The Biden administration may have just committed another foreign policy blunder.
Explosions from an apparent Israeli drone attack were reported Friday in Iran’s Isfahan province, which is home to an airbase and nuclear facilities, according to The Associated Press.
Fox News and CNN were among the outlets quoting U.S. officials as saying Israel carried out retaliatory strikes in response to Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel.
But according to The Jerusalem Post, this was a massive mistake by President Joe Biden’s administration.
Government sources told the Israeli news outlet that Israel is not officially accepting responsibility for the attack for strategic reasons.
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The sources also told the Post that Iranians were claiming it was an “explosion at a factory” in an attempt to avoid further escalation.
“It’s unclear why the Pentagon disclosed to American media that Israel was involved; they could have remained silent,” Zvika Klein wrote in the report. “They could have preserved Iran’s dignity and avoided escalating the situation on their own.”
Officially, Israel will not accept responsibility for the air strike on Iran for strategic reasons. Sources explain that the Iranians claim it was an “explosion at a factory” because they wish to avoid escalation.@ZvikaKlein reports.https://t.co/TEikQBpXPi
— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) April 19, 2024
CNN reported that the U.S. was given advance notice on Thursday that Israel was planning to strike Iran “in the coming days.”
Both Fox News and CNN indicated that Iranian news agencies reported that Iran’s nuclear facility in the Isfahan province was fully safe and secure.
Reuters reported that Iran has “played down the incident and indicated it had no plans for retaliation.”
“The foreign source of the incident has not been confirmed. We have not received any external attack, and the discussion leans more towards infiltration than attack,” a senior Iranian official told the outlet.
Given that the two parties directly involved in the situation are seeking to de-escalate tensions and avoid further conflict, it’s unclear why the Biden administration would have leaked Israel’s involvement in the attack to U.S. media.
The blunder comes when tensions in the Middle East are high after Iran launched hundreds of rockets and drones into Israel on April 13 in retaliation for Israel’s attack against an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed several Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers.
The Biden administration’s leak of Israel’s involvement put the safety and security of the Middle East in jeopardy.
U.S. officials have long feared that Iran would become involved in the war between Israel and Hamas and cause the conflict to spread across the region.
Those fears grew when Iran attacked the Jewish state and Israel vowed to respond.
Has Biden’s presidency been a foreign policy disaster?
Yet, if both countries were content to allow tensions to die down after this latest incident, why would the Biden administration do something that could ramp them back up?
At best, this was a clumsy oversight for which Israel and our allies deserve an explanation.
But if the Biden administration deliberately leaked this information against the wishes of America’s strongest ally in the region, that would raise serious questions about its intentions.
