Iran, the Strait, and Nuclear Weapons

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In Michael Gordon’s piece on The Battle for Hormuz, he wrote that

A stable peace appears elusive, some former officials say, as each side is calculating that it can win the long game in a test of wills….

A stable peace with terrorists is an oxymoron, and it’s time to put down that pipe dream. Green then closed his piece with this:

Former military officials say the US can weaken the regime if it is persistent but warn there is a long road ahead.
“The US will need to identify and pursue a longer term strategy that addresses Iran’s focus on controlling the Strait of Hormuz, threatening its neighbors with missiles and drones, and the nuclear weapons program,” said Joseph Votel, the retired Army general who led Central Command from 2016 to 2019. “This is going to be a long-term effort.”

The leaders of the Iranian government, the civilians in Tehran and the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, will never agree to limits on their nuclear weapons program or to giving up their aspiration to control the Strait of Hormuz. That doesn’t mean we should quit the struggle.

In fact, we can shorten it well within Votel’s implied time frame with a change in emphasis and a firmer drive to achieve the fight’s primary aim, the end of Iran’s nuclear weapons acquisition capability. Rather than seeking to “influence” or “coerce” those leadership teams, or “weaken” them into agreeing to a deal, it’s time to accelerate and broaden—escalate, if you will—the attacks on Iran, focusing on three target sets in all their breadth and (occasionally literal) depth: destroy Iran’s ability to fight at all by destroying not just some weapon sites and caches, but the means of producing replacements; destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities wherever they are along with their caches of purified uranium, including deepening the burial of those caches already hit; and killing Iran’s leaders, especially those running the IRGC. The latter has dispersed its command and control facilities and personnel, so that will be especially…tedious. Israel, though, has a demonstrated facility at this sort of activity; it would be good if we could enlist that nation’s aid here.

Only by completely disarming Iran and killing the terrorists reigning over it can there be a lasting, stable peace and one that includes a restoration of the Strait, and of the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, to their status as international waters freely usable by commercial shipping.

Finally

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President Donald Trump (R) has had done with trying to negotiate with Iran’s government. Finally. For now.

I don’t want to negotiate now. I said, “Let’s not negotiate. Three days ago, we had a deal.

He’s finally figured out, maybe, that it’s not possible to negotiate with terrorists.

In many diplomatic respects, Trump is as naïve as Jimmy Carter was.

Chatrie v United States and Follow-on

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The Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie that police gatherings of Google location histories constituted a search and so must be subject to 4th Amendment strictures. From that, we get parents pushing back against K-12 school districts conducting surveillance of students’ parents, explicitly to gather [a]ccess license plate data and develop pattern of life information.

One of those tracking packages, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, explicitly brags about the software’s ability to collect and provide to school managers residency verification, address validation, license plate verification, all with a view to [u]nderstand who owns and lives at the address provided and other related locations and to develop pattern of life information. The purveyors of this PRC-esque surveillance package also brag that school managers can [e]asily connect information about people, businesses, assets, affiliations, and other vital content.

All of that without the parents’ prior knowledge or permission and without any court sanction of the surveillance.

That such invasions of average Americans’ privacy is being done by school system managers is one more reason they need their reins jerked up short.

Statesmanship

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The estimable editors of The Wall Street Journal spent an entire column dunking on Vice President JD Vance (R) and his foreign policy miscues. Buried in the text, though, were a couple of nuggets.

…hedge-fund magnate Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor, said he’d favor Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a matchup between the two for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination.

Unmentioned by the editors is that Rubio has already said he won’t run for the party’s nomination for President if Vance does, the plain subtext of which is he won’t risk dividing the party with such a contest. This is an assurance Vance has so far chosen not to offer.

And these, regarding the cease fire deal he thought he’d negotiated with the civilians in the Tehran branch of Iran’s government (the other branch being the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps):

I think that they see there’s a real opportunity here to turn over a new leaf so long as they do the right thing[.]
…
They want to have a much brighter future….

As the editors noted, though, the regime’s vision of a brighter future entails nuclear weapons that allow it to control the region, not prosperity for its people.

Vance’s misunderstanding of whose view of “right thing” actually was in play, along with his miss regarding whose vision was operating, are not just statesmanship misses, they’re failures of political acumen.

A Truism, and a Solution

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A letter-writer in Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote this while commenting on Alexis de Tocqueville’s praise for our nation’s then-penchant for solving problems locally rather than crying to Mama Government:

A statute can’t manufacture civic energy or entrepreneurial zeal. That has to come from citizens who are politically engaged or not hindered in their efforts to continue the American dream.

That is plainly true. And, pedantically, it echoes Aristotle’s and Plato’s remarks about politics and citizens’ role in it.

The solution is just as plain, and it’s made so by the failing, and increasing depth of the failure, of our public school systems to properly educate our children. We need the competition of school choice, the freely done setup of voucher and charter schools and of homeschooling, whether individually or parents setting up homeschool pods. That competition even improves the performance of local examples of public schools.

That last, though, requires the reduction, if not elimination, of teachers unions, organizations whose management teams care not a farthing about our children, nor even of their teacher members, but only about their own political power.