Is Biden a Dope, a Coward, or a Collaborator?

The accumulating evidence points in a bad direction.

As is often the case, Paul beat me to the punch with his essentially unarguable analysis in “Stop the calibration and get serious about Iran.” But I think it important to examine more closely why President Biden isn’t getting more serious, and will never get more serious as that word is ordinarily understood.

This piece in the WSJ is a good place to start:

It was bound to happen eventually... A drone or missile launched by Iran’s militia proxies would elude U.S. defenses and kill American soldiers. That’s what happened Sunday as three Americans were killed and 25 wounded at a U.S. base in Jordan near the Syrian border. The question now is what will the Commander in Chief do about it?

The short answer is talk — talk with the same weary bromides we hear over and over.

Mr. Biden issued a statement Sunday that “America’s heart is heavy” at the death of patriots who are the “best of our nation.” That sentiment is nice, and no doubt sincere, but at this point it is inadequate and infuriating.

One reason it’s infuriating is — contrary to the Journal — its flagrant and by now obvious insincerity. Biden’s heart is no more heavy than when his helter-skelter exit from Afghanistan near the beginning of his Administration left four times as many Americans dead, and God knows how many Afghans who had been on our side (foolishly, it would now seem) to the mercies of the Taliban.

The sorry truth is that these casualties are the result of the President’s policy choices. Mr. Biden has tolerated more than 150 Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East since October. Only occasionally has he or the Administration registered more than rhetorical displeasure by retaliating militarily, and then only with limited airstrikes.

When you make the same “kick-me-again” policy choice a hundred fifty times, it’s not stupidity and it’s not cowardice. It’s what, deep down, you want.

This is what we need to face about Joe Biden. He might have been dragging up the rear of his class in law school, but he was an apt student of Barack Obama’s swoon for “Death to America” Iran.

The President refused to change course even after U.S. troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. A Christmas Day proxy attack in Iraq left a U.S. Army pilot in a coma. Last week, more than a month later, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Garrett Illerbrunn was finally “sitting up in the chair for the first time for most of the day,” and “alert with both eyes opened and following,” his family’s medical blog says.

Yeah, well, look, stuff happens. The important thing as far as our troops go is that they learn to use the right pronoun with transgender people. To the extent Iran’s barbaric proxies may be concerned, from Syria to Hamas in Gaza, the important thing — the thing Biden was falling all over himself to broadcast — was summed up in Pentagon spokesman John Kirby’s Monday all-but-apology to the mullahs: “We are not looking for war with Iran.”

Maybe Franklin Roosevelt’s address to Congress on December 8, 1941 should have started out, “We are not looking for war with Japan” — as if the problem then or now is that America is looking for war.

Biden knows better than this because even someone with his mental functioning knows better. We know his weak, feckless reactions are not stupidity, regardless of how convincing his imitation of it momentarily might seem, because no one is that stupid.

Mr. Biden vowed Sunday to “hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing,” though that stock line rings increasingly hollow.

Again, the WSJ is being generous to a fault. It’s not that Biden’s bravado line “rings hollow;” it’s that it’s the worst kind of cynical BS. And of course it’s false. Biden might allow a missile or missiles to be fired into some desert sand dune, but that’s it, as anyone who’s been paying attention knows.

He has no choice now other than to approve strikes in retaliation, but targeting the responsible militia is insufficient. Mr. Biden and the Pentagon are playing Mideast Whac-a-Mole.

Everyone knows that the real orchestrator of these attacks is Iran. But the President has put his anxieties about upsetting Iran and risking escalation above his duty to defend U.S. soldiers abroad. It would have been more honest (if a sign of weakness) to withdraw American troops from the region, rather than consign them to catching Iranian drones for months.

Paul made this same point. Biden, who’s behind in the great majority of the polls, can’t afford to look weak. The DNC, which is already sweating it out, would have a cow. But to my way of thinking, the danger of withdrawing American troops is not the appearance but the fact of weakness, and the gargantuan costs to America’s interests and the interests of the West, that weakness will create, the first of which will be an even more accelerated schedule for Iran to build the atomic bomb.

The irony of Mr. Biden’s strategy—avoid escalation with Iran above all else—is that he’ll now have to strike back harder than if he had responded with devastating force the first time U.S. forces were hit, and every time since.

Again, this is obvious. What its obviousness means is that Biden’s decisions about the (non)use of a powerful response are not a result of bad thinking. Something else is going on. Many conservatives think that other thing is cowardice, but I doubt it: Biden himself is facing no danger, and his administration has proved now and before that getting our people killed is, except for the PR problems it creates, a matter of indifference. So it’s not cowardice.

[A serious retaliation option would] include hitting Iranian military or commercial assets. There are certainly risks of escalation from doing so. But Iran and its proxies are already escalating, and they have no incentive to stop unless they know their own forces are at risk.

Paul made this point as well, and any thinking person would see it.

One thing to watch is whether the Administration will react to this attack by putting more pressure on Israel to stop its campaign against Hamas.

Again, I think this is naive. The Administration will put more pressure on Israel to stop its campaign against Hamas for the same reason that pressure has been behind its policy from the get-go: It wants to pretend to be supporting Israel while in reality playing the long game in which Israel will be destroyed. People who think Biden is oblivious to the rapidly growing anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party are kidding themselves.

Mr. Biden has spent months fretting about a broader regional war without confronting the reality that the U.S. is already in one. The result is that U.S. deterrence has collapsed in the region, and Americans are dying. Mr. Biden’s repeated displays of weakness are inviting more attacks. In the 1970s, Iran helped to ruin Jimmy Carter’s Presidency by seizing hostages. Mr. Biden should worry that it will also take down his Presidency if he won’t respond with enough force that the mullahs get the message.

The question rightly conceived of course is not Biden’s political fate. The question, dreadful though it be for us to face, is whether Biden will sacrifice the leadership and interests of the United States to his inherited (from Obama) love affair with Iran.

The conventional wisdom is that we oppose Iranian aggression and terrorism yet are understandably leery of striking at Iran for fear of what the consequences might be. But everything I see from this Administration tells me it’s something different and worse than that. It’s that the left wing of the Democratic Party, which increasingly is running the show, wants a racist, imperialist Amerika finally to face the reckoning its wretched history has earned. And what better to confront that shameful Amerika than having its soldiers killed again and again with no answer; a nuclear armed Iran; and a decimated key ally, Israel.

What Biden’s Administration is doing is not stupidity and it’s not cowardice. However disguised, sometimes cleverly and sometimes less so, is collaboration.