[MAILCHIMP] With the potential for the Americans to get caught up in simultaneous wars with the Russians and Chinese, do I think the US can handle it? The short answer is that the US will be fine, but if you had asked me this during the Cold War - it would have been a cakewalk for the Americans.
While I don’t think it’s likely (and it is most certainly not recommended), simultaneous wars with the Russians and Chinese wouldn’t be overwhelming for the US military. That is because those two wars would boast extremely different circumstances.
War with the Russians would be a war of supply, providing munitions - specifically the decommissioned and outdated stuff - to the Ukrainians. On the flip side, war with the Chinese would be fought on the seas; the navies would be doing much of the heavy lifting.
The military assets needed to fight these wars would strain different structures, allowing the US military to operate at a manageable and sustainable level.
#1
The presumption seems to be that both will sit on their hands and not conduct operations against US assets abroad (military bases) or cyber / other strikes on the US. From my perspective both are working to avoid direct conflict with the US to allow it to implode on its own. That’s safer and surer with less damage to their own economies and populations
#4
If the PLA were to suddenly invade Luzon instead of Taiwan, for instance, I suspect it would play to our weaknesses instead of our strengths.
Not really. The PLA doesn't have great transport capability over water to begin with. They barely have enough landing craft to make a seizure of a port a remote possibility. Leaving the cover of SAMs and going for Luzon will leave what they have very exposed to American missiles, naval and air power. It would be an Operation Eagle Claw level of failure for the PLA.
#5
And corruption kills. The Chinese military is even more corrupt than the Russian. Further, the Taiwanese would flood social media with viral videos of the horrendous losses the amphibious forces would suffer. Something so visible, mom and dad will furiously demand an end to the stupidity.
Everyone assumes the Chinese have all the agency and everyone will passively react to what they do. That's not real life, theother side always has a say in the plans.
#6
I submit that an alliance of enemies are conducting low-intensity, clandestine warfare against the US now! It is cultural, political, and economic, but very real and very well established. The Chinese elite capture strategy is just the first among many examples, and the ROE and target folders are easily visible across the landscape of daily American life. That there are surrogate actors like Obama, Soros, the DNC, the SPLC, much of academia and the media doing their bidding in return for wealth, access, advantage and ego, doesn't change the effects. It is, or has been slow motion, and subversive/corrosive against core American values and ethos, and it is partnered with useful idiots and fellow travellers of our own. But it is very real and very well financed, since we buy their products and services, giving them the resources they use to strangle and main us slowly.
What is different is the velocity of the "change you can believe in", since they capture of the federal government is now accelerating the effects. How else do you explain the insanity, the corruption, the outright fraud and subversion?
If a secret, Marxist coup was underway in America today, how would it be different than what is happening daily?
An astute observation. Fentanyl is only a part of it, the chemical component. The biological component was, of course, covid. But the corruption is just astounding. Hollywood, the media, academia and politicians all kowtow to the CCP.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/07/2023 12:25 Comments ||
Top||
#8
Above comment in response to this comment:
I submit that an alliance of enemies are conducting low-intensity, clandestine warfare against the US now!
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/07/2023 12:32 Comments ||
Top||
#9
I submit that an alliance of enemies are conducting low-intensity, clandestine warfare against the US now
China has been waging a total cold war against the US since at least 2006. Russia joined in after 2010. The damage to the US and its institutions have gotten severe, but not instantly fatal. Yet.
It is a race between how much they can poison the US into a civil war or collapse vs China and Russian collapses.
#10
China has been waging a total cold war against the US since at least 2006.
It seems to me the plan commenced when Nixon opened China. First the general seduction, then manufacturing — remember all the inexpensive Chinese silk clothes that were so much part of the 1980s big hair look? — then the consolidation of one manufacturing monopoly after another via predatory pricing... and along the way they suddenly had the accumulated funds to bribe those who hadn’t thrown in with them for envisioned profits, not to mention entrap the rest of the world via belt-and-road and predatory lending.
Which is the long way round to your total war since 2006, DarthVader. You’ll have to forgive my slowness — I lack the training, so I’m figuring it out from first principles, mostly picked up here.
#11
TW, for some of us who spent a career under the rubric of Cold Warrior, the long, often clandestine conflict created a world view that said never trust those Basta*ds and never think they actually just gave up when the wall came down and we declared victory. The ChiComs were early junior partners, and more purist, at least overtly, in their Marxist beliefs. But what they also were were shrewd judges of the short attention span of the west and our focus on markets and profits. The Nixonian opening to China in the early 70s was always about the Kissinger affection for triangulation as a technique for breaking the Sino-Soviet linkages. We painted benevolent faces on their motives and saw their under-developed economy as a "market" and they quickly welcomed the economic envelopment. Cheap labor and cheap infrastructure costs drove short-term thinkers in business here to "de-industrialize", and from that point forward, the rest is history.
#16
From what I've seen over my lifetime the US can't fight its way out of a wet paper bag.
The US can and has. I have seen it quite a few times in my 50 years and been part of it. When the objective is clear, and when the commanders are free to do what they need to do.
When the objectives are fuzzy and politicians use the military to do political roles, that is where things fall down. Watched it happen for 20 years in the middle east. When there was a clearly defined enemy and the dog was let off the leash, the US military tore them up. Otherwise it was just a giant game of grab ass where our people got killed and maimed.
[Townhall] With his declining mental capabilities, ill-conceived policies, blundering administration, incompetent vice president, and corrupt son, brother, and family, Joe Biden is an easy target. Who can't take a strong swipe at him?
The signs point to Biden being a puppet of communist China, of democracy destroyer George Soros, of the treasonous Left, and, most of all, of Barack Obama. Without Obama’s Marxism and let’s call it accordingly, Communism, the current iteration of Joe Biden, the perfect stooge, would not exist.
DEFTLY COERCIVE
Sworn in as president of the United States 14 years ago, Obama served as the ultimate sleeper cell. His raison d'etre was to rise to the top of political power in America and, by default, the world, and take the country "down a couple notches" so that we would be merely another nation among the 200+ nations on Earth.
Joe Biden is perpetually being led and on many days doesn't know what he's doing, however, one cannot make that argument about Obama. Obama steered the ship of state based on his own whims and aspirations. His evil heart, never understood or even perceived by rank and file Democrats, plagues us enormously to this day.
Obama represents the pronounced threat that the Founding Fathers feared most: the enemy from within. To illustrate how treasonous and despicable his two terms in office proved to be, here is my previously unpublished poem from 2015. It was crafted to capture the "highlights" and nuances of Barack Obama’s eight years as president:
#6
Obama steered the ship of state based on his own whims and aspirations.
Not so sure about that. I could never give him that much credit. Somebody sponsored him, brought him along so to speak, whispered in his ear, pulled his strings or just outright gave him his marching orders every single day.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/07/2023 12:37 Comments ||
Top||
#7
"Obama represents the pronounced threat that the Founding Fathers feared most: the enemy from within."
If there was a time machine, who would be a hero...
#FanFiction
In case you missed it in today's Israel Times article from TW, comments and string.
[Gatestone] The Movement for Quality Government (MQG) in Israel is the far-left organization at the epicenter of the Israeli left's war against the Netanyahu government. MQG began its current campaign of delegitimization, subversion and demonization immediately after the Netanyahu government was sworn into office on December 29. The next day, MQG petitioned the Supreme Court to prevent Shas leader Aryeh Deri from serving as a minister in the government.
There was no legal basis for the petition. But that didn't bother the lawyers at MQG.
In its petition, MQG claimed that the terms of a plea deal Deri reached with the State Prosecution last year on tax reporting errors barred him from serving as a minister. Never mind that nothing in the plea deal stipulated anything of the sort or that 400,000 Israeli voters cast their ballots for Shas with the full expectation that Deri would serve as a senior minister.
Like MQG, the Supreme Court justices didn't bother giving a legal basis for their decision to act on MQG's petition and bar Deri from serving as a cabinet minister. The justices said Deri's appointment was "unreasonable," and with a stroke of a pen, the court retroactively disenfranchised Shas voters.
Building on its success, late last month MQG submitted a new petition asking the justices to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As in the case of Deri, MQG's petition is based on a political rather than a legal argument. MQG argues that as a criminal defendant, Netanyahu is unfit to serve. The premier, MQG insists, is acting with a conflict of interest by overseeing judicial reforms while on trial. And as a result, the justices should declare him unfit and remove him from office.
Never mind that the justices have a conflict of interest since it is their powers the government's proposed reforms would check. Never mind that in a bid to prevent politicized judges and prosecutors from overturning the will of the voters, the law explicitly permits prime ministers to serve not only while standing trial, but even if convicted. And never mind that the charges against Netanyahu have fallen apart in Jerusalem District Court.
See here for the frame in which this picture sits.
[TheFreePress] Matti Friedman, the author of today’s essay, is among Israel’s most articulate and insightful writers. Perhaps that’s because the Jewish state is his chosen country.
Friedman immigrated from Canada as a teenager in 1995 and served in the military, as he outlines in his magnificent book Pumpkinflowers. In the years since, in other books and in countless essays—this one was particularly prescient—he has done two things perhaps better than anyone of his generation: defended Israel and deepened our understanding of a young country whose identity is still emergent. His writing tends to cut through the political hysteria that surrounds events in Israel, and suggests context and perspective often lacking elsewhere.
So it is a very rare thing to have him write with such alarm, as he does below, about the Netanyahu government and the country’s spiraling political crisis.
The government’s moves—particularly with regard to the country’s legal system—have driven hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets and has the current president of the country, Isaac Herzog, warning: "I am anxious we are on the brink of an internal struggle that could consume us all."
It’s not clear at first why the current political situation in Israel feels so different, so much darker. In coverage abroad, events here are being described as an argument about legal reform, which is a bit like describing World War I as a dispute about an archduke.
I moved here from Canada at the age of 17, hoping to find a home in a country I found irresistible, one where I wouldn’t have to live as a minority. In nearly 30 years since then, through controversial peace plans, waves of Palestinian terror attacks, and wars, I’ve seen crises come and go. I’ve been at more protests than I can count. But I’ve never seen politics seep so alarmingly into the psyches and private lives of my friends, or so many people losing sleep, seized by fear that the country they love won’t make it.
Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister, as he has been for most of the last decade and a half. The peace process is dead, as it has been for more than 20 years. The political left is nearly extinct, the center is amorphous, and neither of those things are new either. So what’s going on?
On one level, what’s going on is simply that we had an election in November. A coalition led by Netanyahu won, and a blitz of right-wing legislation ensued, drawing protests from liberal Israelis.
But what’s actually going on was best expressed this week by a friend of mine, a career army officer, religiously observant and a political centrist. "I’ve had governments I disagreed with," he said, "but never one that was out to get me."
I knew exactly what he meant. Israelis are used to being surrounded by enemy states. But right now, for the half of Israel’s citizens who didn’t vote for this government, our own country is starting to feel like one.
Israel has always lived with its extreme elements, but has never before been governed by them. If you saw images this weekend of well over 100,000 people on the streets in Tel Aviv waving blue-and-white flags, with tens of thousands protesting elsewhere in the country, including my family and me, and including many whose politics lie on the right, this is why. And this is why, if you follow events here, you’ve seen petition after petition from economists, jurists, and Nobel Prize winners sounding an unprecedented warning and begging the government to change course. It’s why some army reservists and air force pilots have now signaled—in a shocking move for this country’s most committed citizens—that a leadership of this kind can no longer count on their service.
I’ve never been a Netanyahu voter. But I always assumed that when it came to matters of national security, he could be trusted. When the last election results came in showing a victory for Netanyahu, with about a quarter of the vote, and for his ideological allies, I sighed but didn’t panic. Since coming to power for the second time, in 2009, he led Israel to a period of stability following years of terror attacks, and to economic growth that’s obvious to anyone who lands in the new forest of skyscrapers and cranes in Tel Aviv. He always governed with at least one party to his left, and his reputation abroad as a leader with a quick trigger finger was never deserved.
It didn’t occur to me that any leader of Israel would be irresponsible enough to risk our internal cohesion, economy, international relations, and safety in pursuit of his own interests or extremist fantasies. I was wrong.
Foreign observers are unlikely to have been following the twists and turns over the past few months. Even for Israelis, it can be hard to keep track.
The Netanyahu who reappeared this past November as prime minister after a year and a half in the opposition—during which time we were led by an odd but inspiring coalition that somehow included both settlers and religious Muslims—was changed. Aging, harried, and under indictment for corruption, he seemed like a man who’d been stewing in the swamps of resentment and conspiracy. He was furious at the political opponents who’d temporarily pushed him from power, and at the legal system that dared put him on trial. He was surrounded by the junior yes-men who are his only remaining loyalists. And he was encouraged by the fetid atmosphere of his family, publicly expressed in the far-right internet nuttery of his son, Yair.
Israel’s centrist parties are willing to serve in a coalition with Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud in charge, and indeed have done so in the past. But they will no longer serve under Netanyahu himself: The prime minister, a master of the political maneuver, has simply lied to too many people too many times.
Given this state of affairs, a responsible leader would have stood aside after the last election and allowed another Likud leader to form a broad Zionist coalition with 74 seats of 120 in Knesset, without extremists or narrow interest groups—the government we desperately need. But Netanyahu seems to have lost any sense of distinction between himself and the state. So instead, he rallied the forces hostile to the Israeli mainstream, and to institutions like the judiciary and police that hold our fractured society together, and unleashed them against his opponents.
In came the ultra-Orthodox politicians dedicated to expanding their taxpayer-funded autonomy, along with the messianic wing of the settler movement and the racists of "Jewish Power." Netanyahu won the votes of many Israelis of Mizrahi background who’ve supported Likud since the early days of the state, when Menachem Begin led the party. They have a justified sense of exclusion by the elites, and have been on the political and economic margins for too long, to the country’s shame.
With all of this, and with under half of the popular vote, Netanyahu cobbled together the first government we’ve ever had whose enmity is aimed primarily at other Israelis. Those who oppose Netanyahu would now be described as leftists, elitists, and subversives. The institutions that threaten Netanyahu, or suggest a country with an identity larger than his personality, would be neutered or rendered ludicrous.
In one of his first moves, Netanyahu placed a hooligan, Itamar Ben-Gvir, in charge of the police. (Ben-Gvir has criminal convictions for incitement to racism and support for a terror organization, and that’s a partial list.) Then he split the authority of the Defense Ministry between two cabinet ministers, giving part to the fundamentalist hard-liner Betzalel Smotrich, who was also handed the Treasury. Smotrich has called in the past for Israel’s Arab parties to be outlawed, and has said Israel should have "finished the job" at its founding in 1948 by expelling all Arab residents. Last week, following the murder by Palestinians of two Israelis in a West Bank town and a deadly mob attack by settlers in retaliation, he tweeted (before he was forced to hedge) that the entire town should be "wiped out."
The Justice Ministry was split between the anti-judiciary crusader Yariv Levin and David Amsalem, a Likud lawmaker with the style of a foul-mouthed thug. The latter promptly pronounced in Knesset that the hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters were upper-class Israelis in Mercedes and Rolexes; at the time he was wearing a Cartier watch reported to be worth $7,000. The protesters I could see were parents with little kids, grandparents, and normal people in the middle of their lives as well as former army chiefs of staff, police chiefs, and Shin Bet directors once appointed by Netanyahu. (Netanyahu, for his part, has described the protesters as foreign-funded "anarchists.")
Netanyahu gave the Interior Ministry to Aryeh Deri, twice convicted of corruption. The Communications Ministry went to a politician who described the last government, which was headed by the religious right-winger Naftali Bennett, as "defying the armies of the living God" and "persecuting Torah scholars," and declared his intention to shut down Israel’s essential public broadcaster. A new law would expand the power of religious courts. Another would seek penalties for women dressed immodestly at the Western Wall. Israelis wake up every morning not to a unifying vision or to reassuring words from their leaders, but to a fresh attack.
America has a written constitution detailing citizens’ rights. It has two legislatures, the House and the Senate, and separate state elections and governments that further buffer citizens from federal power. Israel has none of those things. We have only one legislature, it’s controlled by the governing majority, and the single brake on majority power is the court. This is the only force that can stem the current paroxysm—and so it’s this force that’s now being removed, in what is being misunderstood by some as a simple "legal reform." What’s actually happening is a takeover of Israel’s independent judiciary by the most extreme government in our history.
There is a good case for reform that would set the limits of court power with broad consent. That’s not what’s happening.
The new system, which is supposed to be set in law by next month, will allow the government to select judges and overrule the court’s decisions. If the reform passes and the government decides that there will now be elections every 10 years, for example, or every 20—there will be no force to rule otherwise. Israel, which has rightly prided itself as being the only democracy in the Middle East, will move closer to the model of Hungary or Turkey than of America.
Israel’s stable and internationally respected court system is one of the reasons for our economic miracle over the past few decades. (Another reason is Netanyahu himself, in his more responsible days). Several billion dollars are already believed to have left the country in the past month, a sign of a trend that could snowball. The tech CEOs of Tel Aviv, who need a liberal social ecosystem and strong courts trusted by foreign investors, are eyeing Palo Alto. There are warnings about our international credit rating, and the shekel has dropped. LOL the wokies are welcome to them.
Many Israelis have spent their lives serving the country in the military or the civil service, or simply by being good citizens who pay high taxes and live with the punches this place delivers daily. Many have sent their kids to the army, often in the service of governments and policies they didn’t like; some never got those kids back. Some spent years fighting the libel campaign waged by our enemies to demonize this country and make it easier to abandon and destroy. It’s these Israelis who are now watching their government treat them as traitors.
Anyone looking on from the outside, especially those tempted to apply American lenses and judgment, must understand the kind of anguish that is bringing masses of normal people into the streets every week. The protests are an inspiration—a reminder of the unique Israeli energies that become apparent here in moments of crisis. In my most optimistic moments on the streets, I see the glimmer of a new political force that may be viable one day soon. But this force must contend with a government feeding on our divisions, pitting us against each other, and dismantling the solidarity that has always been Israel’s secret weapon.
I’ve defended Israel in the regular infantry and the reserves, and have covered wars as a reporter. I’ve always done my best to explain this country, articulate its fears, and place its many errors in context. I’d like to do that now. But like many of my fellow citizens at this moment, I’m at a loss for words.
#2
"The tech CEOs of Tel Aviv, who need a liberal social ecosystem and strong courts trusted by foreign investors, are eyeing Palo Alto." This bozo is living in a dream world. It is an unfettered judicial system that has created the cleavage that exists in Israel, and Palo Alto is certainly not the answer.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[MAILCHIMP] With the potential for the Americans to get caught up in simultaneous wars with the Russians and Chinese, do I think the US can handle it? The short answer is that the US will be fine, but if you had asked me this during the Cold War - it would have been a cakewalk for the Americans.
[Townhall] With his declining mental capabilities, ill-conceived policies, blundering administration, incompetent vice president, and corrupt son, brother, and family, Joe Biden is an easy target. Who can't take a strong swipe at him?
