As Iran hits Israel with missiles, Trump urges Israeli restraint.
It was a dark evening. The Islamic Republic of Iran struck Israel, and Trump told Netanyahu not to retaliate, saying that a deal was very close to being concluded. This was nonsense from the beginning. The idea that the Islamic Republic would abide by any deal it made with the United States was always based on a towering house of cards of false assumptions, including the idea that the Islamic Republic wanted peace at all, and that it would give up its jihad against America and Israel, and that it would ever stop pursuing whatever weapons it needed in order to destroy both of those enemies.
Now it looks as if all that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and whoever else is leading Iran these days need in order to emerge victorious from this conflict is Donald Trump in the White House. Trump is so avid to be seen as the great peacemaker that he has turned against Israel, which is America’s ally, and embraced Iran, where the leadership screams “Death to America.” This is as craven and wrongheaded a betrayal of an American ally as Obama and Biden ever perpetrated against Israel, and Trump has done it for strikingly similar reasons, albeit with some important differences.
Obama and Biden wanted to bring peace to the Middle East and the world by bringing the Islamic Republic of Iran into the family of nations as a partner of the United States and a rock of stability in the region. They would do this with Obama’s nuclear deal and other conciliatory gestures, including sending billions of dollars to Tehran. Meanwhile, the various constraints they placed upon Israel — opposition to the “settlements” during the Obama years, and Biden’s withholding of weapons shipments after Oct. 7 — were meant to appease Iran’s inveterate hostility to the Jewish state, while America’s continuing alliance with Israel at the same time deterred Iran from waging all-out war against Israel.
Trump was a vociferous critic of the Obama/Biden appeasement of Iran, and promised toughness: the rescinding of the disastrous nuclear deal during his first term was a manifestation of that. But now he has decided that peace is the foremost goal of his foreign policy. He must be remembered as the man who ended wars. He must get that Nobel Peace Prize. And so as the Oct. 7 war dragged on, Trump hit on a grand solution: he would force Israel to make peace with Hamas before it had attained its oft-stated goal of destroying the jihad terror group. He would launch airstrikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran in tandem with Israel, but not in order to help the Iranian people (despite his repeated promises to do so) free themselves from the Islamic regime they detest and abhor. Instead, all he wanted to do was accomplish what Obama and Biden failed to accomplish by sending billions of dollars to Tehran: if their carrots didn’t work, he would use the stick to show the Islamic Republic that waging jihad against Israel was fruitless and not going to be tolerated. Nevertheless, he still wants peace above everything else, including Israel’s self-defense. So he has adopted what is essentially the Obama/Biden policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran: constrain and scold Israel while reaching out in friendship to Tehran. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images |
For the Iranian regime, the purpose of negotiations is to force America to surrender.
From the start of the war with Iran, it was clear that the stakes couldn’t have been higher.
If the United States and Israel were to succeed in neutralizing the Iranian regime, the outcome wouldn’t just have been the removal of a monstrous threat to Israel, the Iranian people and the world.
It also would have reshaped global politics by tearing apart the web of evil spun by Russia, China and North Korea, at the center of which squatted the regime on which they all depended—the Islamic Republic of Iran.
If, however, the United States were to lose that war and the Iranian regime remained as a threat, Russia, China and North Korea would be galvanized by the perception that mighty America was in fact a paper tiger, and the whole free world would be placed in even greater danger.
The early successes of the war, which so greatly weakened Iran, suggested that the first option was eminently possible. But now the picture looks very different.
In an article in Foreign Affairs, two pro-Islamic regime analysts, Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr, gloat over what they see as an Iranian victory over America. They write: “The war has given rise to a new Iran, one that will reshape the [Middle East] and influence the course of geopolitics for years to come.”
Despite the fact that this is an Iranian propaganda line, it’s hard not to conclude—incredible as this may seem—that U.S. President Donald Trump is now actually dancing to the tune of Tehran.
On April 8, a ceasefire was declared between Iran and the U.S.-Israel alliance. Since then, Iran has continued to launch attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and on Gulf states.
On Tuesday night, it launched drone attacks on Kuwait, killing one person and injuring more than 60. Other missiles were intercepted by U.S. and Bahraini air defenses.
Since the purported ceasefire with America, Iran has used its proxy army Hezbollah repeatedly to attack Israeli military and civilian targets from Lebanon. Unsurprisingly, Israel has responded fiercely.
On April 17, after the Iranian regime, which was behaving like the mafia in the Strait of Hormuz, outrageously complained that Israeli retaliation against Hezbollah was preventing the strait from reopening, Trump pressured Israel into a ceasefire in Lebanon.
Since that ceasefire, 14 Israel Defense Forces soldiers have been killed there. No country could be expected to soft-pedal its defense in such a situation.
To defeat Hezbollah, Israel needs to destroy its nerve center in the Beirut district known as the Dahiyeh. On Monday, it was about to do so. Alarmed by this very real threat to its vital proxy, Iran threatened to walk away from negotiations with America. As a result, Trump ordered Israel not to attack Beirut and declared another ceasefire.
Three hours later, Hezbollah fired a barrage of missiles at Israel. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, a Hezbollah drone crossed into northern Israel, sending 25,000 Israelis running once more into the bomb shelters. That day, Israel and Lebanon agreed to another dubious ceasefire between the two warring sides.
It is, of course, intolerable for Trump to prevent Israel from doing what it needs to do to protect its citizens against such attacks. Moreover, Trump’s statements appear to fly in the face of reality. --->READ MORE HERE
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