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As Buddy said, appears China either has little influence over N Korea or fears the consequences of putting pressure on "Fat Boy." (See 1 below.)
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Ossoff loses his grip as Karen demonstrated she knew how to Handel him! Jon did not know who he was so he kept changing during the campaign. In the end he learned he was a loser.
The Democrats keep trying to tear down Trump. They keep pouring money, like gasoline, down the drain and they keep getting singed. Their party is now controlled by radicals, their party is against Capitalism in favor of Socialism and they remain totally out of step with America because they still believe Obama's America is acceptable, ie. diss Israel, fund Iran and downgrade our relationship with Egypt and The Saudis..
If the Democrats want to follow Hollywood and the Jane Fonda's into oblivion they should keep doing what they are doing because that is where they are heading. Demwits are absorbed with resistance, obstruction and impeachment and Americans want jobs and a recovering economy. Trump is doing what resonates with voters.
As for the Republican Party, they too better heed the message voters sent to Handel. Go to work, do what is right by America or you too, will be out on the streets with your tin cups wondering what hit you.
Republicans must learn to fight back, be passionate about their agenda and stop the in fighting.
In the ensuing days it will be interesting to see how the mass media handles the Handel matter. They pretty much backed themselves into a corner where there are few legitimate excuses but no doubt they will find some and/or make them up as they wipe more egg, once again, off their collective faces.. (See 2 below.)
When your goal is to find collusion nothing will deter you from making the numbers work. Rep. Adam Schiff is gunning for a Senate seat and he fits right in with slimy Schumer and Franken. (See 2a and 2b below.)
For those who have read these memos they know there is nothing new in this posting. Because it was written by the Cheney's Democrats will deny the message but then truth hurts. (See 2c below.)
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Should Hezbollah attack Israel, it is prepared to respond with much more power than in 2006. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Trump Says China Tried But Failed to Help on North Korea
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Chinese efforts to persuade North Korea to rein in its nuclear program have failed, ratcheting up the rhetoric over the death of an American student who had been detained by Pyongyang.
Trump had held high hopes for greater cooperation from China to exert influence over North Korea, leaning heavily on Chinese President Xi Jinping for his assistance. The two leaders had a high-profile summit in Florida in April and Trump has frequently praised Xi and resisted criticizing Chinese trade practices.
"While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!" Trump wrote in a tweet.
It was unclear whether his remark represented a significant shift in his thinking in the U.S. struggle to stop North Korea's nuclear program and its test launching of missiles or a change in U.S. policy toward China.
But it was likely to increase pressure on Beijing ahead of a U.S.-China Diplomatic and Security Dialogue on Wednesday.
The talks will pair U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis with China's top diplomat, State Councilor Yang Jiechi, and General Fang Fenghui, chief of state of the People’s Liberation Army.
The State Department says the dialogue will focus on ways to increase pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear and missile programs, but also cover such areas as counter-terrorism and territorial rivalries in the strategic South China Sea.
In a sign that U.S.-Chinese relations remain stable, a White House aide said Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, were invited by the Beijing government to visit China later this year.
Trump has hardened his rhetoric against North Korea following the death of Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who died on Monday in the United States after returning from captivity in North Korea in a coma.
In a White House meeting with visiting Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko, Trump criticized the way Warmbier's case was handled in the year since his arrest, appearing to assail both North Korea and his predecessor, U.S. President Barack Obama.
"What happened to Otto is a disgrace. And I spoke with his family. His family is incredible ... but he should have been brought home a long time ago," Trump said.
Trump's tweet about China took some advisers by surprise. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States had limited options to rein in North Korea without Chinese assistance.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said a meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is less likely following Warmbier's death.
Spicer said Trump would be willing to meet Kim under the right conditions, but that, "clearly we're moving further away, not closer to those conditions."
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2)
Media Bias: As news outlets dissect every new crumb in the alleged Trump-Russia-collusion scandal, they're largely ignoring other, very troubling scandals that happen to involve the previous administration.
2)
Real Scandals The Trump-Obsessed Media Are Ignoring
Investor's Business Daily
Media Bias: As news outlets dissect every new crumb in the alleged Trump-Russia-collusion scandal, they're largely ignoring other, very troubling scandals that happen to involve the previous administration.
So far, and no doubt to the disappointment of many Trump haters, the Russia scandal has been going nowhere fast. Eleven months of investigating has so far turned up no hard evidence that there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere with the November elections.
While that scandal drags on, however, several others have taken surprising turns. Not that you'd know it from the coverage these are getting from the mainstream press.
Unmasking Scandal: On Monday, Judicial Watch announced that it hit a dead end in its effort to dig out information about why White House advisor Susan Rice ordered an "unmasking" of Trump campaign officials in classified reports. In response to Judicial Watch's April 4 request for materials related to these unmasking requests — to determine whether they were politically motivated — the National Security Council said it had sent all those records to Obama's presidential library, where they can't be released for five years.
"Prosecutors, Congress, and the public will want to know when the National Security Council shipped off the records about potential intelligence abuses by Susan Rice and others in the Obama White House to the memory hole of the Obama Presidential Library," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Fitton fittingly left journalists off his list of those who will want to know about this, since the latest weird twist in this story garnered precious little interest among the mainstream media.
Nor did an earlier development in this case, when the House Intelligence Committee issued subpoenas for information related to unmasking requests involving Rice as well as former CIA Director John Brennan, and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Power.
These subpoenas were, Rep. Devin Nunes said, "just further escalation in the concern we have of the unmaskings of Americans by the senior leaders of the Obama administration."
Media response: Yawn.
Loretta Lynch Scandal: Despite blanket coverage of James Comey's testimony about his firing by Trump, few noted the bombshell Comey dropped about Obama's attorney general, Loretta Lynch, who, Comey said, pressured him to downplay the significance of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's reckless handling of classified emails on her private server. Comey said Lynch told him to call it a "matter," not an investigation.
Comey said this gave him a "queasy" feeling, since Lynch was specifically asking him to parrot the words the Clinton campaign was using to describe the FBI probe. That, on top of the Lynch's private meeting with Bill Clinton, as well as the unusually lenient immunity deals the Justice Department cut with key witnesses in the Clinton email case, suggest Lynch had turned the Justice Department into an arm of the Clinton campaign.
Comey's revelation was enough for liberal California Sen. Diane Feinstein to call for an investigation into Lynch's actions. "I think we need to know more about that, and there's only one way to know about it, and that's to have the Judiciary Committee take a look at that," she said.
As we noted in this space recently, Comey's revelation raises other questions as well. "Did President Obama know this? Did he approve of it? Was it his idea? Did anyone at the White House tell Lynch to soft-pedal the investigations? Was this all conducted in concert with the Clinton campaign?"
Media interest in getting answers to any of these questions? Zero.
NSA Spying Scandal: In late May, Circa News published a truly bombshell report about how the National Security Agency had been conducting illegal searches on American citizens for years, "routinely violat(ing) American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts." In addition, the administration "failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall."
Classified documents obtained by Circa showed that "one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream internet data on Americans inside the NSA's so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011."
Circa also reported that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court blasted Obama administration officials, saying that the improper searches posed a "very serious Fourth Amendment issue" and the administration's failure to disclose the violations amounted to an "institutional lack of candor."
Media response? The three network news programs all ignored this report, and it got little attention by any of the other mainstream news outlets.
So what we have here is evidence suggesting that the Obama administration abused national security to damage the Trump administration, politicized the Justice Department to subvert an active investigation into Hillary Clinton, and routinely spied on Americans for reasons unknown. That's a lot of potentially very serious scandals for an administration that described itself as scandal-free.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
2a) Anatomy of a Witch Hunt
The Trump-Russia scare comes from the same playbook as fake cancer scares.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Their launching point is the process by which we (i.e., human beings) decide to believe what others believe, and judge the truth of a proposition by how familiar it is. Such “availability cascades” drive government policy in good ways and bad, but usually bad. An example the authors analyze in detail is 1989’s fake “Alar” cancer scare that devastated U.S. apple growers.
Which brings us to today’s question: How did it become widely believed in the first half of 2017 that a U.S. president committed treason with Russia?
Consider what has passed for proof in the media. Tens of thousands of Americans have done business with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to mention before.
In 2009 President Obama made the first of his two trips to Russia with a gaggle of U.S. business leaders in tow.
Of these many thousands, four were associated with the Trump campaign, and now became evidence of Trump collusion with Russia.
Every president for 75 years has sought improved relations with Russia. That’s what those endless summits were about. Mr. Trump, in his typically bombastic way, also promoted improved relations with Russia. Now this was evidence of collusion.
Russian diplomats live in the U.S. and rub shoulders with countless Americans. Such shoulder-rubbing, if Trump associates were involved, now is proof of crime.
The Alar pesticide scare only took off when activists whom Messrs. Kuran and Sunstein label “availability entrepreneurs” peddled deceptive claims to a credulous “60 Minutes.” We would probably not be having this Russia discussion today if not for the so-called Trump dossier alleging improbable, lurid connections between Donald Trump and the Kremlin.
It had no provenance that anyone was bound to respect or rely upon. Its alleged author, a retired British agent named Christopher Steele, supposedly had Russian intelligence sources, but why would Russian intelligence blow the cover of their blackmail agent Mr. Trump whom they presumably so carefully and expensively cultivated? They wouldn’t.
Yet recall the litany of Rep. Adam Schiff, who declared in a House Intelligence Committee hearing: “Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence?”
His litany actually consisted of innocuous, incidental and routine Trump associations interspersed with claims from the Trump dossier to make the innocuous, incidental and routine seem nefarious.
Maybe Mr. Schiff is a cynic, or maybe Harvard Law sent him back into the world with the same skull full of mush with which he arrived. But ever since, every faulty or incomplete recollection of a meeting with a Russian has been promoted in the media as proof of treason by Trump associates.
The president’s obvious irritation with being called a traitor is proof that he is a traitor.
Whether the Russia incubus did more harm to Mr. Trump’s vote or Hillary’s vote during the election is impossible to know. But Mr. Trump won, so under the hindsight fallacy his victory is now proof that he conspired with Russia.
The term “availability bias” originated in the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose Nobel Prize-winning research gave birth to the field of behavioral economics.
Mr. Kahneman went on to write 2011’s indispensable “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” and I’m here to tell you that journalists especially pride themselves on their fast thinking—the kind that mistakes randomness for pattern, confuses correlation with causation, and gives excessive rein to emotional and cognitive biases.
Notice I don’t say reporters and editors are so dumb they can’t free themselves from such errors. I say that such errors are their stock in trade.
The original allegory of fast thinking, of course, is the old folklore tale, “the emperor’s new clothes.” In his 1922 book “Public Opinion,” Walter Lippmann explained how journalists reduce complex, novel realities to off-the-shelf “stereotypes.”
Or as a colleague once said of Stalin, “[He] tries to force life into a ready-made framework. The more life resists . . . the more forcefully he mangles and breaks it.”
Come to think of it, that’s not a bad way of describing how the D.C. anthill has reacted to the unexpected, exotic, high-risk, possibly providential experiment of the Trump presidency.
We mean every descriptor. His very unsuitability, the mood of the American public that elected him, the obscure impasse of American politics that brought him to power—all these signs deserve more respect than they’re getting.
His Torquemadas don’t and can’t know whether our democracy, in the improbable Mr. Trump, found a lever to move us forward, but there’s something repugnant in their desire not to find out.
2b)
Five Takeaways From Tuesday's Special Elections
ANALYSIS
Last night, the political world was glued to computer and television screens in a manner reminiscent of a general election, to watch returns filter in from a previously obscure congressional district in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. Democrats had high hopes that they could capture the open congressional seat previously held by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. But Republican Karen Handel defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff by a surprisingly large margin of four percentage points in a district that looked like it was getting away from Republicans just a few weeks ago.
Republicans are spinning the loss as terrible news for Democrats’ hopes of claiming a majority in 2018, while Democrats insist that Republicans dodged a bullet. To them, the real story is that they came close in a heavily Republican district – two, if you count South Carolina’s 5th District, which also held an election last night. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Here are five observations on the elections, and the state of play in the House:
1. Georgia 6 isn’t great news for Democrats. Although these numbers have been tossed about frequently, they probably bear repeating, because a lot of the interpretation of this race comes down to what you think the nature of the district is. GA-6 had been reliably Republican for decades, since the creation of its rough present form in 1992. Indeed, over the course of its existence, it has regularly turned out large margins for Republicans. In 2012, it was the 83rd most Republican district; there are 157 districts more Democratic than it is that are nonetheless held by Republicans. So, if this is the proper baseline, the result is actually quite good for Democrats.
But it isn’t the only way to read GA-6. The district has the most college-educated whites of any district held by Republicans in the country, and it swung hard against Donald Trump in 2016. Only 26 Republicans hold seats where Hillary Clinton won a larger share of the vote. If this represents the outer bounds of where Democrats can hope to win, their path to a 24-seat gain runs through the psephological equivalent of an inside straight.
Which one you think is more important in defining the district is difficult to sort out, but what we can say is this: The district defines one potential path for Democrats to a House majority in 2018. Democrats had hoped that an Ossoff win would suggest that traditionally Republican suburban districts, particularly in the South, were abandoning their GOP roots and preparing to swing to the Democrats. Talk abounded of making serious runs in similarly situated districts that hadn’t seen competitive races in decades (and in some cases, ever). In particular, the 18th- and 20th-most Democratic districts won by a Republican in 2016 were Texas’ 32nd and 7th districts, respectively the inner suburbs of Dallas and Houston (the latter was first won by a Republican when an obscure Texas oilman by the name of George H.W. Bush claimed it in 1966). Handel’s win here doesn’t foreclose that route by any stretch, but it does suggest that it isn’t a done deal.
Perhaps most importantly, Democrats are unlikely to get as clean a shot in any of these other districts as they had here. Most of the remaining districts will feature Republican incumbents, and few will have a candidate who is able to raise tens of millions of dollars, as did Ossoff. In other words, this path doesn’t necessarily get any easier for Democrats.
Again, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any other routes for Democrats; it doesn’t even mean that this route is foreclosed. In that sense, winning Georgia 6 was probably sufficient to prove Democrats had a good shot at the House, but not necessary. At the same time, I think it is a bit of a reality check on those who had thought these sorts of Republican voters would be eager to flip.
2. SC-5 shows another route for Democrats, one that runs through traditionally Democratic, blue-collar areas that swung hard toward Trump. There, Republican Ralph Norman defeated Democrat Archie Parnell by a surprisingly small margin of 3.4 points. This district had gone heavily for Trump, who carried it by 19 points, but it had gone for Mitt Romney and John McCain by narrower margins.
Moreover, its partisanship wasn’t changed much in the 2010 redistricting. At its core, it was still the same district that elected a Republican for the first time since Reconstruction in 2010, and where Democrat John Spratt had been considered unassailable for years prior. But once again, Democrats came up just short in a race that largely flew under the radar.
3. The distribution and enthusiasm gaps could be problems for Democrats. A developing scenario is this: Democrats have a highly energized core of supporters who would walk through a hurricane to vote against a Republican. In polling parlance, they make up the “tens” of enthusiasm (races for which tens of millions of dollars are raised). The strata below them, however, may be disproportionately Republican, who typically make up a larger percentage of high-propensity voters but are apathetic because of Trump, or at least displaced by Democrats.
This makes it easy for Democrats to over perform in races that slide under the radar, explaining results like KS-4 earlier this year and SC-5. But as the election gains visibility, those lower-propensity Republican voters become activated. The problem is that these special elections serve as shots across the bow for complacent Republicans and could reduce the number of Democrats who might sneak through in 2018.
One other possibility here: If those unusually energized Democrats are disproportionately distributed in heavily Democratic or rural Republican districts, it could reflect an especially large distributional issue for Democrats.
4. It is important for the GOP agenda. One significant consequence of an Ossoff win would have been concern about the viability and popularity of Trump’s agenda. It would have imperiled priorities such as the health-care bill, tax cuts, immigration, and other issues. Ossoff’s loss doesn’t make those objectives a sure thing by any stretch, but it does remove a potential existential threat.
5. It’s early. This is probably the most important thing to remember. The 2018 midterms are still 17 months away. The president is unpopular, and Democrats have a sizable lead on the generic ballot (which asks whether people would vote for Democrat or Republican in the fall). We should also remember that in mid-2010, Republicans lost a close race in southwest Pennsylvania, in the only district that voted for John McCain and John Kerry, which many interpreted as evidence that the House wouldn’t flip. Instead, it turned out to just be a district where Democrats got lucky: They went on to lose 63 seats in the fall. That’s the danger with dodging bullets; sooner or later, one of them is likely to hit.
Sean Trende is senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics. He is a co-author of the 2014 Almanac of American Politics and author of The Lost Majority. He can be reached at strende@realclearpolitics.com.
2c)
Congress and Obama Depleted the Military
The Trump budget would increase spending only 3%. With today’s threats, that’s not nearly enough.
By Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney
North Korea is making alarming progress in its ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. Russia and China are developing and fielding advanced weapons against which the U.S. may not be able to defend. Al Qaeda operates in more countries than ever. Islamic State is targeting the West and launching attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. Iran is supporting terrorist organizations across the globe, modernizing its ballistic-missile and other capabilities and likely continuing to pursue nuclear weapons.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee last week that the U.S. is losing the military edge on which our security has long relied: “Today, every operating domain—including outer space, air, sea, undersea, land and cyberspace—is contested.”
Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seconded that worry in written testimony for the same hearing: “Without sustained, sufficient and predictable funding,” he wrote, “I assess that within five years we will lose our ability to project power; the basis of how we defend the homeland, advance U.S. interests, and meet our alliance commitments.”
In short, the situation President Trump inherited is dire. America today faces an array of threats more serious and complex than at any time in the past 75 years.
President Obama and his policies are largely to blame. The 2011 Budget Control Act, which mandated across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, at a time when threats were growing, has also done serious damage. “No enemy in the field,” Mr. Mattis told lawmakers, “has done more to harm the combat readiness of our military than sequestration.”
What have eight years of Mr. Obama’s policies, and six years of the Budget Control Act, wrought? The military superiority America relied on after the end of the Cold War has been seriously eroded, our capabilities diminished. In the past three months alone, military leaders have testified that:
• The Army is “outranged, outgunned, outdated,” with only three of 58 brigade combat teams ready to “fight tonight.”
• The Navy is the smallest and least ready it has been in modern times. Fewer than half the Navy’s aircraft can fly because so many are grounded for maintenance or because they lack spare parts.
• The Air Force is the oldest and smallest it has ever been, and less than half of its combat forces are sufficiently ready to fight tonight.
• The Marine Corps is insufficiently manned, trained and equipped across the depth of the force.
Rebuilding America’s defenses will require a massive, concerted and long-term effort that must begin today. Mr. Trump rightly promised to do this during last year’s presidential election. Unfortunately, the White House budget submitted to Congress earlier this month fails to provide the necessary resources.
The White House has requested only 3% more funding for defense than Mr. Obama’s proposed 2018 budget, meaning the Pentagon would essentially tread water for at least a year—time the U.S. cannot spare in this threat environment. Instead of leading the effort to repeal the Budget Control Act, the White House budget envisions extending it by six years, to 2027. The president’s budget also cuts funding in absolutely essential areas, including $300 million from missile defense and $1 billion from Navy shipbuilding. In sum, the 2018 White House defense budget differs little from what Mr. Obama would have requested were he still president.
If Congress is serious about providing the resources necessary to defend the nation, lawmakers must do two things: pass a base defense budget for fiscal 2018 of at least $640 billion, instead of the $603 billion the White House requested; and repeal the Budget Control Act to eliminate the arbitrary spending caps and devastating sequestration.
The figure of $640 billion comes from the House and Senate Armed Services committees, which over the past year have conducted in-depth analyses and concluded this is the amount necessary in 2018 to begin rebuilding the military. This figure is a floor, not a ceiling.
For context, compare it with the projections from the Pentagon’s fiscal 2012 budget. Because this was the last budget prepared prior to the Budget Control Act, it was also the last one based on assessing the threats America faces and what would be needed to meet them. It projected a base defense budget of $661 billion for 2018. That assessment was made before Islamic State arose in the Middle East, before North Korea’s recent progress on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, before Russia invaded Ukraine, before China’s aggression in the South China Sea, and before Mr. Obama’s indefensible nuclear agreement with Iran.
Rebuilding the military is not a one-year project. To undo the damage of the Obama era and provide for America’s security in a world of increasingly threatening adversaries, Congress must dedicate itself to providing significant resources for many years to come.
Providing for the defense of America is the most sacred constitutional obligation of the U.S. Congress. If Congress fails in this, no balanced budget, no health-care reform, no tax reform, no entitlement reform will matter. If lawmakers fail to provide the resources necessary for the defense of the nation, nothing else they do will matter.
Mr. Cheney was vice president, 2001-09. Ms. Cheney is Wyoming’s U.S. representative
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3)AF chief: Israel has 4-5 times the power than in 2006 to strike Hezbollah
By JPOST.COM STAFF,YONAH JEREMY BOB,REUTERS
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IAF commander Amir Eshel speaks of a potential future conflict between the Jewish state and its northern neighbor. Israel can now strike Hezbollah with four-to-five times the bombing power than was used in the 2006 war with Lebanon, Israeli Air Force Maj.-Gen. Amir Eshel said Wednesday.
Speaking at this year's Herzliya Conference of Israel's aerial defense operations and preparations, the IAF commander discussed a potential future conflict between the Jewish state and its northern neighbor, saying such an aggression would largely be fought in the air.
Eshel said qualitative and quantitative improvements in the air force since the 2006 Lebanon war meant it could carry out in just two or three days the same number of bombings it mounted in those 34 days of fighting.
"If war breaks out in the north, we have to open with all our strength from the start," he said, pointing to the likelihood of international pressure for a quick ceasefire before Israel can achieve all its strategic goals.
In addition, Eshel warned civilians in southern Lebanon to leave their homes if war with Israel breaks out, saying that "every four out of five homes has weapons hidden in them."
In recent years, tensions have again mounted on Israel's northern border with Hezbollah's involvement on the side of the Assad regime in the Syrian Civil War.
Since the last war with Israel, the Iranian-back Lebanese Shi'ite terrorist group has also reportedly stockpiled more than 100,000 projectiles allegedly capable of reaching various parts of Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel has bolstered its missile-defense apparatus, deploying Iron Dome, Arrow and David Sling projectile interceptors.
The idea for Iron Dome came after the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when large Israeli cities were struck by missiles for the first time from its northern neighbor. It has since been used during two military operations against Hamas.
Together the systems will provide Israel the ability to counter threats posed by both short and mid-range missiles used by Hezbollah and terrorist groups in Gaza, as well as the threat posed by more sophisticated long-range Iranian ballistic missiles.
Speaking on Wednesday, Eshel also hinted at reported Israeli strikes on Hezbollah weapons caches in Syria. He indicated that such strike are more complex now with Russian and US fighter jets in the region.
"The skies of the Middle East are a lot more crowded than before, with lots of players," he stated.
While Israel rarely comments on foreign reports of such strikes, the IDF in April made a rare confirmation of an air strike on a Hezbollah weapons convoy transferring advanced weapons to its operatives in Syria.
In March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also addressed Israeli strikes targeting weapons in Syria headed for Hezbollah.
Speaking at this year's Herzliya Conference of Israel's aerial defense operations and preparations, the IAF commander discussed a potential future conflict between the Jewish state and its northern neighbor, saying such an aggression would largely be fought in the air.
Eshel said qualitative and quantitative improvements in the air force since the 2006 Lebanon war meant it could carry out in just two or three days the same number of bombings it mounted in those 34 days of fighting.
"If war breaks out in the north, we have to open with all our strength from the start," he said, pointing to the likelihood of international pressure for a quick ceasefire before Israel can achieve all its strategic goals.
In addition, Eshel warned civilians in southern Lebanon to leave their homes if war with Israel breaks out, saying that "every four out of five homes has weapons hidden in them."
In recent years, tensions have again mounted on Israel's northern border with Hezbollah's involvement on the side of the Assad regime in the Syrian Civil War.
Since the last war with Israel, the Iranian-back Lebanese Shi'ite terrorist group has also reportedly stockpiled more than 100,000 projectiles allegedly capable of reaching various parts of Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel has bolstered its missile-defense apparatus, deploying Iron Dome, Arrow and David Sling projectile interceptors.
The idea for Iron Dome came after the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when large Israeli cities were struck by missiles for the first time from its northern neighbor. It has since been used during two military operations against Hamas.
Together the systems will provide Israel the ability to counter threats posed by both short and mid-range missiles used by Hezbollah and terrorist groups in Gaza, as well as the threat posed by more sophisticated long-range Iranian ballistic missiles.
Speaking on Wednesday, Eshel also hinted at reported Israeli strikes on Hezbollah weapons caches in Syria. He indicated that such strike are more complex now with Russian and US fighter jets in the region.
"The skies of the Middle East are a lot more crowded than before, with lots of players," he stated.
While Israel rarely comments on foreign reports of such strikes, the IDF in April made a rare confirmation of an air strike on a Hezbollah weapons convoy transferring advanced weapons to its operatives in Syria.
In March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also addressed Israeli strikes targeting weapons in Syria headed for Hezbollah.
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