Posted on 06/22/2019 3:59:02 PM PDT by Twotone
Tucker Carlson’s cable-tv show begins identically each night. After the words “Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight”—always intoned and inflected exactly the same way—the host launches into an opening monologue on the news of the day, or what he thinks ought to be the news of the day.
On January 2, 2019, though, there was no news. So Carlson used the holiday lull to deliver a non-stop, 15-minute, 2,571-word evisceration of America’s ruling class—political, industrial, financial, intellectual, and cultural. Our rulers, he insisted, had failed at their ostensible tasks: to improve the health of the country and the lives of its citizens.
The show is usually leavened throughout with puckish humor. Not that night; Carlson was deadly serious. He laid at the feet of our ruling class a devastating litany of failure: the destruction of the family, skyrocketing out-of-wedlock births, the opioid crisis, rampant male unemployment, the sleazy effort to anesthetize the dispossessed with payday loans and pot, increasing financialization and techification of the economy and resultant wealth concentration, and foreign war without purpose, strategy, victory, or end.
But have our rulers really failed? Not if one understands, Carlson explained, that their real aim is to enrich themselves and maintain their power: “We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”
(Excerpt) Read more at claremont.org ...
Tucker sounded like a typical Code Pink air head last night. Lost a good deal of respect for him. “What did Iran ever do to us”. “We’re acting like bullies”, etc, etc. Guy’s an idiot half the time.
Angelo Cordevilla beat them all in 2009
Donald Trump was elected because Americans are tired of that globalist warmongering bullsh!t in Washington.
No one in their right mind wants a war, especially over the shooting down of an unmanned drone, as if that was the only problem with Iran. But Tucker went on and on about the Iranians never having done anything to us, how they are not a threat to us, and other such totally stupid/ignorant stuff like that. He sounded just like a Code Pink phony-baloney ‘peace’ activist, blasting America for being the “instigator”, after WE were attacked.
Sounds familiar. Look at these quotes from "The Russian Revolution" by Alan Moorehead 1958
"… this was a predatory state which the Czar and a small group of noblemen and bureaucrats ruled for their own exclusive benefit...The ruling group owned all the wealth, enjoyed all the privileges and monopolized all the political power, and it did not intend to give up any of its prerogatives. It considered the peasants to be little better than animals..."
I heard an entirely different broadcast. Maybe you just hear what you want to hear.
Like the RATs.
In international airspace, which follows the boundaries of international waters (generally 12nm out from shore) peaceful and direct transit is always permissible. Period.
In places where the sea (and air) is not more than 24nm wide there is usually an international agreement, sometimes put into place “forcibly” but most of the time by pretty-clean (by international standards anyway) negotiation. In basically all of these agreements, however, direct transit rights and similar do not include spying and similar activities.
It’s without dispute that the drone in question was in the air not present as a “Freedom Of Navigation” exercise (e.g. “a boat or plane going from one place to another that happens to go through the area in question”) but rather was present for the sole purpose of gathering intelligence. This is very distinct from, for example, one of our destroyers sailing through the Taiwan Strait which, incidentally, is somewhat more than 50nm wide in any event.
The “easement”, if you will, that exists for direct transit and similar in these situations is typically negotiated by nations with such interests (in this case Oman, UAE and Iran) for the specific purpose of peaceable passage for ordinary commercial activity. These sorts of international agreements are typically worded in such a fashion that they do not give license to third parties, no matter who they are, to use that space to conduct military spying operations.
So the key question here is did the drone intrude within 12nm of Iranian soil?
There is no right for an American military asset that is present within 12nm of Iranian soil for the explicit purpose of surveillance to be left alone. End of discussion.
Next we must look at the facts related to these “incursions.” It is a standard military tactic to intrude into a nation’s airspace intentionally for the specific purpose of provoking them to light up radar installations — specifically, targeting radars associated with various weapon systems, especially surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles.
The reason you do this is so you know exactly where they are and the purpose of knowing exactly where they are is so you can blow them up with your own military assets.
If we in fact intruded into Iranian airspace we did so for the explicit purpose of determining the exact location of military targets for the purpose of being able to destroy them. That is by definition a hostile act.
Centcom obviously did not expect that Iran would not only light up their targeting radar but they’d also immediately follow up with a missile. To that I say this: Tough crap, provided we invaded Iranian airspace. That’s the risk and price of doing it; you are committing an act of naked aggression, you are doing so on their sovereign territory, you are doing it for the purpose of identifying targets so you can destroy them and if they shoot at you for doing it that’s your problem, not theirs — you had it coming and deserved it.
Next up is the fact that we’ve very much hyped the supposed “hard to hit nature” of these drones. How’s that working out in the real world seeing as that drone is now a bunch of flaming pieces? It seems that Iran, by the manifest weight of the evidence, had exactly zero trouble knowing from where and when we put it in the air, tracking it, and hitting it with a missile. So much for our $100+ million “investment” in supposedly “resistant to attack” drone technology eh?
The FAA has done the smart thing and issued a “no fly” over the disputed areas. Good idea, considering that Iran can certainly hit a commercial airliner if it can hit an allegedly “stealthy” drone. I doubt very much that they’d do that on purpose as there’s exactly zero benefit to them in doing so but the possibility of an accident is still very present.
As for Trump and his so-called “restraint”, I say “bah!” to that too. Far more likely is that despite all the chickenhawk bullcrap he was being fed he correctly surmised that our so-called “stealth” is worth a warm bucket of spit against these guys and they could quite-easily unload a few more missile launchers in the direction of our assets over there. We might intercept some of them but it only takes one that gets through and hits something with people in it and now you’ve got a real mess on your hands. Go shoot a bunch of their radar installations, which we can trivially do, and it only takes one dead Iranian for them to have every reason to do exactly that at a time and place of their choosing.
Now that risk might be defensible if Iran fired at something that was clearly not in their airspace. But for reasons I pointed out above I don’t believe that’s what happened, and to convince me you’re going to have to prove that drone never entered airspace less than 12nm off Iranian soil; whatever the specifics may exist in a transit agreement they do not apply to a military aircraft engaged in spying. The coordinates published by Iran place the drone at ~9.6 statute miles off the Iranian coastline. If their claim of where the drone was when they decided to shoot was made is accurate then we did indeed violate their airspace. Let’s remember that both sides have an incentive to lie with $100m+ worth of military hardware in lots of little pieces, so I’m not willing to take either side’s claims at face value.
There’s no clean way out of this mess either folks, and I’m not suggesting there is. Iran has no reason not to continue enriching nuclear fuel. We withdrew from the agreement, and that’s that. You can’t rip up an agreement and then expect the other side to live up to the terms. Sorry, that’s not how life works.
Simply put, however, that’s not our problem. If Saudi Arabia and/or Israel don’t like it then let them deal with it on their own. The old cachet of “we need their oil” is no longer true and never was a clean justification for the sort of garbage over the last 30+ years anyway. If said oil was ever that important than we should just suck it up and go take it — period. Absent being willing to do that then we have no business interfering in any respect over there to begin with, whether Israel and Saudi Arabia like it or not.
/courtesy of Karl Denninger
//http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=236122
You claim that “WE were attacked,” and yet there you have a video of John Bolton telling an audience in 2017 that the U.S. was going to topple the Iranian regime before 2019.
If the Chinese defense minister made a public statement like that about toppling the U.S. government and then the Chinese military began flying combat and surveillance aircraft along the length of our border with Mexico, do you think maybe we would consider that an overt act of hostility? You’re damn right we would.
We have not been at peace with Iran since the Ayatollahs took over.
The Ayatollahs have been championing “Death to America” for the entire period.
Anyone who thinks our troubles with Iran began in 1979 is either ignorant or is fabricating propaganda.
I never said our troubles with Iran started in 1979.
However, we had friendly relations with Iran during the rein of the Shah.
In many of these Islamic sh!t-holes the U.S. doesn't have friendly relations with a country. Instead, we simply end up taking sides in a civil war. That only works as long as we can pretend that there's no real internal opposition to the ruling government.
Look at Syria, for heaven's sake. We were a de facto "ally" of ISIS in that debacle.
Dude, take the L. If I was a boxing referee, you’d be counted out.
How long would it take too destroy the Iranian navy? That’s not a war. It’s a weekend. Iran is developing a bomb and the ICBMs to deliver it. That’s what they have done and are doing Tucker.
Tucker was also wrong about Biden. He covered for him. He characterized his molesting as being too touchy with adult women. there are three videos of Biden with his hand on the breast of young girls and one angry and pushing him away. Biden is child molester and Tucker and Hannity and others cover for him. Another video shows Sessions pushing Biden’s hands away from a little Chinese girl in white dress indication g sessions knows he is a perv.
Yep, ‘the Shah might have been a bastard, but he was our bastard’.
Thanks for posting this. Michael Anton is always worth reading - a genuine breath of fresh air in the for lack of a better word - conservative movement.
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