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The great 4th century B.C. orator Demosthenes, scolding the Athenians for their passive response to Phillip of Macedon’s escalating aggression, said, “You carry on war with Phillip exactly as a barbarian boxes. The barbarian, when struck, always clutches the place; hit him on the other side, and there go his hands. He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow, or how to watch his adversary.”
Demosthenes’ point was that an enemy must be preempted by anticipating where his next attack will likely come, rather than merely reacting to it––a mistake that for too long has marred our foreign policy.
The news that the Biden administration had ordered nearly a dozen air-defense systems to the Middle East to protect American forces there, made me think of Demosthenes’ simile, and the similar mistakes we are making in dealing both with Hamas’ atrocities against Israel, and with more than four decades of aggression against us by Iran, the world’s most deadly state-supporter of terrorism.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “The U.S. is scrambling to deploy nearly a dozen air-defense systems to countries across the Middle East ahead of Israel’s expected land invasion of Gaza, deploying missile launchers to Iraq, Syria and the Gulf, U.S. officials said. The Pentagon is sending a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, to Saudi Arabia, and Patriot surface-to-air missile systems to Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.”
This decision follows recent drone attacks against our soldiers in Iraq and Syria, killing one contractor and wounding 24 servicemen. Iranian clients and proxies like the Houthi in Yemen are likely behind the attacks, which the Department of Defense expects to escalate: “What we are seeing is the prospect for more significant escalation against U.S. forces and personnel across the region in the very near-term coming from Iranian proxy forces and ultimately from Iran.”
And if that happens, don’t worry: the U.S. will be “responding decisively.” Does anyone believe that the Mullahs in Iran are frightened by this flaccid threat? The Biden administration has been courting them for over two years to rejoin the nuclear deal, and bribing them with billions of dollars that Iran has used to arm the jihadists now firing missiles at our soldiers.
This halting, piecemeal response to aggression by the Biden administration epitomizes the illusory “kinder, gentler” war-making that typifies the West these days. The reaction to Iran’s proxies attacking U.S. forces in the region exemplifies this dangerous reticence. For example, why have we waited until now, and have to “scramble” to beef up our defenses of those force? We’ve known from the regime’s beginning Iran’s intentions when it declared war against our nation. And we know that they have armed proxies in order to prosecute that war at every opportunity. If we are not going to make Iran pay for its mischief and murder, at least we can defend our troops better before they come under attack.
But not even the moral hazard of future risks to our soldiers’ lives from our inaction and Biden’s “Don’t” bluster, has spurred us to anticipate the enemy’s moves in waging its declared war against us, and to preempt their attacks. When it comes to Iran, though, multiple acts of aggression have been appeased for years, starting in 1979 with the kidnapping of our diplomatic staff in Tehran during the revolution, who were returned only after Jimmy Carter paid Khomeini millions in Danegeld to get them back.
But as Kipling said, once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. The kidnapping of Americans has become Iran’s go-to tactic for acquiring funds––six billion in the latest hostage-ransom payola––and for humiliating the most powerful military in world history.
During the Obama presidency, for example, Americans unlawfully detained by Iran on flimsy charges, were exchanged for seven Iranians indicted or convicted for stealing military related technology. Adding insult to injury, Obama also wired the Mullahs $1.7 billion of Iranian funds impounded during the 1979 revolution––a down payment on the $100-150 billion promised to Iran as part of the nuclear deal. Not a dime was recovered of the some $45 billion in civil judgments awarded to Americans for damages suffered from Iranian-sponsored terrorism.
This bad habit of paying Iran to punch us in the face, moreover, has been a bipartisan one. The Reagan administration undertook the disastrous arms-for-hostages operation in 1985-86. What came to be known as “Iran-Contra” involved ransoming three American hostages––the fourth was tortured to death–– held by Iranian proxies in Lebanon, by selling Iran over 2,000 TOW anti-tank missiles and 100 HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, in violation of an arms embargo on Iran. The three hostages were released––but then were immediately replaced by three other kidnapped Americans.
So the U.S. for decades has failed not only to anticipate such blows to our prestige and interests, but also failed to counter-punch with enough force to deter further kidnappings––at the same time providing funds that a sworn enemy will use not just to attack our interests and security, but to build nuclear weapons that will make them virtually untouchable.
Why do we make such blunders? These irresponsible foreign policy moves reflect some timeless truths about governments that are accountable to voters. Given the power of the vote, citizens prefer to spend funds on butter rather than guns, and will punish politicians who ignore their preferences. Moreover, the so-called “peace dividend” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the Nineties encouraged stinting military preparedness, and instead binging on spending for more entitlements and shiny new toys like cancelling student-loans debt, or virtue-signaling “zero net-carbon” subsidies.
This ancient bad habit, moreover, is empowered by another one: the difficulty citizens and their representatives have in identifying future threats and taking measures to neutralize them. Our short political attention span rarely go beyond the next election cycle, making sure that our immediate concerns about taxes or the economy will take precedence over the more distant consequences of neglecting and failing to punish threats and aggression. Alleviating today’s discomfort takes priority over stopping tomorrow’s much more grievous suffering.
Then there’s the problem of our delusional foreign policy idealism that privilege “soft power” and “smart diplomacy” over mind-concentrating force. This received wisdom has discredited decisive military action with all its risks and unforeseen consequences. Bluster, empty threats, PR press conferences, and showy deployments all create the illusion of action without taking the risks and facing the consequences of action.
Which brings us back to Biden’s transfers to the region of missile defense systems and two Carrier Strike Groups, the most lethal war-making materiel in history. The question is, will they be used to immediately destroy those missile batteries? Or, like the barbarian boxer, will we wait until Iran’s proxies strike again, at the cost of more American lives in attacks that our strategists have foreseen are coming?
Finally, will we at last stop taking Iran’s blows after they are thrown, and instead punch them first, before they acquire nuclear weapons that will drastically increase the risks of a devastating war?
Biden’s Presidency has made the USofA huckleberry to the world.
We started down the huckleberry path after WWII.
For a moment I thought you were somehow making a dig at Barbara “Senator Ma’am” Boxer.
Me too. Then i remembered she is in Beijing a lot these days.
This final showdown with Islam was inevitable as the West were looking for a pretext to smash Iran before they became a nuclear power , so the Hamas raid into Israel seems like it’s going to create a domino effect not unlike the slide into WW1 with Gaza as a kind of troublesome Bosnia Herzegovina, Lebanon as Serbia, and Israel as Austria who is given a blank cheque by the USA (Germany ) Iran will be Russia, a defender of the Serbs
It’s not a perfect historical analogy but it’s close enough, except this time it’s the Central Powers who will be victorious
Douglas MacGregor has made a similar analysis, and really fears a very possible WWIII. I wish more people high up would listen to him, but I also wonder, what, exactly, he would have Israel do? It seems a damned if they do, damned if they don’t situation, despite the pro-invasion stance of all the writers at Frontpage.
This is all a smokescreen, I’m in London again this week after my week in Fagchester. Almost every business, public building, and lots of other places have dual language signs. English and Arabic.
They are far more powerful than we realise.
There are UK Polish shops with dual language signage, Gujurati shops with dual language signage the same for Greeks, Turks and just about every other ethnic enclave in most major UK towns and cities. Every government form has to be in a dozen different languages. The UK sadly, is not what it used to be before Blair opened the immigration flood gates “ to rub the Tories noses in migration”
“It is the fault of…………..the American MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, all they care about is PROFITS.”
Does a rational man sell the gun, in the morning, to the thug who will kill him with that gun, in the evening?
What kind of a profit is that?
One has to ask what is blinding all these businesses and businessmen to long-range consequences? Why have they abandoned long-range principles that will show them the long-range consequences?
And it’s not just the so-called Military Industrial Complex. Amazon, Nike, and many, many, other American and Western companies are doing business with the thugs of the CCP, and Russia, and Iran. They are aiding and abetting their eventual destroyers.
And it’s not just businessmen. Why is the American government funding Hamas directly by confiscating the earnings of the American taxpayer and sending that stolen loot to the Palestinians?
The answer is that ALTRUISM and PRAGMATISM are today’s dominant philosophies.
“As a group, businessmen have been withdrawing for decades from the ideological battlefield, disarmed by the deadly combination of altruism and Pragmatism. Their public policy has consisted in appeasing, compromising and apologizing: appeasing their crudest, loudest antagonists; compromising with any attack, any lie, any insult; apologizing for their own existence. Abandoning the field of ideas to their enemies, they have been relying on lobbying, i.e., on private manipulations, on pull, on seeking momentary favors from government officials. Today, the last group one can expect to fight for capitalism is the capitalists.” – Ayn Rand
THX: “One has to ask what is blinding all these businesses and businessmen to long-range consequences? Why have they abandoned long-range principles that will show them the long-range consequences?”
THX [continued]: “The answer is that ALTRUISM and PRAGMATISM are today’s dominant philosophies.”
The answer is SELFISH ambition and greedy gain NOT altruism. Too many people make too much money off the military industrial complex, and so we have forever war. How you can shoehorn that into “altruism” is patently ridiculous and speaks of your irrational, religious fervor for objectivism – truly a faith against all evidence and reason.
Sacrificing your long-range life for a short-range “profit” is anything but selfish.
How is it in your selfish, self-interest, and self-preservation, to sell a gun in the morning to your sworn enemy who will use that gun to kill you in the evening?
That’s not rational selfishness but altruistic self-sacrifice.
“To redeem both man and morality, it is the concept of “selfishness” that one has to redeem….
Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles. This is why the Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational self-interest—or of rational selfishness.
Since selfishness is “concern with one’s own interests,” the Objectivist ethics uses that concept in its EXACT AND PUREST SENSE [emphasis added]. It is not a concept that one can surrender to man’s enemies, nor to the unthinking misconceptions, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and the irrational. The attack on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.” – Ayn Rand
Reading the responses to your posts lately it would appear that folks are getting sick and tired of your “stuck on stupid” response to everything explaining it away as, oh God….ALTRUISM!!!
It is clear you have no idea what you are talking about unless you can explain it away as altruism. What if it isn’t altruism? What if it’s simply selfishness? What if it’s simply business?
Your constant fallback position is simply a little too easy, because you really don’t have a lot going on upstairs in that lazy pile of grey matter you call a brain.
The military industrial complex is NOT shot at, innocent civilians and occasionally soldiers are killed NOT the people doing the selling.
And you call yourself rational!
Mo writes: “The military industrial complex is NOT shot at, innocent civilians and occasionally soldiers are killed NOT the people doing the selling.
And you call yourself rational!”
If you’re a rational person that thinks in long-term principles and therefore are aware of long-term consequences, you realize that you cannot sell weapons of mass destruction to the enemies of YOUR freedom, liberty, and YOUR capitalism. The whole point of rational long term principles is that you don’t have to be literally and physically shot at or bombed to realize that the guns and the bombs that you’re selling to Iran or the CCP can destroy the country, the freedom, the liberty, the capitalism, that you depend on to make a profit to live and to flourish.
To Mo:
“A principle is “a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend.” Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by means of principles that one can set one’s long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and to achieve it.
The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.
To make it more grotesque, that haggling is accompanied by an aura of hysterical self-righteousness, in the form of belligerent assertions that one must compromise with anybody on anything (except on the tenet that one must compromise) and by panicky appeals to “practicality.”
But there is nothing as impractical as a so-called “practical” man. His view of practicality can best be illustrated as follows: if you want to drive from New York to Los Angeles, it is “impractical” and “idealistic” to consult a map and to select the best way to get there; you will get there much faster if you just start out driving at random, turning (or cutting) any corner, taking any road in any direction, following nothing but the mood and the weather of the moment.
The fact is, of course, that by this method you will never get there at all. But while most people do recognize this fact in regard to the course of a journey, they are not so perceptive in regard to the course of their life and of their country.” – Ayn Rand
Any assertion that altruism is the illness of business or gov is laughably ridiculous. It is the stuff of warrior philosophers safely behind keyboards. OMG, such stupidity!
Oye pendeja, have you ever read Ayn Rand’s book “The Virtue Of Selfishness”?
What would a day be like without your daily excuse of altruism as your favorite “whipping boy”, for all of our ills.
Well I guess I was wrong. You couldn’t help yourself. Your latest post is all about your “altruism” drug habit.
If “businessmen withdrew from the ideological battlefield” long ago. But they’re back big time.
Ayn Rand (d. 1982). What’s the relevance to 2023?
Hey, what is the author talking about? We DID drop two bombs on structures used by Iranian proxies in response to 29 attacks on U.S. troops. Doesn’t the author think that this and telling the Iranians “don’t, don’t, don’t” will show ’em. Why, Biden is a regular Charles Atlas, he is.
He is not.
He IS troubled with gas of the intestinal kind, unfortunately.
Just ask the Vatican or maybe Camilla and her lady pal who attended that conference on “environment”.
Biden makes dirty deals and ill-gotten cash for the enemies of America
so long as the OBAMA – BIDEN – GEORGE SOROS regime is in power muslims will continue to win!
Will we wait? Here’s a list of headlines from just today’s Front Page.
Biden Admin Warns Israel Against Cutting Off Hamas Internet, Money and Propaganda
While Anti-Israel Activists Call for Ceasefire, Hamas Vows More Attacks Until Israel is Destroyed
Sociology Professors Defend Hamas Butchery
Biden’s Pact With Muslim Brotherhood-Connected Engage
Yep, our ruling class is going to make us wait for the next atrocity .. and even then they won’t do much.
why do hamas members always cover their faces with masks?
Has anyone consider the possibility that China may this opportunity to invade Taiwan, while we are involved in two conflicts elsewhere?
War: A massacre of people who dont know each other for the profit of people who know each other but dont massacre each other..
Remind me again of why there are US Troops in Iraq and Syria.
As well as Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain,Japan, Germany UK, Italy, Turkey, Morocco and soon perhaps… Ukraine…
While the USA is defending various countries from their enemies Uncle Sam does not seem to think its important to protect America.
Self annihilation in the works.
If muslim crazies around the World tell us they are going to destroy us then should we believe them or laugh at them.
Inquiring minds want to know.
“GAZA needs to be WIPED OUT.”
It certainly does. Engulf it in shiny green glass!
Good Grief, Iran will use any weakness it perceives by the Biden administration to advance wars, and take dominance over the world. All the Democrats who united with Islam against the rest of the world and specifically Israel, are not going to be favored for their foolish decisions in any way shape or form.