The past 30 days have witnessed tense exchanges of airstrikes between Israel and Iran, beginning with Israel’s alleged bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1. Iran retaliated in a widely telegraphed response designed to minimize human casualties and to provide room for de-escalation. Israel responded similarly with an even smaller second strike, and Iran has stated that it will not return fire from that attack at all. For now, under pressure from the global community to avoid a major war, it appears both parties are consciously pursuing this strategy of managed de-escalation.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten accuses President Biden and the United States of working too closely with Iran throughout all of this. He says that Biden essentially “greenlit” the Iranian airstrike on Israel. Weingarten encourages the United States to take a more hawkish position against Iran instead of attempting to mediate the conflict.
Iran’s unprecedented aerial invasion of Israel, a brazen act of war, was the poisonous fruit of more than a decade of Obama-Biden administration policy to make Iran the Middle East strong horse. To add insult to that injury, there’s compelling evidence the Biden administration is cynically seeking to exploit the jihadist regimes [sic], has sought to further advance its Iran-first agenda, imperiling Israel’s very existence by leveraging the attack to box her. Iran launched hundreds of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at Israel in purported retaliation for a strike on Iranian military leaders in Syria attributed to Israeli leaders, including the IRGC mastermind behind the October 7 attack.
It’s debatable, of course, whether Iran’s attack was retaliatory, given Israel’s strike could come in retaliation for Hamas’s Holocaust-in-a-day that Iran funded and coordinated. But that aside, Iran’s escalation seems oddly to be telegraphed. Subsequent reporting would suggest and made known what was coming to the U.S. through a variety of channels, the Biden administration effectively greenlit the attack by not only distancing itself from the serious strike, but apparently refusing to threaten massive consequences should Iran respond.