HARRISON MANN: This deployment, I think, sends a very strong message, unfortunately, to the Netanyahu government, which is that if you continue to escalate with Iran, you will be rewarded with the protection of additional U.S. systems and troops. And it also, unfortunately, sends the message that, you know, we’ve seen the people burning in tents, and we’ve seen you publicly muse about starving everybody in northern Gaza to death, and that’s not a deal breaker.
And then, the other issue here is that we are, indisputably, putting more U.S. troops at risk by sending them to Israel. They’re going to be operating out of Israeli military installations. And we’ve seen, both with the October 1 Iranian attack and then more recent Hezbollah attacks, that Israel’s adversaries can penetrate its air defenses and can strike targets within Israeli bases. So, we have to be very clear that these troops are entering a combat zone. They are going to be at risk, especially as escalation continues. And unfortunately, they’ve been sent there, I think, with no consultation with Congress, with no clear legal justification, without the argument that they are needed to go there for urgent self-defense needs.
And if you’re asking why would we keep supporting or why would the president keep supporting Netanyahu, even when he knows that he’d rather have a Republican president, Donald Trump, in office, I think they just can’t imagine another strategy. And it’s really unfortunate to see that this administration — and to a certain extent, the Harris campaign — would rather risk her election than distance themselves from Israel and from the genocide.
Iran and Israel played their shadow war, mostly contained to Syria and the Golan Heights/Southern Lebanon for years.
Then after Oct7 Israel threw out the unspoken ‘rules of the game’ and started thwacking Iranian proxy force’s political and military leadership. A new tit-for-tat grew, with Hezbollah and the Houthis responding for Iran.
Israel strikes an Iranian embassy, killing Iranian diplomats and IRGC members. A new escalation.
Iran responds with their extremely telegraphed ‘show of force’ missile/drone attack, doing little damage to Israel, giving the IDF and IAF an easy PR win to shoot down all the Iranian missiles.
Israel quickly escalates again by killing Nasrallah and directly striking Hezbollah, before their ground invasion of Lebanon. Iran responds with a surprise missile attack, using the good missiles this time, and proves they can (and did) strike Israeli military facilities at will.
All of a sudden Israel delays a new escalation, but warns of severe consequences. Now that THAAD is deployed, Netanyahu approves strike plans as recently as last night purportedly.
The “ironclad commitment to Israel’s security” is directly enabling escalation in the region, and has a purported ally dog-walking the global leader. To quote Bill Clinton “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”.