Meddlesome Iran Must Be Stopped. Post War Over Over. Fauda a Must View.

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Old order dead? (See 1 below.)
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Iran's meddling behind Gaza attack. (See 2 below.)
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Lynn and I are absolutely hooked on the Netflix serial called  Fauda which is an Israeli produced  fictionalized story about the relationship of Israel's secret service with the Palestinian Authority's comparable organization and their co-operative relationship  fighting terrorism.

It is captivating, keeps you on the edge of your seat and the acting and photography are excellent.  This is the second season and has 12 programs but you need to watch the first season's twelve programs for continuity purposes.

Highly recommend.
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Dick
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1) Hanson - the Post War Order is over
By Victor Davis Hanson

And not because Trump wrecked it.The 75-year-old post-war order crafted by the United States after World War II is falling apart. Almost every major foreign-policy initiative of the last 16 years seems to have gone haywire.

Donald Trump’s presidency was a reflection, not a catalyst, of the demise of the foreign-policy status quo. Much of the world now already operates on premises that have little to do with official post-war institutions, customs, and traditions, which, however once successful, belong now to a bygone age.

Take the idea of a Western Turkey, “linchpin of NATO southeastern flank” — an idea about as enduring as the “indomitable” French Army of 1939. For over a decade Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insidiously destroyed Turkey’s once pro-Western and largely secular traditions; he could not have done so without at least majority popular support.

Empirically speaking, neo-Ottoman Turkey is a NATO ally in name only. By any standard of behavior — Ankara just withdrew its ambassador from the U.S. — Turkey is a de facto enemy of the United States. It supports radical Islamic movements, is increasingly hostile to U.S. allies such as Greece, the Kurds, and Israel, and opposes almost every foreign-policy initiative that Washington has adopted over the last decade. At some point, some child is going to scream that the emperor has no clothes: Just because Turkey says it is a NATO ally does not mean that it is, much less that it will be one in the future.

Instead, Turkey is analogous to Pakistan, a country whose occasional usefulness to the U.S. does not suggest that it is either an ally or even usually friendly.

There is nothing much left of the old canard that only by appeasing China’s mercantilism can there be a new affluent Chinese middle class that will then inevitably adopt democracy and then will partner with the West and become a model global nation. China is by design a chronic international trade cheater. Trade violations have been its road to affluence. And it seeks to use its cash as leverage to re-create something like the old imperial Japanese Greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere. U.S. trade appeasement of Beijing over the last decades no more brought stability to Asia than did nodding to Tokyo in the 1930s.

There is also nothing sacred about the European Union. It certainly is not the blueprint for any continental-wide democratic civilization — any more than Bonaparte’s rigged “continental system” (to which the EU is on occasion strangely and favorably compared to by its proponents). The often-crude imposition of a democratic socialism, pacifism, and multiculturalism, under the auspices of anti-democratic elites, from the Atlantic to the Russian border, is spreading, not curbing, chaos. The EU utopian mindset has altered European demography, immigration policy, energy production, and defense. The result is that there are already four sorts of antithetical EUs: a renegade and departing United Kingdom, an estranged Eastern European bloc worried over open borders, an insolvent South bitter over front-line illegal immigration and fiscal austerity, and the old core of Western Europe (a euphemism now for German hegemony).

As for Germany, it is no longer the “new” model West Germany of the post-war order, but a familiar old Germany that now pushes around its neighbors on matters of illegal immigration, financial bailouts, Brexit, Russian energy, and NATO contributions, much as it used to seek to expand Prussia and the Sudetenland. German unification now channels more the spirit of 1871 than of 1989. Call the new German attitude “Prussian postmodernism” — a sort of green and politically correct intimidation. Likewise, in terms of the treatment of German Jews, Germany seems more back in the pre-war than in the post-war world.

As far as the U.S., Germany has redefined its post-war relationship with the America on something like the following three assumptions: 1) Germany’ right to renege on its promise to spend 2 percent of its GDP on defense in order to meet its NATO promises is not negotiable; 2) its annual $65 billion surplus with the U.S. is not negotiable; 3) its world-record-busting account surplus of $280 billion is not negotiable. Corollaries to the above assumptions are Germany’s insistence that NATO in its traditional form is immutable and that the present “free” trade system is inviolable.

Soon, some naïf is going to reexamine German–American relations and exclaim “there is no there.”

The post-war energy norm ended about ten years ago. The U.S. by next year will be the world’s largest producer of natural gas, oil, and coal — at a time of real progress in all types of hybrid engines. Israel does not need the Middle East’s — or anyone else’s — oil or natural gas. The Persian Gulf is now mostly a strategic concern of Iran and its archrival Gulf monarchies selling their oil to China and Europe, neither of which so far has the naval power to protect the precarious fonts of its energy interests.

The Palestinian issue of the last 75 years is ossified. If the millions of persons displaced in Europe and the Middle East between 1946 and 1950 — at about the same time as Palestinians left present-day Israel —were not considered “refugees” for decades, then Palestinians can hardly be singular sufferers. Perpetual victimhood is not a basis for a national agenda, much less a blank check for endless, virtue-signaling Western aid. Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was simply an iconic recognition of what has been true for nearly a decade.

The West Bank’s rich Arab patrons now fear Iran more than they do Israel. The next Middle East war will be between Israel and Iran, not the Palestinians and their Arab sponsors and Tel Aviv — and the Sunni Arab world will be rooting for Israel to defeat Islamic Iran.

Even nuclear proliferation no longer quite follows the post-war boilerplate of the anxious West clamoring for non-proliferation, rogue regimes getting nukes with a wink and nod of either the Chinese or Russians, and then the world assuming “once a nuclear nation, always a nuclear nation.”

Instead, if there is a next round of proliferation, it will likely be among democratic nations — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia — to counter the failure of Western nations, the U.N., and international associations to stop proliferation by the unhinged. They will seek deterrence against regimes that were nuclearized and supported by Russia and China in the past. Likewise, it is not written in stone that North Korea or Iran will always have nuclear weapons, given their isolated economies’ vulnerability to sanctions and blockades, their international unpopularity, and the costs that will be imposed upon their stealthy patrons.

Finally, we’re seeing the end of the old truism that the U.S. was either psychologically or economically so strong that it could easily take on the burdens of global leadership — taking trade hits for newly ascendant capitalist nations that ignored trade rules, subsidizing the Continental defense of an affluent Europe, rubber-stamping international institutions on the premise that they adhered to Western liberalism and tolerance, and opening its borders either to assuage guilt or to recalibrate a supposedly culpable demography.

Historic forces have made post-war thinking obsolete and thereby left many reactionary “experts” wedded to the past and in denial about the often-dangerous reality before their eyes. Worse is the autopilot railing for the nth time that Donald Trump threatens the post-war order, undermines NATO, is clueless about the EU, or ignores the sophisticated institutions that hold the world together.

About the only metaphor that works is that Trump threw a pebble at a global glass house. But that is not a morality tale about the power of pebbles, but rather about the easy shattering of cracked glass.

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2) Iran is the culprit behind Tuesday's Gaza rocket barrage, Israel says

By ANNA AHRONHEIM

Israel is pointing a finger at Iran for being behind the most serious escalation on it’s southern front in four years.

Less than a month after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps fired 32 rockets toward Israel’s northern Golan Heights, the Iranian-funded Islamic Jihad along with Hamas fired some 180 Iranian-made 120-mm. mortar shells and 107-mm. rockets toward communities in southern Israel.

It was the largest salvo fired from the Gaza Strip since the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014. In response, Israel carried out the most extensive retaliation since 2014, striking 65 Hamas targets across the entire Gaza Strip, including a dual-purpose tunnel dug one kilometer into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and then 900 meters into Israeli territory.

According to IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis, the tunnel was meant to not only carry out attacks against Israel, but to smuggle weaponry into the blockaded coastal enclave.

Despite Israel’s intelligence superiority over terror groups, as well a blockade imposed both by the IDF and Egypt, Hamas and other terror groups in the Strip have restocked their supply of weapons in the four years since the last round of fighting between Israel and Hamas.

The mass-produced Iranian mortar shells used in Tuesday’s salvos were also used by Islamic Jihad in an attack in January and in a barrage 12 mortar shells fired toward an army outpost in November.



Israel has intercepted Iranian weapons destined for the Strip several times, including just months before the outbreak of Operation Protective Edge, when it stopped the Klos C commercial ship which was carrying Iranian long-range rockets.

Before the salvos, less than 10 projectiles had been fired from the Hamas-run Strip into Israeli territory in 2018. The previous year saw 31, mainly during the month of December after US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced his intention to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In 2016 some 15 were fired, and another 21 were launched toward Israel in 2015.

With an estimated 180 projectiles fired into Israel in one 24-hour period, that makes the total amount of projectiles fired into Israel more than the total of rockets and mortars fired from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip since 2014.

Speaking on a conference call organized by the Israel Project, Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, the former director-general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry and former head of the research division in Military Intelligence, said that the “relatively short” round of violence on Tuesday was in a way “encouraged by the Iranians.”

Tuesday’s violence was “another reflection of Iran’s frustrations and tensions which is trying to show it can cause trouble and instability,” he said, pointing to Hamas’s involvement with the “Great March of Return” and how Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar has boasted about his close ties to Hezbollah and Iran, including IRGC Quds Force commander Maj.-Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

“Iran doesn’t want stability here. They want to make everyone realize that they are a player, and that they should be taken very seriously with a lot of respect, and in this way deter people from putting more pressure on them; but it isn’t working.”

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