Now That Iran’s Attacking Israel, NatSec Experts Go Quiet

F or days, we listened to top Democratic national-security officials drone on — and man, do these guys know how to drone — about how Israel was guilty of terrorism and war crimes for what were in fact exquisitely discriminatory, proportionate strikes against Hezbollah fighters in the “grim beeper” operation and against the top tier of Hezbollah and Hamas in targeted assassinations. Now, though, those voices sure seem to have gone quiet. And that’s because now the spotlight is on Iran.

For the second time in six months, emboldened by Democratic appeasement, the jihadist regime has launched missiles directly at Israel, including indiscriminate strikes on civilian centers. The Jerusalem Post reports that Iran fired about 180 missiles.

Let’s be clear on what happened here. Israel did not provoke the Iranian attack by striking Iran — although it did conduct a targeted assassination of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran when Haniyeh was being harbored there (during a visit to honor Iran’s new president). Haniyeh orchestrated the October 7 barbarities against Israelis and Americans. (The Biden-Harris administration would like you to forget that it has done nothing about an international terrorist organization, designated as such under U.S. law for nearly 30 years, that mass-murdered Americans and has continued, for a year, to hold at least four of them hostage — while murdering others.)

To the contrary, Iran carried out Tuesday’s bombings in retaliation for Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, a terrorist organization, in Lebanon — including decapitation strikes that ultimately took out Hezbollah’s emir of over 30 years, the infamous jihadist Hassan Nasrallah. (Throughout his stewardship, Hezbollah trained al-Qaeda’s jihadists in its camps and collaborated in such attacks as the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing of the U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia, the 9/11 atrocities, and operations against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.) Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon were provoked: At Iran’s direction, Hezbollah began cross-border strikes against Israel on October 8, 2023, in order to complement the October 7 savagery of Hamas — whose anti-Israeli and anti-American terrorism is also materially supported by Iran. In the interim, Iran has directed others among its proxies in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and the West Bank to attack Israel.

Remember, on the eve of the 2020 election, Democratic self-styled national-security experts assured you that Hunter Biden’s laptop — with all its evidence implicating Joe Biden in the Biden family influence-peddling business — was just a Russian-influence operation that you should ignore. On the eve of the 2024 election, with our senescent president and the Harris-Walz campaign placing higher priority on their fears that “escalation” will harm the Democratic ticket’s chances than on Israel’s struggle to survive jihadist aggressions, some of these same experts told you the Israeli government was guilty of war crimes and terrorism.

And now, with the actual terrorist regime that Biden and Harris have been appeasing for four years committing its usual war crimes and terrorism, the “experts” seem a tad tongue-tied.

I recently argued that Israel is beset by a competence penalty. In essence, Israel is extraordinarily adept at national defense and combat operations after it has been attacked; Iran and its jihadist proxies, by contrast, are ruthless but markedly less competent, especially when it comes to defending themselves. They rely mainly on conducting their operations and storing their munitions in civilian areas and, in Iran’s case, on the well-founded assumption that the United States government will shield Iranian territory from responsive strikes — i.e., that the U.S. will decline to retaliate against Iran itself when its proxies attack Americans and will strong-arm Israel into not striking back.

The dichotomy has contributed heavily to the distortion of proportionality. This law-of-war concept simply means that, in attacking a military target, a combatant is expected to make reasonable efforts to minimize collateral damage — understanding that the target is still legitimate and may thus be attacked even if collateral damage is unavoidable. Transnational progressives, particularly in assessing Israeli (and American) military operations, have twisted proportionality into a numbers game — as if a combatant fighting a defensive war must not exceed the number of casualties caused by a terrorist aggressor that ignores the laws of war.

But now it’s even more absurd. Israel bears a competence handicap: Because its national-defense operations are highly effective and its terrorist aggressors cannot compete on the battlefield, Israel is expected to accept more military and civilian casualties and to refrain from attacking legitimate targets — you know, just to keep things “proportionate.” Israeli national defense, in an existential war started by jihadists who will be satisfied with nothing less than the Jewish state’s destruction, is slandered as “escalation,” “war crimes,” and “terrorism.”

Bottom line: Like the Obama-Biden administration before it, the Biden-Harris administration has spent its entire term not only appeasing but enriching and empowering Iran, enabling the underwriting of its proxies and launching of its missile attacks on Israel — all while Iran inches closer to nuclear weapons (if it’s not there already). Iran, however, is in an aggressive war against Israel and the United States. The U.S. government’s appeasement and empowerment of Tehran, including its functioning as a shield safeguarding Iranian territory, emboldens Iran and keeps the war going. The war ends only when Iran’s revolutionary sharia-supremacist regime has been defeated and defanged, or overthrown and replaced by a government that wants peace and prosperity.