If you’re looking for a particularly perverse and ironic military policy, look no further than Russia’s current intersection with armed drones.
As we say, ironic. Russia cancelled victory-over-Nazism parades in city after city. If ever there should be a parade that is not cancelled, this is it. But Russia is afraid of violence from the skies — from drones. So it cancelled the victory parades in all but its largest cities. This same Russia rains down bombs on Ukrainian cities using drones — Iranian-made drones. One is tempted to say: What goes around comes around. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Pick your metaphor. It signals the worst kind of irony, the kind behind which death and destruction hide.
The related irony: Russia needs Iranian-made drones because its own military has been exposed in its aggression against Ukraine as partly outdated, partly under-maintained, partly ill supplied; yet, for all that, capable of massive destruction. Thanks, in part, to Iran. Does anyone now doubt that Iran would rain down these same drones on Israel if it could?
Does anyone doubt that if Iran secured a nuclear weapon, it would use it against Israel the first moment it felt it could?
More irony: The Biden administration very admirably pulls out, well, if not all the stops, then most of the stops, to keep Ukraine from being destroyed by Russia, yet also, very unadmirably, undertakes no evident action to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
This inaction heightens the danger of an all out war in the Middle East, which, given Iran’s verified imperialist ambitions and lack of scruples about doing anything to impose its inhumane version of Islam on the world, endangers American security. This is because the downside of our support for Ukraine is the depletion of our own military stocks. It would be dangerous indeed for the US to have to face down China in the Pacific, face down Russia in Ukraine — and also figure out how to deal with a war in the Middle East.
When we note that Iran’s imperialist ambitions are “verified,” we mean Iran’s spread of terrorism around the Middle East, from its arming of Hezbollah in Lebanon to its arming of terrorists in Gaza to its years-long war in Yemen. The final irony: the superpower (i.e., the nuclear-armed) Russia depends on the un-nuclear-armed Iran.
We hope that the Biden administration will focus on de-fanging Iran now that Israel, once again, must confront Iran’s military proxies in Gaza who fire rockets at Israeli civilians. The moral calculus cannot be repeated often enough: Palestinian Islamic Jihad fires on Israel in response to an act of malice that it itself caused; in this instance, a Palestinian who starved himself to death in an Israeli prison.
Israel should not be expected to cancel civilian life as a “solution” to Hamas’ violence for which Iran is the conduit —the violence that, if Iran and Gaza terrorists had their way, would rain down from Israel’s skies as often as it does from Ukraine’s skies.
Copyright © 2023 by the Intermountain Jewish News
