Iran

Open Thread

Mark Noonan19 Comments

The Iran war has been a major revelation showing us how the entire Global Ruling class has a vested interest in keeping the Mullah regime going. Now, just why is that? Well:

  1. A lot of them are bribed. The Mullahs pay them off. Never forget that the Ruling Class is corrupt and greedy – throw a couple bucks at them and they’ll dance to your tune.
  2. Peace in the Middle East would be a catastrophe. Reminder: the continued chaos there justifies the continuation of migration to Europe…gotta get those poor people outta there, right? If there’s peace, there’s no justification for replacing French and British voters.
  3. They really hate Israel. Of all the geopolitical events since 1945, Israel is the one they’ve come to hate the most. It is rich. It is powerful. It has the only growing Christian population in the Middle East. It is the only Middle East nation where Muslims are able to vote in genuinely free elections. It is a standing indictment of not just the Muslim world, but of the entire Third World…showing that starting from war and poverty you can lift yourselves up and very rapidly. You can have a free and law abiding society.
  4. Combined with this, the Ruling Class has been importing Muslims by the million and in order to keep them voting for that Ruling Class, hating Israel is a requirement. Even if one of them would prefer to support Israel, the potential loss of votes – and the turning over of their nations to patriots – is something not worth the risk.

Combine all that and you can see why they are so invested in the Mullah regime. Make no mistake about it, the Mullahs have not closed the Straight of Hormuz. They can’t. They lack the physical means to do so. But the Mullahs said it is closed and the Global Ruling Class went along with it and ordered the ships to stop sailing…because they hoped it would spike oil prices and force Trump to back down. What they didn’t understand was that Drill Baby Drill had already made the USA independent of the global oil market…we have had price spikes, but those really are just people being greedy. Charging the higher price because they can, not because they need to…in the USA, there is no shortage of oil or natural gas. To be sure, lots of countries are running out (I hear that Thailand is already rationing gasoline), but we aren’t. Trump is right when he proclaims we don’t need the Straight – it is Europe and Asia’s problem if it is closed. We can go on like this for a while – and the longer it goes on, the more the USA will be decoupled from the global oil and gas market…that is, our prices will start to drop, rapidly, even if the rest of the world is paying $20 a gallon for rationed gasoline.

Now, how will Trump wrap this up? I have no idea. It won’t go on much longer, though. Don’t pay much attention to alleged statements from the Mullah regime – in reality, there is no regime. No real government. Just various factions – mostly led by third and fourth tier people – vying for survival. Any idiot can put on a dress uniform and appear in front of a camera with a flag in the background to make a statement. What appears to be happening is the continued rapid degradation of every Iranian military asset – including tanks, vehicles and ammunition supplies – while Trump people talk to various Iranian people, trying to find the guy who will cut a deal…that is, bury the Mullah regime and become the transitional government. The continued bombing is important because day by day the various factions have less to bring to the table…and now it appears we’re hitting the ability to censor the internet and television. That is, the Iranian people are now getting access to non-regime news. The longer the factions hold out, the less their leverage…the coup de grace would be US occupation of strategic Iranian territory. Everyone is focused on Kharg Island, but I’m thinking Bandar Abbas and environs. But, that is all up to Trump and his people. We’ll see how he brings this to an end.

A Spanish girl in government care was raped by migrants. Not getting proper help afterwards, she attempted suicide which left her paralyzed. Then the government pressured her in to “assisted suicide” and her organs were harvested. You really need to think about that one – and not get angry at the migrants. To be sure, they all need to be flogged and then hung…but they aren’t the problem. The problem is the host of people – doctors, nurses, lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, orderlies, etc – who made it all happen. The evil of the Nazi regime – or the Stalinist regime – wasn’t Hitler (or Stalin) it was the army of faceless operatives who made it all happen. The clerks who fill out the forms. The officials who sign the forms. The end-use operatives who carry out whatever is written on the forms. There was someone who filled out the form for the girl’s suicide…typing away at a computer screen, making sure there were no typos and all the relevant information was accurate…and what that clerk was doing was having a poor, suffering victim killed…to be harvested for organs and then forgotten about. After all, looking up at the clock, have to get this one done before lunch today!

The evils of the modern world are only possible because people go along with them. With a shrug. And it is just those people who must be severely punished. The insanely evil can’t do it unless (allegedly) decent, hard working people agree to help. We have to figure out some way to make such faceless actors indictable – and then convict them and subject them to something really horrific. It is the only way to drive home the absolute moral requirement that nobody cooperate with evil. Ever. Even for a minute.

UPDATE: All yesterday a growing love between Americans and Japanese flowed through social media. Appropriately it started with a shared love of barbecue. But it looks pretty awesome…some samples:

Japanese version of Country Roads. Very much worth a watch!

Japanese apparently like country music:


Japanese thanks Trump for the Pearl Harbor joke because, in his view, it finally completely buries the WWII hatchet. We can josh with each other, even about the bad things, because we’re friends.

Awesome:

Also awesome:

And more awesomeness:

Open Thread

Mark Noonan43 Comments

Trump may be playing a much deeper game than even his supporters suspect – that the Iran conflict is just one piece of a global puzzle designed to make NATO useful, or no more while at the same time imposing American dominance not just in the Naval sphere, but in the whole of global maritime commerce. Think about what he’s concentrating on – Panama, Greenland, Hormuz…some of the major choke points for global seaborne trade being taken under American power with a US President who wants a massive revival in American shipbuilding (once again, all true strategists concentrate on logistics…the movement of people and goods…Trump wants us in control of it). The NATO aspect is, crudely, poop or get off the pot…is NATO of any worth at all? Can NATO do something as simple as control a maritime trade corridor? If it can’t or won’t do that, what is the point of it?

And what, then, the point of the UN?

Things are moving on a deep level here…and I’m interested to see how Trump wraps it all up. The war with Iran will probably finish up to at least the main elements in the next seven to ten days. But the long term ramifications of it might be quite surprising and take some months to shake out.

There’s a non-zero chance that in the California jungle primary it is two GOPers who face off in November for governor. Naturally, Democrats will do all they can to ensure against this – but the seven Democrats in the race are all morons and egotistical…they might not be able to get enough of them to back out.

Latest propaganda line out of Tehran is that the more Mullahs we kill the stronger Iran gets. This is like me winning a fight by letting the other guy bash my face in. Its a bold strategy, we’ll see if it pays off.

The late Cesar Chavez – of United Farm Workers fame – appears to have been a guy who liked to abuse young girls. It isn’t all confirmed but it does look pretty bad for his reputation…and if it is true, then we have to keep in mind that everyone – and I mean everyone – around him must have known it was going on and kept their mouths shut because, at the time, Chavez was doing the Ruling Class’ bidding. Why tear him down now, years after his death? Because he was opposed to illegal immigration…and so the Left is unpersoning him posthumously.

Biden’s CIA identified “motherhood” and “homemaking” as indicators or racist extremism.

But it wasn’t just a brand new thing – essentially, since 1945, the things of the West have been considered by our Ruling Class as the markers for evil. They’ve been at war with them since the end of World War Two…it is just out in the open now.

Glory to Those Who Do

Mark Noonan18 Comments

That is a picture of a man who is pretty much universally denigrated in the history books: Joseph Joffre, Marshall of France. He was in command of the French army for the first two years of World War One and the massive slaughter of those two years is laid at his feet and condemns him before the bar of history as a man who pointlessly sacrificed French youth for nothing. And, indeed, he made his mistakes. On the other hand, who hasn’t? Even when we consider the greatest commanders, we still have Napoleon blowing it at Waterloo and MacArthur being caught with his pants down hours after receiving word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

You can’t get past the number of French soldiers who died and that will always remain a horror but in judging the actions of people, one must always first place yourself in their shoes. Joffre was an experienced officer with a background in engineering and logistics. In other words, on paper exactly what you want. He was also a man who was impossible to panic – no matter how bad things were going, he was going to remain calm and rapidly issue decisive orders. Anyone who knows history – especially military history – knows that calmness plus the willingness to act are crucial in war. History is filled with generals who either lost their nerve or simply became paralyzed with indecision. Better a bad decision gets made than no decision at all. In sum, Joffre was not an idiot, nor in inhuman monster. He was presented with a puzzle and did his best to solve it.

His first puzzle was trying to figure out the best way to deploy his armies at the start. Can’t use hindsight! He only knew for certain that the Germans were coming and would likely make a significant effort in Belgium. But in those days of armies moving no faster than marching feet, he knew he’d have time to watch any such move develop. He could have deployed his main armies along the borders with Belgium. But what if the Germans then decided to advance south of Belgium? It is like that in war: trying to guess through a fog what is best. Taking one thing with another, Joffre’s decision was to launch the French attack in what amounted to the center of the German line – the idea being to split that line and flank the Germans marching into Belgium. This is, actually, a pretty good plan. There was only one major flaw: the power of defense.

The French hadn’t fought any major military action since 1870 – when machine guns were unknown, field artillery was much less lethal and the primary firearms were single shot rifles. The French had, of course, kept abreast of military developments but reading a report isn’t fighting…and they just had no conception of the power of a dug in enemy. The Russians knew it as they had fought the Japanese in 1905. The Brits knew it as they had fought the Boers in 1901. The French had no idea. Of course, neither did the Germans, who also hadn’t fought a major engagement since 1870. They were, together, military babes in the woods…and they both launched their armies right at each other and both got a massive and bloody wake up call. But the Germans were able to keep advancing because, as it turns out, they had placed almost their whole army into Belgium and simply had overwhelming weight of numbers. Given this, the French and their British allies were compelled to retreat…but only until they got themselves reorganized to stop the Germans. Which they did, at the Marne.

Whole libraries have been written about that battle which marked the highwater mark of German advance in 1914 and their forced retirement after the French counterattack. Who did what, which orders were given by whom are matters of deep study; mostly trying to show that someone other than the commander, Joffre, had been decisive. What was it, really? After the war, Joffre was asked who had won the Battle of the Marne and he answered, “I cannot say for certain, but I know who would have lost it, if it had been lost.”

After that, Joffre’s puzzle was how to expel the Germans from France – which is of course what you want to do if you’re a French officer and German’s occupy about ten percent of your country. Joffre tried this method and that – each time modifying the program a bit based on lessons learned. But, in the end, under Joffre’s tenure, the magic talisman to break a line defended by barbed wire, trenches, magazine rifles, machine guns and artillery was not discovered. Various important steps were taken – including the development of aerial bombing while the first French tanks were created in 1915 – but the total mechanism for crossing a bit of ground swept by enemy fire and breaking through an entrenched enemy force was not found by the time Joffre was kicked upstairs in the aftermath of the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Naturally, the efforts Joffre made were costly in lives and this, as noted, is laid at his feet and used to condemn him…make him out to be some sort of insensate monster fruitlessly sacrificing French lives.

But what else was he supposed to do? Just leave the Germans alone to build their strength until they could attack? Surrender? The enemy had to be expelled…Joffre and every other officer involved had no idea how to do it. You can only think it over, come up with ideas and then try them out. And, in the end, the ideas tried out by Joffre (massive heavy artillery – which Joffre had wanted pre-war but was denied the funds to procure – tanks and planes) were put together by his ultimate successor, Foch, and the deed was done – the Germans were defeated and expelled from France.

I bring all this up because I think we have a problem in our society in that we tear down those who do – and honor the guys in the peanut gallery who never do anything. Especially in light of the response to our campaign against Iran we’re seeing this. For forty seven years everyone sort of sat there and left the mullah regime alone – there are probably lots of reasons for this (all bad) but the bottom line is that today we have those who let this cancer fester upset at the man who proposes to excise it from the global political situation. The past forty seven years show what you get when you aren’t willing to at least try. If the fact that getting the Germans out of France was to be a bloody business prevented French action, then the Germans would still be there…the war might have gone on much, much longer with an ultimately higher cost in lives. Something had to be done both back in 1914 and here in 2026. And all honor to those who are willing to do something, even if they make mistakes doing it. Better to have a mistake than to have a drift.

Things must be done. Someone has to come up with the moral courage to act…and often act on very incomplete information and with no certainty they’ve come up with the right response. As Wellington put it, the whole art of war is getting at what’s on the other side of the hill – you don’t know what’s there, but you must do it. We’ve been half a century so fearful of that other side of the hill that we’ve essentially done nothing – and worse than nothing because we have killed a lot of people (had a lot of ours killed, too) and expended huge amounts of money while essentially cowering over on our side of the hill.

Trump is doing what should have been done on November 4th, 1979…and every day since. We’ve got a regime in Tehran which is mere social pestilence upon the global body politic. It had to go and must go. Trump just has the courage everyone else lacked (when they weren’t bought by Iranian or other foreign money – there is that, as well). The glory is his – he looked at the situation, realized it had to be solved and has decided to solve it. His opponents are in the wrong – not just on technical aspects, but in the larger moral requirements of being human.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Our enemies – foreign and domestic – are upset that an American sub sank an Iranian warship. It was sneaky!

Like, do you guys even know what a submarine is for?

For the record: it doesn’t matter if the ship was armed. Doesn’t matter if it was close or far from home. It was a warship – it was a target. It was sunk and that’s all there is to it…if you’re upset about it then I direct you to complain to the nearest Mullah hiding in an Iranian tunnel…they sent that ship to see in whatever condition it was. It should have been fully ready for war – warships are always supposed to be fully ready for war. If they’re not, then the commanders of those ships are the criminals, not the people who destroyed them.

Some people are saying that the Geneva Convention requires us to rescue the survivors of a torpedoing and to that I answer…what the heck are you talking about? The Conventions don’t mention submarine warfare and, indeed, it is the one area of warfare which has practically no treaty or legal coverage. Deliberately so: no nation which employs submarines would ever limit them…they are there to suddenly destroy, without warning and then sail away to find the next target. Warning the target or bringing succor to the survivors merely makes submarine warfare useless. This was disposed of as an argument by the Nuremburg tribunals where we tried to nail Doenitz for unrestricted submarine warfare – no less than Fleet Admiral Nimitz scotched that by pointing out to the tribunal that he had issued the exact same orders right after Pearl Harbor. Maybe subs should never have happened – but they did and in war time, their targets are anything on the seas. Anything. At any time.

We are being treated to a heavy dose of defeatist propaganda. Well, we are if we listen…as for me, I’ve muted most accounts on X which start off with “breaking” because I’ve found that what comes after is 99% nonsense. Merest clickbait unsupported by facts or even by common sense.

How is the war going? We’re sending B-52s. We don’t send B-52s into an environment where the enemy in any way contests control of the air. They are great planes. We’ll probably be flying them into the 2040s…but they are no match for anything like a modern air defense system, let alone a modern fighter. They go in when the skies are clear and we have a large target we want heavily degraded. That’s how the war is going. That is how we know we’re winning.

We’re re-establishing full diplomatic relations with Venezuela if you want a clue about how this thing in Iran will come out. Turns out that being America actually gets results. We haven’t tried to be America since Truman fired MacArthur.

Noem got the boot…and a new job with Rubio’s State Department. So, she clearly upset Trump a bit, but not all the way. She has a clear shot to get herself back into good graces. We’ll see how she does in the new role. Meanwhile, Senator Mullin is named as replacement and he figures that the babies of illegals need to be deported, too. So, Democrats may have semi-collected a scalp here, but they’re not going to like it long term.

Iran War

Mark Noonan36 Comments

It is getting a little funny, looking at the opposition: they are just shotgunning out every possible justification for opposition.

The 1953 coup!

US keeps bases in the Middle East!

Trump promised America First!

Israel is the bad guys!

Jews control Trump!

We’re running out of missiles!

Iran wasn’t a threat!

We killed a Mullah during Ramadan!

Blah, blah, blah.

The first thing for any American to consider in relation to Iran is this: what is peace?

Nobody in the opposition will answer it – nor even consider it. Because to consider it is to understand, and the opposition doesn’t want understanding…they just want it stopped. But the bottom line is that the Mullah regime is dedicated to destroying the United States. That they can’t and never will have the power to do so is neither here nor there – it is what they want and what they predicate their foreign and military policy on: destroying us. As long as this is Mullah policy, they will never cease to attack us. Sure, almost all attacks are by proxy, but that doesn’t change the reality. So, once again, what is peace? Where’s the compromise point? What is half a loaf for both sides?

There isn’t one. Unless the Mullahs surrender their dream, there can’t be peace. Trump tried to convince them to do so short of war – and with the example of Maduro as a test of both American capability and Trump’s will. The Mullahs ignored it. And probably with some justification – ever since 1979 in every confrontation it has been the USA which climbed down. Republican or Democrat, Left and Right, everyone was always on the side of an accommodation with the Mullahs. They probably expected that whatever Trump decided to do, it wouldn’t cut at the vitals of the Mullah regime. They bet wrong. And now there will be a change in Iran – we can’t say with certainty exactly what will emerge post-war…but it won’t be what came before. Some sort of compromise will be made by whomever emerges as Iranian leadership. Some modification away from “Death to America.”

Personally, I’m confident that Trump has this well in hand. For instance, in the FY 2026 budget was a big increase in missile procurement…after years of this being neglected, we suddenly did a big bump. Now we know why: Trump wanted the means in hand not just to attack, but to sustain an attack over the long term. This shows that Trump is thinking strategically (fake strategists concentrate on military moves…real strategists concentrate on logistics). Given this, I’d be shocked to find that we haven’t already assessed the situation on the ground in Iran…doubly shocked if we didn’t have special forces on the ground there by now trying to find if there are people willing to storm Iranian government offices. In the end, I expect a change in Iran…even if an alleged Mullah is in charge of the transition, it will be a Mullah who got the message and knows its time to wind up the Islamic Republic – sort of like in Venezuela where the regime is still technically in power, but the moves are already being made to allow for a successor government.

It is like waking up from a dream. Or a nightmare. That is, a world where we were a helpless, blundering giant – able to kill but never able to obtain our strategic ends. A world where a corrupt Ruling Class grew fat off of war while the world fell further into barbarism day by day. In a burst of military action, that whole thing came tumbling down. This could have been done at any time – a real, genuine aerial campaign to destroy the regime’s ability to wage war. We’ve had this ability all along. We built it in World War Two…and for all the bombs we’ve dropped since then, we’ve never done what we’re capable of (the closest was in the 1991 Gulf War…but even there we didn’t hit at the regime’s ability to control Iraq; it was still a half measure). The Mullahs never had a chance – our capability is so far beyond what they could comprehend, let alone build. China and Russia are now probably in a funk…realizing that any strategic assets they have only exist as long as we want them to…and that no matter how much they hurry up trying to match us, but the time they can stop us we’ve moved on to the next generation of capability (word is that the Israelis – and, therefor, us – had hacked into Tehran’s traffic cameras…we essentially knew where everyone was in real time…everything is tracked by camera in China…they now know they’ve merely built a system to let us know where everything is).

God bless our troops. God bless President Trump. May our victory be swift and peace restored.

Hitting Iran and Restoring the Real World

Mark Noonan14 Comments

Why? Well, here’s a couple reasons why:

There’s a lot more, of course. The mullah regime has been the focal point of terrorism in the world since 1979. They fund it. Arm it. Train it. Facilitate it across borders. They are a pestilence which needed to be squashed out the gate. But, we didn’t. Jimmy Carter was given full justification for war against Iran on November 4th, 1979 and he chose to negotiate with them…to play a game they set up where they were the aggrieved party and the USA had to offer reparations for its sins. And then President after President let it slide…mounting numbers of death, more and more terror and oppression and yet it was hands-off on Iran.

I don’t know why. Sure, there were bribes. Clearly to this day – perhaps even to this minute if we haven’t blocked all the Iranian bank accounts – people have been getting paid to toe Iran’s line. Also, there was idiocy. People built up a bizarre fantasy world where the West in general and the USA in particular was the cause of all the ills in the world and so any entity standing against the West and the USA were the good guys. I can’t adequately describe the level of insanity one has to have for this to seem like a rational idea…we’re dealing with savages who hang people for being gay and stone women to death for showing a little ankle. People who do this are obviously evil…but wash it through an Ivy League degree and all of a sudden a 73 year old coup in Iran excuses it all. But even with all that, I can’t see why we didn’t just take them out.

We are overwhelmingly more powerful. Not just a bit stronger – overwhelming. We have absolute aerial superiority. Complete command of the seas. Vastly more money, manpower and manufacturing capacity. It doesn’t matter how brave and dedicated the regime’s servants are – power is power and we have vastly more than Iran. There is no negotiation with this disparity of power – it is we say what we want, perhaps give them a bit of what they want (if it suits us) and if agreement is not made, the regime is destroyed. And any fool can easily see this is the outcome…but only if the Iranians know there is an American government which is serious. That has been the missing element. Again and again we have simply rolled over for the Mullahs. Republicans and Democrats, hawks and doves…everyone has been eager to kowtow to mullah bluster.

The mullahs decided we were still bluffing – the lesson of Maduro did not take hold. Just yesterday the mullahs were still full of shouts and threats. But this time, today, it was all different – because Trump doesn’t bluff. He’ll wheel and deal. He’ll move in a complex dance with alternate velvet gloves and iron fists..but in the end when he says “it will be thus”, that is what it will be – and he never demands something that is out of reach. The mullahs could have made a deal. Heck, per Trump the remnants still alive right now can make a deal…but the deal is no nukes, no more terrorism and the Iranian people get to run their own lives. However they want. Trump hasn’t said what sort of new Iran there must be – rightly so because it isn’t our call to make. Monarchy. Democracy. Heck, even Islamic Republic, if the Iranians want it. But it has to be what they want, and must never threaten America or American interests again.

This is yet more of Trump getting us back into the real world. A world where we simply are top of the heap. Hate it all you want, it is what it is. Even in our currently weakened state, we still outshine everyone, and by a lot. Trump is resetting the world: letting it know that you don’t want to defy us. Argue with us all you want. Hit us hard in the give and take of negotiations. Press for every ounce of advantage against us. Fine. And we’ll play the same game. But defy us? Threaten us? Attack us? Not a good idea. You will lose. And very badly.

And how are the Democrats responding? Other than Fetterman, even worse than you’d expect. They are condemning it. That is, condemning the effort to rid the world of a half-century old pestilence. We’ll see what judgement the American people render on it.

Iran

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Did I vote for this?

You mean for Trump’s oft-stated determination that Iran would not be able to obtain a nuclear weapon? You mean his confirmation of official and bi-partisan US policy for the past quarter century? Yeah, I voted for that. In fact, I voted to make sure it would happen – because no other person in office would have done it.

Sure, I would have preferred the Mullahs had bowed to the inevitable. I thought – and Trump probably thought – that the vaporization of Soleimani would convince the Mullahs that Trump’s intentions were serious. I guess it didn’t. They probably thought they could just drag things out and wait for non-Trump to be in office. There is a good chance, after all, that Iranian intel people monitor the American MSM and figure they’re getting an accurate picture of the American political scene. Anyone who takes the American MSM seriously is going to have a massively warped sense of what is going on over here…and if the Mullahs believed that Trump was in trouble over deporting illegals, then that might have convinced them they could dig in their heels and wait him out.

Wrong answer!

Some people – including some who have been allegedly MAGA – are now lighting their hair on fire over the prospect of Trump sending in the Army. I am convinced this is paid for by the Iranian government…its just too stupid for words. We just showed we don’t need to send in the Army. We can destroy any target we wish in Iran with impunity. Sure, the Mullahs might send their absurd little Navy on a suicide run, but that will be quickly disposed of by the US Navy (sorry, 60 year old frigates and aged Russian Kilo-class subs are going to be sunk before they even know we’re there). They might try a proxy attack using terrorist groups – but Trump has already said that any Iranian retaliation will result in further US attacks…and I doubt that Trump is going to be too concerned about proving Iran was behind any attack…we’ll just assume they were behind it. And if they aren’t behind it, too bad, so sad – when you fund lunatic terrorist groups you takes your chances. Should have thought about blowback a long time ago. Trump did suggest that regime change would be useful but there was nothing in his statement indicating he wants us to forcibly change the regime…and he’s not dumb enough to come before the American people and say he wants to send 250,000 of our sons and daughters to Tehran. Just won’t happen.

And he posted that because he knows – even if his idiotic critics don’t – that the end of the Mullah regime means peace. They are the only people keeping the Islamist nonsense alive. Muslims might very well hate me, hate Jews, hate the USA, hate the west…but from the hate to the suicide vest are lots of steps. Takes lots of money for propaganda, for materials and training…take away that money and the hate might fester but it will fester in a void. Some jackanapes in Cairo ranting about stupid Americans as if we care. It is wise for Trump to put that prospect out there…it gets the Mullahs looking over their shoulders and realizing that, come what may, the oil sales must go on or they’ll run out of money to pay their bully boys – and no bully boys means mobs outside the palace calling for your blood.

As for what the Iranian people want – I couldn’t care less. I’ve seen some people write up how the Mullahs betrayed the Iranian revolution and it sounds like something wise to say and I’ve pretty much accepted it but then it kinda struck me – going back to ancient times, the people of Iran haven’t known a minute of political freedom. They were under absolute monarchy until the 1930’s and then a sort of bogus parliament was created as a fig leaf for absolute monarchy. And even in that absolute monarchy, it was really just a series of competing interest groups trying to be the power behind the throne…mostly in order to steal the money, especially the oil money once that came rolling in. Sure, the Shah was oppressive and by the mid-1970s he was unpopular, but did the mobs demonstrating against him even know what they wanted? Have any conception of what it means to be free? They had never lived it – and going back to their earliest civilized ancestors, they had no experience of it. Very likely they were just being manipulated by the Ayatollah’s people and they eventually got rid of the Shah for him and he just stepped into the role of absolute monarch under a different mask. Basically, it is all nonsense…and in a very real sense, not even a fully real country…just people who happen to speak mostly the same language and hold the same religious beliefs crammed into the borders Russia and Britain drew for them in the 19th century. I mean, for goodness sake, the Shah was trying to take the mantle of Cyrus the Great – the Shah was the son of a usurper placed on the throne by British machinations and here this nitwit was trying to claim he was somehow connected to the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. That isn’t God’s anointed…that is a guy play acting and hoping nobody bothers to check behind the curtain.

I just don’t care what they do. I’m only interested in Iran insofar as they cause my country any trouble. And shouting “death to America” while trying to build a nuke is the definition of trouble. If they had never done anything else to offend us, I’d still want them zapped over that. Call me silly, but when someone says they want to kill me and they’re trying to obtain the means to do so, I’m going to take them seriously and respond accordingly. And it isn’t The Jews making me do this – if Israel didn’t exist it wouldn’t change my view. And, no, I in no way feel morally responsible for their plight…I don’t care about the 1953 coup or anything else the Iranians use as an excuse to hate me. You see, I don’t care if they hate me – and I can’t fix what happened in the past. I only care if they want to kill me. And they have told us again and again they want to kill us. They could stop that at any time and we’d all be cool and happy. Their choice. Not mine.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan29 Comments

I get Trump’s reticence in relation to military action against Iran. War is always incalculable in results. Once the guns go off, you never quite know how it will come out. Clearly, the Mullahs should never possess a nuclear weapon. The chances they’ll actually use one are low given Israel’s almost certain already existing nuclear deterrent, but the world can’t rely on Mullah reasonableness. Additionally, I have held since 1979 that the Iranian regime is a pestilence. And since the fall of the USSR, they have been the primary promoter of Islamist terrorism (good to remember that prior to the fall of the USSR, most Muslim terrorists officially adhered to some sort of Socialist program downplaying the Islamic element…but the only pay for it post 1991 has been Tehran, so the Socialism is muted and the Islamism emphasized). Bottom line, if the Mullah regime goes, the most likely outcome in the Middle East is a general peace settlement as there will be no one to pay for Islamist programs (another good thing to remember is that outside Iran and its proxies, Islamist propaganda these days is heavily suppressed in Muslim nations…sure, they’ll let you publish endless copies of Mein Kampf and anti-Semitism if the order of the day…but this “river to the sea” nonsense is kept under control). In my view, we should – if necessary – launch attacks to ensure Iran’s nuclear program is crippled (there is some doubt that Israel has a weapon – outside a nuke – which can reach the deepest buried elements).

But I’m going to trust Trump’s judgement on this. He does have access to a lot of information we don’t have and, very important, he has earned our trust. The man took a bullet for us. He’s reliable – even if he gets it wrong, the motivation will still be to do what is best for the USA. If he orders an attack, I support that – if he decides to hold off, I’ll support that.

Someone posted a video on X claiming to show an empty Los Angeles emergency room – with the narration claiming it is a horror as “our people” aren’t getting life-saving care. If true, what it means is that illegals aren’t using the ER as their primary care facility…which they routinely do, clogging up the system and costing everyone untold sums of money. If they’re refusing to do this out of fear of ICE, then that is what I voted for – illegals should be afraid to show their faces. They should live furtive lives in the shadows – impossible to rent a house, buy a car, get health care…because they aren’t supposed to be here. They can go back home and not have these problems.

We’re also getting more tear-jerker bits of propaganda about some of the deported – “she’s a grandma who has been here 30 years and she loves being in America”. Yeah, if she had the least bit of respect for America and Americans, she wouldn’t have come here illegally. We really need to get that across – illegally crossing our border is an insult. It is done by people with total contempt for the United States and our people.

And, guys, it has been a long time since the immigrant was a self-selected, hard-working person who wanted to build a better life. The floodgates were opened under Obama (and, really, even before that) and the word went out that the suckers in the USA would let you stay illegally and provide you housing, medical care, food and education…never asking you to contribute or develop any love for America. The people who flooded in – especially when Biden was in office – are leeches looking to live off the American people. They’re precisely the people who keep their home countries as dumps…voting for any conman who offers a free ride and cheering loudly each tin pot dictator in turn…and, of course, considering it a point of honor to help and protect criminal gangs. They all have to go.

ICE is reporting a 500% increase in assaults on their officers – all of this encouraged and orchestrated by the Democrats. They are all-in on illegals – this is insane but, really, they can’t do otherwise…an end to illegal immigration and the huge amounts of graft it begets is a death knell for the Democrat party. Already the DNC is being starved of funds…the more Trump does the less money the Democrats will have. And that’s just one of a score of problems here – each 750,000 illegals deported means one less Blue State House seat, even if the SC refuses to allow Trump to only count citizens in the census. They must fight like this and hope that some even turns the American people against Trump’s policies. I don’t see that happening – they probably don’t, either – but they’ll keep at it because they have no choice.

The Mullahs: They Still Have to Go

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Gotta tip the hat to the Israelis – that must have taken months to set up. They did it without anyone figuring it out and it clearly caught the Iranians totally by surprise.

There are Right voices being raised against Israel – rather stupid Right voices, but they are there. It isn’t just for the Left that some people think history started last week. Also, things like the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Marine Corps Barracks bombing are very much ancient history – the young don’t even know they happened. It is, perhaps, a little hard for me to realize that one of the central events of my formative years is ancient but so it is…in fact, as ancient to the youth of today as World War One was to me when I was their age. But at least I knew about World War One! The kids today don’t know much – and a healthy skepticism about foreign adventures is being twisted by malevolent actors into sheer stupidity.

There are good and bad nations in the world. Good and bad governments. For the most part, it is a matter of perfect indifference to an American what another nation is like – if they are bad, we can just stay away from them and that’s fine. But some nations aren’t just bad, they are malicious. Iran is one of the malicious nations. Their government, actually. It isn’t that they chant “Death to America” that is the problem…it is that they try to carry out the chant. That they are mostly incompetent at it is neither here nor there. It is that they try to strike my nation any way they can which matters. Essentially, since the fall of the USSR and the termination of Soviet funding for terrorism, Iran has been the prime mover in the terrorist world. They fund it. Train it. Supply it. Facilitate it at every turn. They take the money of the people of Iran – the part they don’t steal and hide away in Western banks – and use it to fund people who enjoy killing. You know, like the Hamas cretins who attacked Israel on October 7th. They live for the day when they might pull off something like that in the USA. I’ve been saying since 1979 that the Mullah regime in Tehran has to go – and everything that has happened since 1979 has simply confirmed this view as correct. But if you’re talking to a kid born in 2002 you won’t get through to them…they don’t remember it. They don’t even remember 9/11. All they see is the aftermath of our failed War on Terrorism and they were fed a story about how it all happened…The Jews and so forth made it happen and, hey, you know they lied about that Hitler fellow, too!

Good place to point out that Iran funds a lot of the Holocaust revisionism. Muslim nations have generally done this since WWII in an attempt to undercut Israel’s moral legitimacy…but the Mullahs put it all on steroids. Another reason they are malevolent. And what is malevolent has to go. The cancer has to be cut out…because if you don’t, it’ll eventually kill you.

To be fair, there are plenty of nations with governments that are evil – they rob their own people, oppress, kill, etc. But I have no concern about it because they aren’t trying to kill me. This is a key distinction, guys! The pragmatic facts of life are that peace cannot come to the Middle East until the Mullahs are removed from power. As long as they are in power, they will continue to stir the pot and fund terrorism in a program to seek maximum advantage in service of their sick and twisted goal of destroying Israel and the United States. It doesn’t matter that they never will have this power – it is that they will keep trying to achieve their goal. Get rid of them and there will be peace. Their dream is stupid but they won’t give it up – so it will have to be taken away from them.

What Israel is doing won’t do the job. Oh, there’s a slight chance that the temporary weakening of the regime will allow for popular revolt in Iran, but that is a very slight chance. The Mullahs make sure their security goons are well paid – and that means they’ll continue to obey orders to kill anyone who steps out of line. More than likely, the Mullahs will ride this out – and will remain the problem. Even if Israel destroys their nuclear program – literally sets it back to square one – it won’t solve the problem. Still good for Israel and the world, but not a resolution. A resolution only comes when the Mullahs are gone.

I’ve favored for years the most logical way to get the Mullahs out – as they remain in power because they can pay for goons, take away their money. Complete freeze on all assets, total blockade – land, sea and air. Nobody and nothing gets in or out. Within a few months the money is gone and shortages are spreading and though the Mullahs will lash out they can’t actually break the blockade…and hungry people facing off with unpaid goons is only going to go one way. Any military element here (other than the actual blockading forces) will be to degrade the means Iran has of striking out – mostly wiping out their small Navy and destroying their missile production facilities. It wouldn’t take much. It wouldn’t take long. It just takes the will to do it.

That will is lacking – even in Trump – because people simply do not understand the nature of the problem. You can’t reason with people who have no reason. We’ve seen it – try arguing with a Liberal. It is impossible. They will not address your points nor your objections but will just endlessly and quite mindlessly repeat their talking points. The Mullahs may or may not be truly insane – but they do know, sane or not, that if they give up the Death to America/Israel dream, then there’s no justification for their continued power. They know that at best a life of impoverished exile awaits them after that…and very likely death at the hands of their own people. There is no upside for them to act rationally – and so they won’t. And they will continue to rely on our unwillingness to see their insanity. See it. Understand it. And then get rid of them – whatever it costs its cheaper than another 50 years of dealing with these lunatics.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan16 Comments

I’ve read some articles which assert that Democrats believe they have a winner in the Maryland Man issue – they figure they can move off from defending the man but garner support by pointing out the procedural error which got him back to El Salvador.

No. Serious! They seem to really think this. That the American people will rise up in outrage over deportations because the forms weren’t filled out correctly.

At first glance we just laugh – but then it dawns on us: the Left are the people who run the bureaucracy, public and private. All they’ve ever done in their life is check off boxes and make certain forms are filled out. They consider this an accomplishment and the height of intellectual achievement. Think about every issue: the Experts says it is so and so and with this report from the Experts there is nothing further to discuss. Just check off that box and move on! And heaven help you if you don’t…because they love to find the clerical or spelling error…makes them feel smart.

We are, as I’ve said, dealing with some very stupid people. And we really should have figured this out a long while ago – we thought the Green stuff was Secret Communism…and it is but it is also very, very stupid…anyone can see that if your goal is to reduce CO2 you’ll build nuclear plants by the dozen. Nope: place mirrors in the desert that don’t work! Student loans – how often do you hear anyone suggest making them dischargable in bankruptcy? Hardly ever, if at all – and it is the simplest solution. If the grad simply isn’t making enough money post-college to carry the freight, file for bankruptcy and be done with it. But they don’t want that – they want to annul the debt. After the forms are filled out, of course. This is the dumbest way to go about it. But the Left is wedded to it (to be sure, this could also stem from a lot of well-off grads just not wanting to pay the bill…if the solution is bankruptcy but you make too much money for that, then where’s the advantage for you?).

I’ve seen a lot of Doomers on X – people who are saying it is all over, Trump has failed, the GOP is finished…and it all would have been better if Trump had done Y instead of Z. We are on Day 92. Just past three months. The Doomers are getting irritating. Sure, maybe the whole Trump experiment fails…but it’ll take a couple years for it to happen. And even if we get whacked in 2026 that doesn’t mean Trump has failed…Reagan got whacked in 1982, after all. Keep in mind as we go forward that there is money to be had in clicks…and hate clicks pay as much as love clicks. Some people will just say things to get clicks. As for me, when I see a Doomer on X or other social media, I hit the mute button. Won’t engage. Not going to give them money for poisoning the well.

DNI Tulsi Gabbard appears to be wary of engaging in military action against Iran. This, and her unwillingness to go to war over Ukraine, is upsetting a lot of hawks. Anyone who has hung around the blog knows that I want no war with Russia but have long figured we should go to war with Iran. These are my opinions informed by my understanding of the facts. Others can come to different conclusions. That’s ok. It is possible for honest people to look at the same set of facts and conclude differently. Nothing doing with some people – because Gabbard doesn’t want war with Russia she is now a Putin stooge and because she’s wary of an attack on Iran she’s also a Mullah stooge.

Stop it, people. Gabbard may be right or she may be wrong – but she’s not a traitor. She’s an honest, patriotic American citizen. She also doesn’t call the shots – Trump does. She gets to say what she thinks and then Trump decides. And only fool would want Trump to only receive one point of view on policy matters. Lets hear every honest opinion and try to sift through them to the best result – understanding that there might not be an actual good choice in a situation…some times it is just picking the least bad option.

Got into an argument on X yesterday. Surprise! Anyways, it started with someone noting a Leftwing account arguing that every Confederate should have been tortured and killed post-war. Naturally, this clickbait was generating a lot of outrage (as was its intent) but I noted that the real problem wasn’t that we didn’t mass murder Confederates, but simply that Johnson pardoned them all. And he did this because he was trying to curry favor with the former Planter Class (whom he despised) for an 1868 Presidential run as a Democrat. It didn’t work – they wouldn’t forgive him for remaining loyal to the Union and being Lincoln’s running mate. But that, really, was the entire post-Civil War failure…it created the whole problem. Which wasn’t the Klan (insane violence is always only a temporary problem) – the problem was we let the Confederates vote themselves back into power and, by outnumbering black Americans in the South, vote black Americans into Jim Crow. If the former Confederates were disenfranchised for good, it never would have happened. The race issue would have resolved itself in a generation or two – by 1920 at the latest.

This, in turn, got me a bunch of “how dare you!” from the Right…the usual blather about how the Confederacy was spotlessly honorable and the men who served her needed to be reintegrated back into civil life. Balderdash – the Confederacy came about because the Planter Class had lost power at the Federal level and wanted to keep stealing the labor of black Americans. There were decades of propaganda built up for it – keeping in mind that the idea of the Confederacy was born under Jackson’s Administration – playing upon racial fears, disdain for Northern tradesmen (greasy mechanics, the South considered them), prospects for conquest south of the Rio Grande and a rather hypocritical view of States Rights (ie, they wanted their States Rights…except in the case of the Fugitive Slave Act which essentially made every State a slave State), the Southern Ruling Class got their war.

And it was a catastrophe. The least justified Civil War in history and then they botched the execution (Washington could have told Lee that his job was to remain in being and free to maneuver; not being tied down to defending one city while the rest of the war was lost out West). A million or so people ended up dead (war, disease, hunger-related illness and so on). They got their arrogant, upper class, Plantation butts handed to them on a platter. Repent? Offer reparation? At least admit it wasn’t such a great idea? Nothing doing – they started working up justifications for themselves, lobbied for pardons and then recaptured the political system they had failed…the worst aspect of it was the fact that the Union was merciful. Nothing is quite so American as Grant’s “let ’em up easy” policy. This should have lead to that repentance (it did in some, most notably James Longstreet, but there were others), but the mercy was spat upon…with a spasm of Klan violence and laws mandating smaller water fountains among other ridiculous indignities.

Look, I get it – great-great-grandpa who served in the Alabama 5th Infantry was a good man who fought for what he thought was right. No, we don’t need to be tearing down statues. There was a greatness in Lee, and the sublime courage Confederate soldiers showed even against hopeless odds still shines across the ages. But lets also not kid ourselves about what happened. Lets keep in mind all those corpses and only say the war was justified if we could go to them and say, “it was good you died for this cause”. It was good for Billy Yank … Johnny Reb? Not so much. He shouldn’t have had to show his sublime courage in a lost cause. Wiser heads should have prevailed. And so it goes with most wars – and that it the primary point I make these days. Sometimes you do have to fight – but only because someone else is doing something so egregiously immoral that there is no other way to stop them.