Tuesday’s Final Word – HotAir
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Come a little bit closer, you’re my kind of tab, so big and so strong … 

Ed: How’s that working out for you? 

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Times of Israel: Iran’s military apparatus is “in distress” and incapable of launching many missiles at Israel, while members of the country’s security forces stay indoors for fear of Israeli and US warplanes, according to an assessment reportedly delivered by the IDF intelligence chief to political leaders.

But despite Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder’s rosy assessment of the the US-Israeli bombing campaign’s operation successes, the closed-door meeting held recently by political leaders was inconclusive as to whether those successes could be translated into regime change in Iran, Channel 12 news reported Monday.

During the meeting, Binder said that lately “the Iranians are starting to realize what happened to them,” according to the unsourced report.

“They’re discovering how exposed their command structure is and the damage that has been caused” in the bombing campaign launched by the US and Israel on February 28, Binder said, according to the report.

Ed: This meeting took place, I believe, before the strike on Larijani. These issued become exponentially worse for Iran after that, as Larijani was the connection between the mullahs and the IRGC junta. The elimination of so many top-level commanders in the IRGC and the Basij at roughly the same time will accelerate the confusion and degradation of the command structure. 

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Ed: Get ready for an “austere cleric” style of obit at the NYT and WaPo, at least. 

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Ed: It’s not amazing at all. It’s a feature for progressive journalists. Remember how Thomas Friedman wished that the US had a system similar to China so that the progressive agenda could be imposed by force?

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WSJ: The top U.S. counterterrorism official said Tuesday he had resigned over his concerns with the ongoing war in Iran, marking the first significant departure from the Trump administration due to the conflict.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a social-media post on X, in which he shared a screenshot of his resignation letter addressed to President Trump. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he wrote.

Kent’s abrupt departure is the first significant public sign of dissent within the Trump administration over the president’s handling of the Iran war, which is now in its third week. While some Trump supporters outside the administration have been critical of the president’s actions, the administration has largely presented a united front.

Ed: This was the nine-hour wonder of a headline today. I’m not sure any of us will write about this at length, but it’s not a terribly important story anyway, other than to wonder why Kent had been brought into the administration at all. Perhaps more will emerge on this one way or the other, but I suspect this will be as meaningful as that low-level functionary who claimed to be part of the inner circle posting as Anonymous during Trump’s first term. 

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Official says also the White House told DNI Gabbard Kent should be fired for suspected leaks, but she never did.

Ed: So why did they allow Gabbard to keep him around? Did they use him to spread disinformation that would get back to Iran, or just didn’t use much discipline in dealing with leakers?

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Noah Rothman at NRO: “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote at the outset of his letter. If that’s his biggest problem with this war, then it calls into question not America’s actions but the author’s judgment. At no point since 1979 has the Islamic Republic of Iran not represented an imminent threat to the lives of U.S. civilians and service personnel, as well as American national interests across the globe. The Iranian threat is measured in degrees, not in its presence or absence. The amount of time and resources America devotes around the clock to containing the Islamic Republic’s bloody ambitions has been prodigious. If the National Counterterrorism Center didn’t know that or simply discounted it, he was in the wrong job. …

Indeed, Kent appears to even blame his wife’s tragic death in combat against the Islamic State militia on Israel when he alleges that the Syrian Civil War — or, at least, America’s intervention in it — was “manufactured by Israel.” Does he mean that Syrian instability was an Israeli project? If so, Jerusalem is also to blame for the Arab Spring revolts that ignited many conflicts in the region and ousted figures like the relatively Israel-friendly Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak in favor (briefly) of a figure in league with the Muslim Brotherhood. Bit of a blooper there.

Or maybe Kent resents America’s introduction of soldiers into Eastern Syria to protect the area’s oil infrastructure. If so, his grievance is with Barack Obama, who spent two years resisting the necessity of intervention inside Syria even as he reluctantly committed U.S. troops and air assets to the campaign against ISIS in Iraq in 2014.

Ed: His letter seemed pretty incoherent to me as well. Kent also got the Israeli position on the Iraq War entirely incorrect, as practically everyone noted today. Israel rather famously warned the US that Iran was a far greater threat than Saddam’s Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. Noah covers that as well in another part of his essay. It seems Kent not only leaked, but couldn’t get the basics correct. 

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Ed: That made it sound like Iran posed an “imminent threat,” no? That’s not even the standard, by the way The standard is “a clear and present danger.” That does not require imminence. However, the fact that Iran had enriched uranium to at least a 60% threshold (which Abbas Araghchi admitted in Oman the day before the war began) made the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran clear, present, and imminent. There is no peaceful use for uranium enriched to that level except for weapons, and Iran could have enriched that to weapons-grade uranium in a matter of a few weeks before June 2025, and potentially to this day. Even without Araghchi’s admission, the dangers of the Iranian regime to the US have been both clear and present since November 1979. 

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Ben Shapiro, via RCP: Again, the idea here seems to be that President Trump is a moron misled into war by nefarious Israelis and unnamed influential members of the American media. Don’t say it, don’t say it.

Again, apparently President Trump has no agency and no thoughts.

Kent’s letter is replete with this conspiratorial idiocy, including — as we just saw — the idea that it was Israel that forced the original Iraq war, an idea totally and utterly unsupportable by any evidence, given the fact that the actual prime minister of Israel at the time, Ariel Sharon, opposed the Iraq war.

This stuff is brain rot.

Ed: Indeed it is. One has to wonder why Kent got brought into the administration at all. He’s good friends with Tucker Carlson, Ben notes, who has been defending Kent on line today, so perhaps Tucker lobbied Trump during the transition. The responsibility here is Gabbard’s, however. My friend Olivier Knox and CNN’s Jake Tapper made the same observation about the assumption that Trump’s agency is nonexistent, when he’s clearly making his own decisions. 

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Ed: Again … why was Kent left in this position until now?

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NBC News: Several “Cesar Chavez Day” activities are reportedly being canceled across the country amid allegations made against the late labor leader and civil rights activist.

The Cesar Chavez Foundation said in a statement that it was aware Chavez had been accused of engaging in inappropriate behavior with women and minors during his time as president of the United Farm Workers of America.

“We are deeply shocked and saddened by what we are hearing,” the foundation said in a statement.

The United Farm Workers also issued a statement it learned of “deeply troubling allegations” that Chavez, one of the union’s co-founders, “behaved in ways that are incompatible with our organization’s values.”

Ed: Well, now I’ve seen everything. The Left is actually cancelling Cesar Chavez. Interestingly, neither the NBC News report nor the statement from either the UFW or CCF contain specific allegations of the “misconduct.” Will cities around the country rename streets that bear his name too, before we get to hear what the allegations actually are?

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Ed: Yup. Well, most of them …

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