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Joe Biden Warned Iran Not to Do Anything. Iran Did Something. Again. So Now What?

(AP Photo/Joel Auerbach)

When Grandpa gets enough rings around his trunk, families react in vastly different ways. But the overall consensus is, often after a lot of heartache, argument, prayer, and angst, you take the car keys away from him so he can’t hurt himself or anyone else. You weep when he begins to angrily shout out loud to nobody in particular about events that occurred throughout his entire lifetime, blending them all together. Often, the outbursts include events that never happened in the first place.

End of life care for our most senior of citizens is not a joking matter, although there are often moments in the aging cycle that can be quite funny. The process can be poignant, tragic, and emotionally exhausting. The one common thread in all of this is that when a member of someone’s family gets to the stage where decline has obviously set in, the very last thing that families do is give that elderly member of the family more responsibility. You don’t hand him the keys to the most powerful military in the world. You don’t put him in charge of overseeing the biggest economy in the world. And yet that’s exactly what the Democratic Party offers to the nation for the next four years.

Being president is the hardest job in the world. There literally is no easy decision. Every problem that can be solved relatively easily is handled well below the president’s level in the Executive Branch. The crises that reach the Oval Office, every decision that needs to be made by the president, is a national or international dilemma of some kind where lives, treasure, morality, culpability, and politics are on the line. The decisions that Joe Biden faces every day are ones that literally nobody else in his government wants to make. Or if they do, they certainly don’t want to be held accountable to the American people for making that choice.

On February 18th, 2021, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. officially began the lifting of crippling sanctions on Iran by way of executive order. When this choice was actually decided is unclear, but it became U.S. policy to enable Iran less than a month on the job. Nearly three years and almost $100 billion of very fungible dollars later, Iran has spearheaded, through a resurgent network of proxies around the globe, 159 separate attacks on U.S. interests in the Middle East just since the October 7th terror attacks in Israel. The most recent attack, Tower 22 in Jordan by a radar-jamming Iranian drone, killed three U.S. servicemembers thus far, and have injured at least 34, many with traumatic brain injuries. The fatality count could certainly climb.

Joe Biden 17 days ago said this about the last Iranian attack by way of the Houthis against U.S. and British interests in the Red Sea.

Iran heard the message. They responded with more attacks. Why did they respond the way they did? Perhaps because they’re watching and listening to the same Joe Biden we see and hear. Here’s the President on Thursday in Wisconsin at a brewery.

And here is Joe Biden Saturday in South Carolina.

Biden got angry about Donald Trump and started shouting.

Weather and lack of presidential logistics, meaning a motorcade and advance team, are why Trump couldn’t visit Normandy, not his lack of willingness. And in the process, Biden seems to insinuate that his deceased son, Beau, who died at Walter Reed due to a brain tumor, was a military casualty that is now permanently at rest overlooking Omaha Beach. It’s nonsense. And speaking of nonsense, there’s this about Snickers.

Perhaps the President should have recalled Jell-O pudding ads instead of Snickers, because the gray matter in his cranium is beginning to resemble his new Secret Service codeword – Tapioca.

Not only is Biden being played as a sucker, which would be bad enough, he is demonstrating every day that our enemies in Tehran have absolutely nothing to fear so long as he’s in command. Biden is not well. He hasn’t been well for a long time, and he’s continuing to decline right in front of our eyes. We all see it. Democrats see it, and it’s reflected in polling. Republicans know he’s too old to do the job now, much less for the next four-plus years. And our enemies know he’s unfit as well. Hence, we were attacked yet again, this time killing at least three in the process.

There are consequential, tangible things that could be done right now, today, that would reestablish deterrence with Iran and probably stop them from conducting attacks for a while. Every known residence of Ayatollah Khamenei could be reduced to rubble by nightfall. Every Iranian government vessel that floats could be at the bottom of the sea. Victor Davis Hanson’s strategy of taking out the one gasoline refinery that exists in Iran might be a good option. Iran may export oil, but they don’t have nearly enough refining capacity to cover their population’s demand for gasoline. If their one refinery were to blow up, and a blockade were established so that they couldn’t import gas, everybody in Iran would walk within 30 days, and they wouldn’t be happy about it.

We saw all the mini revolutions in recent years where Iranian citizens were not exactly in lockstep with the mullahcracy. The country could topple from within if the right pressures were applied and maintained. But that would take someone at the top with the ability to make that hard decision, and Joe Biden is not the guy capable of doing that right now.

At a bare minimum, you’d think that by tomorrow, Biden would announce that snapback sanctions against Iran would be imposed immediately, and the terror state would once again be cut off from international banking and commerce. Biden can’t do that, though. It would admit not only that his policy failed, but that Donald Trump’s Iran policy was the right strategy. Politically, from a reelection campaign standpoint, about a third of his anti-Semitic Democratic voting base would revolt if he escalated with Iran. It would also be rhetorically impossible for Biden to raise the ante against Tehran while simultaneously telling the Israelis to tone it down in their war against Iran-backed enemies. Hell, it’s rhetorically impossible for Joe Biden to read a sentence out loud that contains the words, “Beer,” “Brew”, and “Here”.

After the attack at Tower 22 in Jordan, the White House released this statement.

We’re committed to the fight against terrorism. That, quite simply, is a lie. Biden had a former member of UNRWA working in his National Security Council during a time when material support was going to the people that ended up attacking Israel. We weren’t fighting the terrorist enemy, we were paying abettors of our terrorist enemy to help shape our foreign policy towards our terrorist enemy.

To be fair, Joe Biden’s initial instinct on October 7th was a good one. Turns out, it was a fluke. It’s been disastrous ever since. Even after discovering that UNRWA was aiding, abetting, and participating in the terror attacks of 10/7, the White House’s condemnation only went so far. Sure, we’re no longer going to fund UNRWA…but that’s only for new projects. Existing ones, like the one that helped train, abet, and participate with Hamas, those still get our taxpayer dollars to stay afloat

Israel is presently fighting a war for its existence that would also hopefully reestablish deterrence. Or at least they would be if the Americans weren’t blocking them every step of the way. As for American deterrence in the Middle East, especially concerning the Iranians, there simply isn’t any. The President promises we’ll respond at a time of our choosing. My guess is any proper response will not come in an election year. Any action that would be decisive enough for Joe Biden to take credit for and campaign on would need to be Shock and Awe caliber, not duck and cover. And there’s a zero percent chance this president who is this unpopular, this befuddled, this old, and in this much political trouble, is going to unleash the military to do what is needed in order to restore deterrence to Tehran.

Joe Biden on January 23rd, after repeatedly saying “No, no, no, no,” to a then-unnamed Iran as a warning not to step up attacks, and after pinpoint retaliatory strikes on Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps broom closets all over Hell’s half acre, was asked whether his plan of deterrence was working.

No. No, they’re not working, and yes, we’re going to continue doing it. That’s literally the classical definition of insanity – doing exactly the same thing and expecting a different result. His smart press secretary, John Kirby, as opposed to the dumb one, Karine Jean-Pierre, also admitted the plan isn’t working, but will continue until Iranian morale improves.

Q    Okay, thank you so much.  Admiral, can you comment on what happened in the Red Sea this morning?  Two Maersk vessels had to turn back after explosions happened.  So, were these explosions due to strikes by the Houthis?  And if so, does it mean that the campaign against the Houthis still is not working?

MR. KIRBY:  What I can tell you and what I do know what happened today it was that there were three Houthi missiles fired at two merchant vessels and — in the Southern Red Sea.  One missile missed by something like 200 kilometers.  The other two were shot down by a U.S. Navy destroyer.

That — that’s — that’s what I know.  It’s — obviously, underscores that the Houthis still intend to conduct these attacks, which means we’re obviously still going to have to do what we have to — have to do to protect that shipping.

That was just last Thursday. The administration downplayed a previous attack by Iran proxies that caused brain injuries to a handful of our servicemembers. Their unstated red line seemed to be that so long as no one on our side gets killed, notwithstanding Americans killed in the original 10/7 attacks, we wouldn’t mete out the necessary response to the growing terror threat coming out of Iran. Hope was their strategy. That red line has now been passed. There is blood on Iran’s hands, as there always has been, but this time, those lost American lives can be traced directly back to the deadly and wrongheaded policies decisions of an 81-year old infirm President Joe Biden.

Now that the red line has been crossed without reservation by Iran, I fear what the next attack on U.S. interests will look like, and where that attack may take place, after another obligatory yawner of a reactionary strike. I wrote most of this column Sunday afternoon after the news from the Jordan border broke. I didn’t finish it on purpose until late Sunday night, leaving myself room to include the chance that Joe Biden would get angry and order the code red on Tehran and the U.S. would be in a game-on shooting war as your work week started. Sunday night came and went. No response. I guess this wasn’t Biden’s time and he didn’t choose. He’s probably been in bed for at least 5 hours already sleeping off another day of fecklessness, which admittedly can be exhausting.

Iran waited for the response that has not as of yet arrived, and killed four Kurdish dissidents.

Remember the Kurds? They were our allies once. They technically still are, except this White House all but abandoned them, too, just like he’s done with the Afghanis. Here was the last minute plea from the 5-year old son of one of the four that Iran hung to death tonight.

Politico reported a general election head-to-head poll taken in early January between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, in Michigan. Trump would win by 8 points against Biden, but would lose to Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The only red line Joe Biden seems to be watching these days, and from which he’s basing his Middle East policy decisions, is the red line from the Wolverine State and its 15 Electoral Votes.

God help us all.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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