(Grainy photo of the Iranian frigate Alborz entering the Red Sea. Low resolution image used for identification purposes only).

Progress! We are getting in tune with the new number we are supposed to attach to the end of the date at the top of these missives. It is only a single number, mind you, but it starts the morning parade. We have had a marvelous little holiday break with folks catching up on sleep after the flurry of Holiday merriment. Splalsh checked the calendar as he sauntered out on the Patio. “Yep. Four days into it already. Only one war started since last week, and we are holiday-free until Valentine’s Day.”

The rest of us have allowed 2023 to slide off into the collection of years we keep in reserve to use if something else comes along that is even worse. The Salts around the circle naturally have a little professional interest in the maritime aspect of international relations, so you can imagine the morning topic.

We have all been following the strange kinetic events around the world. The conflict in Ukraine once had little highlight sections about the slog of horror that reads like accounts from what they once called the Great War. That term became obsolete when we had a Greater War a few years later. Perhaps we should put the two together into what they represented, which was more akin to a kinetic double-header. Now, with the current fighting nearly two years in duration, it is just the ‘other war’ in lower case font.

The one with the headlines this morning the storm that is coming our way. The earnest fellows on the Weather Channel have placed the line of faux blizzard doom just along the riverbank east of here. So we may or may not be able to report on how Mother Nature treats us. But we are snug and cozy in the embrace of Big Pink’s slightly fuchsia colored bricks.

The impending snowfall has partially distracted us from the evolution of the conflict in Gaza. it has been an evolving struggle that incorporates old animosity and grievances that last more than a millennium. This chapter started with an attack on a music festival in southern Israel. there were 1,300 people- men women and children, killed in the attack and the Israelis naturally struck back.

That is the last time we will attempt to use words like “naturally,” since naturally there is plenty of confusion. Some reports were that money was flowing from the United States Treasury to the Islamic Republic of Iran. That was part of some other continuing regional beef that has been going on throughout our professional careers of fifty years. When some of us went through trining at Pensacola, there were still Iranian student pilots on base, proud in their crisp uniforms, earning to fly the F-14 jets we agreed to provide for Iran as a regional power in the binary calculus of the Cold War.

Back then, the Carter administration had some ideas that were intended to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Oslo Process was a series of negotiations that began as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1993. No American fingerprints were directly on the Oslo Declaration of Principles, negotiated without U.S. mediation. It was a historic agreement that seemed to contain the prospect of peace.

We won’t bother you about the Ottomans and Brits and French that trooped across the Temple Mount, but that is part of it, with mischief started long before. Some. of have stood atop Masada and gazed down at the stones that formed the camp of the Roman X (10th) Legion Fretensis.

Considering what came after in the swirl of Romans, Turks and Brits there is plenty to discuss, but Germany’s contribution to the long litany of the story is what begins the chapter we are living now. Our visit to Masada some thirty years ago coincided with the start of the Oslo process and there was mild hope for a developing and lasting peace between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. It looked like a good start for about fifteen minutes of Middle East time, since the PA was muscled out by a more radical organization known as “Hamas.”

This line of thought leads us through the bewildering world of Proxys. The Theocracy in Tehran is a sponsor of Hamas, and a similar radical group known as Hezbollah operating in what used to be Lebanon.
As a military note, neither the groups Gaza or Beirut can overcome the Israeli Defense Forces. The problem is the propaganda being spewed about who the aggressor in this chapter of a very long story. You can hear the outline of that matter with the virulent condemnation of IDF response as “genocidal warfare.”

We don’t have a footnote for that handy, but will assert here a statement of our opposition to any of that sort of activity.

We would prefer to spend our brief time together talking about the massive snow storm that is about to pummel us. The fellow doing the predictions on the flatscreen drew the blue line of Big Snow in a way that edges our parking lot. We may get buried and we may not, so all the other stuff here at home and overseas will fade away until the snow melts. Hanging in the breeze is the fact that we still have no Federal budget, which should be addressed in one of thousand page bills no one has read.

But there is one image we talked about with a certain gravity. The news yesterday was about maritime activity- US Navy ships and helicopters conducting operations against Houthi insurgents, killing or injuring a dozen of them. The Iranians are part of that proxy thing as well, since the Saudis have been engaged against the Houthi rebels for years, long before we started talking about snow.

A jumble? it certainly is here. We have competent combat ships in the Red Sea determined to keep the international waterway open for commercial shipping. In apparent response to the USN response, the Iranians have sent their Navy frigate Alborz through the Bab El Mandeb strait.

The discussion varied then from how much snow we are going to get and whether or not some tactical miscue could plunge us into something much chiller than ice and snow. It is something to stand on the deck of a ship painted gray and making turns toward trouble. Our thoughts go out to those who steam on our ships, halfway around the world. Give them strength and courage, and the unique ability to distinguish who the heck the Proxy players are.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
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