How the White House Averted Full-Blown War

Wall Street Journal: “The scale of Tehran’s first-ever direct attack on Israel matched U.S. spy agencies’ worst-case scenarios, U.S. officials said later. It threatened not only a close U.S. ally, but Biden’s hopes of preventing a six-month Middle East crisis from widening into an all-out regional war.”

“Assembling in the Situation Room at 5:15 p.m. that Saturday, Biden and his aides couldn’t be sure that Israel’s antimissile systems, reinforced by the U.S. military’s antimissile and counterdrone deployments in the previous 10 days, would block nearly 99% of Iran’s salvo.”

“The agonizing wait during the Iranian barrage was among the tense moments in a 19-day crisis for Biden and his national-security team, one where they often found themselves uninformed or uncertain about what both Israel and Iran were planning at critical times.”