Category Archives: defense policy

Misplaced Optimism

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The news writers over at The Wall Street Journal wrote this in all seriousness about the aftermath of the Israeli airstrikes on Iran; followed by the US’ MOP and cruise missile deliveries to Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan; followed by a cease-fire between Iran and Israel:

The attack [by US B-2s and cruise missiles] made the US and the region safer, but did the diplomacy? The answer depends on how Mr Trump plays it from here.

No, it does not. The “answer” depends entirely on Iran’s Ayatollah and his mullah cronies in the Iranian government. Those persons still hate Israel and Jews in general, and they still hate the US. They still adhere to a prior Iranian President’s statement as those current Iranian government persons now resume their efforts to put together nuclear bombs with which to destroy Israel and pass on to later-reviving terrorist proxies for their use. Rafsanjani’s statement—brag, really, and threat—about which I’ve written before, l repeat here:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

On top of that, this war is not over because those Iranian government persons have not accepted defeat, and never will, much like Rome in an earlier period:

The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation…. This attitude prevented the Romans from losing the [Punic] war and ultimately allowed them to win it.

Iran, or at least the current crop of Iranian government persons, have not yet been annihilated. All that’s happened is that those persons have agreed to a cease-fire of uncertain durability and duration, during which they will rest their forces, refit them, rearm them, and then resume, possibly using alternative means, their murderous assaults on Israel, Europe, and the US.

It’s unfortunate that so many in the news writing business seriously think the Iranian government personnel think like Westerners do, have the same moral imperatives Westerners do, have the same value sets and respect for human life Westerners do.

These Iranian government persons are not interested in victory, per se. They’re interested in the destruction of Israel, and they do not care at all about the cost in lives to the Iranian people or to the lives of Muslims generally.

What Trump does, or does not do, diplomatically is wholly irrelevant.

A Thought

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I had another one. This one was brought to my forebrain by a Wall Street Journal article that discussed the lack of Russian military assistance to Iran during the latter’s attacks on Israel and Israel’s nearly two week response in and over Iran.

Israel’s responses to the Iranian war over those dozen days included the virtual elimination of Iran’s air defense capability; reduction of Iran’s ballistic missile capability, both missile production and launchers and launcher production; and Iran’s drone inventory and drone production capability.

It’s that last that interests me. I’ve already seen an apparent reduction in Russian missile attacks on Ukraine since the UA’s successful attacks on Russia’s LRA, at least compared to the number of drone attacks on Ukraine. Iran has been a major source of Russia’s longer-ranged and bigger payload capable drones, the Shaheds. Iran’s ability to produce these were particular targets of Israel’s anti-drone sorties. I wonder what effect the seemingly inevitable drop in exports to Russia will have on Russia’s aerial assaults on Ukraine. It’s true enough that Russia has a growing domestic capability to produce drones roughly equivalent to the Shahed, but that capability isn’t all that yet.

NATO’s Promises

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A NATO pledge. President Donald Trump (R) appears close to getting NATO nations to pledge to raise their NATO-related defense spending to 5% of each nation’s GDP, which would be a marked increase in those nations’ spending.

I question the value of those nations’ promises. Fully a third of NATO’s member nations already have, and are, welching on prior commitments to spend money on NATO-related expenses, for all that Trump’s open questioning of the value of the alliance over its freeloading on American treasure and blood has contributed to an increase in the number of nations that spend adequate amounts on NATO (from five or six!) to the current roughly two-thirds.

The value of a new, and replacement, arrangement centered on the US and the Three Seas Initiative nations is looking better and better.

This Should Not Be

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Iran is saying that it’ll negotiate—”this time we really mean it”—if the US stays out of the Iran-Israeli war whose current stage is in progress.

In the midst of a ferocious Israeli air campaign, Tehran has told Arab officials it would be open to returning to the negotiating table as long as the US doesn’t join the attack, the officials said.

I’ll leave aside the mullah’s cynical non sequitur that our participation in the war or not is a negotiable matter.

The mullahs of the Iranian government have welched on every agreement they’ve made with us, with Israel, with the West in general. Their word is worthless. It would be worse than a waste of time to pause the fighting now in favor of more Iranian dissembling under the guise of negotiating. It would cost even more friendly lives as Iran stalls, recovers it ability to build nuclear weapons, and then delivers them.

Apart from that, in addition to it, the US should play a limited offensive role. Iran’s Fordow nuclear weapons plant is under a mountain. Israel does not have the bombs or the delivery systems needed to attack it beyond (temporarily) closing its entry/exit points and, if they can spot them, the air vents. The US has the Massive Ordnance Penetrators capable of getting down to and destroying the Fordow facility, and we have the delivery systems. It would only take 3-5 of these MOPs to destroy that facility. If it isn’t destroyed, Iran would be able to resume building its nuclear bombs after the current stage of its war on Israel is concluded regardless of any other damage the Israelis could inflict.

The US should deliver those MOPs.

What He Said

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This quote isn’t the main point of the Power Line post, but it’s spot on in its own right.

Trump had said over and over again that he would not allow Iran to get a nuclear bomb. He said he’d prefer to do it the easy way, through diplomacy, and he let Steve Witkoff offer the Iranians the most generous terms they were going to get. He held the Israelis back until he had given the talks a chance to run their course. But he gave the Iranians a clear deadline, and he also said again and again that if they didn’t agree to his deal, he’d have no choice but to do things the hard way.

The Tablet article from which the above is cited in Power Line is behind a paywall, so h/t Power Line for bringing this much out.

In any event, Park MacDougould, the author of the Tablet piece, is spot on.