Category Archives: foreign policy

Indicative, but also Misleading

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A Wall Street Poll found strong support for Israel in the war Hamas has inflicted on it, but the question the paper chose to illustrate the matter also is misleading.

Overall support for Israelis is solid, although there is considerable support for both Palestinians and Israelis “equally” in the Hamas war.

Unsurprisingly, given the strong antisemitic streak running through the Progressive-Democratic Party, those worthies especially strongly sympathize with both Palestinians and Israelis rather than with Israelis alone.

What’s misleading about the question, though, is the tacit inclusion of the terrorist Hamas gang under the rubric “Palestinian people.” The question needs to be asked concerning sympathizing with Israelis, whose civilians are explicitly targeted by Hamas, vs sympathizing with Gazans, whose civilians are equally targeted by Hamas in the form of shields and Gazan residences and facilities used by the terrorists for weapons storage and launch sites and command centers.

Sympathizing with both Israelis and Gazans (not generic Palestinians) would have more legitimacy given Hamas’ assaults on both sets of civilians more or less equally, albeit one with deliberate targeting and the other with deliberate abandon.

Distinctions

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s 4 December Letters section drew a distinction between Israel’s treatment of civilians during Hamas’ war on Israel and Hamas’ treatment of civilians.

Just like Israel warned Gaza City residents to leave before its airstrikes, Hamas tried repeatedly to get Israelis to avoid the concert near the border and leave the nearby kibbutzim, right? Wrong, of course, and therein lies a fundamental distinction. Israel would have been glad to see Gazan civilians evacuated to safety to avoid its airstrikes, but Hamas would have been bitterly disappointed if those Israeli civilians hadn’t been around to be slaughtered.

That brings to mind a broader distinction between civilized nations (especially those of the West) on the one hand and terrorist entities on the other.

In WWII, the Allies deliberately and indiscriminately attacked the enemies’ population centers and infrastructure in an attempt to cow those populations into surrender. It didn’t work, and in the aftermath, those western nations recognized the both the politico-military ineffectiveness of the strategy and especially its immorality. Ever since, western civilized nations have been at pains to minimize collateral damage—especially including accidental deaths to civilians, from both direct and indirect causes—and they have set high standards regarding the definition of “unavoidable” and “accidental” civilian deaths. These nations have set similarly high standards regarding collateral damage to or destruction of infrastructure unrelated to an enemy’s war effort.

Terrorists, on the other hand—of which Hamas (and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and Russia are current exemplars—deliberately target population centers and civilian infrastructure in the prosecution of their wars. Their targeting has nothing to do with any attempt to cow the targeted population into surrender; it is a core part of terrorists’ war aims: the extermination of those populations and the erasure of those populations’ nations from the world.

Oil Buyback

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden now plans to buy 2.7 million barrels of oil to put back into our oil strategic reserve.

Couple things about that.

We had 630 million barrels of oil in our strategic reserve before Biden took office and started selling it to the People’s Republic of China while claiming he was doing it to slow the gasoline price inflation his spending was causing. As recently as 24 November last, our reserve was down to 351 million barrels. According to my second grade arithmetic, that means Biden had reduced our reserve by 279 million barrels in just those two years and 10 months. My third grade arithmetic tells me that those 27 million barrels he’s buying for the reserve is just 1% of what he’s taken out of it. Which makes buying that oil an insulting effort to distract us with his pretense of refilling our reserve after his dangerous reduction.

The other thing is that he’s buying that oil at $79/barrel, which means he’s spending $213.3 million to buy that 1%. To replace all 279 million barrels, he’ll have to pay more than $22 billion at those $79 per. When the prior administration (the Trump administration for those following along at home) refilled the reserve after the Obama admin draw-down, Trump’s buyers paid $30-$55 per barrel. Call it, for this back of the envelope estimate, an average of $42.5 per barrel. At that price, Biden could replace the oil he removed for a total cost of $11.8 billion dollars. Bidenomics is going to cost us ordinary American taxpayers more than $10 billion at today’s actual price. That is, if Biden follows through on refilling our strategic oil reserve.

Update: third grade arithmetic tells me that those 27 million barrels should have been third grade arithmetic tells me that those 2.7 million barrels. Fershlugginer keyboard….

It Needs Disrupting

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It seems that the US Navy’s USS Gabrielle Giffords, a littoral combat ship, sailed too close to Second Thomas Shoal to suit the People’s Republic of China, and the PLA’s Southern Theater objected.

The US deliberately disrupted the situation in the South China Sea, seriously violated China’s sovereignty and security, seriously undermined regional peace and stability, and seriously violated international law and basic norms governing international relations, fully demonstrating that the US is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the South China Sea[.]

This is plainly untrue; no PRC sovereignty was violated since the shoal is owned by the Republic of the Philippines. Nevertheless, the PRC continued its provocations and tacit threats by having its naval force “mobilize” and track the Giffords.

In response to this latest PRC attempt at intimidation, the US Navy—and Australia, India, and Japan, the other members of the Quad—should send groups of combat ships (not just onesies and twosies) into the same area, conduct combat and surveillance aircraft flyovers, and engage in tracking PLAN shipping in the area.

The situation in the South China Sea badly wants disruption and the situation restored to its condition prior to the PRC’s invasion of the Sea and its occupation of all those islands owned by the other nations rimming the Sea.

Take Appropriate Action

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In response to Iran’s proxy Houthis’ attacks on US Navy combat ships and on commercial freight shipping in the Red Sea, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, through his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, said that

The United States is going to take “appropriate action[.]”

Sure we will. Biden will have the Navy go drop a bomb, or two, on or toss a couple of missiles at a couple of unimportant Houthi buildings in the Yemeni desert, just like he did in the Syrian desert in pseudo-response to Iran’s Syria proxies’ dozens of attacks on US facilities there.

And the timing of this “appropriate action?” Sullivan, again saying the words Biden gave him to say:

We are going to take appropriate action in consultation with others, and we will do so at a time and place of our choosing.

Biden’s America is incapable of acting on its own, but only with the permission of others. Beyond that, his timing is nothing more than an empty “Whenever, man.”