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worth a repeat:
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Ironwoman contest
I apologize for intruding science on Greta and you liberal's emotional "bullshit" regarding climate change.
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Important SCOTUS no one seems to have on their radar
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Come the dawn!
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The Generals’ Belated Awakening
By Caroline Glick
Something is changing in Israel’s military brass’ assessment of the Iranian nuclear threat.
Evidence is growing that members of the IDF General Staff and the Mossad are beginning to realize that the U.S. doesn’t share Israel’s goal of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Last week for instance, Michael Makovsky, the head of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, (JINSA) a Washington-based group that cultivates ties between Israeli and U.S. generals published an article in the New York Post where he described their rude awakening.
Makovsky wrote, “Recent meetings with senior defense officials from our closest Middle East ally, Israel, were the most pessimistic I can recall. They perceive America as checked out, adrift, pusillanimous, unfeared and desperate to avoid military confrontation, and Iran as emboldened and nearing the nuclear weapons threshold.”
Makovsky said that all his interlocutors raised the same three points: The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan showed that the Biden administration is comfortable betraying U.S. allies. The administration’s decision not to respond to the October 20 Iranian attack on its airbase in Tanf, Syria showed the U.S. is willing to allow Iran to attack it with impunity. And the administration’s willingness to be humiliated by the Iranians at the nuclear talks in Vienna shows that the only thing the administration wants is to reach a deal – any deal — with Iran.
By Makovsky’s telling, the Israelis are divided on what the Iranians want and they still haven’t completely given up hope that the Americans will come through, somehow. He ended his article by arguing that the U.S. should provide Israel with the equipment and weapons platforms it requires to successfully strike Iran’s nuclear installations without the U.S. But it was clear from his description of the Israeli security brass’ disposition that their faith the U.S. will actually follow through on its pledge to block Iran from becoming a nuclear power has waned significantly. It is beginning to dawn on them that in the fight against Iran, Israel is alone.
While Israel’s security establishment’s frustration with the Biden administration, and their apparent, grudging acceptance of reality are understandable, there is something deeply unsettling about both.
Where have the generals been for the past thirteen years?
Since former president Barack Obama entered office in January 2009, the U.S. has had two policies for contending with Iran’s nuclear program. The first is the Obama-Biden policy. The second is the Donald Trump policy.
The Obama-Biden policy is to engage in diplomacy with Iran that will enable Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, with the backing of the UN Security Council. And then to call the outcome “peace,”
Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran — the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — which Biden now seeks desperately to reinstate in some fashion, guaranteed that Iran would be a nuclear threshold state by 2030 at the latest. As Makovsky’s general friends indicated, from Biden’s diplomatic machinations it’s clear that as far as Biden and his team are concerned, any deal is fine with them – even one that gives Iran international approval of its nuclear weapons program and lifts all sanctions on Iran immediately.
Trump’s policy towards Iran’s nuclear program was a welcome respite from the Obama-Biden policy. Trump’s policy did not involve abandoning America’s Middle East allies. It involved empowering them. Trump’s policy was to create the diplomatic, economic and military conditions that would enable Israel to successfully attack Iran’s nuclear installations.
For all the differences between them, the Obama-Biden policy on the one hand and the Trump policy on the other shared a common denominator: Both ruled out a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations.
This common reality was never hard to see. Anyone willing to really listen to what the Americans were saying and watch what they were doing could have figured out that the U.S. had no intention of attacking Iran’s nuclear installations. The only party that could possibly be expected to attack Iran’s nuclear sites – if it were to be done at all – was Israel.
Those who were unwilling to look reality in the face have clung to certain popular, but incorrect narratives. The most popular one, which several of Makovsky’s friends shared with him is the utterly false claim that Obama’s 2015 deal slowed down Iran’s nuclear progress, and therefore was a positive development. Today, leading Israeli military leaders in the dominant America-centric clique and their colleagues on the political left argue that the 2015 deal served to slow Iran’s nuclear advance and that Biden’s plan to reinstate the deal will do the same. This is a good thing they say, because it buys Israel time to develop the military means to attack Iran’s nuclear sites.
Unfortunately, this position is based on ignoring, rather than accepting reality. As U.S. strategic expert Dr. David Wurmser explained recently to Israel Hayom, the Iranians did not slow their uranium enrichment because they agreed to the JCPOA. Wurmser, who served in both the Bush and Trump national security councils, explained that the Iranians timed the agreement to align with their nuclear schedule. In 2014-2015, the Iranians began work on advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to military levels of purity. In the course of the negotiations on the nuclear deal, the Iranians insisted that they be permitted under the deal to continue their nuclear research and development on the advanced centrifuges. Obama and his team accepted their demand. In 2016 and 2017, reports emerged that Iran had successfully acquired the capacity to use advanced centrifuges.
As Wurmser explains, Iran began using their advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium to 60 percent purity as soon as they were ready. The popular claim that Trump’s decision to abandon the JCPOA in 2018 precipitated Iran’s actions is nothing more than a delusion. Iran would have done so regardless of Trump’s actions. The real leap in Iran’s uranium enrichment came after Biden’s inauguration. His arrival gave the Iranians confidence that they would face no opposition from Washington as they sprinted to the nuclear finish line.
The one person who understood and acted on the basis of reality from the outset of the Obama administration was then prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu saw that Iran was galloping ahead as quickly as it could with its nuclear program and that the U.S. had no intention of using force to block its advance. When the chorus began chanting in unison that the JCPOA slowed Iran’s nuclear progress, Netanyahu rightly rejected their contention as absurd.
Recognizing that the Americans would not attack Iran’s nuclear installations, Netanyahu worked to develop, expand and use Israel’s diplomatic, military, intelligence, cyber and sabotage capabilities to harm Iran’s nuclear program. Netanyahu was willing for Israel to go it alone and also eagerly sought out and cooperated with anyone who was willing to work with Israel to oppose Iran.
Among other things, Netanyahu pushed economic sanctions on Iran to prevent the ayatollahs from having the economic means to fund their nuclear program. Sanctions also work to destabilize their regime and delegitimize its nuclear program in the eyes of the impoverished Iranian people.
To undermine Obama and Biden’s ability to sell their pro-Iranian policy to Congress as non-proliferation, or peace, Netanyahu worked in the diplomatic arena to highlight the danger Iran’s nuclear program poses to Israel, the Middle East, global security and U.S. security.
Netanyahu’s most powerful and trenchant opponents at home were Israel’s national security brass. Led by IDF chiefs of General Staff Gaby Ashkenazy, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, and Mossad directors Meir Dagan and Tamir Pardo, Israel’s security leadership embraced a policy based not on reality, but on faith. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the generals insisted the U.S. would come through in the end and attack Iran’s nuclear installations.
True, they acknowledged, Israel is the only country that Iran threatens to annihilate. But they insisted that since Iran’s nuclear program threatens the entire region as well as Europe and the U.S., taking out Iran’s nuclear installations is America’s responsibility, not Israel’s. And even as Obama acknowledged that at the end of the JCPOA in 2030, Iran’s breakout time to independent nuclear capabilities would be “zero,” the generals insisted that America could be trusted when it promised that it would not permit Iran to become a nuclear power.
Given their aspirational, rather than reality-based policy assessment of U.S. intentions, Israel’s security leaders argued that Israel’s job is to cooperate with the Americans and under no circumstance should it publicly dispute anything the Americans say. Israel’s security leaders said that through proper coordination, when the day arrived to strike Iran, they would be able to convince Washington to do the right thing.
Operating on this assessment, the heads of Israel’s national security establishment opposed Netanyahu’s diplomatic campaign against the nuclear deal and harshly criticized him for his actions in this arena. They supported Obama against Netanyahu and praised the deal.
In 2010, Ashkenazy and Dagan refused Netanyahu’s direct order to prepare Israel’s forces to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. If that weren’t bad enough, Dagan divulged Netanyahu’s order to his U.S. counterpart then CIA chief Leon Panetta.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has expressed no clear policy on Iran, although his refusal to meet Robert Malley, Biden’s envoy to the negotiations when he travelled to Israel two weeks ago indicated that Bennett is aligned with Netanyahu’s position. At any rate, with paltry support in the public and in in his own government, Bennett is not the primary decision-maker on Iran. That power today rests with Defense Minister Benny Gantz. Gants is the most prominent and powerful member of the America-dependent camp. And even as the Biden administration remains fixated on reaching a deal – any deal – with the mullahs –Gantz flew to Washington this week to coordinate. To neutralize growing concern in Israel’s security establishment, the administration decided to put pull out a few stoppers.
Ahead of Gantz’s arrival in Washington, a senior administration official told Reuters that Gantz would speak with his counterpart Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about holding a joint U.S.-Israel training exercise to practice attacking Iran’s nuclear installations. While comforting, it is hard to credence the statement for several reasons. First, if the U.S. was really planning to attack Iran’s nuclear installations with Israel, senior officials wouldn’t call Reuters to divulge this highly classified state of affairs.
Second, while the unnamed official was revealing ostensibly top-secret operational plans to Reuters, Malley was in the Persian Gulf telling America’s allies that the U.S. is dead set on cutting a deal.
Finally, Malley’s boss Secretary of State Tony Blinken pointedly refuses to even pay lip service to the notion of attacking Iran’s nuclear installations militarily.
Obviously, Israel’s credulous generals would rather believe Reuters than Malley. But reality isn’t really concerned with their preferences. If Iran is to be prevented from becoming a nuclear-armed state, the generals’ belated awakening must proceed at top speed. Not only must they recognize that Netanyahu was right all along. They must adopt his policy of working across the board to weaken Iran’s regime and block its path to the bomb.
Originally published in Israel Hayom.
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Garland vs Holder.
Merrick Garland One-Ups Eric Holder
The Justice Department is pursuing an even more partisan agenda than it did in the Obama years.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Joe Biden has a habit of stating the opposite of reality, whether it’s the “extraordinary success” of his Afghanistan withdrawal, the “great” jobs reports, or his comments on “Jim Crow” voting reforms. Then there’s this claim from January: As attorney general, Merrick Garland will “restore the honor, the integrity, the independence” of the Department of Justice.
On Monday that department sued Texas. Again. The complaint claims Texas’ new redistricting maps violate the Voting Rights Act. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta accused the state of “disregard for the massive minority population growth,” and the lawsuit blasts Texas for “decade after decade” of minority voter repression. The department asks the court to impose its own interim map, presumably one crafted by the Biden administration itself.
The lawsuit comes not long after the department sued Texas and Georgia over their recent voting reforms. The Texas law is the one state Democrats failed to derail, even after decamping to Washington for more than a month. This week’s lawsuit also comes three months after Justice sued Texas over its new abortion law, twisting both federal law and the Constitution to bring a case. What Texas Democrats can’t do via legislative process, Mr. Garland intends to accomplish through the courts. At this rate, the department might need a Texas Division.
Nine months into Mr. Garland’s tenure—and in one of the biggest disappointments of this administration—the Justice Department is back to operating as a branch of the Democratic National Committee. Attorney General William Barr took over from a sidelined Jeff Sessions, and spent two years trying to clean up a department that under Barack Obama had became a weapon for a partisan agenda. Mr. Obama’s Justice Department brought America punishing lawsuits against financial firms, “disparate impact” cases, slush funds for liberal activist groups, litigation against school voucher programs, investigations of journalists and Hillary Clinton’s great Russia-collusion hoax.
Mr. Garland’s appointment offered hope that a respected veteran judge would continue this effort. Instead, the Garland Justice Department is on track to surpass the politicized Eric Holder regime. The department’s indictments include plenty of routine matters. But the high-profile lawsuits, investigations and initiatives are as politicized as they come. Mr. Biden’s prosecutors seem to think the real criminals aren’t drug lords or cyberterrorists, but U.S. states, localities and citizens who stand in the way of today’s Democratic agenda.
It says everything that the department’s current top priority is preventing Republican states from crafting their own voting laws or legislative maps. Career lawyers continue to seethe over Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court ruling that ended their automatic oversight of redistricting in disfavored states, and their answer is to use lawsuits to accomplish the same. After Texas, don’t be surprised if Georgia, North Carolina or Ohio, where Republicans control the redistricting process, is next. States like Illinois, Maryland and New York are all brazenly stacking their map for Democrats, but this is apparently legal under the Justice Department’s blue-states-can-do-whatever policy.
The department’s other top priority is the harassment of fellow law-enforcement officers, the legal corollary to progressives’ defund-the-police agenda. Justice currently has active investigations of the police departments in Minneapolis, Phoenix, Louisville, Ky., and Mount Vernon, N.Y. It’s separately launched investigations into conditions in Georgia prisons and Texas juvenile detention facilities.
Name a hot-button cultural or political issue, and the Garland Justice Department is all over it. In June it announced an initiative to harass lawful firearms dealers. Last month it directed prosecutors to go after grumpy airline passengers amid growing outrage over Mr. Biden’s Covid rules. And there was Mr. Garland’s October memo putting parents on notice if they complain about school boards. That one contained strong evidence the action was coordinated with the White House and activists, despite Mr. Garland’s promise that his department would remain independent.
Then there are the unambiguously political cases. In June news leaked that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Republican and longtime target of congressional Democrats for purported violations of campaign-finance laws. In November, prosecutors obtained an indictment of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon for refusing to comply with a House subpoena, despite a continuing dispute over whether he is legally obligated to do so. The department is typically reluctant to act on House contempt referrals, given their partisan nature. Not this time.
All this politicking is clearly getting in the way of important Justice Department duties—like soundly advising the president. Federal judges have blocked the administration’s drilling “pause,” eviction moratorium, border policies, cruise ship rules, Covid-bill tax policies and vaccine mandates. A prelaw undergrad could notch a better record.
It’s unclear whether Mr. Garland is driving or merely condoning all this. Either way, it’s harmful for the department’s reputation, and the routinization of political activity risks more scandals in the manner of the Russia hoax. Mr. Barr refused Donald Trump’s demands to weaponize the Justice Department. Mr. Garland might take a leaf from his predecessor—for the sake of both his reputation and the department’s.
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Whether George Friedman is right or wrong is not the question. What is far more interesting is his ability to challenge the reader with insightful and interesting thinking and perspective:
Ukraine, War and American Doctrine
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
During the Vietnam War, an American doctrine emerged whereby wars were primarily political and waging wars signaled to other powers that the U.S. was ready to fight wherever challenged. I call it “political war” because the intent was focused not on destroying the enemy but on establishing American credibility. It was characterized by an irrational confidence in America’s ability to rapidly defeat an enemy with minimal effort and loss. The United States failed to understand the will of the enemy, frequently because its leaders focused on warfighting technology as the measure of power, and in any case the war did not begin with a clear definition of victory.
From Vietnam to Afghanistan, the United States engaged an enemy far more willing than Washington to absorb casualties. Since the wars were not existential matters for the United States, its commitment was limited. For the North Vietnamese and the Taliban, the war was a moral absolute. It would be fought whatever the cost and with whatever weapons were available. Some wars ended in outright defeat, some (the exception being Desert Storm) ended in U.S. retreat and withdrawal. Few of these engagements convinced potential enemies of American power. Instead, they caused adversaries to misread American power and increased the risk that the U.S. would choose another elective war.
All nations go to war at some point in history, but the United States has spent most of the 21st century at war. The desire to use war as a signal of power, coupled with not understanding the amount of power needed to wage a successful war, raises the question of whether the U.S. has an interest in intervening in Ukraine if the Russians invade. I doubt a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine intended to occupy the entire country is in the offing, but thinking of such an invasion helps us to define current warfighting doctrine.
The United States has two strategic imperatives. First, it must maintain relations with Canada and Mexico, the two nations that could provide a base for a ground attack on the United States. Second, since the first is reasonably secure, it must make certain that it maintains control over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the only places that would facilitate offensive action against the United States.
Obviously this requires the U.S. to control the seas via naval, air and space power. But the challenge is subtler than that. World War II was for the United States a struggle to secure the seas. This is obvious in the Pacific but was also the case in the Atlantic. The American concern after the fall of France was that Britain might be forced to capitulate to Germany, and that capitulation would mean that the Royal Navy was to become a German navy. The Royal Navy was a challenge to the U.S. Navy, so this meant either a naval war in the Atlantic or even German control of the Atlantic.
That would have been catastrophic for the U.S., which responded by maintaining open sea lanes to Britain and supplying Britain with needed equipment. Even the land aspects of the war were partly designed to shift German resources away from the navy; the invasion of France was part of the strategy. U.S. strategy was ultimately to fight in Europe to prevent German threats to the United States.
During the Cold War, the United States feared a Soviet invasion of Western Europe and seizure of German and French ports – i.e., the Soviets forcing their way into the Atlantic. For the U.S., defending Europe was essential to securing the Atlantic, and so Washington spent a great deal of time during the Cold War securing the Atlantic for eastern-moving convoys. The GIUK gap around Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom was a prime focus of the United States. If the Soviets broke through, they could block reinforcements to NATO and likely win the war. The fate of Europe was of interest to the United States, but the fate of the Atlantic was existential. The battle would be fought in Europe, but the ultimate objective would be the Atlantic.
Any U.S. military doctrine must therefore exclude hostile powers from the Atlantic and Pacific. (That’s precisely what the United States is doing in the South China Sea.) Because Washington has no challenger in the Atlantic right now, and since a new doctrine must focus on existential needs and focus on achieving military ends, it would seem that at the moment Russia cannot challenge U.S. control of the Atlantic.
The Soviet Union cracked in 1991. The buffer zones surrounding Russia spun out of Russian control. Moscow’s own imperatives and doctrines require that it demonstrate a return to power in Ukraine. Here again, the U.S. is concerned less about the territory involved than about losing credibility if it doesn’t act. Credibility is not trivial, nor has it proved a successful basis for initiating conflict. But for Russia, the Ukrainian border is about 300 miles from Moscow and while no threat exists at this moment, the speed with which a third power such as the United States could appear in Ukraine and threaten the heartland should not be discounted. The Russians cannot discount it, and therefore want to preclude the possibility by controlling Ukraine.
U.S. strategy hasn’t really changed, but the geography has. The Cold War doctrine was to maintain sea lanes to Europe by blocking Soviet naval and air power and defeat Russia with overwhelming and replaceable force. But that was when the Soviet border was well west of Ukraine. There are two avenues of advance by Russia if it decides to take Ukraine. One is the North European Plain through Belarus and Poland. The other is through the Carpathian Mountains in the south. So long as Poland is well defended and the Russians remain east of the Carpathians, the probability of Russia posing a threat to Europe, and by extension the Atlantic, is low.
Russia cannot leave Ukraine in the position it is. Doing so is potentially too dangerous. The United States cannot fight a land war on the doorstep of Russia. With the amount of force Russia can quickly bring to bear, the U.S. mission would, at best, fail. At worst, it would be defeated. This is dictated by geography. If the U.S. intervenes, it must do so on the western reaches of the Carpathians and the plains of Poland. It cannot go farther west.
This is a rather ruthless application of a doctrine. Ukraine has a right to self-determination. But the maturity of American foreign policy rests not on testing the justice of the cause but on the price and probability of victory. No matter what the politics or morality might be, the recognition of geography, capability and interest must take priority over indulging in military action likely to fail. What we have learned is that the U.S. is powerful but not omnipotent. The idea that the U.S. must fight for political right on the assumption of omnipotence is juvenile. The great comfort is that Russia is as afraid of losing as I am, so it likely is an academic exercise.
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