What strikes me as the most important story of the day is this decision by the DC district circuit court of appeals, reported by Andrew Goudsward at Reuters:

WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Donald Trump does not have immunity from charges he plotted to overturn his 2020 election defeat, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday, bringing the former U.S. president a step closer to an unprecedented criminal trial.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Trump’s claim that he cannot be prosecuted because the allegations relate to his official responsibilities as president.

“We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter,” the unanimous panel wrote.
The court concluded that any executive immunity that may have shielded Trump from criminal charges while he served as president “no longer protects him against this prosecution.”

The ruling, which Trump vowed to appeal, rebuffs his attempt to avoid a trial on charges that he undermined American democracy and the transfer of power, even as he consolidates his position as the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

I honestly don’t know the law on this but I will admit to a healthy skepticism of Trump’s argument. Now it’s on to the Supreme Court? Will the SCOTUS hear the case and how quickly?

First and foremost I think we are too involved in the Middle East rather than not involved enough. The reasons that we have farflung outposts in Syria and Iraq like the one in which a drone killed three American soldiers are unclear to me. They seem far too risky. I honestly don’t understand how you can blame Israel for the Hamas attack that took place on 10/7 and not blame the U. S. for that drone attack but I’ve seen accounts that do just that.

That said and if you believe we should be responding to these militia attacks with military force I think that Frank Sobchak’s advice at the Modern War Institute at West Point is pretty good. He recommends

• targeting senior IRGC Quds Force leaders outside of Iran and linked to its violent proxies
• warning the Iranians and then sinking the Iranian spy ship off Yemen
• telling Iran that submarines and craft capable of laying mines will not be allowed to leave their bases until this crisis is over or they will be destroyed

If there is legitimate fear that Iran has nuclear breakout capability, I would have other recommendations.

This backgrounder at PBS Newshour summarizes the situation with respect to the U. S. offensive against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen as of yesterday:

The United States and Britain have struck Iran-backed armed groups in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, while Israel presses ahead with its offensive against Hamas in Gaza.

Here is what to know about what is happening in the region now, and why…

As of today via Sky News the militias are responding:

A drone attack apparently carried out by the Iran-backed Islamic Resistance group overnight has killed six Kurdish commandos from the Syrian Democratic Forces who were stationed at an American base in eastern Syria, the SDF has said.

The SDF is composed primarily of Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian/Syriac members.

Fourteen people were injured.

“The number [of deaths] is likely to rise due to serious injuries,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The base, near al Omar oil field, was targeted with a drone, as part of the “Revenge for Gaza” campaign, it added.

Attacks against shipping in the Red Sea in the last three weeks are also greater than they were three weeks ago.

I continue to wonder what the objectives of our military responses are. If they are to deter attacks by these militias, clearly they are not effective yet. Do we have reason to believe that more U. S. attacks will be more effective? I have no idea.

Jack has now been a part of our pack for about a year and a half. He’s obviously still a juvenile but is maturing.

It may have escaped your attention but last week the Chicago City Council passed a resolution that had national if not international importance. At ABC 7 Chicago Jessica D’Onofrio, Craig Wall and Eric Horng report:

CHICAGO (WLS) — A large crowd gathered in Daley Plaza after the Chicago City Council passed a controversial resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza on Wednesday.

Some also marched in the streets.

The council meeting became tense at times, with people in the audience shouting out and some being escorted from council chambers.

The council vote became dramatic, with Mayor Brandon Johnson casting the tie-breaking vote. Resolutions are typically passed quickly and without controversy, but the council spent months on this topic.

Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, who spearheaded the cease-fire resolution, hugged a colleague and wiped away a tear after the final vote.

“I mean, I am very overwhelmed emotionally. I’m very grateful for all the colleagues that supported the resolution,” she said.

It ended months of debate over the war in Gaza that caused great division in the city council.

That was on full display as the council debated the non-binding resolution for the third time. The only Jewish alderperson made a passionate plea against it.

“How do you support a revolution that allows a terrorist regime to stay in power, so that it can continue to attack the world’s only Jewish state?” said 50th Ward Alderwoman Debra Silverstein.

Mayor Brandon Johnson cleared the chambers and recessed for an hour after repeated disruptions by pro-Palestinian supporters in the gallery. When debate resumed, it was civil, but urgent.

Chicago is the largest city whose city council has called for a ceasefire in Gaza. If the ceasefire they’re calling for actually took place it would not mean an end to violence. It would mean that all of the violence would be perpetrated by Hamas and members of other radical Islamist groups.

Why do I say it has everything? My first reaction was that the resolution was an indication of the loss of influence of Jewish voters in Chicago’s politics. Can you imagine IDF civilian truck repairman Rahm Emanuel casting the deciding vote in support of this resolution? Me, neither.

I don’t think that issues like this are the concerns of city governments at all.

Also, keep in mind that calling for a ceasefire without calling for Hamas to surrender and disarm itself is materially genocidal. So, we have a city council taking a materially pro-genocide position.

Note, too, that the debate was disrupted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Why was that not insurrection?

The Trib’s editorial calls the resolution “hateful”.

The vote was largely along racial/ethnic lines.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal John H. Cochrane explains why, despite his what might generously be referred to as his flaws, many Americans continue to support Donald Trump:

Democrats and traditional Republicans are flummoxed. How are 4 in 10 of our fellow citizens ready to vote for Donald Trump? Democrats deplore Trump supporters as racists who must be saved from their ignorance. Traditional Republicans dream that some policy plan or another attack on Mr. Trump’s character might sway his voters.

We ought to listen instead. What motivates Trump supporters? Simple: They want their country back.

They might have lost a loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan. What was the sacrifice for? In the botched peace and withdrawal, they concluded that the foreign-policy elite don’t know what they’re doing. They are hesitant about Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan because the same crew is in charge. They’ll back an America that fights to win, but they don’t want their sons and daughters to die for America only to lose slowly.

In the 2007-08 financial crisis, they lost a house, a job or a business. They learned that the people in charge of the financial system don’t know what they’re doing. ObamaCare sent them a health-insurance card that doesn’t work well when they get sick. They wonder: Do any of the policy wonks who promote this stuff actually use it themselves? They looked at Hillary Clinton and saw her insincerity, her nonprofit collecting millions, the way she said Trump supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables.” They gambled on Mr. Trump.

Then the establishment blew up. They saw the Federal Bureau of Investigation harass Mr. Trump’s appointees, much of official Washington fashion itself “the resistance,” the Russia-collusion hoax, years of pointless investigations.

In 2020 Covid hit. Trump supporters initially went along, trusting institutions. But the pandemic soon exposed the politicized incompetence of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the scientific establishment. Lockdowns destroyed lives. Officials made up rules and ramped up censorship. Inquiries about whether the virus came from a lab leak, or anything negative about masks or vaccines, became “misinformation” subject to censorship. Trump supporters saw media, tech companies and national-security bigwigs suppress the news of the Hunter Biden laptop just in time for the election.

When schools went remote, parents found out what was actually going on inside the classrooms. Teachers were coaching students to hate themselves, their country and their religious traditions and sexualizing young children. The FBI treated angry parents as domestic terrorists. After Oct. 7, Trump supporters learned that universities are incompetent and politicized and disdain people like them. They saw that once-trusted mainstream-media outlets had become political advocates long ago.

Voters see the chaos of a dysfunctional immigration system spill into their neighborhoods. They see crime overwhelming and shutting down cities where officials refuse to enforce laws. They see the homeless invading public spaces.

They aren’t proud of Mr. Trump’s actions after the 2020 election. But 91 felony counts, some brought by prosecutors who campaigned on a promise to get Mr. Trump, and most unrelated to the election? Bonnie and Clyde didn’t have this much legal trouble! And now disqualifying Mr. Trump from the ballot? “Destroy democracy to save democracy” is no longer a joke. The existence of the deep state seems to be confirmed with every outrage.

Why I continue to oppose Trump and will not vote for him is explained by a passage from the New Testament, Matthew 7:18:

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

I do not believe that Mr. Trump is a good man. Furthermore he does not have the personal skills or understanding of the law and the federal government to accomplish even what his supporters reasonably want. I don’t believe that any good can come from a second Trump term.

Although he doesn’t say it outright James Joyner’s recent post strongly suggests, through his reference to an episode of The West Wing, that he finds the U. S. response to continuing attacks by what are blithely referred to as “militant groups” in the Middle East inadequate. He sounds more fatigued than anything else.

My own reaction is that I’m skeptical that it’s a just use of military force. For such to be just it must:

• Have a just objective
• Use just means
• Have a just authority

Retaliation against those who killed American soldiers in Jordan last week would be just but retaliation against people who had nothing to do with those deaths would not. The large number of targets strongly suggests it is not a just retaliation. The means are just enough.

But President Biden did not seek Congressional approval which he would need to have done to have a just authority for his actions. Consequently, I’m skeptical the actions are just and echo James’s conclusion:

So the tiresome game of tit for tat continues.

Well, I’ll say this about John Judis. He doesn’t mince words. Today John B. Judis has a highly negative post about President Biden’s foreign policy accomplishments at Compact. Here’s the summary:

Success in foreign policy can be gauged by whether an administration can see beyond immediate events and anticipate and head off trouble before it arises. By that measure, the Biden administration has been an abysmal failure.

and I agree with Mr. Judis’s assessment of why the Biden foreign policy has failed:

The misjudgments of the Biden administration and the wider establishment may have also stemmed from adherence to a foreign-policy idealism, mixed with tough-guy hawkishness that has gotten the United States in trouble before. The administration has portrayed itself as the defender of democracy against autocracy and of “a rules-based order [against] one governed by brute force,” but the conflicts of nations continue to defy these antinomies.

although I’m not in complete agreement with his point by point analyses. He goes into some depth on how President Biden has failed in each of the following cases:

• Negotiating a new treaty with Iran
• Withdrawing from Afghanistan
• The war in Ukraine
• Israel’s war in Gaza

which is a succinct explanation of why President Biden won’t be running for re-election on the basis of his foreign policy accomplishments. Fortunately for him, Americans don’t much care about foreign policy.

Domestically, President Biden has successfully gotten quite a bit of legislation enacted and, IMO his most important accomplishment, he concluded the federal declaration of the COVID-19 epidemic. His legislation reminds me more than anything else of the old wisecrack about a wife being a person who supports you through the troubles you would never have had if you hadn’t been married. Considering that 80% of American households consider themselves worse off now than pre-COVID it will be hard for President Biden to run on his domestic record.

All of which explains why he’s running on the platform of not being Donald Trump. That’s a pretty low bar. 330 million Americans can say the same thing.

Nearly every day I encounter a serious news or opinion piece that strikes me as unintentionally funny. This morning it was this piece by Erin Banco at Politico with the caption “US intelligence officials estimate Tehran does not have full control of its proxy groups”:

Intelligence officials have calculated that Tehran does not have full control over its proxy groups in the Middle East, including those responsible for attacking and killing U.S. troops in recent weeks, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The Quds Force — an elite branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps — is responsible for sending weapons and military advisers as well as intelligence to support militias in Iraq and Syria as well as the Houthis in Yemen. The groups have varying ambitions and agendas, which sometimes overlap, but Tehran does not appear to have complete authority over their operational decision-making, the officials said.

Why funny? A number of reasons. First, you don’t need an expert to tell you that. Anyone with even a casual familiarity with the history and societies of the Middle East could tell you that. It’s one of the region’s problems. The Ottoman had central control. Arab tribes do not. That’s why the Ottoman ruled the Arabs for most of the last millennium.

And it also confirms what I’ve been saying around here. Deterrence is extremely difficult in the Middle East. When you are attacked by Group A, if you retaliate against Group A it doesn’t deter Group B. And, worse, when you are attacked by Group A, if you retaliate against Group B, it definitely doesn’t deter Group A. It may even encourage them. That these groups are composed of irregulars adds an additional layer of complexity.

My view is somewhat different from the conventional one. Irregulars are criminals and should be treated as criminals. They don’t fall under the laws of war. The people supporting such criminals aren’t protected under the laws of war.

This may be controversial but I think that when an actual country is providing support to irregulars it falls into a gray area in the laws of war. I recognize we do it, too, but I believe that’s an error on our part.

My first preference would be to avoid the fractious Middle East, leaving it to countries that are more ruthless and less scrupulous than we are but, obviously, that ship has sailed. Given that reality, I think we should notify Iran that we consider criminal acts supported by Tehran to be acts of war against the United States and that they’re forfeiting any protection under the laws of war by supporting such groups. That, undoubtedly, is too bellicose. What are the alternatives when you can’t avoid the situation, you are under attack, no counter-attack will be an effective deterrent, and an effective deterrent is too bellicose?