An Israeli air strike managed to kill Hassan Nasrallah, the top boss of Hizballah — the Iranian proxy terrorists — who had been its chief for at least three decades, obeying the orders of the ayatollahs in Tehran.
The Iranian nuclear weapons program is close to producing deployable nuclear weapons. How close no one knows.
The death of Nasrallah came about a week after Israeli intelligence operatives managed to detonate thousands of Hizballah pagers and hundreds of their walkie-talkie radios.
It was also the week in which President Joe Biden, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly.
While Biden made another pitch for diplomatic resolutions in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, Pezeshkian said that Israel and the U.S. were the troublemakers in the Middle East, not Iran. He also said that Israel was dragging Iran into a war that no one could win. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: The World, Israel, and Our Diplomacy of Dunces)
That was a typical Iranian lie. Tehran firmly believes that it can win the long-term war with Israel and that the Jewish state must be destroyed.
All of this set the context for a visit by my wife’s last college pal last week. I look forward to his visits because he is the only liberal I can talk to without getting into a shouting match.
No Peace While Iran Wants Israel’s Destruction
He and I email each other occasionally to talk about some of the things I write. His attitude reflects the 1992 statement by Rodney King: can’t we all just get along?
We can’t and we don’t because the natural state of mankind is war, not peace. Some nation — or despot or religious dictator — always wants something that another nation wants to protect. In this case, it is Israel’s desire to keep its people safe from terrorist attacks which Iran and its proxies — Hizballah and Hamas — want to continue until Israel is overcome.
There was not a word in Biden’s UN speech about the U.S. hostages still being held by Hamas presumably in the Gaza Strip. He only had words for Israel, urging it to accept some idealistically idiotic cease fire. He urged the same for the coming war in Lebanon. It’s no wonder that neither he nor Kamala Harris have any effect on Netanyahu, Hizballah, or Hamas. They do not ignore us at their peril: they can comfortably ignore us because no American force compels them to do otherwise.
Hizballah has been raining missiles on Israeli civilians for years. The tempo of the launches has greatly increased since the Hamas massacre of Israelis last October.
In answer to that, Netanyahu has managed to kill Nasrallah in Beirut, Ismail Haniyeh (a top Hamas commander) in Tehran, and taken the aforementioned actions with Hizballah pagers and two-way radios.
After the airstrike that killed Nasrallah and the other actions, Hizballah’s command structure has been at least decimated if not destroyed. Iran will replace it.
Israeli commanders warned this week that they were planning a ground invasion of Lebanon to ensure that Hizballah’s capacity to attack Israel is destroyed.
Netanyahu and his government understand that there can be no long-term peace and that they cannot keep up the pace of war that the Hamas attack triggered. Israel’s economy has suffered because hundreds of thousands of young men and women are fighting the wars instead of doing their civilian jobs. No nation, not even Israel, can be perpetually at war. But Israel’s neighbors keep attacking them.
Wars are about winners and losers. If Israel attacks Lebanon we must wish it well and help them as much as we can. They didn’t start this war but it has to end — temporarily — on their terms. Netanyahu understands what Biden & Co. do not: that there can be no peace in Gaza or Lebanon or anywhere else in the Middle East while the vultures still roost in Tehran.
There was a report earlier this week that Iran was moving troops in Syria to directly threaten Israel. To my knowledge, that report was false. Iran wants only to attack Israel by proxy until it has been able to deploy nuclear weapons. Its direct attack on Israel last April was a failure because its missiles and drones were almost entirely destroyed before they hit their targets.
Biden, like most presidents before him, has promised that Iran will never be allowed to deploy nukes. But he has done nothing to prevent it from doing so. Neither has Kamala Harris. All they have done is to try to revive Obama’s 2015 nuclear weapons deal with Iran. The Iranian nuclear weapons program is close to producing deployable nuclear weapons. How close no one knows. (READ MORE: ABC News Blew It. Crime Is Up.)
Deterrence Fails With Iran
As I wrote last week, our deterrent strategy has failed. In the latest example, U.S. warships came under attack in the Red Sea by Houthis — another Iranian proxy force — who had launched about two dozen missiles and drones which were shot down. Biden has made no effort to punish the Houthis.
There’s no two ways about it. The Houthi attack on American ships was an act of war. Biden — or Harris or whoever is actually running our government — would be entirely justified were he to order a strike on the Houthis by air, missiles, or however. Yet they do nothing.
The Houthis are in control of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. There is no reason why we shouldn’t bomb the hell out of their leadership and command structure there. We have the forces in the area to do precisely that, but the Biden-Harris-Blinken-Sullivan crew is ignoring the Houthi attack.
This is why we are no longer a global superpower, a nation that enemies treat seriously or that allies can rely on. As this column is fond of reminding its readers, the late Donald Rumsfeld often said “weakness is provocative.” Three-plus years of Biden and Harris have proven him right again and again.