Mac On Fire--The Problem

Tomorrow looks like a busy day, but I’ve done a limited transcript of a conversation between Danny Davis and Doug Macgregor. I’ve skipped the Ukraine part and gone ahead to the Palestine/Middle East part, which begins around 39:00. I’ve mostly only transcribed Macgregor’s comments—the few by Davis are clearly marked. I promise, it’s much more interesting than the title line suggests:

Col Douglas Macgregor: Zelensky's Dire Warning for UKRAINE / Would Israel Go Nuclear Against IRAN

Macgregor begins by noting that many military commentators, like General Keane, claim that Iran is militarily weak—except for its missiles. Macgregor responds, Duh! Iran has no need for an offensive capability.

The truth is that Iran is not interested in territorial conquest or acquisition. It's not building forces to subdue or subjugate anybody, anywhere. It's protecting itself and its co-religionists (Shiites), that's all. Israel, on the other hand, wants to expand. We understand why and the rationale for that, but they want to do it at the expense of humanity, at the expense of millions of people who are Arabs, who happen to live there, whom they regard as animals and subhuman but still qualify--in my judgment--as human beings and do not deserve to be murdered. That's the problem. They they don't want to go there, they don't want to address that. The wider war helps them escape that discussion.

At the same time you've got the problem with the [Iranian] missile arsenal. It is substantial and the Israelis know it. They're well aware of the dangers of challenging it without us, so the notion that you can have limited measured attacks by the United States is nonsense. That's not how we do business. If we try to start that way we inevitably scale up and escalate, because you have to. The Iranians I think are smarter and, if they are attacked in what we call limited or measured ways, I think they will throw off the constraints and they will unleash everything they've got--on the assumption that if they don't they may lose it. In that case Israel will be in a lot of trouble. I would hate to see that, ... but right now no one is thinking in those terms.

Thucydides said you go to war for essentially three reasons: fear, honor, or interest. The Israelis have certain interests but they don't necessarily conflict with Iran, in my judgment, to the extent that they think they do. But they do have interests. They want to expand their country. They are afraid. Israelis have been afraid of what the Iranians can do for a long time, and I think fear has overcome any other inhibitions at this point. Honor is probably not terribly meaningful to Israel. I think, on the other hand, with Iran, they did what they thought their national honor required, but they don't want a regional war. They don't want a direct confrontation. If it's forced on them they'll fight and it will be destructive, and no one will profit from the outcome--neither we nor the Israelis nor anybody in the region, and certainly not Iran. Everyone will pay a price.

I'm not confident that Mr Biden is really in charge. I think he has handlers who move him from place to place, who hand him things to say--which he says. That doesn't mean that he's resistant to it. I think he's happy to comply and go along, but there are other figures behind the scenes wielding greater power, and as a result the promise that we will not participate in an attack on Iran, I think, is hollow. I'm afraid that we would inevitably be dragged in, which is why I don't think it should occur at all, but we're now at that stage where something is going to be done. When Passover ends I suspect we're going to see, and that ends on Saturday. I think we will see a response from the Israelis, just as we saw something from Iran after Ramadan. I can't predict what it will be. Whatever it turns out to be will probably influence whether or not we have this regional war.

DD: It's difficult for me to see any off ramp, given who's in charge, given who the players are in the US and in Israel right now. It's hard for me to see anybody doing the rational thing.

Right. Double D seems to know a thing or two about Neocons and Zionists.

Macgregor brings up the idea of a hotline, on the example of China and Vietnam. Personally, I think the situations are different.

Creating a hotline between Teheran and Jerusalem in my judgment would be a good thing, but that would cause Jerusalem to acknowledge that Teheran has the right to exist, that the Iranians have the right to defend their country, that the Iranians have interests that should be respected. The Israelis don't like that word “diplomacy” anymore than the people running our government today—who are much like the Israelis, have no use for the word, diplomacy. ... We will continue to splurge money in every conceivable direction on whatever project Washington wants to undertake, and right now that project is essentially making war with Israel against its enemies, although there are people that have expressed reservations. Yes, the president has said we won't join an attack on Iran, but again how do you avoid being entangled ultimately? If that happens I don't see how we or the Russians stay out. The Russians are on very good terms with the Iranians. They have made it very clear they will not allow us to destroy the country. If you look at the Russians and their positions in the region, they're shadowing our vessels, they have a lot of military power at sea--not just surface ships but submarines. They have more forces now in Syria than they did previously. The opportunity for this to widen to include Russia is real and should be in everybody's mind--where it probably isn't, but it should be.

The other day Macgregor also expressed great concern for what could happen to the US Navy in the event of a regional war. Many of our ships are stationed well within range of Iranian missiles—especially if some Iranian missiles happen to be in Yemen.

Next, Macgregor gets into something that I addressed in my first post this morning. I think it’s more complicated than Macgregor makes out, because Russia’s involvement could make all the difference for Azerbaijan as well as for Azerbaijan’s major ally, Turkey. Still, it’s concerning.

By the way, there's something that you may not be aware of, but there there have been talks for some time between the Israelis and the Azeris in Azerbaijan about the use of airfields in the Caucasus that belong to Azerbaijan that could be staging areas for Israeli strikes against Iran. I think the Azeris are probably going to come to some sort of arrangement because the Israelis have provided the Azeris with capabilities that they used against the Armenians successfully. So this thing is already widening. I'm sure that that is something that bothers Mr Putin in Moscow. I'm sure that he would like the Azerbaijanis to back out of this. I don't know what's going to happen but there are too many critical points now where the tension and the heat is up, so it wouldn't take a great deal to trigger this regional war we keep talking about. And that's why what the Israelis do next is so important.

DD: Doug, there's already been information out that we spent about $ 1.5 billion dollar in helping Israel repulse this relatively small level of attack. If this continues, if it gets into a war, what is the risk that we run out of the kinds of interceptor missiles or artillery shells or all these things that we keep giving to both Israel and to Ukraine? I mean, we have a limited number of some of these things. JD Vance published a piece last week or so talking specifically about our limitations in producing Pac 3 missiles for the Patriot AA defense systems, and if we get into an actual sustained war I don't know that our ships and our planes and everything else can continue to fire these missiles off at that rate.

The other day I included in a post a tweet that advised that the US had shipped missiles from Qatar to Israel. That should raise alarm bells. Qatar is home to the Al Udeid air base—the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. For Iran to strike Al Udeid would be like shooting fish in a barrel, yet the US is stripping defenses for our biggest base in the region to rearm Israel. Hmmm.

Well, remember that it's sort of a rule of thumb that you fire two or three of our air defense missiles at any incoming target, so you can go through our entire inventory in a matter of a few days, so I think Senator Vance's concern is very legitimate. Again, there isn't any thinking here. Everything is impulse driven. There is no strategy. ... We have a government that's gone out of its way to promote war in Eastern Europe and I think now will promote war in the Middle East. In Eastern Europe we're very fortunate that we have not come to blows with the Russians directly, because the Russians are now mobilized, they've got the manufacturing base operating at a very high rate, they can produce whatever they need for as long as they need to do it. We found out that this abundance of resources in Russia makes a difference.

The question is, are we going to risk this kind of conflict in the Middle East and involve ourselves directly when we cannot be certain of victory? If you can't be certain that you will win you shouldn't engage in it at all. Certainly give yourself at least an 80% probability of success. General Keane is promising we can obliterate Iran. I think we can obliterate it, but we're not going to get away from it without sustaining serious damage ourselves. ... He's not looking at the larger strategic picture that involves Russia, that involves China. China is preparing to invest heavily in Iran right now. The Chinese are not going to sit quietly by and let us destroy Iran, either. That doesn't mean the Chinese will attack us, but it does mean that the Chinese will provide whatever is required by Iran and Russia in a conflict that involves us. We we are not a free agent that wanders aimlessly and strikes wherever it likes without consequences and implications.

Look at the state of the Navy--not good. The United States Navy has serious problems ... Sustaining ships at sea for long periods--people think, you know, ship goes to sea, it sails around for eight or nine months and it comes home. No! It has to be provisioned wherever it goes--it has to be routinely provisioned, and if you're in a war that's no small matter. It's not just ammunition. It's also water and food and how do you get it to them if they're trying to evade destruction in an allout war. None of this makes any sense. We're not prepared for this. We haven't thought it through. We need to stop. What we need right now is diplomacy. We need someone to step in and say, 'Wait a minute, we don't want a war and we're going to make damn sure it doesn't happen, and this is what we want to do.' ...

We're the minority voices. We're not the brave dynamic figures on the Hill and in Washington who've never seen war, who've never been shot at, who've never killed anybody in combat. They have a cocktail level of familiarity with real war and they don't believe it can ever reach us--they're the ones pushing this nonsense!

... no one, Dan, ever asks whether or not the American people have been consulted. What if you took a poll tomorrow or the next day and asked, 'Is everyone ready for a regional war that could reach the coasts of the United States, reach into our territorial waters, reach into our country, could involve people that have already marched into our country with millions of other illegals--are you prepared for this?' Of course you know what kind of an answer you're going to get--of course not! But we don't ask those questions. What we say is, 'Do you support Israel?' Of course I support Israel. That doesn't mean I want to go to war with Iran! And it doesn't mean I think it would be good for the Israelis to do that. In fact I think it would be catastrophic.

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Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook

Research shows terms like 'massacre' and 'slaughter' are only ever used by the New York Times to describe the killing of Israelis, never for the killing of Palestinians.

Now the Intercept has found the NYT memo that specifically bars its journalists, and even interviewees, from using these terms in relation to Palestinian deaths, as well as a ban on the use of 'genocide', 'ethnic cleansing', 'occupied territories', 'refugee camps' and 'Palestine'.

The term 'terrorism' is restricted to describing Palestinian attacks, according to the memo. Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians and civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals, is excluded.

The entire Palestinian narrative – and the region's history – has been erased from the NYT's coverage, exactly as Israel would want it to be.

Now we just need to unearth the memos issued by the BBC, Guardian and a host of other outlets that are serving precisely the same purpose of skewing the coverage exclusively in Israel's favour.

More here: https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/…

8:15 PM · Apr 16, 2024

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