OPINION:
The long war that Iran’s rulers and their proxies have been waging against Israel took an unexpected turn last week. Thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon had ditched their cellphones — afraid Israelis were tapping them — for low-tech pagers.
Sometime earlier, however, those beepers had been covertly transformed into miniature bombs that exploded suddenly and simultaneously, incapacitating or killing those Hezbollah operatives.
Few civilians — even those standing near the terrorists — were harmed. Many just looked on in astonishment.
Precision Israeli airstrikes followed, eliminating more than a dozen Hezbollah leaders.
Two had been on America’s “most wanted” list with multimillion-dollar bounties on their heads for truck bombings that killed more than 300 diplomats and military personnel serving on a peace mission in Beirut in 1983.
Nevertheless, it’s become reflexive: Whatever actions Israelis take to deter and perhaps defeat their enemies — who declare without equivocation that Jewish genocide is their aim — are denounced as unfair and illegal by U.N. officials, bogus human rights activists and other members of the chattering classes who do not wish Israelis well.
Let me take two paragraphs to remind you how this battle began.
Last Oct. 8 — the day after Hamas terrorists attacked southern Israel and committed the most horrific atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust — Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization, began firing thousands of missiles at northern Israel. Among the Israelis killed in the months since: 12 children playing soccer.
More than 60,000 Israelis have been forced to abandon their homes near the border and live as refugees in their own country.
The Biden administration’s heavy-handed guidance to Israel: Don’t escalate against Hezbollah, Iran’s foreign legion in Lebanon. Make a deal with Hamas, Tehran’s proxy.
Then, last Friday, unnamed Washington officials leaked a new policy that will please Iranian leader Ali Khamenei: President Biden plans to withdraw the tiny contingent of American forces — just 2,500 troops — from Iraq by 2026.
“This is the clinical definition of insanity!” remarked retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, my colleague at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was alluding to the quote (often misattributed to Einstein) that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Among the past repetitions he has in mind: In 2011, then-President Barack Obama withdrew all U.S. troops from Iraq, disregarding advisers who urged him to leave in place at least a residual force to suppress terrorists — both those affiliated with al Qaeda and those armed and instructed by Mr. Khamenei.
Mr. Obama’s bugout led to the rise of the Islamic State group, aka ISIS. Also empowered were the Tehran-backed Shiite militias responsible for killing hundreds of American soldiers.
In 2014, Mr. Obama had little choice but to send American troops back to Iraq, where they engaged in a conflict with ISIS, which by then was ruling 12 million people in an area the size of Britain.
Five years later, during the Trump administration, ISIS was finally evicted from the territories it had conquered.
A small contingent of elite U.S. troops supporting Kurdish, Arab and Syrian Christian partners have remained in Iraq and in Syria to continue suppressing ISIS and help contain Mr. Khamenei’s forces.
Having not learned from that experience, President Biden, just before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, withdrew U.S. troops (at that point also only about 2,500) from Afghanistan, where they had been training, assisting and advising the Afghan security forces, preventing the Taliban from seizing Kabul and other cities.
During the badly planned and executed retreat, 13 American troops and 170 Afghans were killed by a bomber from the local ISIS franchise.
Yes, Mr. Biden had inherited from President Donald Trump an ill-advised deal with the Taliban. But the Taliban had been violating its commitments, so the deal should have been scrapped.
The mistake Mr. Biden is now making is akin to a mistake Mr. Trump almost made as president.
In December 2018, Mr. Trump announced his intention to withdraw the 2,000 mostly elite U.S. troops then in Syria, who were effectively working with local allies to contain 30,000 ISIS terrorists, keep Syrian oil reserves out of Iranian hands, and prevent Mr. Khamenei from establishing a land bridge to Lebanon and on to the Mediterranean Sea.
In response, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis submitted a letter of resignation. Mr. Trump ultimately decided not to abandon America’s friends and bolster America’s enemies.
If Mr. Biden does give Iraq — a country that American blood and treasure liberated from Saddam Hussein — to Mr. Khamenei, will that thaw relations between Washington and Tehran?
Consider that Iran-backed Shiite militias have attacked American forces in the Middle East more than 170 times over the past 11 months. Three U.S. soldiers have been killed, and many more injured. American reprisals have been few and far between.
Pushing the U.S. out of the Middle East would be a great victory for Mr. Khamenei.
His Arab neighbors would be left more vulnerable. As for Israel, Mr. Khamenei won’t countenance a “two-state solution.” He will continue to pursue what the Nazis called a “final solution.”
His allies in Moscow and Beijing know that if Americans can be made to pivot away from the Middle East, they can be chased out of Europe and Asia.
Israelis are not retreating. They are defending their right to exist with resilience, resolve and courage. They are on the front lines in a war against the West. They are latter-day Davids using high-tech slingshots to battle a medieval Goliath.
I think most Americans — by no means all — understand that and are becoming increasingly aware of what it would mean for an axis of Iranian jihadis, Russian imperialists and Chinese Communists to defeat and destroy Israel and other free nations.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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