National Review Online
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on
Tuesday, setting off sirens across the entire country and driving its 10
million citizens into bomb shelters.
Fortunately, due to the incredible work of the IDF’s
anti-missile systems as well as help from the U.S. Navy, most of the missiles
were intercepted — or they landed in areas where they did not kill civilians.
As of this writing, one Palestinian in the West Bank was killed and two
Israelis were injured in falling shrapnel. Video also showed large craters near
Tel Aviv and severe damage to a school in central Israel (luckily, the attack
came when school was out of session).
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised a severe
response that will make Iran pay a price — as it should.
As we await the Israeli reaction and its implications for
the region, it’s worth emphasizing that Tuesday’s attack is the latest example
of the failed policy of appeasing Iran that has been a fixture of Democratic
administrations dating back to Barack Obama.
When President Obama took office in 2009, he pursued a
strategy that attempted to reorient United States policy in the Middle East.
The U.S. was too reflexively pro-Israel, he argued, and only by showing more
“daylight” could America earn the respect of the Arab states. At the same time,
he wanted to move away from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and pursue warmer
relations with Iran, deluded into thinking that doing so would usher in more
moderation despite the fact that the regime was founded on Islamic fanaticism,
has one of the worst human-rights records in the world, and is the leading
sponsor of state terrorism.
To grease the wheels of diplomacy, Obama turned a blind
eye to the malign behavior of Iran and its terrorist proxies. Its efforts to
downplay Iran’s destabilizing effect on the region culminated in a disastrous
nuclear deal that provided tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief to
the regime, allowed it to pursue ballistic-missile development, and left it on
a long-term glide path toward nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump wisely tore up the nuclear deal and
ratcheted up sanctions, delivering a crushing economic blow to the terror
state. But President Biden and Kamala Harris brought back many of the same
advisers responsible for the Obama catastrophe. In hopes of resurrecting the
deal, the Biden-Harris administration once again gave billions in sanctions
relief to Iran and once again downplayed its bad behavior. In the process, they
removed all deterrence, and Iran felt a free hand to pursue its evil designs and
replenish its terror subsidiaries.
To Israel’s south, Hamas was rebuilt and emboldened to
orchestrate the October 7 attacks; to its north, Hezbollah has fired thousands
of rockets at Israel, making the top part of the country uninhabitable to
80,000 residents who were forced to flee; in Yemen, Houthis have fired with
little restraint at ships traveling through an economically significant section
of the Red Sea (and the rebels have taken credit for downing multiple
American-made Reaper drones).
At every escalation by Iran, the response by the
Biden-Harris administration has been to show weakness. Sure, the administration
has held that its support for Israel’s defense is “ironclad,” and it has now
for the second time helped Israel avoid a mass-casualty event. But it has
failed to recognize that defensive measures against Iran can only go so far
when they aren’t accompanied by a strong offensive response to reestablish
deterrence. Instead, Biden has repeatedly told Israel to stand down, to de-escalate,
to “take a win,” out of a desperate hope of avoiding a broader war that could
imperil Democratic hopes of retaining the White House. This strategy of
weakness has only brought the region closer to the war he is trying to avoid.
This time, the response to Iranian aggression must be
different. For the second time in five months, Iran has fired hundreds of
projectiles at Israel. Thanks to the gains the regime is believed to have made
in uranium enrichment under the Biden-Harris administration, there is simply no
way Israel can take the chance that the next time Iran launches such an attack,
some of the missiles could be loaded with nuclear warheads.
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