Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
This morning, I went on “Judging Freedom” with Judge Napolitano to discuss the latest tomfoolery by the Trump administration.
Judge Napolitano showed a clip of a U.S. government official, a nuclear proliferation expert, explaining he could not comment on whether Israel had nuclear weapons.
WTF? Israel started working on nuclear weapons early in the 1960s. Everyone knows they have a nuclear arsenal of somewhere between 90 and 200 nuclear bombs (some estimates go as high as 300). Yet Trump administration officials can’t even acknowledge that Israel has nukes. Could you be more slavishly subservient to Israel than that?
(A lyric from Elton John/Bernie Taupin comes to mind: It’s a sad, sad situation—and it’s gettin’ more and more absurd.)
Meanwhile, Iran has zero nuclear weapons and did not have an active program to build one, so said America’s 18 (!) intelligence agencies. But Iran is the nuclear threat in the Middle East? I’m not buying it, and neither is any other sentient human.
One thing I mentioned on the show were reports on U.S. troop deployments to the region, including Marines and elements of the 82nd Airborne division. Those reports have been exaggerated, notes Ken Klippenstein, and I hope he’s right about this. Any U.S. ground invasion of Iran proper or Kharg Island would be a total Scheißesturm, to use a technical term.
The Judge and I also talked about airpower and its lack of decisiveness. Put simply, airpower can be effective at destroying specific targets, but it doesn’t control territory, it lacks persistence and staying power, and its effects can be counterproductive. Think here of the London Blitz in 1940, which united the British against the Nazis. Attacks from the air often serve to unite a people against a common foe, a result we’re witnessing in Iran right now.
Airpower proponents like to sell air attacks as decisive, but short of total annihilation with nuclear weapons, bombing from the air, in and of itself, isn’t war-winning. If it was, the USA would have won in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and everywhere else it’s fought since 1945.
Meanwhile, as the USA denies any knowledge of Israeli nukes, Israel itself continues on a warpath to create a Greater Israel irrespective of the cost to America (and of course the peoples of the Middle East).
