Given the latest war developments, a hot question in Washington is whether President Biden should stick to his plan to visit Israel immediately.
Here’s a bigger, better question: What’s Biden’s plan for Iran?
Does he have one?
The mad mullahs are pulling the strings in Gaza and Lebanon and there’s an obvious way for Biden to show he understands the game and intends to stop it.
As a first step, the president should re-freeze the $6 billion sweetener he included as part of a recent prisoner swap.
In a flash, that will get Iran’s attention more than anything else he can say or do.
A raging war zone
As for Biden’s planned visit to Israel, there are valid reasons for it, but there are better reasons why he shouldn’t go just now.
Chief among them is that, with Hamas continuing to fire rockets from Gaza, there are no guarantees the president will be safe.
The timing is especially fraught because of Tuesday’s explosion at a Gaza hospital, killing as many as 500 people.
Arabs immediately blamed Israel, but Israel blamed a flawed Hamas rocket launch.
I tend to believe the Israelis because Hamas rockets often land on their own citizens, which they try to distort for propaganda purposes.
But either way, the enormous number of casualties raises the stakes, so why should the president take the risk of stumbling into harm’s way when he doesn’t have to?
Other than a photo op that might give him a political boost at home, it’s not clear what he could achieve there that he couldn’t achieve by a secure Zoom call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Already, Biden’s diplomacy has taken a hit, when the Jordan portion of his visit was canceled. Infuriated by the hospital calamity, Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank leader, said he wouldn’t attend — and the presidents of Egypt and Jordan pulled out as well.
Similarly, his plan to go to Jordan to meet with that nation’s king, the president of Egypt and the West Bank’s Palestinian leader raises more questions than answers.
It, too, could be done remotely, and the fact that no Israelis are invited has a whiff of turning back the clock to the days when Jordan and Egypt were enemies of the Jewish state.
The meeting was thrown into further doubt when Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank leader, said he wouldn’t attend because of the hospital calamity.
Troubled timing
All of which leads to a growing suspicion the president’s decision to travel halfway around the world has an ulterior motive.
The timing suggests it is designed primarily to stall and perhaps prevent Israel from launching its expected ground assault into Gaza.
The assumption is that Biden has failed to get Netanyahu’s agreement to hold off, and so is forcing the issue by showing up on the prime minister’s doorstep.
Look at it this way: the president’s visit effectively froze Israel’s options the moment the decision was made and conveyed to Netanyahu, which probably happened last weekend.
And there can be no ground attack for as long as the president is in the region, and for at least a day or two after he leaves so as not to embarrass him or make it seem as if he okayed an invasion.
At which point, two weeks will have passed since Hamas carried out its fiendish terrorism on Israeli citizens and children and Israel’s response will have been limited to smashing buildings with bombs and rockets.
To be fair, there are two possible good reasons why Biden might want Israel to delay and why Netanyahu might agree.
The first would be that there is progress in secret negotiations to release the hostages Hamas is holding, which may number as many as 200.
An attack would end any chance of a voluntary release and further endanger them, so if there is a chance they could be released soon, it’s worth a brief wait.
A second good reason for delaying the ground assault would be if Washington had a comprehensive strategy for dealing with Hamas and, most important, with its puppeteer and financer in Tehran.
But without any sign that either or both of those two reasons are in play, the logical conclusion is that Biden’s visit aims to tie Israel’s hands without producing any obvious benefit to our ally.
That scenario favors Iran because its malign actions remain unhindered and its proxies remain free to kill Israelis.
Tehran delusion at WH
More galling is that Biden and his advisers continue to pretend they don’t see the elephant in the room.
Their repeated claims that they have seen no “direct evidence” that Iran knew or planned the Hamas attack is a transparent refusal to see an inconvenient truth.
With The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and others reporting on-the-record claims that Iran signed off on the attack, and with common sense underscoring the evidence, the administration’s claim to see nothing rings false.
The only reasonable conclusion is that it has no plan to counter Iran, and so aims to restrain Israel from taking any action that would give the mad mullahs an excuse to open a second front in Lebanon or attack Israel directly.
‘Pre-emptive action’
That prospect appears closer than ever given reports that Iran has threatened “preemptive action” if Israel goes into Gaza.
“Leaders of the Resistance will not allow the Zionist regime to take any action in Gaza,” Iran’s foreign minister said Monday, Fox News reported.
“All options are open, and we cannot be indifferent to the war crimes committed against the people of Gaza.”
He went on to say “The resistance front is capable of waging a long-term war with the enemy” and “in the coming hours, we can expect a preemptive action by the resistance front.”
Keep up with today’s most important news
Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update.
Threats don’t get any more naked, but it’s a card Iran can play anytime it chooses.
If Biden is always going to pull back and demand Israel do as well, Iran will have neutered America and have a free hand to unleash its proxies against Israel.
The pattern is not new, and was well established during the Obama-Biden administration.
Recall that existing sanctions against Iran’s oil industry were lifted as part of the misbegotten nuclear deal, with the mullahs also getting pallets of cash.
Instead of behaving, they used the gusher of money to ramp up their regional aggressions and also cheated on the nuke deal.
Former President Donald Trump correctly saw the problem, withdrew from the nuke scam, re-established sanctions and eliminated the head of Iran’s terror force with a drone strike.
In the height of foolishness, Biden took office looking to undo the Trump way and started immediately to make nice again.
Nearly three years later, he’s proven beyond doubt appeasement doesn’t work with a nation whose leaders are committed to worldwide revolution and domination.
So Biden is now confronted with threats from the very people he’s been trying to bribe and sweet-talk.
But still there’s no sign he realizes how he got here and that his weakness is provoking aggression.
The pattern started with his chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in his first year in office, which helped embolden Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine six months later.
Despite the carnage against our ally, Biden has repeatedly been slow to understand and respond to hostile moves by Putin, as evidenced by his slow-walking of key weaponry to Ukraine.
The stalemate there is now a factor in the Mideast because Israel also needs advanced weaponry, and there have been repeated reports that our industries are not able to keep up with the heightened demand.
Meanwhile, the aggressors feel free to push harder, making serious clashes more likely because the US must increasingly act in ways that show it is determined to push back.
The Hamas terror attack and Iran’s threats fit the model, yet Biden still doesn’t appear to have a strategy or even a short-term plan to deal with either.
Absent those, demanding that Israel hold back increases the likelihood the war will grow larger and more deadly.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/10/17/joe-biden-visits-israel-but-continues-to-remain-silent-on-the-iran-threat/