BREAKING: It’s On. Iranian Drones Detected Heading Toward Israel; Israel and Jordan Close Air Space

Israel Defense Forces spokesman Brigadier General Daniel Hagari has announced that Iran has launched drones from Iranian-controlled territory toward Israel.
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The attack has been announced by accounts linked to the IRGC.

Also let’s have a fucktard flashback…

So yes, Trump has been bad for the Western Alliance nations. He has fundamentally weakened the Alliances. Biden will get them working again.

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So despite years of the USA sucking up to Iran, first under Obama and now Biden – interspersed by a four year burst of hardline pressure on the bastards by Trump – there is news that in the next few days Iran may attack Israel:

Israel is preparing for a direct attack from Iran on southern or northern Israel as soon as Friday or Saturday, according to a person familiar with the matter. A person briefed by the Iranian leadership, however, said that while plans to attack are being discussed, no final decision has been made.
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Earlier this week, U.S. intelligence reports showed that an attack on Israeli assets by Iran or its proxies could be imminent, but a source says it now appears that the attack could be within Israel’s borders.

This is in retaliation for Israel sending into paradise, on April Fools Day, a commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, his deputy, and five other IRGC officersm, with an airstrike on a building attached to the Iranian embassy in Damascus where the men were gathering.

Israel had already cancelled leave for all combat soldiers soon after that strike, in anticipation of an attack either by Iran directly or using its Hezbollah proxy force in Southern Lebanon, or both.

The phrase “Death To The Great Satan” has been on the Mullah’s lips for more than four decades, but specific threats to the US are unusual simply because the US is so much more militarily powerful than Israel and the Mullahs are not stupid:

Senior US officials currently believe that an attack by Iran is “inevitable” – a view shared by their Israeli counterparts, that official said. The two governments are furiously working to get in position ahead of what is to come, as they anticipate that Iran’s attack could unfold in a number of different ways – and that both US and Israeli assets and personnel are at risk of being targeted.

Aside from fluffing Iran for years now, with endless concessions on sanctions, their nuclear weapons programme and sending them billions of dollars, America has a long and bad track record of making poor selections of friends and enemies in the Middle East. Here’s just one example, Our Terrorist Ally in Syria, which is the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) used by the USA to fight ISIS in recent years. Now the USA has swung back and forth with various Islamic groups over the decades, starting with using the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in the 1980’s, but the backing the SDF is especially stupid:

At its core is the Syrian element of a notorious, originally Marxist, U.S.-designated terrorist organization originating in Turkey called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. For 40 years, the PKK has consistently promoted a violent, totalitarian, revolutionary mentality—albeit with some superficial ideological window-dressing for Western audiences—and a cult of personality for true believers centered on its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who has been incarcerated in Turkey since 1999. The PKK has engaged in terrorist attacks and clashes against Turkish security forces, as well as Turkish and Kurdish civilian targets primarily in Turkey—a NATO ally and home to half if not more of the world’s more than 30 million Kurds—but also in northern Syria, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Europe, and elsewhere. Some 40,000 people reportedly have been killed since the PKK’s first attack in 1984. 

Sure, the PKK was naturally keen to go after ISIS and cuddle up to the boundless resources of the USA, but from the American point of view was it really necessary to pick an ally that would piss off the likes of Turkey, the Kurds, and basically every other Muslim group in the region. Sure the Turks have been difficult allies, notably stopping US forces from entering Iraq out of Turkey in 2003, but they are a NATO member, they’ve long viewed the PKK as a primary security threat and they weren’t fooled by US policy makers under the Obama, Trump and Biden Administrations performing a PR service for the PKK by pushing the whole SDF thing as a band of democratic freedom fighters against Syria and ISIS.

Meanwhile other Muslim groups were also not impressed by the spin that the PKK had a commitment to religious freedom even as the PKK maintained its abiding commitment to revolutionary, ideological struggle. This may have sucked in a few right-wing conservatives in the US, who otherwise might be a bit concerned about lining up with revolutionary Marxists, but the likes of the Kurds weren’t fooled, especially in the light of this sort of shit:

In fact, the PKK routinely threatens and suppresses Syrians and other Kurds who reject the PKK’s secularist ideology and power interests, and creates tensions with local Arabs. It also engages in kidnappings and forcible compulsion of Kurdish children into the PKK ranks. Moreover, it suppresses the ancient Sufi orders, which had pervasive influence among the Kurds in Syria and elsewhere and had been a bulwark against the ideological inroads not only of the PKK, but of ISIS and other militant “jihadist” groups. 

Great! So using the PKK to help solve one problem, ISIS, is causing wider problems.

The PKK’s expansionism threatens the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq—another key US partner in the region, seeing it as its principal challenger for the hearts and minds of the Kurds. As Nechirvan Barzani, the President of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, recently noted, the PKK poses a threat to neighboring countries. The PKK has long sought to undermine and overthrow the traditional social, Sufi and Sunni religious, and political structures that, key to Kurdish identity, are the root of the KRG’s stability, political authority, and legitimacy. A widespread view in Erbil, the KRG capital, is that KRG warnings of the dangers to the region posed by the PKK, bolstered by its power in Syria and partnership with the U.S. there, have largely fallen on deaf Western ears.

And as you can see, all this has not only been bi-partisan (Democrat and GOP), it seems to have been driven less by US Presidents or their Cabinet members than by people scattered throughout the State Department, the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community.

As such I was amused by this article’s headline, looking forward hopefully to a Trump victory in 2024, Our Intelligence Community Is Broken, with the sub-header, “Trump will fix it, not break it“:

the Intelligence Community has not remained insulated from politics, and its credibility has been tarnished as a result. The American public has developed a profound skepticism of intelligence practices, and Republican support for the IC fell from 71 percent to 51 percent from 2020 to 2022. In addition, trust in the FBI is at record lows, with only 17 percent of Republicans having a positive view of the agency.

The “entrenched D.C. intelligence apparatus,” a term I use to encompass long-time government officials, policymakers, and certain elements within the intelligence community itself, is largely to blame for this dramatic loss of trust by the American people.

Yeah…. Nah. It does a good job summarising the IC’s problems but I saw not a single, concrete proposal in there as to exactly how Trump would fix them. Perhaps they are unfixable and are now, together with the State Department, a set of Federal bureaucracies that have largely gone rogue.