Iran’s Nightmares

Details of the recent limited Israeli retaliatory strike against Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries at Isfahan are still sketchy. 

But nonetheless, we can draw some conclusions.

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Blade of Perseus

April 25, 2024

Israel’s small volley of missiles hit their intended targets, to the point of zeroing in on the very launchers designed to stop such incoming ordnance.

The target was near the Natanz enrichment facility. That proximity was by design. Israel showed Iran it could take out the very anti-missile battery designed to thwart an attack on its nearby nuclear facility.

The larger message sent to the world was that Israel could send a retaliatory barrage at Iranian nuclear sites with reasonable assurances that the incoming attacks could not be stopped. By comparison, Iran’s earlier attack on Israel was much greater and more indiscriminate. It was also a huge flop, with an estimated 99 percent of the more than 320 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles failing to hit their planned targets.

Moreover, it was reported that more than 50 percent of Iran’s roughly 115-120 ballistic missiles failed at launch or malfunctioned in flight.

Collate these facts, and it presents a disturbing corrective to Iran’s non-stop boasts of soon possessing a nuclear arsenal that will obliterate the Jewish state.

Consider further the following nightmarish scenarios: Were Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles ever launched at Israel, they could pass over, in addition to Syria and Iraq, either Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, or all four. In the cases of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, such trajectories would constitute an act of war, especially considering that some of Iran’s recent aerial barrages were intercepted and destroyed over Arab territory well before they reached Israel.

Iran’s strike prompted Arab nations, the US, the UK, and France to work in concert to destroy almost all of Iran’s drones. For Iran, that is a premonition of the sort of sophisticated aerial opposition it might face if it ever decided to stage a nuclear version.

Even if half of Iran’s ballistic missiles did launch successfully, only a handful apparently neared their intended targets—in sharp contrast to Israel’s successful attack on Iranian missile batteries. Is it thus conceivable that any Iranian-nuclear-tipped missile launched toward Israel might pose as great a threat to Iran itself or its neighbors as to Israel?

And even if such missiles made it into the air and even if they successfully traversed Arab airspace, there is still an overwhelming chance they would be neutralized before detonating above Israel.

Any such launch would warrant an immediate Israeli response. And the incoming bombs and missiles would likely have a 100 percent certainty of evading Iran’s countermeasures and hitting their targets.

Now that the soil of both Iran and Israel is no longer sacred and immune from attack, the mystique of the Iranian nuclear threat has dissipated.

It should be harder for the theocracy to shake down Western governments for hostage bribes, sanctions relief, and Iran-deal giveaways on the implied threat of Iran successfully nuking the Jewish state.

The new reality is that Iran has goaded an Israel that has numerous nuclear weapons and dozens of nuclear-tipped missiles in hardened silos and on submarines. Tehran has zero ability to stop any of these missiles or sophisticated fifth-generation Israeli aircraft armed with nuclear bombs and missiles.

Iran must now fear that if it launched 2-3 nuclear missiles, there would be overwhelming odds that they would either fail at launch, go awry in the air, implode inside Iran, be taken down over Arab territory by Israel’s allies, or be knocked down by the tripartite Israel anti-missile defense system.

Add it all up, and the Iranian attack on Israel seems a historic blunder. It showed the world the impotence of an Iranian aerial assault at the very time it threatens to go nuclear. It revealed that an incompetent Iran may be as much a threat to itself as to its enemies. It opened up a new chapter in which its own soil, thanks to its attack on Israel, is no longer off limits to any Western power.

Its failure to stop a much smaller Israel response, coupled with the overwhelming success of Israel and its allies in stopping a much larger Iranian attack, reminds the Iranian autocracy that its shrill rhetoric is designed to mask its impotence and to hide its own vulnerabilities from its enemies.

And the long-suffering Iranian people?

The truth will come out that its own theocracy hit the Israeli homeland with negligible results and earned a successful, though merely demonstrative, Israeli response in return.

So Iranians will learn their homeland is now vulnerable and, for the future, no longer off limits.

And they will conclude that Israel has more effective allies than Iran and that their own ballistic missiles may be more suicidal than homicidal.

As a result, they may conclude that the real enemies of the Iranian nation are not the Jewish people of Israel after all, but their own unhinged Islamist theocrats.

Many Culprits Behind Rise of Antisemitism, Including the Media

By: Howard Levitt

Gatestone Institute

April 23, 2024

Over the last several years, Canadian employers have increasingly brought in “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) trainers to rid their workforces of conscious, and even subconscious, racism. On the face of it, who can object to diversity, equity and inclusion? It is like objecting to Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, these workshops too often have been hijacked by radical ideologues who pitted races against each other. The unhappy story of Richard Bilkszto, who committed suicide after alleging he was deemed a racist by one such trainer for observing that Canadians are not more racist than Americans, was simply the publicly exposed tip of that iceberg.

I have had many Jewish clients, even before Oct. 7, complain about how Jews have been treated in these DEI seminars. To what extent has this radical training played a role in the sudden outpouring of antisemitism here?

Who indeed is to blame for the wave of hatred toward Jews that is roiling Canadian workplaces, universities, unions, social media postings, even our streets and neighbourhoods?

Antisemitism has had a long sordid history in Canada and, for some (ironically many of those who have never knowingly even met a Jew), it has always been hidden just below the surface. There was a reprieve after the guilt induced by the atrocities of the Second World War. But it is ascendant again, and surprisingly, its adherents are proudly so.

Who are the purveyors of antisemitism?

Obviously, first are the radical Islamists importing their ancient historic Jew-hatred based on their particular interpretation of the Koran. Their hatred of Christians and other “infidels” is only slightly behind in the hierarchy.

There is the radical woke left, which has, since Israel’s underdog defeat of the combined armies of Jordan, Egypt and Syria in 1967, viewed Israel as an oppressor. I believe much of the antisemitism in the public sector union movement can be attributed to that strain.

There is the influence of DEI which has too often placed Jews at the top of a racial hierarchy, ignoring the fact that Jews have always been, and remain, dramatically more discriminated against than any other group, including those groups at the supposed bottom of the DEI hierarchy of intersectionality: Indigenous, Blacks, Muslims and the LGBTQIA+.

Allied with those forces are universities and colleges, which have been temples of wokeness for years, penalizing students who express views that dissent from their left-wing pronouncements. While campuses are hotbeds of support for Hamas, polls have shown young people who have not been in the clutches of our university and college professors support Israel, as do most other groups in Canada by large majorities.

Although I am distinguishing them, the left, the universities and DEI practitioners are somewhat interchangeable, and have many of the same members.

The last group which I believe has been responsible for rising antisemitism are irresponsible media publications.

Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, has been particularly one-sided and unrelenting in its coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. It still does not describe Hamas as a terrorist organization and has yet to apologize for falsely accusing Israel of bombing a hospital and killing hundreds — even though it has long been acknowledged that a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket was to blame and that the death toll was much lower.

Consistently, the CBC has presented a view of the war, distorted in Hamas’ favour.

In a recent column in the daily Toronto Sun, Warren Kinsella revealed that the CBC has a committee struck to directly oversee its coverage on Israel. He also reported that Jewish journalists there say the stories they pitch on the war are being routinely ignored.

CBC is the worst, but it is not alone. Montreal’s La Presse daily ran a ghoulish cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a repulsive vampire with a big nose and sharp claws poised to suck the life out of Palestinians, referring to him as “Nosfenyahu” in reference to the 1922 German silent horror movie Nosferatu, which has long been seen as deeply antisemitic. The Toronto Star has also published columns with strong anti-Israel positions.

I will close with a disturbing, but unsurprising, story about our public broadcaster. It says it all.

Early in the war, CBC sought out “deeply personal essays” about what it means to be Jewish and Canadian today, and welcomed Jewish Canadians to pitch their stories.

As a result, Shawna Cohen of Toronto submitted a piece. A producer from the CBC responded:

“Specifically, I’d like to hear from someone who wants a ceasefire/is finding it hard to be pro-Israel right now OR someone who supports the war despite the high cost of civilian life — and how their personal lived experiences inform those views. Please let me know if you might want to write something along those lines, and if so, what would your take be.”

Ms. Cohen wrote back:

“As a Jewish person, I feel I have a responsibility to let you know that the specific angle CBC is searching for is dangerous and narrow-minded. The Jewish community is feeling extremely unsafe — in Canada and beyond.

“Rather than providing writers with an opportunity to share how and why Jews are feeling this way, CBC has reverse engineered the narrative. It is specifically seeking out a rare breed of Jew who doesn’t support Israel and/or is willing to negotiate with a terrorist organization. Taking this approach only contributes to anti-Israel propaganda.

“To be honest, I was reluctant to pitch my story to CBC because of its established record of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist bias. From your response, it is clear that CBC does not welcome genuine opinions or perspectives that are not viewed through its own narrow, sociopolitical lens. This reality is unconscionable for a publicly funded broadcaster that considers itself the voice of a nation.”

She never received a response.

Hopefully our public broadcaster will be defunded soon enough. It has become a national disgrace.

Howard Levitt is the senior partner of Levitt Sheikh, Canadian employment and labour lawyers, and Bencher (Director) of the Law Society of Ontario.

Openly Jewish

By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Restoration

April 23, 2024

Last week, the English-speaking world watched in horror a short video clip of a Jewish man in central London being kept away from a pro-Palestinian protest march. It was filmed on Saturday 13th April. A British policeman addresses Gideon Falter, a smartly dressed man wearing a suit and small yarmulke, warning him:

You are quite openly Jewish, this is a pro-Palestinian march, I’m not accusing you of anything, but I’m worried about the reaction to your presence.

These words are naturally horrifying to hear. It is no surprise, given the great suffering of Gazan civilians during Israel’s armed response to brutal and unjustifiable Hamas attack of October 7th, that tensions at such protests are high. Peaceful, law-abiding protest is a fundamental civic freedom in Western society. But it is utterly intolerable that anybody – let alone a British subject – should be unsafe on the streets of London because they look “quite openly Jewish.”

The public square can certainly be tolerant of a great range of political and religious groups, but it can’t be neutral.

Jewish organizations have warned that pro-Palestinian marches in London have featured anti-Semitic chants and slogans since October. Signs have been reported with the slogan, “Welcome to Gaza, twinned with Auschwitz.” Marchers have screamed the so-called Khaybar Chant: Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud! Jaish Muhammad soufa yaʿoud!(“Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return”). The chant refers to Muhammad’s slaughter of purportedly treacherous Jewish allies at the Battle of Khaybar. It is an implicit threat of Islamist violence against Jews – notably, it is not restricted to Israeli “occupiers.” Nor does it claim to represent any supposedly secular or inclusive Palestinian future. For Islamists, this is the subtext of “From the River to the Sea.”

The real shock of the April 13th video, though, is not the perceived threat of Islamist anti-Semitic violence. That we are used to. Instead, it is that a British police officer, an agent of the state, seems to suggest that being “quite openly Jewish” is unacceptable on the streets of a major Western city.

It is important not to be sensationalist here. The police officer, though his choice of words is highly dubious, was clearly motivated more by concern for Falter’s personal safety than by any personal or official anti-Semitism. There is no serious suggestion that the officer is himself a dangerous bigot.

Secondly, a much longer video has since emerged. Mr. Falter was certainly attempting to access the pro-Palestinian protest, with companions of his own. At one point he confronts the police officer, saying, “The Metropolitan police says these marches are completely safe for Jews, there is no problem whatsoever.”Falter seems keen to test this hypothesis. This is presumably in connection with his work as chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism. We might consider this brave, or imprudent, or needlessly provocative. It might even be all three.

None of this excuses what happened. It seems to be a pretty clear implicit admission that a significant proportion of the protestors might be violent anti-Semites.

Again, let’s be clear: peaceful protest is legal. Lots of the protestors will have perfectly legitimate concerns about civilian casualties in Gaza. A few of them would no doubt also march for Ukraine, or deplore the use of violence by thuggish, murderous regimes from Beijing to Baku.

But, apparently, not all of them. Clearly the London Metropolitan Police are aware that there is a real presence in these protests of an anti-Semitic, Islamist element. The kind who from time-to-time chant Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud!

How can these weekly protests be allowed to continue, at least in their current form, if this is the case? If another weekly political protest came with the serious threat of racist or religious violence, would it be allowed to continue? It seems hard to believe that any large-scale march which came with a regular risk of white supremacist chanting or violence would long be tolerated on the streets of Britain’s capital.

Restoring Public Spaces:

Western societies need to realize – need to remember what we all once knew – that peace, order, and lawful freedoms all need to be actively and publicly maintained. This maintenance needs to come from the state, from civil society, and from all citizens as free individuals. We can no longer afford that tired old liberal myth of a neutral public space.

We cannot pretend that there is no difference between peaceful protests and those which come with a threat of Islamist violence. We cannot pretend that there is no difference between different conceptions of the good, of the just society, of human dignity.

We cannot be blind to the way that some Islamist groups – Hamas and Al-Quds supporters among them – have a pretty good grasp of how to wield power in the public square. They know how to exert pressure on agents of the state, and how to project political strength on the streets. This isn’t a naive phenomenon.

Islamism is a world where the minaret towers over all. It’s the burka’s flowing tendrils blanketing women like an invasive vine in a once-flourishing garden. It’s the gathering in the square that proclaims “this is our space now.” It’s the adhan blasted loudly at the Christian or Jewish – or secular! – part of town. Until, one day, there are no non-Muslim parts of town left. The Christians of Istanbul and the Jews of Baghdad found this out the hard way. I pray the monied agnostics of Mayfair and Chelsea never do.

And they may not have to! That is, perhaps the British state can learn to differentiate between legitimate protests (however misguided), and marches that proclaim conquest.

The West needs to recover and to actively, publicly promote some basic ideas about our shared public peace. About the common allegiances and responsibilities of citizens. The public square can certainly be tolerant of a great range of political and religious groups, but it can’t be neutral. Attempted public neutrality is a vacuum that less-than-benevolent groups are always ready to fill.

In a free and democratic society, the day-to-day politics of domestic government, foreign activities, finance, etc., must constantly be debated. This is right and just. But at the same time, Western democracies must demand – in the public square – loyalty not to wispy, vague ideas of procedural neutrality and skin-deep inclusivity. Instead, we need to be a lot better at articulating the importance of public peace, the legitimate authority of our states, mutual fraternity with our fellow citizens, respect for the law, and the dignity of all human beings.

This isn’t a big ask, and it isn’t bigotedly intolerant. A country can be sure of itself and of its fundamental requirements, and still accept newcomers or visitors. Bluntly, people should normally be free to protest against a government’s foreign policy, or to stand in solidarity with those they think are oppressed overseas. But the political deal needs to be clearer, and straightforwardly articulated: the rejection of intimidation, violence, anti-Semitic extremism, and the pursuit of power by unconstitutional means. It’s the difference between having a law-abiding, European-style social democratic party in a country’s parliament, and tolerating organized political violence or state espionage by Communist groups. Western states sometimes benefit from the former, but must have the self-assurance to stamp out the latter.

If we don’t get better at doing this, our public square will be more and more vulnerable to hostile takeover. The present moment is a canary in the coal mine. If we don’t get better at doing this, we risk seeing more of our fellow citizens grimly warned of the dangers of being “openly Jewish.”

With ‘Friends’ Like Mexico’s Obrador,

Who Needs Enemies Like Putin, Xi,

Kim Jong Un and the Ayatollahs?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

April 1, 2024

In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—who prefers to be known as AMLO for short—issued to the Biden administration blackmail demands that sounded more like existential threats.

AMLO warned the U.S. that the current influx of some 10 million illegal aliens through the southern border will most certainly continue—unless America agrees to his ultimatums.

One, Obrador says the U.S. must now send $20 billion in de facto bribery payments to Latin American nations, many of them corrupt and dysfunctional. Apparently, he thinks it is America’s fault that millions of Latin Americans are fleeing these failed states northward, not the inept and corrupt governments that create such misery.

Two, AMLO demands amnesty for vast numbers of Mexican illegal aliens currently unlawfully residing inside the U.S. He apparently also thinks there is no such thing as U.S. immigration law. Or, if there is, such statutes do not apply to citizens of Mexico. Can we ask Mr. Obrador to simply grant permanent visa-free, no-questions-asked residence to any American living in a vacation complex in Mexico?

Three, he also requires America to lift sanctions against anti-American Venezuela. That communist government currently is part of the new China/Russia/Iran strategic axis. It is sending thousands of its citizens northward to enter the U.S. illegally.

Many of them are criminals, as the recent murder of Laken Riley by a felonious Venezuelan illegal alien attests. Dictator Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuelan regime recently threatened to invade and annex oil-rich Guyana, its smaller neighbor to the east. Maduro’s “security forces” have routinely murdered hundreds of political opponents. This rogue state is apparently Mexico’s newest ally.

Four, AMLO further requires the U.S. to stop its long embargo of communist Castroite-controlled Cuba, a decades-long avowed enemy of the U.S.

And what, AMLO was asked, would happen if the U.S. were to refuse Mexico’s blackmail threats?

Obrador abruptly snapped, “The flow of migrants will continue”—an admission that Obrador himself has the power to stop or turn on illegal immigrant influxes into the U.S.

Translated, that means we can expect that another 2-3 million illegal aliens will leave Mexican territory to enter the U.S. unlawfully in 2024. Or if Joe Biden is attuned to the political disaster he has created by illegal immigration for his party in November, we should expect this cynical administration quietly—in the fashion on the eve of the last midterms of cancelling student loans, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, or currently slow-walking resupplies to Israel—to send cash to Obrador to limit inflows before the election.

In his long interview, AMLO also denied that Mexico is one of the most violent countries in the world, despite currently having the ninth highest murder rate among nations. AMLO claims further that there is no corruption in America, although Mexico also ranks among the world’s most corrupt nations.

As far as the nearly 100,000 American deaths per year attributed to Mexican cartel-produced and illegally imported fentanyl—often deliberately disguised as both illicit and prescription drugs to mask its toxicity and increase its usage—Obrador claims that the fault is solely on Americans who take the drug. He believes Mexicans simply supply the demand regardless of its legality and in such a way to ensure thousands of accidental overdoses.

AMLO adds quite dishonestly that there is no real drug use in Mexico. Consequently, the cartels supposedly do not threaten the stability of his government. He apparently shrugs that they are an American, not Mexican, problem, despite the cartels’ annual murdering of several hundred Mexican politicians and candidates.

Finally, under his “Mexico First” policy, AMLO warns he will not pass any law or adopt any policy that is American-inspired.

Much of AMLO periodic tough-guy rhetoric—in the past he has bragged of the huge expatriate Mexican community and the power it now exercises over American politics—is simply the bluster of an insecure, smaller neighbor overshadowed by its northern colossus, and both mindful and resentful of an often shared troublesome history.

In addition, Obrador is a radical socialist. He believes a nation’s prosperity is achieved through forced state, or indeed, international redistribution from the wealthier to the poorer—not by guarantees of free markets, individual freedom, consensual government, or the rule of law. Thus, Mexico’s problem is not its misuse of rich natural resources, lack of the rule of law, corrupt federal, state, and local governments, or the cartels, but simply exploitation by its northern neighbor. Obrador never asks himself why a resource-poor Japan or Switzerland is rich and a resource-rich Mexico is poor.

Two further questions arise in response to Obrador’s unhinged hostility. One, why is AMLO now so emboldened to threaten the United States with even more millions of illegal aliens leaving Mexico soil to enter the U.S. unlawfully?

And two, how will America answer such a belligerent neighbor?

Obrador is feisty and full of anti-American venom now for a lot of reasons. One, he was easily able to transit from his country 10 million illegal immigrants into the United States. He believes that with the existing 50 million foreign-born American residents, America is rapidly becoming a country of enough Latin American ex-patriates to ensure Mexico’s influence over American policy.

In projectionist fashion, Obrador also believes that the American melting pot is dead, replaced by the tribalist salad bowl, in which ethnic groups form large, permanent, and unassimilated blocs and vie for government money and influence against rival ethnicities.

In such a Hobbesian U.S., Latinos, Obrador believes, will come out on top and thus greenlight Mexico’s agenda. The idea that Mexican immigrants will likely quickly assimilate, integrate, and replace their Mexican identity and allegiance with an American persona, he believes, is now passé.

More disturbingly, AMLO assumes that Biden deliberately destroyed the U.S. border in order to welcome in the world’s poor and needy en masse. Biden, he believes, is engineering the new demographics. He has enticed a constituency that will repay de facto amnesty with fealty at the polls, and in the next census, he will thus help redefine dozens of congressional districts to favor Democrats. Thus, Obrador thinks his open-border policies synchronize with the open-border wishes of the Biden administration.

Two, Obrador sees the U.S. decoupling from China. Billions of dollars in American overseas investment are leaving China and being rerouted to Mexico. Hundreds of new factories producing everything from cheap consumer items to cars are now appearing in Mexico entirely for U.S. export.

Obrador assumes that without such outsourcing and offshoring to Mexico, the U.S. would suffer supply chain disruption, higher consumer prices, and shortages of vital goods—and thus be forced to return to its unhealthy dependence on China. So he believes Mexican labor in the U.S. and Mexican factories at home are indispensable to the U.S. economy, and thus he can say or do what he wishes to any president he chooses.

Three, while Obrador was for a while scared of Trump, he has utter contempt for the bumbling Biden administration in general, and, in particular, for an enfeebled Joe Biden himself. On a recent Biden trip to Mexico, Obrador beamed as he was filmed personally propping up a shaky Biden as he descended from the stage.

In Obrador’s view, any country that would open wide its border, welcome in 10 million foreign nationals, without legal sanction, without audit, without even processing, deserves the contempt he extends to it.

Just as he scans the world stage and sees Biden’s humiliating exit from Afghanistan, its passive response to serial Iranian-fueled terrorist attacks on American installations in the Middle East, and its passivity when China launched a spy balloon over the U.S., so too, like other American belligerents, Obrador feels Biden’s America is now there for the taking. Thus his emboldened threats that no Mexican president of the past has ever leveled.

Finally, what can the U.S. do to reestablish its sovereignty and remind Mexico that its belligerency, its export of deadly fentanyl, its deliberate sandbagging of U.S. immigration law, its alliances with America’s worst enemies, and its greenlighting of the Mexican cartels’ anti-American, transborder mayhem all have existential consequences?

So what should the next president do to restore mutual respect and cooperation between our once amicable two countries? Five easy steps:

1.    Quietly finish the wall across the entire border.

2.    Begin deporting to Mexico the ten million illegal aliens who have unlawfully entered and resided in the U.S. over the last three years. Let Mexico disperse them to their countries of origin.

3.    Tax at 10% the $60 billion in remittances that annually flow into Mexico from the U.S. Remittances are Obrador’s largest source of foreign exchange and made possible only by American state and federal governments’ subsidization of Mexican national residents, that in turn frees them to send billions back home to Mexico.

4.    Declare the cartels international terrorist organizations. Begin sanctioning all Mexican banks, corporations, and known Mexico officials that traffic and do business with the cartels.

5.    Deploy the U.S. military to the border, not merely to create deterrence and aid the border patrol, but to end all cartel entry into the United States and to stop all unauthorized cross-border intrusions by Mexican paramilitaries.

Do all that, and paradoxically, Obrador will begin praising the U.S. and ask once again to cooperate in restoring a secure border.

Like so many passive-aggressive bullies, Obrador respects the strong adversaries he slanders but he has utter contempt for the weak leaders he praises.

For Israel, Forbearance Could Be Fatal

By: Richard A. Epstein

Hoover Institution – defining ideas

April 16, 2024

Drones and missiles from Iran spearheaded a large but largely unsuccessful attack in the Negev and the Golan Heights. Launched in retaliation for the attack of April 1, in which Israel took out seven generals and advisers in a military compound in Damascus, the attack came as no surprise—Iranian leaders have said for more years than one can count that their goal is the extermination of the Jewish state, along with, it appears, its entire population. But on this occasion, the Iranian objective was more muted. Iran announced in advance that at least for the short run, it would refrain from further attacks unless attacks by Israel or the United States were launched against them.

But given the long-term risks, there is no time to be complacent. It is all too clear that when oligarchs make statements of that sort, they intend to execute them. This, in turn, dictates the strategies that have to be performed in reply.

Thus, in dealing with potential allies and friends, the optimal strategy is—to use the common parlance—to put your best foot forward. Note that this cautious strategy does not require you to lose your balance. Rather, it indicates a willingness to go forward to the next level of commitment if there is a positive response. Your potential trading partner then puts his or her best foot forward as well. In such arrangements, it is possible that after several iterations one side (perhaps even you) will choose to defect, but with each round the relationship ideally becomes more stable. Both sides have large potential gains from trade, so that a defection that brings a short-term benefit will carry with it the loss of expected future gains, and as those get larger the probability of defection goes down.

One common example of the situation is in the contract at will, where it is understood from the very title that each party is allowed to pull out of any forward commitment without penalty. And yet these arrangements tend to last for long periods, through patterns of slow evolution. In international affairs, the game is far more complicated because each nation is not a single individual but a coalition of multiple groups that keep to a stable course, such that if the coalition gets fractured, the losses could be enormous. This is why bipartisan support for these deals is needed to overcome discontinuities with the shift in dominant power, and why Pax Americana, like Pax Britannia before it, is necessary to hold that coalition together. A breakdown in unity has been evident for at least a generation in the United States, which explains in part our reduced effectiveness in international affairs.

In this setting, no nation has the luxury of picking out the best trading partners, as can be done in private markets (where all others are under a strict injunction not to disrupt current contracts or use force or guile to prevent formation of new ones). Instead, there is an enormous range of players, some friendly and others hostile. The use of the best foot forward has no place in dealing with hostile players, as the risk is that the moment that foot is put forward, it will be lopped off, with no gain in response. Instead, the strategic dimension is transformed so that the only moves that are made are those that leave you better off if the party on the other side accepts, and leaves you no worse off even if they decline and take a strategy intended to inflict maximum pain.

As a matter of principle, any appeasement—defined here as a concession made without obtaining some strategic advantage—is sure to fail, and probably in the short term.

The swarm of Iranian drones and missiles was therefore no surprise, given that the United States has adopted for many years weak positions with major concessions in the vain hope that carrots without sticks would be able to conjure an improvement. Thus, after a strong recovery in the last years of President George W. Bush in Iraq, the Obama years were marked with a general retreat when the United States negotiated the nuclear arms deal with Iran in 2015. The Obama administration showered concession upon concession to persuade Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons program, despite every breach of promises by the Iranians on inspections. Indeed, the only reason the arrangement did not disintegrate sooner was that the Israelis were able to sabotage some of the Iranian nuclear weapons as the United States continued with its carrots-only approach of sending many billions of dollars to Iran under the Obama and Biden administrations. Donald Trump may not have been perfect on these issues, but he credibly held that he would be able to arrange a better US-Iran deal than the one he canceled.

Amid the return to strategic appeasement and supposed neutrality, Hamas attacked Israel with pitiless force by breaking an existing cease-fire on October 7, 2023. At that point, the only meaningful response was what Israel resolved and the United States has tried to block: a maximum effort to wipe out Hamas. There are no intermediate solutions that could prove stable, for as long as Hamas is in power, it will break the next cease-fire with the same impunity.

US foreign policy has made two grave mistakes after its initial burst of support for Israel. First, it has pushed hard for a cease-fire that can accomplish nothing, for in prolonging the war the precarious position of the civilian population becomes riskier than before. Meanwhile, the prolonged fighting reduces the resources that Israel has to mount its defenses against Hezbollah and Iran, while giving Iran additional time to smuggle weapons to the West Bank in the hopes of stirring up political instability and worse. Nor does a cease-fire allow for any rebuilding to take place or any new government to form, as the choice of the corrupt Palestinian Authority is a nonstarter, and the prospect of a demilitarized state for Palestinians is but a way station on the road to the extinction of Israel. 

As John Spencer has long documented, the Israeli offensive in Gaza has been notable for its general precision, while Hamas has violated every requirement of the law of war in ways that increased, perhaps intentionally, the number of civilian deaths, including by using human shields, fighting out of uniforms, and locating bases of operations near hospitals and other facilities, all on top of a tunnel system that has cost billions to create and maintain. There is also a propaganda war: a power that is prepared to use barbaric force will not hesitate also to wield lies and exaggerations, including the endless accusations of Israeli “genocide” in Gaza.

The current but limited hostilities between Iran and Israel have their roots in the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021. The bungled withdrawal set the stage by turning a stable situation into a moral and social catastrophe, which continues unabated to the present day. The signals were unmistakable, and Hamas and Iran read the tea leaves. They have gained huge leverage because US leaders think the United States  can remain “neutral” by continuing to bargain with Hamas, which easily moves the goalposts with each new Western concession.

None of this should have happened. The hesitation of the United States and its allies will prolong the war and result in more deaths and dislocations than a uniform, firm response by Israel and all its squeamish allies. It is therefore incomprehensible that the New York Times should be calling for the United States to limit weapons supplies to Israel until it reforms its practices in Gaza. The Times seems to think Hamas has done nothing to put its own people in danger by its endless succession of bad acts. It is perverse to claim that this drastic curtailment of arms is needed now because “the war in Gaza has taken an enormous toll in human lives, with a cease-fire still out of reach and many hostages still held captive.” Indeed, these are just the reasons why the attack on Rafeh should proceed, so that this dreadful conflict can reach a just and quick conclusion.

Biden and the ‘Blame America First’

Democrats

By: Newt Gingrich

April 18, 2024

When President Joe Biden warned Iran not to attack Israel with the single word “Don’t,” he was setting himself up to look foolish and weak.

The Iranian theocratic dictatorship pays no heed to President Biden. Iran’s leaders have taken Biden’s measure over months of proxy warfare. Iran and its proxies have killed Americans, routinely fired at American bases and ships, and enthusiastically ignored every American effort to appease them. Biden’s done nothing.

When he said “Don’t,” Iran did – with 335 drones and missiles. We might have expected some serious reaction from a president who had publicly instructed Iran not to attack. Instead, we got a pathetic, desperate, all-out Biden administration effort to convince the Israelis to claim a defensive victory and do nothing.

Just as Biden ignored the Chinese Communist spy balloon gradually crossing the United States, he thought the Israelis should ignore 335 drones and missiles fired at their country.

Watching the bizarre performance, it hit me that the Biden Doctrine is to cripple your allies and help your enemies.

Consider the facts.

As soon as Biden took office, he implemented policies that helped the anti-American Iranian dictatorship. They could chant “Death to America,” but he would send them money, release them from sanctions, and tolerate their strategy of waging war through proxies with no consequence. Even then, the Iranians and their puppets fired drones and missiles at American bases – killing some American military and wounding many more. There was no strong response from Biden.

When the U.S. military warned President Biden that leaving Afghanistan too quickly would collapse the pro-American government, we spent 22 years developing, he ignored the advice. He moved so quickly, it guaranteed the Taliban would win the war. Then he claimed the disaster was the best evacuation in history.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden said supportive words about Ukraine but slow walked equipment and help. Furthermore, the Biden Doctrine demonstrated it was OK for Vladimir Putin to wage war on civilians, kidnap Ukrainian children, and destroy Ukrainian infrastructure. But Biden opposed any Ukrainian response that would involve attacking Russia. Defense was OK, but a serious offensive to win the war by hitting targets inside Russia was off limits.

When the Iranian planned, trained, equipped, and financed Hamas terrorist assault of Oct. 7 horrified decent people everywhere, President Biden was briefly positive about helping Israel. However, as is typical of the Biden Doctrine, once our ally began to win, Biden shifted away from Israel and expressed concern for Hamas and the people of Gaza who had sheltered and supported Hamas.

Following the Biden Doctrine of undermining our allies and comforting our enemies, Biden proposed that the city of Rafah should become a sanctuary city. This would allow the remainder of Hamas and its leadership a safe place to recoup and avoid being destroyed by Israeli forces.

The tension shifted into a confrontation between our ally and the American President.

Meanwhile, Biden supports aid to Ukraine and Israel – so long as it is not offset by spending cuts elsewhere and nothing is done to protect the American border. Keeping the American border open is such a high priority for Biden and the left that stalling aid to Israel and Ukraine is an acceptable price. Illegal immigrants coming into the United States is of higher value to Biden than protecting our allies.

Forty years ago, at the 1984 Republican Convention, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick presciently described what Biden and the Democrats have become. She called them the “Blame America first” Democrats.

She said no matter what happens around the world “They always blame America first.”

Kirkpatrick described the Democrat doctrine as being “Less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich – convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.” Quoting the great French analyst Jean Francois Revel, she said, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”

Today, there are American fanatics in Chicago chanting “Death to America.” In four cities, there are other fanatics occupying Google offices demanding that Google drop its contract that is helping Israel defend itself. It is easy to see the damage the Democrats’ moral relativism is doing.

If the Biden doctrine continues, we won’t have any more allies – and our enemies will be much stronger.

April 22, 2024>Omega4America    –  The Super Bowl of Election Interference – 2024> Newt Gingrich    –    Biden and the ‘Blame America First’ Democrats> Richard A. Epstein     –    For Israel, Forbearance Could Be Fatal> Eran Ortal        –         Israel’s First Total War and Its Ramifications The Super Bowl of Election Interference – 2024If you dry up the Leftist ballot inventory the beast can be stopped By: OMEGA4AMERICAApril 18, 2024(Emphasis added) 2024 is lining up to be the Super Bowl of election interference to stop Donald Trump. Every nefarious technique from 2020 is on deck and a bunch of new ones are stacking up. One reality ought to be perfectly clear – and isn’t: there is no way to clean voter rolls in the swing states in the time remaining to impact 2024. The only strategy which has promise – because it works every time it’s tried – is to identify where mail-in ballots are going to be sent, note the ineligible location is a gas station or a convenience store, and challenge that ADDRESS – NOW – to stop a ballot from being sent. If you dry up the ballot inventory, the beast dies. Every day we get calls and emails – one this morning from someone who ought to know better – asking if we can determine the dead voters from death records. Wake up. The dead vote is not impacting elections. The people who vote in Wisconsin and Florida – probably by mistake – are not impacting elections. These are trivial numbers. They do NOT MATTER. Quit screwing around looking for dead voters, voters who vote in multiple states. Stop the Leftist ballot manufacturing operation – it is the heart of all voter roll fraud. The 2024 election will be decided in large part by:ü Voters, registered at ineligible locations such as convenience stores, restaurants and literally hundreds of other non-residence locations – where loose ballots accumulate.ü Illegal aliens being registered in swing states – who then move on to the next swing state – with their ballots accumulating at some NGO location.ü NGOs – religious, civic, or generally do-gooder actively recruiting new voters and stashing them in addresses where ballots will collect and be voted – not by them but by the NGO. Their funding is hidden, tax free, flowing like a river. In all three examples – BALLOTS COLLECT. Those loose ballots are the ammo dump for the Leftists to out-ballot-harvest honest citizens who think ballot harvesting is now OK.ü The first advantage of the ADDRESS DRIVEN strategy is it works. It was this little technique that saved the Senator Ron Johnson seat in Wisconsin in 2022.ü The second advantage is that it sounds great. You are making the Leftists fight having a ballot sent to a 7-11 or a Citizens Bank or Quality Laundromat – even Republicans can win that argument.ü The third advantage is it can be carried out now – with only 7 months to go until November. The lists of every ineligible location – in every county – can be generated quickly, inexpensively, to a phone.ü The fourth advantage is that this is permanent. Leftists need addresses more than names. Think that through a bit. Names can be made up. Names can come from illegal alien transients – signing a form at an NGO location – regardless of age. Names come from transients – churches, shelters, RV Parks, third parties mindlessly registering voter names for dough. (Wisconsin) Names are impossible to check because so many Leftist voters are transient. ADDRESSES are a real pain for the Lefties.·      Addresses are kind of permanent.·      They have attributes – like restaurant or disco.·      They have photos which can be pretty nasty when shown at scale.Watch one of our videos and feel the impact of a warehouse – a dumpy one, falling apart – which is a listed voter roll location! So think through what happens when thousands of physical locations appear on an OFF LIMITS DATABASE on your phone, that tie to 250,000 Wisconsin voters? Leftists need to keep adding new fake voters at real addresses. Names are easy – addresses are hard – if their ineligibility becomes instantly visible. When you remove the ineligible addresses by OUTING them – Leftists must place the 35 people at the 1 bed, 1 bath shack. Comparing property rolls – that sticks out like a bulbous red nose! Leftists knew relational database tech was so hard to use they could stash hundreds of thousands of transient names at warehouses, empty strip malls and hundreds of other locations. Sure, some Republican sleuth might find a few, but the scale was impossible to thwart. They got greedy. Leftists put transients by the hundreds of thousands into these locations. Nobody knew. All the national voter integrity orgs use relational technology which is blind to padding voter rolls – that’s why they haven’t made a dent in 30 years! Now we know which addresses are ineligible – because we cross search property tax rolls. And once a location is identified by its corresponding property tax record as a Korean restaurant, in a stand alone building, having 12 registered voters with Spanish surnames – kind of doesn’t work any more. Now comes advantage five. Surprise! If the address-challenge strategy is implemented, at full scale – including publishing photos of these sketchy locations NOW, on every social media site – making the Left defend that ballot sent to a gas station – they are on their heels! Stop ballots going to those locations and where do the Lefties put those fake voters? It’s to late to move them – by the hundreds of thousands – to residential locations. When they try, we can tell instantly they did it. Sally and Dave on Elm Street might not be cool with the news that 18 former strip mall residents now live in their house. We know they moved there – as voters, not real residents, because we cross search voter rolls on different dates and we can congratulate Dave and Sally on their new household. Maybe send them a postcard with a photo of their address, and 20 voter IDs registered there. See, this is a game two can play. Republicans don’t have to stand back and take it – they can actually do something innovative – and surprising – and when it’s over, they will feel so much better about themselves. So wake up and stop the madness of cleaning voter rolls. You are not going to get them clean in time to impact 2024. The only people who promote this crap are the national voter integrity orgs who do not have any technology – they use obsolete relational technology – so they cannot cross search property tax rolls with voter rolls. Thus, these grifter groups, in permanent money raising mode, deny that cleaning voter rolls is a complete waste of time. It’s a waste of time for you – not for them. They can raise endless dough selling the “cleaning of voter rolls” as a solution – when it hasn’t had any impact in decades. Time is getting shorter. Now might be a great time to count the days until November 5 and evaluate what can be done to stop the steal – and seriously implement ADDRESS driven challenges to having mail-in ballots go out. After all, giving the Leftists a surprise for a change might make everyone feel a lot better.  Biden and the ‘Blame America First’DemocratsBy: Newt GingrichApril 18, 2024 When President Joe Biden warned Iran not to attack Israel with the single word “Don’t,” he was setting himself up to look foolish and weak. The Iranian theocratic dictatorship pays no heed to President Biden. Iran’s leaders have taken Biden’s measure over months of proxy warfare. Iran and its proxies have killed Americans, routinely fired at American bases and ships, and enthusiastically ignored every American effort to appease them. Biden’s done nothing. When he said “Don’t,” Iran did – with 335 drones and missiles. We might have expected some serious reaction from a president who had publicly instructed Iran not to attack. Instead, we got a pathetic, desperate, all-out Biden administration effort to convince the Israelis to claim a defensive victory and do nothing. Just as Biden ignored the Chinese Communist spy balloon gradually crossing the United States, he thought the Israelis should ignore 335 drones and missiles fired at their country. Watching the bizarre performance, it hit me that the Biden Doctrine is to cripple your allies and help your enemies. Consider the facts. As soon as Biden took office, he implemented policies that helped the anti-American Iranian dictatorship. They could chant “Death to America,” but he would send them money, release them from sanctions, and tolerate their strategy of waging war through proxies with no consequence. Even then, the Iranians and their puppets fired drones and missiles at American bases – killing some American military and wounding many more. There was no strong response from Biden. When the U.S. military warned President Biden that leaving Afghanistan too quickly would collapse the pro-American government, we spent 22 years developing, he ignored the advice. He moved so quickly, it guaranteed the Taliban would win the war. Then he claimed the disaster was the best evacuation in history. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden said supportive words about Ukraine but slow walked equipment and help. Furthermore, the Biden Doctrine demonstrated it was OK for Vladimir Putin to wage war on civilians, kidnap Ukrainian children, and destroy Ukrainian infrastructure. But Biden opposed any Ukrainian response that would involve attacking Russia. Defense was OK, but a serious offensive to win the war by hitting targets inside Russia was off limits. When the Iranian planned, trained, equipped, and financed Hamas terrorist assault of Oct. 7 horrified decent people everywhere, President Biden was briefly positive about helping Israel. However, as is typical of the Biden Doctrine, once our ally began to win, Biden shifted away from Israel and expressed concern for Hamas and the people of Gaza who had sheltered and supported Hamas. Following the Biden Doctrine of undermining our allies and comforting our enemies, Biden proposed that the city of Rafah should become a sanctuary city. This would allow the remainder of Hamas and its leadership a safe place to recoup and avoid being destroyed by Israeli forces. The tension shifted into a confrontation between our ally and the American President. Meanwhile, Biden supports aid to Ukraine and Israel – so long as it is not offset by spending cuts elsewhere and nothing is done to protect the American border. Keeping the American border open is such a high priority for Biden and the left that stalling aid to Israel and Ukraine is an acceptable price. Illegal immigrants coming into the United States is of higher value to Biden than protecting our allies. Forty years ago, at the 1984 Republican Convention, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick presciently described what Biden and the Democrats have become. She called them the “Blame America first” Democrats. She said no matter what happens around the world “They always blame America first.” Kirkpatrick described the Democrat doctrine as being “Less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich – convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.” Quoting the great French analyst Jean Francois Revel, she said, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.” Today, there are American fanatics in Chicago chanting “Death to America.” In four cities, there are other fanatics occupying Google offices demanding that Google drop its contract that is helping Israel defend itself. It is easy to see the damage the Democrats’ moral relativism is doing. If the Biden doctrine continues, we won’t have any more allies – and our enemies will be much stronger.  For Israel, Forbearance Could Be Fatal By: Richard A. EpsteinHoover Institution – defining ideasApril 16, 2024 Drones and missiles from Iran spearheaded a large but largely unsuccessful attack in the Negev and the Golan Heights. Launched in retaliation for the attack of April 1, in which Israel took out seven generals and advisers in a military compound in Damascus, the attack came as no surprise—Iranian leaders have said for more years than one can count that their goal is the extermination of the Jewish state, along with, it appears, its entire population. But on this occasion, the Iranian objective was more muted. Iran announced in advance that at least for the short run, it would refrain from further attacks unless attacks by Israel or the United States were launched against them. But given the long-term risks, there is no time to be complacent. It is all too clear that when oligarchs make statements of that sort, they intend to execute them. This, in turn, dictates the strategies that have to be performed in reply. Thus, in dealing with potential allies and friends, the optimal strategy is—to use the common parlance—to put your best foot forward. Note that this cautious strategy does not require you to lose your balance. Rather, it indicates a willingness to go forward to the next level of commitment if there is a positive response. Your potential trading partner then puts his or her best foot forward as well. In such arrangements, it is possible that after several iterations one side (perhaps even you) will choose to defect, but with each round the relationship ideally becomes more stable. Both sides have large potential gains from trade, so that a defection that brings a short-term benefit will carry with it the loss of expected future gains, and as those get larger the probability of defection goes down. One common example of the situation is in the contract at will, where it is understood from the very title that each party is allowed to pull out of any forward commitment without penalty. And yet these arrangements tend to last for long periods, through patterns of slow evolution. In international affairs, the game is far more complicated because each nation is not a single individual but a coalition of multiple groups that keep to a stable course, such that if the coalition gets fractured, the losses could be enormous. This is why bipartisan support for these deals is needed to overcome discontinuities with the shift in dominant power, and why Pax Americana, like Pax Britannia before it, is necessary to hold that coalition together. A breakdown in unity has been evident for at least a generation in the United States, which explains in part our reduced effectiveness in international affairs. In this setting, no nation has the luxury of picking out the best trading partners, as can be done in private markets (where all others are under a strict injunction not to disrupt current contracts or use force or guile to prevent formation of new ones). Instead, there is an enormous range of players, some friendly and others hostile. The use of the best foot forward has no place in dealing with hostile players, as the risk is that the moment that foot is put forward, it will be lopped off, with no gain in response. Instead, the strategic dimension is transformed so that the only moves that are made are those that leave you better off if the party on the other side accepts, and leaves you no worse off even if they decline and take a strategy intended to inflict maximum pain. As a matter of principle, any appeasement—defined here as a concession made without obtaining some strategic advantage—is sure to fail, and probably in the short term. The swarm of Iranian drones and missiles was therefore no surprise, given that the United States has adopted for many years weak positions with major concessions in the vain hope that carrots without sticks would be able to conjure an improvement. Thus, after a strong recovery in the last years of President George W. Bush in Iraq, the Obama years were marked with a general retreat when the United States negotiated the nuclear arms deal with Iran in 2015. The Obama administration showered concession upon concession to persuade Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons program, despite every breach of promises by the Iranians on inspections. Indeed, the only reason the arrangement did not disintegrate sooner was that the Israelis were able to sabotage some of the Iranian nuclear weapons as the United States continued with its carrots-only approach of sending many billions of dollars to Iran under the Obama and Biden administrations. Donald Trump may not have been perfect on these issues, but he credibly held that he would be able to arrange a better US-Iran deal than the one he canceled. Amid the return to strategic appeasement and supposed neutrality, Hamas attacked Israel with pitiless force by breaking an existing cease-fire on October 7, 2023. At that point, the only meaningful response was what Israel resolved and the United States has tried to block: a maximum effort to wipe out Hamas. There are no intermediate solutions that could prove stable, for as long as Hamas is in power, it will break the next cease-fire with the same impunity. US foreign policy has made two grave mistakes after its initial burst of support for Israel. First, it has pushed hard for a cease-fire that can accomplish nothing, for in prolonging the war the precarious position of the civilian population becomes riskier than before. Meanwhile, the prolonged fighting reduces the resources that Israel has to mount its defenses against Hezbollah and Iran, while giving Iran additional time to smuggle weapons to the West Bank in the hopes of stirring up political instability and worse. Nor does a cease-fire allow for any rebuilding to take place or any new government to form, as the choice of the corrupt Palestinian Authority is a nonstarter, and the prospect of a demilitarized state for Palestinians is but a way station on the road to the extinction of Israel.  As John Spencer has long documented, the Israeli offensive in Gaza has been notable for its general precision, while Hamas has violated every requirement of the law of war in ways that increased, perhaps intentionally, the number of civilian deaths, including by using human shields, fighting out of uniforms, and locating bases of operations near hospitals and other facilities, all on top of a tunnel system that has cost billions to create and maintain. There is also a propaganda war: a power that is prepared to use barbaric force will not hesitate also to wield lies and exaggerations, including the endless accusations of Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. The current but limited hostilities between Iran and Israel have their roots in the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021. The bungled withdrawal set the stage by turning a stable situation into a moral and social catastrophe, which continues unabated to the present day. The signals were unmistakable, and Hamas and Iran read the tea leaves. They have gained huge leverage because US leaders think the United States  can remain “neutral” by continuing to bargain with Hamas, which easily moves the goalposts with each new Western concession. None of this should have happened. The hesitation of the United States and its allies will prolong the war and result in more deaths and dislocations than a uniform, firm response by Israel and all its squeamish allies. It is therefore incomprehensible that the New York Times should be calling for the United States to limit weapons supplies to Israel until it reforms its practices in Gaza. The Times seems to think Hamas has done nothing to put its own people in danger by its endless succession of bad acts. It is perverse to claim that this drastic curtailment of arms is needed now because “the war in Gaza has taken an enormous toll in human lives, with a cease-fire still out of reach and many hostages still held captive.” Indeed, these are just the reasons why the attack on Rafeh should proceed, so that this dreadful conflict can reach a just and quick conclusion. Israel’s First Total War And Its Ramifications For the first time, Israel is committed not onlyto the defeat of the enemy’s forces but also tothe annihilation of its regime. That is one reasonthe Gaza war proves to be a long war of attrition. By: Eran OrtalThe Caravan NotebookApril 19, 2024 For the first time, Israel is committed not only to the defeat of the enemy’s forces but also to the annihilation of its regime. That is one reason the Gaza war proves to be a long war of attrition. It is the consequence of not only the Oct 7th catastrophe, and a years-long policy of appeasement but also the gradual derailment of Israel’s defense strategy. What is needed now is a reform aimed at restoring IDF’s decisive battlefield capabilities, without which we face the impossible dilemma of living with further hostilities building up on our borders or a Gaza-like war on a greater scale in  Lebanon.  As war is making its comeback to history everywhere, the West should take note of  Israel’s endeavors.  In his book, The Culture of Military Innovation (Stanford 2010), Dima Adamsky refers to the Israeli strategic culture as one of tactical excellence and innovation on the one hand and theoretical incapacity on the other. Many of us, including Adamsky, himself, saw that culture as changing for the better. Unfortunately, the multi-front Gaza war exposed the inadequacies of that change – too little too late. The war in Gaza is a showcase for the sharp contrast between IDF’s superb performance in the offensive phase in Gaza, and the clear mismanagement of the war at the higher military and political levels. While that gap is apparent for all observers to see, what is less obvious is the failings of Israel’s three-decades-long strategy which collided with the changing circumstances. Analyzing the war from that perspective does not relieve Israeli leadership today of the October 7th disaster, the protracted nature of the war, and the ongoing hostage crisis. However, It does enable a deeper look into our strategic position and hopefully provides for better learning and adaptation. Israel’s first total warBy “total war” I do not mean to say that Israel is engaged in a 20th-century style conflict between nations that involves the industrial base, cities, and population of both sides and the unlimited use of all weapons at hand. In fact, I cannot think of a more bizarre case where a nation, after experiencing an attack such as occurred on  Oct 7 is fighting the enemy on one hand and seeing to the delivery of food, medicine, water, fuels, and even internet communication to the enemy’s population on the other. Needless to say, Hamas’s fighting force is the number one beneficiary of that flow of commodities. What total war here refers to is the complete contrast between Israel’s limited wars of the past and the present one. It is the first war in our history where the aim is not simply to remove the immediate military threat to Israel and end the fighting quickly, but rather it is a commitment to the annihilation of both the military force and the political regime of the enemy. Let it be clear: this is a just and necessary war. Nevertheless, it does drag Israel into a war of attrition that clearly overwhelms the capacity of the IDF and Israel to sustain military, civilian, and international efforts. So the real question at hand is how Israel cornered itself in this dead-end situation. The most apparent answers will be the failures that led directly to Oct 7 such as the lack of early warning, followed by the devastating collapse of the thinly deployed  IDF forces on that day. On a strategic level, however, the question is how did we allow the build-up of the Hamas army on our border? Even the shameful policy of appeasement towards Hamas, a policy as old as Hamas’s rule over Gaza (2007) does not provide a complete answer. If we are to learn anything beyond the political blame game that is tearing Israel apart, we should search even further. Three disruptions put Israel’s traditional defense strategy out of balance. Just as Adamsky described it, while the IDF was relatively quick to adapt tactically, the strategic flaws were overlooked and the more profound military change that was needed was delayed. That is a process that originated in the days of the Israeli-held security zone in south Lebanon in the 1990s. David & GoliathThe most basic observation of Israeli strategy and doctrine in the 50’s was the fact that we cannot change the nature of the conflict by force. We cannot defeat the Arab coalition in the way the Allies defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. So the small state of Israel devised a modest strategy:ü We will only aim for a military, not a political defeat of our adversaries. ü To do that, we will concentrate all resources and personnel in a short decisive war effort that will take the war to the other side to remove the immediate threat. ü We will make all efforts to avoid protracted warfare we cannot sustain. Fast-forward to the 1990’s and circumstances seemed to have profoundly changed. The Soviet Union had just fallen, further weakening its Arab clients, Egypt had withdrawn from the Arab coalition, and the IDF was one of the most modern militaries on the planet with cutting-edge targeting and airpower precision strike capabilities. And yet, faced with guerrilla warfare in southern Lebanon, Israel’s strategy was disrupted. Protecting our northern border from within southern Lebanon has led to prolonged warfare with new Lebanese factions. Moving the battle to the other side now proved more of a problem than a solution. A new strategy was starting to emerge. Never to be officially put in words or on paper, its preferred principles were simple:·      Israel’s advantage lies in airpower.·      Decisive battlefield maneuvering is impractical in the new context. Fortunately, it is also unnecessary.·      Israel is now the Goliath of the equation. Indeed, it is a regional power. We can and should engage in a war of attrition, rather than finding a way to remove the emerging threat.·      Guerillas are inherently less sensitive to airpower. So, Israel’s strategy will be one of coercion, aimed at a “responsible state address” such as Lebanon or Syria, hosting or supporting them. Gradually, three processes took place:·      Airpower coercion became the securing base for the strategic deconfliction strategy practiced with the withdrawal from Lebanon (2000) and disengagement from Gaza (2005).·      The IDF became a formidable targeting machine. Later other excellent tactical adaptations to the deteriorating situation, like air-defense systems, were achieved. Seen as a thing of the past, ground forces were largely left behind.·      Unaffected by the new strategic theory, the adversaries have grown from small guerrilla entities to full-scale militaries based directly on our borders. Rather than responding to  Israel as a superpower, the other side simply enhanced its ability to inflict damage on our cities and disrupt peace on our borders. By the early 2000’s Israeli leadership talked about deterrence but was simultaneously deterred itself. The much-talked-of air campaign Israel has engaged in in Syria since 2012 only serves to highlight the lack of Israeli willingness to stop the entrenchment and armament of Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and Lebanon. The big disruptionsThree major disruptions led to the derailment of Israel’s traditional strategy:ü Control over foreign hostile populated areas, like South Lebanon or the Gaza Strip, has proven to drag Israel into undesired prolonged warfare.ü Rockets and missiles have proven to be the ultimate strategic equalizer working against Israel’s military superiority. ü Holding Israeli cities hostage, they have made it possible for the weaker side to deter Israel from decisive operations, allowing the unhindered build-up of forces by Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas. It also rendered the withdrawal strategy useless as the rockets were aimed and fired at Israeli civilians from deep within Lebanon and Gaza. As for Iran – we went to bed in the 90s with some small and isolated guerrillas on our borders. One day we woke up realizing these are the paws of a huge Iranian tiger. We were thinking of ourselves as a Goliath gradually degrading weaker adversaries, only to learn we are in a war of attrition with a giant via its proxies. Therefore it turns out that our main disruption was not from our adversaries but from within. Short-sighted policy from most Israeli governments helped, but the roots of  the deterioration lay in false optimistic assumptions that were not challenged sufficiently: Can airpower really sustain a strategy by itself?Can Israel sustain the strategic competition with Iran while conducting attrition warfare with its growing proxies on its borders? Progressives and OrthodoxWe have favored a false theoretical framework, never to become official and truly challenged, and the comfort of doing more and better of the same. We have made huge tactical improvements but failed to make more profound adjustments to our theories and capabilities. One can make that statement based on the IDF’s concept of victory from 2020 when it was given official recognition. That concept was supposed to be a vital first step for a military modernization plan. The plan was aimed at the reconstruction of the traditional defense strategy with decisive victory on the battlefield at its focal point. A variety of capabilities and organizational changes were planned to target the enemy’s distant fire and trajectories by utilizing modernized ground forces as well as air assets. Unfortunately, it turned out to be too little too late. For too long the strategic environment and actual threats were rapidly changing for the worse. Israel’s strategic and military thinking was stuck between two opposing schools of thought. The first school created a framework of false assumptions that allowed the comfort of kicking the can down the road. The concept of engineering our adversaries’ intentions rather than preempting their capabilities failed. These schools of thought can be described as “strategic progressives“, turning wishful thinking into a strategy. Reacting against that, the other school can be labeled “military orthodoxy“, denying the change of circumstances altogether. It called for bigger ground forces and a more aggressive approach with the unpromising prospects of house-to-house fighting to clear the enemy from Lebanon. This was a twentieth-century attrition approach to deal with the twenty-first-century challenge of a dispersed enemy with long-range capability. Policymakers, from all sides of the political map, thought that cure was worse than the disease. ConclusionCornered now into a long total war against the Hamas regime, Israel can hardly sustain the effort needed and has no good solutions for the simultaneous threat from Lebanon. In contrast to its self-image as a regional power, Israel re-discovered its basic limits. As successful, flourishing, and technologically advanced as we grew up to be, we are still only David. Israel is not capable of politically engineering our neighborhood, not even in the small Gaza Strip. The failure is far from being tactical or local. Rather than adapting to a new set of military threats within the correct framework of Israeli defense strategy, we have insisted on living in a dream world where terror organizations have state-like responsibility and Israel is a regional power that cannot be beaten. From the three disruptions mentioned, the tangible one we can militarily work with is the second – arms fire, missiles, and rockets. Defeat that, and there is no Iranian ring of fire nor an adversary capable of deterring Israel from preempting threats. We can and should come up with an approach that does exactly that. That approach may be of great interest for the West as it is faced with similar military challenges. The Russian war over Ukraine has come to be a war of attrition dominated by long-range weapons. China’s strategy relies on deterring a possible US response for an armed provocation as its ranged A2AD missiles are deployed and aimed at any approaching navy and air force assets. If we can contribute valid and substantial ideas and capabilities to change that for the better, it could also facilitate a fresh restart for Israel internationally. Brigadier General (Ret.) Ortal is the author of The Battle Before the War (Modan and the Ministry of Defense 2022, Hebrew) which deals with change and the need for change in the IDF. He now teaches Defense Strategy at Reichman University, serves as a senior consultant for strategy and technology at the Israeli MOD, and is a senior fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.  If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

The Wisdom of Thomas JeffersonApril 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826 “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe,  we shall become as corrupt as Europe.” “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those  who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”  “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.  A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.”  “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the  government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”  “ My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.” “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.” “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”  “To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”  Thomas Jefferson said in 1802:  ”I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…”

 

Gaza: Truths Behind All the Lies

By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

March 28, 2024

“Occupied Gaza.” Prior to October 7, there were roughly two million Arab citizens of Israel but no Jewish citizens in Gaza. Gazans in 2006 voted in Hamas to rule them. It summarily executed its Palestinian Authority rivals. Hamas cancelled all future scheduled elections. It established a dictatorship and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid to build a vast underground labyrinth of military installations.

So Gaza has been occupied by Hamas, not Israel, for two decades.

“Collateral Damage.” Hamas began the war by deliberately targeting civilians. It massacred them on October 7 when it invaded Israel during a time of peace and holidays. It sent more than 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities for the sole purpose of killing noncombatants. It has no vocabulary for the collateral damage of Israeli civilians, since it believes any Jewish death under any circumstances is cause for celebration.

Hamas places its terrorist centers beneath and inside hospitals, schools, and mosques. Why? Israel is assumed to have more reservations about collaterally hitting Gaza civilians than Hamas does exposing them as human shields.

“Disproportionate.” We are told Israel wrongly uses disproportionate force to retaliate in Gaza. But it does so because no nation can win a war without disproportionate violence that hurts the enemy more than it is hurt by the enemy.

The U.S. incinerated German and Japanese cities with disproportionate force to end a war both Axis powers started. The American military in Iraq nearly leveled Fallujah and Mosul by disproportional force to root out Islamic gunmen hiding among innocents. Hamas has objections to disproportionate violence—but only when it is achieved by Israel and not Hamas.

“Two-state solution.” Prior to October 7, there was a de facto three-state solution, given that Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza were all separate states ruled by their own governments, two of which were illegitimate without scheduled elections.

It was not Israel, but the people of Gaza and the West Bank who institutionalized the “from river to the sea” agenda of destroying its neighbor.

Israel would have been content to live next to an autonomous Arab Gaza and West Bank that did not seek to destroy Israel in their multigenerational efforts to form their own “one-state solution.”

“Ceasefire.” The so-called international community is demanding Israel agree to a “ceasefire.” But there was already a ceasefire prior to October 7. Hamas broke it by massacring 1,200 Jews and taking over 250 hostages.

Hamas violated that peace because it thought it could gain leverage over Israel by murdering Jews.

Hamas now demands another ceasefire because it thinks it is no longer able to murder more unarmed Jews. Instead, it now fears that Israel will destroy Hamas in the way Hamas sought but failed to destroy Israel.

Did Hamas call for a cease-fire after the first 500 Jews it massacred on October 7?

“Ramadan.” Joe Biden believes that the Muslim religious holiday of Ramadan requires Israel to agree to a ceasefire.

But did either Hamas or any other Arab military ever respect Jewish—or even its own—religious holidays?

The October 7 massacre was timed to catch Israelis unaware while celebrating the Jewish religious holidays of Simchat Torah, Shemini Torah, and Shemini Atzeret on Shabbat.

Moreover, Hamas’s surprise attack was deliberately timed to commemorate the earlier sneak Arab attack on Israel some 50 years earlier.

On October 6, 1973, the Israelis were the target of a surprise attack when celebrating the religious holiday of Yom Kippur. Arab armies also assumed they would achieve greater surprise when attacking during their own religious holiday of Ramadan.

So, Arab militaries fight opportunistically both during Jewish and their own Islamic holidays. Egyptians and Syrians still boast of their 1973 surprise attack on Israel as the “Ramadan War.”

Only Westerners, not Arabs, believe there should be no war during Ramadan.

“Civilian Casualties.” Israel risks the lives of its soldiers to prevent civilian deaths. Hamas risks the lives of its civilians to prevent terrorists’ deaths. Israel considers it a failure, and Hamas considers it globally advantageous when more civilians die than its soldiers.

“Foreign Aid.” The Biden administration threatens to cut off or slow-walk aid to Israel if it continues to retaliate against Hamas even though they started the war. So the administration promises to give more aid to Gaza after the October 7 Hamas massacres than it gave to Gaza before them.

“Prisoners.” The international community that favors Hamas, nevertheless, knows it would be safer to be a prisoner of Israel than of Hamas. It knows women are not going to be raped in custody by Israelis but are by Hamas. And the unarmed are more likely to be mutilated and decapitated by Hamas than Israelis.

Is the international community more likely to charge Israel than Hamas for war crimes because the Jewish state seeks to avoid civilian deaths that Hamas finds useful?

March 21, 2024Special EditionWhen and How Did We Get Here?Gradually, then Suddenly.By: Victor Davis Hanson Part One –  March 12, 2024Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—have either doubled the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse. So our presidents, in how individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat. It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary. So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly? First, we must concede the “gradually,” given we have been in decline for a long, slow time—printing money, turning our schools into feel-good therapeutics rather than rigorous learning, destroying merit, contextualizing crime, embracing racial tribalism and chauvinism, allowing our roads, reservoirs, and bridges to decay, weaponizing our agencies from the CIA and FBI to the IRS and Pentagon. No good could have come from jettisoning civic education, history, languages, science, and math—and crowding them out with the social sciences and their bastard children of -studies courses (black studies, green studies, queer studies, Chicano studies, etc., etc.) and faddish classes on comic books, social media, sports, and popular culture from rap music to TikTok. How did we end up with our elite universities amassing multi-billion-dollar tax-free endowments while the government is in hock for $2 trillion in student loans, with 30% of them nonperforming? All that was the “gradual,” but why in 2020 did the decaying nation suddenly start to implode? In the last four years, we discovered there is no free speech on campus, but plenty of anti-Semitism and tribal hatreds. We learned that our entire system of jurisprudence was hijacked by critical legal and critical race theory jackals, who either did not charge violent lawbreakers with crimes or let those out who were convicted or both. We now expect the Left to remove their opponents from ballots or to use the courts to achieve what they cannot through the ballot. When did these new Soviet versions of McCarthyism, the Salem Witch trials, and medieval iconoclasm take over—doxing, deplatforming, shadow banning, ghosting, ostracizing, erasing perceived rivals and opponents? When did the increasingly unmarried, childless, hook-up/break-up young males become the near norm—disengaging to stagnate amid video games in their parent’s basements? What were the forces that caused the statue toppling, the name changing, and the Trotskization of our past? Since when did states encourage 70 percent of their voters not to show up on Election Day, present an ID, and do their civic duty? Who destroyed the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Grammys? What turned the NBA of Julius Erving and Michael Jordan into the buffoonery of LeBron James? How did a mediocrity like Colin Kaepernick gain such attention for dishonoring the symbols of his country? Where did the Squad and its hatred of the American past come from? Why did corporations lavish tens of millions of dollars upon the thieving architects of the racist Black Lives Matter? Why did we allow Antifa to burn and destroy our cities? Why did the border simply disappear? Why did we canonize the law-breaking illegal alien and ignore the law-abiding legal immigrant? Since when were defecation, urination, injection, and fornication OK on our public streets—if committed by the homeless? And since when did Mexico, the cartels, and China face no repercussions for lacing all sorts of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs with fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year with impunity? Why does the government shut down its cheap energy sources, outlaw clean-burning natural gas stoves, and try to ban efficient gasoline and diesel engines? Was Afghanistan planned, given such lethal incompetence would be hard to replicate? Why was not the Chinese spy balloon shot down on day one of crossing into U.S. airspace? How and why did the most lethal military in history fly from Afghanistan, abandoning billions in weaponry to terrorists? How did Iran simply take over the Middle East through the bloodwork of its terrorist tentacles? So what exactly caused this “suddenly” that followed the “gradually”?  Part Two – March 13, 2024Our nation’s change into something unrecognizable just four years ago had a few precursors and catalysts. The first was the Obama administration’s redefining of American norms. Before Obama, “racial relations” were largely defined as the historical 12 percent black/88 percent “non-black” dichotomy, in the context of dealing with the sins of southern slavery and Jim Crow and widespread discrimination—and the quest to make race incidental not essential to us all. Sixty years of serial Civil Rights acts, affirmative action, increased integration and assimilation, interaction, and intermarriage, and “content of your character, not the color of your skin” mentalities were all working toward an ecumenical society, in which soon we would not consider race relevant to who were are and instead focus on the individual not the collective. “Climate change” took over from “global warming” as Al Gore/John Kerry were unleashed. Suddenly clean-burning natural gas was a culprit, a fossil fuel supposedly wrongly disguised as a valuable transition fuel. Abroad, Iran was redefined as the oppressed Persian, Shiite counterweight to the overdog Gulf monarchies and Zionist Israel. We then would green-light a “Shiite Crescent”—Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza—that would balance our former pro-Western allies, Israel in particular. We then from time to time, as the rivalry heated up, would adjudicate the ensuing creative tension. America would be the honest broker with no real preference for a democratic Western Israel or pro-American autocratic governments in the Gulf, Jordan, or Egypt. A second catalyst in the “sudden” transformation of America was the ill-fated COVID-19 lockdowns, the first time in American history that the entire nation went into quarantine. The result, as we can finally see in retrospect, was a disaster in almost every dimension: increased suicides, spousal/familial/substance abuse, economic ruin, increased psycho-social problems, social polarization, unsustainable federal spending, and deficits, destruction of a critical two-years of K-12 education for millions of our school-aged children, universities shut down, GDP in freefall, and unemployment up. Yet in retrospect, the Swedish model of focusing on the vulnerable and elderly while keeping society open and functioning cost no more lives than COVID-19 but saved millions from life-long disastrous consequences of lockdowns. In the case of the U.S., millions were shut inside their homes, distant from human interaction. They became inert and dependent on their computers, cell phones, Zoom links, and televisions for news, communications, and information. The result was a caged, paranoid society now prone to rumor, hysteria, and fits of passive-aggressive mania. Without human interaction and conversation, a nation of 330 million recluses after a year or two became susceptible to what followed the death of George Floyd. Part Three – March 15, 2024The third catalyst that fueled our sudden madness and melted down the country was the aftermath of the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The eight-time felon was reportedly arrested after trying to pass counterfeit bills. He resisted arrest, was likely under the influence of recent (or very recent) fentanyl ingestion and amphetamine drugs, and suffered from cardiovascular disease and recent COVID sequelae. He tragically died in police custody purportedly due to asphyxiation and cardiac arrest caused by a police officer using a knee to compress his neck for nearly 10 minutes—a finding challenged in antithetical autopsies. The seemingly cruel grimace on the face of Officer Chauvin and his failure to stand down as Floyd claimed he was breathless were the matches that lit the ensuing explosions. The actual details of Floyd’s death mattered little to the public. Much less important were statistics that showed unarmed African Americans died no more commonly than whites from police, at least when their respective incidence of arrests and encounters were factored in. No matter. Murals appeared of Floyd with a halo and angel wings from Washington, D.C. to Kabul. Politicians damned the police in general. What followed were 120 days of mass rioting, looting, arson, murder, assault, and random violence that resulted in $2 billion in property damage, 1,500 injured police officers, 14,000 arrests (most subsequently let go or never charged), and 35-40 dead. The non-ending riot was egged on and led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and encouraged by the likes of Kamala Harris (“They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day.” Note how fact-checkers preposterously claimed she meant only the peaceful protests, even as the streets were burning and mass looting was then the norm). In fear of the civilizational meltdown, terrified blue-state mayors and governors would not stop the madness, but pandered to and appeased it. We talk now about the crime of entering unlawfully the Capitol Rotunda (though not when protesting on behalf of Hamas), but shrug on the news that the 2020 mobs torched a police precinct, federal courthouse, the iconic St. John’s Episcopal Church, and tried to storm the White House grounds and get to the president, who was whisked away to the presidential bunker. (Is not an attempt to storm the White House grounds analogous to January 6th? Or perhaps the more recent pro-Hamas mob effort to block the presidential motor entourage to the Capitol that resulted in Biden delaying his State of the Union address for 20 minutes!). The New York Times laughed at Trump’s supposed cowardice of being escorted below, rather than condemning the insurrectionary act of trying to take over the White House grounds. Somehow all those violent months were “largely peaceful” and “a summer of love” while the buffoonish January 6th afternoon was an “insurrection” and “the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War.” In fear that our cities would go up in smoke, suddenly the cooped-up nation went nuts—defunding the police, hiring thousands of DEI commissars on campuses and in corporations, capitalizing “Black,” and turning over downtown streets to weeks-long occupation by the mob. Universities began reparatory admissions. Stanford restricted its white quota to 20-21 percent of its incoming classes and published the fact, proud of its new Kendi-“anti-racism” racism. Universities ditched the SAT after decades. New faculty were hired in various grievance studies. In some sense, this was the hour of the opportunist and the time of the manipulator and the careerist. George Soros stepped up his strategies of lavishing funds on critical legal theory prosecutors in otherwise usually below-the-radar elections—to ensure as many cities as possible would allow criminals to commit violence without ramifications. Fakers and grifters came out of the woodwork—from Professor Kendi to the shake-down artists of Black Lives Matter. Suddenly, publishing companies, Hollywood, corporations, and foundations competed in virtue signaling with each other to pour money into anti-policing causes, to create faculty and administrative positions, to solicit scripts and books—all to spread the lie that the United States was a systemically racist nation. Suddenly the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Chief of Naval Operations were revising their curricula to include Black Lives Matter nonsense while promising to hunt down “white supremacists” in the ranks. Two years later in December 2023, the Pentagon quietly released its internal investigation report that found no such cabal—but not before alienating thousands of would-be white-male soldiers who no longer wanted any of the new summer of 2020 military, and were certainly no longer willing to die in combat at twice their percentage of the population only to be libeled as conspiracists and insurrectionists or drummed out as “anti-vaxers.” Part Four – March 19, 2024The final catalyst that led to our collective implosion was the election year 2020 and the accelerating Trump Derangement Syndrome. As the cities burned, unbelievable madness followed in efforts to ensure the incumbent president would not be reelected. Suddenly, congressional officials, mayors, and governors all refused to keep the peace by requesting federal troops to stop the summer riots. The more the cities went up in flames, the more the blue states blamed Trump. It was almost as if they would fault Trump for the ongoing violence and blame him even more if he sent in the military to quell it. Had they forgotten the Rodney King LA riots of 1992, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Colin Powell, called up President George H. W. Bush to encourage him to deploy the 5,000 Marines then ready to go into South Central and Watts to quell the violence? And so, Bush did just that and stopped the mass looting and rioting. No matter. The nation was now a Luche Libre of open anti-Trump craziness. Mark Zuckerberg poured in a historic $419 million to absorb the work of the registrars in key election precincts. Social media suppressed news unfavorable to Biden. Street riots and protests were modulated to aid the Biden campaign. Liberal Time essayist Molly Ball described the “conspiracy”: There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises resulted from an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy. Seventy percent of the electorate in many states voted by mail before Election Day (with a radical drop in the rate of rejected ballots), in the greatest revolution in national balloting in our history. Or as Ball gushed:Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks… Shortly after the first debate Trump got Covid—to the delight of his opponents—and was hospitalized (and may have been stricken during the actual debate itself). Biden had sought refuge in the Covid lockdowns to justify his eight-to-noon basement campaign, and there were only two debates. Trump lost the first, Biden the second—but the latter took place after 60 million people had already voted. In nineteenth-century front porch style and for the first time in a century, a major party candidate outsourced his entire campaign to subordinates, in Biden’s case the media, big money, and leftwing politicos. Suddenly, our retired generals were libeling their president as a veritable Nazi and a fascist. We were to learn later that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley had called up his Chinese communist counterpart to apprise the Chinese military that in times of international crises, Milley, now both general and apparently certified psychiatrist, would diagnose Trump, and if he was found unstable, would not necessarily follow his presidential orders but instead warn the Chinese. The FBI? It too was now actively paying Twitter and Facebook contractors to suppress the news to aid the Biden campaign. Its last three directors had either lied to federal investigators or pled amnesia when grilled before Congress. The CIA Director and the Director of National Intelligence under Obama had both lied under oath—with impunity. And now the two cheered on the lie that Trump was a “Russian asset.” The CIA? Its retired “authorities” had gone over to the dark side. They now organized 50 former intelligence officers knowingly to lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.” That whopper they knew to be a lie, given the FBI had the laptop and had already authenticated it, but kept it tightly in their control. Leon Panetta, ex-CIA director, was assuring us that the Russians fabricated the embarrassing information in the Hunter Biden laptop. Whom to trust? What followed by 2023 were attempts to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot, to use lawfare to bankrupt, to indict, to convict, and to jail him before the election. Democrats were mobilizing to find ways to stop the certification of the 2024 election should Trump win—pretty much what they had accused Trump of doing in 2020. The country might have been able to remain unchanged as it recovered from the revolutionary seeds that Obama has sewn over his eight years in office. It might have survived its national quarantine and lockdown. It could have endured the George Floyd riots and the mass racial hysteria that followed them. And it might have sustained the Trump Derangement Syndrome and Election Day insanity. But it was not able to overcome all four incitements and goads. And so, what had been “gradual” became “sudden.” The result is that America has never been the same since. If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

March 21, 2024Special EditionWhen and How Did We Get Here?Gradually, then Suddenly.By: Victor Davis Hanson Part One –  March 12, 2024Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—have either doubled the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse. So our presidents, in how individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat. It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary. So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly? First, we must concede the “gradually,” given we have been in decline for a long, slow time—printing money, turning our schools into feel-good therapeutics rather than rigorous learning, destroying merit, contextualizing crime, embracing racial tribalism and chauvinism, allowing our roads, reservoirs, and bridges to decay, weaponizing our agencies from the CIA and FBI to the IRS and Pentagon. No good could have come from jettisoning civic education, history, languages, science, and math—and crowding them out with the social sciences and their bastard children of -studies courses (black studies, green studies, queer studies, Chicano studies, etc., etc.) and faddish classes on comic books, social media, sports, and popular culture from rap music to TikTok. How did we end up with our elite universities amassing multi-billion-dollar tax-free endowments while the government is in hock for $2 trillion in student loans, with 30% of them nonperforming? All that was the “gradual,” but why in 2020 did the decaying nation suddenly start to implode? In the last four years, we discovered there is no free speech on campus, but plenty of anti-Semitism and tribal hatreds. We learned that our entire system of jurisprudence was hijacked by critical legal and critical race theory jackals, who either did not charge violent lawbreakers with crimes or let those out who were convicted or both. We now expect the Left to remove their opponents from ballots or to use the courts to achieve what they cannot through the ballot. When did these new Soviet versions of McCarthyism, the Salem Witch trials, and medieval iconoclasm take over—doxing, deplatforming, shadow banning, ghosting, ostracizing, erasing perceived rivals and opponents? When did the increasingly unmarried, childless, hook-up/break-up young males become the near norm—disengaging to stagnate amid video games in their parent’s basements? What were the forces that caused the statue toppling, the name changing, and the Trotskization of our past? Since when did states encourage 70 percent of their voters not to show up on Election Day, present an ID, and do their civic duty? Who destroyed the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Grammys? What turned the NBA of Julius Erving and Michael Jordan into the buffoonery of LeBron James? How did a mediocrity like Colin Kaepernick gain such attention for dishonoring the symbols of his country? Where did the Squad and its hatred of the American past come from? Why did corporations lavish tens of millions of dollars upon the thieving architects of the racist Black Lives Matter? Why did we allow Antifa to burn and destroy our cities? Why did the border simply disappear? Why did we canonize the law-breaking illegal alien and ignore the law-abiding legal immigrant? Since when were defecation, urination, injection, and fornication OK on our public streets—if committed by the homeless? And since when did Mexico, the cartels, and China face no repercussions for lacing all sorts of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs with fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year with impunity? Why does the government shut down its cheap energy sources, outlaw clean-burning natural gas stoves, and try to ban efficient gasoline and diesel engines? Was Afghanistan planned, given such lethal incompetence would be hard to replicate? Why was not the Chinese spy balloon shot down on day one of crossing into U.S. airspace? How and why did the most lethal military in history fly from Afghanistan, abandoning billions in weaponry to terrorists? How did Iran simply take over the Middle East through the bloodwork of its terrorist tentacles? So what exactly caused this “suddenly” that followed the “gradually”?  Part Two – March 13, 2024Our nation’s change into something unrecognizable just four years ago had a few precursors and catalysts. The first was the Obama administration’s redefining of American norms. Before Obama, “racial relations” were largely defined as the historical 12 percent black/88 percent “non-black” dichotomy, in the context of dealing with the sins of southern slavery and Jim Crow and widespread discrimination—and the quest to make race incidental not essential to us all. Sixty years of serial Civil Rights acts, affirmative action, increased integration and assimilation, interaction, and intermarriage, and “content of your character, not the color of your skin” mentalities were all working toward an ecumenical society, in which soon we would not consider race relevant to who were are and instead focus on the individual not the collective. “Climate change” took over from “global warming” as Al Gore/John Kerry were unleashed. Suddenly clean-burning natural gas was a culprit, a fossil fuel supposedly wrongly disguised as a valuable transition fuel. Abroad, Iran was redefined as the oppressed Persian, Shiite counterweight to the overdog Gulf monarchies and Zionist Israel. We then would green-light a “Shiite Crescent”—Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza—that would balance our former pro-Western allies, Israel in particular. We then from time to time, as the rivalry heated up, would adjudicate the ensuing creative tension. America would be the honest broker with no real preference for a democratic Western Israel or pro-American autocratic governments in the Gulf, Jordan, or Egypt. A second catalyst in the “sudden” transformation of America was the ill-fated COVID-19 lockdowns, the first time in American history that the entire nation went into quarantine. The result, as we can finally see in retrospect, was a disaster in almost every dimension: increased suicides, spousal/familial/substance abuse, economic ruin, increased psycho-social problems, social polarization, unsustainable federal spending, and deficits, destruction of a critical two-years of K-12 education for millions of our school-aged children, universities shut down, GDP in freefall, and unemployment up. Yet in retrospect, the Swedish model of focusing on the vulnerable and elderly while keeping society open and functioning cost no more lives than COVID-19 but saved millions from life-long disastrous consequences of lockdowns. In the case of the U.S., millions were shut inside their homes, distant from human interaction. They became inert and dependent on their computers, cell phones, Zoom links, and televisions for news, communications, and information. The result was a caged, paranoid society now prone to rumor, hysteria, and fits of passive-aggressive mania. Without human interaction and conversation, a nation of 330 million recluses after a year or two became susceptible to what followed the death of George Floyd. Part Three – March 15, 2024The third catalyst that fueled our sudden madness and melted down the country was the aftermath of the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The eight-time felon was reportedly arrested after trying to pass counterfeit bills. He resisted arrest, was likely under the influence of recent (or very recent) fentanyl ingestion and amphetamine drugs, and suffered from cardiovascular disease and recent COVID sequelae. He tragically died in police custody purportedly due to asphyxiation and cardiac arrest caused by a police officer using a knee to compress his neck for nearly 10 minutes—a finding challenged in antithetical autopsies. The seemingly cruel grimace on the face of Officer Chauvin and his failure to stand down as Floyd claimed he was breathless were the matches that lit the ensuing explosions. The actual details of Floyd’s death mattered little to the public. Much less important were statistics that showed unarmed African Americans died no more commonly than whites from police, at least when their respective incidence of arrests and encounters were factored in. No matter. Murals appeared of Floyd with a halo and angel wings from Washington, D.C. to Kabul. Politicians damned the police in general. What followed were 120 days of mass rioting, looting, arson, murder, assault, and random violence that resulted in $2 billion in property damage, 1,500 injured police officers, 14,000 arrests (most subsequently let go or never charged), and 35-40 dead. The non-ending riot was egged on and led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and encouraged by the likes of Kamala Harris (“They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day.” Note how fact-checkers preposterously claimed she meant only the peaceful protests, even as the streets were burning and mass looting was then the norm). In fear of the civilizational meltdown, terrified blue-state mayors and governors would not stop the madness, but pandered to and appeased it. We talk now about the crime of entering unlawfully the Capitol Rotunda (though not when protesting on behalf of Hamas), but shrug on the news that the 2020 mobs torched a police precinct, federal courthouse, the iconic St. John’s Episcopal Church, and tried to storm the White House grounds and get to the president, who was whisked away to the presidential bunker. (Is not an attempt to storm the White House grounds analogous to January 6th? Or perhaps the more recent pro-Hamas mob effort to block the presidential motor entourage to the Capitol that resulted in Biden delaying his State of the Union address for 20 minutes!). The New York Times laughed at Trump’s supposed cowardice of being escorted below, rather than condemning the insurrectionary act of trying to take over the White House grounds. Somehow all those violent months were “largely peaceful” and “a summer of love” while the buffoonish January 6th afternoon was an “insurrection” and “the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War.” In fear that our cities would go up in smoke, suddenly the cooped-up nation went nuts—defunding the police, hiring thousands of DEI commissars on campuses and in corporations, capitalizing “Black,” and turning over downtown streets to weeks-long occupation by the mob. Universities began reparatory admissions. Stanford restricted its white quota to 20-21 percent of its incoming classes and published the fact, proud of its new Kendi-“anti-racism” racism. Universities ditched the SAT after decades. New faculty were hired in various grievance studies. In some sense, this was the hour of the opportunist and the time of the manipulator and the careerist. George Soros stepped up his strategies of lavishing funds on critical legal theory prosecutors in otherwise usually below-the-radar elections—to ensure as many cities as possible would allow criminals to commit violence without ramifications. Fakers and grifters came out of the woodwork—from Professor Kendi to the shake-down artists of Black Lives Matter. Suddenly, publishing companies, Hollywood, corporations, and foundations competed in virtue signaling with each other to pour money into anti-policing causes, to create faculty and administrative positions, to solicit scripts and books—all to spread the lie that the United States was a systemically racist nation. Suddenly the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Chief of Naval Operations were revising their curricula to include Black Lives Matter nonsense while promising to hunt down “white supremacists” in the ranks. Two years later in December 2023, the Pentagon quietly released its internal investigation report that found no such cabal—but not before alienating thousands of would-be white-male soldiers who no longer wanted any of the new summer of 2020 military, and were certainly no longer willing to die in combat at twice their percentage of the population only to be libeled as conspiracists and insurrectionists or drummed out as “anti-vaxers.” Part Four – March 19, 2024The final catalyst that led to our collective implosion was the election year 2020 and the accelerating Trump Derangement Syndrome. As the cities burned, unbelievable madness followed in efforts to ensure the incumbent president would not be reelected. Suddenly, congressional officials, mayors, and governors all refused to keep the peace by requesting federal troops to stop the summer riots. The more the cities went up in flames, the more the blue states blamed Trump. It was almost as if they would fault Trump for the ongoing violence and blame him even more if he sent in the military to quell it. Had they forgotten the Rodney King LA riots of 1992, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Colin Powell, called up President George H. W. Bush to encourage him to deploy the 5,000 Marines then ready to go into South Central and Watts to quell the violence? And so, Bush did just that and stopped the mass looting and rioting. No matter. The nation was now a Luche Libre of open anti-Trump craziness. Mark Zuckerberg poured in a historic $419 million to absorb the work of the registrars in key election precincts. Social media suppressed news unfavorable to Biden. Street riots and protests were modulated to aid the Biden campaign. Liberal Time essayist Molly Ball described the “conspiracy”: There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises resulted from an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy. Seventy percent of the electorate in many states voted by mail before Election Day (with a radical drop in the rate of rejected ballots), in the greatest revolution in national balloting in our history. Or as Ball gushed:Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks… Shortly after the first debate Trump got Covid—to the delight of his opponents—and was hospitalized (and may have been stricken during the actual debate itself). Biden had sought refuge in the Covid lockdowns to justify his eight-to-noon basement campaign, and there were only two debates. Trump lost the first, Biden the second—but the latter took place after 60 million people had already voted. In nineteenth-century front porch style and for the first time in a century, a major party candidate outsourced his entire campaign to subordinates, in Biden’s case the media, big money, and leftwing politicos. Suddenly, our retired generals were libeling their president as a veritable Nazi and a fascist. We were to learn later that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley had called up his Chinese communist counterpart to apprise the Chinese military that in times of international crises, Milley, now both general and apparently certified psychiatrist, would diagnose Trump, and if he was found unstable, would not necessarily follow his presidential orders but instead warn the Chinese. The FBI? It too was now actively paying Twitter and Facebook contractors to suppress the news to aid the Biden campaign. Its last three directors had either lied to federal investigators or pled amnesia when grilled before Congress. The CIA Director and the Director of National Intelligence under Obama had both lied under oath—with impunity. And now the two cheered on the lie that Trump was a “Russian asset.” The CIA? Its retired “authorities” had gone over to the dark side. They now organized 50 former intelligence officers knowingly to lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.” That whopper they knew to be a lie, given the FBI had the laptop and had already authenticated it, but kept it tightly in their control. Leon Panetta, ex-CIA director, was assuring us that the Russians fabricated the embarrassing information in the Hunter Biden laptop. Whom to trust? What followed by 2023 were attempts to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot, to use lawfare to bankrupt, to indict, to convict, and to jail him before the election. Democrats were mobilizing to find ways to stop the certification of the 2024 election should Trump win—pretty much what they had accused Trump of doing in 2020. The country might have been able to remain unchanged as it recovered from the revolutionary seeds that Obama has sewn over his eight years in office. It might have survived its national quarantine and lockdown. It could have endured the George Floyd riots and the mass racial hysteria that followed them. And it might have sustained the Trump Derangement Syndrome and Election Day insanity. But it was not able to overcome all four incitements and goads. And so, what had been “gradual” became “sudden.” The result is that America has never been the same since. If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

March 17, 2024 Special Edition CRIMINAL GANGS and CARTELS ARE COMINGTO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU; FIX IT By: Marvin L. Covault,Lt Gen US Army, retiredMarch 12, 2024 PART 1, WHERE WE ARE TODAYThe Problem as defined in some recent headlines;·       HONDURAS DECLARES NATIONAL EMERGENCY OVER GANG EXTORTIONS·       EL SALVADOR: THOUSANDS OF TROOPS SURROUND CITY IN GANG CRACKDOWN·       COLOMBIA’S ‘CAPITAL OF HORROR’ DESPAIRS AMID NEW WAVE OF GANG VIOLENCE ·       GUATEMALA BATTLES WAVE OF MEXICAN DRUG GANGS·       MEXICO’S GANGS ARE BECOMING CRIMINAL CONGLOMERATES·       OVER 200 GANGS ACTIVE IN PANAMA·       THE VENEZUELAN GOVERNMENT IS LOSING GROUND AS GANGS TAKE TERRITORY·       GANGS RULE HAITI’S CAPITAL, KIDNAPPING AND KILLING THOUSANDS  As we move through this discussion, keep in mind that there are three crisis issues inexorably linked together facing Americans every day; gangs, cartels, and drugs.  CRIMINAL GANGS IN THE U.S.Altogether within the U.S., the FBI reports that some 33,000 violent street gangs, motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs are criminally active with about 1.4 million members. The average size gang is about 42 and most of the recruits are ages 17 and 18.  Many are sophisticated and well-organized. All use violence to control neighborhoods and boost their illegal money-making activities, which include robbery, drug and gun trafficking, prostitution, human trafficking, and fraud. To help curb the growth of gangs, the FBI, at the direction of Congress, established the National Gang Intelligence Center, or NGIC, in 2005.  Some of the largest gangs in the US include the Latin Kings, 18th Street, MS13, Bloods, and Crips. TRANSNATIONAL GANGS: Transitional gangs move us forward from the urban neighborhood street gang that controls a few city blocks and pushes a little dope, to something larger, more violent, and linked and aligned to more advanced and sophisticated crime organizations in Latin America.   MS13, for example, has become a transnational organization in that leaders in El Salvadore have been sending representatives into the U.S. illegally, to gain control of local MS13 gangs. The representatives then connect the local MS13 gangs to leaders in El Salvador. This transnational alliance, called “The Program”, or “La Programma,” in which the leaders direct the American MS13 gangs to become more violent and to control territory. The gangs accomplish this by killing rivals and extorting legitimate businesses run by legal Central American immigrants and illegal businesses such as prostitution and gambling. The local, U.S.-based MS13 gangs then send a portion of their profits to the leadership in El Salvador.  MS13 is the current leading transnational gang example. It is the largest street gang in Latin America and one of the world’s largest and most violent gangs. The gang began in Los Angeles during the 1980s, formed by immigrants from El Salvador. The MS stands for Mara Salvatrucha, said to be a combination of Mara, meaning gang, Salva, for Salvador, and trucha, which translates roughly into street smarts. The 13 represents the position of M in the alphabet. MS13’s motto is, “kill, rape, control.” MS13 is a transnational criminal organization with more than 10,000 members in the United States. They regularly conduct gang activities in at least 40 states and the District of Columbia.  It is important to point out that MS13 is not the only transnational gang organization in the U.S., the 18th Street gangs also continue to expand their influence in the United States. FBI investigations reveal these transnational gangs are present in almost every state and continue to grow their memberships GANGS vs SOCIETY:     American gangs are responsible for: 48.9% of violent crimes, 42.9% of property crime,39.9% of drug sales and 13% of all homicides.  Gangs are responsible for close to 40% of homicides in most Latin American countries.  A Portland study found that 49.1% of human trafficking victims were connected to a gang; 96.4% of the victims were female. LAW ENFORCEMENT vs GANGS:MS13 gang member apprehensions in the U.S. in FY 2023 were a trivial 178. In 2019 the FBI dismantled 217 of the existing 33,000 gangs; .0065%.  In 2020, 71% of gang members actively used social media to mobilize and attract vulnerable teenagers, video posting, bragging, and celebrating the life of a gang member. WHO IS WORKING THE CRIMINAL GANG PROBLEM? The National Gang Center (NGC) is a project funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The NGC is an integral component of the Justice Department’s mission to provide innovative leadership in coordination with federal, state, local, and tribal justice systems to prevent and reduce crime. The NGC disseminates information, knowledge, and outcome‐driven practices that engage and empower those in local communities with chronic and emerging gang problems to create comprehensive solutions to prevent gang violence, reduce gang involvement, and suppress gang‐related crime. MEXICAN CARTELS:  The current criminal landscape in Mexico is driven largely by the battle between the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) and the Sinaloa Cartel (CDS). However, three other major transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), Los Zetas, Gulf Cartel, and Juarez Cartel, all contribute to high levels of violence.·      Mexican drug cartels are leading suppliers of fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and other illicit narcotics to the United States.·      The cartels and the drug trade fuel rampant corruption and violence in Mexico, contributing to tens of thousands of homicides in the country each year.·      Since Mexico launched a war on the cartels in 2006, the United States has provided billions of dollars in security and counternarcotics assistance with limited success.  RECENT EVENTS: Rising violence in 2018 helped propel President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, into office, with Mexicans’ desperation for basic safety a key driver of the vote for change. He promised a seismic shift, ending the war on drugs with a concept of operations he calls, “hugs not bullets.” It has been and continues to be a complete failure.  As reported in 2019: “The streets of Culiacan, the capital of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, became a battlefield, with the Sinaloa cartel directly confronting the government and winning. The week before, thirteen police officers were killed in an ambush in Michoacan, likely by the Jalisco Nueva Generacion cartel. Overall, murders and kidnappings are at record levels and spreading through Mexico’s once-safer industrial heartland. Talk of Mexico becoming a failed state is again on the rise.” Criminal gangs and cartels in Mexico, under AMLO rule are experiencing accelerated growth in seized territory, taking over elected and appointed positions in local governments, the murder of political rivals, and extortion of local businesses.  Killing of government officials, candidates, and political party members increased from 94 in 2018 to 355 in 2020.  Good, competent people are reluctant to run for office, fearing for their lives and the safety of their families. The situation is driving Mexican families to the U.S. in record numbers; with about 30,000 in December 2023. Ironically, by diversifying into migrant smuggling, cartels are profiting from the locals who are attempting to flee from cartel control.  Mexico is disappearing one village and town at a time.  The common scenario: Armed criminal gangs and/or cartel operatives will enter a town in force, and start threatening, extorting, torturing, and killing locals until they relinquish all control. For example, organized crime groups operated in 16% of Mexico’s municipalities in 2017. Three years later in 2020, that number had increased to 29%.  Some of these facts are from an exhaustive Wall Street Journal article last month on 26 February,  Cartels vs criminal gangs; criminal gangs vs cartels; cartel/criminal gang partnerships, etc. “Who’s on first?”As the cartels continue at war against each other, Mexico’s criminal landscape has shifted over the past decade, with splinter groups and more than 400 criminal gangs emerging. Those groups partner with and fight against the remaining major cartels that control much of the drug trade. That proliferation has been both a challenge and an asset for major cartels, but it has overwhelmed Mexican law enforcement.  The worst news is that most of these criminal organizations have ties inside the U.S.  The “splintering” is in some cases intentional and operationally advantageous to reinforce a well-known and successful operational concept, “maximum centralized planning, maximum decentralized execution.” The Sinaloa Cartel, for example, has split into more than 37 “small and medium-sized cells.”  The Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion operates with more than 36 cells around the country. The proliferation of small gangs and the presence of powerful criminal organizations have overwhelmed Mexican law enforcement. The criminal organizations in Mexico are extremely empowered by the fact that they believe there is no threat to them by the Mexican state. It is generally held that by threats to individuals and/or their families or by choice many of Mexico’s law-enforcement authorities are actively and sometimes willingly participating in organized crime. CARTELS IN THE U.S.There are at least 13 U.S. cities that are used as distribution hubs by the Mexican drug cartels. These cartels primarily employ Mexican nationals to oversee their distribution operations in the U.S. Their second choice for leadership positions is U.S. citizens who are of Mexican origin.   This is where the transnational gangs in the U.S. come into play. They are the in-place foot soldiers for the distribution and sale of cartel-supplied drugs.  THE IMPORTATION OF FENTANYL:The availability of massive amounts of fentanyl changed everything. Since it is so profitable and can be moved in such small quantities, fentanyl has made the cartels much more empowered, controlling, and rich, thereby overwhelming all levels of authority. It’s encouraging to hear about U.S. authorities intercepting hundreds or even thousands of pounds of fentanyl at the Mexican border. That is until we also hear the Border Patrol authorities tell us they estimate that the recovery is only about 5% of what gets successfully into the U.S. and distributed throughout the country.  On average in 2023, 307 young Americans died EVERY DAY from drug overdose, the majority from fentanyl.  Has your president ever mentioned this?   WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT THE INVASION OF CRIMINAL GANGS, CARTELS and DRUGS?Let’s start at the top….ü The President: President Biden is so fond of warning us about “emerging existential threats”, shouldn’t criminal gangs and cartel operatives make the list and at least rank up there with “MAGA extremists”?ü The Vice President: Isn’t this invasion related to the 3 million Biden illegal “gotaways” at our nonexistent southern border? Should we expect something from VP Kamala, our border czar?  Dream on. ü Homeland Security: Isn’t this all about the national security of our homeland or the lack thereof?  Where is Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas?  Still AWOL?ü The Attorney General: At its roots, isn’t this all about law and order?  What have we heard from the nation’s “top cop” the Attorney General? ü The FBI: In a couple of Congressional hearings this year, the FBI Director has mentioned gangs but only in the context of them as a growing threat, with no mention of a solution to the problem. ü Drug Enforcement Administration: The mission of the DEA is to enforce the controlled substances laws and regulations of the United States and bring to the criminal and civil justice system of the United States, or any other competent jurisdiction, those organizations and principal members of organizations, involved in the growing, manufacture, or distribution of controlled substances appearing in or destined for illicit traffic in the United States. How are they doing?  307 Americans overdosed per day. ü Congress: How about some specific, focused, Congressional hearing to get the above players activated?ü The National Gang Intelligence Center: NGIC is an agency of the US Department of Justice established by the FBI upon order of Congress in 2005. The NGIC is a multi-agency effort that integrates the gang intelligence assets of federal, state, and local law enforcement entities to serve as a centralized intelligence resource for gang information and analytical support. Ever heard of them?ü The Drug Czar: Dr. Rahul Gupta, the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, ONDCP will have a $46.1 billion FY24 budget to advise the president, evaluate, coordinate, and oversee the international and domestic anti-drug efforts. of executive branch agencies. and ensures that such efforts sustain and complement State and local anti-drug activities. Ever heard from them? ü Transnational anti-gang (TAG) task forces:  These FBI TAGs continue to work with international partners to eradicate transnational gangs.  The success rate is about zero- nonexistent. ü The National Gang Center: NGC is a project funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The NGC is an integral component of the Justice Department’s mission to provide innovative leadership in coordination with federal, state, local, and tribal justice systems to prevent and reduce crime. The alphabet soup issue: POTUS, VPOTUS, HLS, DOJ, FBI, NGIC, DEA, ONDCP, TAG, OJP, NGC, OJJDP, etc. collectively equals tens of billions of annual tax dollars, thousands of bureaucrats, and untold laws and regulations. The problems get studied to death year after year with little or no action at the point of execution which is in every community in America. Case in point, with all that wasted money and manpower we apprehended a grand total of 178 MS13 members in the U.S. in FY 2023, while we lost, to drug overdose, on average, 307 young Americans EVERY DAY.   The drug policy experts tell us, “The magnitude of this calamity now eclipses every previous drug epidemic, from the 1980s to the prescription opioid crisis of the 2000s.” FYI, AN ONGOING ACTION BY EL SALVADOR’S NEW PRESIDENT: President Nayib Bukele has declared a state of emergency and constructed a huge new mega-prison, the largest in the Americas, as the centerpiece. The prison will eventually house up to 40,000 inmates. Tens of thousands of gang members have been rounded up and the first group of 2,000 have been moved to the prison. President Bukele tweeted “This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, unable to do any further harm to the population.” Dramatic photos online of “President Nayib Bukele’s gang prison” show hundreds of inmates in tight formations completely helpless and compliant.  This is a prison where the inmates are neither running the show nor conducting gang operations from inside. Interesting SOME CONCLUSIONS:Ø All of this is sad news, bad news, getting worse rapidly, and a true threat to our safety and security. Ø As usual, we are trying to solve a serious problem with a massive federal bureaucracy, and by throwing billions of dollars at the problem repeatedly and getting the same failed annual results; the true definition of insanity. Ø Our most senior leaders in the executive and congressional branches have, are currently, and will in the near term fail to lead. Ø No society can survive without law and order at the local level; that must therefore be the point of execution. At the local level investigate, find the gang members, arrest them, try them, and send them to prison. All the planning and funding must focus on that formula. Ø We should probably begin to build more prisons.  Ø A lack of law and order is consistently destroying our cities and their economies. Ø Arresting criminals with long rap sheets of 10, 20 sometimes more prior arrests flies in the face of the simple philosophy that if the criminals are off the streets and in jail, crime will go down.  The U.S. may have to consider using force in Mexico to take down the cartels.  I absolutely believe it can be done.  See the concept of operations at:    THE U.S. IS UNDER ATTACK  www.WeThePeopleSpeaking.com Sep 4, 2023 HOW TO MOVE FORWARD. The current problem is our president: First, he will not admit he has a problem that exists in his administration.  If forced to address a crisis he will do so with the blame game.  Most of the time it begins with, “My predecessor…..” as he did 13 times during his recent State of the Union address. Cardinal rule, “Blame” is the first fallback position of a failed leader. Then he will let the issue die out of focus and hope the left media comes to his rescue by dropping it from public view.  BOTTOM LINE:  this cannot be allowed to endure.  PART 2, LET’S CLEAN UP THIS MESSWe should recognize that the alphabet-soup government agencies have proven they are, collectively, incapable of solving this problem with their current agenda.  Every year, within the local, state, and federal governments we probably produce thousands of studies, have countless meetings spend billions of dollars, and watch the problem get progressively worse every year because NO ONE is in charge.  There is no specificity and no focus associated with the day-to-day efforts.  There are no identifiable positive results.  No best practices are being shared from community to community.   Here is what we need to do: PHASE ONE, 2024: Elect a president who can lead, who can plan, who can act, and will kick ass and take names.  PHASE TWO, 20 January, 2025. About 4 pm: Begin the process of focusing We-the-People on criminal gangs. Begin the process of changing the culture of law enforcement in America. Criminals, once arrested, should not be intentionally and immediately put back on the streets to commit another crime.   The new president’s first Executive Order should specify his or her intent and look something like this: 1)          The level of lawlessness and drug abuse in this country is unacceptable and a growing threat to our national security. Therefore, I intend to rid our country of criminal gangs, cartel operatives, and drug dealers by focusing our efforts on identifying every one of them, arresting them, giving them a speedy trial, and, if convicted, putting them in jail, thereby dramatically reducing crimes of all types at all levels and simultaneously reducing the import, distribution, and sale of illegal drugs. 2)         To accomplish this, I am hereby declaring a narrowly focused national state of emergency to curb rampant lawlessness across the country.  It will NOT infringe on your day-to-day rights and privileges. It will NOT restrict your actions and activities.  It will NOT raise your taxes. But it will require you to be a willing participant and to respect and support all of our first responders, law enforcement officers, and those prosecutors and judges administering the judicial system. 3)         This will be a focused effort with all actions from families, leaders, and administrators at the local level to the Office of the President, seeking to take down criminal gangs, Mexican Cartel operatives, and anyone associated with the transport, warehousing, production, distribution and sale of illegal drugs.  4)          Upon publication of this Executive Order, every gang member is hereby designated a criminal guilty of a felony offense simply by being a gang member. 5)         What is a “gang”? ·      A group whose members share an identity, typically linked to a name, and often some other symbols.·      Members view themselves as a gang, and they are recognized by others as a gang.·      The group has some permanence and a degree of organization and leadership.·      The group is involved in some level of criminal activity.·      This becomes the national definition.  No ambiguity, no soft-on-crime individual states, cities, or communities. 6)         The law:  it is illegal to be a member of an organization, whatever size, that is engaged in criminal activity. One does not have to physically engage in committing a crime (for example, selling illegal drugs), simply being a member of a gang that does it is, in and of itself, a crime. Being a gang member is a felony offense. If convicted, jail time is hereby a mandatory sentence. We have to get specific about the law and its consistency among all the states.  7)         Family involvement:  Across this country, tonight every family, particularly those with teenage youngsters, should have this conversation: Jimmy/Susan, if you are a member of a gang, as of today you are a criminal committing a federal felony offense and you are subject to being arrested, tried and sentenced to prison. The point is that at the dinner table within a few hours of signing this Executive Order there is focused initiative in tens of millions of homes across the entire nation and the 33,000 gang structures are under siege.  8)         Human intelligence, Humint, will be the center of gravity for this campaign.  Definition: The center of Gravity can be a person, thing, circumstance, or situation that is central to the success of an operation or can cause it to fail.  There are an estimated 33,000 gangs in the U.S.  In order to take them down law enforcement must know who the members are, where they live, and with what criminal activities they are involved. Certainly, there can and will be some surveillance involved in fact-gathering.  But the bulk of the information will come from within the community.  People know who the gang members are, and will be encouraged to share their knowledge.  But the bulk of the Humint will come from the members themselves.   9)         Amnesty: Every community will immediately set up and announce a short-term (weeks not months) amnesty program in which every gang member, cartel operative, and drug dealer is offered the opportunity to make an appointment with law enforcement officials and in a confidentially recorded conversation denounce their membership, disclose the who/what/when/where facts about their organization and in exchange be offered amnesty from prosecution relative to past crimes in which they participated, except for murder. The main objective of the interview is to gather all possible information about the gang’s leaders.  Acting on that information, the police should then arrest the leaders which will prompt the remaining members to apply for amnesty and effectively shut down the gang within days of activating this campaign. 10)                  At the end of the amnesty period, across the country, the mass roundup of active gang members, cartel operatives, and drug dealers will begin.  11)                  Prosecutors and judges serve at the will of We-the-People they swore to protect.  They will use their power to the full extent of the law and if they choose to function outside the intent of this Executive Order, they should be removed and replaced.  12)                  Outside the bounds of this Executive Order, but still key to reestablishing law and order across the nation are two additional directives:  First, a too-often occurrence today when arresting an alleged criminal is to discover they have a ridiculously lengthy “rap sheet” with a dozen or even dozens of prior arrests. Therefore, it is hereby directed that a third misdemeanor arrest will automatically be recorded and prosecuted as a felony crime.   The second point has to do with minimum sentencing. If a gang member has been convicted of committing a crime and is sentenced, the minimum sentence will be two years in jail without parole just for being a gang member.  A gang member arrested with a gun will receive a minimum sentence of 4 years in jail without parole.  As the numbers of gangs and gang members diminish, there will be an impact on illegal drug distribution. The FBI and DEA must go with the flow, and adjust plans and actions to take advantage of reduced foot soldiers to defeat drug importation, distribution, and sale.  Sanctuary states and cities are not excluded from any of the above directives.  The objective of publishing this Executive Order is to dramatically and simultaneously launch the law-and-order campaign in millions of homes and every community today. Tomorrow, actions should begin and will continue until the 33,000 gangs are gone from our communities.   Repeating the previously stated current statistics, the estimated 1.4 million American gang members are responsible for: 48.9% of violent crimes, 42.9% of property crimes, 39.9% of drug sales, and 13% of all homicides.  If we can get perhaps a million of them to accept amnesty in the next few weeks, the crime rates may be reduced to the point that our diminished police forces can effectively handle the remaining crime load.  The overall intent of this campaign is to create an enduring overarching culture of deterrence when it is time for teens to choose between law and order or a criminal street gang, they will think hard about the possibility of landing in jail for two years.  This must become the law of the land.  No separate versions for the soft-on-crime individual states, cities, or communities are authorized. Logically, the Attorney General and Department of Justice should take the lead for the following reasons: First of all, he/she is the existing senior cop in the country; no reason to create a new organization to do this. Additionally, two of the critical subordinate action organizations are already direct-reports to the Attorney General; they are, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration.  I request that every newspaper and news magazine publish this entire Executive Order at their earliest convenience. I want a couple hundred million Americans to have access to their own personal copy.  If this Executive Order, for any reason, becomes a partisan issue, we will be doing the American public a terrible disservice.  End of Executive Order. Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, FIX THE SYSTEMS, TRANSFORM AMERICA as well as the author of a blog WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato