LARRY KUDLOW: Iran is unappeasable

Why is it that President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House Spokesman John Kirby, day-in and day-out, continue the fiction that Iran had no direct involvement with the terrorists in Hamas – or for that matter Islamic Jihad, or for that matter Hezbollah – before the barbaric invasion of Israel on October 7?  

Why does our government maintain this lie?  Today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal is an exclusive news story headlined: "Hamas fighters trained in Iran before October 7 attacks".    

The subhead: "Roughly 500 Palestinian militants got specialized combat instruction at Iranian facilities as recently as September." It's a long, carefully constructed news article, and about a third of the way in is this quote: "Before the war, Iran directly assisted Hamas with money, training, and weapons and technological know-how," said rear admiral Daniel Hagari, the military's chief spokesman in Israel.   

Then, he adds, "Even now, Iran is helping Hamas with intelligence."  Right after the October 7 catastrophe, the Wall Street Journal ran a story with the headline: "Iran helped plot attack on Israel over several weeks." By the way, the Washington Post corroborated that story the next day.  

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To be fair, this morning's Wall Street Journal story quotes an Air Force general who maintains the fiction that there was no direct connection between the Hamas attacks and Iran, but looking at this and other news reports – news reports, mind you, not editorials – I think the U.S. government is making a big mistake denying Iran's direct involvement.   

This has a Vietnam feel to it, when Democratic and Republican administrations lied to the American public about U.S. involvement in the Vietnamese war.  Oddly, from a political standpoint, Americans by huge majorities support the Israeli cause and they have an enormous distrust of Iran.  

So, I don't understand the political judgment, much less the highly flawed military judgment.  Now, as we know, for nearly three years, President Biden has tried to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.  He inherited this stupidity from President Obama. Obama's deal would've never passed the Senate, so they did it through the United Nation instead and they attached U.N. Security Council sanctions on that misbegotten deal.  

Lately, however, when the U.N. sanctions expired last week, they were not snapped back. So, now, even those unenforced sanctions have essentially expired, but the Biden administration has also chosen not to enforce the economic sanctions that were put in place by the Trump administration.   

Those economic and energy sanctions, that were strictly implemented by Mr. Trump, basically bankrupted Iran. So, when Trump took out Iran's top military man Soleimani, the Iranians didn't do anything – because they were broke.  Today, as we all know and as the facts show, Iran is flush with energy and foreign exchange reserves that they have used to finance Hamas and the other terrorist groups.  Indeed, before the October 7 blow-up, Biden was trying to give Iran even more cash.   

Essentially, the key point, I suppose, is to acknowledge Iran's direct role in training and financing the terrorist attacks against Israel and the U.S. would require an acknowledgment from Biden that his Iranian policy of appeasement was wrong – from the very beginning.  Apparently, he doesn't want to make that acknowledgment.  So, he and his spokespeople have come up with this fiction, which at best is semantic and at worst is an outright lie, that Iran had no direct involvement in the Israeli and American massacres. You can parse words, but you can’t parse the truth. 

Iran is unappeasable. Without deterrence, they will continue as the largest state sponsor of terrorism.  The Bidens must understand this hard fact. Iran will never change its ways, nor will its terrorist puppets, and if President Biden wants to show Americans and the rest of the world that he has figured this out, then he must – at a bare minimum – re-instate the economic and energy sanctions.   

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The quickest way I can think of to do that would be to interdict or impound an Iranian ship on the high seas that is carrying oil, or weapons, or anything else forbidden under the sanctions imposed legislatively by the U.S. Congress and enforced by the Trump administration.  

I call it "stop a ship and send a message."  Go back to the Trump model. A change of Biden's policies toward Iran that is an honest and transparent reappraisal of the failure of those policies is the best thing Biden can do to protect Israel and the United States and quit lying to us!   

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the October 26, 2023, edition of "Kudlow."