Living to fight another day

We'll all have to put our backs into it sooner or later. The shadow war is being fought far away and here at home. But at least some sunlight is finally revealing the terrain.

Coming at the eve of Passover, this newsletter was going to be a full-on Real Story Sunday magazine. There’s been too much going on in my beat, and a couple of really exhausting investigations have kept me too busy. There’s still quite a lot of ground to cover today. For now, some good news:

The Americans are finally get themselves sorted

More or less, anyway. Yesterday, after months of filibustering histrionics and obstructions, the Republican Party’s caucus of grownups finally joined with their Democratic Party counterparts in the U.S. House of Representatives to send back to the Senate a $95 billion bipartisan national security and foreign aid appropriation.

A rough breakdown: There’s $26.38 billion “to support Israel in its effort to defend itself against Iran and its proxies” and to reimburse U.S. military operations in response to recent attacks. A late amendment from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries stipulates that roughly $9.5 billion from the Israel portion will go to humanitarian aid, mostly in Gaza. A good thing.

Another $8.12 billion is set aside “to continue efforts to counter communist China and ensure a strong deterrence in the region.” As you might imagine, I approve. Especially since those efforts are mainly about the defence of Taiwan, and the Trudeau Liberals’ persistent Beijing-adjacency should be expected to draw more heat.

On that subject, I spoke at length with Michael Campbell in this video conversation, broadcast yesterday. It was mostly about the Hogue Inquiry into Election Interference. I see Andrew Coyne in the Globe and Mail (The foreign interference inquiry features a parade of senior Liberals protesting too much) has taken up the same standpoint as my own. Except I take a sterner tone in The National Post and especially in last Monday’s deep background newsletter, Shooting the Messengers, where I raise the possibility of Team Trudeau’s outright perjury.

Anyway, back to the main event, out of Americaland, from yesterday.

The big ticket item: $60 billion for Ukraine. Although “for Ukraine” requires some parsing. Of that amount, $23.2 billion goes to “replenish defense articles and defense services provided to Ukraine,” another $11.3 billion is set aside for “current U.S. military operations” in the region, and only $13.8 billion goes to procuring “advanced weapons systems, defense articles, and defense services.” The rest goes to spending on oversight and so on.

Will President Biden use the powers Congress has given him?

The thing that may be the most important aspect of Saturday’s Congressional action is that it comes with the passage of a law that would allow the seizure of frozen Russian assets and the transfer of those funds to the Ukrainian war effort.

It’s hard to discern how much the U.S. could free up if Joe Biden used the power the law gives him, but roughly $300 billion in Russia’s central bank assets have been frozen by the U.S., the EU and the G7 countries. The U.S. directly controls only about $5 billion of that money in American banks, but if the White House broke the logjam on the issue among Kyiv’s allies, it could accelerate the Council of Europe’s proposed plan to take it all and devote it to a new fund for Ukraine's reconstruction.

In any case, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is putting on a brave face. "The vital U.S. aid bill passed today by the House will keep the war from expanding, save thousands and thousands of lives, and help both of our nations to become stronger."

With any luck the bill will now move quickly to the oval office where Biden can begin affixing his signature to things, and American Trumpists can go back to twisting themselves into knots with lies about how those damn Europeans aren’t pulling their weight in the fight against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which they also say nobody should be fighting anyway because Putin is defending the last redoubt of Christianity.

A quick fact-check or two is in order.

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys no more

Between European Union institutions, individual EU member states and the United Kingdom, over the past two years the Europeans have contributed a few billion Euros more in military aid to Ukraine than the €42 billion American contribution to date. When you add in humanitarian and financial assistance, the Europeans have committed more than four times as much as the €24 billion U.S. contribution of that kind to Ukraine.

Of the $68 billion in military and related assistance Congress had approved for the Ukrainian war effort before yesterday’s logjam was broken, as much as 90 per cent of it, depending in which analysis you prefer, was spent in the United States.

American support is crucial to Ukraine’s defence, obviously. Without it, the Europeans who’d just as soon pack it in would have their way. Europe does need to up its game, but fortunately, there are Europeans made of much sterner stuff than Germany’s Olaf Scholz.

Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas: "Hope this vote encourages all allies to look through their warehouses and do more." Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström: "Now is also the time to remember that the EU now have to increase our own production of armaments, ammunition and supplies to aid Ukraine on a long-term basis." the Czech republic’s Jan Lipavský: “Europe must do more, too. Our hesitation and indecision in effectively supporting Ukraine just motivate the Kremlin to further aggression that costs more lives.”

Canada’s total contribution, in military, humanitarian and financial aid, amounts to a measly $6 billion. Here’s former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole: “Ukraine is literally pleading for armoured vehicles from Canada to protect their soldiers. They know we have hundreds in surplus and a defence industry that can quickly assemble more. What are we waiting for?”

O’Toole was responding to this important piece by the CBC’s Murray Brewster: As Russia presses forward, Ukraine pleads with Canada for armour, air defence.

Saint Vlad, The Impaler

You’d have to be possessed of a fairly twisted and sectarian conception of Christianity to delude yourself into believing the sort of things Marjorie (Jewish Space Lasers) Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson want you to believe about Vladimir Putin.

Since Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine two years ago, in league with the corrupt Moscow Patriarchate, the Kremlin has moved with a Medieval ferocity against Christians in the Ukrainian territory it occupies. The targets are overwhelmingly mainline Protestants. Thirty clergymen have been killed or kidnapped. More than 100 cases of arrests, interrogations and forced expulsions have been documented. At least 600 churches and chapels have been destroyed.

Johns Hopkins University’s Peter Pomerantsev, author of This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, lays it all out for you in Time Magazine: Russia’s War Against Evangelicals.

Happy Birthday, Ali Khamenei!

What do you give a guy who has everything? Ali Khamenei is Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, head of state in control of all three branches of the Iranian government, commander in chief of every branch and terrorist wing of the Iranian armed forces, de facto editor in chief of everything that resembles the news media in Iran, and a constant lash to the backs of Iranian women.

Shadow war: The Hezbis we strangely hear little about are the tens of thousands of fighters in Kataib Hezbollah, a U.S. terror listed group that leads a militia consortium funded by Iraqi prime minister Mohamed Shia Sudani’s government, which is funded by the Biden White House.

Khamenei has been in power since 1989, longer than any other ruler in the Greater Middle East. Owing mostly to Obama-era hubris and cowardice - inviting Russia to take America’s place in the Greater Middle East looks really smart now, doesn’t it? - the Islamic Republic’s China-financed and Russian-backed imperial project has gobbled up Southern Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, half of the Iraqi State, and the de facto government of Yemen.

Those are the main Middle East theatres in the “shadow war” everybody’s suddenly noticing. Backstory from last November in the National Post and right here in the Real Story: The War The White House Won’t Talk About. Suddenly we’re starting to talk about it. Good.

On Friday morning, on the day Khamenei turned 85, Israel wished the old geezer many happy returns: We see you and we will raise you, we have done this before and we can do it again. For now, on this most auspicious day, a little token our esteem.

The target was a military base near Isfahan, a major center of missile production, research and development. It’s where they make Shahab medium-range missiles, which can reach Israel.

This was Israel’s response to Iran’s unprecedented barrage of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles? No it wasn’t. We’ll have to wait for that. For Israel’s sake, a proper response can’t come a moment too soon, as I’ll make clear below.

A much bigger deal was the event in the wee hours of Friday night and Saturday morning: Huge explosions at an Iraqi “Popular Mobilization Forces” military base 50 kilometres south of Baghdad. This is something the White House really, really doesn’t want people talking about.

After the ISIS savageries in Northern Iraq during the Obama years, the PMF was fully integrated into the Iraqi military’s chain of command. The Iraqi military base that was hit this weekend is a command centre of the PMF’s most powerful and most lavishly subsidized constituent: Kataib Hezbollah.

Kataib Hezbollah is a Tehran-aligned, U.S.-listed terrorist organization responsible for dozens of attacks on U.S interests since the Hamas invasion of Israel last October 7.

In all likelihood, it was Kataib Hezbollah that was behind the kidnapping last year of Princeton University’s Elizabeth Tsurkov. When you’re done here you might want to read Emma Tsurkov’s My tax dollars -and yours - are helping hold my sister hostage: The US is both fighting and funding a terror organization in Iraq.

Last year alone, the Biden administration provided more than $260 million in assistance to the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia Sudani, who was making the rounds in the United States only last week. Awkward or what.

The PMF's chief of staff is the Kataib Hezbollah’s senior commander, Abu Fadak. Only two weeks ago Fadak was in Tehran for an Al-Quds Day march, pledging allegiance to Khamenei and stating things plain as day: “The PMF is a fundamental part of the battle in Gaza and Palestine.”

In Toronto, the Al-Quds day march was just another day of bloodcurdling antisemitic and anti-Israel incitements in Canada in a deafening crescendo of stupidly-described “pro-Palestinian” activism that has been shocking the conscience of ordinary Canadians ever since last October.

I do try to be cheerful.

Here are a handful of points I touched on in the National Post, after having been assigned to weigh in on the implications of the Islamic Republic’s first-ever direct attack on Israel last weekend.

Almost the entirety of the barrage of 170 suicide drones, 120 ballistic missiles and at least 30 cruise missiles were blown out of the sky before they entered Israeli air space. Assisted by British and French fighter jets, the Americans and even the Jordanians came to Israel’s defence. Even the Saudis played a part. That’s very good news.

The only casualty appears to have been a seven-year-old Israeli Bedouin girl from the Negev Desert. Amina al-Hassouni was severely injured by falling debris or shrapnel from an Iranian missile. She’s getting better, recovering in Beersheva’s Soroka Hospital. Also good news.

Even the pretext cited by Iran and its legions of “ceasefire now” supporters in the leafy neighbourhoods of the NATO capitals - Israel’s smashing of a consular annex to the Iranian embassy in Damascus — was very good news.

Lebanese Hezbollah remains equipped with thousands of missiles pointed strait south into Israel, but the Israel’s Damascus job removed Mohamed Reza Zahedi, a senior Quds Force brigadier-general in Tehran’s arming of Hezbollah in collaboration with Syrian mass-murderer Bashar Assad, was removed from the world of living things, along with several of his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps underlings.

That alone was a tremendous contribution to civic hygiene in the region.

My only prediction: Israel will punish the Islamic Republic sooner or later, and it will be appropriately brutal. As for the excitements in and around that airbase in Isfahan on Friday, that wasn’t it. Israelis do this sort of thing all the time.

A remote-controlled killer robot that was initially dismissed as a fanciful sci-fi conspiracy theory turned out to have been really the shooter in the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, on November 27, 2020.

A May, 2022 drone strike interrupted routines at the Parchin military base just southeast of Tehran. The target there was a key Defence Ministry research facility working on missile, nuclear and drone technology.

In January, 2023, an Israeli suicide drone smashed a military facility in the center of the city of Isfahan. And so on.

A much bigger deal was that deafening hit on the PMF base south of Baghdad, very likely an American job - the Americans aren’t saying. Or an Israel job - the Israelis never kiss and tell.

Tehran, Moscow and Beijing have to be stopped. Somehow. Soon.

“Taking the win,” as President Biden advised Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu after last weekend’s attack, was not as unreasonable a thing to suggest as some have insisted. What is unreasonable is to expect Israel to settle for merely having lived to fight another day.

Here’s a couple of points from my National Post piece that I want to reiterate here.

Beijing buys 90 per cent of Iran’s oil output, including the crude oil sold by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force to finance Tehran’s network of terror proxies across the Greater Middle East.

Among those proxies, the Yemeni Houthis will continue to fire rockets at Israel and bomb and hijack ships traversing the Red Sea while allowing ships registered with China and Russia safe passage, according to terms concluded in Oman last month with the Houthis’ Mohammed Abdel Salam.

In keeping with its congenital incoherence, the Biden White House will continue to spend money arming the Iraqi government, which has incorporated into its armed forces the Iranian terrorist front Kataib Hezbollah, one of Tehran’s most vicious and effective proxies in the entire Greater Middle East.

This is why the world can’t wait forever:

Tehran will continue to supply Russia with the thousands of missiles and suicide drones it began selling to Moscow two years ago to aid in Russia’s savage war of conquest in Ukraine.

This is why Israel can’t wait forever:

In return, Moscow will soon be providing Iran with missile launchers and antiaircraft systems capable of detecting and destroying any stealth fighters the Israeli Air Force might want to scramble in Iran’s direction, whatever the Americans have to say about it.

So sure, let’s persist in badgering the Israelis to exercise “restraint,” and to take the win. But what happens after Moscow provides the Islamic Republic with the capacity to detect and shoot down Israeli stealth fighters? Isn’t that an “escalation” we should be worried about?

A Churchill-or-Chamberlain moment

We have all lived to fight another day. The free world (yes, there is still such a thing) still has a fighting chance to muster more than the usual milquetoast diplocracy in this century’s existential struggle between the world’s liberal democracies and the United Nations’ torture-state bloc.

“This is a Churchill or Chamberlain moment,” is the way the Democratic Party’s House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put it, in the lead-up to Saturday’s vote in Congress.

“The world is on fire, and history will judge us by our actions,” said the Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul. “Here’s the question history will ask of Congress: ‘Were you Chamberlain, or were you Churchill?’”

I tend towards the viewpoint expressed by Harold James, professor of European history at Princeton University. When he looks at the leaders of Europe and North America at the moment, this is what he sees: “Their 1930s equivalents, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, appear less pathetic in comparison.”

But yes, Saturday was a Churchill or Chamberlain moment in the United States Congress. For all of us, it still is.

The moment has not passed. It’s been put off, to another day.