Eldar Mamedov
The U.S. Vice President and the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, showed a worryingly shallow grasp of the nation’s national security challenges by calling Iran America’s “greatest adversary” in a Tuesday interview with CBS News’s 60 Minutes. She elaborated that “Iran has American blood on its hands” and referred to the “200 ballistic missiles” it fired on Israel.
In a world of a great-power rivalry with the nuclear-armed peer competitors China and Russia, to present a remote Middle Eastern country—hobbled by a plethora of U.S. sanctions, highly vulnerable to alleged acts of sabotage by Israel, with literally no allies besides militias in a handful of failed states—as the main threat to the United States is entirely absurd. Even with its arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones, Iran is no threat to the U.S., which it has no capability and no interest to attack.
Rather, the only conceivable threat from Iran to the U.S. comes from the Iranian proxy groups in Syria and Iraq—it is in those countries where Iran, presumably, got its hands soaked in that American blood. The question that she ought to be asking is, Why are American troops still in those lands? With the boiling tensions between Israel and Iran, and the nearly unconditional support that the Biden administration is offering Israel, those U.S. soldiers have merely become targets for attacks by an array of pro-Iranian Shiite groups in Iraq and Syria, with no discernible upside for Washington.
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