The Biden-Harris administration’s decision to send a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense battery to Israel to help it bring down Iranian missiles is a Trojan horse, not a real show of support.
Israel welcomed the move, but at the same time, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was threatening Israel with an arms embargo if it failed to comply with a host of new conditions that would end Israel’s current offensive against Hamas in northern Gaza.
In truth, Israel does not need the THAAD. It has an effective array of overlapping missile defense systems — the Iron Dome for short-range rockets, the David’s Sling for medium range missiles, and the Arrow for long-range missiles.
The Israeli shield is not 100% effective, but it has been extremely effective against two massive Iranian missile attacks. The THAAD is a different system that adds redundancy, at best, and could even complicate Israel’s system.
President Joe Biden, or his advisers, knew that the THAAD was an offer that Israel could not refuse, politically. The Israeli public, strained after a year of war, would not have been happy to know that Netanyahu had refused a missile defense system — one of just a handful of THAAD batteries.
Netanyahu’s opponents would have accused him of exacerbating tensions with the U.S. Democrats would also have accused him of interfering in the U.S. election.
Still, it is an offer that amounts to a Trojan horse. By sending the THAAD system to Israel, Biden will be able to claim that he is helping Israel defend itself directly. That will give him greater control over Netanyahu’s military strategy.
Until now, Netanyahu has ignored Biden’s demands — that he not fight Hamas in Rafah, and accept a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Netanyahu has been right in each case, but Biden does not care: he wants Israel reined in.
That was the message Austin sent to Israel in his letter, which claimed — without evidence — that Israel is stopping aid from entering Gaza, despite the fact that Israel has been shipping hundreds of trucks of aid into Gaza daily. Austin gave Israel a 30-day deadline to comply, and also demanded that Israel set up a “channel” that would allow the U.S. to protest whenever Palestinians claimed civilians had been harmed. (Austin made no additional demands of Hamas.)
There is another major problem with the THAAD offer: it comes with 100 U.S. troops whose expertise is necessary to operate the system.
Israel has always prided itself on the fact that no American soldier or sailor has ever died in its defense. The THAAD team would probably be safe from harm — as safe as any Israeli, at least — but the fact is that America now has “boots on the ground” in Israel, which means there are risks to Americans — and to Israel as well.
After all the fuss in March about Biden’s promise that there would be no boots on the ground for the construction of his ill-fated pier, which was meant to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza but was destroyed by the Mediterranean itself, the insertion of 100 U.S. troops into a hot war between Israel and Iran seems to have passed with little notice. That could change very quickly, and it could cause serious damage to Israel’s standing with a war-weary American public.
Instead of sending the THAAD, the Biden-Harris administration should have said that the U.S. supported an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program. Even if Israel had not gone that far, the threat itself would have weakened Iran.
The THAAD represents what Biden and Harris mean when they say they support Israel’s right to defend itself: only when attacked.
That is why Biden restrained Israel’s response to Iran’s first attack in April. That is why the threat persists.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
