Iron Dome: Have Your Abqaiq, and Eat It, Too

Editor’s Note:The season is changing here in the country. Like all veteran crisis junkies, the current multi-level, multi-arena crises in progress have me galvanized. The best way to deal with this reality is to take a deep, cleansing breath and turn to WETA on the cable box and watch an episode of the new Ken Burns documentary “Country Music.” It is a fascinating history of a culture that has had the crap knocked out if by the politics of the day. Refreshing. Point Loma is watching too as an antidote to a lifetime of adrenaline rushes. This episode looks at how things might play out in a very important place. Me? I am going to switch the satellite radio to the country station and listen to Patsy Cline.
-Vic

Author’s Note:I’m starting to piss off my wife a little by doing this shit but felt compelled to write all night. i seriously had no idea where it was going to go when i started but got around to it at the end – it might be a sign. maybe watching the stories of Hank and Johnny as well-told by Ken Burns is rubbing off, and encouraging me to find my muse. Note that I don’t think there is an f-bomb in there – might be a first…

Have Your Abqaiq, and Eat It, Too
Okay, so I was not quite right about the rush for war over the strike against the world by the Iranians on the Saudi refineries at Abqaiq. I’ve been wrong before, and I’m okay with that, but it’s not over yet. I started this piece not knowing where it was going to go – part of the fun of creative writing with no real editor except for Vic. I think I will find a punch line at the end, whenever that comes…

The President has been pretty cautious when it comes to responding to Iran’s provocations. As an attack-kind-of-guy, my first impulse is to strike back hard with max fire-power, but that in itself is hard. There are no good options against a cagey enemy who has planned to be evasive in their closed, controlled society, which puts up with the diversion of state resources to build hidey holes in which to conceal their nefarious weaponry and feckless leadership from the death and destruction that we can wreak from above – wicked smart. We saw that with the ex-Brother Leader of the Revolution, Muammar, and later with Saddam, snaked out of his spider hole by US SOF.

Hell, Yasser Arafat never slept in the same place two nights in a row; must have been a hell of an existence even if driven by faith and hatred. The fact that the Iranians are doing the same reinforces the notion that their intentions are not good. The same thing could be said for the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans.
So far, our response has been a little erratic, but now seems to have settled down a bit, since we are slapping on even stronger sanctions and deploying defensive weapon systems to protect the Kingdom, our bases, and the oil which powers the world. This is not trivial. The denouement, however, is yet to come, and we may well be firing up a special can of whoop ass – it has to work the first time.

If I was king for a day and wanted to stick it to the bad guys, I would get the Israelis to deploy several Iron Dome units over there, just to piss everyone off. After all, we paid for most of it, so why not? Alas, the Israelis are going through their own special form of election hell, and deciding whether or not to toss Bibi, who may be an overbearing asshole, but a true hero who has been there, done that, and has the battle scars to prove it. He was wounded several times during Sayaret Matkal Special Forces raids, and his brother Yonatan was killed leading the Raid on Entebbe. These are a serious, no shit people, and family.

Bibi was born in Tel Aviv but grew up in Philly, that’s right, listen to his accent. His father was a university professor at Dropsie College, and Bibi graduated from Cheltenham High School. Maybe one of the reasons that his schtick doesn’t go down that well in Israel is that they think he’s more of an American. However, DNA tests have shown that he is a Sephardic Jew – basically a Palestinian, and not an Ashkenazi, who were the European immigrants after WWII. Man, what a conundrum, which is why the politics over there focus more on what he does, instead of who he is, and what his accomplishments and leadership represent.

Bibi and I share a certain background. At different times, we both attended Harvard and the MIT Sloan School. Compared to his academic accomplishments there, I am a mere pretender. Here’s a passage from his Wiki page:
“At MIT, Netanyahu studied a double-load, completing a SM (that would normally take four years) in only two and a half years; despite taking a break to fight in the Yom Kippur War, and while simultaneously completing a thesis in a graduate course at Harvard. Professor Groisser at MIT recalled: “He did superbly. He was very bright. Organized. Strong. Powerful. He knew what he wanted to do and how to get it done.”[1]

So here we have a war hero, super smart and dedicated scholar, entrepreneur, and gifted politician; a guy from Philly running one of the most rambunctious, free, lively, liberal, and hated countries in the world, and his own people want to toss him out? FMTT – what are they thinking? Why do we (collectively) hate the capable ones for that? Their (and our) wars are not over yet, and may never be resolved in our lifetimes. Strong leadership is imperative if our way of life is going to survive. Unfortunately, democracies have some kind of unnatural aversion to that – it seems that we will have to learn the same hard lessons over again.

We’ve seen the same thing happen time after time. The Brits shit-canned Churchill after he pretty much single-handedly saved their asses from the Nazis; we did the same to George H.W. Bush after the good Gulf War, which gave us the pedophile Bill Clinton and all the harm he did to the military with the “Peace Dividend”, interrupted by W, but then continued under Saint Obama. And it seems to be we are looking at doing the same thing to Trump in lieu of Elizabeth Warren. The Iranians and Hezbollah, much less our other fine friends – the Chinese, Russians, and North Koreans, have got be laughing their asses off at us and licking their chops. Why do we have such a non-appreciation to strong leadership, guys like Churchill, Reagan, and Bibi? The bad guys have theirs – Vlad, XI, Kim, and the Ayatollah Khamenei. All of the current Lib-tards are running on strict legalisms and social issues – wait until they have to deal with these serious bad dudes. Can you see any of them holding their own? Pygmies – the entire lot of them. I’m going to start hoarding cash, canned food, and ammunition. So while they are surrendering to our overseas enemies, they will also be coming for what’s ours if they can.

Given our own problems, I guess we are going to let the Israelis sort it out for themselves. Figuring out who is going to be the new PM in a much-divided Knesset is going to take a while, maybe months. Don’t be startled if they surprise us with a meticulously-planned, precision, and successful strike on the nuclear bullshit of our Persian friends. They have a knack and enviable history for doing just that.

So, I guess I had better get back to Abqaiq and what to do about it. After throttling back, I think the prudent course is the one that is apparently being pursued right now – deploy air defense units and beef up security. I myself would also be sending every anti-UAV technology over there to field-test-it just in case, followed up with some heavy firepower like another carrier, along with B-1s and B-52s, and a shit load of Wild Weasels for Iron Hand missions to beat down the IADS. Sending Iron Dome over there to protect Saudi and Kuwait oil installations would be an “up-your-ass” move that only I would advocate for – poetic justice.

Copyright 2019 Pt Loma
www.vicsocotra.com
[1]Source: Wikipedia.org.