I find George Friedman’s latest offering frustrating. Here’s a snippet:

In other words, technological advancements have rendered the 18th-century framework of war declaration obsolete. A congressional debate over the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would have eliminated a fundamental necessity of war: surprise. It would also undermine a fundamental element in diplomacy: the ability to credibly threaten military action unless the other side makes concessions. If the president cannot make such threats without a public congressional debate, then the threat becomes less immediate and less persuasive. Both the secrecy and ambiguity essential to war and diplomacy are compromised.

Shorter: if you think the law is obsolete, ignore it.

I see no way that such a view is compatible with the rule of law. Clearly, Mr. Friedman doesn’t, either, and provides no remedy in his piece. His observation is not a new one. For more than 200 years we have recognized that autocracies can be more decisive than democracies. Somehow we’ve managed to muddle along.

Today I’m seeing articles in many news outlets questioning the efficacy of President Trump’s attacks on the Iranian nuclear development facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. At Commentary Seth Mandel tackles them head-on:

CNN reported one US intelligence assessment concluded that Iran’s nuclear program has only been set back a few months. The New York Times soon followed with a nearly identical piece.

There are no specifics in either piece. We don’t know—and it’s clear the reporters do not know—which sites they are relaying quotes about. And there’s a strange, or maybe not so strange, unwillingness to note that the assessment in question, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, was made with “low confidence”—which is code for “we don’t really know what happened so we’re going to guess, kind of.”

He goes on to quote David Albright’s WSJ interview.

So now we’re bickering over whether the attacks accomplished their objective or not. My opinion is that nobody knows and will not know for some time if ever.

One of the things that strikes me is that from some of his published remarks it’s reasonable to infer that President Trump is receiving Israeli intelligence and has more confidence in it than U. S. intelligence which IMO is a sad commentary.

Take a quick look at this graphic at Visual Capitalist and then explain to me how countries (like Germany, Spain, Netherlands, and Belgium) that can’t scrape up 2% of GDP will manage to spend 5% of GDP on defense? This is after two years of the threat posed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It should be noted that some countries are spending in excess of 3%, notably Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. What could possibly explain that? Unfortunately, their aggregate GDP is less than that of Spain.

My answer is that our European allies are much more skilled at issuing press releases than they are at expanding defense spending.

Bonus question: how much will Germany and Italy need to spend to bring their militaries up to an adequate level of readiness and preparedness?

There’s a quote from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough making the rounds, presumably in defense of President Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear development facilities, of which I’m skeptical. Not of its authenticity but of its perspicacity. Here it is from the Daily Mail:

On Monday, the famously left-leaning Scarborough, 62, argued that Trump had no other choice.

‘I find it hard to believe that Bush 41, Bush 43, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton – you know, go down the list – any president wouldn’t have felt compelled to take that strike,’ the former Florida Republican explained.

He also said Trump was left with ‘no good options’ when it came to a solution.

Conspicuous by their absence from that litany are Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I don’t believe either of those presidents would have attacked Iran’s nuclear development sites, diplomacy working or not.

As for me I have already said that I think the action was illegal and immoral. I also think that sort of military action has a way of coming back to bite you in the butt.

So, here’s my question. Would Joe Biden have bombed Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan and, if so, why didn’t he?

We know one thing we didn’t know yesterday. The Iranians have, indeed, retaliated for the U. S. attack on their nuclear development sites by firing missiles at our base in Qatar which, as I predicted, was largely performative. I can’t help but wonder if the more punishing attack the Iranians made yesterday was the almost immediate failure of the ceasefire that President Trump announced yesterday, something in which the Israelis participated as well.

The Iranians have responded to our attack on their nuclear development facilities with a counter-attack on our base in Qatar. Barak Ravid remarks at Axios:

Iran launched multiple missiles against an American military base in Qatar on Monday in retaliation for the U.S. strike on its nuclear facilities this weekend.

The latest: Iran coordinated its attack on Al Udeid Air Base with Qatar, and the Trump administration was aware of the threat in advance, a source familiar with the matter told Axios. The U.S. had “good advance warning” of the Iranian attack, a second source said.

Similar to past Iranian responses, this counter-attack is largely performative in nature. If it produced serious damage or casualties, it’s our own fault.

As I see it there are two alternatives. Either we can just ignore it as an exercise in swatting flies or we can follow through with President Trump’s warning of a catastrophic response. Keep in mind that despite the missile launches Iran still does not have control over its own airspace. Israel and the United States are able to do pretty much whatever they want there. Whether they should is a different subject.

Over the weekend U. S. bombers struck the three major Iranian nuclear development sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. President Trump declared the operation a “spectacular military success”.

We can be confident that the three sites were struck. Independent satellite photography has shown as much. Beyond that we don’t know a great deal for certain.

We know that the attack was illegal for reasons that James Joyner explains, also noting that its legality won’t matter.

We know that it was an act of war whatever the president says.

We know that it was unjust since it doesn’t conform to the standards for a just war that have been the consensus view for more than a millennium. At the very least it is unjust because it is illegal and does not meet the just authority standard.

We know that domestic reaction to the attack by politicians and the media has largely been along party lines. But not entirely (as James points out).

We can be confident that the attack was expensive. In rough terms the “bunker buster” bombs used cost about $4 million each and something like 30 of them were deployed. Add the Tomahawk missiles launched against Isfahan and the total cost of the munitions comes to something like $150 million. A B2 bomber is expensive to fly—roughly $135,000 per flight hour and something like thirty of them were involved in two squadrons, one flying east and one flying west, at least according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine. That’s 36 flight hours for 30 aircraft at $135,000 per flight hour or roughly another $150,000. Add the flight hours for the support aircraft and let’s say the whole operation cost $350 million or more. Quite a bit for a single mission.

Beyond that we don’t know a good deal.

We don’t know, for example, whether the mission was effective. The president’s declaration notwithstanding we probably won’t know whether it was effective for some time. We may never know.

We don’t know how Iran will respond. At the Washington Post Damir Marusic, Jason Rezaian and Jason Willick say much the same thing at considerably greater length.

We don’t know if the Iranians will attempt to close the Straits of Hormuz, as their parliament has voted. If they do I won’t be surprise, given what we have just seen and what happened forty years ago, if they lose their entire navy in the process.

Something I for one don’t know is how we can argue that we did the right thing but the Russians have done the wrong thing in Ukraine. Make no mistake: I think that what the Russians have done in Ukraine is illegal and immoral. Preventive war is not justifiable and that’s what this is.

We don’t know if there will be attempted terrorist actions against the U. S. either in the Gulf or here in the United States. “Unconventional warfare” would be my guess but we don’t really know. Iranian proxies like the Houthi, Hezbollah, and Hamas have been severely degraded and the B2 mission may give them pause. That still doesn’t rule out “lone wolf” or, even more likely, “loon wolf” terrorists.

I also want to take note of Wesley Clark’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, sort of an open letter to the administration, urging them to give diplomacy a chance. Here’s the meat of the piece:

The most rational endgame is to give the mullahs a choice: Give up uranium enrichment and the nuclear ambitions it enables. Give up the proxy terror war against Israel and its supporters. In return, escape more-severe military attacks and the crippling sanctions that have decimated the Iranian economy. The U.S. should allow the mullahs to survive but should leave government to the Iranian people. Enable Iranians to engage in open and internationally supervised elections, with the hope of Persia’s return to peace and prosperity.

The U.S. has a rare opportunity to combine the leverage of a military campaign with strategic diplomacy to force Iran’s remaining leadership to confront their real choice: likely being overthrown and killed by their own people, or giving up their aggressive ambitions and renouncing their hold on government. If they choose wrongly, they will reap the consequences.

The power is in our hands. Do we have the wisdom, gained by painful experience, to achieve a more peaceful Middle East?

I think we’ve demonstrated repeatedly that we do not have that wisdom and I’m afraid that we will just repeat our mistakes of the past. Far from preventing countries from becoming failed states we’ve left a trail of failed states in our wake.

For the last thirty years we’ve been a lot better at knocking countries down than standing them back up again.

It’s a bit of a digression but I suspect that Gen. Clark is also underestimating the popularity of the present regime among the urban poor and, consequently, its staying power.

I wanted to draw your attention to this compendium at the Center for Immigration Studies, “Negative Impacts of Immigration”. It’s basically a list of recent academic studies. Here’s the introduction of the compendium:

Have scholars reached a consensus that immigration has no downsides for the United States? Listening to advocates and their allied media, one might assume so. Vox once ran this headline: “There’s no evidence that immigrants hurt any American workers”. The Cato Institute similarly claims “there is no evidence that immigrants weaken or undermine American economic, political, or cultural institutions”. A writer for Forbes has declared that immigration restrictionists “are on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of social science”.

The purpose of this compendium is to dispel such self-serving myths. The truth is that the costs and benefits of immigration are routinely measured, weighed, and debated in academic journals. No fair reading of the literature could conclude that immigration is an unambiguous good. What follows are my own summaries of 72 recent academic works showing negative impacts of immigration in areas ranging from labor markets to health. Each summary focuses on the immigration aspects of the work, draws out policy implications, and links to related CIS research whenever helpful.

As I have said repeatedly in the past I am not anti-immigration although I do oppose mass immigration and some of its attendant problems, e.g. an increase in cultural persistence. This compendium illustrates that immigration, particularly of low-skilled immigrants who cannot speak, read, and write English fluently, has risks that are too frequently ignored by immigration advocates.