Something is different. Perhaps it's the directness of Israel's threatened response to Iran's missile salvo on Tuesday. “This is a grave violation,” the Israel Defense Forces spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, told reporters Tuesday evening.“This attack will have repercussions. We have plans, and we will act at the time and place of our choosing.”
An unidentified official told Kan News that the Israeli response will be “unlike anything we’ve known until now. " Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a videotaped message to the people of Iran that an Iranian attack would trigger a strike on “strategic” targets inside Iran.
"Strategic targets" is a not very subtle hint that Israel could attack Iran's nuclear infrastructure. “I think Israel is in a risk-ready mood, so yes, I think it’s possible,” the policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran, Jason Brodsky, tells the Sun.
Taking out the heads of Hamas and Hezbollah couldn't get much riskier. Blowing up several thousand Hezbollah fighters by offering them exploding pagers and walkie-talkies takes risk-taking to a whole other level. If Netanyahu wanted a war with Iran, he went about it exactly the right way.
By ordering all these attacks, Netanyahu was baiting Iran to do exactly as it did on Tuesday: launch an ultimately unproductive missile barrage that exposed its weakness for its allies and foes to see. Now the Israeli prime minister is free to remove the biggest threat to Israel's existence: Iran.
All that's standing in his way is an 81-year-old enfeebled American president. Joe Biden's delusional concept of what constitutes security for Israel doesn't jibe with that of the Israeli prime minister. Biden sees a role Iran can play in his brave new world order. That's why he keeps dealing with it. That's why he refused to attack its nuclear infrastructure despite it being months away from being able to deploy a nuclear weapon. And that's why he keeps attacking its proxies instead of going after the head of the snake.
PJ Media's Steve Green recently wrote, "Sometimes, if you want peace, you've got to keep blowing up the bad guys until the survivors cry uncle or you run out of bad guys. The question for Israel now is how far up the bad guys' food chain do they want to go?
The question for the U.S. is: Are we going to let Israel win the war that Iran started? There's plenty of reason to doubt that this is what Biden wants.
A few months into Israel’s war in Gaza, the Biden administration began to get cold feet. In December, a little over a week into Israel’s ground offensive into Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken began to warn that Israel was not doing enough to protect civilians who were deliberately placed in between Israeli forces and the Hamas fighters hiding in the tunnels below.
The pressure was ramped up ahead of Biden’s last State of the Union address, in which he used casualty statistics from the Hamas-run health ministry, only a few months after he said he didn’t trust those statistics. In May, Biden publicly threatened to withhold delivery of heavy bombs to Israel if it went ahead with an operation to clear Hamas from its remaining stronghold in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. In March, Harris told ABC News that she had studied maps of Rafah, and there was nowhere for civilians to escape if Israel went in.
"We have Israel's back," Biden said shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas. That's proven to be an empty promise. At almost every turn of the screws, Washington ordered Israel to restrain itself. Biden was trying to prevent a wider war from breaking out. Unfortunately, no one restrained Iran.
Iran's use of proxies to do its dirty work finally got to be too much for the Israelis. It was already systematically dismantling the threat from Hamas when it took off after Hezbollah. Severely weakened by the pager attack, the Party of God turned to its patrone Iran, which had no response to the Israeli onslaught. Even when Israel killed Hezbollah's long-time leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iran hesitated. Eventually, it felt it had no choice but to risk hellfire and launch its missiles against Israel.
That attack on Israel may have forced Biden to reluctantly take the handcuffs off of Israel and allow it free reign to destroy the Iranian threat.
And this brings things back to the American policy of restraining Israel. One can never get into the minds of the madmen who run Iran, but it’s quite possible the mullahs believed that America would continue to restrain Israel to deescalate the regional conflict that Iran—through its proxies—initiated nearly a year ago.
But what does it tell us about what comes next? Thus far, the Biden administration is playing its cards close to the vest. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that he and the president were consulting with Israel on how to respond to the Iranian attack. He gave no specifics, but said one of the factors would be to “promote stability to the maximum extent possible as we go forward.”
If Sullivan means that the U.S. will continue its policy of hoping to deter Iran by restraining Israel, then he is inviting further Iranian escalation. With two of Iran’s proxies—Hamas and Hezbollah—reeling, now is not the time to return the Middle East to an inherently unstable status quo. Real stability demands the ending of Iran’s nuclear blackmail of the region.
It would be in the interests of the United States as well as Israel to end the mullahs' dreams of a nuclear Iran. As Israel showed with the strike that killed Hassan Nasrallah, the U.S.-made 2,000 lb "Bunker Buster" bombs work well. Nasrallah was 65 feet below street level when the roof literally fell in on him.
The Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Bushehr, and Fordow and the military base at Parchin are all hardened and underground. But if the IDF can take out a hardened bunker 65 feet below street level, it has probably figured out how to breach Iran's hardened facilities that are the beating heart of its nuclear program.
Biden doesn't want a regional war in the Middle East. No sane person does. Would Russia or China come to Iran's aid if Israel attacked? Possibly but unlikely. The Arab states would condemn Israel but would be dancing jigs in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Iraq, Syria, and some terrorist groups might make noises about joining Iran, but those armies are a shadow of their former selves.
Iran is basically alone. And for Israel, there would never be a better time in our lifetimes to strike and strike hard.
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