Post/intra war thoughts (ii)

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I was doing a pretty good job the last six weeks suppressing my inclination to Eeyorism, so much so that I even agreed to a host a guest post by someone arguing America was three weeks away from victory based on increased oil production capacity in the western hemisphere being sufficient to wait it out until Iranian economic collapse.¹ The author was saved from looking like a massive tit by my no-posting-on-Chol-haMoed policy, but arguably I myself look like a massive tit based on my earlier bullet-point post. Nevertheless, the bullet-point format does big numbers for frankly trivial effort so we’re doing it again.

1. A funny quirk of the modern era is that elected politicians, at any rate American ones, have significantly more leeway to Just Do Things in the sphere of foreign policy than in other areas.² Partly, this is obviously a function of some historical quirks in the distribution of decision-making within the American constitutional system, but there’s also something a bit deeper - dare I say it? ‘structural’ (you gaylord) - for another day. For now, though, I’ll observe that a consequence of this is that a lot of political engagement and ideological polarisation now revolves around foreign policy. Polls consistently shows that electorates rate domestic issues as more important, but concrete differences of opinion are small or non-existent. Neither side is explicitly in favour of more crime or worse healthcare or economic decline, though, with justification, different parties are seen as better or worse on these issues, and more or less willing to discount them against other priorities.³ Foreign policy, by contrast, comes with a worldview and an identity attached, and lots of shouting. The problem is that this is a big problem. As a rule, most people shouldn’t really have opinions about anything, but they should have opinions about foreign policy least of all. Forming a perspective about even one country requires a lot of reading about disparate topics, and warfare, the ultimate foreign policy instrument, requires lots of specialist technical knowledge, which is mostly extremely boring, and much of which is literally secret. Inevitably, foreign policy ideologies are clownish attempts to process complex reality into memes for which the metaphor of the square peg and the round hole lacks five or six dimensions. The most successful version today elevates noninterventionism into a religious principle where phrases like ‘regime-change war’, ‘boots on the ground’, or ‘forever wars’ function as taboo impurities that are seriously supposed to (and, worse, actually do) regulate the actions of the global hegemon. Terrifyingly, though, this may actually be the least insane ‘school’ of foreign-policy thought that can be laundered at scale through contemporary mass media. If you have some pet issue like Taiwan, do what you can to keep it the preserve of wonks and publicity-averse lobbies. Of course, these decision-making structures are structurally insane too, but less, and more predictably.

2. The State of Israel for the foreseeable future is probably going to be at war frequently. Our take is that it’s not our fault; we tried as hard as we could and the Arabs or the Muslims wouldn’t play ball and this is how it’s got to be. Let’s accept that for the sake of argument. If you are going to be at war all the time, you need to, quite literally, normalise war, treat it as politics by other means. On a practical level, Israel is quite good at that. Our civil defence makes it so you can go to work, shop and maintain regular rhythm more or less, but, at the same time, culturally it all goes to pot. Every war is the war, the last war, the most significant war in history, and then it ends, and the next one is instead. Here’s an extremely indigenous Jew showing me his deeply-rooted and indigenous Jewish culture by telling me the Messiah is coming by Pesach because, look, it says right here in this Polish collection of babble completely untethered from reality.

   Unfortunately, the goyim know about all this Amalek stuff. Mostly, they are concerned that it entails some kind of intention to complete massive war crimes, and this concern is not without merit, but I think more important is the flight from reality it entails, the belief that by wildly pattern-matching current events to biblical ones refracted through folk mysticism you are understanding them more deeply rather than, more prosaically, not understanding them. On a simple practical level, how many times can these people keep doing this while still summoning up enthusiasm? I don’t know, but it’s certainly quite a lot. It isn’t just the literal retards either, here’s great friend of the blog and extremely enlightened Charedi, Ash.

   

   I’ll try: Israeli intelligence (a) has very high human capital to work with (b) is extremely well-funded (c) is competing against a dysfunctional basket-case regime with millions of silent defectors and (d) rightly or wrongly, doesn’t respect taboos such as assassinating leaders adhered to by other states. If you are inclined to see miracles, you can see them here, like you can see them in a lot of places. Mrs NonZionism made a cake on Pesach from some recipe she found on the internet and it was amazing. Why that cake and not some other gross cake? No-one knows. It’s far from the worst hashgacha pratis story I’ve heard. I’m rambling because I’m hungry, but the point is knock it off with this crap, OK. Find something else to be religiously inspired by, like the kingfisher, or Cheerios or whatever. Just not Israeli war every six months.

3. Back to the moral-boundary point, I think Israel’s extensive use of assassination as a military tactic in very clear violation of international law to whatever extent it can be said to exist, is, in the abstract, a good thing. The long-term incentives are pretty bad, since an international order in which assassination was the norm would be composed of states led by the foolhardy and the insane, but, looked at in isolation, it’s so obviously more moral to target the people who make the decisions rather than their conscripts. Moral, however, is not the same as effective. At a basic level, the present predicament is a function of Iran having escalation dominance over the U.S. because (a) they are willing to commit economic terrorism against third parties and really the whole human race and (b) they are willing to push the immiseration of their population right to the edge. These two factors, however, are not givens, they depend on the specific composition of the regime. Up till now, when pushed to the wall, Iran did the less criminal thing and cucked. This time it did the more criminal thing and Trump cucked. Chime in if I’m wrong, but it seems that the net result of the assassination policy was to increase the criminality quotient of key decision makers.

4. The war was a gamble, like any war, but a bit more so than usual. The big black pill here is that technically everything went very well. Since there aren’t really any operational failures of note to blame things on, it looks like the odds were just bad going in, which means it was a bad decision, which is a problem because everyone knows who the main advocate of the decision was.

5. From the Israeli perspective, this was a good bet. We got the most powerful military in the history of mankind fighting on our behalf. The risks were distributed globally, and while no-one likes a global recession, we are relatively immune, since we are only a marginal net energy importer, and very little of our supply comes through the Strait of Hormuz. Our economy is not heavily dependent on industries that are highly vulnerable to oil-price shocks. Iran is an existential threat, certainly to some degree, but also an ongoing non-existential threat, in multiple ways ranging from irritating to deadly. Under such conditions, it makes sense to roll the dice, and, in truth, we haven’t even come out of it so bad, while Iran has certainly been set back a great deal militarily. The hitch is that this is the behaviour of an insane terrorist state that exploits weaknesses in the American political system as a force multiplier, and offloads the costs on random third parties. The problem with being an insane terrorist state, though, is that people think you are an insane terrorist state. Even if they accept the argument that you have no choice to do that to survive, they’ll just kind of wish you wouldn’t, that you would go away. The people who want to drive this country off a cliff rely on being able to portray all critics as third worldists, centrist bugmen, cuckservatives, leftards, anti-semites, woke Right etc. Luckily for them, there are plenty of these people and they do their very best to crowd out other criticism of Israel. However, we are getting closer and closer to the point where no-one is buying what we are selling except weird third-world Pentecostals and football hooligans with brain damage. I recommend sharing this article from Pimlico Journal with Zionists to get them to understand how thoughtful gentiles are looking that them. This one by Scott Greer is also good. You don’t have to agree with anything (I don’t), but you should be able to understand everything without reaching for your cliches. (Try!)