The Biden White House is – reportedly – holding crisis talks to try to prevent an Iranian attack on Israel.
US President Joe Biden held crisis talks on Monday on a potential Iranian counterattack on Israel as his administration said it was working around the clock to avoid all-out war in the Middle East.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are engaged in frantic diplomacy to try to ease tensions sparked by a suspected Israeli strike that killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week.
Israeli officials have not claimed responsibility, but Iran has vowed to seek retribution, stoking fears that violence in the Middle East could spiral out of control.
Those fears grew yesterday after Tehran claimed that it has the ‘legal right’ to respond to Haniyeh’s assassination, with foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanani telling a news conference: ‘No one has the right to doubt Iran’s legal right to punish the Zionist regime.’
Bear in mind that Iran’s mouth is usually bigger than its fists. And Israel tends to play just the opposite game.
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As for the Biden administration, there’s one thing you can count on when the Middle East is concerned; when, for example, Antony Blinken makes a pious pronouncement about the antagonists showing restraint, he means that Israel must show restraint. Granted, Israel is about the only nation or group involved in the current dust-up that pays the United States any heed at all, largely because we are the source for a lot of their weaponry and munitions. But as for “frantic diplomacy?”
In affairs like this, diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice doggy, nice doggy” until you can find a rock. In this case, Iran is the dog, and Israel already has the rock; if Iran really wants to play, the Israelis will very likely knock them for a loop – unless Iran already does have a nuclear device. The problem with Iran’s building as using a nuke on Tel Aviv or Haifa is that Israel has them too, and they likely have some nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on their small but modern diesel-electric submarine fleet. They have five of these – Dolphin-class attack submarines that are (and yes, the irony of this is palpable) built by German shipbuilder Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW.)
That’s probably not a road that Iran wants to go down.
But, the Biden administration has more to say on the matter.
In a desperate bid to ease tensions, Biden yesterday called King Abdullah II of Jordan, who helped down Iranian drones and missiles in an earlier showdown in April, while Blinken called top officials in Qatar and Egypt, the key intermediaries seeking a ceasefire in the 10-month Israel-Hamas war.
‘We are engaged in intense diplomacy, pretty much around the clock, with a very simple message – all parties must refrain from escalation,’ Blinken said after joining other top officials in a White House meeting.
‘It’s also critical that we break this cycle by reaching a ceasefire in Gaza,’ said Blinken, who has also spoken since Sunday with G7 counterparts and Iraq‘s prime minister.
And back to Gaza again – and again, what Blinken means is that Israel must agree to a ceasefire in Gaza because Hamas surely won’t – and they won’t be asked to.
Iran is the source of all this. Iran supplies Hamas and Hezbollah with weapons and training. Iran is the foremost state sponsor of Islamic terrorism on the planet. Iran doesn’t care what the United States thinks about them – especially not the hapless and ineffective Biden administration. And they likely don’t care what Jordan, Qatar, or Egypt think, either. The Biden administration isn’t looking for a rock, and they aren’t engaging in anything that has any chance of success; they are marking time until January, when it becomes, as we used to say in the Army, a “Sierra Echo Papa” – Someone Else’s Problem.
