Oy Vey! Iran is Showing More Strategic Acumen Than Israel

Surprising no one the United States attacked Iran a few nights ago. They dropped a few bunker buster bombs on three nuclear sites and went home.

I was wondering how Iran would react and I suggested they would be smart not to, instead focusing on Israel. That would have been the best strategic move.

In the end they attacked some US assets in the Region but not before announcing the time, place and nature of the strikes to the Americans and the host countries. In other words, they launched a token retaliation and then went back to pounding their true enemy in this conflict.

It should be obvious that the US cannot really hurt Iran unless they commit much more than what they are willing to commit, including ground troops. That could get lost in the heat of the moment and then the Iranians would play into the hands of their primary enemy by shifting their focus to attacking a country they have no hope of defeating.

They did not do that. We in the West are made to believe that Iran and Israel's Arab neighbours are backwards boobs, completely out of their league with regard to taking on Israel and the US. Iran just proved that they can think strategically.

Too bad Israel has lost that ability.

The only saving grace for the Israelis is Iran does not have any ability to destroy the state of Israel. But then again Israel does not have the ability to destroy Iran. So instead they will continue to pound each other until they exhaust their ammunition. 

They will eventually stop and start to rearm for the next round. The key difference is between then and now the Iranians will acquire nuclear weapons, which the Israelis will be unable to prevent because they wasted their efforts in a pointless conflict this time. 

Iran has had the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons for a couple of decades. They have not done so up to now and took steps beyond being part of the Non-proliferation treaty to prove that they were not making them and allowing outsiders to keep making certain it stayed that way. By just sticking to the status quo Israel could look forward to having a nuclear monopoly in that region for the foreseeable future. They blew that. 

I stated in my previous post that Iran cannot lose strategically in this conflict. The only way they might have lost that advantage was to allow themselves to become embroiled in a war with the US. They have avoided that so now it is just a matter of ending the current conflict and preparing for the next one.

PM Netanyahu and his Government Really are that Blind

We are less than a week into the war between Israel and Iran and something about it has jelled, even when how the rest of it will play out is still unclear. It would appear that the Israeli government completely underestimated the ability of Iran to hit back at their country.

Which is really astounding.

Iran is a country with more than 10 times the population of Israel. It has about 100 times the geographical area, with all sorts of access to natural resources within the country and from other parts of the world (sanctions be damned). It has been preparing for war with Israel for over 30 years, basically since the Israelis bombed one of their nuclear facilities in the 1980s. Further, their good friend George W. Bush eliminated their only threat of land invasion in 2003 when he destroyed Iraq as a functioning country. So, Iran has had the luxury of exclusively preparing for war with Israel since then. It should surprise no one that they did so with a sense of urgency and are now more than capable of hitting back at Israel with enough force to hurt them.

Now Israel finds itself in a situation they have not been in since 1973. An enemy that can hurt them as badly as they can hurt that enemy. As well, since they cannot use their ground forces to bring this conflict to a conclusion they will have to continue to endure the pounding they have been receiving.

The fog of war prevents us from knowing the full extent of that damage. However, there is no denying that there are videos coming out of Israel showing Iranian missiles raining down on them with increasing frequency. The war has become a battle of missile attrition. The Iranians have a limited number of missiles they can fire but the Israelis have a limited number of missiles with which to intercept them. As well, it appears that the Israelis have to use three interceptor missiles to take down one Iranian missile, on average. If that is the case it would seem that the Israelis are burning through their defensive missiles at a faster rate than the Iranians are using theirs.

Now the Americans are involved but they are irrelevant. They cannot stop the Iranian onslaught any more than the Israelis can. Sure they can use some special munitions to try to take out Iranian nuclear facilities but that does not help prevent the continued destruction of Tel Aviv.

If the Iranians are smart they will ignore the Americans and focus on Israel. All the Iranians can do to the US is threaten some US servicemen in bases around the Persian Gulf. They can do real damage to Israel however. This would have the added benefit of showing the US just how powerless and irrelevant they have become in the Middle East.

So how does this impact things in the medium to long-term.

First, the Iranians are going to acquire nuclear weapons, either by making them themselves or by buying them from the Chinese or Russians. They currently do not have them because if they did they would have announced that to the world, mostly to inform the Israelis that they now live under a Mutual Assured Destruction situation. Incidentally, that is why the Israelis want to prevent the Iranians from acquiring them. They have a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the region and want to keep it that way. They have just guaranteed that they will lose it, probably before the end of this decade.

Second, the Iranians and much of the rest of the Global South are going to move towards aligning themselves with the Chinese. Their influence on the global order will increase at the expense of the United States and the West.

In the short-term it is a race to see who will run out of missiles first. If it is the Israelis they will have no choice but to ask for the cease-fire and the old aura of invincibility of the Israeli military, security and intelligence services will take yet one more hit. If it is the Iranians then they will suffer some short-term pain but that will not impact their relations with their allies.

Really, the Iranians can suffer a tactical defeat during this war but not a strategic one. Regardless of how the fighting finally stops the Iranians are going to come out on top strategically. How the Israelis did not figure this out before they started the war is astounding.

Perfection is the Enemy of the Good

Since Parliament resumed I have been watching some progressive commentators lamenting that Mark Carney is "governing from the right". That is not true of course. He is governing from the centre but after 10 years of Justin Trudeau it just seems that Mark Carney is right wing.

I have said it many times before that Justin Trudeau was the most progressive PM, who lead the most progressive government, since his father and he will be the last progressive PM for at least the next two decades, probably longer. 

However, that did not stop many progressive commentators and voters from turning on him as much as the Conservatives did. Scratch that, the Conservatives never liked him but progressives did not take long to join them. 

"But he bought a pipeline" progressives cried. 

He also brought in the CERB and other supports for citizens during Covid. If anybody besides Mr. Trudeau would have been PM they would have followed the old government playbook of shoveling 10s of billions of dollars at big business to encourage them not to lay people off. Of course, those same businesses would have given big dividends to their shareholders and bonuses to the company senior management and then they would have laid off 10s of thousands of workers. The reason why Canada came out of the pandemic so well, economically, is because the progressive government of Justin Trudeau put people over corporations.

"He broke his promise on electoral reform" progressives lamented. He also brought in national childcare, national dental care and other programs that directly assist Canadians in raising their children and taking care of themselves.

His reward in 2019 and 2021 was for progressive voters to desert the Liberals for the NDP in large enough numbers to deny them a majority government. And in 2024, if you believe the polls, it looked like enough would abandon him to allow the Conservatives to form a majority government. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

It is ironic, after the Liberals got rid of their progressive leader and elected a more traditional, centrist leader, progressives deserted the NDP and the Greens in droves for the Liberals. You guys were one election too late and now you have to live with the consequences.

Progressives had it great with Justin Trudeau. He brought in so many of the policies and programs that progressives had been calling for since Brian Mulroney began dismantling PET's progressive programs. There was no one else besides Justin Trudeau who would have done so. None of those who were pegged as his likely successor, before Mark Carney came on the scene, were as progressive as he was. So his replacement was always going to go back to the right.

That did not seem to matter to many progressive because he was not the perfect progressive. He pursued just too many policies and programs that they did not like so many decided he had to go.

Now, after contributing to forcing him out, they complain about the new government not being progressive enough. *Slowly butts head against a wall*.

Too freaking bad! The Conservatives can be forgiven for not liking Justin Trudeau and his government. It was a matter of profound ideological differences for them. For progressives they were just too stupid and short sighted to realize how good they had it and that is on you if you were one of them. I have no sympathy for you.

Moderate Conservatives Lost an Opportunity

The CPC needed to be humiliated in the last election. That was the only way for moderate conservatives to regain their voice in Canadian politics. They lost it to populist conservatives, who took over the Conservative Party of Canada, when Stephen Harper was elected leader of the CPC.

As a result the CPC has been drifting further and further to the right until they can now be truthfully called Maple MAGA. 

The last election was a golden opportunity to change that. All moderate conservatives had to do what to hold their nose, for this one election, and vote Liberal. If the CPC would have been reduced to less than 100 seats then the grip of Maple MAGA could have been broken. The irony is by doing so moderate conservatives would have been voting for one of their own. Make no mistake, Mark Carney would not have been out of place in Brian Mulroney's cabinet and he would have blended into a Joe Clark cabinet very well.

However, moderate conservatives just could not bring themselves to do that, at least not in large enough numbers to make a difference. The end result is the CPC lost but not badly enough for them to believe that they actually need to change and renew their party. Pierre Poilievre will win his by-election and he will continue to rule his party much like he did before the election.

Or, he could still lose his grip on the party but his replacement will not be any different from him. Maple MAGA has been emboldened by the increase in the CPC seat count so no matter who winds up leading them into the next election their differences from Mr. Poilievre will be nothing more than differences in packaging and style. They will still be Maple MAGA.

Moderate conservatives forfeited their voice in Canadians Federal politics for at least a decade and probably longer.

Election Assessment: NDP

The NDP find themselves in an existential crisis because their latest election campaign was the culmination of more than a decade of bad political decisions. The way they were going it was just a matter of time before they suffered the fate they suffered on April 28.

I cannot really say anything specific about their campaign except that it was apparent early on that they realized they had no chance and just phoned it in. 

All of this started with Jack Layton. I know that he has been deified by NDP partisans because he managed to take the perennial third party and make it the Official Opposition against a majority government. The problem is he did so by making the NDP just another political party and one that has never learned how to win at the federal level.

Before Jack Layton, the NDP had the reputation of being the conscience of Parliament. They always pursued principled positions and they used that to keep the other parties honest, even when those parties lead majority governments. Jack Layton, decided to move away from that and help the Conservatives in their attempt to eliminate the Liberal Party of Canada. His two successors continued that pursuit. The only problem with that is they were unsuccessful and the result of April 28 was inevitable. It was only a matter of time.

That result is a repeat of the 1993 election. After that election they no longer had official party status because they won around 7 seats. At the time everybody who followed politics was upset by this. We all thought they deserved better. They were just caught up in the wave of revulsion Canadians had towards the Mulroney Tories, who were reduced to two seats in that election and would eventually be swallowed by the Reform Party. This time, I do not know anybody who cares about what happened to the NDP, except for the most partisan of NDP partisans. I know I do not care and as far as I am concerned they can be completely eliminated and I would not shed a tear.

So what happens now?

In the short term they will support the Liberals in everything because they will not want an election any time soon. So as long as all of the recounts currently taking place do not reduce the Liberals to under 165 seats the Liberals will be able to govern as if they have a majority for the foreseeable future.

As for the NDP that will be up to them. What they need to do is rebuild their party from the ground up. That is what they did after 1993. It took them almost a decade, and two leaders, to come back to respectability but they did it. However, what I expect will happen is they will try to go for the quick fix. They will try to get back into the game by the next election. If they succeed then that would be good on them but there is a very real risk that they will fail and failure will mean the destruction of the NDP as a political force at the Federal level. 

We will have to see how their leadership election progresses to see what approach they will decide to follow.

Election Assessment: Conservatives

The Conservatives lost the election on April 28 but not by as much as many believed it would. However, that is very significant because as late as the end of January everybody and their brother were saying that the Conservatives were poised to form a huge majority government. That was BS of course, over the course of an election everything would have come back to the centre, regardless of whether Justin Trudeau had stayed on and Donald Trump had not opened his mouth. However, the perception is the Conservatives blew it big time.

The Conservatives can blame Donald Trump to some extent. His talking about making Canada the 51st state in the weeks leading up to the election did not help. It created a great sense of patriotism, which gave the incumbent Liberals the best opportunity to work with that to unite the country behind them. However, as I stated in my previous post the Liberals failed to fully exploit that opportunity.

So much of the responsibility for the Conservative loss lies with Pierre Poilievre and the campaign he lead. The Liberal campaign sucked but the Conservative campaign was brutal. Pierre Poilievre has the charisma of an angry turnip but he could have overcome that to some extent if he would have had any political instincts and acumen. At every turn, when he had the chance to make the right political decision he did the exact opposite. The number of examples of his political ineptness are too many to articulate here. Someone should write a book about it. 

However, I will pick the example of the Liberals zeroing the Carbon Tax as a case study. That decision worried me because it could have been spun as a sign of weakness that would have dogged the Liberal campaign until the end if the Conservatives would have played it right and they would have been right because it was a sign of weakness. They did not do that however. When Mark Carney eliminated the Carbon Tax the Conservatives became hostile. They claimed it was not real and that PM Carney was just another Justin Trudeau. When I saw that I breathed a sigh of relief because I knew it would not resonate. What I feared and what the Conservatives should have done was take the freaking win. They spent 3 years demanding the Liberals "Axe the Tax" and the Liberals did just that. They won the war but then had no idea what to do afterwards and lost the peace. What they should have done was congratulate the Liberals in finally agreeing with them. They should have ridiculed the Liberals while thanking them, which they deserved. When the price of gasoline dropped by over 20 cents per litre on April 1, Pierre Poilievre should have shouted "I did this", with a regular and online ad campaign and with his MPs and candidates going onto social media to say the same thing. He should have continued by bringing up the topic during the debates. Doing so would have cemented his victory in the minds of voters and it might have shaken enough votes loose for him to actually win. Of course he did not do so. It was interesting, the week before the debates a pollster asked respondents who they credited with eliminating the Carbon Tax. Fifty two percent of respondents said Mark Carney and only 25% said Pierre Poilievre. So after three years of hard slogging, until they finally won, they did not receive credit for their victory. That pretty much sums up the political stupidity of the Pierre Poilievre.

So where to the Conservatives go from here. On the one hand the Conservatives did pick up 24 more seats over their 2021 result. On the other hand they lost an election that they were expected to win and Pierre Poilievre lost his own seat. So Mr. Poilievre could make a plausible argument for staying on as leader but there is also a plausible argument for his resigning. Added to this, it is probable that the Liberals will lose the next election. The probability of them winning a 5th consecutive election are extremely low. So, the leader of the CPC, during the next election, will probably become PM. That is going to make those who want to replace Mr. Poilievre quite motivated to make him leave.

The result could be some real fireworks coming from the Conservatives over the next little while and it could last quite some time. If Mr. Poilievre does not go quickly the infighting in the CPC will just become more vicious the longer he clings to his position. 

That is going to motivate Mr. Poilievre to try to bring down the Liberal government sooner rather than later but with both the NDP and the Bloc having no interest in another election that will not happen. And every time he fails to bring down the government will weaken his grip on the party that much more. I am not going to say that the CPC will split. Nothing that dramatic will happen but the infighting will be hard to miss and as long as it goes on the Liberals will be able to govern without an effective opposition.

Election Assessment: Liberals

The Liberals won the election last night. That cannot be disputed. However, you cannot shake the feeling that they squandered an opportunity for a majority government and they only have themselves to blame.

The Liberals had the best conditions for winning a majority government since 2015. They had the orange gas bag in the US making threats against Canada. They had a brand new leader who seemed uniquely qualified to deal with that very same gas bag. Their chief opponent ran a terrible campaign. (More on that in my next post.)

So what happened?

First of all, Mark Carney has very little charisma. He looks and acts like the technocrat that he is. Part of the job of the leader of a political party is to connect with Canadians on an emotional level and he failed to do that. It is true that he came across as the most competent but that was not enough. It is rarely enough. The campaign that he ran was boring and uninspiring. 

Second, the Conservatives ceded the Donald Trump issue to the Liberals and they did not take full advantage of it. At the beginning of the campaign Donald Trump dominated but that faded after the phone call between him and PM Carney. Although the issue never went away it dropped off as THE issue of the campaign, thus letting the Conservatives off the hook for their woefully inadequate response to Donald Trump's threat to Canada. I compared this campaign to the 1988 election. The big difference between that one and this one was the Liberals never relented using the perceived threat to our sovereignty that was represented by the Canada/US Free Trade Agreement. The Liberals should have done the same thing this time. They did not have to be over the top and they did not have to go into any histrionics. All they had to do was remind Canadians of Mr. Trump's actions and words for the whole campaign. Instead of that we had the Liberals talk about Trump's action impacting the global economy, probably creating a global economic crisis. Great, that is all true but that does not hit you in the gut like Donald Trump's direct threats against Canada. 

I was not impressed by the Liberal campaign and it would appear a large number of Canadians agreed. While I still voted for them anyway it would appear that millions of Canadians decided not to. That is on them.

So what does it mean for their ability to govern?

For now not much and there is a chance that they could govern with their near majority for quite some time. The NDP is going to be addressing a potential existential crisis. This happened to them in 1993 and it took eight years and two elections for them to come back. It could very well that as long this time which means that they may not want to force an election during the next four years. They could very well prop them up while they get their own house in order. That could last anywhere from 18 months to four years.

As well, their chief opponent is going to be going through some stuff in the coming months. I would imagine infighting, while they deal with it, will leave them unwilling to force an election, even if they could get the other parties to agree, which they would not do.

So the Liberals probably have a guaranteed window of about 18 months to push through their key election promises. After that they will be operating on borrowed time and their opponents will probably ramp up the shenanigans to disrupt their ability to govern. So they better move quickly.

One final note, it is very likely that this will be the Liberals' last term for quite sometime. This should also motivate them to move quickly.