On Saturday night, Iran launched its attack, codenamed “Ya Rasool Allah” or “Messenger of Allah”, on the Jewish State, after Israel had taken out the Iranian mastermind of Oct 7.
The attack began with waves of drones to swamp Israel’s air defenses, followed by cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. While the British and the French took out some drones, U.S. forces accounted for about half the total of drones and some of the ballistic missiles, leaving the rest for the Israelis to deal with. By the time it was over, 99% of the attack had been intercepted.
The only serious injury in the “Messenger of Allah” bombardment was to a 7-year-old Muslim Bedouin girl.
But why was Iran able to launch so many missiles at all, how did everyone know when the attack would happen, and why is Biden warning Israel not to respond to the Iranian attack?
Last month, the Biden administration provided a $10 billion sanctions waiver for Iran. The administration warned Iran that it would impose sanctions on its missile program if it sent them to Russia. There was no mention of the real focus of those sanctions which was concern that Iran would provide those weapons to proxy terror groups like Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias and the Houthis, now using those weapons to attack civilian container ships and US Navy vessels.
Iran should never have had that weapons technology in the first place. In 2006, the Bush administration had convinced the UN Security Council to sanction Iran’s missile program “to prevent the supply, sale or transfer …of all items, materials, equipment, goods and technology which could contribute to Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.”
Part of Obama’s Iran Deal allowed those sanctions to expire on October 18, 2023. Two weeks after the Oct 7 attacks on Israel which killed over 1,000 people, the Biden administration let the UN sanctions lapse, making it easier for Iran to buy, export and boost its development of weapons technology. The administration tried to substitute a limited sanctions program of its own for the original sanctions while continuing to allow Iran to access billions in sanctions relief.
Where the Trump administration had snapped back sanctions for Iran’s violations, Biden lifted them a month after taking office. Sen. Ted Cruz has estimated that the Biden administration allowed around $100 billion to flow to Iran since 2021. That $10 billion was just the latest of it.
Despite the open violations of the Iran Deal, Biden allowed Iran to benefit from an agreement it was actively violating every single day even as it was attacking American soldiers and Israel.
When Biden allowed Iran that latest $10 billion in sanctions relief, not only were US Navy personnel actively in combat with Iran’s Houthi terrorists, but two Navy SEALS had died in an operation to intercept Iranian weapons being smuggled from Somalia to the Houthis in Yemen. In Jordan, an attack by Iran’s Shiite militias operating out of Iraq had killed three American servicemembers. While Biden appeared willing to let Iran get away with it, Israel was not.
As General Mohammad Zahedi and other figures from Iran’s IRGC international terror network were meeting in a building near Iran’s terror facility in Damascus, they were taken out. After his death, Iranian sources named Zahedi as the mastermind of the Oct 7 attacks.
What followed were a series of back-channel communications between the Biden administration and Iran through various third parties. The goal of these negotiations was to persuade Iran not to “escalate” the conflict by limiting its attack to what a Reuters report described as “within certain limits.” The timing of the attack was so widely known that media reports correctly repeated warnings that Iran would strike within 36 hours. Hours before the attack began, not only Iran’s allies, but also other countries in the region, were already prepared for it to begin.
Instead of making clear to Iran that an attack was unacceptable, the Biden administration was pre-arranging the terms of the attack on one of its allies while warning it not to respond.
When Iran launched the attack, it had been coordinated with Biden officials. Had it really wanted to launch a damaging assault, it would have changed the timing of the attack. Instead it not only launched the attack on time, but it did so while communicating with D.C. through backchannels before and after the attack. A Biden administration official stated that there were “direct communications through the Swiss channel” including to tell the Biden administration when the attack was winding down.
That is not how attacks normally work, but this was not a normal attack, nor is it the actual one.
Iran launched the attack to demonstrate its capabilities. For the first time it showed that it could coordinate missile and drone launches from all of its clients across the region. The launches took place not only from Iran, but from the Houthis in Yemen, Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The attacks allowed Iran to test a coordinated assault across four countries, to test how Israeli and American air defenses would respond to being swarmed, and to score a propaganda victory with images of its drones over Jerusalem and that part of the Temple Mount where Muslim invaders had built their Al Aqsa mosque. What it was not meant to do was be devastating.
Iran would have rejoiced if it had hammered Israeli air bases and cities, but barring critical errors by Israel and America, it wasn’t expecting more than an expensive light show and a little rubble.
Compare the Iranian attack on Israel with the finely coordinated attack on Tower 22, the U.S. base on the Jordanian-Iranian border, where the Iraqi Shiite terror proxies had perfectly timed the attack to coincide with a moment of confusion caused by the return of a U.S. drone, or the Oct 7 attack which set out to analyze and dismantle Israel’s border defense network, timing drone attacks to disable automated defenses, with this straightforward telegraphed attack.
If Iran remains true to form, the actual attack will come from its proxies, will exploit vulnerabilities in Israeli defenses and will allow the regime to maintain plausible deniability as it did on Oct 7.
What happened on Saturday night was not the actual attack, but a feint with the added purpose of convincing the Biden administration that its diplomatic approach can work. Beginning with the Iran Deal, the Islamic terror state has played a complicated game, welcoming diplomacy and then abruptly rejecting it, holding out hope and then taking it away, but only doing it long enough to keep up the chase. This time around, Tehran convinced Biden that its Islamic leadership, despite their cries of, “Death to America” are rational actors who want to manage the conflict.
In the two years before Oct 7, Hamas convinced the Biden administration and the Israelis that it could be dealt with before launching a devastating assault, so too Iran, like other Islamic terrorist entities, specializes in luring America into a state of complacency before an attack.
And so the Biden administration is warning Israel not to respond. After all these years it believes that Iran can be dealt with and that it successfully negotiated an end to the crisis. It allowed Iran to launch its attack on Israel, helped intercept it and foolishly believes that Tehran is now satisfied because all its leaders ever wanted, like Biden, was a show, not the real thing.
Biden thinks that when Iran’s elites chant, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”, it’s as empty a slogan as all of his campaign promises. But, unlike Biden, Iran’s leaders keep their promises. The slogans are serious. They intend to destroy America and they intend to destroy Israel.
American soldiers continue dying at the hands of Iran and its terror proxies while D.C. diplomats conduct empty negotiations and Iran’s agents penetrate their way into our government.
After September 11, Biden suggested, “this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.” Since then billions of dollars have made their way to Iran. The Islamic terror state has killed and kidnapped Americans, it is encircling America’s allies in the region, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, and still the ‘no strings’ checks keep coming from D.C.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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