How Joe Biden/Kamala Harris Ensured 7 October
In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson casts blame on the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris administration for “just about guaranteeing” that something similar to the 7 October “massacres would inevitably follow.” We are now witnessing a subsequent year of violence that has now engulfed the Middle East.
Biden/Harris bought into the anti-Americanism and anti-Israel boilerplate of our enemies. “They thought to make amends by seeing Iran and its terrorists as the moral equivalent of democratic, pro-American Israel.”
The Abraham Accords focused on regional peace and prosperity. The 2020 agreements capitalized on emerging dynamics in the Middle East by bringing the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kosovo into normalized relations with Israel.
A good measure of blame goes to the adoption of the Biden/Harris administration’s 5-step “revisionist protocol that appeased and encouraged Iran and its terrorist surrogates Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.”
Making Saudi Arabis an Outcast
Joe Biden, on the 2020 campaign trail, damned long-time American ally Saudi Arabia as a “pariah.”
1. Biden-Harris nihilistically killed off the Trump administration’s “Abraham Accords,” which was a diplomatic breakthrough and a successful blueprint for moderate Arab nations to seek détente with Israel. It would have ended decades of hostilities to unite against the common Middle East threat of Iran.
2. The dropping of oil sanctions against the theocracy allowed a near-destitute Iran to recoup $100 billion in profits. The administration also greenlighted $6 billion in hostage ransoms to Tehran.
What did Tehran do with that $6 billion ransom money? The money was used in support of and to obtain weapons for the anti-Western terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah. It also allowed the Houthis to attack Israel, Americans and international shipping. Iran soon began partnering with China and Russia to form a new anti-American axis.
3. Biden-Harris restored hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the West Bank and Gaza, without any guarantees that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas would desist from their past serial terrorist acts.
4. US and Western “humanitarian aid” freed up more fungible dollars in Gaza to arm Hamas and to expand its subterranean tunnel complex essential to its 7 October atrocities.
Constraining America’s Closest Middle East Friend
5. Ensuing increased tensions, Biden-Harris pressured the Israelis to act “proportionally” in responding to the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis and nearly 20,000 missiles, rockets, and drones launched at their homeland from Iran, the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The Iranian-backed terrorist group, thinking there was now “daylight” between the U.S. and its closest regional ally. Iran, believed it had a green light to test how far it could safely go in attacking Israel.
Empowering a Rogue Iran
Looking to strengthen a new balance of power in the region, the Biden/Harris administration naively tried to resurrect the old, discredited Obama administration’s notion of ‘creative tension’—of empowering a rogue Iran and its terrorists to play off Israel and the moderate Arab regimes.
Wishful Thinking
Were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris naïve and gullible? Could stupidity apply? Biden/Harris bought into the anti-Americanism and anti-Israel boilerplate of our enemies. The administration was caving to increased anti-Semitism at home and the rise of powerful, pro-Palestinian groups on U.S. campuses and in critical swing Electoral College states.
By seeking to make amends by seeing Iran and its terrorists as the moral equivalent of democratic, pro-American Israel, the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris administration encouraged the malignant legacy that is now the current disaster in the Middle East.
“Hardliners on both sides are running things,” reports Paul Wood in the Spectator.
The past week has shown there is no such thing as “escalating to de-escalate” — only escalation. The window for diplomacy is closing and what happens next depends on an American president in the dying days of his administration.
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