Mac And DD: Great Discussion On The Coming Middle East War

So the news of the day, so far—and I’ve probably missed a lot while reading and writing—is:

Lloyd Austin says we’ll defend Israel. And, oh yeah, we’ll try to de-escalate.

The US is supposed to be trying to talk Iran and Hezbollah into responding “symbolically” to the Israeli attacks.

Iran is telling the US, Watch your step! We will target your bases.

Iran is also warning regional countries, like KSA, not to allow their airspace to be used for attacks on Iran.

The USS Teddy skedaddled out of the Persian Gulf. Not a healthy environment of an aircraft carrier. Bases aren’t so easy to move.

Dmitry Medvedev thinks maybe a war will bring a “shaky peace”, and blames the US.

Netanyahu categorically rejects ending the Israeli war for Middle Eastern Supremacy and an Arabrein Greater Israel.

While talking peace, the US is deploying 12 additional warships to the region.

With all that going on, Doug Macgregor got into an outstanding discussion of what’s going on, with Daniel Davis. They got into all sorts of topics, and my transcript doesn’t cover them all. However, let me underline a few of Mac’s points:

This is all driven by Israel. Netanyahu runs DC, the US military will do what he tells them to do. His goal is an Arabrein Greater Israel and regional dominance. Blinken works for Israel, not the US. The last 9 months have been simply a cover to buy time for Israel to complete its genocide. Israel has failed, so now it’s time to go big.

Here we go—this should place most of this in a meaningful context:

Col Doug Macgregor: US Deploys 12 Warships in Middle East

DD: The United States is sending 12 warships to the Middle East the US Secretary of Defense claims without any hesitation that we'll be sending US air power to fight on the behalf of of Israel should there be a war. What in the world is going on? Is the United States about to get sucked into yet another Middle Eastern War? I want to bring in the US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who was asked whether we would be participating if anything goes hot in the war against Lebanon:

"If Israel is attacked we certainly will help defend Israel. You saw us do that in April. You can expect to see us do that again. But we we don't want to see any of that happen. We're going to work hard to make sure that that, you know, we're doing things to help take the temperature down and address issues through

Okay, so, we're seeking a diplomatic means when he's leading with, 'Oh, yeah, if Israel is attacked we're going to be with them and, of course, the last time that that did happen, when we did fight, the last time it was because Israel attacked and destroyed an embassy facility in Syria which violated every international norm that you can imagine for centuries, and then they were attacked and we went to help them.’ What do you hear when you hear him talk about we will defend Israel if they get attacked by Hezbollah?

Mac: I think that has to be interpreted as a reinforcement of the guarantee that was given in private to Mr Netanyahu, that if he decides to widen the war in the region--which I think he's done--and take on both Hezbollah and Iran as well as the militias in the region we are going to support him. That, after all, is the real reason behind his visit to the United States. I mean, he enjoys the accolades that are showered on him when he comes to visit and he loves to be seen by his own population as effectively in charge of Washington--which he is; I mean, he controls more of what happens here right now, particularly in foreign and defense policy, than Joe Biden. So he's gotten what he wanted from key figures inside the administration, in the cabinet, but most important also from the Senate and the House. Remember, there was only one Republican who absented himself from the speech, as I recollect. I think that's Thomas Massie. There were eight eight or nine Democrats who didn't show up but virtually everyone else was there, so that was a sign of American fealty to Israel. He's got the guarantees that he wanted and now you see additional forces being sent to the region once again--a clear and unambiguous signal that we're ready to fight alongside the Israelis.

DD: Now this could go sideways pretty quick. I want to look at two separate aspects of this because, first of all, there's the potential incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah by Israel, but then there's also the potential that this could escalate to include Iran. I want to look at those separately so, first of all, from the military perspective, is the idea that, after having fought almost 10 months of war now in the Gaza Strip, do the Israelis have the capacity and the ammunition supplies by the way to launch an incursion into southern Lebanon? By all accounts Hezbollah has been basically preparing since 2007, 2008, for this kind of conflict.

Mac: I think the Israelis certainly have the ammunition they need. We've provided almost without question anything they asked for, so I don't think there's a shortage on the ammunition side. Now the [Israeli] ground force, as you know, is much like a large Army National Guard. You have very competent, exceptionally professional, people at the top who know what they're doing. But once you get down below the lieutenant colonel level you're running into large numbers of people who are effectively reservists or guardsmen. They are not extraordinarily well trained, although I'm sure they've gotten a lot of good training and experience over the last 10 months. They've taken a number of casualties. I've seen all sorts of figures ... I have no idea ... but I think we can say with some certainty that the ground force has been stretched. But keep something in mind: the Israelis see this as primarily an air and missile campaign with a ground force that will go in to mop up, and I'm talking specifically about Hezbollah. We are also viewing this as an air and missile campaign, if for no other reason because we don't have much to send in terms of ground forces.

DD: I want to look at that. You're talking about the missile forces. One of the things that seemed evident from the June strike, when Iran sent 350 missiles and drones and the the Iron Dome allegedly knocked out 95% or something like that, but ... actually many of the missiles were not intercepted and many of those that were were designed to be shot down to try to avoid escalation. If Iran had actually wanted to harm Israel they could have picked a lot different targets and caused a lot more damage. ... There's some suggestion that the Iron Dome may not be very effective at all, and Israel could be seriously harmed by the Hezbollah missiles.

Mac: Well the Iron Dome has never performed to the level as advertised. You know, 90 plus percent intercepts--that's always been nonsense. They're getting something in the neighborhood of 50 to 60% of what's out there, but keep in mind that everyone's missile arsenal or stocks are designed to exhaust the air defense capability, so you can run the Israelis--and for that matter, us--out of anti-missile missiles very quickly. Doesn't take very long ... we have limited supplies. The Iranians and the Shiites in Hezbollah are in a different position. What we don't know is how this will begin. I think it's pretty obvious that you're going to get a major war in the region. That's unfortunate. A lot of us have tried very hard to persuade everyone not to do go down this road, but I think Mr Netanyahu will. As a result I think there will be an attack on Hezbollah by Israel. Bear in mind, you've got Lloyd Austin saying we're going to help Israel if they're attacked. Well, they're already under attack. The Israeli attitude is that 'we're the permanent victims in the region so whatever we do is defense anyway.' So that's a forgone conclusion. What kind of assistance are we going to provide, other than logistics and munitions? We are going to provide as much air and naval power as we can mobilize, and that will be directed wherever the Israelis, frankly, urge us to go. We're obviously prepared to attack Iran if we see evidence that the Iranians are going to join in this fight. We've got target overlays,we're definitely ready to go. The question is, what happens with Hezbollah--and I've said from the beginning that I think the Israelis know that the Hezbollah fight is an existential one and the only way to win is to pulverize Hezbollah with everything they've got, and that may include tactical nuclear weapons.

DD: I want to look at it from a slightly different perspective ... [Issue is, what happened to the Constitution and declarations of war?]

Mac: Well, as we know, Washington is donor occupied territory. Everybody who clapped vigorously for Mr Netanyahu has been the beneficiary of The Israel Lobby's largess. If you go back and look at their campaigns and look at who pours money into their political action committees and helps them stay in office The Lobby has a big role in that. ...

...

DD: Let me just show you one more piece of the nonsense. I just showed you the Secretary of Defense talking categorically how he's ready to send US forces to assist another country that doesn't belong to our forces. Here's John Kirby--who I think you might charitably say is stretching the truth or obscuring the truth, because what he is claiming here is that we're all just looking for peace. We're all about a negotiated settlement. Watch this:

"All of this adds to the complicated nature of what we're trying to get done, and what we're trying to get done is a ceasefire deal that can get you six weeks in Phase One, get a lot of hostages--the most at risk--out of there and home with their families and get some more humanitarian assistance in. Based on the constructive conversations that we had with the Prime Minister last week we still believe that this is a worthy endeavor. We still believe that the gaps can be narrowed, the details can be fleshed out, and a deal can be had. Now again it's too soon to know what these recent events over the last 24, 48 hours are going to do to the process. I don't want to sound overly sanguine here, but we still believe the deal on the table is worth pursuing and the hostages need to come home and and we're not going to stop trying to work on that."

It's hard for me to to even just keep my composure when I hear this official statement by the senior White House spokesman say that our constructive conversations with Netanyahu last week are still hopeful, that we can get a ceasefire deal, get the hostages back at all, when the the events that he was referring to there is the assassination of the negotiating partner on the Hamas side, all but killing any kind of possibility of constructive talks. So how how do we view those things when they say things that seem so at odds with truth?

Mac: The short explanation is that this government and the society they currently dominate right now has been sovietized. ... it's one lie on top of another lie. No one in Israel is interested in peace and as long as Mr Netanyahu and his electorate are not interested in peace neither is the United States Congress. Whatever the American people think is irrelevant.

DD: That's not very encouraging. There's one other person that kind of sees it that way. Here is former Ambassador Chas Freeman who was responding to what Kirby and some of these other people have been saying about what the US government is claiming to do.

"I believe it represents an effort by prime minister Netanyahu which he began nine months ago to entangle the United States in Israel's wars with the Palestinians and its neighbors. I think if you are serious about negotiating a hostage release and a ceasefire you don't murder your opposite number at the negotiating table. So any doubt that anyone may have had about whether Israel was sincere in pursuing an agreement with Palestinians has now been eliminated."

Mac: I might just say very briefly, use the word sincerely, I think Mr Netanyahu is sincerely interested in the elimination of all the Arabs that currently live in the area he calls Greater Israel. A journalist returned not long ago from the Middle East and reported that he actually saw Israeli soldiers wearing a patch that depicts Greater Israel. ... I think he, Mr Netanyahu, is sincerely interested in annihilating everything south of the Litani River [in Lebanon] and if Iran--which I think will happen--inevitably intervenes then he's comfortable now that the United States will act on his behalf to utterly destroy and pulverize Iran into submission. Austin just flat out said that.

DD: I'd be remiss if I didn't show our lead Diplomat here, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who threw his two cents in:

"Q: Haniyeh was involved in cease fire talks in Gaza. What impact is his death going to have?

A: Well, of course I've seen the seen the reports and what I can tell you is this. First, this is something we were not aware of or involved in. It's very hard to speculate and I've learned over many years never to speculate on the the impact one event may have on something, else so I can't tell you what this means. I can tell you that the the imperative of getting a ceasefire, the importance that that has for everyone remains and we will continue to labor for as long as it takes to get there."

Doug, it's hard for me to stomach these kinds of statements which we've been hearing for many months now. ... When he keeps talking about we're actually seeking peace and you see every action does the opposite, ... our trust in anybody in our government at the top levels is just getting shredded by the day.

Mac: ... Mr Blinken is doing an excellent job of everything that Mr Netanyahu wants him to do. Number two, and this is equally important in my judgment, he's interested--as is most of Washington--in buying as much time as possible for the Israelis to complete their task of creating Greater Israel--in other words, eliminate all of the Arabs in in Gaza and the West Bank. And they now realize that that's not going to happen unless they can also bring to heel Hezbollah and subjugate that area. So we are buying time for them to do that. It has now moved beyond buying time because it can't be done--certainly not in the time frame that they would like--and instead what you've got brewing is a new war. Normally you would expect the American government to intervene and say, 'Well look we're not prepared for a major war, we didn't commit to that,' but the truth is--behind closed doors--that's exactly what we've committed to do. That's what Mr Austin said and that's exactly what we're about to do. We are going to involve ourselves in a war with not only Hezbollah but also Iran. ... you also have another problem--you have the rest of the world. You have Russia and China and, increasingly, Turkey. ... The Turks aren't going to be able to stay out of the fight if the Israelis March into South Lebanon and initiate this campaign of annihilation--which I think we have to expect. So you could have the entire region finally engaged in this. Can we actually compensate for whatever power Israel doesn't have and needs? I don't know, but I think it's going to be tough. ... I expressed this view to president Trump both written and otherwise back in December of 2020, that we should get our troops our forces and everything we own out of Turkey because at some point our troops on the ground in Turkey could become hostages. And remember we still have some nuclear weapons in Turkey we got to get them out ...

If anybody thinks that the things you and I are discussing about Israel are not understood or appreciated in the Middle East or Asia they're deluded. We are viewed as Israel's tool. We are being governed by Israel. Israel is seen as dominating us, not the other way around.

DD: To underscore that, painfully, this was part of Netanyahu's speech before the joint session of Congress where he's trying to claim that, ‘Hey, we're all in this together!’

"I choose my words carefully. We've jointly developed some of the most sophisticated weapons on Earth that help protect both our countries, and we also help keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East."

So it's our shared interest in the Middle East for the United States to get sucked into a war. And, by the way, you mentioned a second ago that it was Austin's words that said that we're going to, well, despite whatever the Secretary of State said, here's what's happening--12 us warships are now reported to be steaming into the area as tensions rise. So it seems that we're actually getting ready to do Netanyahu's bidding.

Mac: Well, obviously. And once again, as we mentioned earlier, we don't have the ground force to put in there. I'm told that some consideration has been given to putting a Marine force of perhaps 2,000 on the ground in Israel. We'll see whether or not that happens. Obviously 2,000 Marines on the ground in Israel guarantees that somebody's going to get killed if you go to war with Hezbollah and Iran--it's going to be impossible to avoid having something fall on you. But it's not going to make a great deal of difference to the outcome on the ground. Let's be frank--the numbers are just too small. So I think air and missile power, that's where we're we're headed, and we've got probably as much as we can load on to any of the platforms. The Aegis cruisers, destroyers, plus the aircraft carriers and we're prepared to fight and we will go in and we will attack shoulder-to-shoulder with the Israelis and we will end up at war with most of the Middle East. And I think we're probably going to end up dealing with the fallout here at home ... I think from the standpoint of the people running the administration and the government, they might think this is a great thing, if we can drag the American people and the United States into a permanent state of conflict with everyone in the region, that's good for Israel. I think I have to view it that way.

[Extended discussion of whether the US can "destroy" Iran. Mac appears to be of the view that the US can, while DD seems more skeptical. For my part, I believe that the possibility exists for US casualties on a scale not seen, certainly, since Vietnam. I don’t believe the American people will find that acceptable.]

I think the Air Force is probably and the Navy salivating at the prospect because that's what they've always theorized could be done--you can win a war without any ground force. Well, if your only goal is destruction and murder they have a point ...

There are other states out there that are not going to be particularly excited about that. Clearly the Pakistanis are not going to be excited. I don't think India will be excited by it. I know the Russians are going to be horrified if that happens, and again we come back to Turkey. Turks aren't going to like it. If you go to Northeast Asia, it's not just the Chinese who want access to the Straits of Hormuz, which would likely be closed. It's also Japan, Korea, a number of other states in the region that depend on access to those fossil fuels. In other words, this has global impact. The impact is going to be economic, it's going to be political and military, and at some point we may discover that we're up against far far more adversaries and opponents than we reckoned would be the case. You gotta distinguish the desired end state--which is Greater Israel--from what is possibly going to happen--that's very different from that end state.

DD: And there's another big, like, blinking red problem for the United States. [Points out that ten months later Israel is still bogged down in Gaza despite all the munitions at its disposal--how can it go into Lebanon?] But the United States is already in a position where our ammunition stocks are running critically low, and there was a report out just a couple of days ago that--when somebody looking at the China Taiwan issue--if we had to fight China that we could run out of critical supplies within days, in some of the interceptor missiles, and within a few weeks and in many of the other key aspects of the ammunition. And that's just in that one area. If we start still trying to support Ukraine ...

[Long discussion on strategic considerations as well as politics in the US]

Mac: You got to put yourself in the position of Mr Netanyahu and you say, 'If I have to pick a point in time to do this, this is it! So let's pull out all the stops, let's go for broke, and we can win everything at one stroke!' Okay, see how that works out.

DD: ... you may want to accomplish this but, if you don't have the capacity to do so, to go starting on that road without the ability to rationally bring it to a conclusion, I mean, you're setting yourself up for disaster! And to me there is no prospect that Israel can actually militarily conquer this territory, even using the US Armed Forces before we run out of capacity or there's so many more enemies join in we can't match them all. This is like a suicide mission to me, Doug.

[Mac launches into an extended historical excursus on military miscalculations--the Czar in WW1, Hitler in Russia, Napoleon in Russia]

Mac: Why do people double down on dumb ideas, even when they realize it's a dumb idea? Well, there are all sorts of reasons, there's a whole psychology behind it. I think that that's going to happen to Mr Netanyahu and his friends. I think ... people in Washington are going to end up in a very similar position. We didn't sign up for this, we didn't expect this. What are we going to do now? ... I remember having these conversations and, General Petraeus, I was visiting in November 2005 in Leavenworth and he said, 'What do you think about Iraq?' I said, 'I think we should leave.' And he said, 'Oh, we can't just leave!' But the point is, we always do! You can't just leave? Oh yes you can ... A friend of mine used to say, 'Doug, when you have no strategy--in other words, when you haven't thought anything through--you end up in a place called Stalingrad. ...

DD: That's the exact conclusion that I reach when I look at the end and means and the stated objectives. They just don't line up, they don't match. That inevitably leads to that point--we're probably beyond that point already in the Russia Ukraine war and we'll discover to our chagrin what's going to happen there probably something similar to what happened in Afghanistan except on a bigger scale, which hopefully won't expand beyond that.

We don't have time to talk about it now but a lot of people are also posturing to go into the Indo-Pacific and just keep poking China over the Taiwan issue. And it's like, man, what are these people thinking? There was, you've probably seen it, there's a commission that was released by the United States Congress where they said, 'Hey, we're vastly underutilized on a defense industrial base and and we need to fix that,' and they said what we need to be able to do simultaneously is to defend the Homeland, fight little Wars like Afghanistan and Iraq, fight and defeat Russia if need be, fight and defeat China if need be, and fight and defeat Iran if need be. All of that simultaneously! And they want to have a defense to to match with it! That's just lunacy and insanity, in my view, but there are otherwise allegedly smart people and well educated that are arguing for exactly that outcome.

Mac: Well there have been a lot of smart people over the years in charge at the top of many nations that have made these kinds of mistakes. They substitute wishful thinking for hard analysis. They replace realistic assumptions with assumptions based on what they hope will happen, as opposed to what could happen. We're on a dangerous path and all we can do is hope that someone at some point in time realizes exactly what we've been discussing, but you know how long did it take us to ultimately get out of Vietnam? 10 years? Ridiculous. And for what? So we're we're quite capable of repeating the stupidity, and I think that's where we are now.

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