Category: International Relations
Review: 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

Review: 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

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An old Foreign Service buddy of mine recently turned me on to the book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Co-authored by writer Elliott Ackerman and retired Admiral James Stavridis, my friend tells me the novel is all the buzz inside the Beltway these days. In no small measure, this is because in every war game simulation run in recent years, the ChiComs wind up handing the U.S. its ass on a platter. A sobering thought, it was enough to make me want to read this book.

It’s no coincidence that I’m posting this review on August 6, on the 76th anniversary of the day the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. While it takes more than a book to remind us, the specter of nuclear war has not receded into the realm of the totally implausible despite all the changes that have occurred in the world in those intervening years since the Enola Gay (which I’ve actually seen and stood next to) released its payload over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. If anything, an increasingly multi-polar world may be making the world ever more dangerous.

First, from a literary point of view, the book is well written. At times the action is gripping, and it becomes difficult to put the book down (a tendency I confess to have resisted and wound up reading the book in several tranches). There is a fair amount of personal back story of various characters, which got me a bit impatient, though such things usually do when my focus is on the action.

The general premise of the book is that China coordinates with the Iranians and the Russians to goad the U.S. into a conflict in which the U.S. is from the outset at a technological disadvantage. A series of miscalculations and missteps set the world’s two leading powers into a pattern that winds up in a tit-for-tat nuclear exchange, one that, just barely, falls short of being an all-out nuclear blow out. In the end, the world balance of power has shifted, and somehow India winds up emerging as the world’s king maker. There are elements of nuclear porn, for those who seek such things, but the book doesn’t wind up being Apocryphal. If anything, I found the ending rather unsatisfactory, but we’ll get to that.

One of the premises of the book is that the Chinese have developed a technology that renders entire fleets of their ships invisible to detection. Clearly this gives them a huge strategic advantage, but I had to wonder how plausible this is. We have satellites circling the globe with visual surveillance capability, and it just didn’t make sense to me that actual ships on the waters could be hidden from that kind of visual identification.

As it turns out, I recently came across an article where this very issue is raised. Apparently GPS technology already is being intercepted and manipulated by unknown actors to show ships and fleets in locations where they are not. Obviously, this can lead to serious consequences if, for instance, a nation thinks it is about to be attacked by a phantom fleet, which it believes to be real, and retaliates. But, much as I suspected in reading the scenario painted in 2034, visual satellite imagery is used to confirm the actual location of the ships detected and to compare that location with the phantom location to demonstrate the reality. So until someone shows me some technology that completely obscures a vessel’s visual presence (as well as the role played by human intelligence), I have to conclude that this is a stretch too far.

There were other things in the book that didn’t compute to me. Early in the book an entire U.S. naval fleet is destroyed by the Chinese, and yet our retaliation is restrained and the course of events is stretched over several months. If China (or anyone) wipes out an entire fleet of our ships, would we slow-walk our response, as happens in the book? I seriously doubt it. In fact, the whole war seems like it is in slow motion. I understand we’re on entirely new ground here and we have never engaged in a full-scale war with a nuclear power before. We may or may not make a first nuclear strike, but would a nuclear China be as restrained if faced with a massive conventional response? I can’t answer that question, with what I know, but the pace of events just didn’t seem realistic, though it did help fill pages.

Another thing I didn’t understand was a key part where the Russians take out underwater Internet cables passing under the Arctic Sea, completely disrupting domestic U.S. communication. I had to wonder why Internet cables running under the Arctic Sea would be connecting domestic U.S. Internet nodes, and why destroying them would disrupt our internal Internet connectivity. I also looked up current undersea cables and there don’t appear to be any running under the Arctic Sea. But even if there were, I can see where they might disrupt connections to Europe or maybe Asia, but not between the East and West coasts of the U.S. This seemed to be an unanswered question even though it was a critical event in the book.

The cable thing also raised the question why one side or the other wouldn’t have used an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack on the other, which would have had far more widespread effects without the need to resort to nuclear ground attacks and frying whole cities.

I understand a certain degree of literary liberty, but when logic seems not to apply to major elements of the plot, without any explanation, I find it troubling as a reader and it makes me question how much I can suspend disbelief. Perhaps we’ve gotten to the point where we believe that all things are possible with technology, but until pigs fly without benefit of technology, I’m going to retain a level of skepticism.

There are some interesting themes that run through the book. One of them seemed to be, low tech meets high tech and low tech wins (usually, anyway). This has long been a kind of life principle of mine. Are we too dependent (and would be even more so in 13 years which, by the way, doesn’t seem that far off) on technology? Probably. Especially if proper safeguards and backstops aren’t built into it. But meanwhile we are engaged in a technological competition with the Chinese. To believe 2034, they may well be winning that competition. And there is reason to believe they are, aside from the book.

One lesson, early on and which sets the whole story in motion, is how not following proper procedure and going off on deviations can be a very bad idea. A U.S. naval commodore, heading a patrol in the South China Sea, decides to deviate from SOPs to go check out a Chinese merchant vessel that appears to be in trouble. In doing so, she walks right into a trap that had been set by the Chinese. It might not be as heroic or dramatic, but sometimes it’s better to stay with the program and not follow one’s gut feelings or curiosities.

I have long believed that if we get into a nuclear war it would most likely be by accident or miscalculation. We have come pretty close a couple of few times. In the book, a series of mishaps and miscalculations allows a U.S. Navy pilot to get through to nuke Shanghai despite attempts by his commander to call off the attack. And things just continue to snowball.

Parts of the book turned out to be nothingburgers. There is a whole section devoted to a battle for the Strait of Hormuz between the Iranians and the Russians which seemed superfluous and much to-do about not much. I was expecting more involvement by Russia leading to the U.S. being forced to fight a two-front war, and that just never developed.

While, as I said, much of the book is gripping, I found the ending unsatisfactory. It is made to seem that the U.S. had been reduced to some sort of second- or third-rate power, while India, of all countries, had risen to be the major world power. Both the reality and the logic of that eluded me. In the course of the book the Chinese nuke Galveston and San Diego, but in the end the country seems demoralized and a shadow of its former self. Somehow I don’t see how loss of those two cities would have such a major impact on the country as it does in the book. There are even people living in refugee camps, which also seemed superfluous and unlikely.

We’ve faced crises before, whether it was grouping and striking back after Pearl Harbor, or following 9-11. And a major hurricane, like Katrina, certainly devastated a big part of the country, and we dealt with it, if imperfectly. Maybe if New York and Los Angeles were taken out it might be more likely. But with Galveston and San Diego being the targets, I don’t see it. Of course, at the rate and in the direction the country currently is headed, we might be so wimped out and divided and chaotic by then, that we just slip into being a third-rate power.

We also never do find out how things are in China after the war (except they don’t mind putting a bullet in the back of the head of someone who is perceived to have screwed up), and we are left wondering the final disposition of Taiwan, which China has invaded in the course of the war.

My friend who turned me on to the book disagrees with me on the ending. He thinks it would be quite realistic to believe that the country could be so demoralized if even relatively minor cities were nuked that it might actually break up, and the country would face an existential crisis the likes of which we only experienced during the Civil War. In his view, states with extreme politics, like California and Oregon, might opt out of the Union and attempt to become independent entities. There also would be lots of openings, he says, for malicious external actors to support some people’s worst inclinations. I’m not prepared to say his analysis is wrong, again, especially with the current negative trends we’re seeing in the country. I do think it would not be unrealistic to think both the country and the world would be profoundly altered by a war between the superpowers, especially one with nuclear exchanges.

As I proceeded through the book, I was reminded of an argument I had with a friend 40-some years ago. I argued at the time that logic would militate against a nuclear confrontation, and the other party argued that it would in fact be logic that would lead to such a conflict. Reading this book and seeing the progression of events, I actually could see the validity of that argument and how that very logical progression of events led to the conflagration that ensues.

The Washington scenes frequently reminded me of the things I didn’t like about being in the Foreign Service and the reasons that caused me eventually to leave it: The boneheads running the show, the clash of egos, the internal politics, the too many chefs in the kitchen, the hubris, the suits and ties running the ship of state aground. There were little giveaways to when the book was written and the authors’ perspectives, such as a reference to the one-term presidency of Mike Pence, but those didn’t much matter in the overall scheme of things.

Of course I felt bad about all the millions of incinerated people, on both sides. I even felt bad for the ex-wife of one of the main characters who got nuked in Galveston (and I felt bad for the neat little B&B there at which I once stayed). But, think what you will, I felt worst about this squirrel that the main Iranian character squeezes to death in his hand, and for its mate as she watches him do it. That just seemed gratuitously cruel and it bothered me all through the rest of the book.

Perhaps the main value of 2034 is that it draws our attention to the biggest external threat facing the country and the world. China has made no secret of its designs for domination both regionally and on the larger world stage. Its impact has been felt in the past year and a half through a devastating virus that it allowed to be released across the globe and, to date, has faced virtually no consequences for what, at best, was its negligence. Neither has it faced consequences for its repressive internal policies, the genocide it is conducting against the Uighurs, its crushing of Hong Kong’s democracy, or its open threats against Taiwan and even Japan. While our focus and national resolve drift, China’s has intensified.

There are a range of issues the book brings attention to, from the role of technology, to war strategy, to civil preparedness, to hardening our communications, to effective diplomacy. And they are all worthy of attention. But what it fails to address, what fall outside its purview, are the internal divisions that tear at our national fabric, the diversion of both our civilian and military leadership from the big issues of national security to some sort of “woke” agenda that only further weakens us, and our growing loss of educational acuity as China surges ahead. It is the internal threat that, in the end, may pose the greater danger than the external one. The import of that threat is not lost on China nor our other adversaries.

Bottom line: Read 2034, pay more attention to what China is up to, and what is — or isn’t — going on in Washington, too.

>>Click this link to buy the book on Amazon<<

2034: A Novel of the Next World War is by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis.

Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels “Red Dress in Black and White,” “Waiting for Eden,” “Dark at the Crossing,” and “Green on Blue,” as well as the memoir “Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning.” His books have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.

Retired Adm. Jim Stavridis spent more than 30 years in the U.S. Navy, rising to the rank of four-star admiral. He was Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and previously commanded U.S. Southern Command, overseeing military operations through Latin America. At sea, he commanded a Navy destroyer, a destroyer squadron, and an aircraft carrier battle group in combat. He holds a Ph.D from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he recently served five years as dean. He has published eight previous books and hundreds of articles. Admiral Stavridis is chief international security and diplomacy analyst for NBC News, and a columnist at both Time magazine and Bloomberg Opinion. Based in Washington, D.C., he is an operating executive of the Carlyle Group, an international private equity firm, and chair of the board of counselors of McLarty Associates, an international consulting firm.

This piece also is posted on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry, and on Substack in my community there, Issues That Matter. Follow me here, and there.
We Are SOOOO F*cked

We Are SOOOO F*cked

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If you live in America, as I do, and you feel like the bottom monkey in that photo, no one would blame you. That might be true in some other countries right now, too, but I’m relating it mostly to my own country.

Watching the latest missteps, blunders, malfeasance, general incompetence, obvious dementia, and shameless dishonesty of what passes for our current Administration, there is not a day nor night that goes by that I don’t hold my hands to my head and say, “We are SOOOO fucked.”

Usually multiple times. It’s so bad sometimes I have to cover my eyes, unable to witness the latest travesty to waltz across the tube. And this from someone with a pretty strong stomach when it comes to horror scenes. Unfortunately, these horror scenes aren’t cinematic, but are Washington’s version of reality.

One has to wonder how what is supposed to be the most powerful country on earth has allowed itself to sink to this level. Actually, it can all be explained, and if you read my last post (which, if you haven’t, you need to now), you’ll understand precisely how it happened, just as you would if you’ve been reading my posts over the past several years.

No, it’s not a conspiracy theory (for which I have exceedingly little patience) to say it’s all part of a huge and far-ranging plot. No, it’s all been documented. And the plotters are already warming up for the next scene in their grand scheme to once more pull a fast one on the American public. One can hope we’re now inoculated to their schemes, perhaps more than we’re inoculated to the virus that is the single biggest thing the Democratic Party has going for it, but the cynic in me is not encouraged, despite the pundits’ blather to the contrary.

Now it is true that most American voters don’t believe the senile Jell-O Joe Biden is in charge in the White House, or anywhere else outside his self-delusional imagination, and that majority has to have grown even more watching some of his latest, if rare, and excruciatingly embarrassing, public performances. Anyone who has had an even passing brush with dementia in a loved one or otherwise knows what they’re witnessing. Of course, we should all be concerned that the country is being run by a shadow government, but the even bigger concern should be how that shadow government is driving the ship of state straight for the rocks, full speed ahead.

Their intent was pretty clear even before Jan. 20, and the evidence of what it consisted of was plainly manifest when, in one day, Jell-O Joe, at the direction of his handlers, whoever they are — and I do have some theories — undid four years of progress. Now, six months and a week and some into this horror show, it’s hard to even decide on an order for listing the most egregious elements which cross all fronts, domestic and foreign. So let’s just look at some of them, not in any kind of strict order.

The Border

Whose name is on those t-shirts? Can you spell Biden?

For me, it’s a toss up, which is more concerning, our troubled foreign policy, the huge upsurge in violent crime, or the catastrophe at our southwest border. In terms of immediate impact on the country and its inherent barbarity and inhumanity, I’ll go with the border. Jell-O Joe made it clear that our border would be open to anyone who goes to the trouble of crossing it, regardless of legal right to do so, and the hordes of border crashers — about a million in the first six months of this year alone, and heading to a new all-time record of 2 million by the end of the year — have been sure to quote him as having personally issued their invitation. And along with them has come a flood of illegal drugs, including enough deadly fentanyl sufficient to kill a large percentage of the country, illegal weapons, women and children being sex trafficked, violent criminals, and a wave of tens of thousands of new COVID infections. The Mexican cartels smuggling all those illegals have profited hugely, in the billions of dollars, from this free-for-all, and they didn’t even have to contribute to the Democratic Party or be a son of the President to cash in on this bonanza.

All the elements of what the Democratic Party seeks — a flood of future new illegal voters, augmentation of the permanent underclass on which the party depends for its very existence, and a wave of new COVID infections on which to build fear and set the stage for stealing the 2022 mid-term elections as it did in 2020 — are there, in plain sight. Well, plain sight, if the mass media cared to show what actually is going on along the border, especially along the lower Rio Grande. But of course, unless you’re watching Fox News, you may not have seen the mass of humanity, from more than 100 countries all over the world, pouring across our non-existent border every day since Jan. 20. And if you think this is only a border problem, consider that the Administration has been secretly busing and even using the military to fly illegal aliens all over the country.

To put things in perspective, consider that a million people is more population than six states. It would be the population of the 12th largest city in the country, between San Jose and Fort Worth. By the end of the year, at the current rate, two million people will be more than the population of 14 states and it would be equivalent to the fifth largest city, between Houston and Phoenix. Add the new numbers to illegals already in the country, and you’re looking at outnumbering all except the top few biggest states. Do the math, and you’ll see why this utter mockery of U.S. law is being allowed, oaths to faithfully execute the laws be damned. Adding insult to injury, you appoint a feckless Vice President who couldn’t care less about the border as the Border Czar, and a Homeland Security Secretary whose last concern seems to be security of the homeland, and who has no problem blatantly lying about what is going on at the border.

Crime

On the chance you haven’t been on an extended underwater cruise aboard a nuclear submarine or getting your news from CNN or MSNBC, you’ve been aware of surging violent crime around the country. Consider, if you will, these numbers which compare 2021 rates with 2020 rates, which already had surged in many cities compared with 2019:

Atlanta – Homicides are up 58% and shootings are up 40%

Portland, Oregon – Homicides are up 533% and shootings are up 126%

New York City – Homicides are up 13% and shootings are up 64%

Los Angeles – Homicides are up 22% and shootings are up 51%

Chicago – Homicides are up 5% and shootings are up 18%

Philadelphia – Homicides are up 37% and shootings are up 27%

Overall, 37 cities with available data saw an average increase in murders of 18% in the first three months of this year, compared with 2020. In Austin, murders are up 79%, rising from 19 to 34 in the first five months, year-to-year.

Police cars line up in Baltimore, one of the few big cities run by Democrats for decades where the murder rate hasn’t surged in 2021. Of course, the FBI already ranks it second in the nation — only St. Louis outranks it — with a higher murder rate than El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, from whence so many of those illegal migrants allegedly are fleeing crime.

Blacks are victims of these homicides and shootings to a disproportionate degree. While last summer’s widespread violence and lawlessness and the insane call to “defund the police” certainly set the stage for this surge, legislative, judicial, and prosecutorial abandonment of cash bail and releasing known and accused criminals to roam the streets have played no small role in the surge in violent crime, including aggravated assault, in dozens of cities across the country, from New York to Philadelphia to St. Louis to Los Angeles. A sane person would say more, not fewer, police were needed — including the 81 percent of black Americans who want the same level of, or more, policing — and would think a prosecutor’s job is to (speak of radical ideas) prosecute criminals, and not release them out on the streets to victimize more innocent citizens. Instead, George Soros financially backs these renegade prosecutors, the Dems blame it all on Donald Trump, and Jell-O Joe blames it on legal gun ownership instead of looking at their own incompetence and failed policies. This band of inveterate liars even had the chutzpah to say it was Republicans who wanted to defund the police. But, of course, we were talking about sane people, weren’t we?

Foreign Affairs

It’s called the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. But have you seen who is next in line?

If the worst thing about our current shift in foreign policy was a return of the apology tour that began under Barack Obama, things in this arena wouldn’t be too bad. But when we are berated by China for our alleged human rights abuses, and we just sit there and take it, and say nothing when Beijing mows under the rights of Hong Kongers and threatens Taiwan and Japan, that’s a more serious issue. And what can you say when the Commander in Chief has to resort to index cards to explain U.S. policy toward North Korea, or when the same said CiC keeps mixing up Syria and Libya on an international stage? What I’d say is that we’re in the proverbial deep doo-doo.

Biden restored $235 million in aid, frozen by the Trump Administration, to the Palestinians, and within weeks Hamas rockets were launched by the thousands onto Israel. For their good behavior and peaceful attitude, he added another $38.5 million to sweeten the pot and ostensibly pay for more rockets, which Hamas buys from the Iranians and other sources.

Of course, that’s just chump change compared with the $3 billion in funds that Biden unfroze so they could be returned to Iran. All part of the Administration’s plan to revive the disastrous nuclear agreement with that country. After all, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism which has vowed death to America and to Israel wouldn’t dream of using all that money for any nefarious purposes. Would it?

We’re pulling out of Afghanistan, which might not be the worst idea were we do to it in a controlled and honorable way. Instead it’s like we just discovered we passed our stop on the Metro and need to jump off the train and call an Uber at the next station. Never mind the carnage that many Afghans, who stood by us and supported us through the 20 years of this seemingly endless engagement, already are facing, or the abandonment of perhaps the best government the Afghans have had, ever.

Now no discussion of our misadventures in foreign affairs would be complete without mention of Secretary of State Antony Blinken inviting the UN, that bastion of human rights, to investigate “the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia” in the U.S. After all, the UN’s Human Rights Council includes such bastions of human rights as China, Cuba, Libya, Eritrea, Algeria, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. And let’s not forget Mauritania, where slavery is actively practiced to this day. Don’t you feel all fresh and clean, confessing your sins to these paradigms of liberty and justice? What? You don’t? You MUST be a racist!

Energy and Inflation

Under Trump, America became energy independent for the first time in 62 years. It felt pretty good knowing it wasn’t Saudi princes or Russian oligarchs profiting when I filled up at the pump. But that couldn’t be allowed to persist under Biden, and one of his first acts was canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, keeping the oil it would have carried from Canada on less environmentally sound trains and trucks, and XTing as many as 11,000 good paying union jobs (which he likes to blather so much about). Now while America and its close ally Canada doesn’t need a pipeline, in Biden’s world, Putin, Russia, and Germany do, so he greenlighted Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline by waiving sanctions against the company building it, Nord Stream 2 AG, and its German CEO, Matthias Warnig. Oh, did we mention that Warnig is a close ally of Putin, is a former East German Stasi intel officer, and has served on the supervisory boards of major Russian companies? Now who is Putin’s puppy?

Homelessness isn’t just hidden away any more.

You may have noticed, as I have, how it’s costing you nearly 60 percent more at the pump than it was a year ago, and in some places, like California, gasoline is approaching $6 a gallon, more than in many European countries. Also rising are electric rates, up more than 20 percent in my case, and it’s not all due to the rising cost of petroleum. And if you miss those wild wonderful Jimmy Carter years, we’ve even experienced fuel shortages and lines at the pumps.

Rising energy costs are just one factor fueling inflation, which is surging at rates not seen in 13 years and, in some categories, in 30 years. Along with fuel, consumers are seeing increases in categories as diverse as food, vehicles, home purchases, and construction materials. Record federal debt — currently standing at $28.5 trillion, and climbing — and gratuitous federal payments that make it more attractive for many workers to stay home than go back to work add to the upward pressure on prices. We’ve — by “we,” I’m referring to our illustrious Congress, which the American public holds in even lower esteem than it does the mass media — now come to talk about trillions like they’re rounding errors. Can anyone spell Weimar Republic?

COVID

Finally, in this round-up, we come to what has been the national obsession of the past 18 months, COVID-19. If one wants to be generous, the best one can conclude is that the Biden Administration has succeeded — and that “success” lies in sending out incredibly mixed and confusing signals. If one looks closer at the facts, little of the twisting and turning public pronouncements make any sense, and both the hypocrisy of the Administration’s positions as well as their real purpose come into focus. While bleating about wanting more people to get vaccinated, the Administration comes out with new “guidelines” telling vaccinated people to again wear masks under certain circumstances. Never mind that a fully vaccinated American has a higher chance of being hit by lightning or bitten by a shark than contracting COVID-19, much less dying from it. By the CDC’s own numbers, breakthrough infections — not deaths, just infections — occur in one of 10,000 people. That’s .01%. Deaths from COVID in fully vaccinated individuals are even more rare. Yet we’re supposed to change our behaviors once more over this supposed new threat.

Much hoopla is made of the Delta variant of the virus, but what isn’t being said is the fact that this variant, while more contagious than initial variants, is less deadly. Far less, for vaccinated individuals. Those in power don’t want you to know that, but even in Britain, where this variant took off after its introduction from India, they’re acknowledging this fact.

If you’re expecting consistency from the likes of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky — who seems to have roughly the intelligence of your average chihuahua and kowtows to the party line, whether it comes from the White House or the powerful American Federation of Teachers — you’re not going to get it. Any more than you’ll get it from the Exalted Poobah Anthony Fauci who, among a litany of flip-flops that could occupy an entire piece, lies to Congress about the NIH’s possible role in creating COVID-19 in the first place.

Meanwhile, while studies show that having contracted COVID-19 conveys natural immunity in most cases, we have absolutely no information on how long the immunity granted by vaccination lasts or whether booster shots will be needed. One would think that finding some evidence addressing these questions would be a top priority.

Some people feel you just can’t be safe enough. That’s how the Administration wants you to be.

If you’re confused by the messaging coming out of the White House and its own version of Baghdad Bob, spokesbabbler Jen Psaki — who tells you to follow the guidance just because they told you to — look behind the scenes to see what people in power do. This might reveal their true motivation. Remember what I said up above about all those infected illegals being allowed in and then shipped all over the country? And how they’re indicative of how the Administration really isn’t serious about limiting spread of COVID and is a key piece in the Dem plan to create the nationwide fear and panic to steal the 2022 mid-term elections, like they did the Presidential election of 2020? If you have the bad habit, as I do, of applying logic to what people do, it’s hard to avoid coming to this conclusion.

Another indication of how little the Administration really cares about your well-being is the recent decision by the Justice Department to drop its investigation into the 15,000 COVID nursing home deaths in New York, or similar huge death counts in other Dem-controlled states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, while limiting its investigation in New Jersey. Anyone who felt sorry for Attorney General Merrick Garland not making it to the Supreme Court can drop their regrets now that we see he’s just one more hard-left Dem apparatchik. So much for justice, even for the dead or their families.

Me, I’m happy to live in the free state of Florida and to have a governor not subject to the whims and wishes of the White House and the Democratic Party. I just hope all those people fleeing here from the unfree states don’t bring their stupid political ideas with them. As a country we might be like that bottom monkey in the photo, but here we’re hanging on as long as we can, trying not to be screwed any more than we are, anyway.

And make no mistake: We all are.

Photo credits: Featured photo by cottonbro on Pexels; used with permission. Biden Let Us In by Washington Examiner; used under Fair Use. Baltimore Police Cars by Bruce Emmerling on Pixabay; used with permission. Historic political cartoon, source unknown; used under Fair Use. Downtown Tent by Adam Thomas on Unsplash; used with permission. Masked Couple by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash; used with permission.

Beginning with this post, I’ll also be posting on Substack in my new community there, Issues That Matter. Follow me here, and there.
Applying RICO to the Biden Crime Family, the Dems, and the Media

Applying RICO to the Biden Crime Family, the Dems, and the Media

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At the end of my last piece in this space, I promised to discuss why, and how, the RICO statute – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act – can and should be applied to the Biden crime family, the Democratic Party which has protected and furthered it, and the mass and social media that have engaged in a deliberate cover-up of its criminal activities. That’s what I will do in this piece.

Let me make some things clear up front. First and foremost, this is not about partisan politics. This is about corruption and crime that goes so deep that every American, regardless of political preference, needs to be not just concerned, but outraged. As a matter of disclosure, I will say that I support Donald Trump and will vote for him on election day, not so much because I am a huge fan of Trump – though I have more reasons to be one this time around than I did four years ago – but because the alternative is utterly unacceptable, and should be to any right-thinking voter. The pity is that so many people have already early voted without full knowledge of key facts that may have influenced how they voted.

Second, I’m not going to try to detail all of Joe Biden’s wrongdoing. That can take (and has taken) books. I’ve laid out in some detail much of the wrongdoing in my posts over the past year, and I urge to you read the primary stories where I laid out the corruption fostered by Biden in Ukraine and China. Many of the conclusions I drew then and in subsequent stories concerned how Biden’s son Hunter exploited his father’s position as Vice President of the United States to further his own business and profit interests. We now have compelling evidence that not only confirms what I detailed in those pieces, but that goes further to clearly and unambiguously implicate Joe Biden himself in clear abuse of his position and illegal profiteering, with the extent of the wrongdoing taking in many more countries, including Russia, Kazakhstan, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

“Plausible deniability”

Rather than simply repeat information that now is publicly available – though repressed by most in the mainstream media and censored and blocked by the social media giants – I urge you in the strongest terms to go directly to the primary sources (links below) for confirmation that this is not just speculation at this point, and it decidedly is not Russian disinformation, as frauds and liars such as Calif. Rep. Adam Schiff would try to mislead you into believing. Both John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence, and the FBI, the latter of which seized the Hunter Biden laptop in December 2019, have confirmed that the emails are not the product of Russian misinformation.

Foremost in your own investigation, if you did not watch it in real time as it aired on Fox News on Oct. 27, spend the time to listen to Tucker Carlson’s hour-long interview with Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner with the Bidens, who lays out exactly the highly dubious nature of the Bidens’ business activities and Joe Biden’s role in them (Bobulinkski, among other things, confirms that it is Joe Biden who is referred to as “the big guy” and “the chairman” in the emails contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop):

Tucker Carlson interview with Tony Bobulinkski – video and transcript of the full interview on the RealClear Politics site

Read and download the full report (below) of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance – focus especially on the summary, and on pages 65-87 of the report:

Final Report – Homeland Security/Finance Committees

Read the transcript of former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s speech to the Republican National Convention in August in which she outlines the corruption of Joe Biden and the Biden family

And read the stories in the New York Post about the emails and other items on Hunter Biden’s laptop:

The initial Oct. 14 story about how emails reveal how Hunter introduced a top Burisma official to his father.

Oct. 15 story detailing Hunter Biden’s murky business dealings in China

Oct. 16 story about Hunter’s troubled life and pained soul

Oct. 23 story about how Biden business group eyed N.Y. Gov. Mario Cuomo and Sen. Chuck Schumer for deals

Oct. 27 piece by Michael Goodwin in the Post about Joe Biden meetings

See an index of more of the Post‘s Hunter Biden stories

At one point in the Carlson interview, Bobulinski, a former Naval officer, said this:

“And I’m — I’m thinking about the Biden family, like, how are they doing this? I know Joe decided not to run in 2016, but what if he ran in the future? Aren’t they taking political risk or headline risk?

“And I remember looking at Jim Biden [Joe Biden’s brother and a campaign adviser, and one of the main beneficiaries of the Biden family business] and saying, how are you guys getting away with this, like, aren’t you concerned?

“And he — he looked at me and he laughed a little bit and said, ‘plausible deniability.’ ”

You may recall that the administration of Richard Nixon attempted – unsuccessfully, as it turned out – to cover its tracks during Watergate through application of “plausible deniability,” and it’s been used as a form of cover by the CIA going back to the Kennedy administration.

The RICO Act

The RICO Act was passed in 1970 to combat crime conducted as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. It targets organizations, and not just individuals, engaged in such criminal activities as illegal gambling, money laundering, bribery, kidnapping, extortion, sex and drug trafficking, murder, counterfeiting, and embezzlement, among others. To obtain a RICO conviction, the government must prove two or more covered criminal acts over a 10-year period, and must show that a defendant was invested in, maintained an interest in, or participated in a criminal enterprise that was involved in interstate or foreign commerce.

Read the full text of the RICO Act here

If you look at the Biden situation, referring to the above sources, several elements appear to fall under the RICO Act:

  • An ongoing enterprise
  • More than two instances of possible criminal activity
  • Involvement in interstate or foreign commerce
  • Potential criminal activities, including:
    • Extortion (using U.S. public funds, adding an additional level to the offense)
    • Bribery
    • Money laundering
    • Tax evasion
    • Violation of FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act)
    • Violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
    • Sanctions violations (negotiations to acquire a percentage of the Russian state-controlled energy company, Rosneft)

Any of the actions of the Biden family would be bad enough, but what becomes a matter of grave national concern are the deliberate and coordinated actions of the Democratic Party, Party-affiliated PACs, the mass media, and social media, to cover up the various potential offenses committed by Joe Biden, a candidate for President of the United States, and to prevent a large percentage of the American electorate from gaining knowledge of those offenses. This could have lasting impact on the country, and given the criminal nature of the actions being concealed, these parties are implicating themselves in their conduct and, therefore, should also be investigated for RICO violations.

If you have any doubt that this cover-up is deliberate and coordinated, all you have to do is consider that no mainstream broadcast network, other than Fox News, has spent any time reporting on any of this. Even worse than the usual lack of any kind of journalistic vetting of Biden or his running mate, you would have heard how the whole email thing is a product of “Russian disinformation.” Never mind the enormous resources and time the media spent on the last bout of “Russian disinformation,” waged allegedly to support Trump, which turned out to be a complete hoax. This time around, this matter is far from a myth or a hoax, but no attention is being given to it by the mass media. Publicly supported NPR went so far as to state outright that they won’t cover the Biden email scandal.

It has been credibly reported that officials of Democrat-controlled PACs called major media chiefs following the Bobulinski interview and threatened that they would have no access to a Biden administration if they carried any news of the interview. The result: Zero minutes of coverage on any media network outside Fox News. This goes beyond mere journalistic malpractice, which has become a commonplace. This is extortion, and by being complicit in it the media has become an accomplice to a crime. Given the national interest in the outcome of the election and the ability to make valid judgments about the candidates, and the very real possibility that a Presidential candidate could be compromised with America’s leading adversary, Communist China, I would argue this should at minimum merit a RICO investigation, and possible prosecution, by the Justice Department.

As troubling, Tucker Carlson is reporting as I’m writing this, on the night following the Bobulinski interview, that a package of original documents associated with the case, shipped cross-country from New York to Los Angeles by major national private courier, arrived opened and empty, and a thorough investigation by the courier company could not reveal what happened to the documents or who was involved in absconding with them. These are tactics more associated with Communist China or the former Soviet Union. But this is what is happening in 2020 America, a week before the most critical election in our time.

Bobulinski is reported to be staying at a location remote from his family in order to help protect his family from attacks.

Be aware that at no time has Joe Biden or his campaign denied the existence of the Hunter Biden emails. The best they can do is try to discredit how they came into the possession of the Post, which, of course, is Russia, Russia, Russia. Keep in mind that the U.S. had a Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resign his office exactly 47 years ago this month for corruption that is probably vastly eclipsed by Biden’s corruption. How the country has changed since that time, when such things were taken seriously. What is happening now with the media refusing to cover a major corruption story is unprecedented. The overseas media is covering this story more than the American media, which is scandalous.

Jack Dorsey lies under oath to the Senate

In my earlier post, Democracy Dies in Darkness – which I consider perhaps the most significant piece I’ve written in my 50-plus-year journalism career – I expressed the alarm every American should share at the way the social media giants, Twitter and Facebook foremost among them, have suppressed the Post stories, and retweets of them. On Oct. 28, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lied under oath to Sen. Ted Cruz, falsely and repeatedly claiming the block against the Post had been lifted. It has not been lifted, and the Post went on to relate how other media outlets were content to stand by as Twitter attempted to get the Post to essentially retract its documented stand, not unlike what would happen in an authoritarian state.

Along with being investigated for RICO violations, one hopes that Cruz and other senators to whom Dorsey lied make a criminal referral for perjury naming Dorsey.

“The time for talk has passed,” said Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. “Take away the special status given these tech companies.”

Hawley has been a consistent critic of the tech companies, and an advocate of removing the Section 230 protections afforded them and which shield them from liability based on their biased actions. But as Hawley pointed out, it was two hours into the hearings when Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act even came up, indicative of how Congress has not shown any resolve in doing anything substantive to rein in the enormous power – and damage being done to our democracy – of the tech giants.

Already in a Brave New World

It would be inaccurate to say that we are facing loss of our democracy if these things are allowed to continue. In effect, we are already there, and we have clearly entered this Brave New World where truth is turned on its head and thought control is forced on us. Should there be a Democractic victory, as illegitimate as it might be, in next week’s elections, we are facing entrenchment of these things on a permanent basis, as I described in my last piece where I asked if America is ready for the one-party state Party leaders have in mind.

Perhaps, you might ask, how people can be so ready to sell out their own country and its freedoms in favor of an authoritarian enemy and system? But consider how for decades there were many Americans – and these included journalists, teachers, scientists, artists, and others – who sold out to the former Soviet Union. They did this in support of their ideology, their view of what a “just” society might look like, their belief, as misguided as it was, that Soviet Communism represented a better solution for the country.

Why should we be surprised now that there are those today – including those same categories of people who sold out to the Soviets, and maybe now throw in some politicians, corrupt and otherwise, too – who are ready to toss in with our leading adversary. That includes one of the two candidates for President of the country. After all, Joe Biden himself has said it: “Come on, man, I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.”

Again, the state of affairs in 2020 America.

Featured image: Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, Larry Downing, Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Tony Bobulinski, Fox News. Used under Fair Use.

Jack Dorsey on the cover of the New York Post of Oct. 29, 2020. Used under Fair Use.

max-larochelle-uu-Jw5SunYI-unsplash edit big weather story
Bigger Than a Big Weather Story

Bigger Than a Big Weather Story

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When I was a practicing journalist I came to learn that there are few stories bigger than a big weather story. I still remember, more than three decades later, my managing editor at the daily paper where I worked standing in the middle of the newsroom as a tropical storm was headed our way and bellowing, “Blow it all out of proportion!” And we dutifully did.

So what’s bigger than a big weather story? The current furor over COVID-19, AKA the coronavirus, reminds me of our coverage of tropical storms and hurricanes, but on steroids. The media has certainly seen to the task of blowing it all out of proportion, making it bigger by far than a big weather story.

Now I can already hear the protests and mocking retorts. “But, BUT! This thing is deadly! It’s killing people! It’s a pandemic! It will destroy civilization as we know it!”

Yes, yes, I know all that (except the last one, of course), and I don’t mean to minimize the potential for death and destruction that this virus can wreak, any more than I would minimize the potential of seriously bad weather to kill and destroy. I’m also not intending to discourage people from taking reasonable precautions to protect themselves and others, though I am advocating that people not overreact. While some people, mostly older people and those with serious underlying medical conditions, are at high risk, many cases of the virus in the U.S. have been relatively mild. I think it’s both useful and even hugely beneficial to keep things in perspective and not run off the cliff by blowing things all out of proportion.

Striking a balance

As with any emergency, two factors are critically important. One is to recognize the danger and how to best address it, and the other is to stay calm and avoid panic. The kind of media coverage we’ve gotten on COVID-19, for the most part, has been heavy on the former (even as it was late in coming and largely distorted, which it remains), and exceedingly light on the later. I don’t think it has done what it could to make people safer and shockingly little to calm them or put things in perspective. We’ve seen the results of this as people rush to alter their everyday lives in ways that often are gross overreactions while not necessarily making them any safer. Meanwhile, the impact on the economy, with more than a 20% drop in the markets and massive slow-downs and shut-downs of whole industries, appears to be perhaps more harmful to the country than the virus itself.

We’ve watched on television as people in places, mostly on the West and East Coasts, stripped store shelves bare, as if theynauris-pukis-S0XbrnbUo-g-unsplash close quarters were expecting some sort of plague of locusts to descend on them. By way of comparison, as recently as a few days ago everything remained normal here where I live in North-Central Florida. I felt people were being sensible, given the remote risk involved, and there were no signs of panic. And then the dominoes started falling here as elsewhere. The National Hot Rod Association announced it was postponing the Gator Nationals hot rod races in Gainesville, which particularly pissed me off, partly because I had already bought my ticket, but more because it is an outdoor event, furchrissake. Florida colleges and universities are considering moving all classes online. And then yesterday I visited some of the local stores and, while I wouldn’t characterize the atmosphere as one of panic, it clearly had shifted from the usual norm. I’m not an expert, but I have to think the chance of contracting a virus in the closed confines of a supermarket has to be greater than in the open air.

As in other places, along with water, toilet paper and some other products had been stripped from the shelves. While I can kind of understand and even expected the water – these stores run out of water even in more normal times – but toilet paper? Folks, this isn’t a dysentery epidemic. What possible need for toilet paper, beyond normal consumption, can anyone have? And it turns out this isn’t just happening in this country, but overseas, too. There is the family in Australia who (by mistake) ordered not 48 rolls but 48 cases of toilet paper. By their estimate, 12 years worth of the stuff. Now admittedly the order was placed before the coronavirus furor reached full bore, but the family is finding they’ve become very popular among people who can’t find TP in the stores in Oz and are re-selling the rolls as a fundraiser.

Watching people rolling carts topped to the brim with products, one wonders if they’re planning on withdrawing to underground bunkers to await the all-clear after the radioactive fallout from nuclear war has stopped dropping or for when the invading aliens have returned to their distant galaxy. In large part promoted by the media, this sort of rush is now under way across the country.

One report I got was from my contractor, who described the scene in coastal Mississippi: “I stocked up on enough food and supplies to last a month just in case we have to be isolated but I’ve seen people buying enough to last for the rest of the year. It’s absolutely ridiculous.” Number, as of today, of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Mississippi: 10, at least one of which originated out of state. Number of deaths in the state from COVID-19: 0. Mississippi’s population: 2.99 million.

Ridiculous, indeed.

Putting things in perspective

To further see how ridiculous, let’s put things in perspective a bit. As of today, this county where I live has had a grand total of no cases of coronavirus. The county to the east has had five cases, the county to the north has had one (which came from Georgia, the state, not the country), and one to the southwest has recorded one case. None of the other four counties that border on this county has had any cases, and no deaths have been recorded in any of these counties. The state of Florida, which has about 22 million people, not counting its many visitors, has so far confirmed 76 cases and three deaths, several cases involving people who had traveled abroad or were from other states.

Meanwhile, so far this year, if averages from other recent years can be relied on, in just 75 days something like 630 people have died in road accidents on the state’s streets and highways and another 51,000 or so have been injured. Perhaps if people paid more attention to their driving and less to concern about wiping their butts they’d be a lot better off.

I haven’t even been able to find accurate statistics on how many people have come down from the flu or died from it in Florida, but nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that as many as 49 million people this flu season alone have contracted the flu, there have been up to 23 million medical visits and 620,000 hospitalizations, and 52,000 deaths, including 144 children to date (that includes 12 so far in Florida). By comparison, the CDC is reporting 1,629 cases of coronavirus in 46 states and the District of Columbia, and 41 deaths, with no child deaths in the U.S. Not that any of those cases or deaths are to be dismissed, but the comparison with the illness and deaths from the flu and other things can’t be ignored. In this country, we see more than 67,000 people die each year from opioids.

Hysteria and playing politics

If you look objectively at what the current Administration in the White House has done to control introduction and spread of this virus, it has acted decisively and quickly. When it became apparent that the virus had originated in or around the city of Wuhan in China, the President on Jan. 31 ordered a limited ban on entry into the U.S. by most travelers coming from China, and it went into effect on Feb. 2. This past week, on March 11, the President ordered a similar ban on travel from Europe, with exemptions for travelers from the U.K. and Ireland, both of which were later added to the ban. And on March 13 he declared a national state of emergency, with the effect of releasing additional federal resources and funding to deal with the crisis.

To assure a coordinated approach, the President on Feb. 26 had put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus, with experts from the CDC and National Institutes of Health (NIH) leading the medical response to the threat posed by COVID-19. If you didn’t see that press conference you should now since I think it was one of the most explanatory and straightforward presidential press conference I’ve ever seen.

You’d almost never know that President Trump was doing anything to address the threat of coronavirus if you only follow the never-Trumpers on the left wing of the media who, along with some on the Democratic side of the aisle in Congress, have disgustingly done their utmost to politicize what is a national crisis. It reached the point where on some networks program hosts blatantly squelched any views that offered support to the President. This was transparently obvious, for instance, to anyone watching as CNN’s Don Lemon – who, in my assessment, would have a hard time beating out a clever hamster in an intelligence contest – repeatedly shut down former Ohio Gov. John Kasich (himself no big Trump supporter) as Kasich attempted to defend the President’s response to the crisis.

Along with the anti-Trump prejudice, we heard such inanities as commentators saying it was “zenophobic” and “racist” to call macau-photo-agency-4I6VHLP5Ws4-unsplash masked familythe virus “the Wuhan virus” or “the Chinese virus,” despite the fact that the origins of the virus in and around Wuhan is little disputed. That encouraged Chinese officials to blast the U.S. for saying the virus originated in China and even to threaten to withhold vital medications from the U.S. Meanwhile, lots of viruses and ailments, including Ebola, West Nile, Zika, and Lyme, not to mention “the Spanish flu” and “the Asian flu” – remember those, from 1918 and 1957, respectively? – have been named after the area in which they originated, and no one ever called those names racist or zenophobic.

Two big scandals exposed by the coronavirus

Not to sugar coat anything, there are at least two big national scandals this coronavirus thing has in fact uncovered, and we should be grateful that it has. One is the lack of our capacity to produce kits to test for the virus on a massive scale. While South Korea has been able to test 20,000 people a day, it is safe to say we don’t really know how many people in the U.S. have been tested. We do know that testing capacity in this country has been severely limited – perhaps no more than 20,000 tests in total performed to date – and this falls squarely on the shoulders of the CDC. Conflicts between the CDC and some states, such as the conflict with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, at the epicenter of the outbreak, have been reported, and little has been done to tap the capacity of the private sector to produce test kits of sufficient number. Fortunately, on March 13 the FDA approved pharmaceutical giant Roche’s new automated test, which should allow a rapid ramp-up of testing capability as it begins to roll out. Roche says it already has 500,000 tests ready and can produce another 1.5 million of them per month. Going forward, a more flexible approach to developing and deploying testing for various diseases needs to be implemented.

The other big scandal, and perhaps the bigger and more difficult one to address, is how dependent the U.S. has become on overseas production of pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical components, with China holding the lion’s share of production of some key medications. It is estimated that China is the source of 97 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S., and two countries, China and India, produce most of the pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical materials used in the U.S. Along with the strategic threat this preponderance of source represents, there also have been issues of quality control and corruption in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. It would seem that moves should begin immediately to domesticate key elements of this country’s pharmaceuticals production, something other countries also should do.

We have learned lessons from previous pandemics, such as the H1N1 pandemic of a decade ago, but sometimes lessons are forgotten and each new pandemic brings with it new challenges. Making systemic fixes to address such obvious and serious problems as these two needs to be a national priority. And that is not blowing things out of proportion.

Photo credits: Featured image: Max LaRochelle/Unsplash; Crowded: Nauris Pukis/Unsplash; Masked Family: Macau Photo Agency/Unsplash
Ding-Dong! The Wizard Is Dead

Ding-Dong! The Wizard Is Dead

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In the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the East is killed when Dorothy’s house, spirited off to Oz from Kansas by a cyclone, lands on her. In 2020 real life, the Wicked Wizard of the East, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasam Soleimani, was killed when he came into the crosshairs of an American drone flying over Baghdad’s international airport in Iraq. Ding-dong! The wizard is dead.

As the Munchkin Coroner states in the 1939 film, “As Coroner, I must aver I thoroughly examined her, and she’s not only merely dead, she’s really, most sincerely dead.”

Ditto for Soleimani.

Just as the Munchkins rejoiced at seeing the wicked witch’s stockinged feet protruding from under Dorothy’s transplanted house, there is grounds to celebrate the demise of Soleimani, the head of Iran’s deadly Quds Force. Unfortunately, the figurative kingdom is rife with naysayers and handwringers, and political divisiveness seems ever-ready in contemporary America to overcome any shared sense of victory.

While it is Pollyannish to expect that there won’t be some consequences in the targeting of Soleimani, regarded as the second most powerful figure in Iran’s arcane political structure, it is just as Pollyannish to think that there wouldn’t be consequences were he still alive and having breakfast this morning on Al Rasheed Street in downtown Baghdad.

The havoc and death wreaked by Soleimani stretches back four decades to when, in 1979, he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the Iranian revolution and, beginning in the Iraq-Iran War of the early 1980s, he rapidly advanced within the hierarchy. In 1998 he took over command of the Quds Force, designated a terrorist organization by the State Department. Sometimes called “the world’s number one bad guy,” consider these feats of Soleimani and the Quds Force he headed:

Taking out Soleimani wasn’t just a random act. It followed an attack by Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, in which the attackers had penetrated the entrance to the compound and burned a reception area. While no one was kllled in the attack, the U.S. responded by sending in 100 Marines to secure the compound, given the failure of the Iraqi government to meet its internationally mandated requirement to protect diplomatic facilities.

There was more involved than the embassy attack, though. Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley made it clear that reliable intelligence indicated that a wave of Iranian-inspired terrorist attacks against U.S. assets in the region was being planned and was imminent. And, of course, Soleiman was brazen enough to show up at Baghdad’s international airport, exposing himself to the drone attack that killed him and also Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces militia.

“I can’t talk too much about the nature of the threats. But the American people should know that the President’s decision to remove Soleimani from the battlefield saved American lives,” Pompeo told CNN. “The risk of doing nothing was enormous. Intelligence community made that assessment and President Trump acted decisively last night.”

Pompeo said hundreds of American lives had been at risk. He later told Fox’s Sean Hannity that the attack also had saved European lives, though he hadn’t gotten the kind of support he expected from European allies.

“The Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did, what the Americans did, saved lives in Europe as well,” he said.

Milley said the U.S. had intelligence that was “clear, unambiguous” that Soleiman was planning a campaign of violence against the U.S., leading to the decision to attack him. Targets included American military outposts in Syria and diplomatic and financial targets in Lebanon.

“By the way, it still might happen,” Milley said.

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qasem Soleiman
Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, left, deputy head of the Iranian-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, and Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, right, both killed in the U.S. strike.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei immediately appointed Maj. Gen. Ismail Qaani to replace Soleiman as head of the Quds Force and, predictably, pledged revenge. Qaani said the Quds agenda would remain unchanged.

As predictable as Khamenei’s reaction was, so was the response in Congress, which broke down along party lines. The anti-Trump Dems, for whom the President can do nothing right, were quick to criticize the action, going so far in some cases to say the strike on Soleimani was illegal, though reportedly legal departments at both State and Defense, as well as at Justice, approved the strike.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi complained that Congress hadn’t been consulted on the planned attack on Soleimani – no surprise there, given the tendency of Congress to leak like a rusty old sieve – and she had the temerity to call the killing of the man who had murdered hundreds of thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans, “provocative and disproportionate.”

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called the killing of Soleimani an “assassination” and introduced legislation to block funding of any military action in the region. Most of the other candidates in the race piled on with criticism of the attack.

There was some push back, though, even within the parties. Another Dem candidate, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was quick to strike back at Sanders, calling his “assassination” claim “outrageous.”

“If he was talking about killing the general . . . this is a guy who had an awful amount of American blood on his hands. I think that’s an outrageous thing to say,” Bloomberg said. “Nobody that I know of would think that we did something wrong in getting the general.”

While prominent Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Marco Rubio, expressed strong words of support for the attack, another Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, expressing his libertarian view on foreign affairs, said the Trump administration should not embark on a war in the Middle East without Congressional approval.

As the naysaying and handwringing goes on, and will in the days and weeks and more to come, if there is one prediction that will always be correct it is forecasting violence in the Middle East. If that’s anyone’s prediction, they’d be right, with or without Soleimani. In anticipation of Iran’s reaction, the U.S. is sending an additional 3,500 troops to the region. Soleimani may be really, most sincerely dead, but the seething animosities of the region most certainly aren’t, and there are no ruby slippers, like the ones that passed to Dorothy from the deceased Wicked Witch of the East, to magically bring them to a close. So stand by. Film at 11.

Disclosure: The author was an intelligence analyst with the State Department covering the Middle East.

Photo credits: Main image: Donovan Reeves / Unsplash, used with permission; al-Muhandis and Soleimani images, AFP via Getty, used under Fair Use.