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.

Back in 1906 Ambrose Bierce produced The Devil’s Dictionary, a collection of satirical definitions. It had begun as entries published in the newspaper every so often, starting in 1881. Here are some examples:

Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion
Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ so long as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
Conservative, n. A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with others.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Un-American, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.

As you can see despite being well over a century old many of them have resonance today.

I’m accepting suggestions for entries in a modern devil’s dictionary. I think that very nearly all opinions, views, ideologies, and behaviors are fair game for such lampooning.

At Foreign Affairs Daniel C. Kurtzer and Steven N. Simon urge the Trump Administration to interceded with Israel to end its war on Iran:

Since launching its military operation against Iran last Friday, Israel has dealt a devastating blow to the country’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile arsenal, and its military leadership. But Israel is unlikely to be able to fully destroy Iran’s nuclear program by itself. It does not have the bombers or heavy ordnance it would need to penetrate the fortified, underground Fordow enrichment facility. It has also evidently avoided striking fuel-storage facilities for fear of unleashing a public health crisis.

The United States has the aircraft and so-called bunker-buster bombs to cripple Fordow. That means that the outcome of the war will depend as much on decisions made by U.S. President Donald Trump as it will on further Israeli airstrikes. Israel has urged the United States to join the war, and if Trump decides to do so, Iran would almost certainly suffer a strategic defeat serious enough to push its nuclear capabilities back years and conceivably threaten the viability of the regime—which would quickly become a U.S. goal, owing to the logic of escalation.

But Trump should not enter the war as a combatant on Israel’s side. The United States does have an interest in preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. In 2015, it secured an agreement with Iran that would have blocked the Islamic Republic’s quest for that for at least a decade, if not longer. Washington believed that negotiating an outcome in which Iran had a stake would be a more durable solution, and much less expensive than opting for war. Israel did not agree with this approach, nor did Trump.

In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement, an act that facilitated Iran’s impressive accumulation of highly enriched uranium. It is no more in Washington’s interest now than it was in 2015 to go to war for a result that could be achieved with far less risk through negotiations. That means that it is not in the U.S. interest to go to war to neutralize Fordow militarily, either, and it would be a mistake to do so. If Israel is determined to substantially damage Fordow, the Israel Defense Forces could do so by sending troops to Iran or by making it impossible to enter the facility or relocate centrifuges there. Achieving either goal, however, would be tricky and costly, and it is understandable that Israel would want to outsource the job to the Americans.

Sadly, I don’t find their argument compelling. I say “sadly” because I materially agree with it. My argument is that preventive war, which is what Israel’s war against Iran is, is immoral. I wish that an appeal to morality were more convincing to Americans and, especially, to President Trump but that does not appear to be the case.

The Washington Post polled American opinion on a U. S. attack on Iran:

What do Americans think about the possibility of launching U.S. airstrikes against Iran, which President Donald Trump threatened this week unless the country dismantles its nuclear program? The Washington Post texted more than 1,000 people on Wednesday to ask.

The poll finds Americans opposing U.S. airstrikes against Iran by a 20 percentage-point margin — 45 percent to 25 percent — with a sizable 30 percent saying they are unsure.

In no group that the WaPo sampled did a majority of those polled favor a U. S. military response against Iran. Not Democrats (by a large margin). Not Republicans. Not independents. Not veterans. Not non-veterans.

Only 7% thought that Iran’s nuclear development program is not a threat to the U. S. at all and nearly 2/3s think that Iran’s program is either “an immediate and serious threat” or a “somewhat serious threat”.

With his characteristic analytic rigor Tomas Pueyo considers why Israel is attacking Iran now rather than earlier or later:

Israel attacked Iran because it believed Iran was close to getting a nuclear weapon, and that threatened Israel’s existence.

But why does Iran want to eliminate Israel?
Was it close to developing a nuclear weapon?
Why did Israel attack now? Why not earlier or later?
Was there any other way?
What does all this say about the outcome of the war?

After a detailed account of the actions of the Shah, he summarizes:

This is not an exhaustive list, but you can see the pattern: An elitist, pro-Western, anti-Islamic leader, propped up by the US, initially succeeded in modernizing the economy, but hit some roadblocks and didn’t act decisively, letting the opposition take over.

That is followed by an analysis of the anti-U. S. stance of the present regime, the anti-Israel stance of the present regime, and whether Iran has been developing a nuclear weapon. Here’s his summary of that:

So Was Iran pursuing an actual bomb? Well:

• It was opening another enrichment sites in an undisclosed place
• It was likely hiding three more nuclear sites
• It had enough enriched uranium for 9-10 bombs, which is not for nuclear energy
• It was accelerating its uranium enrichment
• It was uncooperative with the IAEA
• It was developed a form of metallic uranium that is only useful for nuclear bombs

which comports with my view. He characterizes the U. S. view as “naive”. He concludes by speculating that Israel attacked now because a) it was ready and b) its intelligence assets within Iran were receiving increased scrutiny.

I encourage you to read the whole thing.

I have only one conjecture to add. One of the things that might have affected the apparent lack of readiness of Iran’s air defenses is the large number of air force officers who were murdered in the early years of the mullahocracy. They numbered in the hundreds or even thousands. Those are the men who would have been responsible for formulating Iran’s air defense posture and those who replaced them were not as capable or well-trained.

Every year ’round about this time give or take the Social Security trustees provide their annual report. Sometimes they have good news. Others, like this year, they have bad news reports Julie Zauzmer Weil at the Washington Post:

The trust funds for Social Security and Medicare will run out of money in less than a decade, according to a report released Wednesday, as the programs’ trustees warned that the funds’ depletion date is significantly closer than predicted a year ago.

If Congress does not overhaul the programs’ financing, automatic cuts will slash Social Security benefits by 23 percent and Medicare hospital benefits by 11 percent in 2033, the report said.

Read the whole thing. My prediction is that Congress will not overhaul Social Security and Medicare until it’s absolutely necessary which will be too late to do much about it. As I’ve said before my proposals for reforming those systems are:

1. Make all wage income subject to Social Security withholding
2. Reform the retirement ages to make the actuarial assumptions resemble those at the inception of the plan more closely

To those I believe that employers should be required to report how many jobs they are outsourcing and pay a tax of roughly 30% of the gross to make domestic jobs more competitive with offshore employees. I don’t know who first made the wisecrack. I’ve heard it attributed to Joe Kennedy, father of JFK, Bobby, and Teddy:

When my shoeshine boy was giving me stock tips I knew it was time to get out of the market.

Offshore outsourcing isn’t just for enterprise-sized companies anymore. Even very small companies are offshoring software development these days. When a $10 million company is offshoring jobs, it’s time to start keeping track of the practice and controlling it.

I don’t think that the Iranian regime is nearly as shaky as some seem to believe and I also don’t believe that the Israelis are in nearly as strong a position as some seem to be claiming.

With respect to the mullahocracy, I suspect its support remains quite strong among the rural and urban poor. Yes, they’ve taken substantial losses of leadership personnel. I have no idea how deep their “bench” is.

And with respect to Israel I have no idea how many offensive and defensive weapons remain in their arsenal. A serious depletion of the missiles that constitute their “Iron Dome” would have dire implications. Neither they nor we can replenish them particularly quickly. The advantage they have there is that the Iranians’ inventory is being depleted too and it can’t be replenished particularly quickly, either.

What I do know is that we have a recent history of underestimating the staying power of our opponents.

Please don’t construe this post as my declaring defeat. As the title of this post indicates, I’m asking a question rather than making a claim. The more opinion pieces I read that say the Iranian regime is on the verge of collapse the more I suspect propaganda at work.