Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Breitbart News on Sunday that President Joe Biden needed to follow President Donald Trump’s example and attack Iran’s terrorist commanders if he wants to avoid a broader war.
Goldberg spoke to Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM Patriot 125 on the day that an Iranian-backed militia killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded dozens more in a drone attack on a U.S. outpost on the Jordanian border.
Goldberg, a former Capitol Hill staffer and U.S. Navy Reserve officer who helped coordinate opposition to President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, said that Biden’s policy of appeasing — and funding — Iran was bearing bitter fruit.
“This was a long time coming, with warning signs for three years that President Biden ignored, willfully. … This is roughly the 250th attack by Iran-directed militias against U.S. forces in the Middle East since Joe Biden became president. He has never responded militarily against Iran, once. Instead, he has opened the financial spigot … to run after Barack Obama’s vision of an Iran nuclear deal.”
“Now, the White House has a decision to make: is this the moment that his appeasement policy towards Iran has to end? Or will he find a way around this, do what he’s done 250 times before, have a pinprick strike against an Arab militia in Syria or Iraq, and allowed the Iranians to get away with murder, quite literally?”
Goldberg said that Biden could order a military response short of all-out war that would deter Iran from further attacks. He said Trump’s attack in 2020 on Iranian terror general Qasem Soleimani in Iraq was the model. Iranians fired a barrage of missiles at a U.S. base in response but did not kill any American troops.
“What we’re talking about is something exactly like what President Trump did. … That threw the Iranian regime back on its heels. … They were afraid of Donald Trump. They didn’t even escalate their nuclear program for a year, until Joe Biden came into office.”
Goldberg said Biden should cut funding to Iran, cut political support for the Iranian regime through negotiations on a nuclear deal, and launch direct attacks on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an elite force that the Trump administration declared a terror group.
“He has to target the [Iranian] Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders who are directing this attack. He can’t just go after the Arab militias. That’s not the same as launching an invasion of Iran — nobody’s calling for that. Nobody’s calling for increasing the likelihood of a regional conflict. The way to decrease it is to put the Iranians back on defense. Make them scared.
“President Biden has to have a ‘Soleimani moment,” or more Americans are going to die.”
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 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.