Biden’s Weak Response to Iran in Syria

National Review Online

Friday, November 10, 2023

 

Iranian proxies aren’t relenting in their campaign to kill Americans in the Middle East. If President Biden truly has any interest in shutting down the attacks, he has a strange way of showing it — because his response thus far has been to invite more strikes by Tehran’s friends.

 

Wednesday night, Biden ordered what is only the second retaliatory strike since Iranian proxies began a relentless drumbeat of attacks on U.S. troops and bases in the aftermath of October 7. U.S. forces struck a Syrian facility where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force is believed to have stashed weapons that Iranian-backed terrorists are using against American targets.

 

At least 46 Americans have been injured in the more than 40 strikes carried out by Iran’s proxies in recent weeks. But the White House reportedly waited to launch Wednesday night’s retaliation until IRGC personnel had left the facility to avoid hitting Iranian fighters or their partners from other groups.

 

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports, U.S. officials know where many of the proxy group’s leaders are and have spent the past two weeks debating the potential consequences of any attacks to take them out.

 

It seems only a matter of time, though, before such leaders order strikes that end up killing Americans. Between another set of pinprick strikes that the White House ordered two weeks ago and the latest strikes, Iran-backed groups have only loaded more explosives onto the drones with which they’re hitting American targets, officials told the Times. It’s only good fortune that Americans haven’t already died in Tehran’s proxy-war offensive.

 

Biden and his team have sounded obligatory, but wan, warnings against continuing the attacks against Americans. The president warned late last month, “We will respond.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has directly implicated the Iranian regime, saying that it “wants to hide its hand and deny its role in these attacks against our forces. We will not let them.”

 

About that much, Austin is correct. The U.S. should not let Iran obscure its direct role in these operations. But by ordering pinprick retaliatory measures that are so severely limited that there’s not even a possibility of hitting personnel from Iran’s proxy forces, Team Biden is letting the ayatollah get away with thinly veiled aggression.

 

To reestablish deterrence, Biden need look no further than what his predecessor did in 2020, after he ordered the killing of Quds Force general Qasem Soleimani, an act that sent shock waves across the Middle East.

 

Biden’s warnings aren’t breaking through because the Iranians simply don’t believe them. This is the president who spent his first year in office delaying missile tests so as not to provoke Russia, and who couldn’t bring himself to kill a malign Russian pipeline project that would have put a noose around Ukraine’s stability and security. (Everyone knows what happened next.)

 

He’s the president who failed to respond forcefully to Iran’s pre-October 7 proxy attacks — and to Iran’s plots to assassinate former senior U.S. officials and journalists. And the president who was more preoccupied with sending aid to Palestinians that almost certainly got diverted to Hamas, and with unwinding Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign, than squeezing Iranian terrorists.

 

President Biden’s messages to the regime are best delivered via airmail — but evidently no one is receiving them, because the missiles are landing when they’re not home.