Joe’s Missing Words
President Biden deserves much praise for another excellent speech Wednesday, vowing in Tel Aviv to stand by Israel and deploring the “pure, unadulterated evil” of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Yet what’s his plan for dealing with Iran, which grows ever more threatening by the day?
“You are not alone,” Biden told suffering Israelis: “As long as the United States stands . . . we’ll not let you ever be alone.”
Hear, hear. It would a monumental betrayal for Washington’s support for Israel, one of America’s closest allies, to waver in its hour of need.
During the Holocaust, the prez recalled, “the world watched” and “did nothing.” “We will not stand by and do nothing again.”
Exactly the words Israelis needed to hear. But Biden has yet to utter a word about Iran’s obvious complicity in the attack. Or respond to its increasingly stark threats.
“If the crimes of the Zionist regime continue, Muslims and resistance forces will become impatient, and no one can stop them,” warned Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“The time has come for the global unity of humanity against this fake regime,” tweeted Foreign Minister Hossein AmirAbdollahian, after falsely claiming Israel had bombed a Gazan hospital. “Time is OVER!”
Make no mistake: The Iranian threat is real. Earlier, Amir-Abollahian warned that militias across the region would open “multiple fronts” against Israel if it continued to pursue Hamas in Gaza.
That plainly includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, an arm of the Iranian regime that’s believed to harbor as many as 150,000 missiles and has already been attacking Israeli military posts in the north and launching rockets into Israel. Plus, Iranian-backed militias and its Revolutionary Guard operate throughout the region; Tehran can call them into action at a moment’s notice.
Biden did issue a warning of his own: “My message to any other state or any other hostile actor thinking about attacking Israel is . . . Don’t.”
Fine. But . . . or what? What’s his response if they do attack?
He warned Russia not to invade Ukraine, too. Yet Vladimir Putin invaded anyway. Biden’s response? Sanctions, which made not a whit of difference to Putin’s actions.
(Yes, Biden then began sending Ukraine arms — but never enough, or the most advanced, plainly because he takes Putin’s threat to go nuclear seriously.)
If Biden truly wants to deter Iran, he needs to say publicly (and mean it!) that any escalation by outsiders will trigger direct US retaliation against whatever proxy gets out of line and perhaps even nuke facilities in Iran itself.
Biden’s words of consolation and commitment to Israel will surely bolster confidence in the Jewish state.
Yet stopping Iran from widening the conflict — by laying out serious consequences if it does — will count for far more.