I don’t have the time to devote to this post but it’s becoming apparent (see WaPo) that the Ukrainians were behind the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines. I only have time to ask the question: is forcing Germany’s hand the act of an ally?

My answer to that is that there are priorities. For the Ukrainians detaching Germany from Russia was a higher priority than being Germany’s ally.

If the story has legs, there should be a price to pay. More fuel for delaying Ukraine’s admission to NATO or being under NATO’s aegis.

The editors of the Washington Post encourage support for Ukraine:

The steady but deliberate pace of Western arms deliveries has frustrated Mr. Zelensky. Ukraine rightly fears it has been given enough to survive but not enough to win, in part because of President Biden’s concerns about escalation with Russia. Congress can boost Ukrainian morale and military performance by passing a large economic and military aid package in the coming weeks, sufficient to avoid stop-start disruptions in the year ahead. Despite the reluctance of some House Republicans, there remains a sizable majority in both chambers for such a package.

The United States and its allies should also work to frustrate the Kremlin’s growing circumvention of the cap of $60 per barrel on Russian oil exports. The cap allows Western companies to ship, trade or insure Russian oil only if sold at or below the cap ― or else face penalties. But Russian oil companies and traders have built a shadow fleet of tankers to bypass the cap, and its biggest customers, China and India, don’t honor the cap, although they purchase Russian oil at a discount. Overall, Russian oil revenue rose by more than a quarter in October compared with the same month last year. The revenue will help Russia support the war effort. The West should continue to press sanctions on those who facilitate the shadow fleet.

However, their conclusion includes a point that bears comment:

In the end, Ukraine may face the reality that it needs to negotiate with a Russian foe willing to endlessly sacrifice treasure and lives on the battlefield. That point has not been reached, but the West should give Ukraine the leverage to drive the best possible bargain if the time comes. And that leverage means preserving Ukraine’s chance to survive and grow as a thriving European democracy, not a vassal of the Kremlin.

Unmentioned is that the “steady but deliberate” pace of Western arms deliveries is the maximum that we can achieve without increasing production capacity and increasing production capacity is in conflict with the goal of reducing carbon emissions.

Also, note that the objective they’re advocating is not the one that Ukrainian President Zelensky avers. It is, however, consistent with the lesser objective that I’ve been articulating here: our objectives should be to ensure that Ukraine doesn’t lose outright and that there is a Ukraine when the war concludes. Those objectives require that Ukrainians and Russians get to the bargaining table quickly which neither side is willing to do at this point.

There’s something about the editors’ plan that reminds me of the stories of Hitler in his bunker as Allied forces approached Berlin, ordering nonexistent units into battle.

In a column in the Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot declaims against the rise of U. S. isolationism:

On this score, my worry is less about the political left than some of our friends on the right. Modern progressives will always put the welfare state above defenses because that is their governing model and ideology. They believe in the restraining power of international treaties and arms control. They believe adversaries will be deterred by America’s forbearance and good example. They will never rebuild our defenses without pressure from the political right.

What worries me these days is the lack of unity and resolve on the right. That includes the return of conservative isolationism. The proponents of this view would not identify themselves with that term, but the policies they espouse justify it.

Senators, think-tank leaders, Silicon Valley billionaires with a podcast, even presidential candidates argue in some way or another in favor of a U.S. retreat from the world. They start by denying that defending Ukraine is in our interests. But listen and you can hear where this goes. Next they say we should consider withdrawing from NATO or South Korea. They are willing to support Israel, at least for now, but that won’t last if it means engaging more in the Middle East.

What is most striking is how much this isolationism of the right resembles the traditional isolationism of the left. Isolationists in the Vietnam era argued that America wasn’t good enough for the world. We were baby killers and imperialists. This is the view of today’s pro-Hamas left.

As Charles Krauthammer pointed out 20 years ago, the conservative isolationism that flourished in the 1930s argued the opposite—that America was too good for the world. Our republican values shouldn’t be tarnished by the bloody intrigues of Europe or Asia. But the new isolationists on the right now agree with the left that the U.S. doesn’t deserve to lead the world. They say we are too degraded culturally and too weak fiscally to play the role we did during the Cold War. They say we are too woke and too broke.

There is an element of truth to this critique. We are neither as culturally united nor as fiscally sound as we were in the 1980s. But this is not an adequate excuse for an American retreat from the world. And it cannot be an excuse for failing to protect national security, the first obligation of government.

I wonder how he defines “isolationism”? I believe in robust trade and social relations with other countries. Definitionally, that means I am not an isolationist. However, I also believe that we should not interfere in the domestic politics of other countries or invade them. I would characterize that as non-interventionist rather than isolationist. What does Mr. Gigot mean?

I would challenge Mr. Gigot to illustrate how the invasion of Panama in 1989, invading Afghanistan and Iraq, U. S. military action against Somalia, Sudan, and too many other countries to name, and U. S. support of Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen has made the world a better place, made us safer, or improved our lives?

We may or may not need more military spending. I think we need military spending focused less on aggression and more on making us safer and more secure.

I’d share with you the observations made Qanta A. Ahmed in in op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. She is a physician and a Muslim and has been visiting morgues in Israel to, as she puts it, “bear witness”:

I arrived on Oct. 19 to spend 10 days as a human-rights observer with the permission of the nation’s Foreign Affairs Ministry and help from Israel Defense Forces officer Kobi Valer. As an observant Muslim, I felt a duty to come and bear witness. What I saw will remain with me forever.

Hamas waged its attacks in the nation’s south, but hundreds of its victims have since been moved north. I encountered many of them at the morgues at the Shura military base near Ramle, some 15 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. I toured the Sammy Ofer Fortified Underground Emergency Hospital in Haifa, visiting the neonatal units whose tiny patients had recently been relocated in anticipation of further conflict. I examined bodies and ashes, incinerated teeth and bones. I saw toddlers, teens and adults, young and old, many of them bound, tortured and burned alive.

and

The Oct. 7 genocide was different, more barbaric than anything before it. The attacks were cloaked in the language and metaphors of Islam, yet corrupted with cosmic enmity for the Jewish people, Judaism, global Jewry and the Jewish state. They revealed again that Islamism is a virulent impostor of Islam with intentions anathema to the faith. And there was no doubt of Islamism’s guilt: I saw real-time footage generated by the Hamas commandos’ own GoPro cameras. I heard phone calls exclaiming the Shahadah—the Islamic declaration of faith—as they murdered, executed, burned, pillaged and then broadcast their crimes.

To me this was the key passage:

This wasn’t like the pogroms of the 1880s, a frenzy of killing with rabid emotion. This was a methodically planned genocide. No such circumstances apply to Israel’s operation in Gaza, and so the description must not be the same. The sovereign state of Israel is destroying Hamas because Hamas is threatening Israel, which is working to mitigate civilian losses. The country has a duty to prevent further genocide against its people. Saying so doesn’t detract from the suffering of Palestinians who are captives of Hamas.

Two weeks after the attack, Queen Rania of Jordan suggested that the butchering of children had yet to be “independently verified” as I examined images of their remains in Ramle. The deceit felt as barbaric as the atrocities. There is no context, no nuance, that justifies genocide. Its intention is the same throughout the ages: the destruction of a people.

She concludes by imploring Muslims to “respond with the necessary moral clarity”. I infer from the tone and content of his op-ed that she does not mean standing in solidarity with Palestinians by that.

Most of Tom Friedman’s most recent column is devoted to variations on the idea that Israel today bears little resemblance to the Israel he’s visited before. Having people with whom you are acquainted slaughtered in their beds has a way of doing that.

His conclusion is what I want to focus on:

The sooner Israel replaces Netanyahu and his far-right allies with a true center-left-center-right national unity government, the better chance it has to hold together during what is going to be a hellish war and aftermath. And the better chance that President Biden — who may be down in the polls in America but could get elected here in a landslide for the empathy and steel he showed at Israel’s hour of need — will not have hitched his credibility and ours to a Netanyahu Israel that will never be able to fully help us to help it.

This society is so much better than its leader. It is too bad it took a war to drive that home. Ron Scherf is a retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit and a founder of Brothers in Arms — the Israeli activist coalition that mobilized veterans and reservists to oppose Netanyahu’s judicial coup. Immediately after the Hamas invasion, Brothers in Arms pivoted to organizing reservists and aid workers to get to the front — left, right, religious, secular, it didn’t matter — many hours before this incompetent government did.

When in the history of the world has an attack resulted in more moderation? I can’t recall any such instance in U. S. history. The hundreds of attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel have had the opposite effect if anything. The Netanyahu government didn’t just sneak up on a quiet, moderate unware Israeli population. It was the result of endless attacks by people on the West Bank and Gaza on the one hand and the conviction by ultra-conservative Israelis that they were bound by their religion to expand Israel into the West Bank and Gaza on the other.

Quite to the contrary when the United States was attacked by Japan it had the effect of silencing isolationists and people calling for moderation in favor of those who had wanted to make war on Germany for years. The world in which an attack had the outcome of moderating the population might be a better one than our present world but I don’t think it is our present world and I would expect the Israelis to be no different.

At USA Today Medora Lee provides an example of how cost increases, particularly increases in the cost of health care, eat up the recently announced cost of living adjustment in Social Security and then some:

Social Security checks will increase next year, but for retired staffing company executive Lou Scrivani, 76, the bump won’t even be enough to cover increases in his health care costs, much less the inflated prices of everything else over the past year.

Starting in January, more than 66 million beneficiaries of the program will receive a cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, of 3.2%, averaging out to more than $50 extra each month.

COLA is meant to help Americans keep up with inflation so they can maintain their standard of living year to year. But the hikes are falling short, many seniors say. The cost of items older adults spend most of their money on consistently outpaces COLA, according to The Senior Citizens League, a nonprofit advocate for older adults. The biggest expense is health care.

She does the math. The Scrivanis are in the red.

I think this is a real public service on the part of Ms. Lee.

Although I am the oldest in my family nonetheless I am not retired. I keep toiling away. It’s galling to me that the steepest increases in prices in forty years are making it harder to save every year.

Yet I’m in a pretty good place compared to most people my age or older.

There are all sorts of things that go unmentioned in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. I’ll list a few.

Hamas is composed primarily of irregulars and as such they are not protected by the laws of war.

Hamas’s tunnels are themselves a war crime. Attacking them is not a war crime or, more precisely, civilian deaths that result from such attacks are Hamas’s war crimes.

The same is true of placing military headquarters, ammunition dumps, etc. under or within hospitals, schools, or mosques—those are war crimes. Civilian deaths that result from attacking them are Hamas’s war crimes.

The laws of war were fashioned for Western societies. Western societies have made distinctions between combatants and non-combatants that simply don’t exist in any other culture and those distinctions go back thousands of years. Arab societies do not make such distinctions. Neither do Jewish societies except to the extent that they’ve been Westernized.

I’ve posted about this before but I have long thought that Israel has erred in not granting the West Bank + Gaza statehood. Then, when the inevitable attack against Israel occurs, they should declare war against that Palestinian state and seize some of its territory as a buffer. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually there would be no Palestinian state. I don’t support or approve of the Israelis’ (or the Palestinians’) goals. I merely point this out in passing.

I’m going to begin this post with the conclusion: I think that the very notion of a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict is a fantasy. In his Washington Post column Shadi Hamid provides his proposal for a ceasefire and the reasons he does not think such a thing is a fantasy:

What might a plausible cease-fire look like in practice? The specifics matter. Any proposal must take seriously Israel’s legitimate security needs. First, Hamas must agree to release hostages and commit to halting rocket fire into Israel. In exchange, Israel would agree to stop its bombardment of Gaza as well as any ground incursions into Gazan territory.

Once this first step is taken, a cease-fire would allow for further negotiations on what comes next. These talks should be led by the United States, with the active support of governments in communication with Hamas — namely Qatar and Turkey. These countries should demand that Hamas offload its governing responsibilities in Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.

While it will be challenging to iron out the specifics of such an arrangement, some rough outlines can be sketched. Just as it is unrealistic to ask Israel to accept an unconditional cease-fire, so, too, is the notion that Hamas can be “eradicated.” Unlike al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, both of which often relied on foreign fighters, Hamas members and their families are Palestinian. Truly eliminating the organization — one with hundreds of thousands of supporters and sympathizers — would require mass killing on an unprecedented scale.

But if Hamas members won’t disappear, what happens to them? Any intra-Palestinian negotiations should include a path for low- and mid-level Hamas cadres, as well as members of the group’s political leadership, to be incorporated within any future governing structure. Without one, the Palestinian Authority will continue to suffer from a major legitimacy deficit. Under any such “reconciliation” agreement between Palestinian factions, armed groups would need to demobilize and integrate their military forces within those of the Palestinian Authority. Elections would need to be held within a reasonable time and, in order to participate, members of Hamas and other militants would need to commit to pursuing any political aims through the ballot box.

His justification is terribly weak. He argues from precedent but the precedents he cites, in 2014 and 2017, are self-refuting. The last seven years are an indication of their failure not of their success.

To his credit Mr. Hamid recognizes that any ceasefire must not be limited to the Israeli Defense Force—Hamas must end hostilities as well.

My reasons for believing a ceasefire is a fantasy include:

What about Palestinian Islamic Jihad?

In the unlikely event that Hamas would end hostilities, there is another terrorist group operating in Gaza and firing rockets into Israel: Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). As long as that’s the case any ceasefire would be hollow.. Hamas would blame any attack onm PIJ and vice versa. A ceasefire would need to a complete end to all attacks on Israel emanating from Gaza.

That won’t happen.

Hamas’s very reason for existence is to make war against the Jews in Israel. It’s right in the organization’s charter.

Precedent is against it.

There have been multiple rocket attacks directed against Israel every month this year except September which might have given us a clue that something was in the wind. That’s not an aberration. It’s typical—it has been true every year for the last ten years. Under present circumstances I doubt that giving Gaza-based terrorist organizations a few free shots every month would be popular in Israel.

What’s in it for the Hamas leadership?

Hamas is not a benevolent society or fraternal organization. It’s more like an organized crime syndicate. Like all such organizations it’s a Ponzi scheme. The leadership has been siphoning off billions in donated money for more than a decade. Some has gone to making war against Israel but a lot has gone to letting the leadership live the high life in other Gulf Arab countries. I have little doubt that more is sitting in nice, secure Swiss bank accounts. I don’t believe the leadership will give that up.

If there isn’t a ceasefire, what will happen? I honestly have no idea. I don’t see a stable endpoint to this conflict. It’s a zero-sum game.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the Republican presidential candidates’ debate. Did I miss anything.

My own view is that it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. Judging by the midterm and mid-midterm election results the Democrats have found a winning formula and I strongly suspect they will continue with that formula in the general election. That suggest that whatever his failings we are likely to see a second Biden term which I also interpret as as a Harris presidency at some point in that term. I doubt that President Biden will make it until 2028. He’ll either die or be removed on 25th Amendment grounds.