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.

Bombing Iran

 

I do not think Donald Trump is qualified to be president by either knowledge, character, demeanor, judgment, or temperament. I wish the Republicans had nominated someone else in the last three presidential elections. I think the only valid reason for voting for him last November was a decision that Harris and Walz likely would be worse. Regardless of that, I am proud of President Trump for ordering the attack on Iran’s atomic weapons production sites. It was the right thing to do and, together with the actions of Israel’s armed forces, has made the world safer and the geopolitical situation better for liberal civilization. He deserves credit and respect for doing it.

On the other hand, many leftist Democrat politicians and many of their public relations people in the traditional media deserve contempt and ridicule for their behavior. From silly claims that all would have been well if Obama’s agreement effectively allowing Iran to develop atomic weapons but maybe a little more slowly had still been in place, to fairly obviously hoping the attack had been a failure, to in some cases directly siding with the Iranians, their behavior has been despicable. There is a joke going around that Democrats are angry about the attack because it destroyed the only Obama/Biden infrastructure project that actually got built. That is unfair, but some of the Dems and their friends deserve the mockery. So do Tucker Carlson and the rest of the anti-Israel, isolationist, and at least somewhat antisemitic gang on the right.

Trump was right on this one, and it does not hurt those of us who do not like him to see it and say so.

Nuanced on Hamas?

 

Since the atrocities of October 7^th there has a been a lot of appropriate condemnation of leftists who have sided with the Hamas savages. While these have been the worst, there are other leftists whose behavior has been bad enough – those who, while unwilling to go whole hog Hamas, push notions of false moral equivalences or hide their refusal to side fully with the victims behind some vague criticism of meanness in general. Several lefties have written that, while Hamas may have behaved badly, conservative Christians are just as big a danger or worse. Five and more centuries ago, there was little to choose between Christianity and Islam in terms of savagery, repression, intolerance, and brutal fanaticism. Jihads, crusades, pogroms, religious wars, tyrannizing and enslaving non-believers, forced conversions, and persecution of heretics were common practice in both Christian and Muslim domains. Over the last three or four hundred years, at different speeds in different places, Christianity mainly has adapted itself or at least resigned itself to liberal civilization. Islam mainly has not. This is a statistical statement of averages and one with many exceptions. There are many liberally minded Muslims and plenty of Christians who would go back to medieval authority if they could. But overall it is valid and a reason attempts to equate American Christians to Hamas or similar organizations are not only wrong, but at least suggestive of where the sympathies of those doing it lie.

An outfit has come up with a different sort of nuance. It is  running a TV spot which begins decrying the increase in antisemitism, “Jewish hate”, and then goes on to warn against anti-black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Asian hate. In the present, post-October 7^th context this is weak, dishonest, and a disservice to those suffering from antisemitism. The implications are first that "hatred" is being applied equally to Jews, blacks, Muslims, and Asians and second, that the trouble is coming from the main demographic group left out of the list – those awful, redneck Christian white folks. Both are false. American Jews now are facing numerous systematic, organized, vigorous acts of antisemitism going far beyond the nasty social media posts the ad warns against and coming from racially diverse, antisemitic, pro-Muslim groups of supporters of Hamas terrorists and the genocidal destruction of Israel, very few, if any, of whose members are Christian conservatives. That is an easily observable fact. It is harder to defend people when you refuse to admit where their danger is coming from.

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.

Truman and Hiroshima

Tomorrow is the 75^th anniversary  of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. There likely will be more than the usual amount of superficial second guessing and pious anti-American hand wringing in the traditional media.

 There are also serious second guessers – historians and military officers who wonder whether Truman made the right decision. I think he did, and that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the least costly way to end the war, not only for Americans but also for the Japanese. In the summer of 1945 there were still millions of men and thousands of airplanes available to the Japanese to defend the home islands from invasion and determination to use them. I have read that Japanese officers estimated that an invasion could be stopped at a cost of ten million dead Japanese soldiers and civilians. After the slaughter on Iwo Jima and on and in the waters around Okinawa,  American officers projected numbers of American casualties in an invasion ranging from several hundred thousand to a million.  In addition to that the Japanese are said to have planned  to murder the thousands of allied prisoners of war in camps around the Pacific when their homeland was invaded.  While one cannot be sure that there was not something other than dropping the atomic bombs which might have led the Japanese to surrender without being invaded, it is interesting to note that after the atomic bombs fell and the Japanese decided to surrender, there was an attempted coup in Tokyo to cancel the surrender and continue the war.  

My father was a Republican, but Harry Truman was a  Democrat he always thought well of.  He was a crew member on transport planes in World War II. He told me that in 1945 his unit was stationed in Hawaii and was scheduled to drop paratroopers during the invasion of Japan.  It was expected that during the invasion the Japanese would try to stop incoming allied planes by crashing kamikaze planes flown by inexperienced pilots into them as they reached Japan. So I  along with a great many other boomers have a personal interest in Truman’s decision to use the bomb. Without it a lot of us might never have been here at all.

ISIS

The question of what the United States should  do about ISIS and other threats from the Middle East may be one of those where the so-called prudent, middle-of-the-road solution is worse than either extreme. The present policy on ISIS is a middle-of-the-road one of moderately funding and supporting its opponents, inflicting minor casualties on it with drone strikes and very limited bombing, and hoping it will be contained. (Until recently the administration even refused to attack the oil convoys which provided ISIS with much of its funding out of concerns for environmental damage  to the desert of Syria and Iraq.) 

One  “extreme” alternative would be to  bow out of policing Syria and Iraq  and let ISIS and its Shia and other opponents  fight it out. Proponents of this argue that we have no strategic interest in determining what factions rule Syria and Iraq, that random and infrequent attacks by terrorists are not a casus belli, and (sometimes) that our leaving ISIS alone might lead to their leaving us alone. 

Another approach would treat ISIS as a serious enemy which is making war on the United States and respond by giving ISIS a taste, not of George W. Bush’s war or Barack Obama’s war, but of Franklin Roosevelt’s war – hard, ruthless, unrelenting, and ending only with their unconditional capitulation or total destruction. Proponents of this argue that the war with Islamic fanatics has already begun, that the fanatics plan for a fight to the finish, and that we should wake up and give them one.

I do not know enough to decide which of the extreme alternatives is better. I prefer some version of the first one with our  obtaining our oil in North America and moving away from policing Syria and Iraq and eventually the rest of the Middle East. However I do not know if it is too late for that or not. If the enemy really is implacable and bent on conquest, it should be destroyed while it is still weak.  I do know that it makes no sense to hit a person, a group, or a country  just  hard enough to make him or them mad and vengeful, but not hard enough to put him or them down. Yet that seems to have been our government’s practice under both Bush and Obama. 

The Attacks in Paris and California

The attacks by Muslims in Paris and California have had strong effects  on politics and public opinion. Perhaps the most beneficial effect is that more people realize the absurdity of the claim that Islam is no different from any other present day  religion in terms of violent aggression toward nonbelievers  and are willing to say so and to question the desirability of admitting large numbers of lower class,  un-Westernized, fundamentalist Muslims into this country.   Liberal, civilized societies are better off without large, cohesive, anti-assimilationist   minorities of people who reject liberal and civilized values on principle.  It may be that enough Americans are starting to accept that fact to cause  changes in the policies and activities of the  government.

The worst effect of the attacks is the overreaction  to them, particularly among politicians. The actions of Muslim fanatics in this country are often brutal and terrible, but, except for the attacks on September 11, 2001, they are also statistically insignificant in relation to the totality of violent crimes or the routine risks of life.  It is often  unclear whether foreign Islamic groups or governments had anything to do with causing or organizing the attacks. Yet people are scared and jumpy, and some politicians are calling for an invasion of Syria and a third invasion of Iraq.

Besides the issue  of whether what happened in California is sufficient reason to go to war even if we could find some foreign enemy to pin it on, there are the practical questions of whether such a war would do much or anything to make such attacks less likely and of whether it would have beneficial or harmful geopolitical results for the United States.   The last such venture was a disaster. It seems to me we should not risk a repetition without better reasons than we have seen so far.