Biden pulled out of Afghanistan so US forces could fight everywhere else
(Originally published Oct. 26 in “What in the World“) The war in Gaza appears increasingly likely to turn into a war between the West and Iran, opening a second front in the ongoing war against Russia in Ukraine.
After reporting that Iran helped Hamas plan its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, The Wall Street Journal, quoting unnamed “people familiar with the intelligence,” says Iran provided special combat training to Hamas militants and members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
It’s the kind of coverage calculated to gin up support for U.S. military spending requests in Congress (now with a functioning House of Representatives!). The “people” the Journal quotes are thus likely sitting somewhere near Pennsylvania Ave., where the Biden Administration has been eagerly painting dots to connect Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China into an Axis of Authoritarianism we must fight wherever their nefarious proxies raise their heads.
Conveniently, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who appears to be the architect of Biden foreign policy, just outlined his vision for this new forever war in a meandering screed for Foreign Affairs that struggles hard over its 7,000-odd words to knit together the best greatest hits from Cold War-era, City on the Hill rhetoric on America’s global responsibility to annihilate Commies everywhere, while reviving the 9/11 sense of long-term commitment to revenge against a stateless terrorists, topped off with a Millennial merengue about global economic competition in which everyone gets a medal, but only the U.S. is allowed to win. Sullivan excuses the surrender of Afghanistan’s freedom-loving people to the authoritarian Taliban by saying removing U.S. forces there freed up the Pentagon to shovel weapons into Ukraine. So, victory?
It isn’t until several paragraphs down in the Journal’s exclusive, however, that the reader is reminded that Iran has long provided regular combat training to the militant groups it arms and finances. Then the article admits there’s no evidence the training in September was designed to prepare for October’s invasion. In other words, the exclusive isn’t news at all, just agit-prop to remind us that Iran is bad and cover for what seems certain to be U.S. intervention.
Biden drew his proverbial line in the sand Wednesday, using a press conference in the White House Rose Garden with visiting AUKUS and Quad ally, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, to warn Iran that the U.S. would retaliate against attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East.
In the where? You heard correctly. As Israel ratchets up airstrikes against Gaza to record-setting intensity, Iran-backed militias in Iraq have joined the escalating violence around Israel, ending a six-month hiatus to re-launch attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.
In Iraq, the country U.S. forces withdrew from in 2011? Yes, in addition to Syria, the Pentagon maintains several thousand troops in Iraq as permanent “guests” of the government in Baghdad, fighting remnants of the Islamic State in Syria even after their supposed defeat in 2019. They also fight Iran-backed militias in northern Iraq. More than 20 years after the U.S. first invaded to depose Saddam Hussein in 2003, then returned 2014 to fight ISIS. So, victory?
The militias have been targeting U.S. troops stationed at Iraq’s Al-Asad airbase, about 150km from the Syrian border and roughly 260km down the Euphrates from the U.S. base at Khasham in Syria.
To protect these outposts of American democratic state-building, the Biden Administration has been lobbying the Israelis to delay their ground invasion of Gaza until the Pentagon can put in place the anti-missile defenses needed to protect them. Iran has threatened to attack if Israel invades Gaza. So the U.S. is rushing in Patriot anti-missile batteries and a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) battery to supplement the two aircraft carrier strike forces—the USS Gerald R. Ford and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower—already in the eastern Mediterranean.
Biden also used his Rose Garden tete-a-tete with Albanese to warn China that any attack on Philippine vessels would trigger the updated and expanded U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty. A Chinese coast guard vessel bumped into a Philippine ship earlier this week trying to resupply Manila’s besieged garrison on Second Thomas Shoal, which China includes as part of its claim to the entire South China Sea.
Our enemies are everywhere. Victory? That’s just around the corner.