Regarding Iran - I'm Not Going To Talk About . . .

I'm not going to talk about Trump bombing Iranian nuclear-development sites despite the fact that they're so far underground they likely don't need fortified concrete ceilings.

I'm not going to talk about Pete Hegseth being the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time for any military operation.

I'm not going to talk about how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played Trump into going along with joining Israel's attack on Iran.

I'm not going to talk about Trump's threat to Iran not to attack American interests in retaliation for the bombings and how the spectacularly insufferable New York Post predicted that Trump's posturing would lead to a prospect for peace and prosperity in the Middle East - and then Iran fired missiles at an American base in Qatar.

I'm not even going to talk about the need not to impeach Trump but for Democratic states to secede from the Union.  

Nor am I going to talk about how Trump's strategy to flood the zone with policy sewage keeps making me have to talk about him - "Oh, Christ, do I have to write about this?"  - when I really want to write something about the closing of the revered Wanamaker department store in Philadelphia and the end of penny production by the U.S. Mint.

I'm only going to say this.

If, by this point, you still have a Trump flag hanging in front of your house . . .

. . . you need some serious psychiatric help. 

Iran Amok

Donald Trump returned to office promising that he would never start another dumb war.  Except if it's with Iran.

Iran has been a bugaboo for Americans for years.  Having had an Islamic republican government since the revolution that swept out the vacuous and hated Shah in 1979, it is living proof that authoritarian states can, in fact, last a long time, contrary to popular wisdom.  The U.S. had supported the Shah and had even put him back in power at the request of the British to keep a socialist prime minister from nationalizing British oil interests, yet it wasn't the British Embassy in Tehran that got overrun by Iranian militants in January 1979, it was the American embassy.  That takeover was short-lived, but on November 4, 1979, two weeks after President Carter let the Shah come to America for medical treatment, militants in Tehran overran our embassy again and took its inhabitants hostage for fourteen months.  Subsequent attempts at normalizing relations with Iran backfired miserably.

Donald Trump clearly has a particular hatred for Iran, or at least for the mullahs who run the show there.  Perhaps the paranoid Trump, who believes that all other nations are out to humiliate us, had his own sensitivities offended when, at the age of 33, he saw the U.S. Embassy get seized in November 1979.  Something about it clearly wedged into the folds of his brain.  For he clearly bought Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's overheated rhetoric about Iran being close to getting the bomb, and he even in his first presidential term withdrew from the agreement that was meant to ensure that that would never happen.  The attacks Israel has launched against Iran have given Trump the excuse he needs to pursue another Middle Eastern war as part of a clearly psychological need to punish Iranians for burning all of those American flags.

Except that even some of his staunchest supporters - Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson - have a problem with that.  Carlson was even appalled when interviewing Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) on his Internet program and Cruz demonstrated his clear lack of knowledge about the very country he wants Trump to go ahead and attack.

Adding to this is the fact that Mike Huckabee, a born-again Christian, is the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and his only qualification for that job is his experience with evangelical Armageddon prophesies.  He wants a war in the Middle East to bring about the Second Coming of Christ to restore the Garden of Eden with Christians, along with Jews who accept Jesus as the Messiah, to be saved and Muslims, along with Jews who still reject Jesus as the Messiah, to be condemned to the fiery furnace.

Meanwhile, the General Authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints will flee from Utah to the site where Mormons believe the Garden of Eden will be restored upon Christ's return - the place non-Mormons know as Kansas City.    

And wouldn't it be something it the Saints turn out to have been right all along.

I'd prefer not to find out just yet.  But it figures that I'm finally ready to travel to Europe, something I've wanted to do for 35 years, and yet one more thing might prevent me from doing so this time as well.

That thing is World War III.

Guess I'll be going to Kansas City instead.  I'm not a Mormon, but I want to hedge my bets.  Also, it's easier to get there than to the Holy Land. 

Gaza: Six Months On

If President Biden is voted out of office in November, the ongoing war in Gaza will be the reason.

Enough young people are appalled at Biden's unwavering support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to go after Hamas with the sort of force comparable to the use of a thermonuclear device, to deny Biden a victory in the election by going third party or staying home.  Nothing Netanyahu has done in prosecuting the fight against Hamas has persuaded the Biden White House to change their policy toward Israel because of Biden's interest in ensuring Israel's right to self-defense.

Except that Israel is gong way too much on the offensive.  This past week, members of Jose Andres' World Central Kitchen were killed by a precision missile fired by the Israeli "Defense" Force, leading many to suspect that part of Israel's strategy is denying relief workers the freedom to feed the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been turned into refugees and are barely scrounging to get by.  President Biden angrily demanded that Netanyahu open a route to food relief for charities to get through, threatening to condition further aid to the IDF, and Netanyahu acquiesced to the demand as the IDF punished those responsible for the firing of the missile .  This will help, but not much.  What Biden really needs to do is reduce aid to Israel to purely defensive weapons and get that damn temporary pier along the sea built to accelerate aid to the Palestinians. 

Biden has to make more of a tilt to trying to get a cease-fire arranged and get as much aid to Gaza as possible before he loses young people and Arab-Americans on such a widespread basis that it's impossible to win Michigan, a state with large Arab-American and Islamic populations as well as many politically active youth (particular among college kids) and a state he absolutely needs to win in November.  Alas, it may already be too late. 

The Hamas War

I never thought that a group of terror commandos could actually launch a full-scale land, sea and air attack on a country, but that's exactly what Hamas did to Israel over the weekend.  The TV news networks covered the war - which Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu (below) made an official declaration of against Hamas,  something I never thought was possible, as Hamas isn't a country - over the weekend at the expense of everything else.

I know what Netanyahu is going to do - frame opposition to his polices as tantamount to opposition to the war, as if to say that is you are either with him or you're with Hamas.  That way, he can continue to pursue his judicial "reform" agenda to consolidate his power.  Except that he spent so much time on that endeavor that he missed warning signals that an attack on Hamas was probably.  This war shouldn't strengthen Netanyahu.  Rather, it should weaken him. 

Of course, it will strengthen him.  In 2004, the revelation of a memo showing that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States before 9/11 was a blow to George Walker Bush's reputation as he was going into a re-election campaign, but did it finish his Presidency?

Why don't you ask President Kerry that? 😠

On a more personal note, I have a lot of friends expressing support for Israel.  But I also have a few friends expressing support for the Palestinians and Hamas, saying that Israel is getting its just deserts for 75 years of oppressing the Palestinian people.  Just as Al Franken once said that his father had believed Jews should support civil rights because of the Holocaust, I, as an Irish Catholic, had long supported the Palestinian cause because of the Troubles in Ulster.  But this is different.  The Irish Republican Army at its worst never perpetrated anything against the British as horrific as what Hamas has just done in Israel.

The New Prime Minister of Israel

Israel's new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, is a right-wing nut who has a problem with the very idea of a Palestinian state and even the very idea of Palestine.  He's leading a coalition of far-right, far-left, moderate and Arab parties sustained by one vote in the Israeli parliament.

He has his work cut out for him in getting things in Israel moving again after two years of political paralysis.   No one in his coalition agrees with each other about anything.  But there is ample reason for hope that Israel can gets its act together, for one reason: Benjamin Netanyahu is gone.

And hopefully, he, like Trump in the U.S., can be prosecuted and imprisoned for corruption charges before he has a chance to regain power. 

And the very fact that he can come back should keep this coalition in power for awhile. 

Middle East Mess

Israel might be President Biden's Achilles heel.

The heavy-handed removal of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and the police raid on the al-Aqsa mosque has started what amounts to a war between two peoples and between a country and territories it currently "occupies."  And while President Biden tiptoes to reach some sort of cease-fire to bring the violence to an end even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu milks the crisis for all it's worth, Democrats grow increasingly hostile to Israeli air attacks on the Gaza Strip.  Meanwhile, Republicans are hoping to galvanize support for them by standing in solidarity for Israel against Hamas rocket attacks.  

This isn't just a foreign-policy problem.  This is a battle in which civilization is at stake.  And President Biden can't make a wrong move without thinking it could cause greater trouble in the region.

This is a time bomb that could detonate into an explosion of biblical proportions.

The Artlessness Of the Deal

Let's play historical make-believe for a moment.  Suppose that Great Britain, officially a Protestant nation as the reigning monarch is the head of the Church of England, wanted to improve relations with the great Catholic powers of Europe in the late 1860s.  The British and the French had defeated Russia in the Crimean War but were still wary of Russian expansion.  The newly united Italy, along with France, Spain, and Austria-Hungary, have long resisted peace deals with Great Britain because of its domination of heavily Catholic Ireland, and they've set an Irish state as a condition of deals with the British. But, let's suppose, let's say that Napoleon III, the Emperor Of the French, and the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz Joseph, are particularly worried about the growing threat from Russia and rush to make a deal for a treaty of amity and commerce with the British, and  the prime minister of Great Britain hails it as a major breakthrough between his country and the Catholic heads of state on the Continent.  And the cause for Irish autonomy is left behind.

Well, except for the names and a few other changes - to paraphrase Neil Diamond's reference to the story of the frog who dreamed of being, and then became, a king - if you talk about what happened this week with the Middle East, the story is the same.   Israel achieved a joint peace deal with the Arab states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates because pf a common fear of Iran, and the Palestinians - still living under Israeli domination - have been left with nothing. A peace deal with the Palestinians was a condition from the Arab states for normalizing relations with Israel, but now they're ready to leave the Palestinians behind over some geopolitical paranoia.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hails it as a major breakthrough, and the monarchs of the two Arab countries are quie pleased.  And someone's going to make money off this.

Here is a picture of the signing of the Israeli-Bahraini-Emirati peace deal at the White House, which allegedly brokered the deal.

Second from right is the frog who would be king. :-p 

Israel Votes Again

I lamented the re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel back in April, but his failure to form a new government means that he and his Likud party have to do a do-over in another election against Benny Gantz's Blue and White party.  The election is today.

Netanyahu's policies are more popular than he is, and he's been pushing another set of popular policy proposals - like annexing a third of the West Bank and taking more land away from a Palestinian state.  But he's also facing corruption charges that may end up exhausting Israeli voters - call it "Bibi fatigue" - and may finally lead to his long-overdue retirement . . . after doing more to undermine peace in the Middle East than any other Israeli leader I can imagine.

On the other hand, with the Blue and White party a new phenomenon, the Labor party a non-entity, and the right-wing minor parties in a good position to form a coalition with Likud, he'll probably squeak through.  Again.

And that's all I have to say about that.      

Share the Nightmare . . .

Bibi No. 5.

Benjamin Netanyahu just won a fifth term as Prime Minister of Israel.

Peace In the Valley

When President Obama proposed starting a peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians that used the June 1967 borders as a starting point, every single Republican in Washington was ready to bash him over it - not because they were against it, but because Obama was for it. Bill Clinton was for using the 1967 borders as a starting point, as was George Walker Bush when he endorsed a Palestinian state. Obama proposed land swaps to crate a final border that, under this plan, would bear little resemblance to the 1967 lines. So what's the problem?

I suspect it's because of politics. Not in the United States, but in Israel. Netanyahu governs with only tacit support from the Israeli Labor party, with much of his support coming from right-wing parties in the Knesset. He can't be seen as conceding to anything the Palestinians support - like what Obama has proposed. He's done a good job of avoiding that perception, re-iterating his steadfast opposition to Obama's proposal both to the President himself and to Congress.

Netanyahu has never been a forceful advocate for any kind of peace plan that can benefit both sides, so I don't expect much from Obama's initiative. However, it's healthy that the prime minister of Israel and the President of the United States can agree to disagree . . . and still talk.