RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/17/3-things-americas-national-interest-demands-after-the-heinous-hamas-attack/

Only exacting pressure from the American people and our representatives will ensure the Biden administration advances our interests over those of our enemies.

When the Iran-backed jihadists of Hamas attacked Israel, butchering Jews in numbers equivalent to more than 45,000 Americans, raping them, and taking them hostage, the genocidal Jew-haters sparked a potential global conflagration. By murdering and taking Americans hostage, as Iran and its proxies have been doing since the very start of the mullahs’ theocratic takeover, Hamas also took this fight to us.

That our greatest ally; most pivotal military, intelligence, and technological partner; and the first line of defense in a bellicose, often barbarous, and anti-American region is under existential threat, and that the threat has come for our people, compels an American response.

By the same token, many are rightly skeptical about involving ourselves in any foreign conflict — let alone one in the Middle East, where over the last quarter-century Americans have sacrificed so much in blood and treasure, only to see our nation’s power erode and the threats persist. We are a divided country, thinly stretched, and war-weary.

Given this volatile situation, and Americans’ competing concerns, what does the U.S. national interest demand with respect to the war forced on Israel and us? I propose three things.

1. Defend Americans and Secure the Homeland

This starts with using all elements of national power to pressure Iran and its proxies — including Qatar, where Hamas’ leadership lives in luxury — to force the return of American hostages immediately. The scandal that this has not yet occurred is only enlarged by the fact that the Biden administration’s coddling of the mullahcracy fueled the kidnapping of Americans in the first place.

https://thespectator.com/topic/america-hamas-double-failure-israel-iran-biden/

Did American failures contribute to Hamas’s war of terror — its unprovoked attack, its total surprise, its horrific butchering of innocent civilians simply because they are Jews?

Yes, but a lesser one. The failures to discover the plans, deter the attack and, having failed at deterrence, to defeat it promptly are Israel’s. The secondary actor here is Iran, not the United States. It was the Islamic regime in Tehran that supplied its terror partner with funds, plans, intelligence and weapons.

Still, the US played a role — a combination of bumbling incompetence and fundamental policy errors that contributed to the onset of the conflict and to Hamas’s success.

Israel’s elaborate network of signals intelligence and human sources failed to uncover a massive plan of attack that involved thousands of terrorists and was months in the making. How could they have missed it? That’s a question its leaders must answer after the war is over. They must also ask why their deployment of military resources near Gaza was insufficient to deter the attack and, failing that, inadequate to protect civilian lives across southern Israel or defeat the rampaging invaders.

But America’s agencies failed, too. They were never expected to unmask internal operations in Gaza, but the CIA and other US intelligence agencies should have discovered what Iran was up to. After all, that regime ranks as one of America’s four enemy states, along with China, Russia and North Korea. Those should be a primary focus of US intelligence efforts — and this was Iran’s biggest foreign policy adventure in years.

Will anyone in the US government be held responsible? You’re kidding. This is The Government. No one is ever held responsible for failures, no matter how grotesque. If the first rule of Fight Club is, “we don’t talk about Fight Club,” the first rule of the Inside the Beltway Club is, “we don’t talk about our mistakes. We protect each other.”

Bad as the intelligence failures were, they were not Washington’s most important blunders. That shameful trophy goes to the Biden administration’s wrongheaded policy in Middle East. Its policy can be summarized in a single word: “appeasement.” The Obama administration pursued the same policy — and many of the same people are in charge now.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/16/our-post-hamas-wreckage/

As Hamas goes, so with it go many of the following related Western pretensions.

The Passions of 9/11, Redux

It has been 22 years since we saw crowds throughout the Middle East celebrating the murder of 3,000 civilians—and since newspapers had daily “idiot watch” notices of American intellectuals defending radical Islamist mass murderers. And now the madness is back again, and we are witnessing the recrudescence of normalizing radical Islamic terrorists abroad.

I suppose the theory is that no one in America cares much about radical Islamists foaming at the mouth, whether abroad or here. And the result is that they are empowered and their defense of murder is growing—yet its hubris will earn an almost-certain response, an anger slowly but insidiously growing at radical Islam.

A Middle East Policy in Ruins 

The current Biden appeasement of Iran and gift of billions of dollars in aggregate to the West Bank and Gaza are now, by bipartisan consensus, unsustainable. The only supporters of that lethal madness left are the embarrassments of BLM, the Squad, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the campus crowd.

Their collective hatred of Jews and Israelis was manifested in their delight over the post mortem mutilations of murdered women and children. And why—even before Israel had responded with air attacks—were leftists and Islamists suddenly celebrating the news of the executions of more than 1,200 Jews? It was instinctual, a Pavlovian response.

Even some leftist Democrats were shocked by their own constituents, whom they had created. Biden still might cling to his past destructive Middle East policies (and I expect him to restrict the Israelis within days after they begin to go in full force into Gaza), but the idea of continuing aid to the West Bank and Gaza or of “normalizing” relations with theocratic Iran will now be rightly seen as a suicidal delusion.

Ukraine and Gaza

Most Americans support arms for Ukraine to repel Russian aggressors.

But something is becoming strange about these two respective wars.

Why did the State Department more or less put no restrictions on Ukrainian retaliation, including operations against the Russian Black Sea Fleet—but the Secretary of State almost immediately called for a “ceasefire” to prevent Israeli retaliation, a mortal sin if he had dared say that about Ukraine’s similar response to aggression? Would an American diplomat lecture Ukraine about ending the “cycle of violence?”

Why does the U.S. discount any possibility of a strategic response from Russia—which reportedly has some 6,000-7,000 nuclear weapons—to attacks on its homeland, but seems almost terrified about calling Iran to account for its central role in arming and funding terrorists to start a war with Israel by slaughtering 1,200 civilians?

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4252577-why-is-biden-ignoring-irans-influence-in-the-hamas-attacks-its-simple-politics/

Critics of Joe Biden are furious that in his denunciations of the terror attacks on Israel he has not once mentioned Iran.

They don’t get it. If Biden blames Tehran for masterminding and funding the horrific killings of Israeli citizens, he will have to take the next step, which is to punish Iran’s leaders for the senseless barbarism. That next step would include harsh sanctions, including reining in Iran’s oil exports.  

But curbing the flow of Iranian oil would drive up the price of gasoline here in the U.S. Higher prices at the pump correlate closely with Biden’s approval ratings; if the cost of a gallon of gas goes up, his polling goes down. Biden cannot survive another downdraft in his approval ratings, which are already the lowest of any president in a generation. 

It is notable that oil prices have moved only slightly higher since the Hamas attack. The betting is that the White House has no stomach for real penalties on Iran.   

Joe Biden’s response to the horrors perpetrated by Hamas terrorists has been entirely inadequate. The bar is now set so low for this president that liberal media outlets were ecstatic that Biden could raise his voice and display anger at babies being beheaded and Americans being held for ransom. The New York Times’s Peter Brooks waxed poetic about the president’s 10-minute speech: “He bristled with righteous indignation as he denounced the bloody Hamas attack in unforgiving terms and vowed to stand by Israel without equivocation.” Good for President Biden! 

Unfortunately, that righteous indignation is not likely to translate into meaningful pushback against the region’s main sponsor of terror.  

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal insisting that Biden “reimpose extensive multilateral sanctions on Tehran and deny Iranian planes overflight rights. Impound the shipping vessels Iran uses to circumvent sanctions. Close Iranian banks with access to the West, and cease the Iranian operations of European businesses. Treat Iranian officials like pariahs and sink Iranian naval boats that threaten international shipping.”  

These are excellent suggestions. But first and foremost, the U.S. must cut off Iran’s oil shipments, its primary source of revenues.