Notes on a New War Mark Steyn
https://www.steynonline.com/15383/more-war
Is this a new war? Lindsey Graham, member of the Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, seems to think so and is panting like Jeffrey Toobin on a Zoom call:
Game on.
Washington has also revealed that it shared its heads-up from Israel with one of its Arab allies – presumably the Saudis.
So far, for Israel, it’s going well: they have destroyed the Republican Guard headquarters and killed its commander, General Salami. In other targeted assassinations, the head of the Iranian army is dead, as are more than ten nuclear scientists, and various other bigshots, including at least one potential successor to Ayatollah Khamenei, who for the moment appears to be alive. It’s the biggest military action on the soil of the Islamic Republic since the Iran/Iraq War forty years ago.
~To get the obvious out of the way, what should America do?
That’s probably correct as far as the politics of it is concerned. But the other reason for not getting America involved is, of course, that the Pentagon is totally crap at war. So, if the US is on your side, you’ll lose. See, most recently, Afghanistan and Ukraine – the former an international humiliation, and the latter having been micro-managed from Washington until January 20th with equally disastrous results, at least for the dwindling number of Ukrainians living in Ukraine. US military effectiveness is fading from living memory: for three-quarters of a century now, Washington has been utterly unable to use war to achieve any strategic national objective – despite accounting for forty per cent of the entire planet’s military expenditures. There is nothing to suggest Iran is likely to be an exception to the rule.
~That presents Israel with certain challenges. If you want to end the Iranian nuclear programme – or at least set it back twenty years – you have to have state-of-the-art bunker-busters that can penetrate all the way down at the Fordow enrichment facility just south of Qom. I’m not sure Israel has such weapons, and I doubt Netanyahu will know until they try it and it works. I note that Freddie Forsyth, who died a few days ago, has a scene in one of his novels in which the Fordow plant is taken out by a precocious computer hacker, which would probably be the best way to do it. Alas, in the real world, the mullahs are more sophisticated than all the “Death to America!” street-dancing would suggest.
~That said, as always with Israel, the creativity and innovation is impressive:
~Will the new war remain finely focused – alternating barrages raining down on Tehran and Tel Aviv – or will it spread beyond? For three years, setting aside occasional provocations such as the Nordstream pipeline, the war in Europe has been contained within Ukraine. In the Middle East Iran has proxies throughout the region – Hamas, Hizb’allah, Houthis… It would seem unreasonable to expect the mullahs to show the same forbearance as Putin.
~As a practical matter, Israel has more friends among the Sunni monarchies antipathetic to Persian Shia regional domination than it does these days in the dying west. Example:
By contrast, Britain, Canada and Europe have spent the quarter-century since 9/11 importing what we used to call “the Arab street'” to their own cities. And even among their dying native populations there are no takers for what Steve Sailer calls “invade the world, invite the world” – ie, boots on the ground everywhere, except at your own borders. Trump 47 has shown a clearer understanding of this than Trump 45 did, but yesterday, as a sitting US senator attempted to charge at a cabinet secretary and as some or other rinky-dink District Court judge removed the President from his command over California’s National Guard, there was a rare sighting of Trump 45:
That’s Trump 45 in his “And that border will will have a big beautiful door in it” mode. That’s the thinking that got us into this mess. No US citizen should have an expectation that he should suffer no consequences for spending decades hiring illegal aliens rather than his fellow Americans.
~What the future holds, who can say? Except that one thing is absolutely certain: at home and abroad, in Ballymena as in Beverly Hills, in Kfar Aza as in Kharkiv, it will be bloody and violent, on a scale few of us can imagine.
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