On Friday, the United States conducted a series of strikes on sites in Syria and Iraq that it said belonged to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated militias. The air raids came in retaliation for the January 28 attack by the armed group Islamic Resistance of Iraq (IRI) on a military base in Jordan that killed three US soldiers and injured more than 40 others.

In a statement issued the same day, US President Joe Biden said the response would not stop at IRGC targets. On Saturday, American and British forces bombarded Houthi bases in Yemen in an apparent continuation of efforts to degrade their ability to disrupt maritime shipping in the Red Sea. There may be more attacks in the coming days as well, but clearly, the US is refraining from directly hitting Iran, which it accuses of supplying weapons to IRI.

A military response was politically unavoidable for the Biden administration. As is normally the case in an election year, any serious domestic development or international incident involving US interests or prestige becomes a defining moment for the sitting administration, whether Republican or Democratic.

The measured retaliation reflects the fact that the US president has a lot to worry about in terms of domestic perceptions and the attitudes of voters he seeks to sway in his favour as well as the dramatic changes in his own party’s electorate.

Since October 7, the Israeli government has sought to portray Hamas’s attack as an Iranian act of aggression. After the January 28 attack in Jordan, some Republican members of Congress echoed this position.

South Carolina........

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