Trump's Surrender

 

I supported our war with Iran. I knew it was risky to go to war with an unfit and unreliable commander in chief, but I believed the goals of freeing the people of Iran from tyranny, fully eliminating Iran’s capability to resume working on building nuclear weapons, destroying its stockpiles of and production facilities for making ballistic missiles, and having Israeli forces finish the job with Hezbollah were good ones that justified taking a chance. I was right about the goals. I was wrong about taking the chance.

I have read the memorandum of understanding between Trump and the rulers of Iran. It is a strange document. It is common for people to surrender and accept an enemy’s terms after being defeated in a war. This is the only instance I can think of of a commander in chief surrendered after his armed forces won.

There are several possibilities as to which of Trump’s flaws led to this disaster. The simplest explanation is insanity, that if his behavior seems like madness, it is. Besides, there is plenty of evidence for the idea of him having some level of serious mental incapacity in his rants, unhinged Truth Social posts, and general erratic and unstable behavior. Apart from the present disaster, there is enough for officials to consider invoking the 25^th Amendment.

Another possibility is cowardice. For the man is surely a coward - a comic, stereotypical example of the blustering bully who likes to act tough, but is not convincing with it, and cannot back it up. The TACO (Trump always chickens out) criticism has been shown to be accurate over and over well before the present war. Now we are getting another and a disastrous example of it.

A third possibility is that Trump did it because he had decided that it would be the best result for Donald Trump – not Israel, not the people of Iran, not world civilization, not the United States of America, just Trump. He may have worried that if the Iranians shot down planes, captured their crews, and used them as hostages, it would make him look like Jimmy Carter. He might have been convinced by someone (maybe Vance and his faction) that if gas prices did not come down, Republicans would lose the midterms, and he would be tormented by congressional investigations for the next two years. He may have been offered personal incentives by the rulers of some of the oil states in the Middle East. He may have just wanted to feel like a master deal maker again. Or he could have had some other imagined gain in mind.

The explanations are not mutually exclusive. My guess is that it was some of all three that led us here.

Finishing the Job

 

The Israeli armed forces have begun a land campaign on Lebanon against Hezbollah. This war and their continuing war against Hamas in Gaza are conflicts of civilization against savagery and barbarism. Americans should be unequivocally for Israel in this war and against the savages. I would guess most of us are. However, our government is not. In Gaza the Biden administration has advocated consistently for an end to the fighting that would leave Hamas surviving as a functional organization, an outcome which would be a strategic victory for Hamas and Iran. In Lebanon it has pushed for restraint and diplomacy at a time when Israel seems to be in a good position to eradicate the menace of Hezbollah, a diplomatic outcome which would deprive Israel of a needed victory and leave Hezbollah in place, dangerous, and functioning. Here at home Biden and Harris have treated pro- Hamas, antisemitic, anti-civilization leftist as very fine people, and officials have appeared less concerned about attacks on and threats against American Jews than about conservative parents getting uppity at school board meetings.

The whole thing is disgraceful, and, for Harris, disqualifying. I hope the Israelis ignore our officials and get the job done fully and decisively both for themselves and the rest of us.

Call It Too Close to Call

 

In most elections voting (other than some protest voting) requires deciding which bad candidate is less bad. With the Republicans picking Trump, and the Democrats sticking with Biden, that surely is the situation this year. Neither of them should be elected president, but unless something surprising happens, one of them will be. I have thought that, bad as Biden is, Trump is enough worse that it was clear who was the lesser evil, and Biden should be reelected. I believed that while still respecting the opinions of people who think the plans and policies of the Republicans are better than those of the Democrats or see the green left, the bigoted DEI left, and the anti-civilization pro-Hamas left for what they are want a bulwark against them or figure they should pick the scoundrel likely to do them less direct harm and so favor Trump.

Now I am not sure, because of what has happened in the last few weeks. In the war in Gaza Israel is right and should win, and Hamas’s savages are wrong and should lose. Seven months ago Biden seemed to know that. Now he does not and has betrayed an ally in wartime. The betrayal goes beyond the disgraceful public carping and refusal to give Israel needed munitions. He and his administration effectively have switched sides by advocating for the wrong outcome of the war. If Hamas survives as a capable force, the war will have been a strategic victory for it and its masters in Iran. An end of the fighting without Israel finishing Hamas off in Rafah would produce that result. The savages would have won, and civilization would have lost. Yet that is what Biden and his administration favor. Meanwhile Trump, who I feared would abandon Ukraine, did not go on the warpath against the speaker’s plan to give more weapons and munitions to that country, giving some reason for hope he would show some sense there.

Right now if people asked me who in this race would be less bad for the country, I could not give them an answer. The best recommendation I could make would be to watch both of the scoundrels until November and hope something happens to make the right choice clear, as I thought it was a while back. (As I have written before,  my plan  now is not to vote for either of them, but most people won't see that as an option and will settle on one or the other.)

Biden and Israel

 

As a matter of humanity and human sympathy the killing of seven innocent civilians in a mistaken attack by the Israeli armed forces was horrible. As a factor in deciding whether and how much the United States should side with Israel in its war against Hamas’s savages, it is irrelevant. Informed people know that horrible mistakes happen in war. (I have read that some GIs in World War II began calling the Ninth Air Force the American Luftwaffe after some of its mistaken attacks on American positions.) They also know there inevitably will be civilians killed in wars where civilians are present and especially in a war where the “fighters” on one side have made it a policy to hide among civilians. According to reports from experts, the Israeli armed forces have made extraordinary efforts to minimize casualties among civilians. That is all, and probably even more than, a reasonable person can request of them. In this war Israel is right and should win, and Hamas is wrong and should be destroyed.

Biden began well by siding unequivocally with Israel at the start of the war. Lately he and people in his administration began equivocating in an effort to appease voters in the pro-Hamas left. Now there are stories in the news suggesting that they may be moving away from supporting Israel. That would be a repugnant betrayal of not only a trusting ally but of the cause and values of liberal civilization. If they do not care about that, they should consider that it also could be a political mistake. Neither Biden nor Trump is an attractive candidate. Foreign policy has been one important point in Biden’s favor – especially given his generally good job on Ukraine and the fear that Trump might abandon Ukraine. If Biden turns against Israel, it could cause people to see him as being no more trustworthy on foreign policy than Trump and as throwing in again with the left, making a formerly fairly easy choice between him and Trump less so. It would me. Sitting this one out or a protest vote for the Libertarian might look pretty good. Sometimes the lesser evil is just too rough.

No Cease Fire Before Victory

 

People need to remember some basic facts about the war in Gaza. This war has a right side and a wrong side. Israel is right and should win. Hamas is wrong and should lose. It is right and appropriate to have regret and compassion for casualties among civilians. However when one side hides behind civilian human shields as a matter of strategy, it, not its opponent, is morally responsible for those casualties. The civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas and not the armed forces of Israel, and it is wrong to demand that those armed forces stop or back off because Hamas has human shields. Demanding a cease fire before Hamas is defeated is demanding that Hamas gets away with what it did on October 7^th and remains capable of doing it again. It is interesting that those demanding a cease fire because of casualties among civilians in Gaza do not suggest or even mention the obvious way to minimize them. Hamas’s “fighters” could dig in in strong points from which they had evacuated civilians and fight it out like men. My guess is that is because they either side with Hamas or realize that there is no chance Hamas’s murders would behave as soldiers, or both.

Should Have Been an Easy Vote

 

After the atrocities of October 7^th the governments of Germany, Britain, and other European countries denounced the terrorists and announced their support for Israel. Recently at the UN they had a chance to put a small part of their money where their mouths were in a vote in the general assembly on a resolution for an immediate cease fire, meaning a victory and no serious consequences for Hamas. It was an easy test to pass, but most of them and most of America’s other allies failed it. A few did not. Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and a few countries in Latin America and the Pacific joined the United States in voting no. Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, Ukraine(!), Australia, Canada, Estonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Denmark, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, and Sweden could not work up the nerve to oppose the resolution, but at least avoided siding directly with the terrorists by abstaining. Belgium, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, and France threw in with Hamas. A cynic might think the commitment of some of our friends in Europe and elsewhere to defending the liberal, civilized order is less serious  than they would have us believe, except of course when their sorry  hides are the ones being threatened. That cynic would have a point.

Students for Hamas

 

Private employers and citizens are free to refuse to hire or do business with someone because of his beliefs. They have that right. The question is whether they should. I think that most of the time they should not. In a free and diverse society one will find people with all sorts of opinions about all sorts of things. Tolerant acceptance of such diversity of opinion usually is a good thing. A person’s opinion one way or the other about whether to believe Rachel Levine when he tells people he is a woman or whether Donald Trump is nuts does not have much to do with what sort of worker or vendor he is and should not be disqualifying.

However there are exceptions when the beliefs and opinions are bad enough that ostracism is justified. For example I see nothing wrong with the blacklisting of communists in Hollywood in the years after World War II. I would not want to hire someone who was a supporter of and propagandist for the regime of Josef Stalin and an obedient member of an organization controlled by that regime’s secret service. Lately some employers have announced they will not be hiring students who rallied in support of Hamas’s murderous savages and the atrocities they committed. That seems reasonable to me. I would not want to spend time around people who think gang rape, purposely slaughtering infants, and torturing and intentionally murdering civilians as a tactic are good admirable activities. The excuse that the students are just kids does not work. They are young adults - older than many enlisted men and women in the armed forces – and responsible for their actions and deserving of the consequences.

Israel and Hamas

 

First one has to state the obvious. People are not the same everywhere. Those in Hamas committing atrocities are inhuman savages, and so is anyone cheering them on in their savagery. Then one can make the point that that does not apply to all Muslims or even to all Palestinians in Gaza. The ideal solution for dealing with Hamas’s terrorists would be (to paraphrase Jacob McCandles) to hunt them down and kill them, every mother’s son of them. A good practical solution is to come close enough to that ideal that they and their organization no longer have a capability to do harm. Hamas is known for using civilians as human shields, even to operating out of schools, mosques, and hospitals, causing enemies to hold back for fear of harming innocent civilians. This time the priority should not be to harm Hamas some, while avoiding civilian casualties, but rather to destroy Hamas, while inflicting as few civilian casualties as are consistent with that objective. The blame for civilian casualties in Gaza is Hamas’s, just as the blame for civilian casualties in the American bomber offensive over Germany was Hitler’s. Americans should support Israel in its war, and the American government should be ready to take direct action to free Americans held as hostages and to punish those who harm Americans. Beyond that the government should find a way to make the rulers of Iran suffer painfully, since Iran is behind the attack.