Poor Iran.

The ultimate paymaster for the radical terrorist groups in the Middle East is Iran, and the New York Times gives a rather flattering portrayal of the dilemma Iran faces in calibrating its proxy attacks on Israel.

This headline/subhed combo will survive for all of 20 more minutes before someone outside the organization informs the Times that they have all gone insane, so get in on it while the getting's good https://t.co/vQe8bwKAhk

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) November 1, 2023

Iran, you see, is hell-bent on killing Jews and wreaking havoc, but its deep involvement in the funding, planning, and execution of attacks on Israel risks dragging it directly into the war.

Iran, which is all about “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” maintains its rather weak hold on legitimacy, if not power, based on its constant stress on its external enemies. The Mullahs whip up fear and loathing, and the mob acts like a mob.

So on the one hand Iran wants to kill Jews, and in fact, the leaders need to kill them to maintain legitimacy, but it would get clobbered in a direct conflict.

Poor Iran. The horns of a dilemma.

For more than four decades, Iran’s rulers have pledged to destroy Israel. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rarely appears in public without wearing a black-and-white checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh.

Iranian military commanders gloat over training and arming groups across the region that are enemies of Israel, including Hezbollah and Hamas. And when Hamas conducted the Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel that killed 1,400 people, Iranian officials praised it as a momentous achievement, shattering the Jewish state’s sense of security.

Now Iran faces a dilemma, weighing how it and its proxy militias — known as the axis of resistance — should respond to Israel’s invasion of Gaza and the killing of thousands of Palestinians, and whether to bolster its revolutionary credentials at the risk of igniting a broader regional war.

The New York Times appears to sympathize with the Iranians. They are trapped by their own “fiery rhetoric.”

Yeah, well, that and the fact that they have been doing this for decades. It’s not rhetoric, it’s what they do and who they are.

What Iran is actually signaling here is that they demand something very simple: impunity. They want to kill Israelis and also demand that nobody retaliate. That is the point of the proxies. They did the same in Iraq.

The Islamic Republic views the militias as its extended arms of influence, able to strike while affording Tehran a measure of deniability. They give Iran leverage in international negotiations and a means of tilting the balance of power in the Middle East away from archenemies like Israel and the United States, and rivals like Saudi Arabia.

But if Iran does nothing, its fiery leaders risk losing credibility among constituents and allies. Some Iranian hard-line conservatives have questioned why Iran’s actions are not matching its rhetoric to “free Al Quds,” or Jerusalem, from Israel’s rule. Many supporters of Iran’s government have even symbolically signed up as volunteers to be deployed to Gaza and fight Israel.

“In the first scenario Iran risks losing an arm; in the second scenario, Iran risks losing face,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention research and advocacy group. “Iran might try to square this circle by allowing its allies to escalate their attacks against Israel and the U.S. in a calibrated manner.”

That the Times can discuss this history as “fiery rhetoric” should be remarkable, but it is another day at the newspaper. The Democrat Party has been trying to turn Iran into a responsible actor in the region–good luck with that–by sending boatloads of cash and treating them with kid gloves. The Times is just fine with that, so it polishes Iran’s image.

Avoiding a war with Iran is a noble goal, but it is also a fool’s errand. The leaders cannot be appeased, meaning our only options appear to be 1) just take it on the chin; 2) calibrated retaliation; or 3) war.

Iran isn’t going to give us another option. Nobody wants the war, which is smart, but bribing Iran won’t work.

Nor will image makeovers, such as this one in the Times. As with so many things, Trump’s Iran policy was much smarter than Obama’s and Biden’s.