After three weeks, how is the war going?
Did you ever go to a ballgame, only to make a trip to the bathroom while the most important action of the game took place? In just a few minutes, your team was down by three and is now leading by four.
With war, until it’s over, one has to be very careful to say definitively how it is going. Even with such caution, there are trends. Nazi commanders like Erwin Rommel knew that the war was lost once the Allies had established their solid beachhead and brought endless amounts of men and supplies to push deeper into Europe. Once Desert Storm started, the Iraqis were on their heels and watching their complete thumping from air, sea and land. The war took six weeks, with only the last few days involving a massive ground invasion that destroyed Saddam’s Republican Guard. So, a war is not over until it is over, but there are indications.
The trends to date involve the US and Israel pummeling Iran at will. Thousands of sorties with a wide range of fighters, bombers, and drones have left much of the Iranian leadership, war-fighting equipment, and industry a smoking heap of rubble. B-52 bombers, which fly slowly and are not appropriate for a highly defended area, are routinely attacking Iranian targets. The B-1 “Bone”, which was unused in most of America’s previous wars, has been prominent in flying numerous sorties. We even think that we saw one over our heads on its way to Iran. The US and Israel are going through massive target lists and adding targets of opportunity as required. Is the current effort enough to get rid of the mullocracy? Will the Straits of Hormuz be safe and open to international shipping? Will Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile dreams be shattered? I don’t know. That which I do know is that Iran has threatened Israel, the US, Europe and its immediate neighbors for decades. If this war had not been initiated by our team, their side would have attacked when they felt that they were ready with projectiles and nuclear warheads. The US has sat on its nuclear weapons for decades; the mullahs would not have let them get cold before firing them off towards Israel.
And what of the projectiles that Iran has been sending this way? The number of alerts has gone down, but is not yet zero. We have seen on a couple of occasions cluster submunitions on their way toward civilian targets in Israel. Around 20 people have been killed. Two foreign workers were killed, as were four Palestinian women in a hair salon. An older couple was killed when they couldn’t get to a safe room. Nine were killed in and around an old bomb shelter attached to a synagogue. There is some damage, as shown for one of the train stations in Ramat Gan—which was cleaned up in time for morning rush hour. While some neuron-depleted fools claim that Tel Aviv is destroyed and that Israeli censorship does not allow the world to know, the reality is quite different. Tel Aviv looks pretty much as it did a month ago. The towers, beaches, parks, and malls are all still there. Some buildings have been damaged, but on the Israeli side, thank God, you do not see massive clouds of billowing smoke. Israel has absorbed losses in people and property; Iran has lost its leadership, navy, air force, parts of its Basij force, portions of Kargh Island, and more. If one wanted to describe a lopsided contest, this might be the best example since the Marianas Turkey Shoot.
After we got married, I noticed a couple of apparent bullet holes in the metal awning outside our bedroom. I asked my wife about them and she said that they were apparently from the 1948 War of Independence. When one of our boys was caught during an air raid siren away from home, he entered a bomb shelter made against Jordanian mortar attacks from the same war. In front of our synagogue is a massive cement wall, placed there to protect those inside from Jordanian shooting. So, on the one hand, nothing is new. The bomb shelter hit directly by a projectile with nine killed, including two in the shelter, was built decades ago when the size of warheads was much smaller. It would not have been considered up to standard for today’s public bomb shelters, but that’s what the people in that part of Beit Shemesh had at their disposal. As I write these words, we have just returned from a 15-minute excursion to our favorite parking structure. Phone warning-sirens-booms in the sky—wait for any potential shrapnel—leave shelter—get the all-clear from the Israeli Home Front. It was actually our first dash over to the reinforced structure in around 34 hours. We don’t go very deep into the structure, while others insist on going down to the -6 level. Then Thursday night, we had four trips in less than two hours, as the Iranians fired lots of missiles. Waze has added an “Emergency” button that will stop the present ride and direct the driver to the nearest bomb shelter or reinforced structure.
I always worry when we get too comfortable with warfare, like the famous episode in Star Trek where people reported for their liquidation so as to avoid actual bloodshed. The Iron Dome is considered a great achievement, and one can definitely say that it has saved lives. But what if Israel had not developed an anti-missile system? You know, when enough projectiles had been flung from Gaza and enough people had been harmed, then the IDF might have clobbered and neutralized Hamas years before the October 7th massacre. Don’t get me wrong. The various American and Israeli anti-missile systems are wonders and have contributed enormously to the relatively low—thank God—casualty rate. But the existence of these systems might be a reason for not dealing with the problem, which only now is being taken apart—though for years the Iranian missile threat was a known subject in Israel and beyond.
One of our boys listened to an interview with one of the few remaining leaders of Iran, their foreign minister. I wanted to throw the iPhone out the window. Iran did nothing. We want peace. We were minding our own business when we were attacked for no reason. These are the talking points for the morons on the Weirdo Right, like Joe Kent, who shared that the Iranians had a fatwa against making nuclear bombs, so clearly no worry there. Marco Rubio, who is a serious fellow, said that there was no country in the world with 60 percent enriched uranium that did not also have nuclear bombs. Electricity production and medical isotopes require a lot less enrichment, but that has never been Iran’s goal. Donald Trump offered them an off-ramp in which their nuclear program would be fully civilian and their ballistic missiles would have a significantly reduced range. The Iranians had no interest in Trump’s offer as their goal is an atomic bomb deliverable to Israel and beyond. The war is an outcome of their intransigence and failure to understand that Donald Trump is not Joe “Don’t!” Biden. As I wrote previously, foreign countries oftentimes do not understand the whiplash in Washington when there is a change in administration. The Iranians could still have the mullahs running the show, but they were not interested in being neutered on the war-making and enrichment continuing side. They chose Door #2 and there was a big B-2 bomber behind it.
In the Hollywood treatment of the sinking of the Bismarck, one of the British officers (1:30:50) says that they have to finish off the German battleship. Ditto for Iran.