Forget Domino’s Pizza orders. Look at the flight line at Ben Gurion Airport.
Israel is a small country of around 10 million people. Its major airport, Ben Gurion Airport, would be the equivalent of a sturdy regional airport in the U.S. In some ways, Israel is the U.S. in miniature. You have almost everything you have there, from beautiful nature sites to all of the most modern technological wonders. But in the end, Israel is tiny compared to the U.S. in terms of its landmass, wealth, and capabilities. The U.S. has dozens of dedicated bombers in the form of B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers. Israel has none. The U.S. has 600 flying tankers; Israel has seven.
As to the subject of those U.S. tankers, many of them are parked at Ben Gurion Airport. This is not some super-secret information, as Israel’s main highway passes right by the airport, and one cannot unsee the endless sea of gray birds taking up much of the tarmac. How many tankers are there? I don’t know the number, but I have read that 12 civilian airliners had to be shipped off to another location due to a lack of space. There was additionally a picture of El-Al planes on the runway on Saturday, when there was very little traffic, and El-Al does not fly. Flight radar generally shows around a half-dozen Tel Aviv-based US tankers in the air between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. It’s good to know that, like their ground-based equivalents, celestial gas stations are also open 24 hours a day.
The continued presence of the tankers, the suggestion by the Israeli Home Front to update their inbound missile warning app, and the cancellation of a planned overseas trip by Israel’s president all suggest that the shooting war is going to start up again soon. Just as my father told me that the neighbors used to sit around and predict when Hitler would get booted from German leadership, our parlor game is to try to figure out when Donald Trump will once again say, “Go!” Tonight, this weekend, early next week? At one level, a normal person would want some kind of agreement that might spare lives and property of Israeli and Gulf citizens. Reading about those killed, wounded, and displaced is painful. But just as a lawyer can’t negotiate with a cancer, nobody can get it through to the mullahs that their nuclear dreams are over. They still think that Jimmy Carter is president and that they can humiliate both the president and his country. One of the problems with modern warfare is that both the U.S. and Israel have built models where the average Joe in the streets of Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran is actually a good guy. It’s those evil terrorists and IRGC/mullah fellows who are the problem. Just as some cancer surgeries require the removal of far more than the cancer itself, finishing evil Islamic players will require a level of violence and destruction that will affect the supposedly pro-American man in the street. Trying to hit “only” IRGC and similar targets encourages the Iranians to move their assets into civilian structures, just as Hamas put much of its weaponry and personnel in hospitals and mosques. Admiral Bradley Cooper said that the Tehran hospital hit early in the war was smack dab in the middle of an IRCG cruise missile base. Now, how could that have happened?
Tucker Carlson recently gave an interview with an Israeli news organization. He said that Israel had lost its moral way by killing so many civilians. Like his fellow travelers on the Weirdo Right, Carlson deals in sleight of hand. Has there ever been a war without civilian casualties? Is there any concrete evidence that Israel intentionally attacks civilians and/or civilian-rich targets? Has any country ever done as much as Israel to warn civilians to move via phone calls, SMS messages, drone warnings, and flyers? So, yes, civilians have died in every Israeli war theater. But by all metrics, the ratio of bad guys to civilians killed in Gaza is one of the highest ever recorded. Of 70,000 killed, it would appear that at least 50,000 were active Hamas members. The U.S. never had that level of precision in Fallujah. As with everything associated with Carlson and his ilk, they start with “Israel Bad” and then work their way backward to supposedly prove it. It is no surprise their buddies, like Congressman Adolph Massie, lost their primaries to Trump-backed candidates.
Let’s go back to Massie before he joins the cadre of podcast morons formerly associated with the Republican Right. In his “I lost but am too proud to accept it” speech, he glibly said that he was delayed because it was hard to find the fellow who vanquished him because the latter was in Tel Aviv. Obviously, Ed Gallrein was not in Israel unless he had Scotty beam him from Tel Aviv back to Kentucky at Star Trek speed. It was an old Nazi trope that all disasters that befall an individual or the nation are due to the Jews. Someone put up statistics for Jews and Israelis in Kentucky, and they are well under one percent of the total population. I can guarantee that the local Israeli press did not discuss this congressional primary at all until the results were made public. Nobody in Israel cares about Thomas Massie or Joe Kent, but one cannot say the same is true in the other direction. They both cannot stop talking about or blaming Israel—like Tucker and Megyn. Bibi pushed Trump into the Iran War! Ahem, Trump has been talking about dealing with Iran since the 1980s. Israel will destroy the ceasefire! Excuse me, isn’t Iran mining the Straits of Hormuz and ignoring the nuclear issue, the basis for potentially renewed fighting? In every generation, there is garbage like Massie that blames Jews for all of his problems. It would never dawn on him that the people of his district want results from their representatives and a fidelity to Donald Trump’s program. Trump beat Vice President Cackles by 30 points in the Bluegrass State. Some estimates have Trump winning recent primaries at a 37-0 clip.
Unlike the claims of the louts in the Weirdo Right, I am not rooting wildly for renewed fighting. That said, I expect the shooting war to resume and that my daily exercise will include multiple trips to the parking structure/bomb shelter across the street. The mullahs want a bomb, and their final address for its use is the United States. There is no way to sugarcoat this fact or claim otherwise. There is a fatwa! They’ll only use it on Tel Aviv! Because most of our commentator class has given up on religion, they no longer understand the dedication and zeal associated with a religiously driven goal. If the mullahs get a bomb, they will use it. Israel has ostensibly been sitting on the bomb for 60 years without firing one. If the mullahs use it, they’ll start local and then go for Europe and the U.S. It doesn’t have to be a missile. It could come in a suitcase. Even if the nuclear program is abandoned, if the IRGC and theocracy remain in place, they will do their all to buy a device from North Korea or Pakistan. The U.S. does not have to topple the regime, and she will not put boots on the ground. If the next round of fighting is aggressive enough, the government and its affiliates will fall from a lost economy and a furious people.
We once again were treated to “Bibi and Trump had a fiery phone call” from the press. Maybe it’s true; maybe it’s a ruse to put the mullahs to sleep. We'll know soon enough.