealed this week that the Iranian regime was complicit in orchestrating Monday’s anarchic and devastating pro-Hamas “demonstrations” by the US Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Surprising internal documents revealed.
The Trump administration was something of a gap between two “realignment” presidential administrations, pursuing diametrically opposed policies of punishing America’s enemies and rewarding its friends. That was the basic logic, and the results were historic. New peace agreements have been signed between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco under the umbrella of the Abraham Accords. It turns out that the obvious is often the best.
The Hamas pogrom and the ensuing war in Gaza were the first real test for this agreement and the coalition to contain Iran that it represents. Importantly, none of the Arab signatories have severed ties with Israel. More notably, Saudi Arabia, which is not part of the deal, acknowledged on Monday that it supported the U.S.-led coalition that thwarted Iran’s weekend attack.
All of this pays tribute to the statesmanship of former President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in getting the deal to the finish line. And it’s also a glimmer of hope that more peace and less Obama-Biden foolishness in emboldening Iran may be just around the corner.
To learn more about Josh Hammer and read features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website. www.creators.com.
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