Category Archives: Politics

Is War Between Israel and Iran Inevitable

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In Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF) annual assessment of the security situation and challenges to be faced in 2022, it appears that a moderate improvement in the security situation surrounding Israel is expected. The Israeli government approved the proposed budget submitted by the Defense Ministry. “Israel’s defense establishment will receive NIS 58 billion, an increase of NIS 7 billion.” The extra allocation takes into account the possible operations against the Iranian nuclear facilities and other maligned Iranian schemes. According to reports, Israel would purchase various types of manned aircraft, intelligence-gathering drones, and unique munitions needed for a possible attack on Iran’s heavily fortified underground nuclear sites.

The evolving strategic cooperation Israel has now with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, is a definite positive development for Israel. In addition, halting the Iranians and their proxies from advancing toward Israel’s Golan Heights, and the support Putin’s Russia is giving to Israel’s operations against Iran is clearly a positive development. The Russians have not obstructed Israeli aerial operations against Iran’s shipment of arms to Hezbollah, nor the Israeli attacks on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) bases and their proxies in Syria.

What is difficult to predict, however, is when Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist groups in Gaza would choose to launch another mini-war with Israel. During the May 2021 war, or as Israel calls it, Operation Guardian of the Walls, Hamas, and the PIJ suffered significant losses in personnel and arms. Many of their top engineers were eliminated, and their “secret weapons” (mini-submarines, and drones carrying bombs) were destroyed, along with a large quantity of their rocketry. The IDF has recommended a tough approach against Hamas’ attempts to rearm.

Although the Lebanese Shiite-Muslim Hezbollah is far more powerful than its fellow terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, Sunni-Muslim Hamas, it is exercising far more restraint in operating against Israel. Having achieved supreme political and military power in Lebanon, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah knows that a war with Israel at this time would jeopardize all that he and Hezbollah have managed to accomplish. The 2006 Second Lebanon War Hezbollah waged against Israel was a devastating one for the Lebanese. A war now would be even more costly for the suffering Lebanese. While both Hamas and Hezbollah’s raison d’être is the destruction of the Jewish state, Hezbollah, unlike Hamas, will be held accountable in the confessional Lebanese system of government. 

The chances for a war initiated by Israel’s enemies, i.e., Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas are projected to be low in 2022. The explosive situation that existed in the last few years on Israel’s northern border has been reduced, and it appears that neither Iran nor Hezbollah are ready for a full-scale war with Israel. Addressing Israel’s Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last month, Israel’s Chief-of-Staff, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi asserted that Hezbollah and the pro-Iranian militias in Syria were obstructed from receiving precision strategic weapons including additional missiles, drones, and air-defense batteries that could hinder the maneuverability of the Israeli Air Force. But, given the US and its western allies reluctance to use the military option against Iran, and the possibility that the US and the other JCPOA western members might settle for a partial deal is certain to provide Iran with incentives to incite a war against Israel either directly or through its proxies.

At this juncture, the Iranian regime does not have the support of the Iranian people to engage Israel in a devastating war. Iran has not fully recuperated from the 1980-1988 war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the US imposed sanctions have created a sharp contraction in the economy. We might also add the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on Iran’s economic woes. The dictatorship of the Ayatollahs, while being less concerned with the hardship of its people, is very much concerned about preserving its power. As such, witnessing recent demonstrations throughout the country with calls such as “down with the dictator,” a reference to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime is fearful of an uprising among its repressed, predominately Sunni minorities, including Kurds, Ahwazi-Arabs, and Baluchis, in addition to the culturally deprived large Azeri minority. Urban Persians and those classified as the educated middle-class are also resentful of the regime.

Once Iran becomes a verifiable “threshold nuclear state,” Jerusalem is likely to change its security assessment, and Israel might act unilaterally to stop the existential threat a nuclear Iran poses to the Jewish state. In that case, war with Iran is inevitable. Although the Biden administration has been consulting with Israel regarding the ongoing negotiations in Vienna, Washington has been dead set against any Israeli unilateral action against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel’s Defense Minister, Benny Gantz, pointed out that Israel’s defense establishment “is committed to safeguarding a strong, stable, fortified Israel, and ensuring that Iran does not develop an existential threat to Israel. We will continue to act with responsibility and to safeguard our independence of action in any place and sector, and secure Israeli citizens.”

The IDF has taken into consideration that an operation to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities would more than likely create a major conflagration, involving Hamas, and Hezbollah. Israel is counting on its three-pronged missile defense systems: short-range Iron Dome, medium-range David’s Sling, and long-range Arrow III missiles. In addition, Israel has the use of the Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles. Iran does have the ability to deploy missiles, drones, and cruise missiles, though its Air Force still deploys older generation US aircraft, and the US sanctions curtail Iran’s ability to acquire updated western military technologies. Israel’s technology, on the other hand, is at least a few steps ahead of the Iranians, and it has the capabilities (albeit not absolute) to protect its civilians and military personnel. In the near future, and in view of the increase in the defense budget, projects that were delayed will now be reactivated. Israel’s high-tech industries will be moving into laser technologies and electromagnetic beams, as well as cyber and artificial intelligence (AI). 

The fifth annual Blue Flag drill was held in Israel’s Negev last October with thousands of troops and dozens of aircraft from around the world including the US, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, as well as personnel from Australia, Croatia, Finland, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, and South Korea. Israel’s Air Force (IAF) commander Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, invited as his personal guest the commander of the United Arab Emirates Air Force, Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Nasser Mohammed al-Alawi.

Gen. Norkin believes that the international drill reaffirms the IAF’s legitimacy to act against external threats. He said, “We are living in a very complicated region, and the threats to the State of Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran are only increasing. Holding the international exercise in this current reality, while continuing our public and overt operational activities on all fronts, is of utmost strategic importance, and has an extensive impact over the IAF, the IDF, and the state of Israel.

Finally, security cooperation and intelligence sharing with regional states, and in particular the Gulf states of UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, provides Israel with a new sense of confidence. Yet, one must caution Israel and the IDF in particular, not to resort to overconfidence, or reducing its vigilance.

Notes from the Underground

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Socialism is legalized crime. It makes sense that socialist cities are encouraging violent crime to rise. It’ what the DemComs want. America’s great cities will join the ash heap of history, sadly.

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President Joe Biden’s first year in office has resulted in record illegal immigration to the United States and defiance to constructing new border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

By the end of the month, analysts project that nearly two million illegal aliens will have attempted to cross the southern border since Biden took office — hundreds of thousands of which have been released into the U.S. interior. [Breitbart News 12-28-21]

DemComs smugly assume they will be in power forever, and this is why. They figure bringing in all these illegals, who fled authoritarian countries, will lead them to embrace an authoritarian, one-party America in exchange for freebies. Will it work? Dishonest, collectivist schemes always have unintended, unexpected consequences. We shall see what happens.

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In a population of almost 40 million Californians, 1 percent of taxpayers account for nearly half of the state’s income tax revenues. And Elon Musk, the biggest of the “1 percenters,” just walked. [Lawrence Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education]

California is heavily dependent on the top 1 percent of income earners to finance their unlimited, expansive socialist programs. Those top income earners are starting to flee. How can California be so stupid? They’re counting on the REST of the country to adopt their policies, so there will be nowhere else to flee. They’re counting on the DemComs to always be in power nationally, to make the US completely socialist, so California won’t seem so oppressive by comparison. They’re also counting on Florida, Texas and other states NOT to secede if we continue on our present, utterly destructive path. Quite a tall order.

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“Common people will believe anything if they are frightened. But critically-thinking people will look for deception and find the truth through the smokescreen of fear. Listen to critical thinkers, not fearful reactors.” — Dr. Suzanne Humphries

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“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” — Stephen Hawking

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“I think college is basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they are not for learning. You can learn anything for free.” — Elon Musk

Conflict: The Iran Regime and its Citizens

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Posted on 12/27/2021, 2:20:05 PM by Kaslin

In July, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) hosted a three-day conference to discuss the future of the Islamic Republic and the prospects for a change of government facilitated by the domestic activist community. Those prospects already appeared substantial in the wake of the previous month’s boycott of the country’s presidential election, which reportedly caused voter turnout to be the lowest in the four-decade history of the clerical regime.

The boycott inspired NCRI members and supporters to conclude that pressure on the regime had not been seriously alleviated over the past year in spite of the fact that the coronavirus pandemic caused a decline in large-scale public unrest. Prior to the pandemic, Iran was experiencing a virtually unprecedented growth in that unrest, with one nationwide uprising encompassing more than 100 localities in January 2018 and another being nearly twice as large in November 2019.

Both uprisings featured slogans like “death to the dictator” which evoked public support for the goal of regime change. This message was reinforced afterwards by smaller-scale demonstrations and by the boycott not only of the presidential election but also earlier elections for parliament seats and governorships. In each case, “Resistance Units” affiliated with the NCRI’s main constituent group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), promoted non-participation as a means for Iranian citizens to “vote for regime change.”

The MEK’s influence over those boycotts was clearly an extension of the influence it had demonstrated in the midst of the uprisings. Although regime authorities had long sought to dismiss the democratic opposition as poorly organized and lacking in popular support, this narrative effectively evaporated in 2018 when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei acknowledged that the MEK had “planned for months” to popularize anti-government slogans and lead protests in every province.

This message was reinforced by Khamenei and others in the context of the subsequent uprising, and even after that movement was suppressed via an extraordinary outpouring of violence, authorities continued to warn about the potential for the MEK to lead further protests and continue expanding its social profile. Such warnings persisted even during the pandemic-related downturn, and have since been proven prescient by new waves of protests.

While many of those protests have been focused on specific grievances such as poverty-level government wages, poor resource management, water shortages, and blackouts, many of them have still featured the demands for regime change that defined the uprisings in 2018 and 2019. Those demands have also been repeated by Resistance Units in the form of public displays that risk arrest for their creators by featuring images of Mrs. Rajavi, or by burning pre-existing public images of the supreme leader.

Behind all of these activities, there appears to be a growing sense that the problems currently facing Iranian society can only be solved through the ouster of the clerical dictatorship. Mrs. Rajavi highlighted this perception in the July conference and concluded that it would be a driving force behind the unprecedented increase of “hostility and enmity between the Iranian regime and society” throughout the year to come.

In offering that prediction, she recognized and praised the very same trends that regime authorities had recognized with a sense of mounting dread. The regime and the Resistance appear to be in agreement about the vulnerability of the clerical dictatorship, though the former is working to conceal it while the latter is working to exploit it. The outcome of this competition may very soon be determined by whether Iran’s foreign adversaries are also able to recognize the same vulnerability, and whether they choose to facilitate Tehran’s concealment or to join the NCRI in adding to pressure on the regime.

Such recognition shouldn’t be difficult to achieve. The Iranian regime’s actions both at home and abroad have frequently betrayed its own vulnerability for all to see. Even the installation of Ebrahim Raisi as president, over the clear objections of the Iranian people, was indicative of just how much the regime felt threatened by the recent growth of unrest.Raisi’s primary claim to fame is as one of the leading perpetrators of a massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988, and this legacy of human rights abuses was reinforced during the 2019 uprising, when Raisi was elevated to the presidency.

Even the installation of Ebrahim Raisi as president, over the clear objections of the Iranian people, was indicative of just how much the regime felt threatened by the recent growth of unrest.

Raisi’s primary claim to fame is as one of the leading perpetrators of a massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988, and this legacy of human rights abuses was reinforced during the 2019 uprising, when Raisi oversaw key aspects of the crackdown as head of the judiciary. His ascension to the presidency was characterized by Mrs. Rajavi as an emerging source of the aforementioned “hostility and enmity.” And even before Raisi was inaugurated in August, the growth of unrest lent support to that conclusion.

Of course, Supreme Leader Khamenei wouldn’t have chosen Raisi as president if he did not believe that the “butcher of 1988” would be capable of overcoming that unrest. But his ability to do so may depend in large part on whether the international community choses to turn a blind eye to his culpability for crimes against humanity, or whether it opts instead to exert more pressure on his administration and on the regime itself.

Only by adopting the latter option will Western powers be fulfilling their solemn duty to safeguard human rights for vulnerable groups throughout the world. But what is just as important is the fact that this strategy will challenge Tehran’s longstanding impunity and thus make it less likely that the regime will expand its nuclear activities, its financing of international terrorism, or any of its other malign activities.

Beyond that, new international pressure on the Iranian regime would go a long way toward supporting the democratic opposition in its efforts to facilitate regime change. This goal has been absent from Western policymaking for a very long time, but the ongoing trend of domestic unrest in the Islamic Republic should awaken lawmakers to the fact that regime change is closer at hand than ever before, and more attainable than many observers ever thought possible.

The Myth of January 6th

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The myth that January 6 was an insurrection that aimed to “overthrow the government” must not be allowed to stand. The time to counter the Big Lie is now.

Most people, I believe, think that the age of myth-making lies in the past. Myths are the things that Ovid wrote about, or Robert Graves cataloged. Their home is in the ancient world, primarily. They live on today mostly in books or in quips. Jack Worthing, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, provides a good illustration of the latter when he exclaims that Lady Bracknell is a Gorgon and then admits that “I don’t really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth.”

Nevertheless, in school, if we went to an artsy one, we learned that myths were important. They told us not about what happened in the world, precisely. Rather, they told us interesting stories about character, motivation, and the dialectic of hubris and nemesis, crime and punishment.

All of that is true, but I submit that the impulse to myth-making, if atavistic in origin, remains a potent force and one, moreover, that has been folded into the metabolism of partisan politics.

An illuminating example from the recent past is the public understanding of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist radical who had adulated the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro. The bullets had barely left Oswald’s rifle before this was known. But the truth about the identity of Kennedy’s assassin was quickly overtaken and enveloped by a partisan myth, assiduously massaged and circulated by Kennedy’s widow, the media, and the political establishment.

brief, the myth about Kennedy’s assassin downplayed Oswald’s communist affiliation and insisted that Kennedy was killed not (as he in fact was) by a lone gunman by rather a generalized “spirit of madness and hate.”

That phrase dripped from the pen of James Reston, one of America’s star columnists whose post at the New York Times amplified and legitimated his opinions nationwide. (The Times was still a respected newspaper in 1963.)

The process of substituting a “climate of hate” for Oswald’s index finger started almost immediately. In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, James Piereson notes that on the trip back from Dallas, Lady Bird Johnson and others asked if Jackie Kennedy wanted to change out of her blood-spattered clothes. “No,” the grieving widow would always reply, “I want them to see what they have done.”

Who, Piereson asks, is “they”? Camelot and the Cultural Revoution traces the rapid process of myth-making that greeted the assassination of Kennedy. It was a transformation or “metamorphosis” as dramatic as anything Ovid described. Kennedy was killed by a wacko communist radical sent round the bend by America’s vendetta against Castro. Within days, Oswald, the lone communist, had been replaced or transformed into a dispensable persona of a mythic “far-Right.” Piereson quotes Drew Pearson, another influential columnist (for The Washington Post*), who argued that American presidents who had been assassinated were killed not by “the fanaticism of one man” but by “powerful influence molders” who “preached disrespect for the authority of the government and the man in the White House who symbolized government.”

Sound familiar? From there it was but a small step for demands that the government tamp down on what Grayson Kirk, the president of Columbia University, called the “sin” of “prejudice.” The state, Kirk said, needed to exert “more energy against extremists and their poison.” It may go without saying that he did not mean communist extremists.

Is there anything that could have been done to intervene in that exercise of myth-making that surrounded the Kennedy assassination? Anything that could have short-circuited the metamorphosis of the criminal action of a single deranged communist into the group responsibility of nebulous “haters” and “extremists” throughout the country?

do not know the answer to that. But the same question has come around again with respect to the events of January 6, 2021 and, more generally, with respect to support for Donald Trump.

Here we can witness in real time the effort to enact another myth—the myth that the events at the Capitol on January 6, constituted an “insurrection” as deadly as Oklahoma City, as 9/11, as Pearl Harbor, even (if you are to believe Joe Biden) the “Civil War.” You could see that narrative, that process of mythopoeia, begin to take place even before the protestors withdrew from the Capitol. It was all nonsense. But it has been pursued assiduously by the left-wing political apparatus in the government and their megaphones in the media.

Nearly year out now, we can see phase two of the operation take shape, as globalist think tanks like the Niskanen Center send around 

send around fundraising newsletters warning that “the majority of the Republican party promotes an authoritarian narrative, purges GOP dissenters, and encourages anti-democratic legislation,” i.e., legislation that aims to check the woke progressivism of the globalist Left. Send money now!

Then we have Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) calling for a “full program of events” and “solemn observance” to mark the anniversary of theinsurrection event. If only she can cadge official recognition for the event, perhaps she can inscribe it on the national conscience as a Democratic talking point.

She will have plenty of support from academia. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, has just announced “The Shock of January 6: First Annual Conference on America’s First Attempted Coup Since 1865.” Will it be a perpetual event? The event will stream live on Twelfth Night, January 6, so those not celebrating Epiphany can tune in to watch Jim Acosta, Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Jonathan Karl, and other, similarly qualified figures weigh in on “extremists,” Trump sympathizers, and other threats to the equanimity of the regime.

I have no doubt that there are many other initiatives of mythopoetic endeavor, from the preposterous and illegally formed January 6 Commission on down. But the new myth has not yet gelled. There are too many dissenting voices, too many accounts of what actually happened that day that conflict with the regime narrative.

The trick now is to magnify those alternative accounts, disseminate them as broadly and as authoritatively as possible. There is no reason that Nancy Pelosi or Jim Acosta or Joe Biden or Merrick Garland should be allowed to define the reality of what happened on January 6. The work of writers like Julie Kelly at American Greatness and Darren Beattie at Revolver News needs to be echoed and extended as vigorously as possible. Myths can be pernicious as well as illuminating or entertaining. The myth that what happened on January 6 was an insurrection that aimed to “overthrow the government” or “overturn the election” must not be allowed to stand and gain credence. The time to counter that Big Lie is now.

  • * The original version of this essay identified Drew Pearson as a columnist for The New York Times. In fact, he worked for The Washington Post.

Liberals are Miserable People

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They say misery loves company, and that may be why liberals always want to extend their control over everyone and everything—because they are miserable people. Thomas Byrne Edsall covers some of the survey evidence about the misery and unhappiness of liberals in a New York Times article back in October:

Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals. Discuss.

Two similarly titled papers with markedly disparate conclusions illustrate the range of disagreement on this subject. “Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?” by Jaime Napier of N.Y.U. in Abu Dhabi and John Jost of N.Y.U., and “Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, but Why?” by Barry R. Schlenker and John Chambers, both of the University of Florida, and Bonnie Le of the University of Rochester.

Using nationally representative samples from the United States and nine other countries, Napier and Jost note that they

consistently found conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers). This ideological gap in happiness is not accounted for by demographic differences or by differences in cognitive style. We did find, however, that the rationalization of inequality — a core component of conservative ideology — helps to explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals.

Napier and Jost contend that their determinations are “consistent with system justification theory, which posits that viewing the status quo (with its attendant degree of inequality) as fair and legitimate serves a palliative function.”

Need I point out that Napier and Jost are far-left? Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that the issue of “inequality” shows up for heavy work here. I suppose it makes some sense, given how the super rich are skewing left these days, and must be unhappy with guilt about this.

But let’s continue with a paper less enslaved (see what I did there?) to leftist ideology:

A very different view of conservatives and the political right emerges in Schlenker, Chambers and Le’s paper:

Conservatives score higher than liberals on personality and attitude measures that are traditionally associated with positive adjustment and mental health, including personal agency, positive outlook, transcendent moral beliefs, and generalized belief in fairness. These constructs, in turn, can account for why conservatives are happier than liberals and have declined less in happiness in recent decades.

In contrast to Napier and Jost’s “view that conservatives are generally fearful, low in self-esteem, and rationalize away social inequality,” Schlenker, Chambers and Le argue:

Conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, in general and in specific domains (e.g., marriage, job, residence), report better mental health and fewer mental and emotional problems, and view social justice in ways that are consistent with binding moral foundations, such as by emphasizing personal agency and equity.

There’s a lot more in Edsall’s long survey of academic literature on this subject, and as a liberal himself Edsall resists drawing the sensible conclusion that conservatives are generally much happier than liberals because of their conservatism.

But if you want to see a great example of the essential miserableness of liberals, take in this piece of work from MSNBC:

NORAD’s Christmas Eve Santa Claus tracker needs to end

By Hayes Brown, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

I’d prefer we end the tradition because it’s about time that we decoupled St. Nick from the world’s most powerful military. American culture is saturated with a desire to associate the military with the saccharine. We get videos of soldiers returning home to their pets or children but never questions about why they were deployed for so long or what threat they were fighting; military jets flying over NFL games give us an injection of jingoist testosterone before more regionally focused battles of testosterone are played on the field; and we get the Netflix movie “Operation Christmas Drop,” a seasonally themed rom-com that cheerfully seeks to boost approval for America’s military base in Guam. . .

I suppose we should be glad that between the existential threat of climate change, which is urgent, and the threat to democracy from the “insurrectionist” right that nearly toppled our Constitution on January 6, some liberals still have the bandwidth to worry about NORAD’s Santa tracker.

Steven Hayward

Individual Rights are the ONLY RIGHTS

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Individual rights exist when the government says: “You are sovereign over your own life. As long as you don’t infringe on this same sovereignty in others, you are free to do as you please. We will uphold your right to life, liberty and property as inalienable.”

“Rights” as they’re known today: “We will protect your rights [LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, racial minority rights], and even give you the property of others beyond what you’re entitled to, via the wheeling and dealing of daily dirty politics. In exchange, we OWN you. When we tell you to mask up, to report your nonvaccinated neighbors, to hand over 50 or 90 percent of your income, to stop using fuel even if it means living the lifestyle of an 18th Century pioneer — WHATEVER we tell you to do, you do it. Why? Because we own you.”

The only rights that matter are individual rights. “Rights” as they’re defined today are not rights at all. It’s nothing more than a legalized criminal protection racket. If you sell your soul to the devil — then you deserve whatever you get. These legalized mobsters in the Imperial City or your state capitals will never have your back … not when it doesn’t suit them.

That’s what happened to America.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason