Edward Luttwak — soldier, strategist, historian, rancher — calls it Obama’s Law: “Iran may attack all, but none may attack Iran.”
The Biden administration has followed Obama’s Law in the same fumbling, shambolic way as an apparently catatonic Joe Biden followed Obama’s cue to leave the stage at a June 15 fundraiser in Los Angeles. The result is Iran on the verge of the bomb, Israel attacked from all sides and chaos and war across the Middle East.
The Biden administration is now trying to prevent full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah – or, rather, continuing to stop Israel from responding fully to the war that Hezbollah launched last October.
Since 2006, according to the State Department, the US has given $2.5 billion to Lebanon’s official army, the Lebanese Armed Forces. The object is to create an “institutional counterweight to Hezbollah”, the real power in the land. The money is supposed to be spent on four areas: sovereignty, border security, internal security and counterterrorism.
A 2022 report by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies found that only in counterterrorism had the LAF developed its capacity. In every other area, Hezbollah had continued to advance its conquest of Lebanon.
As with its subventions to the Palestinians, no one really knows where the money ends up. As with American support of the Palestinians, a policy that is intended to support “moderates” has in effect given diplomatic and financial cover to terrorists.
Hezbollah has ignored UN Resolution 1701, which ordered the demilitarisation of southern Lebanon. The US has looked the other way. Some 80,000 Israelis are refugees in their own country, yet the Biden administration pressures Israel not to respond.
Obama’s Law is also in operation in Gaza. The Biden administration does not want Israel to destroy Hamas. It wants Israel to domesticate Hamas. The administration claims to believe that a genocidal Islamist group will not only accept the existence of a Jewish state; Hamas will also accept a piddling non-state as a pay-off.
This lunacy is nothing more than the logic of the “two-state solution”, played out in reality. The West expects that the Palestinians can be bribed into becoming a shoddy version of Israel, a pluralist, Western-style democracy with the rule of law. Both states can then be integrated into an American-run regional architecture.
This is delusional and dangerous.
Obama’s Law also operates in the Red Sea. The Biden administration doesn’t want to destroy the anti-American, anti-Israel Houthi regime. The administration merely wants the Houthis to stop firing Iranian drones at shipping in the Red Sea, because that’s bad for global supply chains. The US Navy, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 12, has launched some 450 strikes on launchers, radar sites and other installations, and intercepted more than 200 drones and missiles, at a cost of roughly $1 billion.
The Houthis are still firing at US vessels. On their terms, they are winning. Hezbollah has been winning on its terms in Lebanon for years. Hamas will win in Gaza on its terms if the Biden administration gets its way. America is being defeated on its terms because it does not want to win. The administration doesn’t want to bring down Nasrallah or Sinwar. But it does want to bring down Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel cannot defend itself without American support but it will not survive under Obama’s Law. It’s strange that in this, our season of constant polling, no one has published a survey of how American Jews intend to vote in November.
