Speaking to AIPAC today, Vice President Joe Biden sought to placate hawkish conference-goers who are concerned that negotiations with Iran sound suspiciously different from the war they were expecting, assuring them that President Obama was “not bluffing” when he threatened to attack Iran.

The P5+1 meeting with Iran last week ended with both sides claiming significant progress, but the talks have mostly been a target of condemnation at the conference, with speakers either rejecting negotiations on general principle or insisting the talks are some sort of Iranian plot designed to avoid war.

Biden’s own speech all but ignored the P5+1 talks, instead focusing on the Vice President’s own decades of fundraising for the Israel Lobby and the Obama Administration’s military and financial dedication to Israel, with repeated mentions of military threats to Iran.

Yet the threats seemed almost an afterthought, thrown in to his self-congratulatory speech at the last minute to placate worried attendees about the risk of peace breaking out. Indeed, Biden even mistook Iran for Iraq, declaring the latter’s non-existent nuclear weapons program the real threat to Israel, while of course he meant the similarly non-existent program of the former.