On the menu today: Despite what a lot of ominous voice-overs during B-roll will tell you, you don’t have to worry about the Middle East spiraling into a regional war. You have to worry that the regional war is already there. The Biden administration desperately wants Israel to declare victory and the conflict to be resolved, which is akin to its belief that the Ukrainians should win the war, but not using any method that might damage Russian oil refineries or roil the world oil markets. Joe Biden is always telling his friends to hold back, at least internationally.
Biden’s Ineffectiveness on the World Stage
On Sunday’s edition of Face the Nation, CBS News correspondent Debora Patta declared of this weekend’s Iranian attack against Israel, “It is the scenario everyone has feared since the October 7 Hamas attack: a state-to-state confrontation that could spiral into a regional war.”
Spiral into a regional war?
By the Israelis’ count, Iran, along with proxies based in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, fired 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles at Israel Saturday. Thankfully, almost none of the projectiles reached their intended targets — although one seven-year-old girl was hospitalized, and the nearby Israeli Nevatim air-force base suffered minor damage.
The defense of Israel involved the IDF, U.S. forces in the region, U.K. Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter jets based out of Cyprus, and Jordanian military forces shooting down drones as they passed through Jordanian airspace.
That sure sounds like a regional war to me.
It was one of the most-predictable, and most-predicted, attacks in recent memory.
On Friday afternoon, wrapping up remarks at the National Action Network — you know, Al Sharpton’s organization — Biden said he expected an Iranian attack on Israel “sooner rather than later”:
Q: Mr. President, what’s your message to Iran?
Q: How imminent is an Iranian attack on Israel?
THE PRESIDENT: I don’t want to say.
Q: How imminent do you think an attack on Israel is from Iran, Mr. President?
THE PRESIDENT: I don’t want to get into secure information, but my expectation is sooner than later. Thank you.
(Cross-talk.)
Q: Mr. President, what is your message to Iran right now?
Q: Mr. President, what is your message to Iran in this moment?
THE PRESIDENT: “Don’t.”
Thank you.
Q: Or else what?
Biden’s habitual warning of “don’t” was ineffective with Vladimir Putin, with the Iranians last fall, with the Houthis, and with the Iranians this week. No doubt, he still believes and tells himself that no one, er, messes with a Biden.
Later Friday afternoon, Biden departed the White House to spend the weekend at one of his houses in Rehoboth Beach, Del. By midday Saturday, Biden had made the trip back to Washington; apparently someone in the president’s team realized it wouldn’t look good for Biden to appear to be enjoying a weekend away at Rehoboth Beach while Israel faced a massive aerial attack launched directly from Iran.
The performances of the Israeli, U.S., British, and Jordanian forces in their air-defense efforts deserve applause. But we should also recognize that the Iranians appear to have equipped their forces with the cheap stuff:
Roughly 50 percent of the ballistic missiles fired by Iran failed to launch or crashed before reaching their target, three U.S. officials said.
U.S. officials said that Iran launched between 115 and 130 ballistic missiles that targeted Israel. When asked for more details about those strikes, the officials acknowledged that only about half of them were intercepted successfully. The rest failed in flight and didn’t reach their targets, the officials said.
“So much for the vaunted ballistic-missile capability of Iran,” said a U.S. official.
An analysis at CNN contends, “Yet it was an operation that seemed designed to fail — when Iran launched its killer drones from its own territory some 1,000 miles away, it was giving Israel hours of advance notice. The symbolism of the attack did the heavy lifting.”
That “operation designed to fail” line is absolute nonsense. The Iranians can take a guess at how effective Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense systems will be, but they’ll never know for certain. The Iron Dome system is consistently described as “ninety percent effective” — which means about 10 percent of missiles could get through and hit their targets. Most of Iran’s ballistic missiles are about the size of a tractor-trailer. Some of their cruise missiles are seven meters long. Most of the Iranian drones are the size of a person. If any one of them, loaded up with explosives, landed in a populated area, you would have an enormous number of casualties.
And even when you successfully shoot down an incoming drone, you end up with debris and shrapnel plummeting to Earth — hopefully nowhere near human beings, but sometimes people are unlucky, like that seven-year-old girl.
Don’t let anyone tell you that the decision to launch 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles is an attack that’s “symbolic.”
By Sunday morning, the Biden team was urging Israel to declare victory and that the fight was over.
Apparently, the idea is that Iran can launch hundreds of missiles at Israel, but it would be unacceptably escalatory for Israel to shoot back at the missile launchers, air-defense systems, and drone bases, or at any part of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.
I was reminded of the Biden administration’s position that the Ukrainians should win their war against Russia, but not in a way that involves bombing Russian oil refineries, lest it raise global oil prices and make gas prices in the U.S. more expensive this summer. The Wall Street Journal editorial board recently scoffed, “So Ukraine has to suffer attacks on its territory, but it can’t hit back at its aggressor?”
It’s not hard to see a recurring pattern emerging. The Biden administration has no influence over the actions of Iran, Hamas, the Houthis, Russia — or for that matter, China, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, or any other hostile actor or state. But it does have some influence over the Israelis, Ukrainians, and other friends and allies. So, all of our efforts to “deescalate” amount to telling our friends to not hit back after they’ve been hit.
Sunday afternoon, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett laid it out plainly:
The US administration is telling us: “This is a victory, you’ve already won by thwarting the missiles. No need for any further action.” No, it’s NOT a victory. Yes, it’s a remarkable success of Israel’s air defense systems, but it’s not a victory. When a bully tries to hit you 350 times and only succeeds seven time, you’ve NOT won. You don’t win wars just by intercepting your enemy’s hits, nor do you deter it. Your enemy will just try harder with more and better weapons and methods next time. How DO you deter? By exacting a deeply painful price.
The Iranians are upset because on April 1, an Israeli airstrike hit a building next to Iran’s embassy in the Syrian capital of Damascus. That airstrike killed senior members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi. Because if there’s anything history has taught us, it’s that the mullahs’ regime in Iran believes in the sanctity of diplomatic facilities, right? If the Iranians want to complain, tell them to mail a letter to our embassy in Tehran.
The Iranians apparently believed that they could run operations out of the diplomatic compound, and the Israelis would never, ever strike there because it was an embassy.
What we have is a U.S. president and an administration who are more or less begging the rest of the world to just calm down and be quiet between now and November. Winning a second term on “Bidenomics” is going to be a hard sell, and banging the drum on abortion and Trump can only take Biden so far. After a year of strutting around the stage and boasting that “America is back,” overseas chaos has been Biden’s brand.
Alas, the geopolitical world is just not interested in ensuring that a particular octogenarian gets to enjoy quiet weekends at Rehoboth Beach.
ADDENDUM: President Biden, tried to defend his record on inflation last week, saying “We’re in a situation where we’re better situated than we were when we took office where we — inflation was skyrocketing.”
Absolute horse-pucky; President Biden is counting on everyone else in America having as poor a memory as he does.
The inflation rate — the Consumer Price Index, measuring prices from one year to the next — was 1.4 percent in January 2021. It was 1.2 percent the month before in December 2020, 1.4 percent in November 2020, 1.2 percent in October 2020, and 1.2 percent in September 2020. You could find a lot to complain about in American life in the second half of 2020, from the pandemic to schools remaining closed, to arguments about wearing masks, to rising crime. But inflation was not one of the problems in American life as that horrible year came to an end.