President Joe Biden ’s reckless decision to abruptly withdraw United States troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 set into motion an unstoppable sequence of events that have made the world a far more dangerous place. From heads of state to the legacy media, people everywhere recognized that the aftershocks of Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal would be felt for years to come. America’s humiliating military retreat had shaken the balance of power across the globe profoundly and irrevocably.
Though Biden placed blame for the chaos that ensued at the hands of the inept Afghan National Army and even on former President Donald Trump , his responsibility was clear. His massive display of weakness and his abdication of duty as the leader of the free world had created a power vacuum. And, well aware of the opportunity this presented, the tyrants of the world joined forces to exploit it.
Within months, Russian President Vladimir Putin began massing troops near the Ukrainian border in preparation for his February 2022 invasion. Shortly before launching his “special military operation,” Putin joined Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing for talks where the two announced a “friendship without limits.”
Moreover, in Biden’s zeal to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Barack Obama’s farcical nuclear deal with Iran, he handed power to that authoritarian regime as well. And on Oct. 7, we saw them flex their muscles in the most depraved display of evil in modern memory.
Sadly, armed conflict in Israel is nothing new. What is new is the deliberate targeting of civilians and the glee of the terrorists who are carrying it out.
In a Sky News interview, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro pointed out that the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli citizens were even worse than those of the Nazis. The Nazis, he noted, at least knew what they were doing was wrong and tried to hide it. The Hamas militants, on the other hand, live-streamed their barbarity on social media.
Hamas is bankrolled by Iran (and to some extent by Qatar). According to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the terrorist group receives 93% of its funding from Iran. The crippling economic sanctions enacted by the Trump administration had put a serious damper on Iran’s ability to wage a proxy war on Israel. But the Biden administration foolishly turned a blind eye to those restrictions and even lifted $6 billion in sanctions last month, allowing the regime to generate billions of dollars in revenue from oil sales.
Claire Jungman, chief of staff at watchdog group United Against a Nuclear Iran, told the Washington Free Beacon last week that Iran has earned $80 billion from oil sales since Biden took office. “With the resurgence of Iran’s primary revenue source, oil, into play, it’s paramount to recognize the substantial financial leeway they’ve gained through years of relaxed sanctions,” she said. “This surplus not only sustained them but also significantly fortified their proxies.”
To his credit, Biden strongly condemned the Hamas massacre and vowed to stand behind Israel last week. But conspicuously missing from his remarks was any mention of Iran’s complicity.
It took the Wall Street Journal just one day to determine that Iran had helped plan the deadly attack. According to their sources, “Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land, and sea incursions — the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.” The report said further that Iranian officials had given “the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut” just five days earlier. Still, Biden administration officials refuse to admit the regime’s involvement.
Instead, in his Tuesday address, Biden warned “any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation,” that he had just “one word” for them: “Don’t. Don’t.” Unfortunately, he stopped short of telling them what they might expect if they did exploit the tragedy.
Predictably, Biden’s warning fell on deaf ears. On Saturday, Axios reported that Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian issued a warning of his own via the United Nations. If Israel invades Gaza, he promised that Iran would intervene “either directly or indirectly” through Lebanon-based proxy Hezbollah and it would cause “a huge earthquake.”
Mankind is now staring evil in the face and the times call for strong leadership. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inspires confidence. Biden, most definitely, does not. Nothing says “follow me” quite like his declaration — after tripping and nearly falling again — at the Tioga Marine Terminal in Philadelphia on Friday that climate change is the “only existential threat to humanity.”
As wars rage in Ukraine and Israel, and China turns its eyes toward Taiwan, it’s beginning to feel a lot like the 1930s. And where is the U.S. president?
Biden’s unwillingness to acknowledge the truth about Iran, the enemy he and his administration have coddled and enriched in their pursuit of a nuclear deal that the regime will never honor, renders him unfit to serve as commander in chief. As Israel ramps up its response to the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas, the terrorist group funded by Iran, let’s not forget whose blunders brought us here.
Category: International relations
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No comments on How Biden screwed up the Middle East
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Perhaps the most critical question for deciding what the American response should be to the barbarian attack on Israel (“terrorist attack” is too generous) is whether Iran orchestrated it. You will not be surprised to learn that there are two opposite versions being given, one by the Biden State Department/New York Times, and one by journalists at the Wall Street Journal who looked into it.
This is the Times’ account:
The United States has collected multiple pieces of intelligence that show that key Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas attack in Israel, information that has fueled U.S. doubts that Iran played a direct role in planning the assault, according to several American officials.
The United States, Israel and key regional allies have not found evidence that Iran directly helped plan the attack, according to the U.S. officials, an Israeli official and another official in the Middle East.
While the U.S. officials would not identify the Iranian officials who expressed surprise at the weekend’s events, they said the Iranian officials were people who typically would be aware of operations involving the Quds Force, Iran’s paramilitary arm that supports and works with proxy forces.
U.S. officials said the intelligence investigation was continuing and could turn up evidence that Iran or other states were directly involved in the Hamas operation. Senior officials said they were keeping an open mind, reviewing old intelligence reports and looking for new information.
This is the one given by the WSJ:
Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.
I doubt Ringside readers will have a hard time figuring out which account is the truth, but it’s worth spelling out anyway.
Ever since Jimmy Carter decided not to impose any price on Iran for its first hostage taking, Democratic administrations (with for the most part an insufficiently different approach by Republican ones) have been, to put it generously, passive. Essentially no price has been exacted. (Loudly announced but largely unenforced oil embargoes don’t count, nor do “sanctions” that accomplish next to nothing or absolutely nothing). Initially I thought this was just because of Carter’s weakness and cowardice, but forty-three years of more-or-less the same supine stance has convinced me there’s something different going on.
Much of the difference was tipped off years ago in the Obama administration, when it came out that our foreign policy leaders had decided to accept if not indeed support Iran as a “regional power,” even while, for PR purposes, occasionally pretending to oppose its sponsorship of worldwide terrorism. This was followed up by the infamous nuclear agreement, in which Iran was allowed to continue to develop The Bomb, only (supposedly) at a slower rate in future years, in exchange for an immediate cash payment of a few billion dollars. (Of course the major pretense was not that we allegedly got a postponed schedule for Iran to become a nuclear power, but that Iran could be trusted to keep any agreement to do anything).
Obama’s understudy, the feckless Joe Biden, isn’t resolute in much anymore, what with creeping senility, but he is resolute in wanting to re-instate this agreement, which fortunately Donald Trump repudiated (much to the Democrats’ anguish). Biden’s minions at the State Department are also resolute in wanting to derail the rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia (and perhaps other Gulf States wisely fearful of Iran). If Iran is found to be behind the barbarian attack — the one that, besides butchering hundreds of Israeli civilians, murdered about two dozen Americans, took others hostage, and beheaded infants, among its other “accomplishments” — Biden’s plans will be harder for him to implement. Sucking up to mere hostage takers is bad enough PR, as Carter found out when he lost in a landslide to “cowboy” Ronald Reagan (a defeat of which Biden and his crew are painfully aware). Sucking up to those who have actually murdered Americans (while desirable to the Left because of its value in debasing America) is that much more problematic on the PR front. Even Jack Smith will probably be unable to bail Biden out of that one, and there aren’t enough deadbeat college students to bail him out either (notwithstanding how much he’s willing to bail them out (with your money)).
What to do?
Easy. The solution is tried and true on the Left: Lie about it. Claim that Iran had nothing to do with it! The mullahs were taken aback, I tell you!!
Now since it’s been known for years that Hamas is little more than the irregular version of Iran’s armed forces, this is going to be a tough one to bring off. Making excuses for Iran has its own cost, standing alone. Making eye-rolling excuses that no sensible person is going to believe will cost that much more. But necessity (the necessity, that is, of cooperating in the humiliation of America while running a presidential campaign) is the mother of invention — not that the Left’s lying about the mullahs could really be called “invention” at this point, as Paul has explained.
So I must confess error. Yes, it looked like the miserable happenstance of Carter’s weakness and cowardice was the initial cause of decades of being humiliated and outplayed by Iran. But that wasn’t really it. Our failure wasn’t due to personality flaws. It was, and it is (and I’m all but certain will continue to be) a choice.
Conservatives have known for a long time that decline is a choice, and in particular the choice the Left has made to bring an evil Amerika its overdue reckoning. The coming humiliation and paralysis in responding to Iran’s guiding role in the abuse and murder of our citizens is simply the most recent exemplar.
As long a Joe Biden is President, get used to it.
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Democrats are being forced to play defense on President Biden’s controversial deal to free up $6 billion in Iranian assets in exchange for the release of five American prisoners, which Republicans are now demanding be reversed after terror attacks by Hamas.
Many Senate Democrats were caught off guard when outlines of the prisoner exchange deal emerged in August, while the Senate was out of session.
Now they are scrambling to determine whether the $6 billion in Iranian funds, frozen in South Korea, can be held up pending an investigation into what involvement Iran had in supporting or greenlighting the attacks on Israeli civilians over the weekend.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who is up for reelection in Montana, a state that twice voted for former President Trump, called on the Biden administration “at a minimum” to freeze the $6 billion in Iranian assets.
“As American intelligence officials continue to investigate the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas, we should review our options to hold Iran accountable for any support they may have provided,” he said. “At a minimum, we should immediately freeze the $6 billion in Iranian assets and explore other financial tools we have at our disposal.”
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), another Democrat facing a tough reelection race next year, also called for the transfer of Iranian funds to be halted.
“I wasn’t supportive of the initial $6 billion transfer. We should absolutely freeze Iranian assets while we also consider additional statements,” he said Tuesday afternoon.
Manchin released a statement earlier Tuesday calling for harsh sanctions on any country or government linked to the attacks against Israeli civilians.
“Any country or government that is found to be supportive of this terrorist organization should have the most severe sanctions imposed upon them immediately to shut down the support of these terroristic, barbaric actions,” he said.
A Senate Democratic aide in another office said staff members are trying to get answers from the administration about whether the money can be held up and other possible ways to exert leverage over Iran.
“Can we call on the money to be refrozen?” the source asked. “In some ways, we have really limited ability to freeze it up.”
The Democratic aide suggested putting pressure on Western allies to tighten sanctions on Iran in response to the attack.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and members of a bipartisan delegation traveling to China and South Korea met with a group of ambassadors from allied nations at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Beijing on Tuesday to urge allies to do everything they can to stand in solidarity with Israel.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is pushing back on Republican claims that the money released to Iran will help Hamas, which is funded by Iran. He has emphasized none of the money from the frozen account has been spent, and that it may only be used for humanitarian assistance under close supervision by the Treasury Department.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow specializing in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, said the political optics of the prisoner exchange aren’t good for the Biden administration but questioned whether anything can be done about it now.
“That $6 billion deal looks worse and worse,” he said. “But I’m not sure it’s possible to get it back.”
O’Hanlon said the Biden administration would be wise to try to step up pressure on Iran in response to attacks on Israeli civilians, depending on what further investigations into those attacks uncover.
“At a minimum, though, I’d try to put additional pressure on Iran — once the intelligence is sorted out about its role in this tragedy,” he said.
Senate Republicans are calling for an investigation into Biden’s deal and GOP lawmakers in both chambers are ramping up pressure on the administration to stop the $6 billion from flowing to Iran.
Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the top-ranking Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee, said Tuesday that he will press Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to invite Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to appear before the panel to testify about the transfer of funds.
“The Senate should also investigate what led the Biden administration to allow a transfer of $6 billion to Iran and how it could expect Iran to not use that money to continue to fuel terrorism. The American people and Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East, deserve transparency and answers,” said Scott, who is running for president, in a statement.
Brown, who faces a tough reelection in Ohio, said Tuesday that he is speaking with colleagues, the administration, the Israeli government and the Jewish community in Ohio, and he’s “looking at every tool available to support Israel and defeat Hamas.”
He did not make any mention of the $6 billion being released to Iran.
The Washington Post, citing Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials, reported Tuesday that Hamas militants started planning the assault at least a year ago and received support from Iranian allies who provided training, logistical help and tens of millions of dollars in weapons.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and 19 other Senate Republicans sent a letter to Biden on Tuesday demanding that he freeze the money set to flow to Iran.
“To stand by and allow Iran access to these funds as Hamas infiltrates Israel and murders, rapes and mutilates countless Israelis is unconscionable,” they wrote.
The senators argued that even if the funds are restricted for humanitarian purposes, “there is significant risk they could be used to further efforts by Iran or Hamas against Israel.”
Blinken addressed this criticism during a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press”
“Iran has, unfortunately, always used and focused its funds on supporting terrorism, on supporting groups like Hamas. And it’s done that when there have been sanctions. It’s done that when there haven’t been sanctions. And it’s always prioritized that,” he said.
He emphasized that the funds in question “have always been, under the law, available to Iran to use for humanitarian purposes” before being frozen in South Korea.
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President Biden gave a speech yesterday saying that Americans were killed and are being held hostage by Hamas.
Jake Smith tells you what Biden didn’t say:
The Biden administration has made several concessions toward Iran, a country that likely backed Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel on Saturday.
Hamas, an Iranian-backed terrorist organization, launched attacks against Israel on Saturday that killed hundreds of Israelis and at least nine Americans. The Biden administration has historically taken a conciliatory approach when dealing with Iran, such as shelling out a $6 billion “ransom” payment and failing to enforce oil sanctions, as well as allowing a number of individuals secretly working on Iran’s behalf to operate inside the government.
“The theory that if the West restrains, then Iran will restrain, has fallen flat once again,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior researcher on Iranian security and political issues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “In the face of over 2-plus years of unenforced oil sanctions [and] allowing Tehran the potential to earn far more than 6 billion dollars, Iran has continued supporting proxies and partners with the overall aim of sharpening the knife it has pre-positioned at the neck of Israel.”
One example of Biden’s allowances toward Iran has been taking a softer stance on enforcing oil sanctions than previous administrations. Iranian oil exports have reached almost 2 million barrels a day, a sharp contrast to the limited 400,000 barrels exported a day in 2020 under former President Donald Trump.
Homeland Security Investigations have not seized an Iranian oil shipment in over a year, despite the fact that the organization’s prime responsibility is sanctions enforcement. Bipartisan lawmakers have criticized the Biden administration for its “lack of action” and intentional ignorance toward Iranian sanctions violations.
The Biden administration continued to ease off sanctions enforcement following the recent completion of a deal in which $6 billion in assets was unfrozen and granted to Iran in exchange for five American prisoners, in what has been derided by critics as a “ransom” payment. Though the administration insists that the $6 billion can only be used for humanitarian purposes, it also frees up unrestricted funds Iran already had in its reserves, allowing them to fund terrorist operations by Hamas or Hezbollah, experts told the DCNF.
Additionally, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi stated in September that Tehran has the “authority” to use the $6 billion “wherever [they] need it,” despite previous assurances from the White House. The payout is likely only to embolden Iran to take more hostages in the hopes of another payout, experts previously told the DCNF; Hamas has already captured hundreds of Israelis in their attacks that began Saturday.
The Biden administration has likely made such concessions to get Iran back to the negotiating table on the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) – informally known as the Iran nuclear deal – that was signed in 2015 by the Obama administration, according to experts who previously spoke to the DCNF. The deal was scrapped in 2018 by former President Donald Trump for containing too many exemptions, and severe economic sanctions were put in place instead.
The Biden administration started working to return Iran to the deal in 2021, but Iranian leadership has been largely disinterested and refused multiple proposals, leading the administration to come up with new offers that ease some of the harsher aspects of the deal and waives certain sanctions. No deal offered has been accepted by Iran, and it now has enough enriched uranium to build ten nuclear weapons in the course of four months.
“It’s also clear from Biden’s shifting redlines and goals with respect to Iran’s nuclear program – moving from a longer and stronger deal, to clean JCPOA resurrection, to a lesser deal, to merely an informal unwritten understanding – that the administration is looking for as little oversight as possible on the entire process,” Taleblu told the DCNF.
Additionally, a number of members of an influence network known as the Iranian Experts Initiative (IEI) have gained access to U.S. officials, and at least one has held a high-level position in the Pentagon. The IEI was created in 2014 to influence U.S. and European academics to covertly push Tehran’s agenda, either through media appearances, widely publicized op-eds or in government roles.
One such example is Ariane Tabatabai, the current chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations in the Pentagon and a former Iranian diplomat for the Biden administration. After it was discovered that Tabatabai was a member of the IEI, the Pentagon said it would begin investigating how she was hired, but it missed the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) deadline of Oct. 3 and failed to produce updates on the investigation; Tabatabai has not been fired from her role.
Another member of the IEI is Ali Vaez, a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group who’s made multiple appearances in Western media and written a number of pieces favorable to Iran. Vaez visited the White House on multiple occasions to meet with high-level Biden administration officials as recently as March, visitor logs reveal.
It’s not clear if the officials Vaez met with were aware of his ties to the IEI, though it’s certainly possible, according to Gabriel Noronha, former special advisor for the State Department.
“In this case, they either ignored that influence, which has been quite evident to many observers and practitioners of Iran policy insiders for years, or they actually were interested in cultivating someone with ties to the regime,” Noronha said about the White House allowing Vaez to visit.
Both Vaez and Tabatbai are close allies to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, who was recently suspended from his role over concerns about his handling of classified information and his ties to Iranian intelligence. Malley was previously fired from former President Barack Obama’s 2008 Democratic presidential campaign for facilitating communications with Hamas.
No updates have been given by the State Department on the ongoing investigation into Malley, only that it exists and he is still on unpaid leave. He has not been fired from his role.
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Representative Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the new House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, rallied a bipartisan group of lawmakers, alongside Chinese dissidents and human-rights advocates, in front of the alleged Chinese police station in New York City.
As recently as last fall, the existence of the Chinese government police outpost, run by the city of Fuzhou’s public-security bureau in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was unknown to most Americans. But earlier today, it became the center of a highly attended event in downtown New York where CCP opponents called out the Chinese regime’s totalitarianism.
Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democratic committee member who represents a district in the Bronx, emphasized the unified message at the center of the rally.
“We’re sending a powerful message that the defense of human rights from the abuses of the CCP is not a Democratic value or a Republican value. It’s an American value,” he said.
“We know that the transnational policing is not actually about the solving of crimes, it’s about the systematic surveillance and suppression of political dissidents,” he later added.
Representatives from a number of Chinese dissident groups — as well as advocates for populations targeted by CCP repression such as Uyghurs, Mongolians, Hong Kongers, and Tibetans — also attended the event. Representative Neal Dunn, another member of the counter-CCP committee, also spoke, pointing out that “the number-one victims of the CCP is the Chinese people.”
The police station’s existence was brought to light by the human-rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders in a report last fall, finding that other such outposts have been involved in harassment and stalking plots targeting Chinese nationals overseas. Since then, the FBI has reportedly searched the facility, and the State Department has said that the police station closed.
Equipping law enforcement to more effectively counter foreign transnational repression schemes of the sort that Chinese overseas police are involved in was a main focus of the event. Over the past year, the Justice Department has brought cases against several individuals implicated in stalking schemes across the U.S., including in New York. In one case, Chinese spies tried to order a car crash to take out Xiong Yan, a former congressional candidate who left China after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Gallagher said that it’s critical that FBI field offices across the country be trained to deal with Chinese transnational repression. In recent years, the bureau has stepped up its investigations of foreign countries’ repression on U.S. soil, setting up a tip page dedicated to such activities.
“It needs to be local police trained on this as well,” Gallagher added. “If a victim is brave enough to come forward, no repressive act orchestrated by a foreign government should ever fall on deaf ears.”
In his remarks at the event, Chinese dissident and Tiananmen Square protest leader Fengsuo Zhou echoed that point, calling the rally “just a starting point.”
“We need more activities like this. We need more victims to speak out,” he said.
The story does not mention that Gallagher is from Green Bay.
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I’ve spent the last 12 hours speaking to Israelis who were at the Supernova music festival. Their testimonies, as you would imagine, are very emotional. At least one broke down mid-conversation and wasn’t able to continue his recollection.
The attack on the festival outside of Re’im began around 7 a.m. The party was at its peak by then—which meant that by then most people were inebriated. At first, partygoers heard a loud explosion, which they took to be another sporadic rocket attack on southern Israel. But then the explosions grew louder and constant, and kept going for about five minutes. The music stopped, and the police protecting the 4,000 or 5,000 ravers began pushing everyone to leave.
By then, the terrorists were approaching in pickup trucks bearing Hamas military markings.
Shooting began. Many were executed on the spot. 260 bodies have been found, so far, on the site of the rave.
Many of the young men and women started running in the flat expanse of the western Negev desert. Faced with the spectacle of kids fleeing for their lives on a largely flat surface, the terrorists began rounding up the rest of their victims.
Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”
Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.
One survivor who’d returned to the scene later in the day to look for his friends spoke, in a breaking voice, of what he’d seen. Of the bodies, mainly of young women, lying cold and mutilated. Of scantily clad corpses, many of whom appeared to have been shot at point-blank. Of cars, perforated by bullets or blown up by grenades.
Some of the lucky ones ran to a nearby wadi, seeking shelter amid the shrubbery. “I felt like they were shooting right above our heads,” one survivor recalled. “I dove into a bush … It felt like the shooting was coming from 180 degrees, all around us. I understood we’re going to be there for at least a couple of hours. And I had nothing on me. And I was like, the only thing I want is a weapon. I want something to protect us.” Eventually, he and his friends, some of them barefoot, decided to risk it and try to reach safety, walking close enough to the road to see it but not so close so that they might be seen. “I said, if we see like army or police cars, we’re going to go to the road. Otherwise, we’re going to stay away. When we saw police and army cars, we knew that it’s a safe place.”
Later, when the gruesome attack was finally over and IDF soldiers managed to subdue the attackers, they searched these trucks and found RPG launchers, high-end communications devices, assorted AK-47s and other mostly Soviet-made weapons, along with numerous copies of the Quran.
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As I watched the videos of the horrific attacks on innocent civilians in Israel and the absolute bloodthirstiness of Hamas, I was reminded of my conversation in Kyiv with Maryan Zablotskiy, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, and his off-color description of an “Axis of A**holes” operating around the world, attacking the innocent, seeking to destabilize and attack free countries, and conquering territory.
It is not quite true that every one of America’s enemies works together. But they all share interests and often find ways to cooperate when it suits those interests.
The Wall Street Journal confirmed what everyone suspected Sunday — that the beastly men of Hamas pulled the trigger on this massacre of unarmed civilians, but the Iranians trained them, put the weapons in their hands, helped them aim, and gave the order:
Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War — those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.
Apparently, U.S. news organizations can get senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah to confirm things that our intelligence community cannot confirm. Or perhaps members of the Biden administration don’t want to admit that the U.S. intelligence community is confirming these statements.
It is difficult not to notice that the Biden team will quickly believe the worst about its Republican opponents, but, at least in the first 48 hours of this crisis, the administration bent over backward to give the Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt. As if Hamas was going to plan the biggest, most deadly, and most audacious attack on Israel in its history without Iran having any hand in it at all.
Since the moment Biden took office, he and his team have been hell-bent on resuscitating the Iran nuclear deal, and have held to their fervent belief that the U.S. can somehow have a stable and productive relationship with a country whose parliament regularly chants “death to America.” The Iranian regime cannot state its beliefs any clearer, and our leaders keep insisting, “Oh, you don’t really mean that. You seem reasonable, and I’m sure we can work this out.”
With attitudes like this on display, you might think that some of the people advising the Biden administration on its Iran policies were working for the Iranian government. Actually, two of them were.
The administration had a happy narrative of success that was a casualty of Hamas’s attacks this weekend. “What we said was, we want to depressurize, deescalate, and ultimately integrate the Middle East region. . . . The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” national-security adviser Jake Sullivan said at The Atlantic Festival on September 29.
Look closely enough, and you can find ties between almost all our foreign-policy problems and threats.
Hamas is a subsidiary of Iran. Back in 2019, the U.S. State Department calculated that the Iranian government sends $700 million annually to terrorist groups including Hamas; earlier this year, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant estimated that Iran sends Hamas $100 million per year. One report indicated that Iranian support for Hamas had ballooned to $360 million per year, or $30 million per month.
At the beginning of the year, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said in an interview with Al Jaezzra that Iran paid a total of $70 million to the Palestinian group to help it develop missiles and defense systems. (Note that Qatar gives Hamas $30 million per month in “stipends for families, fuel for electricity, and to help pay public sector wages.” As we will discuss below, any money that you don’t spend on non-weapon expenses frees up money to spend on weapons.)
This weekend, you could find lots of Americans spitting hot fire over the Biden administration’s decision to unfreeze $6 billion in seized Iranian funds as part of a hostage-release deal. A wide-scale attack on Israel like this must have required massive funding and arms. Administration sources and friends insist that money can only be spent on humanitarian purposes, and hand-wave away the counterargument that money is fungible — that if Iran knows it is getting $6 billion for humanitarian expenses, it frees up $6 billion in the budget for more support of terrorism. (The Editors, September 14: “This White House is just an easy mark.”)
But we should remember that Iran gets money from a lot of places beyond unfrozen accounts.
China is Iran’s largest trading partner; by itself, that’s not surprising as it was our largest trading partner for a long stretch until Mexico overtook it last month. But Chinese government policies help keep the Iranian economy afloat and minimize the impact of sanctions. China is importing more and more Iranian oil, sending it through Malaysia. The two countries are expanding their military cooperation, and the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian navies conducted joint drills in the Gulf of Oman in March.
Russia and Iran have never been closer; the Russian war effort runs on Iranian-manufactured drones, which gives Tehran more cash to send to its multiple terrorist groups surrounding Israel. As the European Council on Foreign Relations summarized, “Tehran’s military contribution to Russia’s war effort has made an enormous difference to Russia’s ability to persevere in a difficult conflict. Iran, once a secondary player, is now one of Russia’s most significant collaborators in the war in Ukraine.”
A bunch of those Iranian drones are actually manufactured in Syria. North Korea is sending artillery to Russia to use in Ukraine. China comes to the economic rescue of Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela. Serbia, backed by Russia, built up military forces on its border with Kosovo.
The Council on Foreign Relations notes that all over Africa and what we used to call the Third World, “China and Russia are either directly promoting militaries’ returns or helping them consolidate their influence once armed forces have already gained greater power — in other words, pouring fuel on the fire of remilitarization and, in China’s case, definitively trying to create an alternative world order to that led by the United States.”
As I noted after my conversation with Maryan Zablotskiy, the Russian government, its mercenaries, and its allies stir up trouble all over the globe. It’s not just in Ukraine; it’s in Georgia, Moldova, Syria, all over central Asia, the Central African Republic and Sudan, and in the recent coup in Niger.
Oh, and the Taliban in Afghanistan is eager to sell captured U.S. arms to anyone willing to pay. As Foreign Policy magazine laid out in July, “It’s a new arms race — and it’s threatening global security. The Taliban, allies of if not quite affiliates of al Qaeda, are at the center of a global smuggling web that earns billions of dollars from heroin and meth. Now they appear to be funneling small arms to like-minded extremists inspired by their victory.”
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we are witnessing the failure of deterrence; the “rules-based international order” that the Biden team keeps talking about is in tatters. This morning, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt writes, “The world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries — and political groups like Hamas — are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire.”
Hamas rapes and slaughters hundreds of innocent people at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel. Russia invades Ukraine, and China is preparing for the conquest of Taiwan. No one is afraid of the West anymore; no one expects the arsenal of democracy and our allies to show up, guns blazing, in response to some outrageous provocation or massacre or invasion anymore.
Blame it on the images of the Afghanistan withdrawal, blame it on neo-isolationist attitudes taking root all across the West, blame it on amoral Western financial elites who look at brutal autocracies and see just another way to make a buck. (Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya in January 2022: “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay?”)
Maybe blame it on the United States having a geriatric president who attended a barbeque in the Rose Garden for the White House executive staff last night.
Zablotskiy called what we’re facing the “Axis of A**holes.” You may not like that particular term, but we need some label for increasing opportunistic cooperation between Russia, China, Iran, other rogue states such as North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
Considering how everyone involved in this malevolent network has the resume of a demon, I’d say the “Axis of the Devils” fits. It’s been a theme in the fiction work the past few years.
Somewhere in the Gaza Strip, there are innocent Palestinians — just ordinary folks, trying to get through the day, make a living, and raise their families. But if you live next door to a Hamas bomb-making hideout or weapons depot, or let terrorists run your territory, you’ve made a choice to live with an extremely high risk of fatal consequences. It’s hard to know if Palestinians could live any other way than they do now — a de facto terrorist state — as they are ruled by terrorists and sometimes terrorized themselves. If there were a Palestinian Martin Luther King, Hamas would have killed him because it doesn’t want competition or a threat to its power.
Years ago during the Cold War, Sting sang, “Do Russians love their children too?” If you raise your children to believe they have no higher calling in life than to be a suicide bomber, I’d argue you don’t love them. A report in March found, “Teachers and schools at the United Nations agency that runs education and social services for Palestinians regularly call to murder Jews, and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism.”
Think about how many great potential doctors, scientists, businessmen, engineers, architects, and artists the Palestinians have lost because their society told those children the best thing they could do with their lives was blow themselves up and take some Jews with them. Life for the Palestinians could be completely different, and better, than it is now — but for that to happen, they collectively would need to make completely different, and better, choices.
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The Wall Street Journal:
DUBAI—Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.
Asked about the meetings, Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, said the group planned the attacks on its own. “This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision,” he said.
A spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations said the Islamic Republic stood in support of Gaza’s actions but didn’t direct them.
“The decisions made by the Palestinian resistance are fiercely autonomous and unwaveringly aligned with the legitimate interests of the Palestinian people,” the spokesman said. “We are not involved in Palestine’s response, as it is taken solely by Palestine itself.”
A direct Iranian role would take Tehran’s long-running conflict with Israel out of the shadows, raising the risk of broader conflict in the Middle East. Senior Israeli security officials have pledged to strike at Iran’s leadership if Tehran is found responsible for killing Israelis.
The IRGC’s broader plan is to create a multi-front threat that can strangle Israel from all sides—Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, according to the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members and an Iranian official.
At least 700 Israelis are confirmed dead, and Saturday’s assault has punctured the country’s aura of invincibility and left Israelis questioning how their vaunted security forces could let this happen.
Israel has blamed Iran, saying it is behind the attacks, if indirectly. “We know that there were meetings in Syria and in Lebanon with other leaders of the terror armies that surround Israel so obviously it’s easy to understand that they tried to coordinate. The proxies of Iran in our region, they tried to be coordinated as much as possible with Iran,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, said Sunday.
Hamas has publicly acknowledged receiving support from Iran. And on Sunday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi talked to Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah and Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh.
Iran has been setting aside other regional conflicts, such as its open feud with Saudi Arabia in Yemen, to devote the IRGC’s foreign resources toward coordinating, financing and arming militias antagonistic to Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah, the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members said.
The U.S. and Israel have designated Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
“We are now free to focus on the Zionist entity,” the Iranian official said. “They are now very isolated.”
The strike was intended to hit Israel while it appeared distracted by internal political divisions over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It was also aimed at disrupting accelerating U.S.-brokered talks to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel that Iran saw as threatening, the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members said.
Building on peace deals with Egypt and Jordan, expanding Israeli ties with Gulf Arab states could create a chain of American allies linking three key choke points of global trade—the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Bab Al Mandeb connecting the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea, said Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
“That’s very bad news for Iran,” Ibish said. “If they could do this, the strategic map changes dramatically to Iran’s detriment.”
Leading the effort to wrangle Iran’s foreign proxies under a unified command has been Ismail Qaani, the leader of the IRGC’s international military arm, the Quds Force.
Qaani launched coordination among several militias surrounding Israel in April during a meeting in Lebanon, The Wall Street Journal has reported, where Hamas began working more closely with other groups such as Hezbollah for the first time.
Around that time, Palestinian groups staged a rare set of limited strikes on Israel from Lebanon and Gaza, under the direction of Iran, said the Iranian official. “It was a roaring success,” the official said.
Iran has long backed Hamas but, as a Sunni Muslim group, it had been an outsider among Tehran’s Shia proxies until recent months, when cooperation among the groups accelerated.
Representatives of these groups have met with Quds Force leaders at least biweekly in Lebanon since August to discuss this weekend’s attack on Israel and what happens next, they said. Qaani has attended some of those meetings along with Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, Islamic Jihad leader al-Nakhalah, and Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s military chief, the militant-group members said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian attended at least two of the meetings, they said.
“An attack of such scope could only have happened after months of planning and would not have happened without coordination with Iran,” said Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London. “Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, does not single-handedly make decisions to engage in war without prior explicit agreement from Iran.”
The Palestinian and Lebanese militias’ ability to coordinate with Iran will be tested in the coming days as Israel’s response comes into focus.
Egypt, which is trying to mediate in the conflict, has warned Israeli officials that a ground invasion into Gaza would trigger a military response from Hezbollah, opening up a second battlefront, people familiar with the matter said. Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire briefly on Sunday.
Hamas has called on Palestinians in the West Bank and Palestinian citizens of Israel to take up arms and join the fight. There have been limited clashes in the West Bank, but no reports of clashes between Arabs and Jews inside Israel, as happened in May 2021 when Israel and Gaza last engaged in extended combat.
The Iranian official said that if Iran were attacked, it would respond with missile strikes on Israel from Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, and send Iranian fighters into Israel from Syria to attack cities in the north and east of Israel.
Iran’s backing of a coordinated group of Arab militias is ominous for Israel. In previous conflicts, the Soviet Union was the ultimate patron of Israel’s Arab enemies and was always able to pressure them to reach some type of accommodation or recognize a red line, said Bernard Hudson, a former counterterrorism chief for the Central Intelligence Agency.
“The Soviets never considered Israel a permanent foe,” he said. “Iran’s leadership clearly does.”
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You’re about to withstand a barrage of lies about the war that broke out today in Israel.
Some of those lies will be explicit. Some of them will be lies of omission. Others will be lies of obfuscation. Or lies of minimization. Lies told by people who are simply too afraid to look at such an ugly, barbarous reality. And lies told by people whose true beliefs are too ugly to quite say aloud. Turn on cable news and you can hear some of them right now.
So let’s get some facts straight.
Israel was attacked last night. It was attacked by Hamas terrorists who streamed over the border from Gaza. They came on foot and on motorbikes. They came by truck and by car and by paraglider. They came to Israel to murder and maim and mutilate anyone they could find. And that is what they did.
It is impossible to know the numbers of the dead or the missing or the injured.
The official numbers as of this writing: 300 Israelis dead; 1,590 wounded. And dozens—maybe many more—taken hostage into Gaza. They include women, elders, and children.
But none of those words or numbers capture the evil of what unfolded today.
Young festival-goers running for their lives. Teenage girls dragged by their hair by Hamas men. An old woman forced to pose with a Hamas rifle. A mother—a hostage—cradling two redheaded babies in her arms.
I have friends in Israel. Each one of them has a story of someone they know who is missing. Or injured. Or killed. This was not a tit-for-tat, as you’ll see the mainstream media try to spin it. This was not a justifiable military response, or just another day in a cycle of violence. This was the slaughter of innocent civilians.
New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America today announced a protest in honor of the attacks. It’s called All Out for Palestine: “In solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid.” The anti-Zionist group IfNotNow explained the attacks as Israel’s fault and said of the dead Jews: “Their blood is on the hands of the Israeli government.”
You will see a lot like this in the coming days. Ancient lies told in new language whose end is always, strangely, the same: a justification for genocide.
Think about 9/11 and the kind of shock and terror we felt. That is what Israelis feel today. That is the level of devastation Israel is now experiencing.
We are left with so many questions:
How did this happen?
Who is to blame for this catastrophic security failure?
How will Israel respond? How will Israel save the hostages in Gaza?
What was the extent of Iran’s involvement in this sophisticated operation?
Will this change the Biden administration’s policy toward the Islamic Republic?
And so many more.
Those are the questions that require answers. But for today, while others offer mealy-mouthed pablum, we want to do something simple: to tell the truth—plainly—about a catastrophic day.
We’ll have much more reporting for you in the coming days. We’re going to work hard to give you the kind of independent, honest journalism you expect from The Free Press.
Herewith, three essays from a nation at war. The first, by Noah Pollak, explains why today was Israel’s 9/11—and urges us not to avert our eyes from evil. The second, by 20-year-old Arad Fruchter, is a first-person account of his encounter with Hamas terrorists in Israel’s southern desert. The third, by Rabbi Daniel Gordis, tells of a day that began with joyous singing at synagogue and ended with his son being called up to war. And on Honestly: a conversation with historian and former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren.
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Sometimes, in wars and revolutions, fundamental change arrives with a bang. More often, it creeps up on you. That is the way with what we are calling “homeland economics”, a protectionist, high-subsidy, intervention-heavy ideology administered by an ambitious state. Fragile supply chains, growing threats to national security, the energy transition and the cost-of-living crisis have each demanded action by governments—and for good reason. But when you lump them all together, it becomes clear just how systematically the presumption of open markets and limited government has been left in the dust.
For this newspaper, this is an alarming trend. We were founded in 1843 to campaign for, among other things, free trade and a modest role for government. Today these classical liberal values are not only unpopular, they are increasingly absent from political debate. Less than eight years ago President Barack Obama was trying to sign America up to a giant Pacific trade pact. Today if you argue for free trade in Washington, you will be scoffed at as hopelessly naive. In the emerging world, you will be painted as a neocolonial relic from the era when the West knew best.
Our special report this week argues that homeland economics will ultimately prove to be a disappointment. It misdiagnoses what has gone wrong, it overburdens the state with unmeetable responsibilities and it will botch a period of rapid social and technological change. The good news is that eventually it will bring about its own demise.
Central to the new regime is the idea that protectionism is the way to cope with the buffeting of open markets. China’s success convinced working-class Westerners that they had a lot to lose from the free movement of goods across borders. The covid-19 pandemic left elites thinking that global supply chains had to be “derisked”, often by moving production closer to home. China’s rise under “state capitalism”, with its disregard for rules-based trade and challenge to American power, was seized on in rich and emerging economies as a justification for intervention.
This protectionism goes along with extra government spending. Industry is gobbling up subsidies to boost the energy transition and guarantee the supply of strategic goods. Vast handouts to households during the pandemic have raised expectations of the state as a bulwark against life’s misfortunes. The Spanish and Italian governments are even bailing out borrowers who cannot afford the rising cost of mortgages.
And, inevitably, state handouts go along with extra regulation. Antitrust has become activist. Regulators are eyeing nascent markets, from cloud gaming to artificial intelligence. Because carbon prices are still too low, governments end up micro-managing the energy transition by decree.
This mix of protection, spending and regulation comes at a heavy cost. For a start, it is a misdiagnosis. The pooling of risks is indeed an essential function of governments. But not all risks: for markets to work, actions must have consequences.
In contrast to the accepted view, covid and the Ukraine war have shown that markets deal with shocks better than planners do. Globalised trade coped with huge swings in consumer demand: throughput at America’s ports in 2021 was 11% higher than in 2019. In 2022 Germany’s economy repeated the trick, suffering no calamity as it switched rapidly from Russian gas to other sources of energy. By contrast, state-dominated markets like the supply of shells for Ukraine are still struggling. Just like the old complaints about trade with China—which has boosted Americans’ real incomes—gripes about globalisation’s supposed fragility have built a cathedral of fear over a grain of truth.
Another flaw in homeland economics is to overburden the state. Governments are losing all restraint just when they need to curtail welfare spending. Ageing populations weigh down budgets with extra bills for pensions and health care. Rising interest rates make everything worse. After a bond-market crisis in 2022, Britain’s right-wing government is raising taxes, as a share of gdp, by more than in any parliamentary term in the country’s history. As yields rise on long-dated bonds, indebted Italy looks wobbly again. America’s rising debt-service bill will probably match its all-time high before the end of the decade—testimony to the fiscal fragility of the new era.
The least visible, but potentially most costly flaw is that homeland economics is a blunt instrument in a time of rapid change. The energy and ai transitions are too big for any government to plan. Nobody knows the cheapest ways to decarbonise or the best uses of new technology. Ideas need to be tested and channelled by markets, not governed by checklists from the centre. Excessive regulation will inhibit innovation and, by raising costs, make change slower and more painful.
Despite its flaws, homeland economics will be tough to restrain. People enjoy spending other people’s money. As government budgets get bigger, the special interests that feed on them will grow in size and influence. It is harder to withdraw protection and handouts than to grant them—particularly with more elderly voters, who have less of a stake in economic growth. Anyone doe-eyed about the arc of history bending towards progress should remember that a century ago Argentina was about as rich as Switzerland.
Yet disillusionment will eventually set in. That may be because fiscal extravagance catches up with indebted governments. Perhaps the rent-seekers’ greed will become too hard to conceal. Or a stagnating, repressive China may no longer hold out the promise of state-directed prosperity.
When change comes, it can be surprisingly swift—in democracies, at least. In the 1970s the tide turned in favour of free markets almost as fast as it has turned against them today, leading to the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The task for classical liberals is to prepare for that moment by defining a new consensus that adapts their ideas to a more dangerous, interconnected and fractious world. That will not be easy, especially in the face of the rivalry between America and China. But it has been done in the past. And think of the prize.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 