A good argument can be made that President Barack Obama’s and then President Joe Biden’s relaxation of or disregard for sanctions against Iran that netted the Islamic Republic billions in oil revenue and outright gifts created all the recent mayhem in the Middle East from Hezbollah to Hamas to the Houthis to, now, Iran’s attack on Israel.
In fact, it’s more than a good argument. It’s as close to a lockdown truth as you can get in foreign affairs.
First President Obama coddled the mullahs to obtain some absurd nuclear treaty that no one could possibly believe in while democracy demonstrators begged our president to support them against their vicious religious-totalitarian overlords. Instead, he paid the mullahs even more dollars, one notorious time under the radar in giant wads of cash.
Then President Donald Trump came along, put a halt to the bizarre negotiations that only gave Iran cover for nuclear research, and slapped the mullahs with real sanctions, particularly on their energy industry. And guess what? They were quiet, as were their myriad cutouts (Hezbollah, Hamas, and so forth).
Back came President Biden, who, chomping at the bit to reverse not just border security but everything Trump, started the gravy train to the mullahs all over again.
The laughable excuse both President Obama and President Biden gave was that these monies were intended to improve the lives of the beleaguered Iranian people and would be used that way. How could anyone with the proverbial IQ in triple digits believe that? It’s likely that President Obama didn’t—he was undoubtedly aware of the imperialistic goals of Shia Islamism from its theology and knew where the money would go—so we must wonder what his real intentions were. Who knows what President Biden thinks?
What is clear is that Mammon raised his ugly head, as he frequently does, accompanied by President Biden’s peculiar obsession with restricting U.S. energy in the name of diminishing anthropogenic global warming (assuming you believe in that), thereby enriching Iran and Venezuela who provide the same fossil fuels to a needy world, often in a dirtier form. Dictators don’t seem to bother him.
And the mullahs are dictators of the most extreme sort, rivaling Mao and Stalin in their methods if not in their overall success. Evin Prison is their Gulag and arguably worse than the Chinese and Soviet versions. While researching a screenplay, I met personally with people who were incarcerated and tortured there. Their beaten and distorted faces looked like Picassos from his cubist period. Prison guards reportedly rape women, particularly dissidents, the night before their trial to make sure that they never go to heaven, according to their religion.
None of this seems to have been of much concern to either President Obama or President Biden.
What is of concern to President Biden, we can be sure, are votes in Michigan, where the Muslim population could be deserting him. Why else would he have been so loose-lipped as to have reportedly called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a seven-letter expletive beginning with “a” in earshot of witnesses?
This was widely reported, and it is certain Mr. Netanyahu was well aware of what President Biden thought of him while on the phone call the night of April 13 to discuss the Israeli response to the Iranian onslaught. He must have well understood the subtext—or was it the actual text—“Look what we have done for you. Now let me have Michigan,” meaning basically, “Don’t.”
“Don’t do to Iran what they have deserved for decades.”
“Don’t go annihilate Hamas. They’ll be quiet now.”
On and on. American presidents think they run Israel, Democratic ones anyway. They deny the Israelis what an American president would do in a minute—respond to an attack on our territory by an enemy nation. As almost anyone can recall—well, almost anyone these days—Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t waste much time responding to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Two Democratic presidents have been restraining Israel from responding for decades, not just to Iran, but to its increasingly lethal proxies. (Hezbollah now has one of the most heavily armed militaries in the world.) When Israel is permitted and takes it upon itself to go after the proxies, it is inevitably pulled back before it has an opportunity to achieve total victory, the victories America and its allies felt necessary at the end of World War II and that ended up with Japan and Germany becoming peaceful, democratic nations.
That is what is going on now in what appears to be, or ends up being, a de facto combined administration and mainstream media effort to prevent Israel from finishing the destruction of Hamas in Gaza. It is legacy media organs, such as the Associated Press, that were magically on the scene with contemporaneous reports and what became prize-winning photographs in the midst of Hamas’s unconscionably sadistic attacks. Some of their “reporters” are alleged to have been fighting alongside the terrorists. Only the most naïve would think that this does not profit Hamas in the end and, by extension, Iran. The specter of Michigan, again, hovers in the background.
So now we wait to see how Israel responds to Iran’s direct attack on its territory with a combination of some 300 drones, missiles, and cruise missiles.
Because they were unable to get through in any substantial manner, President Biden has declared it a victory for Israel but hastened to make clear the United States will not help in any Israeli reprisal, urging them to not do so. He then convened the G7 to echo that request. The group also made some noise about sanctions.
Ayatollah Khamenei must be smiling. He has heard that sanction talk before and knows how long it lasts.
Is this déja vu all over again? President Obama, it is said, restrained Mr. Netanyahu, whom he insulted by ushering through the back door into the White House, on multiple occasions from attacking Iranian nuclear installations. After all, the president was, as noted, already funneling cash to Iran. It would have been inconsistent.
The same inconsistency, to put it mildly, is still with us.
Will it change?
