‘Proportionate’ responses are a thing of the past?

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That’s the claim of an Israeli opinion reader, Amit Segal, of Israel’s Channel 12 News (Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge, at least, offer an English translation on initial linking). He doesn’t seem to understand proportionality in war, though.

For years, the enemy fired rockets and Israel replied with “proportional” force. This normalized the firing on civilians, kidnapping and invasion.

This isn’t proportionality, though; it’s just a history of tit-for-tat, and that does—and has done—nothing but run up friendly casualties. This has been amply demonstrated by Iran’s years of butchery and destruction of Israeli lives and property in the aftermath of Israel’s repeated tit-for-tat responses to each of those Iranian or Iranian-sponsored terrorist acts.

Proportionality is what the IDF has only lately figured out (and too many Leftist and Progressive-Democrat Americans still fail to understand): when you respond, overwhelm your foe.

The IDF also recognized, lately, an extension of that: the enemy exists in one of two states: pursuer or pursued…if terrorists are running for their lives, they can’t make plans to take ours.

Indeed, true proportionality is to respond so destructively and decisively that the enemy cannot attack again for some long years, and to respond so overwhelmingly that the decision is reached in short order. That’s what minimizes friendly casualties in the mid- and longer-term, and it reduces over the same time frame unnecessary casualties among the enemy’s civilian population. These two outcomes are what makes true proportionality not just sound doctrine, but the more moral one as well.

No They Don’t

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I’ll be brief.

The lede lays out the question.

Companies say President Trump’s climate overhaul makes it tough to frame their future emissions plans and prepare for what they see as inevitable environmental restrictions—particularly as their goals extend beyond the president’s term.

No, they don’t.

Quit planning their future emissions. Quit distorting business decisions away from simple economics and away from what’s optimal for the business’ owners—the shareholders.

Easy peasy, once business managers get up out of their deep defensive crouches and stop cowering in front of climate funding industry pushers.

The hard work, while remaining straightforward, is to engage those duck and cover energies and their existing lobbying budgets to getting the current Congress to codify in statute those Trump moves. Therein lies business planning stability and lower costs for business’ customers.

But What Has UCLA Done Concretely?

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UCLA’s Chancellor Julio Frenk protested that his school has done much to combat antisemitism in his letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section. He even piously cloaked himself in his extended family’s history of flight from Nazi Germany and holocaust survival.

Among other actions, we have recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety, established an Initiative to Combat Antisemitism with dedicated resources, reorganized our Office of Civil Rights, and appointed a Title VI/Title VII officer. We have strengthened our time, place, and manner policies to safeguard both free expression and campus operations. We are also supporting and partnering with community organizations engaged in the fight against antisemitism.

These, though, are merely steps that set up John Cleese-esque argument clinics.

What has the good Chancellor or his staff done to rid the school of its recalcitrant antisemitic bigots, whether employee or pupil? What has he done, personally, to address directly any of these bigots? What has any member of his staff done to address them directly?

Selected Results from Texas’ Primary Elections

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Via NPR, with 93% or more of the votes counted:

Texas Governor primary: 12,800 more Progressive-Democrats voted than Republicans

Senate: 110,518 more Progressive-Democrats

Via NBC News, with more than 91% of the votes counted:

Attorney General: 19,588 more Republicans than Progressive-Democrats

I have little information concerning how these results compare with the history of Texas primaries. These differences strike me as small—0.6% of the total vote in the Governor races, 2.5% in the Senate race, and 0.5% in the AG race.

For comparison, though, putting the current results into a measure of context, here are the 2022 primary results, via The Texas Tribune. Neither Texas Senate seat was up for election:

Governor: 841,244 more Republicans voted than did Progressive-Democrat voters, a difference of some 29% of the total vote.

Attorney General: 907,758 more Republicans voted, a difference of some 31%.

While more Republicans voted in the 2026 primaries, the large swing in those differences—30 percentage points—is from a doubling of Progressive-Democrat voter turnout in 2026 over 2022.

Republicans need to take this to heart and work hard, not only on getting the voters out to the polls, but especially on giving them a reason to come out. Republicans need to get out of their comfy offices and talk directly to their constituents, in person, as well as in local radio and television interviews and op-eds in their local news papers, addressing in specific, concrete terms, measurable by their constituents, what the candidates will do (not just what they have done) to make those voters’ lives better at the gas pump, with their utility bills, at the grocery stores—focusing here on what they actually eat, not some mythical basket of food—and on mortgage, rent, and house insurance costs.

If they don’t do that, Texas will turn blue. And that will be a disaster for our State and for our republic.

Mistaken Analogy

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are correctly worried about ending the current campaign in Iran too soon, before

Iran’s navy and its missile stocks, launchers, and productive capacity are destroyed. It would also leave most of the IRGC and its Basij enforcers intact.

But they drew the wrong analogy in explaining their concern.

…George HW Bush and the first Gulf War in 1990. The coalition campaign was so successful in pushing Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait that Bush and his advisers stopped too soon and spared most of his military.

No. Bush the Younger had gained non-Iraq Arab nations’ cooperation in the campaign by promising not to go for regime change in Iraq and to limit the campaign to driving the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait decisively enough that Saddam would be unable to reinvade for the foreseeable future. Saddam’s forces were driven out, decimated badly, and their remnants driven back to Baghdad. That Bush stopped at that point and largely withdrew coalition forces was simply a fulfillment of that commitment.

After that, southern Iraq’s Shiites revolted against Saddam’s remaining Sunni forces, largely with Bush’s encouragement and were massacred, but this is a separate Bush error, having nothing to do with leaving too soon or keeping his commitment to end the fight with Kuwait’s liberation.

In reality, no analogy is needed regarding too-optimistic and -early off-ramps for the current Iran campaign. This is amply demonstrated by Iran’s behavior in response.

Iran has fired missiles or drones on Israel, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and even Oman, which was negotiating with the US on Iran’s behalf. It also launched strikes, if fewer of them, on Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and…Cyprus.
Some of its targets in these countries are US bases, but the attacks were often directed at civilian targets, including hotels in Dubai. [I add, attacks directed against Israeli apartment complexes.]

This is reason enough to finish the job in Iran before announcing victory.