Wall Street Journalist columnist Walter Russell Mead published a column Monday in which he argues that the policy of trying to appease Iran, followed by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, led directly to the Hamas terror attack on Israel and the war.
While Biden is currently showing strong support for Israel, saying it has a “duty” to destroy Hamas, and sending two aircraft carriers to deter Iran from expanding the conflict, his policies encouraged terror after four years of calm under Donald Trump.
Mead writes:
Even now, Team Biden does not seem to have internalized the reality that the American policy of “conciliate to evacuate”—to develop a U.S.-Iranian détente that would allow the U.S. to reduce its role in the region—remains, as it has since President Obama first began to implement it, a destabilizing force in the Middle East. It has discomfited our friends, disrupted our alliances, emboldened terrorists, and provided Iran’s mullahs with the resources to turn both Hezbollah and Hamas into formidably destructive forces.
…
Iran is unappeasable, but this truth is too inconvenient for the Biden administration to admit. Instead, administration spokesmen continue to minimize Tehran’s involvement with and responsibility for the murders. Iran, which at this point seems to have little fear from an administration it believes it has cowed, is more open. It makes no bones about its support for the murders in Gaza. After the attack, when it was already clear how indiscriminate the killing had been, Iran’s foreign minister embraced the head of Hamas, a man who lives in luxury in Qatar, a country that Mr. Biden last year designated a major non-NATO ally of the U.S.
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The truth is simple. Iran is at war with Israel and with the U.S. It does not seek compromise or accommodation. It does not want its interests respected or its grievances redressed. It wants what it says it wants: a holocaust in Israel and the destruction of the U.S.
Read the full article here.
On the same page, the Journal‘s William McGurn makes a similar argument, calling for a change in course: “On Israel, Mr. Biden has said all the right things. But he remains reluctant to speak of Iran, no doubt aware how bad his policies look in hindsight.”
Notably, President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the weak Iran nuclear deal, applied a policy of “maximum pressure” to Iran through sanctions, and ordered the killing of Iranian terror general Qasem Soleimani — for which Biden criticized him.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and other Republicans are calling for a freeze on the $6 billion that the Biden administration pomised to Iran as part of a recent deal to free American hostages.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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