Killing leaders in war
[NOTE: I know there are other topics than Iran. But Iran is really really on my mind. So here’s another post about it; there’s so much Iran news, however, I can only scratch the surface.]
During most modern wars until recent decades, the dead were soldiers at fronts and/or civilians who were bombed or who starved. Weapons were precise only when they were close up and personal. Bombs were imprecise, and they were used often.
Starting with the Gulf War we have used “smart bombs” that have gotten smarter and smarter and smarter. Also, starting in the 1970s, we’ve had an all-volunteer military and no draft. These two things have contributed to making us more averse than ever to having any soldiers killed. That’s very life-affirming, and I certainly don’t want a single soldier killed, but it also means that as our weapons get better and better we have become so risk-averse that we usually no longer use approaches that will decisively win wars.
In this war against Iran, we also are facing something else new in our warfare history, as far as I can tell. Iran isn’t just a tyrannical regime (we’ve certainly fought those before), nor is it just terrorists or states that shield terrorists (we’ve also fought those before). It is a terrorist regime that has waged a 47-year terrorist war against us, Israel, and the west in general.
Hamas is/was also a terrorist regime – and happens to also be a client/ally of Iran. But we haven’t been at war with Hamas. Israel fought that war, and we assisted them with military supplies. Plus, Gaza is a very small place.
Iran, on the other hand, is very large. And we are currently at war with them, or at least in an extended military operation of large proportions. They have been at war with us for their entire existence, but mostly through terrorism because they didn’t have the reach for anything else. The main reason we attacked them is that they were intent on expanding that reach and its lethality, and had already done so to an alarming extent.
In WWII the war had fronts and leaders were behind the lines in undisclosed places. I strongly believe that if we could have assassinated Hitler we would have done so. We couldn’t. Even the German Resistance failed to do it, although it tried very hard. We did manage, however, to do things like kill Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto:
To boost morale following the defeat at Guadalcanal, Yamamoto decided to make an inspection tour throughout the South Pacific. It was during this tour that U.S. officials commenced an operation to kill him. On April 14, 1943, the United States naval intelligence effort, codenamed “Magic”, intercepted and decrypted a message containing specifics of Yamamoto’s tour …
President Franklin D. Roosevelt may have authorized Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to “get Yamamoto”, but no official record of such an order exists …
On the morning of April 18, despite urging by local commanders to cancel the trip for fear of ambush, Yamamoto’s two Mitsubishi G4M bombers, used as fast transport aircraft without bombs, left Rabaul as scheduled for the 315 mi (507 km) trip. Sixteen P-38s intercepted the flight over Bougainville, and a dogfight ensued between them and the six escorting Mitsubishi A6M Zeroes. First Lieutenant Rex T. Barber engaged the first of the two Japanese transports, which turned out to be T1-323, the one Yamamoto was travelling in. He fired on the aircraft until it began to spew smoke from its left engine. Barber turned away to attack the other transport as Yamamoto’s aircraft crashed into the jungle.
Yamamoto’s death was a major blow to Japanese military morale.
One of the interesting things about the Iran War is what it reveals about Israel’s penetration of Iran in terms of intelligence. Israel probably had the technical and intelligence ability to do this sort of killing of leading Iranian figures previously, but didn’t until now because it required not only the political will to do so but also the degrading of Iran’s air surveillance capacities as well as the weakening of Iran’s aggressive proxies that surrounded Israel. Previously, Israel seems to have thought bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and killing scientists would do the trick. It didn’t. October 7 happened, waged by Iran proxies and originally planned to include Hezbollah, and it was a moment of sharp truth for the Israelis. The would be a war for its very existence.
I think many people underestimate how very different this war is from other wars we have fought. And yes, although regime change isn’t the stated goal, it is a goal in the indirect sense of facilitating its occurrence through the action of the Iranian people themselves.
And that is another difference – the Iranian people are strongly on our side. It is their own government that has warred against them. Unfortunately, it’s the Iranian government that has the weapons and not its people – at least so far.
Anthropoid is the name of the operation that assassinated Reinhard Heydrich.
It’s also the name of an excellent movie about that operation. The movie is incredibly accurate.
The British also had an operation to assassinate Hitler.
I’ll also note that smart bombs were used in Vietnam. The first smart bomb attack I’m aware of was done buy the Germans in WW2.
Al Davis said it best ” Just win baby!”
As the US and Israel wipe out the ranks of the IRGC leadership, the people down lower have got to think, “I’m next!”
Better to save your own skin when the odds are stacked against you than to die a meaningless death for a lost cause.
Self-interest, the desire to live and self-preservation has got to kick in at some point in the ranks.
I’m betting on a major armed revolt against the IRGC, mullahs and militia. I’m hoping for the opposition to start in smaller cities and then take that momentum into Tehran.
It really is vital to the freedom of 93 million Iranians and future world peace for this to happen.
Another short straw
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/zolghadr-top-iranian-security
Yes the yamamoto example came to mind
Anthropoid shows the downside of that operation that michael walshs continuation novel of casablanca suggests
Many of the players like vahidi gholibaf and now zogaldr are rather terrible but one is reminded some of the associates of
stauffenberg were as well
I recall that Operation Iraqi Freedom began with 2 F-117s bombing Saddam’s palace trying to kill him at the start of hostilities. He wasn’t killed, but we tried.
I am reading this evening that the Iranians have struck in the near vicinity of Israel’s nuclear facility in Dimona, using hypersonic missiles. Civilian targets again, this time with the added threat of radioactive fallout.
I think it’s unfortunate that the reporting on the war efforts is long on praising the troops and our capabilities, and short on discussing actual events. Propaganda is a major turn-off for me. If they want support for the war to continue, they have to be straight up with the facts. It’s demoralizing to hear that Iran has been demolished, defeated, only to have them launching advanced weaponry that hits targets.
I’m a big supporter of this action, I think it’s long overdue, sharing space with a doomsday theocracy and standing by while they develop nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems in secret, to carry out their oft-communicated threats. But don’t treat us like mushrooms.
“If they want support for the war to continue, they have to be straight up with the facts.”
It seems to me that propaganda (psychological warfare) is necessary in war. And it seems unrealistic to expect the government to be totally open about the war. Maybe some intrepid newsmen could ferret out some facts, without endangering us or our military people.
= = = = = = = =
Thank you Neo for this very good post and your other posts about this war. It seems to me that this war is the biggest foreign policy story I can remember. Trump’s second term seems like a Hollywood movie, with ever more dramatic events in rapid succession!
In early 1939, the British military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane, proposed a sniper assassination of Hitler. He suggested positioning himself to take a shot from a window as Hitler drove past in a parade or procession in Berlin.
Mason-MacFarlane argued the plan was feasible and could prevent war.
The proposal made its way through Foreign Office channels to Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax.
Halifax rejected it, reportedly stating something to the effect that Britain had “not reached that stage when we have to use assassination as a substitute for diplomacy.” Other officials viewed it as ungentlemanly or unsportsmanlike.
The last German V2 missiles of WWII were launched on March 27, 1945 and Hitler’s suicide was April 30.
Aggie:
You just said yourself it didn’t hit Dimona, just a town near it. Israel is very small and Iran has been firing many missiles at it, and Iran’s proxies have been firing missiles at Israel for years. Iran will keep firing ordinance of various kinds at Israel till no one is left to fire any and/or some sort of meaningful surrender occurs. No one has claimed either of those things has happened, just that we harmed their leadership, their planes and ships and air defense system, and many of their leaders, and that we can fly at will over their skies, and so their capacities have been degraded – not that they literally haven’t a single bomb or missile left.
For a little historic perspective, most historians agree that Germany’s loss was inevitable several years before the war ended. They kept going although the Allies dominated.
What do you think is being kept from you now that you should know? And how would you even know what’s being kept from you? There’s all sorts of wild information floating around, much of it AI.
As for fallout, it’s not an issue even had Dimona been hit:
Cornhead:
The question is, how many are fanatics who don’t mind martyrdom or perhaps even seek it at this point, and how many are pragmatic people who are willing to surrender when things are dire. I certainly don’t know, but I think there are too many of the former.
The conflict has moved from military to personal. How many of the regime will pick spiritual promotion ( Martyrdom) over CYA?
I’ve been beat to it.
There may be quite a few Iranian big-shots who are genuinely willing to seek martyrdom, but I suspect that the run-of-the mill jerk of a tyrant is more desperate to avoid being demoted to an ordinary joe, especially one surrounded by millions of people who are burning with murderous revenge.
neo:
Highly enriched uranium (U-235) can be made into a nuclear fission weapon with the gun- assembly method (Little Boy – Hiroshima). Crude, simple, bulky, not efficient, but not requiring intricate timing and complex design of spherical high explosive lenses.
You can make small modern warheads with highly enriched uranium IIRC. It depends how much tech and secrets your allies (Russia and China) are willing to share with you (Iran).
om:
Not sure what your point is and what it has to do with the information on the Dimona facility.
Iran has already been enriching its own material and supposedly has it buried somewhere.
The war will last through April.
Remember your furious valor, O Achaeans.
Massive bombardment on April 1st?
(Followed by a swift chortle and a shout out to T. S. Eliot…for his help in charting America’s
kineticpoetry-in-motion foreign policy?)Hmm… Perhaps…
+ Bonus (for warthog lovers…):
“’Changes Everything’: The A-10 ‘Warthog’ Proves Its Worth Again Over The Strait Of Hormuz”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/changes-everything-10-warthog-proves-its-worth-again-over-strait-hormuz
Gosh, another “changer”!
Who knew…?
Barry,
Why the AF has been trying to get rid of the A10 for decades is beyond me. Maybe someone here with insider knowledge of the Air Force can comment. They seem perfectly happy with the 80 year old B52. Is it that they don’t like close ground support and think that’s a role for the Marines and Army?
Before Florida, I spent 3 years as a docent at the New England Air Museum where I watched an A10 being restored; what a gorgeous ugly airplane. I learned the legacy of the plane actually starts with the P47, which initially designed as a large fighter, soon proved its value in ground support. No coincidence they share the name Thunderbolt.
Aggie: Propaganda is a major turn-off for me.
Me too. That may be part of it’s purpose: to sow fatigue and distrust. [1]
On the plus side, it’s persuaded me to stop doom scrolling and to reduce my news input to a few good faith and reliable sources, e.g., Neo and Amit Siegel and JE Dyer. [2,3]
Another plus: a crash course in critical thinking. For example, my comment brings personal reflections, but it doesn’t bring any data points to the discussion, so I’ll add some references.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda/Measurement-of-the-effects-of-propaganda
[2] https://www.amitsegal.net/newsletter/
[3] https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/
School of War podcast w/John Spencer interview (43:48):
https://youtu.be/lZeld8qAxWY
They touch on this new manner of fight ( https://x.com/i/status/2037529183811764661 )
Neo in reply to cornhead:
The question is, how many are fanatics who don’t mind martyrdom or perhaps even seek it at this point, and how many are pragmatic people who are willing to surrender when things are dire. I certainly don’t know, but I think there are too many of the former.
————————————-
It is natural and human to fill in gaps with your own experience.
To assume unknowns resemble your personal knowns.
That everyone shares your culture’s definitions of reasonable, honorable, good, evil.
That we all want the same outcomes.
Many Westerners in this thread and on the internet still are doing this waaaay too much when it comes to Islam…. despite mounting, unequivocal evidence in word and deed.
I now have several decades of up-close experience with some of the most well-educated Arabs in the world, well treated by the West.
They are happy to benefit from democracy, rule of law, capitalism – happy for Israel to keep their culture’s violence at bay – but most of them would destroy Israeli society in a heartbeat Even Though They KNOW It Would Plunge Them Into Poverty And Internecine Violence.
There are countless instances of prosperous Israelis with Arab citizenship turning violent, betraying their benefactors. Spontaneous, and planned; individuals and groups (as we saw in the October 7 massacre).
It’s strategically important to pursue things like the Abraham accords. But it will not be the basis for a permanent solution – not until Muslims reform Islam from within.
Don’t believe for a minute that there are more than a handful of “moderate” Muslims of the type Westerners like to imagine in their warm fuzzy kumbaya fantasies. Or that they admire Western “culture” – especially at its current nadir of decadence.
This is the kernel of truth in Trump’s refrain that the Iranian people have to want it and fight for it…. We still don’t know if it’s just a cover story for good old CIA nation-building…. but it’s an essential cover story because the Ummah opposes any infidel inroads in Dar el-Islam.
Anything short of Iberian-peninsula style (re)conquest and expulsion will not “resolve” Muslim violence in an given geographical area.
Like most American Jewish expats, my friends back in the States are shocked by how our opinions have changed. They have been changed not by raaacism but by reality.
Ben David says, apropos Iran:
“The question is, how many are fanatics who don’t mind martyrdom or perhaps will even seek it at this point,…”
If I may extrapolate, speaking as a citizen of The United States of America, how many moslems can we tolerate within our borders? My answer, based on probabilites and past history, is a resounding NONE. Islam, even that form which is not overtly hostile, is foreign and generally opposed to everything that the Christian West (within which our Biblical forebears, the Jews, peaceably co-exist) is based on. To the extent that the typically hypothecated ten per cent is of the “radical” variety, the prevention of violent jihad against us requires erection of an unbreachable wall against any islamic presence within our borders. Moslems have dozens of countries which not only tolerate, but demand adherence to islam, to which they can emigrate and not make any effort to assimilate to a different culture. Why do they wish to come here, to the (if you believe them) hate-filled shores of America? The answer is self-evident.
This is definitely a novel thing. There has always been a squeamishness about one politician ordering the assassination of another. Even when we took out Yamamoto in WWII, Roosevelt and his cabinet labored to make it look like a military decision rather than a political one.
I understand why the Israelis did this. They really don’t have the luxury of worrying so much about future consequences. I’m also not surprised by Trump. He thinks on the the strategic time frame of a goldfish.
We may come to regret this, however. We’ve basically given permission for our adversaries to do the same thing to us, if they’re ever capable. Imagine an adversary launching a surprise attack against us, accompanied by assassinations that flip partisan control of the White House. We had better hope that none of our adversaries are ever able to do that.
Bauxite:
What a strange set of remarks. Why do you say that killing Yamamoto was a political rather than military decision? First of all, a president is also a Commander-in-Chief. Second of all, military leaders – and that’s what Yamamoto was; he was not a politician – are fair game in a war but are usually difficult to get to. What on earth makes you think that killing Yamamoto was a case of “one politician killing another”? From Yamamoto’s Wiki page, he “was an admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the commander of the Combined Fleet during World War II.”
Your remark about Trump’s time frame is also just bizarre You may not agree with him (we know how you feel about him). He is certainly not always successful. But his strategies are often quite complex, such as the present one involving first the Panama Canal, then Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and China.
Your last paragraph would be humorous if the subject matter were not so serious. Do you really think that our adversaries such as Iran were waiting for our permission to assassinate anyone? Just for starters, they tried to assassinate Trump or Biden prior to this war (see this). Of course they would assassinate any president or politician if they could have done it, long before this war. They couldn’t do it, fortunately.
“Imagine an adversary launching a surprise attack against us, accompanied by assassinations”? Do you really think that hasn’t been imagined since 9/11 and even before? Iran hasn’t been able to do it, but not for lack of wanting to and being willing to.
@Bushehr Bauxite
The knee jerk is strong with this one, alas considering how fundamentally weak the analysis is.
Relatively so at least in modern US politics, though I think that evidence indicates a major reason why.
Not really. It is far more of a product of the Renaissance and especially the 19th century onward. Before if you could kill or incapacitate an enemy politician without egregiously breaking whatever honor or diplomatic mores were involved you generally would, and it was more the hardening of diplomatic protocol in the West (and specifically the West; King Kamehaha the Unifier in Hawaii is still suspected of having organized a fraudulent peace summit to gun down one of his rivals) and spates of anarchist and socialist terrorism that helped move people away from this, especially when it came to civilian heads of state like the Supreme Leader supposedly was. It helped that in WWII there was the serious issue of if whoever replaced Hitler or Mussolini would do a better job and that in Japan they replaced themselves and if we killed their leaders nobody would be around to surrender.
And to be fair it was, though there was also the issue of how much of a stretch the operation was and fear of explaining it if things went pear shaped with the over-fueled Lightnings.
Well they can only worry so much about consequences so far in the future and can’t obsess about niceties.
Irrational hatred and folly beget you, Baghdad Bauxite, but that isn’t too surprising. And it is perhaps fitting I note that the idea goldfish have short memories is a myth that got torn apart by research.
I have a lot bad to say about Trump and I don’t doubt I will have plenty more bad to say in the future, but “nonexistent strategic time frame thinking” is not one of them. As you would recognize if you thought more than five seconds about just what a *real estate mogul* involved in many construction projects has to do and how blatantly ignoring that would undermine what credibility you have left.
But for recap, the Trumps are businessmen that have made it big in construction and real estate. Young Donald had to work on the ground floor a few times when he was a young Cheeto. So even turning over existent properties with no construction work would generally take days, weeks, or months. Construction required weeks, months, or outright years. This is not a marketplace fit for people who have zero strategic time frame thinking or deterred gratification; and caricaturing Trump as such says nothing whatsoever about him and everything about how you are turning yourself into a caricature.
It’d be more accurate to say Trump is temperamental or impulsive about his decisions, including those on the strategic time frame. And there’s plenty to say about that. But one does not pitch plans like the anti-PRC Rare Earth Pact, a hardening of the Quad, or infrastructure overhauls without having the ability to think in the strategic time frame.
The prep work for the Maduro Snatch and particularly the approach of using legit Navy duties against drug smuggling to lower the enemy’s sense of alert also underlines that, and while the finer points were doubtless hashed out by the Pentagon and Cabinet Trump had to have his say so.
So just spare us the drivel.
Your concern trolling and obliviousness were tedious even when they were not flat out engaging in covering up enemy action. And yes, that is what you are doing, and the only question is Fool, Knave, or Both?
Under normal circumstances I might agree with this concern…. IF it had been done without provocation or prior breach of that taboo.
But it was not. We now know beyond any doubt that the Iranian dictatorship tried to murder President Trump more than once.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/iranian-intelligence-agent-convicted-terrorism-and-murder-hire-connection-foiled-plot
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/world/middleeast/trump-assassination-iran-hegseth.html
This is important because it shows the Mullahs planned to murder Trump well after he served as President, both when he was a candidate to retake the White House and when he was the duly elected POTUS, which is a massive taboo for assassination that even Saddam Hussein mostly waited on HW Bush to leave office decisively before trying a runner. It is also important because we can show it goes back to before both the Khamenei whacking but also the Maduro Grab, and thus came before Trump went after any duly recognized head of state, no matter how odious or illegitimate.
So by any honest accounting and by your own *stated* standards the Iranian Dictatorship’s plotting “gave permission” to Trump or anybody else to retaliate in kind.
So like the Mullahcracy tried to do at least once after 2024.
I don’t think we need to imagine, Bushehr Bauxite.
And part of that is by punishing attempts to violate the usual taboos against going after elected heads of state with great force and convincing consequences.
Another part of it is by underlining why something is done and shooting down chaff or attempts to problematize justified retaliation.
So quit the dishonest concern trolling Bauxite.
OM:
Although HEU Can be made into a Little Boy/Mark 1 weapon most easily that is a lousy design for a warhead for a missile due to size and weight constraints. The complexity of an implosion design was mostly a) no one had done it before b) Calculating the fluid compression was hard c) Shaped Charges were a new thing .
These days developing good shaped charges is probably the hardest. But Iran has been cranking out shaped charges for EFP (Explosively Formed Projectiles) since they started supplying them to Iraqi Insurgents in the 2003-2008 period, The Hydrodynamic codes can be calculated probably on a programmable calculator or a $30 Raspberry Pi 3b with ease. Much of the broad information went public domain long ago (C.F. Los Alamos Primer). What once took one of the most technical countries in the world 4 years and a couple billion 1940’s dollars is well within the purview of a determined Third World Country if they can get the HEU, and we know Iran had HEU. And A.Q. Khan likely made much of Pakistan’s info for sale, especially to Iran and North Korea simplifying their testing (as Pakistan already did it).
physicsguy, The New England Air Museum is a great little place, with some astounding displays. The Thunderbolt II (aka Warthog) and its grand pappy the P-47 share a feature, they are both designed around a mechanical item, The Thunderbolt II is/was made wholly to contain the GAU-8 30mm that was designed to perforate Soviet/Warsaw Pact tanks from above. The P-47 is designed around an immense supercharger. Period (late 30s/early 40s) US fighter aircraft had very lackluster performance at 20K ft+ (e.g. the P-40 and the early Versions of the P-51 before the Merlin engine) due to the lower air pressure above 10K. To Solve this an immense turbocharger was designed to compress the airand make it morelike sea level at altitude. The Supercharger is integral with the P-47 fuselage, and is part of the reason the P-47 is far larger than most period aircraft. Given it was going to be huge no matter what they did they put a fair bit of armor in it and gave it 8 .50 caliber machine guns instead of the standard 4-6 of the rest of the period US fighters.
”Why the AF has been trying to get rid of the A10 for decades is beyond me. Maybe someone here with insider knowledge of the Air Force can comment.”
There is a sizable and very influential — almost dominant — contingent in the Air Force known as the fighter mafia. They are former fighter pilots and others who embrace the fighter pilot culture. Think back to the original Top Gun but Air Force instead of Navy. That culture values the air-to-air dogfight above all other forms of combat, as it embodies the bravery and sex appeal of a medieval knight meeting his opponent on the field of battle.
The fighter mafia controls Air Force procurement and has for over 40 years. It’s why the AF chose the YF-22 over the YF-23 — the YF-23 was far more effective at air-to-air combat, but it wasn’t a dogfighter the way the F-22 could have been. It’s why the AF shut down the X-45 J-UCAS unmanned systems program — not because it didn’t work but because it worked too well.
It’s also why the AF brass has hated the A-10 from the beginning and why it doesn’t take the drone threat seriously even after witnessing what is happening in Ukraine. They aren’t going to give up their sexy fighter planes in favor of “toy airplanes.”
It’s not the way I’d run an air force, but it’s the way it’s been for a very long time now.
neo – I was thinking more about China and an opening move of a strike against Taiwan than Iran or a minor power of their ilk. China is probably the only country in the world right now that might have the capabilities to pull off such a move against us. I’m not sure that China would have contemplated actually doing such a thing until we did it to someone else (basically – I know Israel conducted the actual attacks against political leaders). Can you even imagine the chaos if we woke up one morning next year to find that Hakeem Jeffries was president and China was invading Taiwan?
We’ll have to agree to disagree about Trump and long term strategic reasoning. Trump’s MO is to throw caution to the wind and bully his way through. That’s pretty much what he’s doing in Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and China. I’m not saying that doesn’t work for him a lot of the time, but its not an exaggeration to say that he doesn’t worry too much about long term consequences.
Re: Roosevelt and Yamamoto – There is circumstantial evidence that Roosevelt gave the order, but made sure that there was no written record of that fact. If ordering assassinations of high level foreign leaders in war time was considered completely OK because Roosevelt was CiC and Yamamoto was an admiral, Roosevelt likely wouldn’t have avoided making records of the order.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA623450.pdf
@Baghdad Bauxite
You little shit. You’re literally trying to gaslight our host. And lying about it.
No, no you were not.
Quote Bauxite:
“We may come to regret this, however. We’ve basically given permission for our adversaries to do the same thing to us, if they’re ever capable. Imagine an adversary launching a surprise attack against us, accompanied by assassinations that flip partisan control of the White House. We had better hope that none of our adversaries are ever able to do that.”
Now there are multiple layers to this sort of gaslighting nonsense and your problems with attempting to reframe it after the fact.
Firstly: If you had actually been primarily concerned about an opening by the PRC to go after Taiwan, I’d expect you’d mention something about US forces being distracted or tied down fighting in Iran and leaving the defenses in the Asia-Pacific or at home distracted. I’d expect you to touch on usual bugaboos like munition depletion. I wouldn’t expect you to be this pithy or vague or talk about assassinations flipping *the White House.*
Neo called your ass out as did I and showed how stupid and tone deaf this particular flavor of pearl clutching was. So now you’re trying to pretend references to knocking off the Ayatollahs was somehow giving “permission” for the PRC to go after Taiwan or other cases of big bads going after minors.
But the wording doesn’t support that. And in any case this would be ignoring…
Secondly: As Neo pointed out and the rest of us can observe, at no point did bad actors ever NEED “permission” from the US or other external factors to attack the nations they want to, if they think they can get away with it, including assassination plots. Iran tried to murder Trump at least twice. Putin tried to coup the Ukrainian Government and either capture or kill Zelenskyy, his cabinet, and much of the leadership of the Rada. Iran and Syria and Hezbollah were almost certainly behind the murder of Lebanese PM Hariri. Chavez and Maduro threatened to Anschluss much of Guyana and made barely veiled threats to kill the Guyanese leadership or annex the entire country.
The list goes on and on and on and on and on.
So this particular onset of pearl clenching is stupid, disgraceful, and disingenuous. There’s been consistent hesitation about going after heads of state, and especially civilian ones, but as far as things go Trump and Netanyahu killing the Iranian Supreme Leader after said Supreme Leader greenlit a breaking of that taboo from trying to kill Trump and having done so before with cases like Hariri is just about the easiest, most defensible case for it and the one least likely to inspire widening of that, because it can be easily sold as the FO to the Mullahcracy’s personal FA regarding the taboo.
And the Chinese would be deterred from doing so because of our explicit nuclear and WMD doctrine as well as the fact that they cannot point to, let alone prove, any case where the US greenlit a plan to personally assassinate Xi or any other high ranking CCP leader in half a century. Meaning that rather than looking like proportional response to Khamenei’s BS including his own murder of political leaders abroad, it would look like an existential escalation.
Does that mean the PRC would be deterred ENOUGH to not do so? God only knows. But I’m pointing out how you are dishonestly glossing over so much in an attempt to bang the Trump Bad Gong, and now you’ve outright graduated to lying about what you wrote *to our Host* when every single one of us can read and paste what you wrote.
“You’re not sure”. “You’re not sure.” “You’re not sure….”
Holy fuck Bauxite, you’re quite literally arguing that the Party of Mao with a track record of killing people abroad for literal decades, including trying to do things like get together a failed Simba plan to kill Mobutu and Thombe and having openly considered assassinating the Chiangs, would not contemplate this until and unless Trump and Netanyahu killed the Supreme Leader of Iran that tried to kill Trump before?
I’m not even going to guess whether you’re gaslighting us again or if you are legitimately this ignorant, because neither speaks very fondly of you and both underline how utterly credulous you are and desperate to try and turn this into a Trump Bad thing.
No, but it’s worth considering. But again, it was worth considering long before Trump and Netanyahu gave Khamenei a taste of his own medicine, because it’s something along the lines of what the CCP has tried to do before (mostly failing but with a few usually local successes) even without such a “permission”, and would probably involve them contracting out work to allies like Iran and Hezbollah, Putin’s Russia, and other bad actors.
But pointing this FACT – and it is a FACT – out and that it would be irresponsible to only consider it NOW and that the CCP would need absolutely no “permission” to do so would undermine your attempt to paint the killing of Khamenei as more novel and less justified, and thus something you can use to gore Trump.
(“Permission” or patterns of prior behavior might make the PRC *faster* to carry such ideas out or less resistant to planning them, especially on such a scale or with such risks. But that’s not going to change the fact that killing political heads of state or government is not and never has been unthinkable for them before. POTUS and the Israeli PM killing an Iranian dictator who had overseen the murder of a Lebanese PM and tried to kill that very POTUS is not going to be new for them.)
This is not a case of you agreeing to disagree with Neo or myself. This is a case of you disagreeing with objective reality.
Trump’s a real estate and construction mogul who had direct experience working on construction sites as per his father’s direction. In that world a time frame of months is Fast, and often times years and decades go. You can fault Trump’s strategic frame of reference or how accurate it is, but the idea he cannot think in the long term at all is simply delusional.
It is not worth humoring, because it is not an honest or accurate frame of reference. It is a lie, and one I will call out.
That’s at best one MO, but I note you are ignoring the setup for those. As well as his observable history.
He has multiple multi year construction projects under his belt, and after he fell out with Epstein and Maxwell over Epstein’s abuse of a Mar a Lago employee, Trump pursued the case doggedly for years in concert with both the Feds and private legal representatives of E and M’s victims, to say nothing of Trump’s OTHER legal entanglements. These are not the actions of someone with no long term strategic thinking.
And even things like his casino failings aren’t the failings of one with no such thinking.
And it’s tedious to deal with you pretending otherwise, and I see no reason whatsoever why something that is objectively bullshit be accorded as just a difference of opinion equally valid or defensible as what Neo said.
Weasel words. But yeah, he does, whether or not he worries enough is another question, as his legal issues showed.
Did you even read your own source?
At no point whatsoever is there any question of the legality or appropriateness of ordering the killing of “high level foreign leaders in wartime”, especially as Yamamoto was acting as military commander in a theater of combat, not as a statesman on the home front or elsewhere. Your own source shows that the main issue was over protecting the Allied codebreaking efforts and plausible deniability.
It was primarily a question of whether or not it was worth the risk to have pilots take that assignment and whether it would possibly leak to the Axis that we could read Japanese codes versus Yamamoto’s proven utility to the enemy war effort and the obvious legal justification for killing him.
Notably, “politic” only appears in your source twice, Leader 10 times, and the main thing the paper says is, and I quote:
“At the same time, there is no testimony or evidence, suggesting the existence of a preexisting plan or standing order to target anyone, military or civilian, in Imperial Japan’s leadership prior.”
This is, at best, extremely poor wording and only technically true in a very limited sense of whether or not the US had standing orders or plans to “Kill this guy in particular, no matter what”, but which very obviously is superseded by a series of standing orders to target the Japanese Empire and its servants as a whole.
Also the source indicates that after some initial jurisdictional wrangling…
“Zacharias in turn requested a report from the Navy’s Judge Advocate General regarding the legalities and historical precedents for
the mission as he sought to build a case for authorization. Zacharias seemed befuddled. He could not understand why Knox hesitated to authorize the mission himself.76”
Notably absent is much or any wrangling over Roosevelt wanting deniability.
Tregonese314:
Timing is everything in spherical explosive compression warhead design IIRC. Years ago (decades ago?) there were export controls on electronic components capable of such uses. Before the Los Alamos Primer came out there was The Nuclear Weapons Databook series of books published by the lefty NGO Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) in the early 1980s; that’s when I started developing a casual interest in this stuff. I’m not a physicst or nuclear engineer, just one of the clean up crew. …..
Machining a copper plate and assembling it with a high explosive charge to form an explosively formed projectile doesn’t seem too be in the same category of difficulty as a nuclear warhead for a ballistic missile. But that’s just a layman’s speculation.
Topic switch to the P-47. The YouTube channel Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles has a comprehensive and excellent series of videos (5 – 10) each about an hour in length on the design, through final models of the P-47.
Turtler:
CC™, aka Baghdad Bauxite, aka that Bullshitting Bozo just loves that hole he is digging for himself.
But after you get that deep, the dirt you shovel out just falls back in on yourself.
This is a significant shift, as Bauxite notes.
When we went after Iraq or Libya, they bombed lots of palaces, but the official position was, we’re not specifically trying to kill him, but we won’t shed any tears if we do. It wasn’t the stated policy to take out the leadership.
This is different. This is a war of assassination.
They started it, but it does change things in the world, and I haven’t seen anyone else talking about it.
@om
I figure Bushehr Bauxite may fit best, given the regurgitation of Iranian propaganda or even one upping it when doing the Orange Whale hunt. But trying to do this to our Host is particularly jarring. Even if he continues his track record of not paying close attention to his sources.
The “political” issue involved in Yamamoto’s case was specifically due to the role codebreaking had in identifying where he would be, and that would have roped in higher government officials and possibly FDE.
@Tim
For all of my issues with Bushehr Bauxite I agree this changes things a bit, but I feel the Maduro snatch and grab may have done moreso because it was a targeted arrest on a head of state (illegitimate as he was) without a known “tried to assassinate or kidnap or something an existing head of state” ‘justification.’ Khamenei would be easier to justify since he was party to murders of a head of state and head of government before and directly tried to murder Trump twice over, so it is easier to paint that as just reprisal. But this being such a pattern does risk making it more normal.
Issue I see is that goes far beyond Trump, and like I mentioned regarding Khamenei and Putin and so on the bad actors are happy to do it if and when they think they can get away with it. Strikes like Khamenei’s issue raise the temperature a bit but would be easily containable in isolation, problem is they aren’t in isolation from other events and you never know how long it might be before people start trying leader assassinations in earnest.
Tegoneese314:
Here is a link to Greg’s YouTube channel and a recent video about the P-47:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qzrg-u-MYdc
And My impression right now is that Taiwan is issuing a sigh of relief. The Chinese seemed to have been inching towards invasion, including moving assets closer to the nearby coast. It’s late enough that it probably won’t be good for invasion until fall now.
I think that three factors are pushing the Chinese away from imminent invasion right now. First, the superweapons that they sold/gave the Iranians didn’t work very well against the US and Israel. They tend to be somewhat risk adverse, and want to know why.
Secondly, they are facing a significant oil supply shortage. They import most of their oil, and were getting below market oil from Venezuela and Iran. Both now shut down. Passage through the straight of Hormuz is now shut down, even though they are supposedly exempt from the Iranian blockade. And the US has made sure that they know that we know, where their ghost fleet of tankers transships oil between tankers to avoid sanctions. Gas lines now are epic, visible from space. That’s very destabling And, yes, the invasion would require oil products.
Third, its neighbors are starting to push back. The new Prime Minister of Japan has, essentially, said that defense of its allies is justified as self defense. Allies including Taiwan. It’s the first time, in 80 years, that they have been allowed to exercise their military. And they are one of the very few countries in the world with access to front line American weaponry (along with GB and Israel). Philippines, Vietnam, etc are also starting to push back. This isn’t an obstacle that China can’t overcome. But rather it just makes invading Taiwan harder.
The Chinese are very patient, and will have a weather window again in the fall. Maybe when they have sufficient gasoline again.
Marco Rubio, our own IrishOtter49, and often-correct analysts like retired Gen. Jack Keane think this war will be over, successfully, by mid or late April. If these opinions prove true, can we expect a retraction from Bauxite?