Daily Archives: 9 January 2020

Some Predictions

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Because the air is fresh out on the end of a limb.

The Wall Street Journal asked a question regarding Iran’s next moves following the successful killing of its head terrorist, Qasim Soleimani:

What do you think are Iran’s next steps?

My predictions—among other things, Iran will do these:

  • hook up with the Taliban
  • strike Saudi oil fields
  • take speedboat shots at our fleet in the Arabian Gulf
  • mine the Strait of Hormuz
  • sink some oil tankers rather than just put minor holes in them, including British and French tankers—not necessarily in the Arabian Gulf
  • hit some Kurdish bases in northeastern Iraq

Preemptive Update: I wrote the above Tuesday morning; I’m writing this Wednesday morning. My predictions already are outdated. In the realization, Iran struck at two Iraqi facilities on which Americans are based–one in Irbil and the other at Ain al-Asad (will the Iraqi government take official notice of this Iranian assault on Iraqi sovereignty?).The air is fresh as the limb falls, too.

Separately:

Of the 15 Iranian missiles fired, 10 missed Ain al-Asad, one missed Irbil, and four failed.  Some are saying the misses were deliberate, but that’s a terrible OR/reliability rate….

Honorable Military Service

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and town mayor Pete Buttigieg has been making a big deal about his heroic service during his five-month tour in Afghanistan.

Greg Kelly and Katie Horgan, both ex-Marines with actual combat duty, had some thoughts about that in their Wall Street Journal op-ed.  So do I.  Kelly and Horgan noted,

He [Buttigieg] entered the military through a little-used shortcut: direct commission in the reserves.

Not even a 90-day wonder—a pomeranian prince.

Especially this:

Mr Buttigieg spent some five months in Afghanistan, where he writes that he remained less busy than he’d been at City Hall, with “more time for reflection and reading than I was used to back home.” He writes that he would take “a laptop and a cigar up to the roof at midnight to pick up a Wi-Fi signal and patch via Skype into a staff meeting at home.”

It’s a mark of the quality of Buttigieg’s “service” that he had less work to do even than that of being a small-town mayor.

Honorable officers, when they’re short of tasks, go looking for more things to do to advance the mission, they don’t head up to the roof top to moonlight on Skype or hide out somewhere recreationally reading.

Oh, and Bob Dole felt no need to lean on his military service, much less his actual wounds, in order to campaign for office. Neither did Phil Hart or Daniel Inouye.  But the unscathed rooftop pomeranian prince does.