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What is it about Iranian generals when it comes to the U.S. and Israel? While president, Donald Trump (who once implicitly suggested that, were his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election campaign, she might be taken out by one of his gun-rights supporters) ordered the drone assassination of Iran's most important general, Qasem Soleimani, as his plane landed in Baghdad, Iraq.
That was in January 2020. Recently, the Israelis topped him by killing two key Iranian generals in a missile attack on that country's consulate in Syria. The Iranians responded by sending more than 300 missiles and drones toward Israel in an operation that seemed "designed to fail" (the "only" casualty being a young Arab Bedouin girl). Trump's reaction? He reposted a tweet of his from 2018. It caught the Trumpian spirit of that moment and this one perfectly: "To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!"
By comparison, Joe Biden, whose record on Gaza has been anything but thrilling, while congratulating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on largely stopping the Iranian attack (with much help from American forces in the region), also urged him to "slow things down and think through" how to respond. More important yet, he reportedly insisted "that the U.S. won't support any Israeli counterattack against Iran."
Today, in the first of a series of pieces over the coming months on key foreign policy issues and the 2024 election, TomDispatch regular Bob Dreyfuss considers the two aging men running for president this year and what to make of them when it comes to Iran. Tom
Handling -- and Mishandling -- the Iran Nuclear Program
Trump Blew Up the Deal, Can Biden Still Fix It?
By Bob Dreyfuss
One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama's second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.
In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they'd trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict -- with the recent devastating Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian response of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran's "axis of resistance" -- including Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria -- has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal U.S. counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
It was President Donald Trump, of course, who condemned the U.S.-Iran agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) while running in 2016. With his team of fervent anti-Iran hawks, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, he took a wrecking ball to relations with Iran. Six years ago, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and, in what he called a campaign of "maximum pressure," reinstituted, then redoubled political and economic sanctions against Tehran. Characteristically, he maintained a consistently belligerent policy toward the Islamic Republic, threatening its very existence and warning that he could "obliterate" Iran.
Joe Biden had been a supporter of the accord, negotiated while he was Obama's vice president. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to rejoin it. In the end, though, he kept Trump's onerous sanctions in place and months of negotiations went nowhere. While he put out feelers to Tehran, crises erupting in 2022 and 2023, including the invasion of Israel by Hamas, placed huge obstacles in the way of tangible progress toward rebooting the JCPOA.
Worse yet, still reeling from the collapse of the 2015 agreement and ruled by a hardline government deeply suspicious of Washington, Iran is in no mood to trust another American diplomatic venture. In fact, during the earlier talks, it distinctly overplayed its hand, demanding far more than Biden could conceivably offer.
Meanwhile, Iran has accelerated its nuclear research and its potential production facilities, amassing large stockpiles of uranium that, as the Washington Post reports, "could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks."
Trump's Anti-Iran Jihad
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