Gaza, however, is but one part of a much larger conflict. In December, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant referred to the war with Iran taking place on seven fronts—the others being Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. Seen from this perspective, it might be better to speak of a confrontation between Washington and Tehran, one which the former appears reluctant to want to acknowledge. The editors of the Washington Free Beacon write:

If the Biden administration has articulated one goal since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, it is to prevent the outbreak of a broader regional war. . . . As with so many of this administration’s foreign-policy initiatives, Iran had other ideas.

As Eli Lake details, the U.S.-Iran conflict has been going on for years, and claimed the lives of over 600 American servicemen in Iraq, and recently those of two navy SEALs in the Indian Ocean. The Free Beacon continues:

Any actual clear-eyed analysis would start and end with Iran, which has been waging a proxy war against the United States for decades. That includes during Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, when Iran took the pallets of cash it received and poured the money into its terror proxies throughout the Middle East. Now, as Iran wages a regional war, the Biden administration’s responses in Iraq and Yemen have been limited to the appendages of the Iranian hydra. To stem this conflict and prevent it from growing further, we must attack it straight on.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.