How Biden’s Mideast Stance Weakens Israel And Emboldens Iran

-OpEd-

The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is weak both structurally and for its dismal popularity level, which has made it take some contradictory, or erratic, decisions in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

Other factors influencing its decisions include the pressures of the families of Hamas hostages, and the U.S. administration’s lukewarm support for this government and entirely reactive response to the military provocations and “hit-and-run” incidents orchestrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, which include Hamas. Israel has also failed to mobilize international opinion behind its war on regional terrorism, in what might be termed a full-blown public relations disaster.

The administration led by President Joe Biden has, by repeating the Democrats’ favored, and some might say feeble, policy of appeasing Iran’s revolutionary regime, duly nullified the effects of Western sanctions imposed on that regime. By delisting its proxies, the Houthis of Yemen, as terrorists, the administration has allowed them to devote their energies to firing drones and missiles across the Red Sea and even indulging in piracy. The general picture is of a moment of pitiful weakness for the West, in which Iran and other members of the Axis – of Evil or Resistance, take your pick – are daily cocking a snook at the Western powers.

You wonder: how could the United States, given its military and technological resources, fail to spot tankers smuggling out banned Iranian oil through the Persian Gulf to finance the regime’s foreign entanglements, while Iran is able to track Israeli-owned ships as far aways as the Indian Ocean? The answer, rather simply, lies in the Biden administration’s decision to indulge the ayatollahs and hope for the best.

It did this again recently by allowing Iraq to pay more restricted monies owed to the Islamic Republic (for electricity). Whether the approach relates to coming presidential elections or because the administration wants to avoid another hostile front after Gaza and Ukraine, its price is being paid by millions of Iranians living in a dictatorship and other peoples in this troubled region.

Reformism and moderation

The Iranian regime is now partially, though brazenly, blocking certain UN inspections of its nuclear program, thus violating commitments, and has publicly refused to let some of the inspectors into Iran. It has dispensed with the need to provide explanations for the suspect activities going on at sites inside Iran. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear inspectorate (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, has been pointing this out, though this time the IAEA governing board has failed, or refused, to react. Its members include the great Western powers, but who is impressed by the European triumvirate of Great Britain, France, and Germany threatening Iran with prolonged sanctions if it keeps acting this way?

The West is absent where needed, and meddles where it shouldn’t.

Don’t be surprised if, in coming weeks, while the world is focused on Ukraine and Gaza, Iran’s regime unveils its “Shia bomb” – the nuclear bomb it insists it never wanted – finally ending its decades-long, farcical, cat-and-mouse game with the UN and Western powers.

Subversive opponent

The West is absent where needed, and meddles where it shouldn’t. It appears to be engaged, absurdly, in finding or forging an opposition leader in Iran acceptable to “everyone,” perhaps in a bid to rearrange the country’s democracy movement. Iranians will not have forgotten the last time the West decided, disastrously, that a change of leadership was needed in Iran, when it pulled the rug from under the Shah in 1978 and paved the way for the ayatollahs. Lately, Western agencies have in turn been giving prizes, and recognition, to prisoners of conscience in Iran, though they will surely know that Tehran will not tolerate any serious or truly subversive opponent.

Perhaps the West has decided to abandon the exiled opposition – and the idea of regime change – and is again angling for reformism and moderation. This might be discerned in the press and social media reactions to some of the exiled crown prince’s recent interviews, with a clear trend to portray Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last monarch, as weak, incoherent or having second thoughts about leading a united opposition to the Islamic Republic.

Perhaps a more laughable example of what some may suspect to be Western connivence with the regime – or its cynicism – is in reports of a phone conversation between Nargues Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace laureate jailed in Iran, and the American actress Angelina Jolie. Who would have thought it: Iran’s hangman regime will let you talk to the foreign press from prison! And yet for years, the same lady wasn’t even allowed to phone her children.