Posted on by

World War III Watch Going to war based on intelligence estimates?

In 2002, President George W Bush started pushing for military action against Iraq, which the Central Intelligence Agency had told him was building and holding ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ WMD, in violation of United Nations’ sanctions after President Saddam Hussein al Tikriti had sent his Republican Guard to conquer and annex bordering Kuwait. President Hussein’s forces openly used chemical weapons against Kurds in Iraq and in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. After the United States led coalition kicked the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq was forced to dismantle its WMD programs and stockpiles, but it wasn’t difficult to believe reports that the country was building them again.

The younger President Bush got the authorization he needed from Congress, and sent in the troops to invade Iraq, quickly overrunning the country and chasing Mr Hussein out of power, but the WMD we went in to seize were never found. A lot of Democrats accused Mr Bush of having made up the whole thing, simply to finish off what his father had left undone in 1991, even though former double-nought spy Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in her book, Fair Game, that not finding the purported WMD surprised the CIA. Mrs Wilson hated Mr Bush, and certainly no reason to defend him, but, of course, the American left were not going to mention that part of her book.

Fast-forward to Juneteenth, and The Wall Street Journal:

MAGA’s Misguided Isolationists

Most Republicans support Israel and don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

By The Editorial Board | Thursday, Juneteenth 2025 | 6:12 PM EDT

The press is full of reporting on the “MAGA civil war” over Iran, but what’s notable is that the loudest isolationists appear to be losing the debate. It’s worth considering how they’ve misread the historical moment, the views of most Republicans, and above all President Trump.

Start with the threat and the mission. Like leftists after Vietnam, the new-right isolationists see every U.S. military intervention as a slippery slope to disaster. Instead of Vietnam Syndrome, they suffer from Iraq Syndrome: Every U.S. intervention will turn into a quagmire of “nation-building,” or even catastrophe.

Well, it’s certainly true that Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, did turn into a “quagmire of ‘nation-building’,” a failed quagmire of nation-building. Afghanistan is once again ruled by the Talban, while Iraq, though nominally a democracy, is wracked with corruption and is considered by some to be yet another authoritarian state. 4,492 Americans were killed in Iraq, and for what? Of the 22,700 American servicemen who were wounded but not killed, 1,650 are amputees of one form or another. Was it worth it?

While I’m one of the few who actually read Mrs Wilson’s book, whether people believed that President Bush deliberately lied or that the intelligence was simply faulty, we all know one thing: the United States went into the second Persian Gulf War based on intelligence reports which did not turn out to be accurate.

That more aggressive American action against Iran was pushed by former Vice President Mike Pence — it was his tweet I used to illustrate this article — can only serve to make conservatives more leery of the idea!

Wars are unpredictable and always come with risks that must be contemplated. But so far Israel is winning this fight without regional, much less global, escalation. Iran has fired back at Israel, with decreasing missiles by the day, while Russia and China steer clear. “Military conflict is not a solution,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday.

The isolationists are unwilling to make distinctions and treat each intervention on its own terms. In Iran’s case, no one is talking about putting U.S. troops on the ground or a military occupation. Nor is anyone asking the U.S. to do the heavy lifting or take the biggest risk. “This is the dirty work that Israel does for all of us,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Tuesday.

Israel’s war against Iran is not a pre-emptive strike, because Iran has been supplying money and weapons to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis all along, encouraging them to use them against Israel, and those terrorist groups have used Iranian supplied weapons to attack the Jewish state. But Israel has been striking targets against sites that Mossad, their intelligence agency, have said are developing and attempting to build nuclear weapons. Mossad may well be right about that — they are the best intelligence agency in the world — but Israel is doing the same thing the younger President Bush did in 2002 and 2003: encouraging military action against a foreign nation based upon intelligence assessments, intelligence assessments which could be wrong.

They were, after all, wrong in 2002!

Another difference with Iraq is that Iran actually has an advanced nuclear program, far beyond any civilian purpose. There’s no uncertainty on this point, as the International Atomic Energy Agency has documented. The only debate is whether Iran, on the precipice of a nuclear breakout, was already weaponizing or merely threatening to do so at a time of its choosing. But does anyone now think Iran would hold off, if it is left with its enrichment at Fordow intact?

And there we have it: the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal have just said that it really doesn’t matter whether the intelligence assessments are right, but that because they could be right, we must bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!

Is it really any surprise, after the intelligence failures over Iraq, that some people who thoroughly support Israel are nevertheless leery of attacking Iran based on intelligence estimates from the agency of a foreign nation which has a vested interest in getting the United States to join in the attack on Iran?

Posted on by

President Trump is winning on immigration: a large number of illegals have apparently self-deported

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain noted this Juneteenth that Steven Camerota and Karen Ziegler of the Center for Immigration Studies analyzed reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and concluded that “the number of illegal immigrants has fallen by one million since the start of the year.” That number is far greater than the number of illegals that have been deported, and that means, if the estimates are close to correct, what President Trump called self-deportation has been occurring in far greater numbers than the most optimistic of us had hoped.

Let’s extrapolate a bit from this analysis. If the number of illegal immigrants decreased by one million in about five months, that’s an average decline of 200,000 every month — roughly 2.4 million per year. So if the current trend could be continued, by the time the 2028 election rolls around, the number of illegals in the United States will be less than it was when Joe Biden took office in 2021.

At this point, Mr McCain noted what this would do to congressional seat, and therefore electoral vote, apportionment. President Trump tried this, sort of, during his first term, when he wanted immigration status included in the 2020 census, as possibly a way to apportion congressional seats based on the number of American citizens rather than raw population, but that effort failed.

But I look at it differently. I have said it previously, that the United States needs immigrants, but that we need good, vetted, useful, legal immigrants, immigrants of good character, immigrants who have clean criminal records in their home countries, and immigrants who are civic minded, attend church, and will assimilate into our country, to wave American flags, not Mexican ones.

Those who have left voluntarily, without being picked up and kicked out, will have the advantage if they apply for legal immigration, not having a forced deportation on their records. We should be able to investigate their records in their home countries, and their records here in the United States, without prejudice, if they apply to return legally. And those who have poor records, we can exclude.

This is what we should want, people who will come to the United States, contribute to our economy and our society. We can assign reasonable criteria that they have to meet:

  • Couples who have been legally married for more than three years;
  • Couples who have children;
  • No single males of military or fighting age;
  • No gangland or gang-related tattoos;
  • People with marketable skills;
  • People who have a record of good employment;
  • Families who attend Mass regularly; and, of course
  • People with clean criminal records.

There was some Democratic politician, I cannot recall whom, who facetiously tried to justify illegal immigration by saying that the Latin American countries were sending us their best people. Actually, I saw it as people who weren’t good enough to make it in their own countries! But with the kinds of criteria I listed, and other criteria could be suggested, we could do our best to assure that the immigrants admitted actually are the best for whom we could hope.

The vast majority of Americans, including the majority of people who voted for President Trump, would gladly accept those kind of immigrants.

Posted on by

Midnight Oil Blogging

Burning the midnight oil

The specter of war with Iran is giving everyone pause, most certainly including me. Israel launched air strikes against the Islamic Republic a few days ago, supposedly with foreknowledge communicated to President Trump. The G7 group, many of the members of which don’t particularly like either President Trump or Israeli Prime Minister, nevertheless agreed that:

“Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” the statement added and said the G7 was “clear that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”

One reason for writing around midnight is that morning has broken over Tehran, which is an odd 7hours and 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Daylight Time in the United States. Iran issued the statement before Wednesday night, “tonight we’ll deliver a surprise the world will remember for centuries,” but in fact the Islamic Republic did nothing. Someone, presumably Israel, hacked Iranian television, pushing messages that civilians should take to the streets and overthrown the government of the mad mullahs. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei publicly rejected negotiations, but Iran has sent out mixed mesages from other sources.

At least as of this writing, there are no reports of belligerent action between Israel and Iran, but while Israel has, reportedly, significantly damaged Iran’s ability to produce weapons-grade uranium, the job of completely ending the country’s nuclear weapons program has not been completed.

The New York Times reported, at 12:14 AM EDT:

The Israeli military said on Thursday morning that missiles had been launched from Iran toward Israel. It called on the public to enter protected spaces such as communal shelters or safe rooms until further notice.

What will happen? We honestly don’t know.

Overnight, an Iranian missile that got through struck a hospital in Tel Aviv.

Posted on by

Bad causes attract bad people Why do the pro-#Hamas groups always lie through their scummy teeth?

I have been amused by the so-called #GlobalMarchToGaza and the silliness of Western liberals in their sympathy for the people who started a war they couldn’t finish, and pointed out their naïveté of hundreds of protesters who believed that Egypt would simply allow them to march through the Sinai desert to the border with Gaza, in theory to break the “siege.”

In a recent post on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — the group were kind enough to include the link to their website, which I naturally checked. So, what did I find?

Is Global March To Gaza a political movement?

  • No. Global March To Gaza is a civic, apolitical, and independent movement.
  • We do not represent any political party, ideology, or religion.
  • We represent the people, in all their diversity and humanism.
  • Our only guiding principles are justice, human dignity, and peace.

So, they claim to be apolitical, to suck in the Western liberals, but a group whose “only guiding principles are justice, human dignity, and peace” would also have been calling for Hamas to release all of the remaining hostages. That I did not find.

One of the six ‘luminaries’ shown, Zwelivelile Mandla Mandela, Chief of the Mvezo Traditional Council, the Amir of the Royal House of Mandela, and the grandson of former President Nelson Mandela, was depicted wearing a ‘Palestinian’ keffiyeh.

The Global March to Gaza are as apolitical as our Democratic Party.

I never expect any group which tells us it is apolitical to actually be apolitical, and once again, I was proven right.

I’ve said it before: bad causes attract bad people, and the Global March to Gaza organizers are simply bad people.

Posted on by

What did they think would happen?

Let’s tell the truth here: Western liberals are, collectively, as dumb as a box of rocks. Images of the border wall between Gaza and Egypt are all over the internet, and anyone who can use Teh Google could have looked up the fact that the Egyptian government see Hamas as just another facet of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group outlawed in Egypt. Egypt has been ‘helping’ with negotiations between Hamas and Israel, because Egypt still dislikes Western civilization — other than Western nations’ money that is! — but sees political Islam as a real threat. That border wall, built by Egypt, not Israel, certainly more of an impediment than the big, beautiful wall President Trump has been building between the United States and Mexico, was meant to keep ‘Palestinians’ from getting into Egypt, because Egypt sees them for what they are: nothing but radical malcontents who have caused trouble everywhere the’ve gone.

Knowing all of that, why would the #GlobalMarchToGaza think that the Egyptian government would go along with their plans? Continue reading →

Posted on by

World War III Watch: Israel tries to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities

There’s one inescapable fact in life: the Israelis are just plain smarter than the Muslims!

We normally use our headline World War III Watch for escalation in the Russo-Ukrainian War, but this time it’s Israel trying to prevent World War III, by going after the Iranian military command and the Islamic Republic’s programs to build nuclear weapons. Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

It has been pointed out that, on April 12, Trump said Iran had 60 days to reach an agreement on ending its nuclear weapons program, and today? Yeah — Day 61.

Anyway, this is YUGE:

Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) confirmed in the early hours of Friday morning local time that Israeli airstrikes on targets in the country eliminated Major General Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Other arms of Iran’s state news apparatus confirmed several other high-profile regime members, including two nuclear scientists, were killed in the strikes. While unverified reports suggested that Salami may be far from the only high-ranking Iranian regime official to have been targeted successfully in the operation, he is the only one whose death the Iranian government has confirmed at press time.

Salami has sustained a place as one of the most prominent and belligerent senior leaders in the Iranian Islamist regime, regularly threatening attacks on America and Israel. In what was perhaps his final public appearance on Thursday, Salami declared that his forces were “war-tested and experienced,” prepared for war against its enemies.

I have to admit it: I have a natural revulsion to these kinds of attacks, but in the case of Iran and its continually threatening stance, I see it more as an attack against Nazi Germany before the Third Reich was really prepared for war. I’ve been very concerned about war with Russia spreading outside of Ukraine, because Russia has a strategic nuclear arsenal; what Israel has been doing is to try to keep Iran from building nuclear weapons.

Mr McCain entitled his article “‘An Earth-Shattering Kaboom’: Israel Wipes Out Top Iranian Military Leaders,” so I just have to include that video from Bugs Bunny; it’ll be below the fold. Continue reading →

Posted on by

Today’s left truly hate #FreedomOfSpeech . . . for people other than themselves Today's left champion 'diversity', just as long as it's not a diversity of opinions.

The “Occupy Democrats” emerged from the silly “Occupy Wall Street” protests and say they are “a merger of the goals and interests of Occupy with those of the Democratic Party.” What they oppose is, in no particular order, Donald Trump, capitalism, and freedom of speech and of the press. They apparently, to judge from the cartoon published on their Facebook page, blame conservative election victories on President Ronald Reagan, who enabled Rush Limbaugh to gain an audience — not that he had “Talent on loan from God” — and then Fox News, the Drudge Report and the Koch brothers, then Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and inevitably Donald Trump. I’m only surprised that they didn’t include Twitter —  I refuse to call it 𝕏 — and Facebook.

We have reported many times on now thankfully former President Joe Biden’s attempt to create a Ministry of Truth under the Department of Fatherland Security, called the “Disinformation Governance Board”, and how we were fortunate that it failed. The left were aghast when Elon Musk was trying to buy Twitter, because they were afraid that conservatives might use Twitter more successfully, and the very lovely Taylor Lorenz, who wants to force us all to wear face masks forever, blamed the failure of that Board on “right-wing attacks.” My good friend — we’re such good friends that she has blocked me on Bluesky — Amanda Marcotte, who exercises her own freedom of speech and of the press on Salon, wanted the government to take over Twitter while The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch suggested it “should exist more as a semi-public utility than as an entity that a man with a spare $44 billion can just light on fire.” Continue reading →

Posted on by

Will the “No Kings” protests be peaceful?

Perhaps we have noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far left and #TrumpDerangement Syndrome afflicted columnist Will Bunch too much recently, but, while doing everything he can to defend the rioters and illegal immigrants in Los Angeles, he’s worried that such might come to the City of Brotherly Love.

Not that he won’t defend the rioters if violence does come to Philadelphia! But, guess what? It already has! Continue reading →