Why has the U.S. refrained from intervening in the Syrian civil war? It’s not out of fear of getting dragged into a Middle Eastern conflict, Lee Smith argues, but in order to placate Iran:

As President Obama wrote to the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, “the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.” The president didn’t do anything to bring down Assad because he was afraid it might anger the Syrian president’s patrons in Iran, and getting a nuclear deal with Iran was Obama’s foreign-policy priority.

There is plenty that the president might have done to support Syrian rebels . . . without ever risking putting American forces on the ground in Syria. . . . Obama, however, kept his eyes on the prize: the Iran deal. . . .

According to the White House’s negotiating partners in Tehran, it’s not their fault if Assad has to keep killing people. No, says Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, it’s those demanding Assad’s ouster who “are responsible for the bloodshed in Syria.” [But] of course it’s Zarif and Iranian allies—from Assad and Hizballah to Iraqi and other foreign Shiite-majority militias—who . . . are still responsible for the vast majority of the deaths in the Syrian conflict. It’s Assad and his Iranian patrons who are responsible for turning what started as a peaceful protest movement against the regime into a civil war that has caused around a quarter-million deaths in four and a half years.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.