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Appeasing Iran Will Suck the U.S. into Another Middle East War

(JNS) Gadi Taub - In his speech before a joint session of Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defined the war with Hamas as one tributary of the larger struggle against Iran and called on the whole of Western civilization to unite around it. The speech created the illusion of wide consensus around self-evident moral truths. But in reality, the Biden administration is not exactly part of such a consensus. The designation of Iran as a common enemy of both the U.S. and Israel may strike many Americans as uncontroversial, even trivial. But from day one, the Biden administration has been doing its best to ignore, deny and downplay Iran's role in the war Israel is fighting against Tehran's proxy in Gaza. The administration has done this to divert attention away from its own policy towards Iran, which has replaced deterrence with "de-escalation." From the moment it took office, the Biden administration has been signaling to Iran that it is seeking accommodation, not confrontation. One of the first acts of the Biden administration was to take the Houthis off the list of designated terror organizations and then withhold from the Saudis weapons with which to wage war against them. It then forced Israel to make concessions to Lebanon to the benefit of Hizbullah in a 2022 maritime border agreement that granted the Lebanese - and therefore Hizbullah - access to presumed underwater gas reservoirs in return for nothing. All the while, the administration has loosened sanctions on Iran, filling the coffers of the mullahs with oil sales revenue, which they then used to boost their proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, West Iraq, Yemen, and Judea and Samaria. All this was a carefully planned - though seriously misguided - policy. But there's a limit to what the administration can do because it can't appear to the American public to be favoring Iran over Israel. The reactions to Netanyahu's speech were a strong reminder of that fact. Most Americans, including Democratic voters, will not approve of throwing Israel under the bus to appease Iran and save Hamas. The writer is a senior lecturer at Hebrew University's Federmann School of Public Policy.
2024-07-30 00:00:00
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