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Biden's First Military Attack in Syria Signals the U.S. Will Act on Iran
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February 26, 2021
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1:16Now PlayingIn the Middle East, when leaders react to a provocation by reserving “the right to respond at the time and place of our choosing,” it is usually the tell of a weak hand. Consider how often the regime in Tehran has deployed that turn of phrase — most recently, against the U.S., after the killing of the military commander Qassem Soleimani, and against Israel, after the killing of the nuclear-weapons expert Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. The louder the threats, the emptier they tend to be.
So when the shibboleth is intoned by the enemy, the Iranians tend to assume that it, too, must be mere bluster. They didn’t believe the Trump administration’s warnings of retaliation for the killing of American servicemen in Iraq, and they seem to have ignored a similar admonition from the Biden administration.
On Monday, less than a week after White House press secretary Jen Psaki invoked the “right to respond in the time and manner of our choosing” to multiple recent attacks by Iranian proxies in Iraq, Tehran’s minions fired three more rockets in the direction of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
The Iranians now know Biden wasn’t bluffing. On Thursday, in his first overt use of military force, the president authorized U.S. air strikes on Iranian-backed militias in eastern Syria who were involved in attacks in Iraq. At least 22 Iraqi militants were killed in the strikes, and three ammunition trucks were destroyed.
The Iranians and their proxies were caught completely off guard. They had been lulled into a sense of impunity by the administration’s early reticence in attributing blame for the attacks in Iraq and the White House’s determination not to “lash out and risk an escalation.”
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