Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday, setting off sirens across the entire country and driving its 10 million citizens into bomb shelters.
Fortunately, due to the incredible work of the IDF’s anti-missile systems as well as help from the U.S. Navy, most of the missiles were intercepted — or they landed in areas where they did not kill civilians. As of this writing, one Palestinian in the West Bank was killed and two Israelis were injured in falling shrapnel. Video also showed large craters near Tel Aviv and severe damage to a school in central Israel (luckily, the attack came when school was out of session).
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised a severe response that will make Iran pay a price — as it should.
As we await the Israeli reaction and its implications for the region, it’s worth emphasizing that Tuesday’s attack is the latest example of the failed policy of appeasing Iran that has been a fixture of Democratic administrations dating back to Barack Obama.
When President Obama took office in 2009, he pursued a strategy that attempted to reorient United States policy in the Middle East. The U.S. was too reflexively pro-Israel, he argued, and only by showing more “daylight” could America earn the respect of the Arab states. At the same time, he wanted to move away from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and pursue warmer relations with Iran, deluded into thinking that doing so would usher in more moderation despite the fact that the regime was founded on Islamic fanaticism, has one of the worst human-rights records in the world, and is the leading sponsor of state terrorism.
To grease the wheels of diplomacy, Obama turned a blind eye to the malign behavior of Iran and its terrorist proxies. Its efforts to downplay Iran’s destabilizing effect on the region culminated in a disastrous nuclear deal that provided tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief to the regime, allowed it to pursue ballistic-missile development, and left it on a long-term glide path toward nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump wisely tore up the nuclear deal and ratcheted up sanctions, delivering a crushing economic blow to the terror state. But President Biden and Kamala Harris brought back many of the same advisers responsible for the Obama catastrophe. In hopes of resurrecting the deal, the Biden-Harris administration once again gave billions in sanctions relief to Iran and once again downplayed its bad behavior. In the process, they removed all deterrence, and Iran felt a free hand to pursue its evil designs and replenish its terror subsidiaries.
To Israel’s south, Hamas was rebuilt and emboldened to orchestrate the October 7 attacks; to its north, Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets at Israel, making the top part of the country uninhabitable to 80,000 residents who were forced to flee; in Yemen, Houthis have fired with little restraint at ships traveling through an economically significant section of the Red Sea (and the rebels have taken credit for downing multiple American-made Reaper drones).
At every escalation by Iran, the response by the Biden-Harris administration has been to show weakness. Sure, the administration has held that its support for Israel’s defense is “ironclad,” and it has now for the second time helped Israel avoid a mass-casualty event. But it has failed to recognize that defensive measures against Iran can only go so far when they aren’t accompanied by a strong offensive response to reestablish deterrence. Instead, Biden has repeatedly told Israel to stand down, to de-escalate, to “take a win,” out of a desperate hope of avoiding a broader war that could imperil Democratic hopes of retaining the White House. This strategy of weakness has only brought the region closer to the war he is trying to avoid.
This time, the response to Iranian aggression must be different. For the second time in five months, Iran has fired hundreds of projectiles at Israel. Thanks to the gains the regime is believed to have made in uranium enrichment under the Biden-Harris administration, there is simply no way Israel can take the chance that the next time Iran launches such an attack, some of the missiles could be loaded with nuclear warheads.