By Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor, The Rocky Mountain Voice
After receiving intelligence reports that Tehran was up to something in response to Israel’s successful strike in Syria that eliminated some top Iranian General’s who were leading Hezbollah units, President Biden publicly told the Iranian’s “Don’t”.
Well, they did. And boy did they fail spectacularly. Of the 110 ballistic missiles, 30 cruise missiles and 170 drones that the Iranian military fired at Israel, virtually none survived to reach their targets. Reportedly a couple landed near an airbase, lamentably injuring a 7-year-old girl, but not even causing a pause in the airbase’s operations.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack with this episode, including the again-demonstrated vacuousness of the Biden Administration’s foreign policy. Nothing particularly stunning or newsworthy about that revelation. What is more remarkable is what it tells us about Iran. Con Coughlin, the brilliant Defense and Foreign Affairs editor for Britain’s The Telegraph, writes that the attacks revealed two things about Iran: the extent of their military weakness, and their true intentions.
“…far from fulfilling the pledge made by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the end of Ramadan last week that Israel must be “punished”, all the drone and missile bombardment has achieved is to expose the fundamental weakness of Iran’s military threat. More than that, the Iranians have demonstrated to the rest of the world their true status as a hostile state that not only sponsors a global network of Islamist terror groups but is intent on waging war against the West and its allies.”
– Con Coughlin
Now, that may not seem like all that much of an epiphany to anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention to affairs in the region since about 1979, but it marks a rather monumental shift in the geopolitics of the Middle East. Until now, Iran has relied on proxies to engage in direct confrontations, like Hamas and Hezbollah. This allowed them, as Coughlin points out, to adopt a veneer of deniability, and maintain a pseudo-distancing from the terrorist activities that constitute the Islamic Republic’s most prolific export after oil. It was a veneer that, as Coughlin put it, “has persuaded naive leaders in the West to engage with the Iranians in the belief that compromise was possible.”
That may have just ended. Iran can no longer deny its belligerent intentions, and it will now be much, much harder for even the most accommodationist Western leader to even pretend to accept, for instance, that the Iranians want uranium for purely peaceful intentions. The West now must come to terms with the fact that Iran is a direct threat, with whom we are at war with, whether we like it or not.
Which brings us back to American policy. Donald Trump’s claim that “the attack would never have happened if he were President” rings of the typical preposterous rodomontade that serves as his own alternative to an effective foreign policy, but the simple fact is that Biden’s almost deliberate weakness was a contributing factor. His demand to the Iranians of “Don’t” was apparently intended to intimidate them into not doing. But intimidation only works if the party one intends to intimidate believes that it is backed up by something more than a steely gaze.
After years of appeasement that has at times seemed almost desperate, the Iranians evidently didn’t believe it was. And why would they think otherwise? For the last several months the Biden Administration has focused more on tut-tutting Israel about “restraint” and threatening to cut off support than on helping in whatever manner necessary to do the one thing that will end the war in Gaza – soundly crush Hamas, occupy the strip, and restore order and the necessities of life.
Well before the missteps of the current administration, Barack Obama ushered in the strategically disastrous nuclear deal. Before that, there was Bill Clinton, whose Iran policy consisted of apologizing to the regime in Tehran for American support of the Shah three decades prior,
while allowing that regime to initiate its nuclear acquisition program, along with North Korea and Pakistan. Jimmy Carter lost his Presidency in part to his ineffectual response to the Revolution which started this whole thing.
Meanwhile, one of the ironies of Iran’s attack was the success of Israel’s defense, the result of weapons systems which Biden spent a considerable part of his long Congressional career opposing. The research necessary to create Israel’s missile shield was permissible only because President George w. Bush rescinded the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which expressly forbade the kinds of anti-missile experimentation that later helped create the Iron dome. Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware the staunchest critic of that recession, and of the ballistic missile defence research it spawned, just has he was among the staunchest critics of Ronald Reagan’s precursor Strategic Defense Initiative a couple decades earlier.
He is now responsible for America’s defense. Like it or not, the civilized world needs to come up with a way forward in dealing with Iran. This will require clear-eyed Western leadership which has been lacking for some time now. Neither Presidential candidate seems particularly up to the task, for vastly different reasons; but they had best learn quickly, because one of them will be President for the next four years, four
years in which neither unmoored braggadocio nor unbacked entreaties of “Don’t” will cut it.