The Biden Administration’s Pathetic Response to Iran

Joe Biden’s administration is lying to you. It’s treating you, the American people, like children who can’t handle the truth about the seriousness and the gravity of developments in the Middle East.

First, in the aftermath of the October 7 massacres in Israel, the Biden administration bent over backwards to turn a blind eye to any connection between the mullahs in Iran and Hamas’s murderous attack. Next, over the course of much of October, the U.S. government hushed up accurate reporting on the scale and frequency of Iranian-backed militia attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria. Then, as Noah Rothman has detailed, the administration slow-rolled information on the number and severity of American casualties suffered during the near-daily attacks this month.

Last night, after the U.S. finally responded with air strikes against two facilities in eastern Syria used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a statement that was breathtaking in its duplicity. After some initial throat-clearing, Austin’s statement reads:

The United States does not seek conflict and has no intention nor desire to engage in further hostilities, but these Iranian-backed attacks against U.S. forces are unacceptable and must stop. Iran wants to hide its hand and deny its role in these attacks against our forces. We will not let them. If attacks by Iran’s proxies against U.S. forces continue, we will not hesitate to take further necessary measures to protect our people.

These narrowly tailored strikes in self-defense were intended solely to protect and defend U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria. They are separate and distinct from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, and do not constitute a shift in our approach to the Israel-Hamas conflict. We continue to urge all state and non-state entities not to take action that would escalate into a broader regional conflict. [Emphasis mine]

Why include that sentence, which is so clearly untrue?

Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we’d prefer it to be otherwise, for more than three decades, the revolutionary government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been intent on killing Americans whenever and wherever it gets the chance. And the Iranian regime and its proxies have succeeded in killing Americans by the hundreds: in Beirut, in Iraq, and around the world. The Iranians have planned terrorist attacks on American soil. And we have done nothing.

Now, the Biden administration is trying to tell you that the outbreak of attacks on Americans by Iranian-backed and -funded militia groups and proxies is simply a coincidence. It has nothing at all to do with Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas (an Iranian-backed and -funded proxy) and Hezbollah (an Iranian-backed and -funded proxy). Remember: According to Joe Biden’s administration, the attacks on Israel and the attacks on Americans in the Middle East are “separate and distinct from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.”

“Death to America,” Iran says.

“It’s negotiable,” the Biden administration responds.

Why is this happening? Joe Biden’s national-security team is obsessed with renegotiating the Iran nuclear deal begun under the Obama administration. Whatever Iran’s actions to date — and whatever comes next — Biden’s team wants to leave the door open to its dream of a new nuclear deal with Iran. In its thinking, if Americans were fully aware of Iran’s actions, we’d demand a tougher response, and that would scuttle any chance of new negotiations. In short, Joe Biden’s administration doesn’t think you can handle the truth about Iran’s pattern of malign intent and its authorship of the region’s upheavals.

It is treating you like children.