…continues…though it’s curious the Iranians missed most, if not all of their targets. Stay tuned…but don’t be surprised if any U.S. response is equally inaccurate.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of the Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty reminds us of irrefutable facts The Left would prefer went unreported:
“Since 1979, no one in the United States has figured out a good way to handle the regime in Tehran. For 40 years, we’ve been having the same arguments, and no matter what we tried, the results were disappointing.
…Last week, President Trump moved past the sanctions, exposure of their agents, and all the other measures that have hurt the Tehran regime on the periphery. He went after the chief architect of Iran’s regional aggression and left Quasem Soleimani a corpse on the road to Baghdad International Airport. Maybe this strike will make things worse, in the sense of bringing this constant low-level conflict with the Iranian regime into high-level open conflict. But now everyone in the Iranian regime has a new factor in their calculations: If the Americans can find and kill Quasem Soleimani, they can probably find just about anyone up and down the chain of command.Maybe the audacity of this attack stirs the Iranian leaders into a frenzy — or maybe it gets them to think twice and hesitate and face their own concerns about tit-for-tat escalation into all-out war. Such a war would undoubtedly hurt the United States, but it would devastate Iran.
Nothing else has gotten the United States to the point it desires — where the Iranian regime either drops “Death to America” as a slogan, a goal, and a philosophy, or everyone can genuinely rest assured that it is merely rote agitprop. The strike on Soleimani was something new — an experiment of sorts to see if it can generate the results that 40 years of other approaches have failed to generate. Let’s all hope that a new spirit of caution and prudence takes root in Tehran.“
Still, leading Dimocrats pretend not to get it:
Maybe…just maybe…the timing could have been related to the recent Iranian-backed rocket attack on U.S. forces in Iraq which killed another American…or the Iranian-inspired assault on our embassy…or the very visible presence in Bagdad of the head of a designated terrorist organization and our possession of the actionable intelligence necessary to take him out?!?
But trust Jake Tapper not to ask the obvious. BTW, Lieawatha’s misleading contention to the contrary notwithstanding, right or wrong, Mike Pence stated Suleimani was involved with the 9/11 attacks, not that his involvement was the reason for taking him out.
Meanwhile, in this forward Shannon Wood, Faisal Abbas of Arab News notes one certainty: when it comes to…
“In the end, he died as he had lived; amid violence and bloodshed, this time brought about by a hand other than his own.
Let no one be in any doubt that the death of Qassem Soleimani, targeted by a US airstrike on Baghdad airport in the early hours of Friday, is as significant in its own way as those of Osama bin Laden, the head of Al-Qaeda, and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of Daesh. Like those two killers, Soleimani brought death and destruction to a vast swath of the Middle East and beyond. And like them, the more publicity his vile deeds attracted, the better he liked it.
…So let there be no tears shed for Qassem Soleimani; he must have known that he could not get away with these crimes forever, and that he would not die in his bed. The questions now are, what lessons can be learned, and where do we go from here?
The first lesson, apparently learned neither by Europe in the 1930s nor by the Obama administration 80 years later, is that no good comes of appeasing bullies and tyrants. It is no coincidence that Qassem Soleimani’s emergence into the public consciousness around 2015 coincided with Obama’s ill-fated agreement to try to curb Iran’s nuclear program by easing sanctions.
Soleimani saw the nuclear deal as a victory, and it is to Donald Trump’s credit that he has done everything in his power to snatch that victory from the Iranian’s grasp — including, on Friday, the ultimate sanction.
As to the future, the doomsayers have already seen it; Iran will retaliate, they say, matters will escalate, and we are on the path to a Third World War. The pessimists, however, forget two things. First, that Iran has been at war with the civilized world for 40 years, and the principle sufferers have been the Iranian people themselves…”
A good start! Heck, Trump could really have stumbled on to something; knock off a gross or so more of Iran’s ruling class and the problem might just take care of itself.
Next up, NRO‘s Rich Lowry makes an interesting comparison, as he wonders…
“Before there was Qasem Soleimani, there was Admiral Yamamoto.
In 1943, the U.S. targeted the exceptionally skilled Japanese commander and killed him in what constituted a precision attack for the time — with the P-38G Lightnings that intercepted him midair playing the role of the MQ-9 Reaper.
If it was wrong to kill Soleimani, it was wrong to kill Yamamoto — just as barbaric and illegal, just as damnable an “assassination.”
Of course, no celebrities back in World War II apologized to Imperial Japan, as actress Rose McGowan did to Iran after the killing of Soleimani in a now-semi-retracted sentiment.There wasn’t a debate about the operation’s legality. Members of the opposition party didn’t call it an assassination.No former sports star — and corporate brand ambassador — condemned it as a lamentable instance of American militarism.
…The motive here wasn’t subtle.The strike at Yamamoto was dubbed Operation Vengeance.
The centrality of Yamamoto to the enemy war effort also played a role.“Yamamoto was the beating heart of the Japanese navy,” Davis continues. “In his own country, he was seen as embodying the unwavering Bushido fighting spirit.”
It was hoped that his loss would stagger Tokyo, and so it did — after an amazing feat of U.S. airmanship downed Yamamoto’s plane, which crashed in the jungle on the island of Bougainville.
There was some worry when considering whether to kill him that Yamamoto’s successor might beeven more formidable.But it was brushed aside.Nimitz asked his exceptional intelligence officer, Edwin Layton, if he was confident that were none better who could replace Yamamoto.“Absolutely none,” Layton replied, according to his later account.“Absolutely none.”
A comment at the outset of the Yamamoto operation could just as easily have applied to the Soleimani operation: ‘TALLYHO X LET’S GET THE BASTARD.’“
Since we’re on the subject of matters military, writing at the WSJ, Greg Kelly and Katie Horgan finally call Mayor Buttgag’s combat bluff:
“When Mayor Pete Buttigieg talks about his military service, his opponents fall silent, the media fall in love, and his political prospects soar.Veterans roll their eyes.
CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Mr. Buttigieg Sunday if President Trump “deserves some credit” for the strike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. “No,” the candidate replied, “not until we know whether this was a good decision and how this decision was made.” He questioned whether “it was the right strategic move” and said his own judgment “is informed by the experience of having been on one of those planes headed into a war zone.”
But Mr. Buttigieg’s stint in the Navy isn’t as impressive as he makes it out to be. His 2019 memoir is called “Shortest Way Home,” an apt description of his military service. He entered the military through a little-used shortcut: direct commission in the reserves. The usual route to an officer’s commission includes four years at Annapolis or another military academy or months of intense training at Officer Candidate School. ROTC programs send prospective officers to far-flung summer training programs and require military drills during the academic year. Mr. Buttigieg skipped all that—no obstacle courses, no weapons training, no evaluation of his ability or willingness to lead. Paperwork, a health exam and a background check were all it took to make him a naval officer.
He writes that his reserve service “will always be one of the highlights of my life, but the price of admission was an ongoing flow of administrativia.”That’s not how it’s supposed to work…
…Mr. Buttigieg spent some five months in Afghanistan, where he writes that he remained less busy than he’d been at City Hall, with “more time for reflection and reading than I was used to back home.” He writes that he would take “a laptop and a cigar up to the roof at midnight to pick up a Wi-Fi signal and patch via Skype into a staff meeting at home.”The closest he came to combat was ferrying other staffers around in an SUV: In his campaign kickoff speech last April he referred to “119 trips I took outside the wire, driving or guarding a vehicle.” That’s a strange thing to count.Combat sorties in an F-18 are carefully logged. Driving a car isn’t.
After the welcome-home rally, glowing press, a few more years of light service, the mayor left the reserves. But his bragging rights were assured.Candidate Buttigieg takes every opportunity to lean in on those months in Afghanistan. Questions ranging from student debt to Colin Kaepernick to gun control prompt him to reference his military stint, sometimes indignantly…”
Yet, with this limited experience, both military and mayoral, Buttgag still feels qualified to assess the propriety of an action geometrically above his pay grade.
FYI, we should note Greg Kelly flew AV-8Bs in the Corps, as well serving as an embedded reporter with the 3rd Infantry Division during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Katie Horgan was on active duty with the Marines for 6 years, and served a 13-month deployment to Iraq.
Which puts either of them in a significantly better position to judge Trump’s actions than Mayor Pete.
Turning to the Ill-Gotten Gains segment, here’s an interesting item from The Hill via Speed Mach:
“Chelsea Clinton has reaped $9 million in compensation since 2011 for serving on the board of an internet investment company, according to Barron’s, the financial publication.
…Clinton, the only child of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has served on IAC’s board since 2011 and receives an annual $50,000 retainer and $250,000 worth of restricted IAC stock units, Barron’s reports.She reported owning $8.95 million worth of IAC stock to the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of December.
Clinton’s public profile has proved a valuable commodity. She earned an annual salary of $600,000 working as a special correspondent for NBC News in 2013 and part of 2014.Clinton was named to the board of Expedia Group in March of 2017, a position that typically earned $250,000 in 2015, according to a report at the time by The Guardian.
Both IAC and Expedia are controlled by Barry Diller, the business and television mogul, who is a friend of Hillary Clinton.“
Not bad for someone with no discernible background in any of the business owned by either IAC or Expedia. Sorta like Hunter Biden…but with a far more repugnant mother.
And in the EnvironMental Moment, courtesy today of Jeff Foutch, James Delingpole details at Breitbart how, in an eerie echo of California’s recent conflagrations…
“Australia is on fire, at least 17 people have been killed, hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and an estimated half-billion animals — both livestock and wildlife — have been burned alive. The area burned in the bush fires so far is considerably bigger than the area burned either in last year’s Amazon rainforest fires or the fires in California.
The stories and images that have emerged from Australia are vivid and dramatic…But let us not allow the heartbreak and the emotion to distract us from the truth about this natural disaster: it has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘climate change’.
As Paul Homewood pointed out last month, there has been no significant long-term decrease in rainfall or increase in temperatures in the affected regions.
Yes, it has been dry in New South Wales (where most of the worst fires are), but there have been several years, especially pre-1960, when it was drier…
The same applies to temperature. Yes, this has been a hot spring in New South Wales. But there have been times when it has been much hotter — making a nonsense of all stories in the Australian media about temperatures being the hottest evah…
So, to be clear, there is zero evidence of any change in climatic conditions that might have increased the likelihood or severity of these bush fires. This is not — repeat NOT — a man-made climate change story, and anyone who claims otherwise is either a gullible idiot or a lying charlatan.
There is, nonetheless, good reason to believe that the stupidity and irresponsibility of man is at least partly to blame for this disaster — just not quite in the way that the left-liberal MSM and the green wankerati would have you believe…”
One would think the raw statistics…17 lives, hundreds of homes and half a billion animals…would accurately convey how destructive these wildfires have been; but one would be wrong, as this graphic from ABC News demonstrates:
After all, the reality of the individual blazes…
…doesn’t paint the proper picture when you’re pushing propaganda.
As Townhall.com‘s Leah Barkoukis reports in a follow-on item from Mr. Foutch…
“A woman in the U.K. was secretly gorging on baby powder for 10 years before her ex-partner discovered the bizarre habit, which she is now seeking professional help for. Lisa Anderson, who said she has depression and anxiety and has been told she may be suffering from pica, is awaiting a formal diagnosis…”
Two thoughts come to mind: first, given the state of Britain’s National Health Service, Ms. Anderson may be awaiting a formal diagnosis for some time. Second, something tells us downing baby powder may not be her only eating disorder.
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.