A Strike

President Donald Trump ordered the strike against Qassem Soleimani that led to the killing of Soleimani at the Baghdad Airport a couple days ago.  The Left, here expressed by members of those unified by their disdain for and resistance to Trump, has been objecting ever since.

[M]any Washington insiders and defense experts remain skeptical about whether those attacks were truly imminent.

Well, of course. This was a Trump move; it cannot be believed.  Never mind that these…insiders…and “experts” don’t have access to the intel the led to the strike’s necessity. More than that, though, is this: a former Pentagon official and Middle East expert, who refused to put his name to his claim (possibly because he knew a sentence or two from his claim might be taken out of context by his NLMSM interviewer) said (in part?)

I believe we have had plans [to eliminate Soleimani] all along. The attack on the US embassy was the trigger to get that ball rolling[.]

You bet we had those plans. We have contingency plans for every action we can think of that might threaten our security. Soleimani in particular has been a threat for years, and his PMF pseudo-protester attack on our Baghdad embassy certainly should have been a trigger to step up locating the thug. Coupling that overt attack with the intel we had added urgency to locating him and to our response.  Keep in mind: success occurs at the intersection of preparation—contingency plans and active intel efforts—and luck—finding him so quickly once his plans had been discovered.

Aside here: the official’s two sentences—what was their context? What else did he say that was edited out from the quote above? Something along the lines of having contingency plans for everything? We can’t tell, so we can’t say whether this person is a member of that resistance or was misquoted.

Then we get this from Jenna Ben-Yehuda, an ex-State Department official who worked with DoD—and so a member of the interagency coordination facility of which Fiona Hill was so proud and quite upset that was occasionally (often, even) bypassed by the man actually responsible for policy:

[H]is move to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization in April 2019, the first time the US has ever given that designation to an element of a foreign government, makes Thursday’s attack part of a destabilizing chain of events.
While Secretary of State Pompeo has asserted that the US made the decision to strike on Thursday in response to “imminent threats” against US personnel and assets, the fact that he appears not to have provided the public, Congress, or allies with additional information about those threats casts doubts on the veracity of his claim[.]

That the “chain” might be in some way destabilizing is a result of Iranian actions, not anything else. Her calling Pompeo a liar regarding the intel assessment is simply another example of the Left’s automatic rejection of anything coming out of this administration—especially when it contradicts the Hill/Ben-Yehuda interagency coordination facility decisions. I’ll elide the fact that, as an ex-official, she, like the unnamed ex-Pentagon person, had no access to the underlying intel, and so she’s completely ignorant of any relevant facts.

Her plaint that Pompeo (and Trump, come to that) didn’t spend time advising anyone in advance of the strike demonstrates her complete lack of understanding of the term “imminent.” Never mind that relevant classified briefings to Congress are scheduled imminently.

That neither Pompeo nor Trump briefed the public—especially her precious self—demonstrates her equally complete lack of understanding of the tenets of secrets and security.  And that explanations, now being made to the public (but not her particularly; she has to read about it in the press like the rest of us), must necessarily lack intel detail to protect, among other things, our methods and sources.

There’s this, too, from Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute:

We know Qassem may have been planning an attack in general terms, but we don’t know about when and how. I would say we got an intel hit. He was going to be at the airpor…and an easy target….

Pollack is claiming that because he didn’t know imminence-of-attack particulars “we” didn’t know. Never mind that he’s no more privy to current intel than are Ben-Yehuda or the ex-Pentagon official.

None of that matters to the Left or to resistors in general. What Trump did violated their predetermined requirements and that’s to be condemned.

What She Said

The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died last Monday, had some thoughts on morals and society in her 1995 Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Liberals and conservatives, radicals and socialists, disagreed about specific policies, but they were agreed on the principle that any measure of relief, for example (or charity, for that matter), had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the recipients….
… This principle stipulated that the condition of the “able-bodied pauper” (it did not apply to the sick, aged or children) be less “eligible”—that is, less desirable, less favorable—than the condition of the independent laborer. And “less-eligibility” meant not only that the pauper receive less by way of relief than the laborer did from his wages, but also that he receive it in such a way as to make pauperism less respectable than work—to “stigmatize” it….
In the past few decades we have deliberately divorced poor relief from moral principles, sanctions or incentives. This reflects in part the theory that society is responsible for all social problems and should therefore assume the task of solving them. …
The divorce of social policy from moral principles—the de-moralization of social policy—also reflects the spirit of relativism that is so pervasive in our time.

Absolutely, what she said. Now we’re at the start of a new year. It’s a good time to set about correcting that moral failure.

RTWT.

Contemptible Average Americans

It’s well-known that the Left and its political organ, the Progressive-Democratic Party, have nothing but contempt for the rest of us, from the NLMSM referring to Tea Partiers as tea baggers, through Barack Obama’s dismissal of Middle Americans as Bible- and gun-clingers (bitter ones, at that), through Hillary Clinton’s irredeemable and deplorable slur.  We also get House Progressive-Democrats loudly questioning the integrity of House Republicans who don’t agree with them on impeachment.  The list is interminable.

Here’s one of the latest, this one from Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator (D, MA) Elizabeth Warren:

[T]he Republicans in Congress have turned into fawning, spineless defenders of his [President Donald Trump] crimes.

So, because Republicans disagree with her, they’re contemptible.  And—which she knows she’s doing, words being her stock in trade—she’s slandering all of us Americans who support this or that Republican or the Republican Party in general.

Oh, and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden told his New Hampshire audience that there are some really decent Republicans that are out there still.

Right.  Biden harkened back to a “compliment” with which persons of his (and my) generation are well familiar: those Republicans are a credit to their…party.

This is the arrogance of the Left, and the contempt for us average Americans in which the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party politicians hold us.

Remember this in the fall.

Bar Them

It turns out the hacks into various cloud-based services and cloud providers by the People’s Republic of China was far more extensive in depth and breadth than heretofore reported.

They came in through cloud service providers, where companies thought their data was safely stored. Once they got in, they could freely and anonymously hop from client to client, and defied investigators’ attempts to kick them out for years.
Cybersecurity investigators first identified aspects of the hack, called Cloud Hopper by the security researchers who first uncovered it, in 2016….
A Wall Street Journal investigation has found that the attack was much bigger than previously known. It goes far beyond the 14 unnamed companies listed in the indictment, stretching across at least a dozen cloud providers, including CGI Group Inc, one of Canada’s largest cloud companies; Tieto Oyj, a major Finnish IT services company; and International Business Machines Corp.

Disgustingly, the cloud providers spent their efforts trying to cover up the breaches rather than working effectively to contain them and eject the spies.

Investigators in and out of government said many of the major cloud companies tried to stonewall clients about what was happening inside their networks. “It was like trying to pin down quicksand,” one investigator said.

Those companies should see their customers walk away, and those companies should be boycotted—and not only of their cloud “services.” They’ve demonstrated that none of their products can be trusted because the companies themselves cannot be trusted.

The government’s response? One example:

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security grew so frustrated by resistance by the cloud companies that they are now working to revise federal contracts that would force them to comply with future probes….

This is the wrong answer. Those contracts should be canceled for cause (obstructing a criminal investigation comes to mind), and those cloud companies barred from doing business with the government. Answers to Requests for Proposals that include these companies as partners or subcontractors in the answers should be rejected, too. Some of the cloud providers became more cooperative after government—ours or overseas—pressure, but that’s not enough.

Cut them all off.

And develop offensive cyber weapons and use them against the PRC’s intelligence, military, and political establishments.

Only Progressive-Democrats

“Iowa nice:” what Iowans have a reputation for doingbeing willing to go out of their way to help a struggling neighbor, a visitor, or a stranded motorist.  It’s a practice for which Iowa citizens have a deserved reputation. And so do the citizens of Texas, Utah, all across the South; indeed, in most regions of the US. We Americans, in the main, just try to help each other.

Yet, this, during the runup to the Progressive-Democratic Party primary campaign Iowa caucus:

As [Progressive-]Democratic presidential candidates crisscross this state ahead of the Feb 3 caucuses that start the nomination process, they are trying to balance distinguishing themselves from each other with respecting that Iowa tradition.

Only Progressive-Democrats would consider Iowa nice and candidate distinctions to be competing interests requiring “balance.”

Hmm….