Category Archives: defense policy

A Test of Biden

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The Wall Street Journal editors wrote of a Hamas test of Israel and of President Joe Biden (D) in the context of the Hamas terrorists’ indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli cities and oil facilities and of Iran’s funding and supplying of its client, Hamas.

The editors concluded their piece with this:

[Biden] has not endorsed the left’s distorted interpretation of the conflict as a dichotomy of privilege and victimhood, with Israel responsible for every wrong.

That was supposed to be a (sort of) favorable remark about a part of Biden’s performance so far.

However.

That lack of endorsement is a bit of a non sequitur here. The Left isn’t distorting, so much as its “interpretation” is a precise reversal of the situation. The actual privileged are the terrorists, so enamored of by the Left and by the core of the Progressive-Democratic Party as embodied by the likes of Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), Ilhan Omar (D, MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D, MI). The victim is Israel, so openly hated by that same collection of persons, and now so plainly under terrorist attack by Party’s heroes.

Their beloved terrorists are murdering children over property.

Stipulate, arguendo, that Palestinians deserve that property and that their lives would be so much better if they had it.

Today, the murdered children are still dead, and the Palestinians, without that property, are still alive.

But, but–children in Gaza are being killed by the hated-Israelis’ as the latter respond to being attacked? True enough. The Left’s heroes should stop hiding behind their own children, stop using them as cover for their own launch sites.

This is the test that Biden and his Progressive-Democrat henchmen are failing.

Let’s Make Lots of Money

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Sounds like a lyric from a Pet Shop Boys song.

The hackers who assaulted Colonial Pipeline, ostensibly for ransom, claim they

only want[] to make money, not disrupt society….

Never mind that their attack on a major oil pipeline does precisely that disruption.

Never mind, either, that these hackers aren’t total idiots—they knew their assault would disrupt a major segment of our economy and so our society. That was the purpose of the attack; this was no petty criminal act. Demanding to be paid by their victim is simply a distraction.

They claimed this, also:

From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.

Right. And they have some bridges across the Reka Vop’ to sell us, also. All illegal behavior, much less terrorist behavior, if left unanswered has social consequences.

No, these…personages…have simply applied a Willy Sutton tenet to their terrorism:

Go where the money is. Go there often.

Our Federal government, actively aided by our State governments, need to get aggressive with active responses to such attacks. The time for passivity, for merely acting defensively after the fact, is long past. Terrorists, physical or cyber, network entities or state-sponsored, need to be burned to the ground.

The negligence of company CEOs, COOs, and CIOs, including those officers at Colonial Pipeline, in not being serious about hardening their systems, also badly wants sanction.

Basing Options

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It seems the Pentagon is only now beginning to think about where to put the soldiers we’re withdrawing from Afghanistan. (I hope some consideration is starting to be given to the equipment, too, rather than just abandoning it to the Afghanis.)

As some of you might expect, I have a thought.

Maybe work a basing deal with Vietnam (we need one of those for our Navy, too).

Alternatively, or in addition, work a basing deal with India, for its far northeast. The states of Sikkim and Assam come to mind.

Wrong Assumptions

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An anonymous writer for the Associated Press summarized the views of some in the operational (as opposed to the political) side of our Federal government regarding our pending withdrawal from Afghanistan.

An unclassified report released Tuesday by the Director of National Intelligence says the Taliban remain “broadly consistent in its restrictive approach to women’s rights and would roll back much of the past two decades’ progress if the group regained national power.”
It’s the latest US warning of the consequences of the Afghan withdrawal now underway, two decades after an American-led coalition toppled the Taliban. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday that there would possibly be “some really dramatic, bad possible outcomes” for Afghan forces left on their own to counter the Taliban, but also noted, “We frankly don’t know yet.” And CIA Director William Burns told Congress in April that the American ability “to collect and act on threats will diminish.”

That’s bad enough.

The really dangerous aspect of our withdrawal—for our nation and our friends and allies, as well as for Afghanis—is this from our Secretary of State:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has acknowledged that a Taliban takeover of the country is possible after the withdrawal. But he has also maintained that the group does not want to be a pariah and will have to embrace or at least tolerate the rights of women, girls, and minorities if it wants to be viewed as legitimate by the international community.

These are dangerously unfounded premises; Blinken is assuming the men [sic] of the Taliban think like we do. He’s assuming these men care about any pariah status from outsiders. He’s assuming these men care about what the international community thinks of them. He’s assuming these men are outward looking in any way.

Such blithe self-centered attitudes blind us to our enemies’ capabilities, and worse, blind us to their intentions.

The National Intelligence Council’s unclassified report can be seen here.

Dangerous Naivete

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken has it. During a 60 Minutes interview, the man actually said that our nation does not have the luxury of not dealing with China.

That’s a blatantly raised straw man. No one is arguing that we should have no dealings with the People’s Republic of China. The debates are centered on how we should deal with it. Leave aside the fact that a total boycott of trade with the PRC is dealing with it, rather than not dealing with it, a means that no one is touting.

Instead, the debates involve moving our supply chain away from the threat the PRC poses, as illustrated by that nation’s attempt to cut off supplies of rare earth metals to other nations. They involve jawboning businesses to stop doing business with PRC suppliers operating with Uyghur slave labor. They involve how to pressure the PRC to desist from its Uyghur genocide in progress. They involve how to respond to the PRC’s occupation of the South China Sea and the islands within it that are owned by other nations (even if ownership is often disputed among those other nations.

Blinken said this, too, in that interview.

I want to be very clear about something. Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to.

This, especially, is an example of Blinken’s naivete. Our purpose most assuredly must include containing the PRC, holding it back. At least until it’s ready to stop being our enemy, to stop its genocide, to stop its slavery, to leave the South China Sea and respect the ownership of sovereign nations’ territory.

In fine, until the PRC is ready to join the community of civilized nations.

The full interview can be seen here.