“World In Shock As Murderous Terrorist State Ignores Warning From Impotent Old Man.”
That was satire site The Babylon Bee’s headline after Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel, despite President Biden’s stern warning to Iran: “Don’t.”
It must be hard to be a satire site, since this administration is largely beyond parody. Iran is, of course, a murderous terrorist state.
And it did ignore Biden’s warning. (As did Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2022.)
Post-attack — going further yet beyond parody — the Biden administration’s chief effort has been aimed at demanding Israel not retaliate.
That’s right. Israel has had more than a thousand of its citizens raped, tortured, murdered and kidnapped, it’s been subjected to a massive missile attack, and it’s being told to exercise “restraint.”
What other country in the world faces this sort of attack and is then told to exercise restraint?
The Biden administration even organized G7 leaders to demand that Israel not respond.
Is this ineptitude, or is it corruption?
As the girl in the taco commercials says, “Why not both?”
The Biden people are certainly unimpressive, to put it mildly.
But there are also self-serving reasons for their policies.
Biden doesn’t want to openly side with Iran, which most Americans — correctly — regard as an enemy of the United States and civilization in general.
On the other hand, Minnesota and swing state Michigan have large numbers of immigrants who chant “Death to Israel” — and sometimes “Death to America” — and Biden needs their votes to win in November. (And they know it.)
What’s more, an Israeli retaliatory strike might well hit Iranian oil-export facilities, which would drive up oil prices, and thus gasoline prices, this summer and hurt Biden’s re-election chances.
So Biden is trying to have it both ways.
He wants to avoid obvious moves that would antagonize Americans who don’t trust Iran, and Jewish donors, while making sure Israel doesn’t make the obvious, logical response to being attacked on its own soil.
It’s not clear this is working.
“In trying to have it both ways Biden got nothing. Now a wider war is inevitable,” national-security pundit Richard Fernandez tweeted. “The failure was from the top. We need a new strategy. The old one is dead.”
Well, this is our own fault — and by “our own,” I mean Biden’s and before that the Obama-Biden administration’s.
In 2009, protests rocked the Iranian government, and it looked like there was a good chance of overthrowing the ruling mullahs in favor of a more liberal, democratic government.
But the Obama administration pointedly failed to back the protesters.
Instead, it chose to pursue a “deal” with Iran in which we gave it money and it gave us a promise not to develop nuclear weapons until it was actually able to do so.
(OK, that’s not quite how the administration phrased it, but that’s what it amounted to.)
Since Biden entered the White House, enacting essentially a third Obama term, US policy has leaned in favor of Iran as well.
It seems pretty clear his team would turn on Israel more harshly if it thought it could get away with it domestically.
Meanwhile, one bright spot is Arab nations for the most part favor Israel over Iran, correctly believing the Israelis don’t want to take over their nations and the Iranians do.
The prospect of a powerful, nuclear-armed Iran does not make its neighbors happy.
Thus countries like Jordan actually shot down Iranian cruise missiles that crossed their airspace on the way to Israel, and some like Saudi Arabia provided Israel intelligence.
This is a big change, cemented by the Trump-era Abraham Accords, which brought together a regional anti-Iran alliance including Israel and Arab nations.
For decades, presidents had promised to bring peace between the two.
Donald Trump actually did it but got surprisingly little credit.
Biden in 2020 claimed that if re-elected, Trump would get us into a war with Iran and destabilize the region.
In fact, under Trump we got involved in no new wars at all, something that cannot be said of Biden.
The truth is our foreign policy is run by people who are — at best and most charitable — incompetent.
We need new leadership. Will we get it?
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
