By restraining Israel, Biden makes a major war in the north more likely.
By
The Editorial Board
June 24, 2024 at 5:41 pm ET
General C.Q. Brown PHOTO: MICHAEL BROCHSTEIN/ZUMA PRESS
While Americans see the war in the Middle East winding down, Israelis worry it is only beginning. Hezbollah has been escalating its strikes on Israel, and the Iranian proxy militia could provoke a larger war unless the U.S. gives it a good reason not to. Washington is too fixated on restraining Israel to notice.
The latest misfire is Sunday’s comments by Gen. C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to reporters on his way to Botswana. According to the Associated Press, America’s top military officer “said the U.S. won’t likely be able to help Israel defend itself against a broader Hezbollah war as well as it helped Israel fight off an Iranian barrage of missiles and drones in April.”
He warned Israel “to think about the second order of effect of any type of operation into Lebanon,” including danger to U.S. forces, and said the Iranians could join the fray directly and give greater support to their proxy “particularly if they felt that Hezbollah was being significantly threatened.”
That’s a calculated red light to Israel—don’t count on U.S. help, do count on Iran’s wrath—but what message is the general sending to Hezbollah? In the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah’s bunker, it probably sounds like: “Go ahead. You can get away with more.”
He would be mistaken, at great cost to the people of Lebanon. The Biden Administration has warned on other occasions in this war that it might not act to help Israel, and still Israel has done what it needed to do.
The other half of this Biden policy is the withholding of armaments, slowing their flow to Israel over the past four months with bureaucratic delays. This gives the President plausible deniability, even though the delays and extended reviews were absent when the Administration wanted them to be.
The White House goal is to discourage a larger war, but a policy of weakening Israel has the opposite effect. It emboldens Hezbollah to keep shooting and extend its range. This increases the domestic pressure in Israel to do something about it. Unprovoked, Hezbollah has already fired nearly 5,000 rockets, missiles and mortars at northern Israel since Oct. 7, depopulating the region. Not that Iran cares, but a major war between Hezbollah and Israel could wreck Lebanon. Central Israel could take damage like it never has before.
The stakes are high, which makes the U.S. policy of publicly trying to deter Israel even harder to figure. Israel is less likely to be compelled to fight Hezbollah if 70,000 Israelis can return to their homes safely in northern Israel.
This means quieting Hezbollah’s rocket fire and convincing it to remove its fighters from the buffer zone in Southern Lebanon. But Hezbollah has no reason to do that if it thinks it can keep firing away and President Biden will protect it from the consequences.
Source: Wall Street Journal
peckford42 
It’s time for the mass murderers to receive unlimited warfare as retribution for their deeds. The sooner,the better. The terrorist Israelis are as ugly and ignorant as Americans and this arrogant slaughter of civilians has to end now. Anybody with half a brain has had enough of both of these regimes:
“We are arrogant and we are ignorant and we lack RESPECT for other people’s cultures and way of life.
How do you persuade Americans to abandon this extreme arrogance that has been inculcated in us, particularly I would argue, over the last 30 years?
It’s always been a problem and it has gotten really out of hand now.
We have been operating well beyond the limits of our own interests for thirty years now-probably longer.” U.S. Army Col. Douglas MacGregor
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Now Canada is looking at mass importation of ” Canadians ” from Lebanon. These are Canadians in name only. They’ve received citizenship to collect Canadas government welfare system. Then they move back to their home country and collect their GST, Carbon credit, old age pension etc without contributing one bit to Canada.
When are we going to wake up? I would hazard a guess that NEVER!!!
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As a side note!! A regular contributor to a local radio show stated on air this morning that “Ultimately if we are not a ” Native Aboriginal ” then we are all immigrants “. Brainwash!! The definition of Native is ” one born to the land “, In other words, if you were born in the land where you live you ARE a native. These individuals are all trying to word spin us out of our rights as human beings.
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America’s Founders were Classical Liberals who discovered and implemented a valid theory of morality for the real world (Individual Rights), implicating the Rights respecting individual as the sovereign who is served by the govt who protects his agency as an individual.
It is this same Classical Liberal ideology (created by the British) that motivated the British Empire to mobilize its military to eradicate slavery everywhere in the world that they could, and were largely successful. Culminating into establishing (via the Balfour Declaration) a Rights respecting Jewish state substantially accomplished by the Jews in spite of the horrific violence from non-Rights respecting fanatical slave regimes in the surroundings.
Modern day “liberalz” are Collectivists virtue signalling as the below described classical version. We’re all learning the hard but necessary way that virtue signalling is not virtuous at all, and that free stuff from the govt is the most expensive stuff there is in the Universe.
Zionism is essentially a belief that Jewish people have a moral Right to a nation of their own to develop and to defend. A Right rightfully earned not because of any history or heritage there actually is between the area and the Jewish people, but because the Jews substantially accomplished establishing a Rights respecting state in an area where no respect for Rights existed before.
The Jews formed a state substantially dedicated to the protection of individual rights; formed in a region in which no rights-respecting state already existed; and they substantially followed thru on the aim of protecting individual rights. This is why Israel is a legitimate state and why Israel has a moral obligation to destroy and crush those who openly call for the extermination of the Jewish people. Modern day Nazism (=Socialism) must be openly condemned, shamed, and ridiculed along with those who openly espouse these toxic collectivist ideas.
Rights are moral principles that define and defend freedoms of action that do not impose obligations, other than the respect of those same freedoms, upon others.
The very charters of the institutions that govern the Palestinians are declarations of intent to murder. Far from being charters for the founding of a civilized, rights-respecting state, they are declarations of war against civilized, rights-respecting society.
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Terrorists like Hamas are clearly one of the worst scourges imposed on humankind by Marxists as is terrorism itself. They must find these psychopaths in hell jails or in asylums IMO.
The behaviour of a terrorist cannot be condoned now matter how aggrieved you may feel about an issue.
Unfortunately, the required response may also be viewed as wrong, that said, barbarism is evil and must elicit the harshest response. The issue should be handled with extreme response and prejudice against perpetrators even if it unpalatable to progressive liberals and other that are easily offended. And no, it’s not only in America, or Israel, it is a global issue.
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