Biden Admin Officials Terrified of Massive Military Escalation: 'It Could All Veer Off the Rails'
As threats and bombs pile up in the Middle East, the Biden administration is feeling queasy about being drawn into a Middle East war.
On Monday, Israel announced it had hit 320 targets in the Gaza Strip, from which Hamas terrorists emerged on Oct. 7 to slaughter 1,400 people in Israel, according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign minister is in talks with Hamas to explore what Hamas is calling “all methods” to stop Israel as Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel duel along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Iran’s foreign minister has already warned that if Israel does not stop attacking Gaza, “the region will go out of control,” according to Axios
If Hezbollah escalates its involvement Israel’s economy minister, Nir Barkat said it would “eliminate Hezbollah” but not stop there, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
“The plan of Iran is to attack Israel on all fronts. If we find they intend to target Israel, we will not just retaliate to those fronts, but we will go to the head of the snake, which is Iran,” he said.
“It’s quite a dangerous situation,” a senior administration official said, according to Axios. “It could all veer off the rails really quickly. The whole region could be in conflict.”
One Biden administration priority is to apply the brakes to Israel’s announced grand invasion of Gaza so that it can bring more military assets to the region, including air defense systems, Axios quoted sources it did not name as saying.
On Saturday, with U.S. forces under attack in Iraq and Syria, the United States said it was sending missile defense systems to the region and moving the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group into a position closer to Iran than its initial deployment.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted the administration’s fear of escalation during a Sunday interview with NBC.
“We expect that there’s a likelihood of escalation … by Iranian proxies directed against our forces … We are taking steps to make sure that we can effectively defend our people and respond decisively if we need to,” he said.
“This is not what we want, not what we’re looking for. We don’t want escalation,” he said.
With that in mind, the U.S. is urging Israel to “go in smartly,” Axios quoted the official it did not name as saying.
“The biggest way to see this escalate, see other groups come in, is to go in in a reckless fashion. It’s impossible to say what they’re going to do. The country is absolutely traumatized, as you would expect,” the official said.
The conflict could alter the political dynamics as Biden is roughly a year out from the 2024 presidential election, according to The New York Times.
“I don’t anticipate any long-term benefits politically,” Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University, said.
“We live in an era now where polarization is so deep that no matter what the magnitude of the crisis is, or the performance of the president, it’s not likely to make a difference,” he said.
Stanley Greenberg, former President Bill Clinton’s pollster in 1992, said Biden gave a good speech summarizing the issue last week, but noted it will be ancient history by the time Americans vote.
“Of course, a year from now, voters will be voting on the cost of living, the economy, the border, crime and other issues,” he said. “Foreign policy is rarely a voting determinant, but President Biden may be leading the attack on isolation and a new partisan choice on how we gain security.”
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