Biden's Phony War In The Middle East

Almost a week ago an American base in Jordan was attacked by Iranian-backed Shia militia. There have been dozens of such attacks in the last couple of months, but this time three Americans were killed. Tremendous pressure was placed on the feckless Biden administration to do something meaningful in response.

The Biden team then spent a full five days telegraphing preparations for retaliatory strikes. Unconfirmed reports from AND Magazine sources in the Middle East suggest this included sending an emissary to Iran to make sure the Iranians were not caught unawares. IRGC leaders and personnel moved away from areas that would be targeted and sought shelter. Key equipment and munitions were hidden.

Then American forces began to target sites in Iraq and Syria. Since then additional strikes have taken place in Yemen. The Biden administration claims it has severely damaged Iranian and Shia militia facilities and forces. This is a lie. We have largely bombed empty buildings and vacant lots. The impact on the Iranians has been nil. Just to prove nothing had changed over the weekend Iranian-backed forces staged another rocket attack on a U.S. base in Syria. Those rockets were fired by the same group that killed our three servicemen and women.

To understand the extent of the charade being perpetrated by the Biden administration, let’s grab ahold of one geographical area and examine what just happened.

During the first round of U.S. attacks in Syria, 27 different targets were hit. A total of 29 people were killed in these strikes including members of Hezbollah and various other Shia militia.

Stop and think about that for a minute. We struck 27 different locations. We flew B-1 bombers all the way from the United States as part of these attacks. We dropped all sorts of ordnance.

We killed a total of 29 people.

What does that tell you? Most of these locations were empty. Everyone was gone. We bombed empty buildings.

Consider for a moment just the financial aspect of this. We sent jet aircraft that cost tens of millions of dollars apiece to drop incredibly expensive ordnance on meaningless targets. A simple U.S. 500-pound “dumb” bomb costs $4000. A 2000-pound unguided bomb runs $16,000. Want to strap on a guidance system and make that dumb iron bomb into a precision-guided munition? That will run you between $20,000 and $30,000 for each bomb.

 It costs in excess of $60,000 an hour to fly a B-1. Keep in mind they had to be refueled in air coming and going from Texas. There are more than 20,000 Iranian and Iranian surrogate fighters in Syria alone. They are spread out over a vast area and stationed at large, well-known, and easily identified facilities.  We have the coordinates of these facilities. We have full target packages on them. We have stacks of satellite images of them.

We bombed a force of 20,000 men, and we killed less than thirty people.

Hussein al-Mosawi, spokesman for the Al-Nujaba Movement part of the Iranian umbrella coalition of Islamic resistance organizations stated the obvious, the targeted sites were mainly "devoid of fighters and military personnel at the time of the attack."

Esmail Kohari a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander and a member of the Iranian parliament stated that no IRGC facilities were targeted by the United States in the strikes.

Other commentators in the Middle East have been equally blunt and pointed out that these strikes were intended for domestic political consumption inside the United States. They had no meaningful military effect.

If you have ever seen the film “Flight of the Intruder” you understand precisely what is happening here. In the movie, Navy pilots are sent out on mission after mission to bomb “suspected truck parks” where the North Vietnamese allegedly have stored vehicles and supplies. They bomb the targets. There are no secondary explosions. It is all a farce.

The pilots are bombing empty space. They are bombing trees. Real, high-value targets are ignored. President Johnson wants to appear to be doing something to win the war while really focusing on appeasing the North Vietnamese and trying to avoid escalation. The only thing that matters is being able to release a press statement back home claiming credit for the air strikes.

This is precisely where we are. From Day One this administration, filled with individuals sympathetic to the ayatollahs, has done everything it can to kowtow to Tehran. It has sent billions of dollars to the world’s greatest sponsors of terrorism and encouraged Iranian-backed Shia militia across the Middle East to set the region on fire. Biden and his minions now find themselves forced to make a show of standing tall and acting tough, because the American people want a response to the killing of our people in Jordan.

That’s all it is, though, a show. We are bombing nothing of significance to anyone. We are fighting a phony war.