The war launched by Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel has roots that go back centuries, but a more recent critical node in the story is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when militant Islam achieved state power in the ancient Persian land. Then, the world watched as a longtime American ally — the shah of Iran and the Pahlavi dynasty — was ousted from power with the tacit acceptance of the Carter administration, which had been critical of the shah (and other American allies) for “human rights” violations. The revolutionary regime backed “students” who seized the U.S. embassy and 52 American hostages for 444 humiliating days, while President Jimmy Carter belatedly responded with a deeply flawed rescue mission that ended in disaster and further humiliation for the United States. Since then, the Islamic regime that has governed Iran, as Michael Ledeen noted in 2008, has been at war with Israel and the United States. Today, Israelis (and Americans in Israel) are reaping what Jimmy Carter sowed.
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The scenes and stories from Israel are horrific. More than a thousand Israelis, including entire families — including babies — are dead. The death count among Americans there is unknown — the Biden administration has said that 14 U.S. citizens have been killed, with an unknown number of others still missing. Both Israelis and Americans have been taken hostage by Hamas terrorists. Israeli warplanes have retaliated against Hamas targets in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his country’s citizens, “We are at war,” and vowed to exact an “unprecedented price” from Hamas. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant added, “The State of Israel will win this war.”
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has fired rockets in the Galilee region, which has spurred fears among Israeli leaders of a two-front war, reminiscent of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. And all this was made possible by Iranian money and backing, a failure of Israeli intelligence, and a disastrous political misjudgment about Hamas’ intentions. As Edward Luttwak explains, Israel recently permitted thousands of Gazans to work in Israel. The “only … way Hamas could have pulled off Saturday’s massive surprise,” Luttwak writes, was “by feeding valuable, indeed ‘actionable’ information to individuals who were Israeli intelligence sources.”
“There are techniques,” Luttwak continues, “that with much skill and patience can uncover double agents, but no tricks can detect agents who are reporting as best they can what they actually know—and who report good enough intelligence to keep everybody too busy to look for what they do not know.” This is the “wilderness of mirrors” described by the late head of CIA counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton that, during the Cold War, enabled the Soviets to supply disinformation to American intelligence. Luttwak believes that Hamas — perhaps with Iranian instruction — has learned how to play that game.
What is also clear is that Hamas could not have pulled this off without Iranian help — indeed, it is likely that Iran at least provided weapons and training to Hamas terrorists. A former U.S. intelligence official told NBC that “[t]he sophistication and the complexity of the attack seems beyond what Hamas could do on its own.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Iran helped Hamas plan the attack and approved it at a meeting in Beirut. Iran under the militant Islamic regime has been funding and supplying intelligence and arms to Hamas and Hezbollah for decades. The attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah have been called an Iranian “proxy war” against Israel.
This is the same Iranian regime to which President Barack Obama apologized for America’s past sins. It is the same Iranian regime for which the Biden administration recently unfroze $6 billion worth of assets in a trade for hostages. This is the same Iranian regime with which the Obama and Biden administrations have reached and resumed a nuclear “agreement” after President Donald Trump wisely withdrew. And this is the same Iranian regime that Jimmy Carter did nothing to prevent gaining power in Iran in 1979. You reap what you sow.
