In which the pond offers a quad bet ... the bromancer, the Lynch mob, the Caterist and the Major ...

 

The way the pond sees it, King Donald has greatly improved his chance of being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. 

After all, Henry Kissinger was awarded the gong after bombing the shit out of Cambodia (and Obama was awarded one after doing SFA for peace). 

So in helping bomb the shit out of Iran, King Donald surely has enhanced his appeal to the committee. Peace, if you like, is very much his warmongering profession.

Certainly not King Donald ...but the pond’s opinion isn’t what appeals to the pond’s correspondents, it’s what the reptiles in the hive mind at the lizard Oz think, and here early in the Monday morning there was much turbulence.

Triumphalism was pretty much the go …

Joe, the lesser member of the Kelly gang, celebrated with...

DECOY FLIGHT, MONTHS IN PLANNING
Operation Midnight Hammer: how the US ambushed Iran
This was a complex and high risk mission involving 125 US aircraft and 75 precision guided weapons.
By Joe Kelly

Shelby Holliday and Lara Seligman marvelled in...

‘CLOSELY HELD SECRET'
Element of surprise: US strike on Iran began with a ruse
A feint to the west drew attention, while stealth bombers and subs maneuvered for the attack.
By Shelby Holliday and Lara Seligman

Jamie Walkier was astonished in...

INSIDE STORY
Deception, precision, chutzpah: how US destroyed Tehran’s nuclear fantasy
The US strikes employed Russian-style maskirovka to deceive the Iranians, Chinese-like precision in execution and all the chutzpah the North Koreans could ever muster to land a potentially lethal blow on the ayatollahs in their stony bastion.
By Jamie Walker

Michael Green advised he had no brain in...

Risk-reward analysis made Iran strike a no-brainer
Imagine a nuclear-armed Iran supporting the kind of attacks Hamas conducted on October 7 and one can immediately understand why Israel, the US and Australia simply cannot allow Iran to have nuclear weapons.
By Michael Green

Other reptiles were assigned the job of hectoring Australia for not demanding an immediate in on yet another bloodletting.

Simplistic Simon cried out ...

ANALYSIS by SIMON BENSON
Canberra’s silence will ring out loudly in Washington
Australia’s foreign policy is becoming increasingly confused and domestically focused as Canberra refuses to endorse the US strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

He was backed up by an admiring duo ...

Israel-Iran conflict
Fog of dialogue: Albanese a shy ally to US
The Albanese government has refused to endorse Donald Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities while issuing a broad call for de-escalation.
By Greg Brown and Ben Packham

Jennings of the IPA fifth form was also on hand to remonstrate

Canberra out of its depth as US, Israel remake Middle East
Any call to urge ‘dialogue’ shows how disengaged Australia has become. Richard Marles continues to weaken our military while the rest of the democratic world is waking up to the threat.
By Peter Jennings
Contributor

There was a slight hesitation in one header, but not in the thrust the celebration of the war mongering and the desire, neigh the need, to get in on the act:

PIVOT OF HISTORY
Nuclear obliteration: US destroys Iran sites, fears war will escalate
Donald Trump has threatened further attacks on Iran if it strikes back against the US after he ­unleashed his country’s most powerful conventional weapons to destroy the rogue state’s nuclear program.
By Ben Packham, Joe Kelly and Ellie Dudley

Some fearful malcontents might be off reading the likes of Anne Applebaum, ranting away in her substack Trump has no strategy, Not in Iran, and not anywhere else.

....Unfortunately I don’t have any confidence in the judgement of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose recklessness and fanaticism has already led to thousands of unnecessary deaths in Gaza. He has also used the war to continue his assault on Israeli democracy, recently firing the chief of Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI, in what felt to many Israelis like a step too far. I don’t trust him not to ignite a broader war, I don’t trust him to moderate his use of violence and I certainly don’t think he cares what kind of Iranian government emerges from this attack.
Nor do I believe that President Trump is interested in the fate of Iran, the future of the Middle East, or anything except himself. His primary motive is to make sure that, in any given encounter, he is “winning.” This is the philosophy that determines his policy on Russia, on tariffs, on Harvard, or on deportations: not what’s good for America, but what’s good for Trump. Before launching this attack he made no attempt to consult Congress, or to build support among the public. He has cut or eliminated US-funded broadcasting into Iran, so the US can’t easily communicate with Iranians, let alone influence what happens next. I don’t believe he has carefully considered what he will do if Iran strikes back, or if the regime strengthens, or indeed if the regime collapses. Perhaps others around him have.
I find that rational people have trouble accepting this absence of forethought. Everyone wants to believe in the existence of a three-dimensional chess game in which the American president has some secret long-term strategy. But he never does.

Oh Anne, Anne, if only you read the bromancer in the lizard Oz, everything would be clear, albeit in a weirdly irrational way ... and best of all, it only took three minutes, or so the reptiles said ..

The header: Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu change the course of the Middle East, While Iran can still do nasty things its rulers now understand that, unlike in the past, these will come with a big cost.
The caption for the tremendous collage, albeit uncredited: In a short address to the nation, Donald Trump said the three nuclear sites were ‘completely obliterated’ as he blasted Iran as the ‘bully of the Middle East’; Benjamin Netanyahu hailed the strikes as a ‘pivot of history’.
The mystical command: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The bromancer was pretty much onside from the get go ...

Like many presidents before him, Donald Trump has undertaken the hardest task in geo-strategic conflict – transforming the Middle East.
He has not done this as a frolic or an adventure. As Trump himself said in his later short speech, for 40 years Iran has been killing Americans and chanting “Death to America! Death to Israel!”
Trump agreed with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran could not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Pretty much the whole civilised world would agree on that proposition. Even the Australian government, so mealy-mouthed it can barely say boo on this or any other subject, repeatedly cites the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs as grave threats.

The reptiles offered a minor distraction in the form of an audio insert ...

Oh there were a few saucy doubts and fears ...

But before we get to the big geo-strategic equation, there are two operational questions which are critical. Were the Americans successful in destroying the Iranian nuclear facilities, especially those at Fordow, but also Natanz and Isfahan?
Trump says these facilities were completely demolished. Iran says damage was relatively minor. It’s a critical question because of the obvious implication for Iran’s ability to reconstruct, or not, its nuclear program.

But how the reptiles loved the kit and their animated graphic celebrating it ...

The bromancer's fears were swept away ...

Given the number of bunker buster bombs the Americans used on Fordow, it’s hard to see how anything could survive intact.
Secondly, perhaps even more importantly, where is Iran’s 400kg stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 per cent? Was it moved before Israel’s strikes, or early in that process? Do the Israelis, with their superb intelligence penetration of Iran, know where it is, but aren’t telling us at the moment?
Uranium enriched to 60 per cent is very nearly weapons grade. If the Iranians retain 400kg of that, the possibility that they could, perhaps with some outside help, eventually use it to produce nuclear weapons remains real.
If there’s any kind of military action Trump would take, it’s the kind he took against Iran. There is no suggestion of US ground troops or prolonged US combat deployments. The action served a fundamental US security interest, namely preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It was accomplished from the air using technology which only the United States possesses.
For its part, Iran, despite the devastation of its military leadership, and with Israel having taken out something approaching half of its missile capacity, hit back straight away with missile barrages against Israel, some of which struck.

The reptiles helped out with another graphic ...

The bromancer ended with pious hope ...

Iran has three possible means of retaliation – missiles against Israel, or against US forces in the Middle East, or US friends in the Middle East, such as the Gulf states; military campaigns by Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, or Shia militia in Iraq; and terrorism, especially against American targets.
It’s likely Iran will try all three. But it’s not as if the US and its allies have not faced such Iranian actions before. Tehran’s ability to strike with all three of these tools is much diminished. Its most powerful proxy, Hezbollah, was devastated by Israeli strikes and seems reluctant to re-enter the battle. Palestinian proxies for Iran, such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are not in a position to launch new strikes against Israel. The Houthis will fire more missiles but get very few through Israel’s defences. If the Houthis start attacking international shipping again they will be hit very hard by the Americans. And Syria, Iran’s chief state ally, has collapsed, which means Iran can no longer resupply Hezbollah easily.
The Shia militia in Iraq are the most intact of the Iranian proxies. They could attack Israel or attack Americans in the region. But the proxies will be less obedient to an Iran which no longer looks as though it’s winning the regional struggle, which won’t have resources or clout to help the proxies in the way it could formerly.
For decades, Iran has been attacking Israel and the United States through proxies and through terrorism. What retaliation there was from Israel and the US was only ever visited on the proxies or the terrorist groups, never on Iran itself.
The Iranians have disastrously over played their hand. The Hamas October 7 terror attacks on Israel changed Jerusalem’s strategic calculus, changed what it regards as acceptable risk. Similarly, Trump has now told Iran “the bullies of the Middle East” that they must make peace of face future consequences more damaging than even the strikes of the last week. In Netanyahu and Trump, Iran now faces leaders who will make Iran itself pay for actions it directs through proxies, terrorists or missiles.
There are still a lot of nasty things Iran can do. But its rulers now understand that, unlike in the past, these will come with a big cost.
Trump and Netanyahu calculate that imposing these costs on Iran will ultimately achieve a more stable Middle East.
Hopefully, they’re right.

Roll on ethnic cleansing and the new genocide ...

The pond then zoomed over to the extreme far right ...

The pond ignored the many other candidates to zoom in on the Lynch mob:

The header: Has Donald Trump flipped the script and become a neo-con? The US President wants to avoid war at all costs, but his action has deepened a tradition his base thought he would end.

The caption: US President Donald Trump was critical of Ronald Reagan’s lack of “backbone” in 1987. Picture: AFP

The mystical injunction: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Captain Bonespurs had found his Melbourne uni muse, with a goodly bigly four minutes of musing:

There is a tension at the heart of President Donald Trump’s world view: he wants to be tough and avoid war at all costs.
That tension got resolved over the skies of Iran this weekend. He went with war. In doing so, he has deepened an American foreign policy tradition his base thought he would end.
The tension was the product of two halves of his adult life. He spent most of the 1970s in his 20s when he imbibed the consequences of American weakness. It began with creeping defeat in Vietnam and ended in the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis.
Along the way, Trump’s future party lost the White House to Jimmy Carter and the Soviet Union marched into Afghanistan. Arab-engineered oil shocks and Japanese neo-mercantilism laid the American economy low.

Cue a snap celebrating a war Captain Bonespurs managed to defer his way out of, some five times, Defeat in the Vietnam War in 1975 was one of the first signs of US weakness for Mr Trump. Picture: AP

You know, because nothing says first signs of US weakness than draft dodgers evoking the bonespurs clause ...

Details, shmetails, the Lynch mob took a different view: 

Trump’s distrust of nefarious foreigners was forged in that decade.
It has never left him. Even Ronald Reagan’s success in bringing America to the brink of Cold War victory did not sate the real estate magnate.
In 1987, Trump took out a full-page ad in The New York Times denouncing Reagan’s lack of “backbone” in the face of an exploiting world.
Rarely, however, did his tough-guy rhetoric translate into calls for a more muscular foreign policy. And thus, we enter the second half of his career, beginning in about 2004, as the Iraq War went pear-shaped.
Since then, we have seen Trump adopt positions that the anti-American left and assorted anti-Israel realists have touted: “America should leave the world alone. Who are we to tell others how to live?”
“Dumb wars” on behalf of ungrateful Muslim populations realised neither jihadist approbation nor American strategic advantage.
The catastrophic consequences of Barack Obama’s war “from behind” in Libya (2011) followed hard upon by the horrors of the Syrian civil war, reinforced the neo-isolationism of the soon-to-be president Donald Trump.

Cue another defeat, this one organised by Captain Bonespurs, and passed off to the man from Scranton, A first-term Trump deal with the Taliban fighters required the US to leave Afghanistan. Picture: AP

The Lynch mob was still waiting for real action:

A signature foreign policy of his first term was a deal with the Taliban requiring the US to quit Afghanistan (incompetently executed by his successor). Millions of young women were abandoned to their Islamist fate.
Sure, Trump would do some tough things, such as killing Iran’s Qassem Soleimani and targeting Houthis. But the era of US-led wars of Muslim liberation, of escorting girls into classrooms, were over.
Tuckerism, the technical label for MAGA’s retreat from war and pretty much all global moral obligations, just about held together in Trump 1.0.
It took nearly as great a battering as Fordow this weekend, however. Trump’s forceful joining with Israel in its war on Iran deepens a long tradition in American foreign policy. It is one Trump was elected in 2016 to end. He hasn’t.
Consider the wars that constitute that tradition. In the post-Cold War era, the United States has committed significant military force abroad at least 11 times: Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1994-95), Iraq (1998), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and Iran (2025).

At this point the reptiles helped out the Lynch mob with a graphic ...

The Lynch mob decided that all this amounted to a crusade, or perhaps a jihad, but in one way or another , some kind of holy war to save Muslims:

Whether Trump admits it or not, he is now complicit in a de facto war for the liberation of Muslims from bad government.
All but two of these campaigns (Panama and Haiti) were not conceived and fought with this rationale, or hoped for consequence, in mind.
We used to call this neo-conservatism: American hard power exists not to be garrisoned but to spread liberal values. It is optimistic about foreigners, especially in the Middle East. Neo-cons think Arabs and Persians are capable of democratic government. There is a tragic irony in a progressive left sneering at this optimism.
Trump has long disavowed a values-driven foreign policy. He determined to humiliate rather than help Ukraine resist Russian aggression. He claims to hate everything the neo-conservatives stood, and (a few) still stand, for.
But if his bunker busters tip Iranians into open rebellion against their rulers and, possibly, into something less vile than millenarian theocracy, he will be a neo-con in all but name.
What Trump says, it turns out, is less significant than what he does. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
Trump has made himself as central to the fate of the Middle East as any of his post-Cold War predecessors.
He has done so, as did they, using military force for high moral purpose: the defence of a beleaguered liberal democracy (Israel) and the possibility of something better (in Iran).

Indeed, indeed, not to mention the high moral purpose of enabling (and distracting from) an ethnic cleansing and a genocide, and the throwing of Ukraine to the sociopathic dictator Vladimir the Impaler, but never mind, cue a snap, US President Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

Strangely the pond was reminded of the doctrines as expounded over the ages ...

The Lynch mob was sympathetic to the bone spurs man's plight ...

Every president since Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) has wrestled with a tension that is now Trump’s to resolve: between wanting to avoid material costs but having the hard power to realise huge moral gains.
A president who, we are told, knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing, could not, ultimately, resist the allure of a moral foreign policy.
“For decades,” said George W. Bush in 2006, “American policy sought to achieve peace in the Middle East by promoting stability in the Middle East, yet these policies gave us neither.”
How remarkable that the anti-Bush Trump should now share his assessment.
Trump was elected to “drain the swamp” at home. Instead, it is the fetid swamp of faux-stable Middle East despotism, starting in Tehran, that may be the first to run dry.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

So much winning ...

Luckily the careening, cratering Caterist was on hand to offer a distraction, an old reptile standby, a staple part of the diet, a goodly dose of renewables bashing ...

The header: Bowen boasts the great energy transition is on track – what could possibly go wrong? The true test of an energy system is not how it performs at peak supply, but whether it can ride out the trough, especially the late afternoon demand spike as solar fades.

Note the sinister smug smirk on that arch villain, captioned Chris Bowen speaks at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Picture: Jason Edwards

There's absolutely nothing new here, and so the pond could romp through the whole thing, a bit like putting on a tired, worn out old coat, while doing the best to avoid lumpy bits of black mould.

The entire point was hopefully to avoid war mongering in the middle east by indulging in war mongering on renewables:

For the record, Australia’s East Coast states hit net zero on Wednesday June 11 between 6pm and 7pm. That is to say, net-zero wind or solar-generated power was available in Queensland, NSW and Victoria as a cold, calm weather system settled over the continent.
It was a low point in a day of spectacular under performance by the renewable energy industry. In the 24 hours from midday June 11, 620 GWh of electricity was consumed on the National Electricity Market of which, 375 GWh came from coal and 91 GWh from gas. The so-called “renewable” component – wind, solar, hydro and batteries – was just 25 per cent, well short of the Energy Minister’s 2030 benchmark.
“Yes, the 82 per cent target does have challenges,” Chris Bowen told ABC’s Insiders recently. “I’ve never suggested that it’s a linear line and it all happens easily, or it’s all automatic.”
Challenging is one way of putting it. Delusional would be another. Either way, the task of supplying electricity when it’s needed to an economy that depends upon it is getting harder by the day.

At this point the reptiles decided to distract by reverting to other forms of war mongering, Sky News host James Macpherson reacts to Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s criticism of Israel’s actions amid the conflict with Iran. “As if you are going to condemn Israel for taking out nuclear facilities which have been used for years to threaten wiping Israel from the map,” Mr Macpherson said. “Zero moral clarity.”

Wrong call, reptiles, roll on the ethnic cleansing and the new genocide as a form of moral clarity.

Now back to the war on renewables ...

As the sun set on June 11, output from weather-dependent generation fell to a trickle and the Australian Energy Market Operator was willing to accept electricity, however dirty the price.
At 5.05pm, AEMO issued a forecast lack of reserve notice for Queensland – the energy equivalent of a flashing red light. It warned there wouldn’t be enough spare capacity if the largest generator failed.
Eight minutes later, a high-voltage connection failed at Belmont substation, 11km southwest of Brisbane CBD. AEMO issued a non-credible contingency event alert, a second red light signalling an expected grid failure that could lead to outages. Fortunately, none occurred.
This wasn’t a freak event. It’s part of the daily drama of powering a grid on a wing and a prayer using ageing base-load generators. The average age of the 14 surviving coal plants is 36. Nine were built in the last century. The oldest, Yallourn in Victoria, was commissioned when Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister.
The average age of gas generators in the National Electricity Market is 24 years. The good news, sort of, is that the first grid-scale gas generator built in 15 years is about to come online, two years late and more than $1 billion over budget. The bad news: the 660MW Kurri Kurri plant isn’t connected to the gas network and will run on diesel.
A grid that relies on ageing generators with limited redundancy is living on borrowed time.
Bowen’s boast that the NEM was running on 46 per cent renewables in the December quarter was a crafty piece of cherry-picking. Electricity demand drops in late spring and early summer, a period of stiff breezes and lengthening daylight.
The June quarter last year told a different story: a colder-than-average start to winter (like this one) and a drop in wind output reduced the renewable share to 30.8 per cent.
The distinct aroma of cooked books wafts from ministerial corridors as Bowen turns to creative accounting to portray failure as progress. AEMO is already shifting the goalposts by promoting a figure it calls “renewable penetration” – the amount of renewable energy “at any moment on any day.”
Thus, we learn that 75.6 per cent of electricity is already renewable, or at least it was at 1pm on November 6 last year, when the eastern states basked in warm, sunny, late-spring weather. It’s the energy equivalent of inflated grain yields in Chinese propaganda extolling Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
The true test of an energy system is not how it performs at peak supply, but whether it can ride out the trough, especially the late afternoon demand spike as solar fades.
This month’s drama, far from exceptional, shows a system running on borrowed time.
Bowen appears to be whistling to keep his courage up, telling David Speers that 15GW had been added to the system since Labor took office.

The very same snap of the demonic ogre heralded another contribution from Jimbo, this time attuned to the war on renewables, blathering away to petulant Peta,  Liberal Senator James McGrath discusses the recent decision by the NSW Nationals to dump their net zero commitments. “We’ve got to get energy policy right, we’ve got to make sure that we don’t crash the economy,” Mr McGrath told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “We do want to reduce emissions. “We have also got to remember that Chris Bowen is the one who’s in charge of it at the moment, and he’s the one with his reckless renewables, who’s actually forcing up people’s power prices.”

Others might be reading arcane nonsense over at The Conversation, such as Global warming is changing cloud patterns. That means more global warming.

Hah, to the Caterist, that's all poppycock, and inspired by Jimbo and petulant Peta, he got incredibly technical, as only a climate science denialist, renewables hater can ...

“That’s three Snowy Hydro schemes added in capacity,” he said. Yet no number of wind turbines could have spared us this month’s on a windless continent facing a cold start to winter.
Battery storage provided brief relief, contributing up to 4 per cent of power in some states in short bursts of just over an hour. The Snowy pumped hydro scheme may come online one day. Yet based recent experience, we’ll be relying on gas and coal well into the future – unless Bowen plans to increase storage capacity by 7700 per cent, the amount needed to run a renewable-only grid for a single winter day.
The ruinous privileges granted to renewable energy investors over the past 20 years have misallocated tens of billions into fickle energy sources, diverting capital away from gas and coal – the only legal baseload options in nuclear-phobic Australia.
Reluctantly, the Albanese government concedes that peaking gas will play a vital role firming intermittent power sources. Yet Victoria’s limited gas generation was pressed into baseload service this month when half the 1480MW capacity at the 50-year-old Yallourn coal plant was lost to a mechanical fault.
Nine newspapers reported that 81 per cent of Victoria’s annual gas allocation was burned in just three days. It was a desperate measure. The average age of the state’s gas generators is 25. At that stage of life, turbines suffer degradation, fouling and corrosion. They lose efficiency, become expensive to run, and are increasingly prone to outages.
Worse, Victoria’s entire gas fleet consists of Open Cycle Gas Turbines – cheap, fast-start units designed for short bursts, not sustained output. They are no substitute for Combined Cycle Gas Turbines (CCGTs), the long-distance runners of gas technology.
Elderly OCGTs emit up to 900kg of CO₂/MWh – on par with average black coal plants. CCGT units emit just 375–500kg/MWh.
Obtaining natural gas in Victoria is fraught. The state government’s ideological hostility to gas has led to the toughest drilling restrictions in the country. Victoria once powered the nation with Bass Strait gas. Now it’s a mendicant state, begging Queensland for LNG while banning exploration at home. Instead, it plans to build a gas import terminal to buy gas on the world market.
Victoria’s energy future borders on the absurd. To cut emissions, it will import gas chilled to −162C, transported and re-gasified in an emissions-intensive process, to generate electricity in the most carbon-intensive form available.
Meanwhile, the federal Energy Minister declares that victory is imminent in a system lurching toward collapse. He insists the great energy transition is on track, and we’re at the cusp an era of clean, cheap and abundant power. What could possibly go wrong?

The only oddity in all this was that the reptiles left off any tag identifying which lobby group the careerist Caterist was representing. 

Was it something to do with Ming the Merciless? Was it some other bunch of fossil fuel lovers? Who knows? The reptiles resolutely refused to provide a clue.

Such a relief only to have to think about the extinction of the planet, a very grand form of genocide.

And so on this very busy day to a bonus featuring Major Mitchell, who dropped in from the golf course to give the mad Mullahs a hard time ...

The header: Journalists turn blind eye to Iran’s intent,Those tut-tutting on social media about Israel’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and rocket launchers seem to misunderstand the Iranian regime.
The caption: Author and academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert. Picture: Aaron Francis

There's pretty much never been a bombing the Major hasn't enjoyed and this time was no different ... perhaps it's his love of golf traps ...

As more people get their news from social media, it is no surprise experienced journalists and academics have sided with Iran against Israel’s operation Rising Lion launched on June 13.
No surprise either that news the United States had dropped bunker buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear sites, including the secret facility under a mountain in Fordow, also came on social media when Donald Trump announced it on Truth Social.
Trump also hit Iran’s facilities at Natanz and Isfahan.
Despite all the hand-wringing on our ABC by journalists such as Raf Epstein on Insiders on Sunday morning, Trump did the right thing.
Iran, once a thriving country with thousands of years of proud Persian heritage, is led by fanatical clerics who hate women, reject the democratic West, publicly advocate for the destruction of Israel and openly support Adolf Hitler and his Final Solution.
People tut-tutting on social media about Israel’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and rocket launchers seem to misunderstand the Iranian regime. They believe tiny Israel with only nine million people in a country one tenth the size of Victoria is bullying a country of 90 million people in a land a third the size of Australia.
They discount attacks on Israeli civilians by Iran’s proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis – over the past two decades and ignore 40 years of public statements by Iranian leaders promising to “drive Israel into the sea”.
Keyboard warriors who are trying to speak truth to power should ask why a country with huge oil and gas reserves languished with a national annual GDP of only $600bn in 2023, compared with little Israel’s $770bn. Australia’s stands at $2.7 trillion.
They could also ask why Israel has an early warning missile alert system but Ayatollah Khamenei has spent nothing to warn his people of attack. Yet he has found tens of billions each year to arm his proxies to keep attacking Israel.
Sceptics of this line could start by reading Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the Australian academic imprisoned in Iran from 2018-20, in The Australian Financial Review last Wednesday, or tracking down her interview on ABC Radio National last Tuesday. She described the repression in 2023 of Iran’s Women Life Freedom movement that received no support from local Hamas backers such as academic Randa Abdel-Fattah.

Odd that the Major should be citing the ABC, but never mind, cue an interrupting snap, Kylie Moore-Gilbert speaks during a rally in support of the Woman Life Freedom movement that is fighting for women’s rights in Iran. Picture: Aaron Francis

The problem for some might be that having no time for the mad Mullahs didn't mean having a lot of time for the barking mad Zionist fundamentalists, who themselves have a decidedly odd view of women, but never mind, back to the Major ranting away ...

To get a good idea what the most displaced people in the region think about the attack on Iran, The Free Press sent reporters out to ask residents of places long part of Iran’s axis of resistance: Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
The Gazans quoted blamed Iran for the damage inflicted on their home since October 7, 2023.
In Lebanon, “still reeling from the months-long clashes between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, most residents we interviewed wanted nothing to do with further escalation”.
The heaviest criticism came from Syrians, victims of now deposed Bashar al-Assad, long propped up by Iran: “Praise be to God, we hope this gangster regime ends,” one Syrian is quoted as saying.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has virtually admitted he has two goals. Only those ignorant of Iran’s history would criticise Israel for wanting regime change. But as Netanyahu said on Friday, it is up to Iran’s people.
Left-wing commentators in Australia have cast doubt on Israel’s second goal – destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They liken it to Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction”.
Regular Nine newspapers’ pro-Islam scholar Amin Saikal was rolled out in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Friday to argue Israel has nuclear weapons and is hypocritical about Iran’s desire for them. Yet Israel has never used them. Israelis feel sure Iran would.
While doubt remains inside the US intelligence community about how close Iran is to weaponising its enriched uranium, sceptics need to read what the UN’s nuclear watchdog has said and ask why Iran has been enriching so much uranium to 60 per cent when only 3 per cent enrichment is needed for power generation.
David Horovitz, founding editor of The Times of Israel, and former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, is no right-wing warrior – he has criticised Israel’s Gaza strategy and has superb political, intelligence and military sources.
He told Times readers on June 18 his sources believe Iran is closer to a bomb than Netanyahu has publicly admitted.
It’s also worth just looking at what Iranian politicians themselves have said.
MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, on May 15, 2024, quoted Iranian politician and academic Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani speaking to Iran’s Roydad 24 News.
He claimed Iran had already achieved nuclear weapons but was not announcing this “so as not to frighten its allies Russia and China, or the world”.
MEMRI on October 16 last year quoted an interview with Jaber Rajabi, a former adviser to the late president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“Iran is afraid to conduct a nuclear test. It is trying to find a place to test the nuclear weapons outside Iran’s borders,” Mr Rajabi said.
There is no hard evidence that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon. Its cat and mouse game with the International Atomic Energy Agency may indeed be a strategy to make its enemies think it is. Yet enriching uranium to 60 per cent would be a very expensive ploy if a bomb was not being planned.
The IAEA censure of Iran the day before Israel launched its June 13 attack is explicit: Iran has enough enriched uranium now to make nine bombs.
Consider, too, the words of the Ayatollah and those closest to him.

It's perhaps unfortunate that the reptiles should have slipped in a reminder of what an epic clusterfuck the Iraq war turned out to be, but they did, An Iraqi woman walks past a portrait of Iraq’s top Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Picture: AFP

That certainly didn't phase the Major. He'd hit his sweet spot and was on song  ...

On March 21, one of the Supreme Leader’s closest confidantes, Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda, denied the Holocaust, saying “all the stories about the Holocaust are a complete lie”.

“England invented the Holocaust to compensate the Jews.”
Khamenei himself, celebrating Iranian rocket strikes on Israel on October 1 last year, said: “Every blow to the Zionist regime serves humanity”
“The Al Aqsa flood operation (Hamas’s October 7 attack) … was a correct and logical move, carried out in accordance with international law and the rights of the Palestinian nation,” he said.
That’s how Iran’s supreme religious leader sees a massacre of 1200 innocents in their homes and at a dance party for peace.
Reza Taghavi, a former member of Iran’s parliament and now a member of a committee that sets guidelines for Friday sermons across the nation, told IRINN Television on October 24 last year that German chancellor Adolf Hitler’s approach to the Jews was right.
Zionists “must be persecuted, deported and killed everywhere”, he said.
A 2021 study by the US Jewish Anti-Defamation League found the Iranian senior, middle and elementary school curriculums full of “incitement to hatred of Jews and Israel” that “strenuously militarises young people, indoctrinating them for war’’.
Reporting of this conflict has been skewed by media hostility to Donald Trump. Yet Israeli sources make clear they believed there were other ways to destroy Fordow.
The US has seen through 20 years of failed diplomacy on Iran. Most Sunni Middle East states will privately approve.

Um, is it wrong to note that the Sunni middle east states are no better than Iran when it comes to women or murdering journalists or slave labour or such like? Or that Zionist fundamentalists are much like the Islamic fundamentalists they deplore? 

Roll on the ethnic cleansing and the new genocide, and let's hope that the government manages to avoid yet another bout of war mongering, inspired by a deep dive into the reptile hive minds at the lizard Oz ...

And so to round out the day with the immortal Rowe ...

It's always in the detail, and what a fine form of nose art there was, a Nobel prize winning pose to help the pilot in his mission ... and how touching he has a Vlad tatt ...