Three reports published since Iran’s April
13 combined missile and UAV assault on Israel stand out for what the
tell us about the nature of U.S. policy in relation to the war.
First, on Sunday Reuters reported
that Turkey mediated between Iran and the United States to agree on the
size and scope of Iran’s assault on Israel before Iran carried it out. A
Turkish diplomatic source told the news agency that, “Iran informed
Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel…[and]
Washington had conveyed to Tehran via Ankara that any action it took had
to be ‘within certain limits.’”
The Turkish diplomat told Reuters
that the mediation was conducted by Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan
Fidan with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and U.S.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
“Iran informed us in advance of what
would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting
with Blinken, and they [the U.S.] conveyed to Iran through us that this
reaction must be within certain limits,” the official said.
The second story, reported widely by the
U.S. and Israeli media, revealed that the United States is pressuring
Israel to suffice with a “symbolic” counterattack against Iran. In other
words, U.S. President Joe Biden and his team are telling Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and the government that Israel can conduct a bit of a
sound and light show over Iran, but it may not do any meaningful damage
to Iran’s military, missile, nuclear, energy, or regime targets.
Blinken reportedly went so far as to tell Minister Benny Gantz and
Jewish leaders in the United States that it isn’t in Israel’s interests
to attack Iran.
Finally, on Thursday morning, Qatari media
reported that the United States has agreed that Israel may attack
Hamas’s final redoubt in Rafah, along the Egyptian border, but only if
Israel’s strike against Iran is little and mild.
The most startling feature common to all
three stories is the sense that for the administration, everything that
is happening here is a game. It isn’t a war. At best, it’s a playground
fight, or a video game. The reports indicate that as the Americans see
things, Iran and its terror armies in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and
Iraq are children. And they’re ganging up on Israel—another child. It’s
Uncle Sam’s job to be the grownup and set rules for their fight that
give everyone a chance to get his licks in—but only so hard, and only so
many.
The rules Biden and his team have set are
fairly straightforward. Iran and its proxies are permitted to attack
Israel as hard as they can. Israel is allowed to defend against their
attacks. Israel is permitted to carry out limited—preferably
covert—raids to counterattack.
Israel is not allowed to defeat its foes.
Consider the administration’s narrative
about Iran’s April 13 strike on Israel. The U.S. version of events
asserts that Iran attacked Israel in response to the April 1 airstrike
in Damascus, attributed to Israel, which took out Mohammad Reza Zahedi,
Iran’s terror master in Syria and Lebanon. Zahedi was killed along with
six other top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers and Hezbollah
terrorists, including his deputy in an IRGC military compound adjacent
to the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Zahedi was reputedly the mastermind
of Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion and slaughter in Israel that left 1,200
Israelis dead and 246 taken hostage in Gaza.
The problem with the U.S. narrative is
that Israel and Iran are in an active state of war across multiple
battlefields, including Damascus. Zahedi was not merely a legitimate
military target—his role as commander of all Iranian operations in
Lebanon and Syria made killing him an operational imperative. To see the
Iranian strike against Israel as a simple response to a lone attack is
to ignore the fact that a war is raging.
The U.S. narrative also ignores the substance of Iran’s assault on Israel.
Iran
combined missile and drone assault against Israel—which included 300
ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones—was the largest such
assault in the history of war. As retired General Kenneth McKenzie, who
commanded U.S. forces in the Middle East until 2022, explained to The Washington Post,
Iran expended “maximum effort” in amassing the force of drones,
ballistic and cruise missiles with which it attacked Israel. There was
“nothing moderate” about Tehran’s aggression, which he assessed included
most of the missile arsenal that the regime had based in western Iran.
Not only was it unprecedented in scope. It was unprecedented in nature.
Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran
has been waging a proxy war against Israel. The goal of the war is to
annihilate Israel. To this end, Iran encircled Israel with proxy armies
and is nearing completion of its nuclear weapons program, that together
with its missile arsenal will give Iran the capacity to wipe Israel off
the map, as its leaders have consistently promised to do. Given the
goals and actions of Iran and its proxies, it is obvious that Israel’s
counterstrikes are in fact a war for national survival.
The assault last Saturday was a watershed
event because in the midst of the highest intensity proxy war Iran has
ever fought, and as Iran is widely reputed to be a threshold nuclear
power, the mullahs stepped out from behind the curtain for the first
time and attacked Israel directly, and did so with an assault
unprecedented in scope.
The fact that a hundred ballistic missiles
were either duds or fell far short of Israel, and that Israel
intercepted 99 percent of the missiles that got through does not
diminish the scope and breath of the attack.
The question is, why did Iran choose to
attack now? Given the scope, the notion that it was a tit for tat in
response to the Zahedi hit is absurd. You don’t shoot all your available
missiles and drones at your sworn enemy in one night out of pique. You
use the Zahedi strike as a justification to do something you had planned
for a long time.
Iran decided to step out from behind the
curtain for the first time in 45 years and directly enter the high
intensity war it has been waging against Israel for six months through
its proxies because it is confident that it is winning. Israeli weakness
isn’t the source of its confidence. Israel’s brilliance on the
battlefields of this war has made the likes of Hezbollah chief Hassan
Nasrallah stutter. Before the IDF launched its ground operation in Gaza
in November, Nasrallah was certain that his Radwan forces, comprising
veterans of the Iranian wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, were far
better than Israel’s largely untested soldiers. He stopped bragging
months ago.
Iran attacked Israel on Saturday night for
the first time in history because it feels confident that the United
States has its back, not Israel’s back. Iran believes that the United
States is not going to permit Israel to win, and therefore, will enable
Tehran and its proxies to expand their war to annihilate Israel—as Iran
did last Saturday.
Last week, Nasrallah stated this outright.
On April 1, IDF forces in Gaza mistakenly attacked an aid convoy in
Gaza, killing seven foreign aid workers. On April 4, Biden gave
Netanyahu an ultimatum in a phone conversation. The president demanded
that Israel massively expand the resupply of Gaza or lose U.S. support.
Faced with the ultimatum, Netanyahu complied. Massive quantities of good
have been flowing into Gaza ever since, much to Hamas’s delight.
Shortly after this conversation, Hamas rejected the hostage deal offer.
Reacting to the turn of events, Nasrallah
said on April 8, “The recent call from Biden [to Netanyahu] proves…that
if the Americans want to stop something, they can make it stop. The
claim that the Americans cannot force Israel to do something is
nonsense.”
Nasrallah concluded gleefully, “According
to some theories, Israel controls America. No sir. It is America that
controls Israel.”
Since Saturday night, U.S. officials and
supportive commentators have played up the “international coalition”
that came together to prevent Iran’s missiles from causing harm to
Israel. This ad hoc group, which included Jordan and Saudi Arabia, it is
said, are proof that Israel can depend on America and that if Israel
follows Washington’s directives, it will enjoy peace and security even
as Iran grows in power, and its proxies prevail, thanks to America’s
protection.
But the truth is far different. The Saudis
and the Jordanians are directly threatened by Iran. Unlike the children
running U.S. policies, the Jordanians and Saudis were aghast at Iran’s
assault, which they rightly understood was not a tit for tat, but an
unprecedented escalation of Iran’s war. They realized that the attack
was a sign that Iran believes that thanks to the Biden administration,
it is now immune from counterattack, to the point where it dares to
attack Israel directly. Their intervention wasn’t on Israel’s behalf,
per se. It was self-defense, as officials from both countries have
stated.
The U.S. posture in this war has rattled
Israel and the U.S.’s Sunni allies to their core. Like Nasrallah, all of
them now understand that while the United States is the most powerful
actor in the region, it is also delusional. It fails to understand the
reality of what is happening. Washington’s policies for contending with
the war that Biden and his top officials refuse to acknowledge are just
making things worse.
If Israel fails to defeat Hamas in Gaza,
then there will no longer be any restraints on Iranian and Iranian-proxy
aggression against Israel. And there will also be no restraints on
Iran’s efforts to overthrow the regimes of Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. If the United States
successfully forces Israel to stand down in the face of Iran’s shocking
attack, then that attack will be the baseline for future
assaults—conventional and unconventional—against Israel and the Sunni
Arab states.
Iran itself is so certain that this is the
case that its top officials are now speaking openly about using nuclear
weapons. As the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
reported, on April 7, Iranian nuclear scientist Mahmoud Reza Aghamiri
said in an interview with Iranian television that Iranian dictator Ali
Khamenei can change his religious ruling forbidding the production of an
atomic bomb whenever he wishes. Aghamiri said that Iran’s nuclear
capabilities “are high,” and that once a country has nuclear
capabilities, making a nuclear bomb “is not complicated.”
The administration’s refusal to recognize
the existential nature of the war Iran and its proxies are now waging
against Israel places Israel in an existential dilemma.
Israel today is compelled to decide
between two options. It can fight the war to win it, in Iran and Gaza,
first and foremost, and risk a rupture of relations with the United
States.
Or, it can lose the war and accept the
position of a U.S. protectorate, with the full knowledge that the United
States will not permit its protectorates to challenge Iranian hegemony.
In other words, if Israel fails to risk a
rupture in relations with the United States, it will accept a position
that will lead to its destruction.
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