The long war that Iran’s rulers and their proxies have been waging against Israel took an unexpected turn last week. Thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon had ditched their cell phones—afraid that the Israelis were tapping them—for low-tech pagers.
But sometime earlier, those beepers had been covertly transformed into miniature bombs that exploded suddenly and simultaneously, killing or incapacitating those Hezbollah operatives.
Few civilians, even those standing near the terrorists, were harmed. Many just looked on in astonishment.
Precision Israeli airstrikes followed, eliminating more than a dozen top Hezbollah leaders.
Two of those leaders had been on America’s “most wanted” list with multimillion-dollar bounties on their heads for truck bombings that killed more than 300 diplomats and military personnel serving on a peace mission in Beirut in 1983.
Nevertheless, it’s become reflexive: Whatever actions Israelis take to deter and perhaps defeat their enemies—who declare without equivocation that Jewish genocide is their war aim—are denounced as unfair and illegal by U.N. officials, bogus human-rights activists and other members of the chattering classes who do not wish Israelis well.
Let me take two paragraphs to remind you how the current battle began.
Last Oct. 8—the day after Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and committed the most horrific atrocities against Jews since World War II and the Holocaust—Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization, began firing thousands of missiles at northern Israel. Among the Israelis killed over the months since were 12 Druze children playing soccer.
More than 60,000 Israelis have been forced to abandon their homes near the border and live as evacuees in their own country.
The Biden administration’s heavy-handed guidance to Israel: Don’t escalate against Hezbollah, Tehran’s foreign legion. Make a deal with Hamas, Tehran’s proxy.
Then on Sept. 12, unnamed Washington officials leaked a new policy that will please Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei: President Joe Biden now plans to withdraw the tiny contingent of American forces, just 2,500 troops, from Iraq by 2026.
“This is the clinical definition of insanity!” remarked my colleague at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery. He was alluding to the quote (often misattributed to Albert Einstein) that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Among the past repetitions he has in mind: In 2011, then-President Barack Obama withdrew all U.S. troops from Iraq, disregarding advisers who urged him to leave in place at least a residual force to suppress terrorists—both those affiliated with Al-Qaeda, as well as those armed and instructed by Khamenei
Obama’s bugout led to the rise of the Islamic State, aka ISIS. Also empowered were the Tehran-backed Shi’ite militias responsible for killing hundreds of American soldiers.
In 2014, Obama had little choice but to send American troops back to Iraq where they engaged in a fierce conflict with ISIS which, by then, was ruling 12 million people in an area the size of Britain. Five years later, during the Trump administration, ISIS was finally evicted from the territories it had conquered.
A small contingent of elite U.S. troops supporting Kurdish, Arab and Syrian Christian partners have remained in Iraq, as well as in Syria, to continue suppressing ISIS, and help contain Khamenei’s forces.
Having not learned from that experience, Biden, just before the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, withdrew U.S. troops (at that point only about 2,500) from Afghanistan where they had been training, assisting and advising the Afghan security forces preventing the Taliban from seizing Kabul and other cities.
During the badly planned and executed retreat, 13 American troops and 170 Afghans were killed by a bomber from the local ISIS franchise.
Yes, Biden had inherited from Trump an ill-advised deal with the Taliban. But the Taliban had been violating its commitments, so the deal should have been scrapped.
The mistake Biden is now in the process of making is akin to a mistake Trump almost made.
In December 2018, Trump announced his intention to withdraw the 2,000 mostly elite U.S. troops then in Syria, who were effectively working with local allies to contain 30,000 ISIS terrorists, keep Syrian oil reserves out of Iranian hands and prevent Khamenei from establishing a land bridge to Lebanon and on to the Mediterranean Sea.
In response, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis submitted his resignation. In the end, Trump decided not to abandon America’s friends and bolster America’s enemies.
If Biden does give Iraq—a country that American blood and treasure liberated from dictator Saddam Hussein—to Khamenei, will that thaw relations between Washington and Tehran?
Consider that Tehran-backed Shi’ite militias have attacked American forces in the Middle East more than 170 times in the past 11 months. Three U.S. soldiers have been killed, and many more injured. American reprisals have been few and far between.
Pushing the United States out of the Middle East would be a great victory for the supreme leader. His Arab neighbors would be left more vulnerable. As for Israel, Khamenei won’t countenance a “two-state solution.” He will continue to pursue what the Nazis called a “final solution.”
His allies in Moscow and Beijing know that if the Americans can be made to pivot away from the Mideast, they also can be chased out of Europe and Asia.
Israelis are not retreating. They are defending their right to exist with resilience, resolve and courage. They are on the front lines in a war against the West. They are latter-day Davids using high-tech slingshots to battle a medieval Goliath.
I think most Americans—by no means, all—understand that fact and are becoming increasingly aware of what it would mean were an axis of Iranian jihadis, Russian imperialists and Chinese Communists to defeat and destroy Israel, and other free nations.
