The Biden administration is breathing a sigh of relief that it has so far avoided a wider regional war between Israel and Iran. But that self-congratulation should be tempered with realization that it was a close call and that the incentives for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governing coalition to provoke one are still present.
The Biden administration’s rhetorical outrage at Iran’s forewarned and well-choreographed symbolic missile and drone attacks on Israeli territory conflicts was absurd, as was its crowing that Israel, with U.S. and allied help, had already “won” by knocking down almost all the sequenced projectiles. American policy has long been so “in the bag” for its Israeli ally, no matter what its behavior, that such silly kabuki has been normalized.
Despite the U.S. declaration of victory, designed to dissuade Israel from a strong escalatory response to the Iranian strike, the Israeli leader came close to ordering a much larger “retaliatory” strike than the limited one the Israelis executed, according to The New York Times.
Although Hamas started the Gaza conflict with its heinous terrorist attack on Israel, Israel’s purposefully reckless attack on Iran’s embassy compound in Syria on April 1, 2024—which killed seven Iranian military personnel, including three top Iranian generals—threatened to widen and escalate the conflict into a direct Israel-Iran war that easily could have dragged in the United States.
Internationally, overseas........