Win the battle, lose the war.
On April 1, Israel did the civilized world a favor by hitting an Iranian terrorist conclave in Damascus, Syria. The Iranian regime threatened to rain fire on Israel. “Don’t,” was President Joe Biden’s public message to Iran on April 13. Just hours later, Iran fired one of the largest, if not the largest, combined barrage of drones and missiles anyone has yet launched.
“Do” was the private message from Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken — just don’t do it too much. After the attack, a Turkish intermediary told Reuters that the Biden administration had requested that Iran’s assault should be “within certain limits” to avoid further escalation. Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, claimed that the Iranian regime had informed the U.S. that its attack would be “limited.” According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Iranian officials “briefed counterparts from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries on the outlines and timing of their plan.”
While the Biden administration was stage-managing an Iranian attack on the United States’s only reliable and capable ally between the English Channel and the Himalayas, it was also organizing the defense. American, British, French, and Jordanian forces helped the Israelis to parry the Iranian attack. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates supplied advance intelligence. The result was that hardly any of the more than 300 missiles struck Israeli soil. Those that did dinged a military air base and severely wounded a 7-year-old Bedouin Israeli girl.
“Take the win,” Biden told Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. But which win, and whose?
In On War, Carl von Clausewitz identified two levels of war: tactical (“the use of armed forces in the engagement”) and strategic (“the uses of engagement for the object of war”). The win that Biden was pressing Benjamin Netanyahu to take is tactical and operational. In a feat of intelligence and accuracy, Israel killed senior Iranian officers as they planned to ignite the next stages of Iran’s “ring of fire” strategy against Israel. Iran merely dented a C-130 Hercules aircraft and hospitalized a 7-year-old girl who had the temerity to exist in the Zionist Entity. Israel comes out ahead. Take the win.
Modern American doctrine adds an intermediary layer to the pugnacious Prussian’s tactical-strategic pairing: the operational. For example, the Pentagon moving Israel from its European Command into Central Command in 2022 allowed the U.S. to coordinate Israeli and moderate Arab responses to the Iranian attack and firm up the anti-Iranian alliance. The successful defense was an operational win for the U.S., Israel, and the Arab states that are also on Iran’s list, and also a limited form of strategic win.
Win the battle, lose the war. The Iranian regime intends to destroy Israel. The clerical terrorists of Tehran have advanced an illegal nuclear weapons program with the kind of strategic determination that no American administration has shown since the Reagan presidency. The mullahs have built a “ring of fire” around Israel, some of it with American money. Hamas’s assault on Oct. 7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was merely the opener. The Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a ragtag of Iraqi militias have all attacked Israel since then. Iranian’s attack on the night of April 13 was its first direct assault on Israeli soil.
Iran is working strategically, so strategically Israel must respond. The Biden administration is pressing Israel not to. This administration has no strategy, only a tactical scramble to get to November without a regional war, a spike in gas prices, or complaints from the New York Times. It is spinning a complaisant media faster than an Iranian centrifuge — as if Israel is the problem, not Iran, the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism. To appease Iran, the administration sent the foreign secretaries of Britain and Germany — two nations that, one way or another, know all about appeasement — to Israel to tell Netanyahu that they will defend Israel’s right to exist, but not its duty to respond to a threat to its existence. This is a disgrace. It won’t work, either.
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The Houthis are targeting the U.S. Navy with intelligence supplied by the Iranian navy. Iraqi militias are peppering U.S. bases in Syria and Iraq with Iranian rockets and drones. The administration does nothing. It does, however, greenlight an Iranian attack on Israel. It denounces Israel for civilian casualties in Gaza, with the president of the United States reciting Hamas’s false casualty numbers, then wonders why Hamas raises its demands in the hostage negotiations. It now seeks to blame Israel for the war that Iran launched — and not just against Israel, but against the United States.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t” were President Joe Biden’s words in the days after Oct. 7 to any state or terrorist organization that thought it might take a swing at Israel. That wasn’t an order from the leader of the free world. It was a plea for mercy. But there is no mercy in the Middle East. The Obama-Biden effort to ally with Iran is now exposed as the most dangerous folly in the error-strewn history of American foreign policy. If Iran goes nuclear, the whole world will have to take the L.
