US officials are touting Israel’s defense of Iran’s attack as a
victory, and that’s the message Biden conveyed to Netanyahu, a sign the
US doesn’t want the situation to escalate. Iran fired over 300 missiles
and drones at Israel, which was a response to Israel’s bombing of Iran’s
consulate in Damascus on April 1.
“Israel really came out far ahead in this exchange. It took out the
IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp] leadership in the Levant, Iran
tried to respond, and Israel clearly demonstrated its military
superiority, defeating this attack, particularly in coordination with
its partners,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters, according to The Times of Israel.
In a statement on the attack released by the White House, Biden said he would convene with other G7 leaders to “coordinate a united diplomatic response to Iran’s brazen attack.”
Israeli officials claimed 99% of the Iranian missiles and drones were
intercepted by Israeli air defense systems and with assistance from the
US, Britain, and Jordan. Some missiles got through and damaged the
Nevatim Airbase in southern Israel. Only one person was injured in the
attack, a seven-year-old Bedouin girl in the Negev, and nobody was
killed.
Iran gave Israel plenty of time to respond to the attack by
announcing it fired the drones hours before they reached Israeli
territory, and Tehran said it gave other regional countries a 72-hour notice. Iranian officials said the attack was “limited” and made clear they do not seek an escalation with Israel.
But Tehran is also warning it will launch an even bigger attack if
Israel responds. “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate
reckless behavior, they will receive a decisive and much stronger
response,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a statement on Sunday.
While the US is signaling it seeks de-escalation and won’t support a
potential Israeli attack on Iran, it’s unclear what Israel will do next.
The Israeli war cabinet convened to discuss the situation on Sunday, and Israeli media reports said they agreed a response would come but didn’t decide on where or when.
Israeli War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz vowed Israel would respond
but signaled it wouldn’t be imminent. Gantz said the “event is not
over” and that Israel should “build a regional coalition and exact a
price from Iran, in a way and at a time that suits us.”
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Biden also told Netanyahu
“that the United States is going to continue to help Israel defend
itself,” signaling the US would intervene again to help Israel if it
does choose to escalate the situation and comes under another attack.
Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria killed 13 people,
including seven members of the IRGC. Israel has a history of conducting
covert attacks inside Iran and killing Iranians in Syria, but the
bombing of the diplomatic facility marked a huge escalation.
simplicius | Now, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts.
This strike was unprecedented for several important reasons. Firstly, it was of course the first Iranian strike on Israeli soil directly from Iranian soil itself, rather than utilizing proxies from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. This alone was a big watershed milestone that has opened up all sorts of potentials for escalation.
Secondly, it was one of the most advanced and longest range peer-to-peer style exchanges in history. Even in Russia, where I have noted we’ve seen the first ever truly modern near-peer conflict, with unprecedented scenes never before witnessed like when highly advanced NATO Storm Shadow missiles flew to Crimea while literally in the same moments, advanced Russian Kalibrs flew past them in the opposite direction—such an exchange has never been witnessed before, as we’ve become accustomed to watching NATO pound on weaker, unarmed opponents over the last few decades. But no, last night Iran upped the ante even more. Because even in Russia, such exchanges at least happen directly over the Russian border onto its neighbor, where logistics and ISR is for obvious reasons much simpler.
But Iran did something unprecedented. They conducted the first ever modern, potentially hypersonic, assault on an enemy with SRBMs and MRBMs across a vast multi-domain space covering several countries and timezones, and potentially as much as 1200-2000km.
Additionally, Iran did all this with potentially hypersonic weapons, which peeled back another layer of sophistication that included such things as possible endoatmospheric interception attempts with Israeli Arrow-3 ABM missiles.
But let’s step back for a moment to state that Iran’s operation in general was modeled after the sophisticated paradigm set by Russia in Ukraine: it began with the launch of various types of drones, which included some Shahed-136s (Geran-2 in Russia) as well as others. We can see that from the Israeli-released footage of some of the drone interceptions:
tri-statedefender |Sharing their experiences with crime
reduction, The Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime wrapped up a two-day
conference at the Hyatt Centric Beale Street Memphis on Thursday, March
28.
Memphis Mayor Paul Young hosted Black leaders from 18 U.S. cities during the meeting that began Wednesday, March 27.
“People want the short-term solution.
They want to figure out how we are going to stop crime today. And then,
we want to figure out how to stop crime in the future. In order to do
that, there has to be an intense dialogue,” said Young.
In addition to Washington D.C., they
came from several states with large African-American populations, like
Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana,
North Carolina and California.
“We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations,” Mayor Tishaura Jones told Action News 5 after the conference.
“So how can we hold those business owners accountable and also bring
down crime? (We’re also finding that ) some of the things that we’re
already doing, we’re finding that other mayors are doing as well.”
Strategies were front and center in
the discussion. They included Operation GOOD in Jackson, Miss. and
Operation Scarlett in Charlotte, N.C. According to proponents, both have
paid dividends in their respective communities.
Operation GOOD is a nonprofit with
ambitious goals to curb recidivism, reduce violence and tackling blight,
for example. Operation Scarlett is an ongoing anti-luxury car theft
operation that was expanded to 11 states and 152 law enforcement
agencies. So far, 132 vehicles have been retrieved.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris and Memphis Police Department Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis also appeared at the event.
Russ Wiggington, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, moderated the conversation.
The Council on Criminal Justice, a
think tank devoted to criminal justice policy, began the conference with
a keynote presentation.
To allow attendants to speak freely,
no media were invited to the event. However, Young has suggested future
meetings could be open to the public and virtual. It’s a sentiment
matched by Mayor Chokwe Lumumba Jr. of Jackson, Miss.
“We’re ensuring amongst ourselves that this will not be the last
engagement, but that we will continue to lean in,” Lumumba said at a
post-conference press event.
Latest Crime Stats
Although crime rates in Memphis has dropped recently, they are still above pre-pandemic levels.
Overall, the Memphis-Shelby County
Crime Commission statistics reflect a 6.4% drop in fourth quarter of
2023, over 2022’s final period. This includes murder, burglary, robbery,
theft, weapons and drug charges. Property crimes fell 10.1% too.
However, violent crime in Memphis
bucked the trend. In addition to 398 homicides in 2023 – breaking the
2021 record – the major violent crime rate rose 7.4% in Memphis. Shelby
County saw inflated numbers too, with a 6.3% jump over 2022.
To date, there have been over 80
homicides in 2024. Memphis has the highest number of all the cities
represented during he meetings. Most have seen a decrease.
The Black Mayors Coalition on Crime
is the latest in a series of conversations Young has recently held to
address crime early in his first term.
Victoria Nuland has let me know that she intends to step
down in the coming weeks as Under Secretary of State for Political
Affairs – a role in which she has personified President Biden’s
commitment to put diplomacy back at the center of our foreign policy and
revitalize America’s global leadership at a crucial time for our nation
and the world. ... [I]t’s Toria’s leadership on Ukraine that
diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come.
Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting Putin’s full-scale
invasion of Ukraine, marshaling a global coalition to ensure his
strategic failure, and helping Ukraine work toward the day when it will
be able to stand strongly on its own feet – democratically,
economically, and militarily. ... President Biden and I have
asked our Under Secretary for Management John Bass to serve as Acting
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs until Toria’s replacement
is confirmed.
She will be remembered for handing out cookies to anti-government demonstrators in Ukraine and for installing the 2014 coup regime.
That has been her main project in the State Department. But the 2014
Maidan putsch that turn the Ukraine into a battering ram against Russia,
has ended in a complete failure.
Neither was Russia 'weakened'
by the war nor has Ukraine any perspective to survive but as some
Russian controlled land-locked backwater country in Europe's east.
Given that billions were spent on Ukraine with little controls and
nothing to show for Nuland, and her family, have certainly made a bit on
the side. One wonders if any of the ongoing and coming investigations
into the black hole Ukraine will leave them unscarred.
As even Guardian commentators are now waking up to the mess they helped create it is high time for European politicians to also finally accept this reality:
Western Europe has no conceivable interest in escalating the
Ukraine war through a long-range missile exchange. While it should
sustain its logistical support for Ukrainian forces, it has no strategic
interest in Kyiv’s desire to drive Russia out of the majority
Russian-speaking areas of Crimea or Donbas. It has every interest in
assiduously seeking an early settlement and starting the rebuilding of
Ukraine.
As for the west’s “soft power” sanctions on Russia, they have failed
miserably, disrupting the global trading economy in the process.
Sanctions may be beloved of western diplomats and thinktanks. They may
even hurt someone – not least Britain’s energy users – but they have not
devastated the Russian economy or changed Putin’s mind. This year
Russia’s growth rate is expected to exceed Britain’s.
The crass ineptitude of a quarter of a century of western military
interventions should have taught us some lessons. Apparently not.
dailymail | Doritos is being slammed as the new Bud Light
after hiring a trans influencer as a 'brand ambassador' despite the
activist appearing to promote child sexual abuse in the past.
Spanish
native Samantha Hudson - whose real name is Iván González Ranedo - is a
singer and activist with over 30,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel. Her partnership with Doritos Spain, run by PepsiCo Spain, was recently announced.
Hudson,
24, has identified herself as 'anti-capitalist' and 'Marxist' in
interviews, released a song critical of the Catholic Church and even
said in one video that she is for 'the abolition of [and to] destroy and
annihilate the traditional monogamous nuclear family.'
As a teen, she has also tweeted about wanting to do 'thuggish things' to a minor.
The
partnership between Hudson and Doritos was quickly blasted online and
many made reference to Bud Light's disastrous partnership with trans
influencer Dylan Mulvaney - which saw Budweiser lose $1.4 billion in sales as a result.
The Daily Caller posted a screenshot of a
tweet she allegedly made in 2015, when Hudson was 15, writing in Spanish
about the seeming assault of a minor.
Another
alleged post translates to: 'In the middle of the street in Mallorca in
panties and screaming that I’m a nymphomaniac in front of a super
beautiful 8-year-old girl.'
According to Newsweek,
she has also been accused of mocking sexual assault victims, though
Hudson herself has claimed she was sexually abused as a teenager in a 2023 interview.
Hudson's new partnership with Doritos was announced through a 50-second video called 'Crunch Talks.'
'Doritos is about to get the Bud Light treatment,' wrote one user on X, formerly Twitter.
Another
wrote: 'Just make flavored tortilla chips. You don't need to have a
stance on anything other than that. It's not tricky.'
'Why
are brands like Doritos being so self-destructive? Have they learned
nothing from the Budweiser snafu? Let me guess, their advertising
division is headed by a DEI hire?'
DailyMail.com has reached out to PepsiCo and Frito Lay for comment.
dailycaller | Karine Jean-Pierre has turned over her spotlight to Admiral John
Kirby in an “unprecedented” way as the White House barrels toward a
pivotal election season, a Daily Caller review of briefing data reveals.
Since
Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Kirby has been a mainstay at briefings
alongside Jean-Pierre to answer reporters’ questions about the foreign
conflict. Though Americans have indicated the war is not their top
concern, Kirby has remained at the briefings — only missing three since
the start of the year through Oct. 7. Of the briefings he has attended
in 2024, 19 out of the 22 total held, Kirby has fielded questions for
almost the exact same amount of time as Jean-Pierre.
As of Feb. 27, Jean-Pierre has spent about 11 hours and 31 minutes at
the White House press briefing podium this year across 22 briefings.
Kirby has answered questions for just under nine hours and two minutes
in 19 briefings. In those 19 briefings when Kirby and Jean-Pierre were
together, the press secretary spoke for just shy of nine hours and 11
minutes — almost a perfect fifty-fifty split with her counterpart.
“There
is no precedent for this. Press secretaries always bring guests, right.
It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have the OMB [the Office of Management and
Budget] guys brief you on the budget and talk to you about that.’
That’s normal,” Sean Spicer, one-time press secretary for former
President Donald Trump, told the Daily Caller. “That’s as old as the
job. But this idea that you have a co-press secretary is unprecedented.”
Some
other names have made appearances at briefings and gaggles, either
alongside Jean-Pierre or Kirby: deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton,
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, White House spokesman for
oversight and investigations Ian Sams and a few other policy-specific
officials from the administration.
But none have appeared nearly as often as Kirby, who Jean-Pierre was reportedly concerned
might usurp her as press secretary when she first got the job. Biden
“awkwardly” added that Kirby would be joining Jean-Pierre’s team when
the president gave her the press secretary position in 2022, leaving her
“upset and confused,” according to Axios.
Jean-Pierre’s appointment was lauded
as historic and powerful when she got the job — she’s the first black
press secretary, and is also a lesbian woman of immigrant parents. From
the beginning, things have reportedly been rocky, though — Biden also
allegedly said that Jean-Pierre didn’t need to worry because she’d “have
an admiral looking over your shoulder,” a comment that was not received well by the new press secretary.
Amid the tension between Kirby and Jean-Pierre, the latter’s top deputy, Dalton, is reportedly ditching the White House for a gig at Apple.
That
leaves a clear path to the top job for Kirby. He has told some around
the White House he’s interested in the position, according to Axios, but
other White House officials denied those accounts.
When it comes
to gaggles, Kirby has appeared at more as of late, speaking at seven of
them between the start of the year and Feb. 16 for a total of more than
an hour and seven minutes. The pair has attended four gaggles together,
with Jean-Pierre answering questions for more than 41 minutes.
“I
don’t think the dynamic is awkward to begin with. I think they did it
under the presence, under the guise of national security and foreign
affairs. But the reality is, Kirby has really taken over a lot more, for
obvious reasons,” Spicer said. “The press secretary should be able to
handle all of the issues and it’s pretty obvious that there’s a level of
competence that just doesn’t exist.”
twitter | In which Jon Stewart tries to convince you crime and urban decay are simply “the price of freedom” and Russia’s clean streets and subways are only possible because of political repression—a total crock, and he knows it. America could easily enjoy those things too, and has in the past.
The idea here is just to use the bogeyman Putin to reconcile Americans to their own social decline by making them reflexively suspicious of high-trust societies, and associate any attempts to stem/reverse the problem (or even draw attention to it) with authoritarianism. “Don’t believe your lying eyes and draw the obvious conclusions—that’s what fascists do!”
No, actually, we don’t have to accept “urinal caked chaotic subways” to protect our liberty. Incredibly stupid and insidious argument by Stewart.
thepressunited |The US Department of Defense has failed its sixth annual audit in a row, but taxpayer money will keep going down that drain
Recently, the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for trillions of
dollars of US taxpayer money, having failed a massive yearly audit for
the sixth year running.
The process consisted of the 29 sub-audits of the DoD’s various
services, and only seven passed this year – no improvement over the
last. These audits only began taking place in 2017, meaning that the
Pentagon has never successfully passed one.
This year’s failure made some headlines, was commented upon briefly
by the mainstream media, and then just as quickly forgotten by an
American society accustomed to pouring money down the black hole of
defense spending.
The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its
$877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations
with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot
fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in
liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense, ostensibly in defense
of the United States and its allies. As the Biden administration seeks
$886 billion for next year’s defense budget (and Congress seems prepared
to add an additional $80 billion to that amount), the apparent
indifference of the American collective – government, media, and public –
to how nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars will be spent speaks
volumes about the overall bankrupt nature of the American
establishment.
Audits, however, are an accountant’s trick, a series of numbers on a
ledger which, for the average person, do not equate to reality.
Americans have grown accustomed to seeing big numbers when it comes to
defense spending, and as a result, we likewise expect big things from
our military. But the fact is, the US defense establishment increasingly
physically resembles the numbers on the ledgers the accountants have
been trying to balance – it just doesn’t add up.
Despite spending some $2.3 trillion on a two-decade military
misadventure in Afghanistan, the American people witnessed the
ignominious retreat from that nation live on TV in August 2021.
Likewise, a $758 billion investment in the 2003 invasion and subsequent
decade-long occupation of Iraq went south when the US was compelled to
withdraw in 2011– only to return in 2014 for another decade of chasing
down ISIS, itself a manifestation of the failures of the original Iraqi
venture. Overall, the US has spent more than $1.8 trillion on its
20-year nightmare in Iraq and Syria.
zerohedge | On Wednesday President Joe Biden suggested that if Congress doesn't send Ukraine more money, now, it may 'embolden' Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade a NATO ally, which would precipitate "American troops fighting Russian troops."
The threat was not persuasive.
In response, Senate Republicans channeled Elon Musk (G...F...Y...), blocking Biden's $111 emergency supplemental package that would also include aid for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and a smattering of border funding.
The
Senate voted 49-51, failing to reach the 60-vote threshold required to
allow the proposal to come up for consideration. Notably, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted against the measure,
while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) flipped his vote to
'no' to preserve the option of revisiting the bill at a later date.
President Joe Biden has raised the possibility of "American troops
fighting Russian troops" in a speech urging Congress to put aside
"petty, partisan, angry politics" which is holding up
his multibillion-dollar aid package for Ukraine. He said that he's
willing to make "significant compromises" with Republicans but that it's
they who've been unwilling to back down from their "extreme" demands.
"This
cannot wait," Biden stressed in the televised remarks from the White
House. “Congress needs to pass supplemental funding for Ukraine before they break for the holiday recess.
Simple as that. Frankly, I think it’s stunning that we’ve gotten to
this point in the first place. Republicans in Congress are willing to give Putin the greatest gift he can hope for and abandon our global leadership."
"I’m
willing to make significant compromises on the border. We need to fix
the broken border system. It is broken. And thus far I’ve gotten no
response," Biden pleaded. He made the speech after speaking with G7
leaders, who are reportedly alarmed that US funding to Ukraine is set to
run dry in a mere three weeks.
"If we walk away, how many
of our European friends are going to continue to fund and at what rates
are they going to continue to fund?" he posed.
And
that's when the fear-mongering really kicked into overdrive. He went so
far as to say that if Ukraine's defense isn't funded, this will lead to
the country being steamrolled by the Russian military machine, and an
emboldened Putin will then seek to gobble up more territory.
pacemaker | I've been waiting for today, knowing it was pre-planned and coming. Today in Riyadh at the China-Arab Summit President Xi of China formally invited the Arab nations to trade oil and gas in yuan on the Shanghai Exchange. Now the way diplomacy works (because it seems to have been forgotten in the West) is that Xi would not have made the invitation unless all the Arab states gathered in Riyadh - and particularly Saudi Arabia as host - had already agreed as a matter of joint policy to take action accordingly. Oil and gas will price in Shanghai and in yuan, breaking the dollar monopoly the US has imposed and enforced since 1974. Since the dollar-for-oil monopoly was the lynchpin of Bretton Woods II stability, it follows Bretton Woods II ended today.
To
refresh memories, President Nixon unilaterally repudiated the US treaty
obligation under the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement to redeem dollars for
gold in 1972. The chaos in foreign exchange markets that followed led
to instability, made worse with the inflationary OPEC oil embargo of
1973-74.
In July 1974 the US Treasury Secretary William Simon and US Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger made a top-secret flight to Riyadh to meet
King Fahd. They offered a deal: sell Saudi oil exclusively for US
dollars and buy US Treasuries with the proceeds, or we kill you, your
entire family, and occupy the oil fields with the US military. Unsurprisingly, they left with a secret agreement.
The
same deal was more or less extended to all of OPEC. Leaders like Saddam
Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya who strayed from the US
dollar were killed, their countries destroyed and destablilsed, as an
example to others. Iran, Syria, and Venezuela have resisted more
successfully, but have been badly destabilised by US occupation, oil
theft, attempted coups, attempted assassinations, and economic
sanctions.
So today marks a big and admirably brave shift. After sending all the
weaponry it could spare to Ukraine all year, ending oil and gas trade
with Russia under sanctions, weakening allies with surging inflation,
and depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of a record amount of oil
to blunt inflation before the midterm elections, the US is not in an
ideal position to launch wars in every Arab state at once. In fact, it
probably can't launch a war or coup even in Saudi Arabia because Saudi
Arabia will have prepared and provided for that risk. In any event, a
new war in the Middle East would make the inflationary shock of the
Ukraine war pale in comparison.
Signs of a shift have been in the wind all year. The fist bump and
low-key reception of President Biden compares poorly to the lavish state
reception of President Xi. Then Biden's attempt to get GCC states to
sanction Russia was unanimously rejected.
And
OPEC's outright refusal to defer oil production cuts until after the
American midterm elections was a further sign Saudi and OPEC+ no longer
take orders from Washington. Saudi took the unusual step of officially
rejecting the US request in public.
When
a presidential state visit by Xi to Saudi began leaking in the fall I
began to watch for confirmatory signs of OPEC moving East. There were
quite a few, but nothing as momentous as the extravagant welcome for
President Xi to Riyadh and the China-Arab Summit. President Xi and King
Salman signed a 30-year Strategic Partnership Agreement for cooperation
on virtually all forward economic plans yesterday: energy, telecoms,
investment, trade, infrastructure, regional development, Belt & Road
Initiative, etc. Significantly, the Agreement bars interference in
domestic affairs by either nation, a principle China has urged widely
for many years.
jonathanturley | Below is my column in The Messenger on the view of diplomats in the
Biden Administration that the President is spreading “misinformation.”
My interest in the story is less the merits than the allegation. The
President is facing the same allegation of ignoring fact and spreading
disinformation that has resulted in thousands being banned or
blacklisted on social media. The Biden Administration has pushed for
such censorship in areas where doctors and pundits held opposing views
on subjects ranging from Covid-19 to climate control. The question is
whether Joe Biden himself should be banned under the standards
promulgated by his own Administration.
Here is the column:
An internal State Department dissent memo was
leaked this past week, opposing the Biden administration’s position on
the war between Israel and Hamas. What was most notable about the memo
is that some administration staffers accused President Joe Biden of “spreading misinformation.”
It was a moment of crushing irony for some of us who have written and testified against
the Biden administration’s censorship efforts. The question is whether,
under the administration’s own standards, President Biden should now be
banned or blacklisted to protect what his administration has called our
“cognitive infrastructure.”
For years, the administration and many
Democrats in Congress have resisted every effort to expose the sprawling
government censorship program that one federal judge described as an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.'” As I have written previously, it included grants to academic and third-party organizations to create a global system of blacklists and to pressure advertisers to withdraw support from conservative sites.
As a result, over the last four years,
researchers, politicians, and even satirical sites have been banned or
blacklisted for offering dissenting views of COVID measures, climate
change, gender identity or social justice, according to the House
Judiciary report. No level of censorship seemed to be sufficient for
President Biden, who once claimed that social media companies were “killing people” by not silencing more dissenting voices.
Now, though, President Biden himself is
accused — by some in his own administration — of spreading
misinformation and supporting war criminals.
Aurelian2022 | In reality, the relationship between the use of force and the
attainment of a defined political objective is a highly complex, inexact
and uncertain art, and is much easier to explain theoretically than to
do in practice. It implies a whole series of complicated, asserted
relationships that don’t necessarily exist tidily in real life. To begin
with, of course, you need to have a defined political objective, which
is agreed, practicable and measurable. Bombing somebody, or firing off
some shells like the French ship, is not an objective in itself, and is
often indistinguishable from a display of pique to make yourself feel
better. What the military call the “end-state” has to be clearly
distinguishable from the current state, not to mention better than it,
or there is no point in pursuing it.
You also have to be
reasonably sure of how the political end-state will play out, or you
could be in a worse situation than you were at the start. This implies a
realistic knowledge of the political situation you are trying to
affect, and what the political consequences of your military actions
might be. So the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 was
intended to humiliate the government of Slobodan Milosevic by forcing
the surrender of Kosovo, and so remove him from power in the elections
the following year. It was assumed that the government that replaced his
would be grateful to NATO for bombing them, and would adopt a
pro-western, pro-NATO stance. What was not anticipated (well, except by
those of us who were paying attention) was that Milosevic would be
brought down by nationalist agitation, and replaced by a hard-line
nationalist President, Kostunica. And as for the idea that a teetering
Gaddafi, perhaps on the point of being overthrown in 2011, could be
pushed over the brink by western intervention, leading to a stable,
pro-western democratic system … well if there is a stronger word than
“catastrophic” to put before “misunderstanding” let’s by all means use
it. Oh, and let’s not even get into the political fantasies of western
capitals about what would follow the forced resignation of Vladimir
Putin.
So this use-of-force-for political-objectives thing
looks a bit more complicated than we thought at first sight, doesn’t it?
It also means that you might just get your fingers trapped in the
wringer. For example, the US has deployed two carrier battle groups to
the eastern Mediterranean. Now, this is a traditional action of
governments that have no other options really open to them, and not, of
itself, necessarily criticable. In the circumstances there is a
political obligation to do something, whatever
that something might be. And to be fair, carriers are very useful for
evacuating foreign nationals, under military protection or otherwise, as
the French showed in Beirut in 2006.
The problem is that it’s virtually certain that the carrier groups have
been deployed according to this “do something” logic, which is to say
that there is almost certainly no accompanying political strategy: as
often, the US is making it up as it goes along. (Talking about
“deterrence” or “stabilisation” is not a strategy, it’s an attempt at a
justification.) The difficulty with all such deployments, though, is
that they are much easier to start than stop. To withdraw the force is
to send a political message that you think the crisis is over, or at
least manageable, which may not be the message you want to send. So you
keep the force in position, and eventually you replace it, because you
don’t have any choice. The difficulty is that, apart from evacuations,
there’s almost nothing for which the career group can be usefully
employed. Intelligence gathering maybe, but there are far easier and
more discreet ways of doing that. In the meantime, they are large
targets, probably limited to flying patrols and not much else. (I’m
assuming that the US would not be so insane as to join in the
bombardment of Gaza itself.)
In turn, this reflects the
effective impotence of the US in the present conflict. Its historical
attempt to combine the positions of independent facilitator with doglike
devotion to one side was always dubious, but was tolerated insofar as
the country was actually able to have some influence. That’s clearly no
longer true. Nobody in the Arab world is going to be influenced by the
US now, and it has also ruled itself out of any influence over Iran,
Hezbollah and Hamas. Biden’s initial maximalist rhetoric has effectively
given away most of the influence the US might have been able to assert
over Israel as well. Which doesn’t leave a lot, and doesn’t leave a lot
for US military power to actually do, either.
In any event,
even if a decision were made to use military power, in a political
vacuum, and just to look threatening, what could the US actually do? For
the moment, nothing. Now if a major ground invasion were to start in Gaza, and if
Hezbollah were to react militarily along the northern frontier, then
theoretically the US could target them, but with massive attendant risks
to the Lebanese population, and considerable risk of casualties to
itself, in other places where there are US troops. Put simply, an attack
agains Hezbollah which is large enough to make a difference could cause
massive collateral damage to Lebanon, whereas anything smaller will not
make a difference anyway. The US has invested massively in the
stability of Lebanon in recent years, and is not to going to put that
investment in jeopardy now.
There is certainly every chance
that Iran would consider a large-scale attack on Hezbollah to be an
unfriendly action, and then retaliate. The problem for the Americans is
that the Iranians can inflict far more damage on them and their
interests than they can inflict on the Iranians. This is nothing to do
with the sophistication, or even numbers, of weapons: it’s a lot more
mundane than that. Get out a map, and have a look at the region, and ask
yourself, where could US carrier groups safely go? Which countries
could be expected to provide airfields, ports and harbours and logistic
depots? In the present political situation, the answer is probably
“none.” No doubt an air- and sea-launched missile attack on Iran could
do some damage, but what would be the point? What possible proportional
political objective could be served thereby? No conceivable amount of
damage caused to Iran could compel the government, for example, to cut
off support for Hezbollah, or for the current government in Syria. By
contrast, severe damage to a single carrier, even if it were not sunk,
would be enough to drive the US out of the region.
I think we
can draw some general lessons from these examples, which in turn may
help us understand how the current Gaza crisis may eventually resolve
itself. We can start by recalling that the theory of using military
power to achieve political end-states is important, but primarily as a
limitation. That’s to say that, whilst military action without a
political objective is pointless, the mere fact of starting military
action towards a declared political end-state doesn’t mean that you will
automatically get there. You still have to do the hard work of turning
the one into the other, and it’s that that I want to talk about now.
Consider
a political end-state of some kind. It doesn’t have to be heaven on
earth or for that matter the surrender of your enemy. It can be
something simpler, such as an enforceable decision by your neighbour to
stop supporting separatist groups in your country. So let’s assume you
define that political end-state, which we’ll call P(E). Now the first
thing to say is that this political end-state must actually be
politically (not just militarily) possible. It must be within the
capacity of the other government to agree to, or failing that the
balance of political forces at the end of the conflict must at least
make it possible. It is pointless and dangerous to attempt to force a
country or a political actor do do something that is beyond their power
to do; not that this hasn’t been attempted often enough.
theintercept | As the national security workforce ages, dementia impacting U.S. officials poses a threat to national security, according to a first-of-its-kind study by a Pentagon-funded think tank. The report, released this spring, came as several prominent U.S. officials trusted with some of the nation’s most highly classified intelligence experienced public lapses, stoking calls for resignations and debate about Washington’s aging leadership.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had a second freezing episode last month, enjoys the most privileged access to classified information of anyone in Congress as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight congressional leadership. Ninety-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., whose decline has seen her confused about how to vote and experiencing memory lapses — forgetting conversations and not recalling a monthslong absence — was for years a member of the Gang of Eight and remains a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on which she has served since 2001.
The study, published by
the RAND Corporation’s National Security Research Division in April,
identifies individuals with both current and former access to classified
material who develop dementia as threats to national security, citing
the possibility that they may unwittingly disclose government secrets.
“Individuals who hold or held a security clearance and handled
classified material could become a security threat if they develop
dementia and unwittingly share government secrets,” the study says.
As the study notes, there does not appear to be any other publicly
available research into dementia, an umbrella term for the loss of
cognitive functioning, despite the fact that Americans are living longer
than ever before and that the researchers were able to identify several
cases in which senior intelligence officials died of Alzheimer’s
disease, a progressive brain disorder and the most common cause of
dementia.
“As people live longer and retire later, challenges associated with
cognitive impairment in the workplace will need to be addressed,” the
report says. “Our limited research suggests this concern is an emerging
security blind spot.”
Most holders of security clearances, a ballooning class of
officials and other bureaucrats with access to secret government
information, are subject to rigorous and invasive vetting procedures.
Applying for a clearance can mean hourslong polygraph tests; character
interviews with old teachers, friends, and neighbors; and ongoing
automated monitoring of their bank accounts and other personal
information. As one senior Pentagon official who oversees such a program
told me of people who enter the intelligence bureaucracy, “You
basically give up your Fourth Amendment rights.”
Yet, as the authors of the RAND report note, there does not appear to
be any vetting for age-related cognitive decline. In fact, the director
of national intelligence’s directive on continuous evaluation contains no mention of age or cognitive decline.
While the study doesn’t mention any U.S. officials by name, its
timing comes amid a simmering debate about gerontocracy: rule by the
elderly. Following McConnell’s first freezing episode, in July, Google
searches for the term “gerontocracy” spiked.
“The president called to check on me,” McConnell said when asked
about the first episode. “I told him I got sandbagged,” he quipped,
referring to President Joe Biden’s trip-and-fall incident during a June
graduation ceremony at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, which
sparked conservative criticisms about the 80-year-old’s own
functioning.
WaPo |Joe Bidenlaunched his candidacy
for president in 2019 with the words “we are in the battle for the soul
of this nation.” He was right. And though it wasn’t obvious at first to
many Democrats, he was the best person to wage that fight. He was a
genial but also shrewd campaigner for the restoration of what
legislators call “regular order.”
Since then, Biden has had a remarkable string of wins. He defeated President Donald Trump
in the 2020 election; he led a Democratic rebuff of Trump’s acolytes in
the 2022 midterms; his Justice Department has systematically prosecuted
the Jan. 6,
2021, insurrection that Trump championed and, now, through special
counsel Jack Smith, the department is bringing Trump himself to justice.
What I admire most about President Biden is that in a polarized nation, he has governed from the center out, as he promised in his victory speech.
With an unexpectedly steady hand, he passed some of the most important
domestic legislation in recent decades. In foreign policy, he managed
the delicate balance of helping Ukraine fight Russia without getting
America itself into a war. In sum, he has been a successful and
effective president.
But
I don’t think Biden and Vice President Harris should run for
reelection. It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of
what they have accomplished. But if he and Harris campaign together in
2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was
stopping Trump.
Biden wrote his political testament
in his inaugural address: “When our days are through, our children and
our children’s children will say of us: They gave their best, they did
their duty, they healed a broken land.” Mr. President, maybe this is
that moment when duty has been served.
Biden would carry two big liabilities into a 2024 campaign. He would be 82 when he began a second term. According to
a recent Associated Press-NORC poll, 77 percent of the public,
including 69 percent of Democrats, think he’s too old to be effective
for four more years. Biden’s age isn’t just a Fox News trope; it’s been
the subject of dinner-table conversations across America this summer.
Because
of their concerns about Biden’s age, voters would sensibly focus on his
presumptive running mate, Harris. She is less popular than Biden, with a
39.5 percent approval rating, according to
polling website FiveThirtyEight. Harris has many laudable qualities,
but the simple fact is that she has failed to gain traction in the
country or even within her own party.
Biden
could encourage a more open vice-presidential selection process that
could produce a stronger running mate. There are many good alternatives,
starting with now-Mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass, whom I wish Biden
had chosen in the first place, or Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. But
breaking up the ticket would be a free-for-all that could alienate Black
women, a key constituency. Biden might end up more vulnerable.
Politicians
who know Biden well say that if he were convinced that Trump were truly
vanquished, he would feel he had accomplished his political mission. He
will run again if he believes in his gut that Trump will be the GOP
nominee and that he has the best chance to defeat Trump and save the
country from the nightmare of a revenge presidency.
Biden
has never been good at saying no. He should have resisted the choice of
Harris, who was a colleague of his beloved son Beau when they were both
state attorneys general. He should have blocked then-House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which has done considerable damage to
the island’s security. He should have stopped his son Hunter from
joining the board of a Ukrainian gas company and representing companies
in China — and he certainly should have resisted Hunter’s attempts to
impress clients by getting Dad on the phone.
Biden
has another chance to say no — to himself, this time — by withdrawing
from the 2024 race. It might not be in character for Biden, but it would
be a wise choice for the country.
Biden
has in many ways remade himself as president. He is no longer the
garrulous glad-hander I met when I first covered Congress more than four
decades ago. He’s still an old-time pol, to be sure, but he is now more
focused and strategic; he executes policies systematically, at home and
abroad. As Franklin Foer writes in “The Last Politician,” a new account of Biden’s presidency, “he will be remembered as the old hack who could.”
Time
is running out. In a month or so, this decision will be cast in stone.
It will be too late for other Democrats, including Harris, to test
themselves in primaries and see whether they have the stuff of
presidential leadership. Right now, there’s no clear alternative to
Biden — no screamingly obvious replacement waiting in the wings. That
might be the decider for Biden, that there’s seemingly nobody else. But
maybe he will trust in democracy to discover new leadership, “in the
arena.”
I
hope Biden has this conversation with himself about whether to run, and
that he levels with the country about it. It would focus the 2024
campaign. Who is the best person to stop Trump? That was the question
when Biden decided to run in 2019, and it’s still the essential test of a
Democratic nominee today.
defensescoop | In separate discussions over the last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and a Pentagon spokesperson briefed DefenseScoop on the near-term vision for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks recently moved to personally
oversee the Pentagon’s unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)
investigation team formally known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution
Office, DefenseScoop has exclusively learned. And a new website will
soon be launched where incidents can be reported.
Hicks now holds regular meetings with AARO’s inaugural director, Sean
Kirkpatrick — who she’s also repositioned to report directly to her.
The Pentagon’s second-in-charge took action late last month, partly to help speed up AARO’s development and launch of a congressionally mandated
public website where the organization will be expected to disclose its
unclassified work and findings and offer a secure mechanism via which
users can submit their own reports of possible UAP observances.
In separate discussions over the last week, Hicks and Pentagon
spokesperson Eric Pahon briefed DefenseScoop on new details regarding
the deputy secretary’s near-term vision for AARO — and the latest status
of the new website and reporting mechanism ahead of an official
announcement from the Defense Department expected on Thursday.
“I believe that transparency is a critical component of AARO’s work,
and I am committed to sharing AARO’s discoveries with Congress and the
public, consistent with our responsibility to protect critical national
defense and intelligence capabilities,” Hicks told DefenseScoop.
Behind the scenes
Mysterious, seemingly unexplainable flying objects have long perplexed humans all over the world. For decades, they have been referred to as UFOs. But recently, the U.S. government began using the “UAP” moniker
to account for what appear to be craft that can travel underwater or
transition between space and Earth’s atmosphere, or other domains.
The latest surge of interest and pressure from the American public
and Congress started really mounting in the last five or so years, in
response to multiple verified videos showing U.S. military pilots’
interactions with baffling objects, often around key national security
installations.
Hicks formally established AARO via an official memorandum last year,
after lawmakers mandated its creation in the fiscal 2022 National
Defense Authorization Act.
“The UAP mission is not easy, and AARO’s mission, to minimize
technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific,
intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and
mitigation of UAP objects of national security issues, is being
orchestrated by a small, but growing team,” Hicks explained.
“AARO is not yet at full operational capability, and I look forward
to AARO achieving that in fiscal year 2024,” she also told
DefenseScoop.
To meet its directions from Congress — and led by it’s inaugural
director Sean Kirkpatrick — AARO officials must disseminate a series of
reviews about the organization’s expanding portfolio of UAP
investigations and sightings that Defense Department and intelligence
community personnel catalog. Kirkpatrick testified at a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing in April that, at that time, AARO was diving deep into more than 650 cases of reported incidents.
Not long after that event, in July, the House Oversight Committee
held a separate hearing on UAP transparency, which was notably
well-attended, where three former U.S. defense officials each testified
under oath that they believe UAP pose “an existential threat to national
security.” During the hearing, all witnesses suggested, and one
blatantly stated, that AARO has not met its responsibility to seriously
engage with potential observers and that DOD needed better reporting and
response mechanisms.
During both Kirkpatrick’s and the whistleblowers’ hearings,
a visible point of contention that came up was associated with AARO’s
seemingly delayed delivery of the fiscal 2023 NDAA-mandated website and
UAP reporting mechanism.
tomdispatch | In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary
of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the
greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that
claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds
“who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”
As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class
background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I
to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise
for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end
of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?
Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before.
The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11
attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force
for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in
a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President
Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering
when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon,
declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond
compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large
standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.
In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: we need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes?
After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the
world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most
advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so
we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting
force” ever.
Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive
military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our
commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the
Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s
budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.
And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we
truly getting what we pay so dearly for — the bestest, finest, most
exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed
democracy really want such a thing?
The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all,
America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this
country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically,
as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we
honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if
we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric
of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think
that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having
peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)
Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional
military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin,
Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”?
Let me count the ways.
The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole
In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin
with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal
“defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues
that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill,
you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took
office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the
disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly
$50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend,
American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget
continued to soar.
Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased
military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20%
increase in just three years
in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of
supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia — so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.
dailycaller | A federal appeals court issued a temporary stay on a judge’s
injunction barring federal officials from communicating with social
media companies for the purposes of censoring protected speech on
Friday.
Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty previously denied the Biden administration’s request for an emergency order pausing his injunction on July 10. In an order Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay on the injunction “until further orders” of the court.
Doughty
had previously issued a preliminary injunction barring the Biden
administration from communicating with social media companies to censor
protected speech on July 4.
The panel of judges who hear the case for arguments on
the merits will later consider the administration’s motion for a longer
stay, according to the order.
NOW: The 5th Circuit has agreed to temporarily pause an injunction that blocked a wide swath of the Biden admin from contacting social media companies; appeal will be expedited, panel of judges to be assigned later will decide whether to grant the longer-term stay DOJ wants pic.twitter.com/AmQcaeatPL
When Doughty denied the administration’s request for an emergency order Monday, he said
the injunction only bars the administration from doing something they
“no legal right to do—contacting social media companies for the purpose
of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, the
removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing
protected free speech posted on social-media platforms. It also contains
numerous exceptions.”
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Louisiana Attorney General Jeffrey Landry slammed
the administration’s attempt to stop the injunction as asking to
“continue violating the First Amendment” in a July 10 court filing.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...