Iran is at war with Israel. This was made plain, if it was ever in doubt, by the Hamas massacre last Oct. 7 and Hezbollah’s commencement of a yearlong supporting missile bombardment of northern Israel the next day.
Terrorist proxies are beside the point now, however, not only because Hamas is largely demolished and Hezbollah decapitated but because Iran just committed an act of war by firing 180 missiles at targets in Israel.
In judging Iran’s culpability, it makes no difference that the mullah’s missiles inflicted little damage other than killing an unfortunate Palestinian when remnants of a rocket fell on him from the sky.
What counts is Iran’s intention to rain death on the Jews. Too many people call for Israeli restraint. Why? It has fewer than 10 million people and is surrounded by enemies vastly superior in number; Iran alone has 90 million. Thus, for its 77 years, Israel has had to respond asymmetrically because it can’t win a war of attrition. Demands for “proportional” responses are facile and disingenuous, as those making them mean “equal.”
The proportional response to Iran, which has gone to war, wishes to kill as many Jews as possible, and is only two weeks away from being able to build a nuclear weapon, is not to rain missiles ineffectively on the great landmass of Iran. It is to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Israel knows, the ayatollahs know, everyone sensible knows that Iran will be far more dangerous once it acquires “the bomb.” So why not destroy its ability to do so, accepting immediate conflict but reducing the risk to the Jewish state and the wider world?
One not-necessarily compelling answer is that Israel probably cannot destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facility at Natanz; only the United States could do that using B-2 bombers and 25,000-pound bombs. But Israel could destroy Iran’s fuel enrichment plant at Fordow with 5,000-pound bombs. It would need extremely difficult sequential precision bombing by F-16s, but what fools would dismiss Israel’s technical abilities after its recent brilliant successes against Hezbollah?
When asked if Israel should smash Iran’s nuclear program, President Joe Biden continued his unblemished record of being wrong on every foreign policy issue for the past half-century, responding, “The answer is no.”
He is once again counseling weakness and appeasement, the behavior that eroded American global leadership on his watch and invited the Oct. 7 pogrom.
Does Iran want to destroy Israel? Yes. Will it be more able and as willing to do so once it has the bomb? Yes. Is Israel America’s ally in the Middle East? Yes. Is Iran America’s enemy? Yes, Iran declares it, kills Americans, and plots the assassination of our leaders.
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Biden and his heir, Kamala Harris, don’t want to wrestle with the extreme difficulties of the situation they helped create because they’d prefer to squeak past the November election and renew their abominably weak leadership.
Israel has wisely rejected the defeatist counsels of hopelessness from Washington. It should continue to do so. It should keep defending its existence and its people in the way counseled by its enemies’ supporters — “by any means necessary.”