...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
?
That’s not a picture of Gaza, but it should be, because it does pretty much sum up the whole thing.
3 years ago Hamas
..a regional Iranian catspaw,...s rapist fighters broke through the barriers around the Gaza Strip and invaded Israel accompanied by other Gazooks who liked the idea of a bit of rape and pillage. Unlike Sept 11, which did not directly affect anyone I know, October 7th did because my company employed 2 Israeli security researchers and one of the two lived on a Kibbutz next to Gaza. As I wrote some time back, she was killed, her children were (fortunately briefly) kidnapped and her body was left boobytrapped for rescuers to find.
I used to assume that it was obvious who to support in the various wars and threatened wars going on. But apparently this is not so because every war now seems to get wrapped around politics in the US and/or Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
and support of one side or the other then depends on whether you support Transgender rights or not (only slightly joking)
A lot of woolly headed sorts in the west think that Israel’s response to having thousands of its citizens murdered and raped has been inappropriate. They may be surprised to learn that I agree, but probably not in a way they consider acceptable.
I think Israel has been inappropriately nice to Hamass and has not killed enough Gazooks. As I finished that section of the previous substack:
[T]hey just can’t face the idea of rubbing the Paleostinians noses in the stick of defeat and keep on giving them an out so that their lying leaders can claim they "won". This time Israel needs to make it abundantly clear to the Gazooks that they have lost and the ideology they supported was a failure.
It is possible that Israel has defanged Hamass enough, but I don’t think so. On the other hand they haven’t stopped. Plus Gaza has been significantly pacified with, IIRC, no attacks from the territory into Israel for the last few months if not year and very few attacks in Gaza on Israeli forces. Moreover the Israelis are gradually locating and executing every Gazook they can identify as involved in the attack which has to be making a lot of terrorist very nervous.
In fact the Hamas attack has convinced Israel as a whole to stop believing in the tooth fairy and instead start taking people at their word when they say they want to see the destruction of Israel. The result of that is that not just Hamass, but also Hez(no)ballah and their sponsors in Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for
spontaneouslytaking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet
militiasto extend the regime's influence. The word
Iranis a cognate form of
Aryan.The abbreviation
IRGCis the same idea as
Stürmabteilung (or SA).The term
Supreme Guideis a the modern version form of either
Duceor
Führeror maybe both. They hate
have had some serious hurt put on them. As of course have sympathetic regimes like Syria and allied terrorist organizations like the Iran's Houthi sock puppets
...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the
Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is
God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the JewsThey like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him...
s. We aren’t yet at a point where Hez(no)ballah can be counted out, but their malign influence on Leb
...The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else?...
has been severely curtailed and their influence on Syria has of course been completely destroyed. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria has made Iran’s sponsorship of Hez(no)ballah much harder because there is now no easy way to transport weapons to them.
Mind you it is unclear whether Iran can make weapons to transport in the first place. Between the Israeli strikes and the subsequent US ones Iran’s weapon industry has been gutted. Of course they still have significant stockpiles (albeit nothing like as many as they had a year ago) but they can’t rebuild them using their own factories and they can’t easily import them from abroad either. The US, Israel and Ukraine have all hit targets on the Caspian Sea side so that path is limited. The US blockade of Iranian ports has stopped imports that way and the destruction of a few key bridges has meant that overland import is also problematic. Yes overland transport is possible, but not in bulk.
Iran is also now seeing its finances being serious attacked with countries like Qatar
...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi...
,
...a NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A single organization with differing goals, equipment, language, doctrine, and structure....
member, but not the most reliable...
and the UAE closing Iranian institutions that they had formerly permitted. In addition various sources have noted that Iran shipped exactly 0 barrels of oil in September. That doesn’t just hurt the IRGC which used those institutions to transfer money but it also hurts all the shady middlemen that have been smuggling things into Iran and profiting from the spread between the official Rial rate and the black market one.
None of this:- the decapitation strikes on Hez(no)ballah and Iran; the deaths of many of Hamass’ own leadership; the destruction of most of Iran’s economy; or the removal of Assad were things that could have been predicted 3 years and a day ago. On October 6th 2023 Israel thought it could negotiate with the IRGC and the various Iranian proxies threatening it. Sure it might have to assassinate one here and there, and probably occasionally blow up a particularly egregious weapons pile, but over all the feeling was that the situation was manageable.
On October 7th Israel learned that this was not the case: when these enemies said they wanted to see the extermination of the Jews they were deadly serious and not engaging in heated rhetoric. Having learned that they moved from "managing" the threats to removing them wholesale and thus the dramatic declines in fortune of Hamass, Hez(no)ballah, Assad and the IRGC.
GLOBAL EFFECTS
There are some interesting secondary effects as well. Within the Middle East it seems clear that countries have changed from fearing Iran to anger at it and a disinclination to tolerate its meddling. So far we are not seeing new official alliances with Israel, but we are clearly seeing unofficial cooperation on a scale that has never been seen before.
There there are the out of region effects. Ukraine’s willingness to share drone defenses with the Gulf States has incentivized those states to finance Ukraine’s various drone programs. That friendliness with Ukraine hurts two would be hegemons - Russia and West Taiwan. Russia is directly hurt since, thanks to its alliance with Iran, perceived as a hostile competitor to the Gulf. That means that no one in the Gulf is going to care about Russia’s desire to export oil and gas except to see them as competition, whereas in 2023 the Gulf and Russia tended to work together on managing oil prices. West Taiwan is hurt in a couple of ways. First it has lost its arms export markets. Countries that might have considered buying Chinese are now significantly less interested having seen those weapons in action.
Secondly the Iran war in particular has likely contributed to the permanent ending of West Taiwan’s ambitions to invade Taiwan. On October 6th, 2023 plenty of analysts looked at what was happening in Ukraine and thought that, while the PLA would have a fight on its hands, it would likely attempt to cross the Taiwan Strait. Thanks to Venezuela
...a country in Central America that sits on an enormous pool of oil. Formerly the most prospereous country in the region, it became infested with Commies sniffing almost unlimited wealth. It turned out the wealth wasn't unlimited, the economy collapsed under the clownish Hugo Chavez, the murder rate exceeded places like Honduras and El Salvador. A significant proportion of the populace refugeed to Colombia and points south...
and Iran, the PLA now knows that its weapons are not up to US levels and that its radars, in particular, only function to detect US stealth warplanes by blowing up when one is nearby. Winnie the Flu told the PLA to be ready by 2027. It is now late 2026 and the top ranks of the PLA have been cleared out by Chairman Winnie for reasons that have not been directly stated but seem to be due to the PLA’s unreadiness to actually invade, both on the weapons capability and on the availability of key logistical requirements such as oil storage. On the latter front there were strong rumors that some of the oil storage that had already been built and allegedly filled with oil turned out to not be filled with oil. It would not surprise me if it turned out that an audit showed other things like missiles also turned out to have been paid for but not actually delivered. Quite a few China commenters have downplayed the corruption parts of the PLA clean out as being "well they are all corrupt so it was just an excuse" but I wonder if in fact those corruption allegations had a factual basis.
Anyway the 2027 deadline looks like it will slip and my guess is that the unofficial official excuse will be President Trump. Thus 2027 becomes 2029 and a hope that the Democrats
...every time you hear the phrase
white people,
white supremacy,
whiteanything but paint, you're listening to a Democrat. Ask him/her/it to reimagine something for you; they do that a lot, though not well. They can hear a dog whistle a mile or two away. They invented the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and inspired the addition of the word
(Thomas) Nastyto the English language. They want to stop continental drift and repeal the law of unintended side effects...
can manage to get some puppet elected. If, as I suspect is more likely, President Trump is succeeded by a President Vance or Rubio then things get delayed even more. If the US does elect a Democrat that may not help the invasion as much as hoped for. By 2029 Japan should have both its ASEV missile cruisers1 deployed and one hopes two more years of prodding the US defense contractors means that missiles will be available in sufficient numbers that not only will the missiles expended against Iran be replaces but there will be surpluses available to allied nations such as Japan.
Whew! I was not looking forward to that war ramping up.