The White House has responded to the wave of terror in Israel with tepid and ambiguous statements, condemning Israel’s “excessive” use of force, claiming that both sides are responsible, and urging both Israel and the Palestinians to “tamp down the violence.” Victor Davis Hanson sees such comments as symptoms of a larger problem:

[T]he present U.S. government—which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year—is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed. . . .

[Meanwhile], President Obama’s Middle East policies are in shambles. . . . Amid the collapse of American power, [Mahmoud] Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed Obama’s pronouncements—from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo speech to his current contextualizations and not-so-private slapdowns of Netanyahu—and has wagered that Obama likes Israel even less than his public statements might suggest. Accordingly, Abbas assumes that there might be few consequences from America if he incites another “cycle of violence.” . . .

The Obama administration is the first postmodern government in American history, and it has adopted almost all of the general culture’s flawed relativist assumptions about human nature. . . . The question is not only whether the Obama administration, in private, favors the cause of the radical Palestinians over a Western ally like Israel, but also whether it is even intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing a democratic state that protects human rights from a non-democratic, authoritarian, and terrorist regime that historically has hated the West, and the United States in particular—and is currently engaged in clear-cut aggression.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.