In today’s Ready Room, it will suffice to weave together three incomplete threads, disparate but connected, as things often are if you look closely enough. We wind up at the end on 6 June at a windswept beach in Normandy, as always since 1944. (It is salutary to remember, as we are apt to forget with the passing years, that by the first anniversary of the amphibious landing at Normandy on D-Day 1944, the war in Europe had already been declared won, following Germany’s surrender in May 1945. It has been decades since such rapid action attended a “great” war.)
The initial stop, however, is in Gaza, where a pier has resurfaced.
Hostage rescue, Lebanon, Gaza
First, naturally, Israel’s rescue of four hostages.
You’re welcome.
Hamas was, of course, using a refugee camp as human shields for Hamas’s arrangements, which included holding the four hostages and embedding numerous Hamas operatives with the displaced persons. When the IDF team arrived to retrieve the hostages, Hamas “hostiles” swarmed out from the “refugee” population and began attacking the rescuers, which started the shooting in which an unknown number of civilians (said to be in the dozens) were killed.
Update on 10 June:
A host of unlawful combatants trying to kill Israelis got the Gazans at the rescue site killed.
Hamas thus came away with more blood on its hands. Hamas doesn’t describe it that way, and Western media are acting a faithful repeaters for the Hamas narrative. But we need not even bother with it here. It’s more expeditious to just go with the truth.
It is an occasion for great rejoicing that God and the IDF brought Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Andrey Kozlov, and Almog Meir Jan home to their families.
We mourn the loss of Arnon Zemorah of the Police Special Forces, who was killed in the action. May his memory be a blessing.
Second, the U.S. Gaza pier is back in action (such as the action is). The pier reportedly succumbs quickly to waves that reach 5 feet, which even in summer is likely to keep happening. Western-exposed beaches subject to long-fetch seas in the Northern hemisphere seem to be the pier apparatus’s kryptonite, so we can hope that in future, we mainly need to use it for operations off East Asia, where it has done pretty well in exercises. (Its least successful exercise outing to date was off Camp Pendleton in Southern California, which ticks all the kryptonite boxes.)
It looks like a short section of the pier was left on the beach, south of the jetty built in March, while the longer section was towed off for repairs after the break-up on 26-27 May 2024. The short section has been affixed more permanently to an improved revetment on the beach.
On 7 June, CENTCOM announced the restoration of the pier apparatus, and images showed that the longer section had been reconnected to the short section fixed on the beach. My guess is that the longer section will be detached and moved offshore to ride the waves if they reach 4-5 feet, while the shorter section is now better fixed in place, and can be supported against “wandering” by the small barge-maneuvering craft that deployed for the pier operation.
The damage reportedly came to $22 million, and to date, the pier has facilitated very little aid delivery. The Biden administration’s determination to keep it in place is political: the opening gambit in internationalizing a post-combat “security” plan for Gaza. It may or may not succeed in functioning that way.
The timing of its restoration, just hours before the hostage rescue, did prompt a rumor flaring throughout Gaza that the pier was used by the IDF in the rescue operation. By far the best communication profile on that, for U.S. forces, would have been to simply ignore it and not respond.
But someone in Washington saw fit to compound the rampant suspicion about a U.S. role in the mission by “leaking” to U.S. media a tale that U.S. intelligence had been instrumental in the hostage recovery.
In this situation, CENTCOM was compelled (I suspect by the higher-ups at the Pentagon) to put out an abject, ill-advised denial of any role in the hostage rescue by CENTCOM, including use of the pier, which CENTCOM is in charge of.
This comes across inevitably as appeasement; i.e., “We had nothing to do with it, please don’t attack our pier.” If we don’t think security is adequate to protect the pier without quavering denials addressed obliquely to Iran, we need to just remove the pier.
Instead, as of Monday, we’re apparently storing arriving aid on (or near) the pier due to the unsettled situation ashore.
Meanwhile, two brief pings on the increasingly incipient Hezbollah front in Northern Israel. One: on 5-6 Jun 2024, the IDF conducted strikes on several Hezbollah targets in Southern Lebanon, one of which was an obviously substantial weapons depot in the vicinity of Wadi Jilou (see map). Israel needs to interdict Hezbollah’s war resources at this level as soon, as broadly, and as relentlessly as possible, to reduce the scope of the task of fighting a second front in the north.
But this is exactly the type of interdiction for which Biden is withholding the bombs whose scheduled delivery, under an agreement from 2008, he suspended weeks ago. As discussed in the earlier post, U.S. intelligence estimated in early 2024 that without such deliveries, Israel probably had about a 15-16-week supply of such bombs on-hand, given the rate of use un Gaza.
The estimate rather obviously predicted that if Israel had to fight Hezbollah in the north, the remaining inventory would be depleted even more rapidly. My eye sees Israel being sparing in the use of the bombs most applicable for tasks like eliminating weapons depots: i.e., bombs in the 1,000- and 2,000-lb weight class. Although Hezbollah has been using rockets to set devastating fires in Northern Israel, the IDF has been slow to respond with interdiction in Lebanon, and has done little that we can see to attack major combat infrastructure.
It can’t help looking like saving bombs for later. That would obviously have an impact (or lack of one) on Hezbollah’s strength in an initial assault.
The second ping is related. The timing of the attack on the depot at Wadi Jilou immediately followed what appears to have been a Hezbollah attack on an Iron Dome battery at the northern border of Israel. Weapon system video of the attack was posted on social media afterward, and the open-source intelligence consensus seems to be that the weapon was an Iranian-made Almas antitank guided missile (ATGM).
The visual appearance of the video was unfamiliar to most analysts (myself included), and the initial discussion favored the idea that it was a drone. There were also reports that the video itself was faked, and separately that the Iron Dome array may have been a decoy.
I doubt it was a decoy. My opinion on the lack of some components of an Iron Dome battery, as seen in the video, was that it was probably due to the components being spread out to make it harder to target all of them, and perhaps as well due to the battery not being fully set up for operations yet, meaning things like connecting cables would not be present.
In the days since, the consensus has settled on the Almas ATGM as the weapon whose video we watch. (The video is of the quality previously posted on social media from the Almas.) The Iranians back-engineered the Almas from Israeli SPIKE weaponry recovered by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
All else aside, the rapid follow-up of an IAF strike on a weapons depot in Lebanon after this hit – which may have legitimately damaged an Iron Dome launcher – tends to validate the Hezbollah attack as a real attack on actual Iron Dome components.
The main point from this incident, in my view, is that even if the Iron Dome battery had been operational, it’s not clear that it would have successfully intercepted the approaching Almas. The Almas was at a very low altitude as it neared the launcher, and it could have made its entire approach from the Lebanese border at such a low altitude. Even if Iron Dome’s radar detected and resolved the target, the reaction time at low altitude would be very short compared to incoming rockets.
A faithful replica of a SPIKE weapon would also be capable of operating in “fire and forget” mode, meaning there are no command signals whose early detection or interdiction would be of use in deflecting it from its target.
Where a weapons threat like the Almas is in play, Iron Dome may well not be its own best defense against an attack on its fielded batteries. I believe an anti-air gun is needed, for now (a modern autocannon with its own targeting radar optimized to detect low-flying threats). And a laser system could be fielded in the near future.
This is the evolving threat context in which Israel will operate in the coming days. The most efficient and effective countermeasure is to destroy these weapons in large quantities at the weapons depot level, before they can even be used. Israel should not have to worry about running out of the bombs suited for attacking such infrastructure and resources – but Biden is making sure that worry is ever-present, with his suspension of delivery for the 500- and 2,000-lb air-delivered bombs.
For this and a number of other reasons, sober analysis of the facts cannot produce the conclusion that Biden supports Israel. I would once have phrased it as “cannot produce the conclusion that Biden supports Israel in the way Americans want Israel supported.” But no more. Biden doesn’t support Israel at all. It’s self-deceptive special pleading to try to make arguments that he does.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and what ails us as history barges in
This brief segment serves mainly to commend to readers a recent article by author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman born a Somali and now an American, living a lifetime of vivid, adamantine thought and communication. She is a passionate defender of the best values of America and there is always much to ponder and learn from her.
In this case, I recommend her article, “The Subversion of the West,” more because it perfectly expresses thoughts I have been looking for an opportunity to assemble. Call my plaudits for the piece confirmation bias, if you like. (Indeed, say that of me at any other time. The “center” of commonly-held thought has collapsed so greatly that it is no longer any sort of virtue to entertain manifestly absurd or corrupt premises, in the interest of “impartial” analysis. Such impartiality has the quality today of bias-confirming blindness: blindness to the poor, indeed destructive, quality of most popular premises. It’s merely affirming a thinking posture that is no longer serviceable, and is being sustained in its practice by the endorsement and applause of others equally blind.)
I don’t sign up to Hirsi Ali’s take on all of the causes or actors she perceives, at least not as primary causes or actors. I do think they are all significant, but some, such as the Chinese Communist Party, haven’t been at work in American thought long enough to have top-level agency in the thorough subversion of mind that she speaks of.
But “cultural Marxism” is a good call, and can reasonably be concluded to be the principal philosophical predator against the moral and political thought of Americans (and the rest of the West). Hirsi Ali’s use of Yuri Bezmenov’s “subversion process” as a set of measures to identify progress and vectors is very useful.
To whet reader appetites, a few brief selections here:
When, on October 8, protests erupted across the Western world in support of Hamas—and not the democracy that had been overrun by terrorists—I saw the revolution. When I look at the recent spectacle at Columbia or Yale or UCLA or Harvard or Stanford—students tearing down American flags and raising Palestinian ones; or chanting in Arabic “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—it is hard not to see the fruit of this long process. I hear the same when, week after week, the streets of London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Hamburg ring with cries of “intifada” or open demands for a caliphate or Sharia law in the heart of Europe. …
What’s striking about the demoralization process is that the law doesn’t typically change—at least not initially. Subversion abuses the tolerance of an open culture, forcing the host society to accomplish its aims like a virus attaches to a host. …
Even in the cases where subversive activity is clearly illegal, such as with destruction and violence during the 2020 riots and at many anti-Israel protests today, crimes committed in service of some larger goal—like “decolonization”—are presented as righteous. …
When young people say “resistance is justified,” many—if not most—of them believe they are simply standing up for the downtrodden. But the deeper implications of that statement are about justifying the morally reprehensible. …
Do most elementary school teachers really want to racially stratify fourth graders? No. I think they dislike the racism of the past and want to do what they can to fix it. Since their betters in college told them that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is the way to go, well, so be it. Likewise, I don’t think your local high school history teacher wants to bring about a Bolshevik revolution. He has simply been told to replace the focus on 1776 with something from The 1619 Project. So he gets with the times. And on and on and on.
What I would go on to do is add a spiritual analysis to what is essentially a secular intellectual analysis. Hirsi Ali’s treatment is excellent as far as it goes. But as she acknowledges, it seems to go only so far to explain how we have sunk with such seeming swiftness to a display-window culture of gibbering idiocy.
Some of the mechanics can be discerned through inspection of the progressive-bureaucracy spaces. Classroom teachers, as Hirsi Ali says, mostly don’t want to racially stratify fourth graders. In spite of increasingly alarming news about teachers in this regard, they also aren’t the main culprits in the crusade to recruit fourth graders to the ranks of “transgender “aspirants. Those teachers’ “betters” in college, who people the educational bureaucracy, tend to be the ones enforcing radical doctrine in the schools.
Radicals, we are discovering, have gotten elected to a lot of school boards too. But these explanatory facts go only so far to illuminate how the radicalism now deeply entrenched in our institutions came to be there, seemingly having met with little resistance as it executed a back-room takeover.
For perspective on that, I propose that the supreme “hack” is to first read Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and other prophets in the Old Testament, and passages from the New Testament letters, the book of Revelation, and the discourses of Jesus Christ. Nothing is a more powerful thinking aid for sorting out what ails the minds of men and women at such a time as this. The books of Psalms and Proverbs will likewise strike a deep chord. Reading about the time of the Judges of ancient Israel can’t fail to be compelling. A power well outside and above ourselves has resonant reality to speak to our spirits, if we have ears to hear.
When it comes to renewing America as a sustainable republic with a constituted purpose, we have miles to go before we sleep. Ayaan Hirsi Ali gives us a framework in which to ponder what our much-compromised modern philosophy would call empirically-perceived factors. But it will take more than that, and the “more” is a project each man and woman must undertake for him or herself.
Climbing the cliffs of D-Day
There is so much to say about the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944. So much to say, and yet I believe it’s important to risk saying too little, in order to focus on the point I want to make.
So instead of covering all the poignant delights from stories and memories and commemorative events, I want to put the perspective of three days’ passing to good use, and go straight to the main purpose. It has been, again, 80 years now. I’ve been thinking a lot about the inevitable reality that, although we’ll have future D-Day commemorations, it will never be this again.
That’s partly because the old soldiers who are still there to revisit the great battle will have faded away. Their ages are generally around 100 or slightly less, if they fought at Normandy. We won’t have their presence among us much longer.
But it’s also because, as I wrote 10 years ago in the 70th anniversary post, the cultural primacy of our connection with the Normandy landing is itself fading. In opening that article, I referred to a 2012 article of mine on the gradual loss of that visceral connection with Pearl Harbor. I recalled how fresh and defining and immediate it felt when I saw the attack on Pearl Harbor depicted on the screen in dramas in the 1970s, as a child and teenager. The connection still had a compelling solemnity about it well into the 1990s. Yet inevitably, that began to change.
World War II, perhaps for Americans especially, was the war. It drew the map the world still lives with today, formed the basis of stability, security, nationhood, national interests, grand strategy, cultural expectations, philosophy, a unifying human narrative. It was a punctuating event in a century awash in nightmarish horrors: the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe, the genocides of Communism. Those horrors did have timelines, but they didn’t feel bounded by time. They didn’t feel like war plans, with start dates and end-states. They didn’t feel like taking conscious, positive action to address great problems.
Neither did the Cold War, which after World War II may have been “cold” and largely bloodless for the “superpower” principals, but could hardly have been bloodier or more hellish for the smaller nations that became collateral damage in the sporadic but relentless advance of collectivism.
War and conflict as a dreamlike Twilight Zone came into their own in the 20th century. Dramas crescendoing on a dream’s atemporal schedule, surging suddenly when the dreamer has been dropped in the middle and doesn’t understand the story – that’s how many peoples experienced parts of the 20th century.
Yet through the middle of the carnage strolled World War II, in some ways like a global Gilligan wandering senselessly through scenes on the tropical island having strangely direct, but unwitting, effects on everything around him. World War II, on its doughty, head-down timeline, gave us our world back with things decided and a course charted, a rare outcome we attribute to winning titanic contests like the landing in Normandy.
If it’s possible to fight like “Normandy” and win our world back today, few if any can really see how to do it. It’s not like social-relationship revolutionaries, the people who crusade for “redefining” marriage and gender and race and the biological features of life itself, are going to mount an airborne assault on defenders of traditional definitions, or gather conveniently on a coastline somewhere to be targeted, all together, with an amphibious landing into their guns by the tradition-defenders. Even those revolutionaries who do propose to fight with kinetics and killing have rarely come at us head-on in battles for territory. The Islamist extremists of ISIS are unusual in this regard; most have been more like Al Qaeda, moving in our blind spots to attack us at work in our cities.
But conditions are nevertheless evanescing around us. The world bequeathed to us – bought for us – by World War II may have a ways to go to crumble completely. But in 2024, we can see cracks in the firmament that were invisible to most people 20 years ago. We see the stable world whose parameters we understand slipping away. And the way to fight for it doesn’t seem clear-cut, as it did when Japan invaded Manchuria, or Hitler invaded Poland.
All of this is prelude to re-upping the musings of 2014 on what D-Day can give us. The process begins with listening to Ronald Reagan, from 1984, recounting how the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” made their slow, horrifically bloody, torturous way ashore and up the formidable cliffs of the Normandy beach.
At Pointe du Hoc they did have territory to target: an assigned sector to seize and hold. It was easier to envision what the enterprise was. Easier to know if it had been accomplished.
But the process of fighting, apart from those clarifying features of conventional combat, is surprisingly informative for us today. This is what I saw in reviewing Reagan’s 1984 speech and the story it told, for an article in 2014. The same perception comes ringing through on the re-read in 2024, and perhaps only more vividly with the cultural collapse the whole world senses around us.
Here are a couple of passages from the speech and the 2014 article. First, Reagan’s text:
At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.
The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers — the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machineguns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After 2 days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.
Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.
These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.
Now the follow-on comments (mine):
There is a real sense – in some ways an even more challenging sense – in which the living generations of today face the sheer, forbidding cliffs of a moral and cultural Pointe du Hoc. In its way, reclaiming the American heritage of freedom, of constitutionalism and limited government for a religious and moral people, is as tremendous and daunting a task as mounting the D-Day invasion.
It has been a long time since Americans faced a challenge whose outcome we knew would be life-altering for us, but whose success or failure we truly could not foresee. …
But America was born from the tenacity of generations of the “boys of Pointe du Hoc.” From the pilgrims on the leaky, lice-ridden Mayflower to the fight for beach-heads in the Pacific in 1944 and 1945, going in where there are no guarantees, yet everything we hold dear is on the line, is what we do. …
We may know the cliff has to be scaled, but that doesn’t mean we can see how to do it.
Reagan’s simple narrative is a good start, though. Throw up a rope ladder and start climbing. When one man falls, take his place, and keep going. When a rope is cut, throw up another and start again. Climb, shoot back, and hold our footing. Soon, one by one, we’ll pull ourselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top, begin to seize back our heritage and our future.
The boys of Pointe du Hoc didn’t know in advance that their fight would be won. Neither do we know today whether ours will be. …
But we know whose shoulders we stand on. And we know, as those forebears did, that we are the ones here, facing the test, and there is no one else.
That’s basically it. That’s what I wanted to say, to twine the D-Day commemoration into the narrative thread of today’s Ready Room.
I hate to harsh any mellows, but in the absence of realism our fight cannot possibly be won. So it is with regret but also the confidence of necessity that I present this sad spectacle, in which President Biden appears to be plagiarizing (at the hands of his speechwriters) portions of the Reagan speech from 1984.
This is where we are. This surreal quality of civic discourse is our starting point. It didn’t get any better at other events on Thursday, such as this one:
I’ll spare the reader the rest. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s keen eye and purity of thought capture well the secular mind’s breakdown and its catalytic effects across a centuries-old – indeed, a millennia-old – civilization. An American president visibly afflicted with elderly dementia is a painfully appropriate symbol. But with fellow readers of the first chapter of Paul’s epistle to the Romans, or indeed of the warnings of the Old Testament prophets, I must see that there are, in any case, no answers for us in secular endeavors.
The secular mind would counsel us not to climb the cliffs of blood and thunder. It would tell us not to even go ashore. It will take a knowledge and certainty deeper than anything empirical sense has for us, to see why we should fight for a better peace, an end-state of renewal rather than resignation, beyond the climb ahead of us.
The arrangements of men give us Ministries of Silly Piers and the dysfunctional obsessions of bad goals and worse alliances. Who knew the day would come when the American people would see so clearly that we must work against the radical regime of Iran, and for the vibrant Western democracy in Israel, while our political leadership was committed with seemingly psychotic tenacity to doing the opposite?
Yet come it has. Note well where we start. I believe it will not be where we end. That’s because the heart of our hope is the very difference between life and death – and the Author of Life who gives us a choice between the two. There is no common ground of compromise between them: no partial life to institute with bustling arrangements, no brokered deal with death, to pull its punches for a little longer. On both heads, the sustainability expiration date has tolled.
Set before us this day is not a conflict we are doomed to lose, or a war to sign an armistice in. Set before us this day are life, and death. The Supreme Author says we can choose one, or the other.
Choose life.
Feature image: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Felix Garza Jr. (Via Wikimedia Commons)
The Optimistic Conservative 
In context of the “subversion process” referenced Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s article: The aim of the U.S. system of government is to enable We the People (through the Bill of Rights) to work together towards “a perfect Union.” In other words, maintain what is working and improve what is not in context of the Constitution.
In a Biblical worldview or philosophy, “perfect” is described as having all needs met. Action motivated by love will result in outcomes where everyone benefits in the long term. In contrast, the aim of those motivated by opposing philosophies can result in more harm. The battle between good (life) and evil (death) started in the Garden of Eden, and the end is described in Revelations.
Within the quality profession, there is agreement that the closer any product or service (including government service) get to the ideal, e.g. more perfect, the better results and less harm to the individual and society. Application of the better quality improvement concepts and methods can provide a tactical advantage and strategic victory in choosing courses of action that will lead to life or death. Additional context: https://timjclarkforcommissioner.com/citizenship-quality-management-christianity/
Following up on your WWII points, I saw Biden at the G7 in Italy. I’m sure it hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that Biden is in worse shape than FDR was at Yalta.
We need leadership, we have none.
The cabal running China Joe* is infuriating. It is as if they want to take down Western Civilization abroad, as in Israel right now, and at home, as per Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s observations. I guess some people can’t handle success.
As long as Obama runs the Biden’s show of ventriloquism , there is nothing to hope for .
The lowest point of moral decay will – God Forbids – be Biden elected anew . That would be Obama 4th mandate .
Have you read one single word by Obama condemning the campuses intifada ?
Not one word ….this speaks a ton . Obama thanks to its calculated passivity has pushed Iran ‘s nuclear race to its final stage.