Donald Trump and maga Republicans are wrong to depend on military might alone to subdue the Iranians. Has Iran surrendered yet?

Is it 1914, in America❓

Excellent echo essay published in the New York Times by Yonatan Touval, a foreign-policy analyst, wrote from Tel Aviv.

Wait, wait❗ ❓ Didn't Donald Trump tell us the Iranians would implode when faced with U.S. and Israeli military force❓ 

Mr. Touval writes this:  So now, both countries are well into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and nothing has changed even as many hundreds of Iranians have been killed.

One conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory.

The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive.

It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive. Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered “target-production machine” capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.

Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.

This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war.

But, war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.

So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite — binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war’s actual terrain. 

Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.

The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago recognized the delusion of reducing war to a kind of algebra. 

War, as Carl von Clausewitz (1780- 1831) understood it (Rules on Warfare and Power), is never merely calculation. It is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose. The algebra has grown more sophisticated. But, the delusion is just as dangerous today as it was in the 19th century.

What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.

Cultural knowledge, of course, rarely prevents the catastrophes of war.

Athens, at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.

Shakespeare understood this blindness better than our strategists. “Macbeth” is not merely a play about ambition. It is about a man who catches sight of a possible future and mistakes that glimpse for a license to force events to conform to his interpretation — and then watches that interpretation devour him. Soon he ceases even to pretend that action should wait on understanding. There are things in his head, he tells his wife, that “must be acted ere they may be scanned” — done before they can be thought through.

Modern targeting systems promise the same fantasy in technological form: to collapse the interval between seeing and striking, to eliminate the pause in which judgment might still enter. Macbeth acts not after deliberation, but instead of it. That is the pattern one can glimpse in this new war, and it is precisely the pattern that literary and historical imagination exists to counter.

Tolstoy traced the same pattern from the other side. In “War and Peace,” he depicted Napoleon — nourished on Plutarch’s “Lives” and its portraits of greatness — who marched through Borodino to Moscow and still could not fathom a people who would let their city burn rather than submit. His error was not tactical. It was imaginative: He could not credit the Russians with a logic that was not his own. That is the mistake the architects of this campaign are repeating. In Iran, a leadership that has spent decades framing resistance to American and Israeli power as a religious obligation will experience military pressure not as a reason to capitulate but more probably as a reason to endure.

The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature. Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire. That is the illiteracy of this war. The algebra of the war makers will have been flawless. But what they cannot read, they will not have reckoned with.

Mother's for Liberty are misguided about banning books Governor Tim Walz says "ban hunger" instead!

Minnessota Governor Tim Walz:  "While others were banning books, we were banishing hunger!" -VP Walz #DNC2024 (I still can't believe folks don't want the children to have free lunch.)

Echo opinion letter published in the Orlando Sentinel

Right now, Florida students are learning distorted versions of African American history and civics and studying literature devoid of many of our greatest authors.

As a writer, editor and former teacher, I have made the fight against censorship a big part of my life’s work. 

Contrary to wrongminded beliefs within the (Mothers for Liberty🙅⚠️) MFL crowd, I do not advocate assigning books for classroom discussion that are sexually explicit for the sake of being so. 

Instead, my mandatory reading must be literature first, not a test case for cultural debate. Many students will tell you such specificity makes them uncomfortable. At the same time, this is why we must not ban Shakespeare, Toni Morrison and other authors whose inclusion of sexuality is a necessary part of the literary narrative.

However, all books 📕📗📙should be available to students in the school libraries where they have the freedom to read what they choose.

Until we end this assault on education, we are graduating students with honors in propaganda.

From:  June S. Neal Delray Beach
June S. Neal is the president of Read Banned Books.

Shakespeare in the Senate? A Reality Drama

Shakespeare- "Gregory, o' my word, we'll not carry coals."

 It's a familiar scene in Shakespeare's plays, the side scene where principal characters conspire about whatever's going on in the plot. "Gregory, o'my word, we'll not carry coals" (Romeo and Juliet Act 1 Scene 1) in Shakespeare speak means "listen here, we aren't taking this anymore, no more guff~!"

In the US Congress, it was a reality scene today when Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and Republican Senator Rand Paul (both R-Kentucky) were caught off microphone speaking about the political version of "carrying coals". McConnell and Paul were caught in a Shakespearean moment, conversing like conspirators, about their entrenched right wing position to keep the federal government in a preventable shut down. They aren't going to budge in their selfish and harmful positions.

These two Republican Senators collaborated, while being heard in a "hot mic" discussion, meaning they didn't know they could be heard. They whispered loudly enough for the microphone to hear them discuss "poll testing" certain key phrases to "win" the argument about how to keep government closed, regardless of the harm this recalcitrant position causes to our government and citizens.
If only the scene were Shakespearean, because we the audience would not be fearful of the story's ending.


Huffington Post reports Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) were caught on a hot mic Wednesday discussing talking-points for the shutdown. This is what they said: "I just did CNN (an interview) and I just go over and over again 'We're willing to compromise. We're willing to negotiate.' I think... I don't think they poll tested we won't negotiate. I think it's awful for [Democrats] to say that over and over again," Paul said.

McConnell responded: "Yeah, I do too and I, and I just came back from that two hour meeting with them and that, and that was basically the same view privately as it was publicly," McConnell agreed.

Paul added, "I think if we keep saying, 'We wanted to defund it. We fought for that and that we're willing to compromise on this', I think they can't, we're gonna, I think... well, I know we don't want to be here, but we're gonna win this, I think."

Isn't it disgusting for our Senate leaders to play with America like they're evil characters in a Shakespearean drama? They simply don't understand how Democracy works. Their GOP 2012 candidate Mitt Romney lost the Presidential election. Now the spiteful Tea Party is holding Americans hostage by forcing a government shut down, as a result. Republicans were unable to force their right wing agenda on voters, who didn't support them in 2012, so they want to take over government, rather than wait their turn to present a winning candidate of their own in the next Presidential election. In fact, Republicans have a 2016 winning candidate in Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, but he's not right wing enough for the Tea Party so they don't give him the political time of day, so to speak.

Standing on the stage of public opinion while getting caught on the hot mic is a despicable way to affirm what Americans already know.  We know how Republicans don't care about democracy and they don't care about the American people. In their Shakespearean moment, their right wing leadership was caught on hot mic scheming about "poll testing" catchy phrases, rather than creating a strategy to get Americans back to work. This conspiracy to undermine the government because Tea Party extremists don't happen to like the Obamacare health care reform law is equivalent to sedition. In some non-democratic countries they'd be ousted in a no-confidence vote. Some countries would even expel them.

In a Democracy, the people voted for the health care reform law, it was upheld as Constitutional by the US Supreme Court and President Obama won re-election by supporting his signature legislation.

There is no compromising about the Obamacare law.

Senator Paul Rand has not "poll tested" the phrase "Obamacare is the law" or, if he has, it's a concept he doesn't want to defend. That's because Obamacare is law, just like the Second Amendment is law. Yet, Paul knows there's no way Democrats will hold government hostage to force a repeal of the gun rights of Americans.

Democrats must use this apologist argument more effectively. They need to remind Americans how we got in this shut down situation. Republicans are demanding a repeal of the Obamacare law. It's a law. Republicans are using the phrase "Obamacare" like it's profanity while Democrats appear to be defensive. Meanwhile, uninsured people by the millions are seeking coverage under the newly formed insurance exchanges, because they're finding insurance they can finally afford to buy.

Shakespeare's dramatic plays often ended tragically.  Americans can only take so much of this preventable budget drama before we finally remove all lawmakers in a "United States Spring". But if the government fails us with these obsessive right wing tactics, we may be unable to wait until an election to replace these third rate political actors. The entire Congress should be recalled for incompetence unless they obey the law, pass a budget, fund Obamacare and pay America's bills by lifting the debt ceiling. To do otherwise is an unpredictable reality we don't want to consider.

Americans certainly won't carry coals much longer.