Enabling Iran’s Role In The Hamas Attacks And Lessons Going Forward

In the wake of the despicable Hamas attacks on Israel, there have been accusations that the Biden administration’s transfer to Iran of $6 billion amounts to subsidizing the latest Hamas war. While this indictment is correct, it does not advance an argument about the future.

This latest war by terrorists on innocent Jews is an indictment of an entirely warped philosophy overtaking foreign policy establishment and prevailed through the last three presidential administrations: that the United States must “pivot” away from the Middle East toward more urgent challenges in places like Beijing and Moscow. Indeed, the George W. Bush administration was the last to reject such naïveté.

For the Obama administration, the Iran nuclear agreement represented an effort to repudiate the post-9/11 wars — “forever wars” that halfwit isolationists adore referencing on cable news — and settle millennia of questions in the Middle East with a deal to effectively make everything go away. It was a contemptible deal, but the juvenile philosophy underpinning it is categorically false. Perhaps that’s why Barack Obama has inexplicably not said a word in roughly 60 hours since the catastrophe.

The Trump team understood the foolhardiness of the Iran nuclear deal, but with its obsessions over trade, believed there was some “deal” to offload the entire region. Their Iran policy would properly weaken the Iranian economy while subcontracting management to a new coalition of Sunni Arabs and Israel. While it was heartening to see a half-century of anti-Jewish enmity subside, the Trump policy was just another pivot.

Enter Joe Biden, whose foreign policy advisors are mainly a resuscitation of the Obama years, with a more dangerous effort to assuage Tehran. There’s not just money but a covert “understanding” with the Mullahs to lay off American targets and a gradual nuclear enrichment to fool congressional Democrats.

It is morally and strategically wrong. Evil regimes in Iran do not make legitimate deals. Obama and Biden emboldened Iran with their ignominious concessions.

After 9/11, many of us reminded our friends that not a decade has gone by when a war in the Middle East has not upended a president’s jejune desire for some inane “nation-building here at home.”

The answer to putting the Middle East into a second tier of threats and instead focusing on China or Russia is a victory for radical Islam. Unless we work with Israel to ultimately defeat Iran and its terror agents, we will inevitably be back again. Preparing for war leads to peace. Isolationism and appeasement lead to death.

Iran — which has long-armed, financed, and advised Hamas, Hezbollah, and other anti-Israel militia groups — has been advertising plans to do something evil like last Saturday morning for over a year.

The Biden administration claims it doesn’t have evidence so far that Iran was directly involved in Hamas’s latest assault; yet on Sunday, a Hamas spokesperson told the BBC that it had received support from Iran, as well as other unnamed sources, for the attack that Iran has since publicly praised. The Wall Street Journal also reported that officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land, and sea incursions” for the attack, and Iranian security officials “gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian visited Beirut twice this year to coordinate among Palestinian factions. He met with Hamas and Hezbollah senior leaders to promote unity among the rogue groups and expand the fight from Gaza to the West Bank.

That coordination has been a theme for the Iranian leadership since a Hezbollah-aligned press reported on critical coordination between Hamas and Iran in Beirut during Operation Guardian of the Walls, the 2021 effort by the Israel Defense Forces to stop continuous rocket attacks from Gaza on Israeli cities.

Iran envisions a future of multifront, city-to-city fighting like Israel has not seen since 1948. Jerusalem apparently felt that plan was a fantasy due to a vastly superior Israeli force. Regardless, signs were there, and Israel should have been prepared for this weekend’s attack. Tragically, it was not.

As Yoav Fromer wrote over the weekend, the overarching purpose of Israel’s creation was to prevent another slaughter of Jews; with help from a distracted West, it failed miserably on October 7, 2023.