Biden’s secret support for Iran America is far from Israel's best friend

It was Obama who first envisioned a strategic “realignment” that would clean up the mess left by the Bush administration’s failed wars in the Middle East. The US occupation of Iraq — rather than empowering peaceful, democratic forces across the region as Bush advertised — had mainly benefitted Iraq’s neighbour, the Shia theocracy of Iran. In the Eighties, under the leadership of the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq fought a war of attrition with Iran in which more than 1 million people were killed, including more than 100,000 civilians. It was the longest conventional war of the 20th century and one of the most brutal, with chemical weapons attacks by Iraq, numerous massacres of civilians, and Iran using children to clear minefields. When it ended, the war left significant divisions between Iraq’s majority Arab Shia population and the ethnically Persian Shia regime of Iran. It was only after American occupation forces disbanded Iraq’s Sunni Baathist government in 2003, triggering a spiral of insurgency and civil war, that policy makers in DC started to see Iran as the key to restoring order in the country.

In addition to former Baathists and Sunni jihadists, the Iraqi insurgency included a large number of Shia militias funded by Iran, some of them operating as direct proxies of the Iranian Quds Force. Given the proper incentives, the Americans reasoned, Iran could muzzle those groups and direct them to stop attacking American soldiers. More broadly, it was thought that Iran could play a crucial role in stabilising Iraqi politics by backing the leaders who Washington selected to run Iraq’s new democratically elected government. “To quickly make a government we allowed Shia exiles and Iranian proxies into the Iraqi government and turned a blind eye to Iran’s control of the Iraqi state,” writes Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who did multiple tours in Iraq before returning to the US and entering conservative politics where he advocates pulling American troops out of the Middle East.

Thus, despite Tehran’s ideological devotion to killing Americans and annihilating Israel, which has never dimmed, the belief in its value as a strategic partner grew within the US foreign policy elite. The moment to realise the idea arrived after Obama won re-election in 2012 and could pursue his most ambitious designs without worrying about voters. The Iran deal, which Obama saw as the centrepiece of his legacy, became the main priority of his second term. By the time the White House, led by its Iran envoy Robert Malley, began public negotiations in 2013 for the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), US officials had already been making secret entreaties to Tehran for several years.

Under the auspices of preventing Iran from getting the bomb, the Obama administration set about weakening its former allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The two countries that had been the main pillars of America’s security architecture in the Middle East were now seen as obstacles due to their opposition to the US embrace of Iran. To deal with them, the Obama administration went on the attack. The White House spied on members of Congress who it suspected of coordinating with Israeli officials to oppose the Iran deal, a move that, in 2015, still looked like an unprecedented use of the US intelligence agencies in partisan politics. On another track, the State Department funded Israeli non-profit groups working to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, exceptional generosity was being shown to Iran. Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, repeatedly blocked the FBI from arresting Iranian terrorists in order to protect the JCPOA, according to agency whistle-blowers. In a leaked email between two FBI agents from 2015, one complains: “We are all beside ourselves on asking the field to stand down on a layup arrest, however as it stands right now we all have to sit back and wait until the US and Iran negotiations resolve themselves.”

To stifle criticism at home, the administration used friendly mouthpieces in the press to smear anyone opposed to the pro-Iran realignment as a neocon trying to drag America into another war. In the softer voice that Obama deployed in the rare, carefully selected moments when he articulated his strategy, he insisted that boosting Iran would be good for the whole region, including the Israelis, by forcing everyone to get along. This would produce a new geopolitical “equilibrium” Obama told The New Yorker in 2014, between “Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare”.

Obama’s comments were made in the midst of the Syrian civil war, but some months before active warfare broke out in Yemen between Iran’s Houthi proxy and the Saudis. Nothing that happened, however, neither Assad’s gas attacks in Syria nor Iran’s increasingly aggressive use of its proxy forces, shook his prevailing faith in the new US-made Middle East. If anything, Iranian military expansionism seemed to redouble Obama’s commitment, as came across in his statements from a press conference in December of 2015, where he spoke of allowing “the Iranians to ensure that their equities are respected”. In other words, American power would now defend Iran’s right to proxy armies in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, so long as they operated within the US regional framework, which set limits on the acceptable levels of violence and terrorism.

Volatile contradictions inherent in Obama’s progressive imperial order stoked a backlash against the realignment and presented a technical problem. How should the White House deal with critics who threatened to undermine their plan for transforming the Middle East? The answer Obama chose was to embrace offensive information operations, otherwise known as mass propaganda, as a legitimate tool of domestic politics.

“We created an echo chamber,” Obama’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, admitted in 2016 to the writer David Samuels. Coasting off the cultish enthusiasm for Obama among America’s progressive elites, the White House recruited non-profit groups and friendly press outlets to lend a false air of independent credibility to administration talking points. Still a relatively new technology at the time, social media proved immensely important in achieving this effect. Twitter synchronised the various narrative purveyors in the echo chamber, connecting them to the public and to each other in a feedback loop that translated political agendas into “objective news”.

It is not too dramatic to say that the Iran deal echo chamber inaugurated a new era of American politics driven by party-directed propaganda. It established the informational networks that allowed the Democratic Party to repeat the formula in the future. And indeed, this is precisely what has happened, in a pattern recurring at increasingly frequent intervals ever since: in, to name but a few, the false claims that Russia “hacked” the US election to anoint Donald Trump, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was an act of Russian disinformation, and most recently in relation to Gaza.

In the context of pervasive, party-directed attempts to control politics through messaging, let’s examine the current US role in the Middle East and the Israel-Hamas war. The official story goes like this: Joe Biden came into office as the greatest friend Israel ever had, a Zionist so committed to the cause he would have personally invented Israel if the Jews hadn’t come up with the idea first. A champion of the Abraham Accords, Biden was pushing to expand them by bringing Israel into a historic new treaty with Saudi Arabia. If there was a criticism of Biden, it was that in his enthusiasm for Israel’s security and the prospect of Arab-Israeli peace he had neglected the Palestinians, who, fearing they might be cast forever off the historical stage, sought to regain the world’s attention by lashing out in the regrettable actions of October 7. But once the war started, it was back to point one with Biden offering maximum support to his stalwart ally Israel.

So far so good for the US-Israeli “special relationship”. But then the Israelis went mad, abandoning any winnable military strategy in order to brutalise the Palestinians like Old Testament fanatics. Perhaps this was a manifestation of the same inherent extremism that had placed Israel’s government in the hands of theocratic fascists. What was clear in any event was that Biden, despite his eternal commitment to the Jewish state, would have to uphold America’s honour by punishing Israel and withholding US support from its war crimes. Moreover, Israel was pushing the entire world to the brink of World War Three as its irresistible lobby in Washington tried to drag the US into a war with Iran. And just what did the Israelis think they could accomplish? Everyone knows that killing terrorists only creates more of them and that there is no way to kill an idea. So, to rescue Israel from itself while also extending America’s moral protection to the Palestinians, the White House has worked towards a ceasefire that will free the hostages and create the conditions for a lasting peace. That peace will of course take the form of the long-sought after two-state solution, which will also solve the problem of Hamas, the organisation that can’t be destroyed, by absorbing its surviving members into a government led by the moderate Palestinian authority. The final realisation of this peace process will fulfil the aspirations of Palestinians, deradicalise the remnants of Hamas, and make Israel along with the entire Middle East, safer and more secure.

You have likely heard some or all of these claims since October 7. Many of them are not presented as claims at all but as axiomatic expressions of objective fact. Yet every assertion made in the preceding two paragraphs is either comprehensively false or twisted to misrepresent the US position in the Middle East. Let us take them in turn.

Joe Biden, rather than being Israel’s best friend, is the leader of a global empire that is simultaneously funding Israel, Hamas and the other Iranian proxies with whom Israel is at war. As the leader of the empire, Biden manages (to the best of his mature ability) a portfolio of client states in the Middle East that includes Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia along with a parallel portfolio reserved for its strategic partner Iran and Iran’s subsidiary “equities” in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. The US pumps money into both portfolios. It funds Iranian terror proxies such as Hezbollah through cut-outs and targeted sanctions relief that Iran exploits to launch attacks and strengthen its regional power. Recently, the US spent $1 billion building a massive new embassy complex in Beirut. The exorbitantly expensive project makes no logical sense until one appreciates that its purpose is to signal America’s commitment to Iran’s main regional proxy and create a slush fund that can be used to pay Hezbollah. Hamas, too, represents an Iranian “equity” as Tehran has become the main funder and backer of the Palestinian group and helped it to plan and orchestrate the October 7 attack. Though you will never hear a White House official state this directly, the reality is that US policy toward Iran and toward Hamas are inseparable.

Whereas Biden officials reject any efforts to force new leadership on Tehran, they show no qualms about using regime change tactics to unseat the Netanyahu government in Israel. “I really think that most Israelis do not want America to stay out of their business,” the US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, said in February of last year after Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli’s criticised Nides for meddling in Israel’s domestic politics.

Prior to October 7, the US pressured Israel to accept “regional integration” — the term used by Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan — with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah — the idea being that if America just puts everyone on the payroll, friends and foes alike, it can buy quiet. After October 7, the US is still pushing the same approach. Despite Biden’s gushing proclamations of support for Israel, his actual policy has focused on preserving the US-Iranian condominium in the Middle East. That is why on October 8, while Israel was still battling with pockets of Hamas operatives who had infiltrated inside its territory, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. It is also why the US is now pressuring Israel to accept integration with Hamas, whose members US officials insist must be included in a new Palestinian government.

The popular notion that Biden championed the Abraham Accords is a farcical inversion of the truth. In reality, Biden was so opposed to Trump’s signature foreign policy legacy that US officials could not even use the term during the first year of his administration. Rather than ignoring the Palestinians, the Biden administration pointedly attempted to recentre them. Whereas the whole premise of the Accords had been that Arab-Israeli peace could advance independent of a political settlement with the Palestinians, Biden reversed this. The much-touted Biden initiative to bring Israel into a new partnership with Saudi Arabia was contingent on the Israelis first accepting a “peace” deal with the Palestinians. The entire thrust of Biden foreign policy has been to undo the significant successes of the Trump era and resurrect Obama’s progressive imperium. Immediately after taking office, Biden lifted sanctions on Iran and took the Houthis, Iran’s proxy force in Yemen, off of the US terrorism watch list. Where Trump had cut funding to the Palestinians because it was being used to fund terrorism, Biden immediately reversed this with an aid package that included $150 million for the UNRWA, the United Nations organisation whose facilities and members are enmeshed with Hamas in Gaza.

Of course, it is legitimate to argue that Biden did not go far enough in his support for the Palestinian cause, but that is not the claim that one hears made. Rather, the charge is that Biden continued Trump’s sin of marginalising the Palestinians and thus provoked their sense of desperation that led to the October 7 attack. But this is flatly contradicted by all available evidence. If being side-lined was the proximate cause of Palestinian terrorism, we would have seen attacks during the Trump years. Instead, Trump’s term brought a period of relative peace in the Middle East, including for Israelis and Palestinians. There were no Israel-Hamas wars under Trump. By contrast, the first Israel-Hamas war of the Biden administration took place months after he entered office, after his many generous overtures toward Iran and the Palestinians, and we are now on the second war of his administration. A great many people of various ideological persuasions are involved in a furious effort to rewrite this history and suggest that there was barely any difference in the foreign policies of the two most recent US administrations. A reasonable person may ask themselves a simple question: Does the world under President Joe Biden appear more or less chaotic and violent than it did under President Donald Trump?

Israel is not wantonly brutalising the Palestinians as an exercise in cruelty. It is fighting a particularly brutal form of urban warfare against an enemy that had more than a decade to prepare a fortified defence with the financial subsidy and support of the “international community”. The horrific scenes from Gaza resemble the scenes from Mosul where US and Iraqi forces fought a similarly brutal war to liberate the city from Isis. The images of devastation from Mosul, where more than 10,000 civilians were killed in the fighting and half of the city was razed, are not as well-known because the Moslawis are not a global empathy trigger. Recent history shows that, in fact, a terrorist group can be destroyed in a particular time and place, but only at a truly harrowing cost.

When senior Biden administration officials tell reporters that they “have to be honest about the fact that Hamas will remain in Gaza in some form after the war is over”, they are being anything but honest. The purpose of such statements is not to describe reality but to telegraph the supposed inevitability of the end state that their own policies —stopping arms sales to Israel, accusing it of war crimes, demanding that it leave Hamas in Rafah — are intended to achieve. The White House insistence on a two-state solution led by the Palestinian Authority, a proposal almost as unpopular with Palestinians as it is with Israelis, is promoted under the humanitarian auspices of granting a people their “rights”, but simply extends the US imperial strategy of “regional integration”. Historically, this is what great powers do. They divide the world’s lesser countries as spoils. The lesser countries would be wise to bear this in mind.

Rather than escalating toward a Third World War with Iran, the aim of American power projection in the Middle East is to preserve Iran’s ability to act as a hegemonic stabiliser. The flaw in this aim is that Iran possesses no such ability and that its leaders are guided by an ideology that violently rejects the very idea of doing so. Yet that has not dissuaded successive Democratic administrations from trying. And why not, when they will never have to pay for their own failures as long as they have the “herd immunity of the ruling class” to protect them from the consequences of their own failures?

It will be a mystery for future historians to ponder how the leaders of the most powerful country in the history of the world could have so recklessly squandered its power in such obviously wasteful pursuits. The analogy that gets closest, to my mind, comes, not from looking at past US wars and foreign policy mistakes but at the Covid pandemic. Secretly funding the Iranian empire on the premise that it would make the world more peaceful is the equivalent of secretly funding Gain of Function research to engineer super deadly viruses at a Chinese bioweapons laboratory on the premise that it would make Americans safer.

“You got a win. Take the win,” Biden told the Israelis in April immediately after Iran launched more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at them. In a phone call, Biden explained to Netanyahu that since the attack had stayed within the proper limits, the US would not support Israel attacking Iran in response. One further relevant detail was provided in a Reuters report: The Iranian attack on Israel had received approval from Washington on the condition that it “must be within certain limits”.

Israel is not a passive victim in this scenario. Neither are any of the other US client states in the Middle East and other parts of the world who have accepted American backing on American terms. It is the empire that sets the rules and America has exercised its prerogative to change them. What is beyond question, though, is that when the US refers to the “rules-based international order”, it means an order in which Iran will maintain its pride of place. As Antony Blinken reportedly told Israeli officials about why they should accept a new US ceasefire proposal that would keep Hamas in power, it offers “the possibility for further integration in the region”.

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Jacob Siegel is Senior Writer at Tablet Magazine

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