The Conservative Cave

Well, I don't have any actual names or times, ...

Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war.
...
But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.

When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.
...
Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than 90 percent from 350 on February 28 to roughly 25 by March 14, according to publicly available data. Drone launches tell the same story: from more than 800 on Day 1 to about 75 on Day 15.
...
Iran’s naval assets, fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air defences have been suppressed to the point at which the US is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace, a decision that signals near-total confidence in air dominance.
...
Iran now faces a strategic dilemma that tightens every day. If it fires its remaining missiles, it exposes launchers that are promptly destroyed. If it conserves them, it forfeits the ability to impose costs of the war. Missile and drone launch data suggest Iran is rationing its remaining capacity for politically timed salvoes rather than sustaining operational tempo.

This is a force managing decline, not projecting strength.
...
Reasonable people can disagree about whether diplomatic alternatives were fully exhausted, the Omani-mediated negotiations in February showed real progress, and there are legitimate questions about whether Washington walked away too soon.

But the critics’ implicit alternative, continued restraint while Iran inched towards a nuclear weapon, is the policy that produced the crisis in the first place. Every year of strategic patience added centrifuges to the enrichment halls and kilogrammes to the stockpile.
...
... Every day the (Strait of Hormuz) blockade continues, Iran severs its own economic lifeline and alienates the one major power that has consistently shielded it at the United Nations. The closure does not just hurt the global economy; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.

Meanwhile, the naval assets Iran needs to sustain the blockade – fast-attack boats, drones, mines, shore-based antiship missiles – are being degraded daily. Its naval bases at Bandar Abbas and Chahbahar have been severely damaged.

The question is not whether the strait reopens but when and whether Iran retains any naval capacity to contest it. Critics compare the challenge of escorting a hundred tankers daily to an impossible logistical burden. But you do not need to escort tankers through a strait if the adversary no longer has the means to threaten them. That is the operational trajectory.
...
But the critics are making a different error: They are treating the costs of action as if the costs of inaction were zero. They were not. They were measured in the slow accretion of a threat that, left unchecked, would have produced exactly the crisis everyone claims to fear: a nuclear-armed Iran capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, surrounded by proxy forces that could hold the entire region hostage indefinitely.

It is time to add that word to the list of worn out words leftys overuse to label those who disagree with them...

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has announced that she has breast cancer, but it sounds like her prognosis is good.

The 68-year-old told the New York Times that it was caught in its early stages. She will begin treatment in Washington soon, and she doesn't plan to take a leave of absence from her role in the Donald Trump administration.

Now, I do think he's a dirty spy. But some spying isn't illegal. Yes, a spy who passes classified information can be prosecuted. But a spy who owns a house in the flight path of a US military base cannot, I don't think, be prosecuted for noting what types of planes are taking off and when, and then sending off that information to his case officer. That's open information, which anyone with eyes can see, and I think that a spy doing that would be non-prosecutable. (Though, if a foreigner permitted to be in the US, his visa would be revoked and he would be declared persona non grata.)

I think Tucker Carlson is a spy in this second sense -- he is acting as the eyes and ears of a hostile foreign power, he is reporting to that hostile foreign power what the president of the United States said to him, but that information was not classified and therefore there is no actual crime in reporting it to Iranian intelligence officials. (Especially because Trump intended it to be reported.)

But it does make him treasonous. Not a traitor by the legal definition, but treasonous in the dictionary sense, acting on behalf of an enemy foreign power against the interests of the US.

And now this fat piece of shit is butthurt because he was a key asset in convincing the Iranians that it was safe to hold a meeting with 90% of the top military and mullah leadership present in the same room a couple of weeks ago.

Tucker Carlson: Hero of Israel! I hope Mossad makes it official and decorates him with an award for his crucial work in this operation!