Category Archives: defense policy

“War Crimes”

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As Eugene Kontorovich’s (of Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum and George Mason University Scalia Law School) in his lede notes,

[A]s Israel fights Hezbollah’s army in Lebanon, it has found a new foe: the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. Having failed at its mission of neutralizing the Hezbollah threat, Unifil is now actively interfering with Israel doing the job.

Never mind that, per the UN’s Security Council, UNIFIL’s mandate includes

ensuring that no “armed groups” operate in southern Lebanon

Those barred armed groups include Hezbollah. Instead, UNIFIL

has allowed Hezbollah to entrench itself in southern Lebanon over the years, storing arms in many of the homes and building a network of fully stocked attack tunnels and small outdoor weapons depots in preparation for an Oct. 7-style assault. Israeli troops have found a tunnel about 100 meters from a Unifil outpost.
For 11 months Hezbollah fired more than 8,500 rockets and missiles at Israel, mostly from southern Lebanon, under Unifil’s nose. The area, militia-free by order of the UN Security Council, was soon crawling with the world’s best-armed terrorists. But the peacekeepers said little and did less.

Not just 100m away. In the IDF’s current move into southern Lebanon,

Israeli forces discovered Hezbollah tunnel entrances abutting Unifil posts.

Kontorovich is being generous. UNIFIL has not failed. It has been succeeding, in its internally defined mission to support Hezbollah and to operate against Israel.

Thus, war crimes. UNIFIL, via its conscious decision to abrogate its assignment of keeping Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, and its equally conscious decision to shield Hezbollah politically and lately to attempt physical shielding, is the one committing war crimes. UNIFIL’s guilt is made manifest by its decision to allow Hezbollah to build tunnels for attacking Israel right up against UNIFIL buildings to contribute to those tunnels’ disguise.

UNIFIL is not the only entity guilty of war crimes, though. UN Secretary General António Guterres shares that guilt with his open support for UNIFIL, and for UNRWA, many of whose members are part of the planners for Hamas’ 7 Oct 23 atrocity and ensuing atrocities throughout the last year, and through them his personal support for terrorists and the terrorists’ atrocities.

Drones Over our Domestic Military Bases

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Now we’re getting reports, and sightings, of drones flying over our military bases, installations like the East Coast Langley Air Force Base.

For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the US The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told [USAF General Mark] Kelly.

And

Two months earlier, in October 2023, five drones flew over a government site used for nuclear-weapons experiments.

No one in our government has any idea of the origin or purpose of the drone overflights, but that isn’t the worst of this. Instead, while the overflights are illegal,

Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the US unless they pose an imminent threat.

This is the worst of it, and this law needs to be changed. Aside from the obvious—espionage flights over our military bases are most certainly an imminent, as well as a long-term threat—in a conflict, those drones will be armed but otherwise indistinguishable from the drones that have illegally flying over our bases for some time.

Israel for Sovereignty

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And against leaks. The headline and subheadline summarize the situation.

U.S. Frustrated by Israel’s Reluctance to Share Iran Retaliation Plans
The Biden administration hopes to avoid a repeat of surprise attacks, such as the killing of Hezbollah’s leader

Israel is behaving like a sovereign nation and not at all like a province of Biden’s dreamland. That frustrates him and his.

Why, though, would Israel want to “share” its plans vis-à-vis Iran (or Hezbollah or Hamas, come to that)? Biden’s administration will only leak those plans, and Iran (and its terrorist arms) would be the better prepared. ‘Course, in my cynical mind, it might be useful for Israel to share one set of plans and then execute another. What Iran was prepared for in the realization would tell a very powerful tale about those leaks, even whether they exist.

We also have this: while the Harris-Biden administration (as Biden sometimes terms it) was trying to force onto Israel finalize a Hezbollah-Israel cease-fire, the IDF successfully killed Hezbollah’s MFWIC Hassan Nasrallah. In an initial telecon immediately after the strike, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that the strike had gone in, successfully. Then,

[d]uring a second call the same day, Austin asked Gallant if Israel was prepared to be “alone” when it came to defending itself, given the lack of notice.

This is the administration threatening Israel to kowtow and stop cutting out the US from planning Israel’s defense moves in the middle of the latter’s struggle for survival against an enemy sworn to exterminate Israel, and to do so without regard for the deaths and destruction to its own people.

“Defense officials” claim otherwise.

Austin was frustrated because the US didn’t have enough time to position its forces to potentially come to Israel’s defense or to protect nearby US troops, defense officials said.

Would these “nearby US troops” be the same US troops Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris insists aren’t there? The Navy’s fleets positioned in the Mediterranean Sea, Gulf of Aden, and the Arabian Sea can’t do the job of “coming to Israel’s defense?” “Defense officials” aren’t even trying to be serious. Austin, along with the Biden-Harris administration in general, just want to control Israel’s behavior.

It would be all right if this administration devoted as much effort to reigning in the terrorists and their arms and money supplier, Iran, as they do trying to keep one or both of Israel’s hands…restrained.

Harris’ Position on Israel

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was asked in a Sunday 60 Minutes interview whether the US has any “sway” over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the war against Hamas continues. The show’s host asked about Netanyahu not listening to Harris’ and Biden’s administration demands.

Harris’ answer, in part:

Now the work we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done which would release the hostages and create a cease-fire. And we’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders.

Except for a couple of things: the Biden-Harris administration (or the Harris-Biden administration, as Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden occasionally puts it) has put no pressure at all on the Arab terrorist entities Hamas and Hezbollah, and they’ve wholly ignored non-Arab Iran, except in one way noted below. The Biden-Harris administration has put tremendous pressure on Israel—Netanyahu—to agree a cease-fire.

Another thing is that a cease-fire would benefit only the terrorists by giving them time to reconstitute, refit, rearm, and attack again, while giving Israel no respite at all, and yielding only minimal—at best—kidnap release.

Aside from that, keep in mind that Kamala Harris is a very intelligent, very committed woman and would make a wonderful President, according to her Progressive-Democratic Party compatriots. That makes her seeming word salad response not empty-calorie rhetoric at all but a deliberate obfuscation of her disdain for Israel and her sub rosa support for terrorist Hamas and Hezbollah, and it puts her in league with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s overt protection of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

One Effect of Biden’s Favoring Iran

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This demonstrates the effect Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s moral equivalence between terrorist- and terrorism-supporting Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other—which amounts to favoring Iran over Israel—has on the situation in the Middle East:

The decision to approve the September 27 strike [killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah] from US soil without alerting the White House beforehand—and later to make public a photo of himself issuing the order—underscored the growing divergence between Netanyahu’s government and the White House.

Netanyahu was speaking directly to Biden with that decision and that method of delivery, but Biden wouldn’t listen.

Biden has done nothing useful in support of Israel, only pushing for—demanding, along with his Secretary of Milquetoast Antony Blinken—Israel to agree a cease-fire even as the IDF is on the verge of defeating decisively both Hamas and Hezbollah, a cease-fire Biden and his syndicate members know full well favors only the terrorists. Biden has been, occasionally, deliberately counterproductive to Israel’s interests, its very survival, by withholding, however briefly, the ammunition resupply the nation needs.

And this:

In the short term, Israel’s unilateral decision-making about striking Iran risks embroiling the Biden administration in another unpopular regional conflict. In the longer term, it could be another flashpoint for critics who say the US gives Israel too much leeway, not using its leverage to rein in its ally.

Rein in!? This is the arrogance of those in the Biden administration, and outside it, who insist, in all seriousness that Israel is nothing but a US satrap, if not a US territory—they’re insisting that Israel isn’t an autonomous, sovereign nation in its own right.

And this:

US attempts to rein in Israel in Gaza yielded only limited results, analysts say.

Analysts are carefully ignoring the major result from the Biden administration’s constant interference in IDF operations in Gaza. By holding Israel back, Biden and his have only prolonged the fight in Gaza, at the expense of more terrorist-caused civilian deaths during the prolonged fighting, increased Israeli casualties, and the murders of more hostages before IDF units could locate and get to them.

It’s no wonder the Israeli government increasingly dismisses Biden administration attempts to pressure and to determine Israel’s self-defense actions.

But it’s not just Joe Biden who’s badly failing here.

As Vice President, it’s hard for Kamala Harris to separate herself from her boss’ position. However, as Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate, it’s imperative that Harris make her position clear on this question. As the highly talented politician and impressively intelligent woman that Party now makes her out to be, of course Harris knows how to walk that seeming divergence. Thus: it’s clear from Harris’ silence on the specifics, and from her Senate colleague Bernie Sanders’ statements regarding the sincerity of her current words, that despite her loud claims of standing four-square with Israel, she agrees with her boss’ favoring Iran and its coming nuclear weapons availability over the security of Israel.