US President Joe Biden’s current Mideast predicament, following the killing by Iranian-backed militias of three US service members and wounding 30 others in Jordan, can be summed up in three words: Don’t, did, and do.
“Don’t,” of course, refers to Biden’s memorable phrase on October 10, just three days after the Simchat Torah massacre, when he warned Iran and its proxies not to take advantage of the situation to launch an attack on Israel.
“Let me say again, to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t. Don’t,” he said.
Yet, they did. Well, kind of.
No, they didn’t open up a major front against Israel, though Hezbollah in the North and the Houthis in the South are continuously pinpricking the Jewish state. They did, however, unleash scores of attacks against US installations in the region – at least 100 drone attacks and some 50 rocket attacks since the first one on October 18.
Most of these have been toward American positions in Iraq and Syria. Luckily, until Sunday, none of them killed anyone. On Sunday, in Jordan, the luck ran out.
Now, after the killing of the three US service members by what Biden said was “a radical Iran-backed militia” group, the question is: What will America do?
“Don’t,” he said.
“We did,” they responded.
“What will Biden do?” the world is now wondering.
In deciding how to respond, Biden will get a sense of what it is like being Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.For just like Netanyahu, Biden needs to decide whether to strike back at Iran – and perhaps inside it – or at one of its proxies.
Would Biden retaliate against Iran?
Do you strike the head of the octopus – to borrow the imagery Naftali Bennett coined to describe Iran and its proxies – or do you fight its tentacles? Do you hit Iran directly, or suffice with continuing to trade jabs with one of its agents – Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen?
The problem with hitting one of the proxies, with fighting with the octopus’s tentacles, is that Iran doesn’t seem to care all that much.
Will the death of a few dozen, or a few hundred, or even a few thousand Iraqi or Syrian militiamen move anyone in Iran? Of course not. They are willing to sacrifice thousands of proxies in the same way that Hamas is willing to sacrifice thousands of Gazans.
What might move them, however, is if Iran pays a price: not the proxies but Iran itself; not Iranian-backed militias but soldiers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Over the past 40 years, the Iranians have developed a perfect – from their point of view – racket. They build up proxies whom they fund and train to do their dirty work, and they just sit back and watch, always retaining deniability.
“It’s not us,” they said quickly following the drone attack on the American base near the Syrian-Iraq border.
Up until recently, everyone – including Israel – pretty much played along, though there have been a few notable exceptions, such as the 2020 assassination of IRCG Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.
Then came October 7, and – at least in Israel – the thinking started to change. After the Hamas massacre on Simchat Torah, it became evident to most Israelis that you can’t just ignore a massive security risk staring you right in the face and pretend it’s not there, or that it will go away on its own. It won’t.
Hamas in Gaza won’t be wished away, nor will Hezbollah in Lebanon, nor Iran in the region. You can’t pretend they will disappear, or that if you don’t deal with them, the problem will constrict. It will only get bigger.
Israel did not destroy Hamas’s capabilities in earlier rounds because it had neither the domestic backing nor the international legitimacy to do so. Plus it wanted quiet and knew that by hitting Hamas, that quiet would be disrupted.
The same is true in Lebanon. Since the end of the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah has blatantly violated the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended the war by building up an arsenal of rockets that would make a small NATO nation proud and by setting up camp directly on Israel’s northern border. Yet Israel did not react, not wanting to rattle the cage and disturb the peace.
Biden now finds himself in a similar dilemma. He knows that Iran is behind the attacks on the US forces – he said as much – and that this is not only a show of support for the Palestinians but a flexing of Iran’s muscles and a challenge to the US by the Iranian-Russian-Chinese axis. Yet he is reticent about hitting Iran directly because of the fear of exacerbating the situation and triggering a major regional war.
And those considerations are exceedingly understandable. But here’s a news flash: The Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hamas exacerbated the situation on October 7, and there will be no regional quiet here as long as Tehran feels that it can act with impunity through its proxies, as it does now.
There is no guarantee that if the US strikes hard against Iranian assets or inside Iran itself, the proxies will stop firing missiles and launching drones against US assets in the region.
There is a guarantee, however, that this will continue unabated if the US continues to respond to attacks against its troops by striking at the octopus’s tentacles rather than at its head.
Those considerations are not the only way the current situation gives Biden a taste of what it feels like to be Netanyahu. Because Biden’s decisions will inevitably be colored – as are Netanyahu’s – by political considerations.
One criticism of Netanyahu being whispered frequently in Washington is that the prime minister’s wartime decisions are over-influenced by ensuring that his right-wing coalition partners, the Religious Zionist Party and Otzma Yehudit, do not bolt and bring down his government. In other words, political considerations are clouding Netanyahu’s wartime thinking.
But now Biden is facing a similar dilemma.
If this were January 2025, and Biden did not have to worry about reelection in November and maintaining the support of the left wing of his party, would he be making the same decision about how to respond to Sunday’s killing of US troops that he is making now? Probably not. Critiquing others for factoring political considerations into life-and-death decisions regarding the use of force is common. It is an entirely different matter, however, being able to refrain from doing so oneself.