Biden tells Israel to seek ‘alternatives’ to striking Iran oil sites

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/04/israel-iran-war-hezbollah-ayatollah-speech-latest-news/

13 Comments

  1. Joe Biden has urged Israel against striking Iran’s oil facilities, a day after he said the United States was discussing the possibility of such strikes with its ally.

    “If I were in their shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oil fields,” Mr Biden told reporters on Friday, adding that he believed Israel had not yet decided on its response.

    Israel has vowed to retaliate to Tehran’s ballistic missile attack on Tuesday, which Iran had carried out in response to Israel’s offensive in Lebanon and the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

    Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a rare sermon on Friday, describing Iran’s missile attack on Israel on Tuesday a “legitimate” act, pledging that Iran and its terror proxies would “not back down”.

    Israel’s adversaries in the region should “double your efforts and capabilities… and resist the aggressive enemy,” Mr Khamenei said.

    **Read more from The Telegraph:** [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/04/israel-iran-war-hezbollah-ayatollah-speech-latest-news/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/04/israel-iran-war-hezbollah-ayatollah-speech-latest-news/)

  2. I don’t understand Biden’s equation at all. He seems to be convinced that preventing successive rounds of escalation is the be-all end-all goal. It sounds nice on its face, but without doing anything to change the underlying power dynamic between the actors in the conflict, all this does is prolong it indefinitely, all but ensuring that we see future rounds of even deadlier escalation.

    Iran is a major destabilizing force in the Middle East; through their proxies, they’ve fueled the conflict in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Israel/Palestine, and most of all in Lebanon, which is basically a failed state due in no small part due to Iran.

    I’m positive that after the decimation of Hezbollah there is now only one thing on the Ayatollah’s mind––getting a nuclear bomb.

    What is Biden waiting for? Will this situation become more solvable if Iran is nuclear armed?

    We’re so drunk on de-escalation that we seem to have forgotten that sometimes you need to take decisive action to solve a problem that won’t go away diplomatically.

    P.S. I’m not advocating a full-scale war with Iran. I mean at the very least, taking out its oil production capabilities, which will force the regime to focus on its own survival instead of funneling money to their proxies and spending billions on nuclear development.

  3. Unsurprising. The number of oilfields within range of Iran’s cheapest drones is mind boggling. Plus shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. They could cause global economic upheaval if they felt the Israeli response went too far.

  4. If Israel spikes the world price of gas it will have implications in the election. Biden needs to reign in their lunatic warmongering leader.

  5. blindwitness23 on

    It’s so weird that we have basically a live chat with retaliations on both sides. What’s next, have a vote on X on where one side should strike? Oddly it puts a different perspective on how things could escalate if it’s all ‘pre-approved’. In my opinion puts one more ‘strike’ in the war is an economic thing more than anything else. Shame that human lives are just part of a balance sheet in all of that.

  6. Didn’t the Saudis say yesterday that they might flood the market and bring oil under $50 a barrel?