In which the pond stays on a war footing, thanks to Polonial prattle, Boudica Dame Slap and the patriotic dog botherer (take that puppy out to the quarry and drown it in the flood waters) ...

 

The big question, the titillation that the pond saved until its meditative Sunday, was the matter of Polonius and the current war.

Polonius has long been a war monger and a hawk. He was still raging about 'Nam back in 2005 ...

Thirty years on, an occasion for some to say sorry (*intermittent archive link)

In those days, it was possible for a reptile to be fully woke about migrants:

 ...in spite of Whitlam, anti-communist Vietnamese refugees arrived in Australia where they have been primarily responsible for changing attitudes in Australia to Asian communism and to Australia's military commitment in Vietnam.

Polonius never gave up on the woulda, coulda, shoulda won 'Nam routine, and he loved war, Why war is hell for Labor  (*intermittent archive link).

That was back in 2003, an Iraq war hawk to the bitter end, and he was still at it in 2011:

Bush and his allies deserve respect after earlier push for Arab democracies (*intermittent archive link)

The establishment of a UN-sanctioned no-fly zone over Libya has led to the destruction of the left's position on the Middle East. The simplistic analysis of the Australian-born leftist guru John Pilger helps prove why.

Uh huh. 

The pond could go on and on - war mongers rarely know when to shut up or to repent - and there was a grim irony catching up on Libya in The Graudian's Power without a throne: how Khalifa Haftar controls Libya (try a different browser if the Graudian demands an email address with menaces):

...Inside Haftar’s territory, a simpler system applied. Since 2014, dissent has been classified as terrorism. A protest, a conversation, a Facebook post: any criticism can carry a death sentence. In October 2016, so many bodies were found on Al-Zayt Street on the outskirts of Benghazi, bound and shot, dumped among the rubbish, that locals renamed it “corpse street”. “When I enquired about a 16-year-old boy who’d disappeared in Benghazi in early 2016, they told me, matter of fact, that they’d murdered him for spying,” Buisier told me. “I protested – we were supposed to be building a state of institutions, of law. They looked at me like I was naive. One officer suggested I might be sympathetic to the terrorists myself.” Buisier left Haftar’s circle shortly after and returned to the US.

Ah democracy, Polonius style. 

Now back to that question: would he maintain his war monger status, or would he veer off into some other arena?

Lo, the prophet cometh ... but aw heck, instead of helping out with Iraq, he's declared war on the Canucks.

Elbows up Canucks, it's going to be a rough ride...

The header: Mark Carney’s US critique ignores truth that middle powers need protection; Canadian PM Mark Carney’s warnings about dangerous hegemony have been exposed as hypocritical by his simultaneous embrace of authoritarian Beijing.

The caption: Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese in Canberra this week. Picture: AFP

On the upside, unlike a lot of other reptiles this weekend, Polonius kept his mongering and his ravaging of the Canucks to a timely four minutes.

I guess I’m in the minority – not for the first time. However, I have read the Canadian Prime Minister’s special address to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on January 20 and found it, well, average.
Without question, Mark Carney has had a brilliant career as a banker, governor of the Bank of Canada, governor of the Bank of England and now Prime Minister of Canada. He exudes charisma and excites audiences, especially of the type who can afford to get to Davos once a year. Writing in the Nine newspapers on March 4 – reporting Carney’s speech to the Lowy Institute in Sydney – journalists Matthew Knott and Peter Hartcher commented that Canada’s Prime Minister had “electrified fellow world leaders in Davos”. Particularly that part about the end of the rules-based international order.
In his speech, Carney made no mention of the US in general or President Donald J. Trump in particular. Yet there was little doubt that this was his target. It’s true that Trump is a Make America Great Again political leader. But, as the US military operation (with the support of Israel) against the radical Islamist theocracy in Iran shows, Trump is not an American isolationist.
At Davos, Carney declared that Canada had prospered under what he called the rules-based international order. No doubt. But this didn’t stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s move into the South China Sea, North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons or Iran’s determination to become a nuclear power.

Another plus. The reptiles kept the visual distractions down to just one, Australia and Canada said on Thursday (March 5) they had signed new agreements on critical minerals, a sign of the developing bond between the "middle powers". The situation in the Middle East was also discussed, with both leaders reiterating the need for de-escalation.

And that created room for a celebratory cartoon:

The pond wouldn't want anyone to think that Polonius forgot his primary mission while going all droog on the Canucks ...

In recent times, Carney has popularised the term hegemony. He used the word, or its derivative, on four occasions in his Davos speech. And again at the Lowy Institute. And yet again in his address to both houses of the Australian parliament on Thursday.
The Canadian Prime Minister sees his country – along with Australia and some other nations – as a middle power. And he contrasts middle powers with hegemonic ones such as the US and China.
This overlooks the fact that Canada – along with Australia and more besides – depends on the US for its security.
Not only with respect to the preservation of sea lanes and air lanes but also in the gathering of intelligence. Canada – plus Australia, Britain, New Zealand and the US – is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership.
The term hegemonic was popularised by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci as a term of abuse to describe what he depicted as the ruling class. Gramsci also popularised the term “long march through the institutions” to describe the intention of the left to come to power in democratic societies by taking over institutions internally rather than by acts of revolution. Looking at some modern democracies, it is evident that Gramsci predicted the weakness of the West.
Not long after warning of the dangers of hegemony at Davos, Carney went off to sign a trade deal between his nation and the hegemonic communist China. Much to the displeasure of Trump.
In any event, in recent times Canada, along with Australia and New Zealand, has publicly supported the US’s intention to remove what is left of Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

And after that lecture, here it comes, those bloody cardigan wearers ruining the Polonial weekend yet again. 

Get out the black sausage, it's ecky thoomp time ...

The US’s action against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran has been criticised by sections of the left. This is particularly evident in Australia at the ABC, led by its Americas editor John Lyons.
On March 4, ABC Radio National presenter Sally Sara interviewed Canadian Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, who was a member of the visiting Canadian delegation.
Sara asked Champagne whether the actions taken by the US and Israel against Iran were consistent with the “international rules-based order”. And whether, if the actions were not consistent with international law, “middle powers such as Canada and Australia (should) speak out or take action”.
To which Champagne responded: “Iran has been the centre of instability that we have seen in the region for quite some time.”

Actually it's not just the ABC. Cartoonists have had a field day ...

But never mind, Polonius was eventually going to wind down, but not before he could foreshadow that war with China, preferably by Xmas, and preferably with diggers leading the way (relax, the Sydney Institute will surely stage a benefit for the wounded) ...

Indeed, its undeclared war with the US began in November 1979, shortly after the mullahs took power in Tehran, when Islamist radicals stormed the US embassy and took 90 people hostage, including 66 Americans, holding 52 of them for 444 days.
The hostage-taking took place during the presidency of the weak Jimmy Carter. They were released when the strong Ronald Reagan was about to become US president from late January 1981 – minutes after Reagan was sworn in.
Since then, the Islamic Republic has attacked US personnel on numerous occasions in Tehran, Beirut, Kuwait City, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, Iraq, Syria and Jordan. The IRGC also has been involved in terrorist attacks against Jewish institutions in Australia and elsewhere.
Many members of the give-the-international-rules-based-order-a-chance cohort have accused Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of breaking international law by bombing Iran.
But the left said nothing when, during the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama, the US dropped bombs on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Likewise, during the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden when US bombs were dropped on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia.
In recent interviews on Radio National Late Night Live, Helen Clark (the former New Zealand Labour prime minister) and Bob Carr (the former Australian Labor foreign minister) have taken a stance against what might be called US attempted hegemony.
Clark praised the fact that in recent years New Zealand has become a country that makes up its own mind with respect to foreign policy. This is not necessarily the position of the current government in Wellington. But Clark overlooked the fact that New Zealand security is secured by Australia and, in turn, by the Australian-American alliance.
Carr has suggested that Australia should reject any proposal by the US that it should involve itself in a US-led defence of Taiwan against an attack by China. But this overlooks the fact that Australia’s sea and air lanes are secured by the US.
Unless and until the likes of New Zealand, Australia and Canada substantially increase military capacity, it is better to be on the side of the hegemonic US than to rely on a non-existent international rules-based order. But such an expression of reality would not lead to a standing ovation at the next WEF in Davos.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Guess who sucked up to the school bully and joined the bully in beating the weaklings in the playground into a pulp? And never mind where the statue might topple ...

The pond hadn't intended to turn to Dame Slap, but there's nothing so splendid as seeing a Boudica (Boadicea if you will) in full warrior, war-mongering, Queen flight ...

After that splendid opening war mongering flourish, there were a couple of snaps, with the caption Mourners attend a memorial vigil after Iranian state media confirmed the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Picture: Daniel Carde/Getty Images

Dame Slap carried on with the law of the jungle, taking up where the Ughmann had left it yesterday:        

According to this Pollyanna rules-based international order, talk soon turns to the rules – so-called international law. To understand why this is equally a dangerous joke, tune in to an international lawyer.
Listen to Ben Saul, professor of international law at the University of Sydney and a UN special rapporteur on human rights, for example. The professor is the go-to guy for the ABC. He appeared early Monday morning on ABC News Radio, quickly dispelling any notion that he, or international law generally, has anything useful to say about Iran or the US-Israeli attacks on it.
This column has frequently pointed out that international human rights law, especially concerning immigration and border security, has been a major contributor to the policy disasters and huge breakdowns in social cohesion that have beset the West in recent years. International human rights law is devoid of precise or predictable, let alone sensible, content and has descended into a contest between who can demonstrate the greatest moral vanity.
On Monday, Saul neatly and succinctly confirmed that the same is true of international law governing war, conflict and terrorism. It’s not merely a joke but a very dangerous one. It goes further than effectively granting impunity to bad actors; it actually condemns any effort to curb those bad actors in the only way that is timely and effective – namely pre-emptively. It metaphorically wrings its hands and clutches its pearls at Iran’s decades-long funding of terrorism, its killing of its own citizens on a scale not seen since Joseph Stalin, its export of destruction to faraway places, notably the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, and its repression of women and gay people. All shocking breaches of various international laws, of course.
But here is the rub. International law is not really law at all because it lacks any effective enforcement mechanism. So, the bad guys ignore it except when they can use it to complain about any effort to control their wickedness.

And this is the real reason the pond went with Dame Slap. She had an entirely meaningless graph imported from kissing cousin The Times:

The pond would have preferred a graphic showing the clever strategy in play:

With that sort of statistical insight in hand, there was no stopping the Dame:

If international law had stopped Tehran decades ago from buying missiles and drones for Hamas to lob at Israel, maybe none of the current drama would have been necessary.
Instead, international law has become an engine of oppression – doing nothing about bad behaviour for decades but swooping in to condemn efforts to clean it up in a timely and effective way. By creating an entirely false veneer of being an enforceable law, it empowers evil and constrains those who seek to restrain evil.
Saul’s interview provides the perfect illustration of why international law is in fact an enabler of global malefactors.
He started with a ringing and unambiguous declaration of the illegality of the actions of the US and Israel. No surprise there. The reasoning bears examination, though. Neither the US nor Israel acted under the authority of a UN Security Council resolution, Saul explained. That doesn’t seem like a good reason to admire international law; since China and Russia have veto powers over such resolutions, they and their allies will always be free to engage in barbarity without being concerned by this head of international law.
Neither, according to Saul, could Israel or the US claim they were acting in self-defence. Apparently under international law you don’t get this defence until the bombs are actually landing in your front yard. An actual attack is required, according to Saul, before you can rely on self-defence. So aggressors can engage in whatever grey zone warfare they like, fund proxy-war fighters such as Hamas or Hezbollah or conduct a secret nuclear weapon program without worrying their victims or intended targets can rely on a claim of self-defence.
Of course, by the time the right to self-defence cuts in, you might not have anything left to defend. An unlawfully constructed nuclear bomb has wiped out Israel? That’s just tough luck for Israel. As Saul helpfully pointed out: “You can’t use force to somehow preventively disarm a country from getting nuclear weapons.”

But wait, there's more, so big the pond had to break it into two gobbets ...

That timeline sent Dame Slap right off, right into the hands of Raff:

Now lest we be unfair to Saul, we are prepared to assume he would be even-handedly robust in condemning Iran’s brutal repression of its own people, its funding of terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The trick, however, is that we must then ask the good professor what remedies does the world have for this wickedness under international law. On the evidence of his earlier comments, precisely none.
According to Saul, you just have to leave it to the UN and collective action by that body. “There is no basis in international law for unilateral regime change for humanitarian reasons. The proper way to do that is through the United Nations.”
Ah yes, the UN. That would be the body that in 2023 appointed Ali Bahreini, Iran’s ambassador to the UN, to chair the November 2023 UN Human Rights Council social forum. And the body that in October 2025 elected Iranian career diplomat Afsaneh Nadipour to its advisory committee to its Human Rights Council for a three-year term. At its February 2026 meeting the advisory committee considered (among other things) technology-facilitated gender-based violence and its impact on women and girls. No doubt Nadipour, whom the National Council of Resistance of Iran called “an accomplice and apologist for the crimes of the misogynistic dictatorship of the mullahs for over 30 years”, had a lot to say on that topic.
Even allowing for the NCRI’s dislike of the Iranian regime, it is simply risible to think the UN could or would do anything to stop Iran’s terrorism, human rights abuses and nuclear plans.
In a fiery speech to parliament on Wednesday, Labor senator Raff Ciccone skewered the hypocrites gnashing their teeth about breaches of so-called international law. “Where was their outrage when women were dragged from the streets for refusing to cover their hair?” Ciccone asked. “Where was their caution when peaceful protesters were executed?”

The reptiles were so enthusiastic they featured Raff ... Labor Senator Raff Ciccone has hit out at the ABC and the Greens over their stance on the Iran war.

Pleased at the company you're keeping Raff? 

Pleased to see the reptiles flocking to your banner and fawning over you? 

Pleased to see the likes of Dame Slap offering plaudits?

Ciccone was surely talking to professors of international law, not just Greens MPs and breathless ABC senior journos such as John Lyons, for choosing “comfort over courage and moral vanity over moral clarity”.
“The Australian Greens and prominent voices rush to condemn Australia for supporting action, claiming that international law has been violated,” Ciccone said. “This is the same international law that was silent as tens of thousands of civilians were murdered by their own government just weeks ago.”
Ciccone’s home truths will mean his own colleague, Labor Foreign Minister Penny Wong, will have to hit pause on her usual craven retreat behind the curtain of international law.
There are a host of reasons why international law is a crock. These range from its unelected makers accountable to no one, to the hijacking of international convention-making bodies by every far-left activist unable to get elected at home, to its convoluted and high-flying language designed to give unelected, politically appointed judges carte blanche.
But the most damning objection is that because international law has no coercive power, enforcement rests solely with the voluntary consent of those subject to it. It is the opposite of the rule of law – the only people who obey international law are those who never, or hardly ever, breach it. Countries such as Iran ignore it with impunity.
Proving that you’d actually be a complete mug to expect tangible order from international law, notice that no Iranians celebrating on the streets this week were holding up posters of the UN secretary-general.

And so to another reading from the sacred text, as the reptiles take us back to the days of great world wars, Victorian empires, and the righteous stoning of errant nations back into the stone age.

What a splendid vision it is to behold. (Why, where would SBS be without the Nazis?)

...Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs as they need, and ye can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill Man!
If ye plunder his Kill from a weaker, devour not all in thy pride;
Pack-Right is the right of the meanest; so leave him the head and the hide.
The Kill of the Pack is the meat of the Pack. Ye must eat where it lies;
And no one may carry away of that meat to his lair, or he dies.
The Kill of the Wolf is the meat of the Wolf. He may do what he will;
But, till he has given permission, the Pack may not eat of that Kill.
Cub-Right is the right of the Yearling. From all of his Pack he may claim
Full-gorge when the killer has eaten; and none may refuse him the same.
Lair-Right is the right of the Mother. From all of her year she may claim
One haunch of each kill for her litter, and none may deny her the same.
Cave-Right is the right of the Father — to hunt by himself for his own:
He is freed of all calls to the Pack; he is judged by the Council alone.
Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe and his paw,
In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of your Head Wolf is Law.
Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is — Obey! (in full here)

The pond immediately heeled.

Obey?

Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy--everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a King Donald bombing the sh*t out of a human face--forever.

What fun it is to head back to the nineteenth century, what fun it is to see Ukraine suffer at the hands of a big bully, and what fun it is to see the big bully do all sorts of backflips...

The pond regrets that it doesn't have the space for the likes of Dave Kilkullen brooding about the war in. It was a bigly 11 minute read, a veritable "Ned" Everest...

Sorry Dave, that's too long, forgive the pond if it sends you off to the intermittent archive, with only your closing remarks noted ...

...At the strategic level, one lesson is that, irrespective of Trump’s need for a quick resolution to the conflict, lest it undermine his support ahead of critical midterm elections in November, war is inherently complex and non-linear, unleashing forces that cannot be predicted or controlled. Even now, the campaign is illustrating the impossibility of doing regime change from the air, to say nothing of whether regime change is even a viable goal: 20 years of the war on terror would suggest not.
One thing I heard whispered in Washington this week was that – between Venezuela, Greenland and now Iran – others may be concluding they cannot trust American negotiators. The terms of any deal seem increasingly contingent on political whim in the White House, rather than consistent policy, and attacking a counterparts mid-negotiation makes it less likely that adversaries will themselves negotiate in good faith.
One congressional staffer gloomily told me this week that, under this administration’s force-based approach to international relations, diplomatic consistency carried less weight, but that wouldn’t always be the case. Russia and China were watching this conflict closely, she noted, and if they saw an opportunity to move against Western interests while the US was tied down in Iran, credibility with allies would matter again, fast. The broader potential for escalation – for Gulf War III to become World War III – is not in the forefront of anyone’s mind at present but the risk is real.
Impact at home
For Australia, the implications of the current conflict are stark enough. As a globally connected trading nation, with millions of Australians overseas and massive exposure to the global system, Australians’ safety and our nation’s prosperity can easily be disrupted by events thousands of kilometres away. Just one illustration of this is petroleum imports, which despite rapid growth in renewables still drive almost every aspect of our economy.
The latest Australian petroleum statistics, from December 2025, showed Australia with 50 days net import coverage, 25 days of diesel consumption, enough jet fuel for 20 days and enough automotive petrol for 26 days. In other words, if global oil supplies are interrupted for more than three to four weeks, Australia’s transportation and production systems start grinding to a halt. The government has rightly advised against panic hoarding, but fuel resilience will become a real issue as the conflict drags on.
There is also the possibility that an expanded conflict may lead to a spike in terrorism risk. Iranian-sponsored terror cells aside, unrest among or against Iranian, Jewish, Kurdish, Arab and other communities is a real issue, one that many Western governments are watching, Australia almost certainly included.
A final possibility is that, if the war drags on or escalates, Australia and other allies may receive a US request for support. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – including joint facilities in Australia – are almost certainly already involved. No request for warships, aircraft or ground troops has been publicly discussed but planners would be wise to be thinking ahead.
In the meantime, and much more importantly, families such as my friend’s – across Iran, Israel, the Gulf states and elsewhere – are sheltering in basements, comforting their kids, hoping they have enough food, water, cash and medical supplies, and worrying what the future holds. Tens of thousands of Australians and other expats are stranded as they seek to leave the region, and millions more locals have no exit in sight. This war is unlikely to end soon, but it has already changed the game.

It's certainly done that Dave...

And so to the dog botherer doing what Polonius was doing but doing it better, bigger, louder: blame the ABC! Blame those damned cardigan wearers for not being sufficiently war monger ...

The header: Our ABC, so why promote our enemies’ interests? When an institution actively works against the nation that funds it, drastic remedial action is required.

The uncredited caption for a collage that's wisely uncredited, so crass it is: Does the ABC show loyalty to the country and citizens who fund it?

It's no surprise that the dog botherer is the sort of flag-waving ratbag to be found in Australia Day marches:

“Australians still need things that we all have in common,” Labor’s Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Julian Hill, said last week. “Principles that everyone is expected to sign up to, values we share, and events and moments broadly marked and celebrated together.”
It was refreshing to hear this plain statement of patriotism from the Albanese government. Hill was even brave enough to back Australia Day and the flag.
The idea of national values and common aspirations, along with respectful disagreement, is something to which most of us would subscribe. This is the centrality of what passes for our national compact. It is right there in the citizenship pledge: “I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.”
So far, so good. But my question is this: Why does none of this seem to apply to our national broadcaster? Does the ABC show loyalty to the country and citizens who fund it? Or show respect for their rights and liberties?
Time and again ABC journalists make the arguments of Australia’s critics and enemies. They undervalue our rights in favour of the perceived rights of others, such as those arriving illegally by boat.
The ABC’s reflex position is to oppose foreign conflicts, amplify foreign criticism and express deep scepticism about the US alliance at the core of our national security. The national broadcaster regularly takes positions at odds with our national interest.
This is not what politicians had in mind when they founded the ABC. In his opening broadcast in 1932 prime minister Joseph Lyons spoke idealistically about the “power to promote the establishment of a lasting world peace” and the “high sense of public duty” ABC members would exhibit. The ABC charter, enshrined in legislation, demands “programs that contribute to a sense of national identity”. They should “encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs” – an undertaking the ABC seems to observe in the breach.

The reptiles were so shocked that they slipped in a snap of the main villain, ABC Americas editor John Lyons.

It wasn't that surprising. He was just saying what others were saying ...

For once the pond was so pleased with the way an ABC reporter had managed to agitate the reptiles that it decided to feature him at the bottom of this post- for those who might have missed it.

And for those worried about missing the dog botherer? Never fear, they're only verbal bombs, a form of diarrhea, the sort of sludge that can make a sewer overflow ...

We have seen this across the past two years after Israel was attacked by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, triggering antisemitism and Islamist extremism targeting the Australian Jewish community. The ABC fanned the flames of “pro-Palestinian” activism and downplayed the threat of antisemitic attacks, all the way to December’s Bondi Beach atrocity.
The ABC’s delinquency has been on display this week too as Israel and the US attempt to deal with the malign influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Albanese government issued a statement last weekend offering mild support: Australia “stands with the brave people of Iran” and supports “the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” and threatening global security.

Ah yes, America first and Australia second ...

At this point the reptiles slipped in an unfortunate swishing Switzer, still on his redemption tour.

What he was saying rightfully should have seen him branded a treasonous traitor: The Australian columnist Tom Switzer says the majority of Americans “oppose” the intervention in Iran. Mr Switzer told Sky News host Chris Kenny that Iran will need to “hold out” against the US. “If the Iranian regime can hold out for four to five weeks, then they live to see another day.”

Hang on, hang on, that's the sort of talk that would see the reptiles hang that spitting Lyons from the nearest lamp post:

“To me, that is political propaganda,” ABC Americas editor John Lyons spat. “What they actually mean, they don’t say it, but what that sentence should say, if they’re being accurate, if the Prime Minister of ­Australia is telling the truth, it should say: ‘Australia stands with Israel and the US in their new war on Iran.’ So that is absolute, in my assessment, political ­propaganda.”
Judging by his coverage of the Middle East and the Trump presidency, Lyons knows about propaganda. After the President’s first words on the Iran action, Lyons said: “My main impression listening to that is that’s Israel’s agenda, that’s Israel’s talking points, not the United States.” These comments regurgitated a tired antisemitic trope about Jews covertly controlling global power. They also ridiculously suggested Trump is not his own man.
“There’s a lot of untrue statements and narratives being told at the moment,” Lyons ranted. “They are all in unison now; I mean Anthony Albanese’s statement could have been written by the United States and Israel, it is straight out of their playbook.”

Shocking stuff, almost as shocking as discovering that the reptiles still haven't managed that rebadging of Sky Noise Down Under: Sky News contributor Kosha Gada comments on Labor Senator Raff Ciccone’s speech about the hypocrisy of the ABC and the Greens. This comes amid joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran, which killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and prompted days of mourning at several Islamic centres and Mosques throughout Australia. “There are many downstream consequences of immigration policy, and you just create this patchwork society, and there’s this coalition of the fringes then that ends up being the backbone of a political party,” Ms Gada told Sky News host Steve Price.

Hang on, hang on, that Kosha is a bloody Yank. 

What's she doing out here on Sky Noise down under? 

Who let a bloody Yank in? The last thing we need is a patchwork society where some sort of fringe loon thinks they can come in here and wank away for a Yank-owned foreign corporation. If we want a yank, we can do it ourselves.

Shouldn't she be tending the home fires? Perhaps enlisting in the cause, fighting the good fight, fallingin behind her fearless leader?

Sorry, back to the dog botherer, still in a state of high Lyon agitation:

Someone as experienced as Lyons would know allies tend to speak in unison. It seems what really angered him was Australia siding with the US and Israel; Lyons could not stomach that, even against a foe as brutal and repressive as the theocratic dictatorship of Iran.
More than two years of Iran-instigated and funded war against Israel, months of Iranian dissenters being slaughtered, decades of terror attacks across the Middle East and persistent programs to develop nuclear weapons and stonewalling in negotiations while vowing to annihilate Israel, yet Lyons and the ABC were outraged that the US and Israel would attack.
Even Iranian terrorism unleashed on our soil – the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne and a business in Sydney – was not enough to convince the ABC and Lyons that our national interest might lie in standing with democratic allies.
This is a flabbergasting failure of moral and strategic clarity. And it was paid for by taxpayers who expect government to provide security.
On the ABC, James Glenday, Sarah Ferguson, Sally Sara (and no doubt others) have obsessed over whether the Iran military action complies with international law. A better question, of course, would be whether it is justified on strategic, security or humanitarian grounds.
This legalistic preoccupation is shared by the hard left, UN multilateralists and virtue signallers of various kinds.
Sarah Hanson-Young, Mehreen Faruqi, Andrew Wilkie and Malcolm Turnbull have all been pushing the “illegal war” line – oh, so has the Iranian representative at the UN.
In fact the UN charter (article 51) allows for self-defence, and this alone could justify the war given the number of assaults against Israel and American interests by Iran and its proxies.
But the absurdity of the “illegal war” angle is laid bare when you consider that, in effect, critics are demanding UN Security Council authorisation knowing full well that Russia and China have a veto.

The reptiles decided to show a couple of snaps designed to make the dog botherer flip right out ... Sarah Hanson-Young and Malcolm Turnbull have been pushing the ‘illegal war’ line. Picture: Newswire /Martin Ollman

 

The pond has absolutely no idea why it would be called an illegal war ...

The dog botherer ended with a cry of pain ... of the sort that comes daily from the Australian Daily Zionist News...             

So the legality argument is not a serious one, it just demonstrates that the UN is a busted flush. It is a way of attacking the US, Israel and even their timid supporters such as Australia while avoiding the substance of the issue.
Valid arguments can be made against the war, relating to exit plans, unintended consequences or whether diplomacy has been exhausted. In this case those arguments are particularly weak compared with the risks Iran poses, so hardline critics run the legality nonsense and the ABC gives them credence and volume.
None of this serves our national interest. It only helps Australia’s enemies.
This coverage puts the leftist bias of the ABC up in neon, even under Labor. As we saw when the Hawke government supported the first Iraq war and when the Gillard government tried to stop people-smuggling, the ABC occasionally will attack Labor but only from the left.
When national institutions work against the nation that funds them, remedial action is required. Corrective action at the ABC would seem particularly remote, however, given its chairman, Kim Williams, exposed his own bias to the Nine Entertainment newspapers last week when discussing a love of Israel’s history.
“I don’t think (Benjamin Netanyahu) is part of that very long, deep history,” the ABC chairman said. “I think he is an aberrant creature … I think he’s frankly an aberrant creature in the history of Israel.” Catching his own words, Williams added: “But that’s a very inappropriate thing for me to say and I shouldn’t really be saying it.”
He just demonstrated how the ABC has about as much ideological diversity as the Iranian theocracy. Taxpayers are forced to fund it under the obscene misapprehension that it improves us.

What a hoot. 

The pond always loves it when the hive mind talks about ideological diversity and the dangers of theocracy, while exhibiting all the diversity of a hive mind, and the theological diversity of the Australian Daily Zionist News ... now there's a theocracy that gets the bombing done.

And after all that, after an entire weekend spent with the warrior reptiles? 

The pond's mind was left in a state as clear as mud ...

Time for a purgative, time for a correction, time for a few teaser trailers for Haaretz ...

Netanyahu Aims His Awesome Power at Iran – and 'The Enemy Within'
The cynical gang that fantasizes about toppling the Iranian regime speaks in the name of freedom, but its distance from the values of a liberal democracy is longer than the journey from Tel Aviv to Tehran. Another kind of heavy bombing will start the day after the war (*intermittent archive link)

"Only force works: when people are afraid of you," Benjamin Netanyahu said at a security cabinet meeting before the attack on Iran. The prime minister was dismissive of "experts, even ones from the leading universities of the world," who don't understand this simple truth. Anyone hearing this Darwinist monologue could have gotten the impression that when Netanyahu stressed the importance of force, he wasn't only thinking about the ayatollah regime.
The prime minister's recorded message the first night of the war opened with the words "My brothers and sisters." But he and his people see half of their brothers and sisters as an enemy no less dangerous than the Revolutionary Guards. For three years they have tried to suppress anti-government protests, claimed that the demonstrators are stabbing the nation in the back, and spread conspiracy theories about a betrayal from within.
"Terror amazons," Netanyahu called some of the protest movement's activists in private talks, demanding that the head of the Shin Bet security service handle protesters with an iron fist.
Just before the war, members of the governing coalition defended thugs who intimidated people they believed to be leftists. Now, as the missiles fall, they're demanding that the victims of their incitement join hands with them in the bomb shelters. The heavy bombing will start on the day after. The Iranian campaign will be depicted as a historic victory regardless of its actual results, and the other war will resume.
Urgent issues like the campaign to end Netanyahu's corruption trial weren't neglected this week either. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir showed up at the site where a missile killed a woman in Tel Aviv and declared that "this trial should have ended a long time ago." The prime minister immediately rewarded him by assailing Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who had informed the High Court of Justice, alas way too late, that she saw no option but to call for Ben-Gvir's dismissal. Petitions to the court seek his removal over the alleged politicization of the police and his alleged excessive involvement in its operations.

And again:

Everyone in This Country Has Gone Insane
Not a single voice of reason to be found among the pundits, politicians and general public, who all run to the shelters on an hourly basis but smile when they emerge, praising the Iran war and the blessings it brings. It almost makes you miss 1967 (*intermittent archive link)

Where was it determined that wartime is also a time for stupidity? Who wrote that when the cannons roar, the muses are not only silent but ought to be ashamed? It's been a long time coming, but what has happened to the public discourse in Israel this week is shattering all record lows.
It is impossible not to miss the victory albums and the songs of glory of 1967. "Nasser is waiting for Rabin, ay, ay, ay" is subtle compared to the garbage today. And who would have thought that we would miss, "Oh Sharm el-Sheikh, we have returned to you again." Today, it's "Finally we'll be able to live free, finally we'll be able to breathe, Israel is free, Iran is free, everyone hears the roaring lion, Hallelujah to the air force, Hallelujah to the army … You're our great pride" (lyrics by Pnina Rosenblum).
Except we are not just talking about songs, but the public and media discourse. Ultanationalist, we're used to it already; militaristic, that's normal too. Everything is right-aligned, there is no room for doubt, for opposition, for question marks or anything less than respect and praise for the Israel Defense Forces – that's also a characteristic of wartime. Silence – we're shooting. Only patriotism in the TV and radio studios and on social media. What's different this time is the level of the discourse, or, we should say, its unfathomably low level – never before has it been so hollow, cliched and stupefying.
A former soccer player is considered the voice of wisdom, a military-police officer the voice of morality. Every Persian Jew is a pundit. To the sock puppets otherwise known as military correspondents and their peers covering foreign affairs, who have also joined the chorus, a new cadre of analysts has been added, a type that never before filled the airwaves and social media so densely and with such exclusivity; barrages of brainwashing the likes of which have never been seen here before. That's how it is after two and a half years without real journalism, without even minimal coverage of the war in Gaza.
Try to find even a single voice of reason, someone with something to say, who actually knows something. Not a one. For Purim, media personality Avri Gilad is an air force pilot, and the children's entertainer Yuval Shem Tov sings in Farsi. Everyone is so gleeful: Why? Or maybe it will all end in tears. It's unacceptable even to raise the possibility. The orgy of assassinations is in full swing, every hit a cause for celebration.

And so on at the link, and now for that Lyons moment. 

Sure, it's already days old, but how sublime that he managed to keep the reptiles in a rage for a week ...

And now that you've had the war Ozsplained for the entire weekend, time to have it Foxsplained ...

And let's not forget the usual positive summary of positive events from the always positive and cheery Simon Marks ...

In which the pond enters the reptile war zone, and is trapped in a hell hole bunker with "Ned", the bromancer and the Ughmann for an ungodly twenty minutes or so ...

 

Today was the day the reptiles went all in ...

There's no way that the pond could carpet bomb that mob into submission. 

Instead the pond had to chose its targets carefully, and so ended up withe usual suspects...

"Ned" led the charge ... aided by a frankly wretched collage...

The header: Donald Trump’s Iran gamble is flawed but necessary: The US President launched this war without a clear plan and continues to radiate both hyper-confidence and abject confusion. But he should be supported for this action.

The caption for the frankly tedious collage: With the neatness of his earlier operation in Venezuela in his rear vision, Donald Trump is learning that Iran is a far more complex challenge Artwork by Frank Ling.

"Ned" sounded all in, at least in the header, but as always with "Ned", the devil was in the mind-numbingly tedious both siderist detail.

Running at a bigly ten minutes, replete with graphs, the pond felt a need to surrender immediately, to run up the white flag, and decided to take it on the chin:

Amid the unpredictability of an expanding war and confusion over Donald Trump’s war aims in Iran there is one certainty – sooner or later the President will declare a victory and invoke the military demolition in Iran as proof of a transformation of power in the Middle East.
Trump is now sucked into the cult of the strongman, with all the shocks this carries. The US-Israeli war machine under Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu is dismantling much of the Iranian security state and its defence capability, starting with the stunning precision decapitation of its leadership. The consequences of this incredibly intense Trump-Netanyahu war will reverberate for decades. Iran’s strategic weight in the region is being devastated, yet where its political system finishes from this military battering defies prediction.
The regime of the ayatollahs, now hostage to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is fighting for its survival, and when authoritarian regimes confront a survival crisis they act from desperation. They have nothing to lose, hence Iran’s attack on the Persian Gulf states and beyond.
The depth of the regime’s resilience is being tested but its defiance is apparent, revealed in the intention to appoint as its successor the hardliner Mojtaba Khamenei, son of assassinated ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a reminder of Trump’s inability to command Iran’s political future.
With the neatness of his earlier operation in Venezuela in his rear vision, Trump is learning that Iran is a far more complex challenge. He can command the US military campaign but he cannot control the erupting impact of the forces he has unleashed – as Europe moves to defend its interests, Israel launches a fresh campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon and global energy prices are set to skyrocket with damaging domestic impacts.
Trump’s big mistake
Trump radiates hyper-confidence about the military results and abject confusion about the political future. At mid-week he said Iran “has no navy, it’s been knocked out, they have no air force, it’s been knocked out, they have no air detection, that’s been knocked out. Just about everything’s been knocked out.”
Yet at week’s end a frustrated Trump declared that Mojtaba Khamenei was an “unacceptable” choice as leader and that he wanted a role in that decision.
Trump has signalled – in an interview with The New York Times – that his preference for leadership change was replication of the Venezuelan model where US forces extracted its dictator, Nicolas Maduro, denied the nation’s democratic forces and relied on a regime replacement more acceptable to US pressure.

Make of that what you will, as the reptiles decided on a break with liddle Marco, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stands behind as President Donald Trump. All week official Washington has been riddled in chaos and contradictions from the President and his senior officials about the war aims. Picture: AP

The pond is hearing talk of chaos and confusion and contradictions, but when has that ever troubled the Daily Zionist News?

Trying to apply this model to Iran is beyond bizarre. Earlier in the week, when asked who he would like to rule Iran, Trump said: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead.” Might the regime be stronger in reinvention than Trump anticipated?
Trump won’t commit US ground forces but reports that Iranian Kurds coming from Iraq might become the “boots on the ground” are deeply ominous, raising the risk of ethnic and sectarian conflicts in Iran as well posing a new danger to Tehran. Might Trump authorise the CIA to encourage resistance on the ground?
Israel’s objectives
The evidence is that Netanyahu has a much clearer sense of Israeli objectives in this war than does Trump of American objectives. Trump’s mistake in announcing the war was tying the campaign to the goal of regime change when he had no plan whatsoever to achieve that goal.
Indeed, his method was to tell the Iranian people to rise up and “take over your government” when they had no arms, no organisation and the regime was ready to shoot them.
Air power alone is a forlorn means to achieve regime change in a nation of 90 million people. Trump launched this war without seriously devising a plan to achieve his goal of regime change beyond the military elimination of the top 50 leaders.
All week official Washington has been riddled in chaos and contradictions from the President and his senior officials about the war aims. The efficiency of the military contrasted with the ineptitude of the political leaders, with no sign Trump made any proper assessment of how the regime might respond, the strategic impact of a wider conflict or the global economic consequences of a possible closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where tankers are already ablaze.
Trump and Netanyahu identified Iran’s weakness and went for the kill. This was ruthless opportunism. Despite claims to the contrary, every logic still points to a relatively short US war given Trump’s impatient character, the prospect that US opinion will be sceptical of the war, erupting energy prices and ongoing strains on the US military.

At this point, the reptiles began to wade into graphs as a kind of sea invasion:

"Ned" pressed on, in a kind of 'boots on the verbiage ground' invasion:

Trump’s suggested four or five weeks while Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said it could last eight weeks. The bottom line is obvious: Trump won’t be duplicating the disastrous commitment of George W. Bush in Iraq. But any US war termination by Trump won’t necessarily end the conflicts now being unleashed or internal struggles within Iran.
Despite the confusion and the blunders, criticism about an illegal war, scepticism from allies and lukewarm support at home, the US and Israel are justified in their strike to eliminate much of the danger to the region and the world from the post-1979 Iranian revolutionary regime.
This central conclusion can be expected to carry the day – that the time for reckoning finally has come for Iran’s fanatical and terrorist regime, given its sponsorship of terrorism, its obsession about destroying the Israeli state, its periodic military strikes against the US, Israel and the West, its repression and killing of its own people, and its quest for a nuclear weapons capacity to guarantee its immunity.
Albanese, Wong make an important decision
Given Trump’s decision to mount a decisive strike against the regime, strategic and moral assessments dictate support – despite the serious risks and downsides involved. This is the judgment made by the Albanese government, with Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong in the lead. It is one of their most important foreign policy decisions so far and hostility from the left will be fierce, as they know.
While putting the emphasis on the need to deny Iran a nuclear weapon and sidestepping regime change, Labor’s response was faster and firmer than many European nations, notably Britain and France. Australian support is bipartisan. Albanese said: “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security.”

There came another visual distraction: The strategic interest for Australia is obvious: we need a short war, a reconstructed Iran, a refocus as soon as possible by the US on the Indo-Pacific.

How simple it sounded, how easy peasy. A short war, reconstruct Iran, and then focus on the Indo-Pacific war with China by Xmas!

"Ned" sounded pleased that we'd decided to get on board with a narcissistic, demented king, always keen to distract from his domestic crimes (what with the puppy killer being replaced by an MMA clown as silly as a brain-afflicted sausage):

This reveals Labor’s fidelity to US power, the moral case for the war and a belated recognition the so-called rules-based order is on life support, being submerged by ugly power realities.
This war highlights Trump’s obsession about threatening or attacking weak targets, from Greenland to Venezuela to a diminished Iran. Now he crosses a threshold: herein is Trump as champion of great-power muscle flexing. Where his predecessor, Joe Biden, was defined by his sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump is defined by the use of force to smash Iran. He thrives on the notion.
It is a mistake to extrapolate from Trump’s military venture in Iran to think Russia and China will be intimidated by the strongman in action – Trump’s aggression against the weak does not equate to audacity against the strong, notably President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping. Trump is a gambler. Iran proves that – but he gambles only with the battlefield loaded in his favour.
Destroying Iran’s proxies
Trump and Netanyahu have combined in an awesome display of their military and intelligence power that represents a dramatic reversal from Iran’s ascendancy at October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its massacre of Israelis. This event triggered one of the most important strategic sea changes in Israel’s history.
Netanyahu grasped that Israel’s position was being relentlessly eroded by Iranian tactics and proxies. He decided that such proxies – Hamas and Hezbollah – must be destroyed and that Israel must attack Iran as the source of endless regional conflict.
That strategy is being played out in Tehran in an unfolding military catastrophe for the Islamists.

At this point the reptiles flung in a whole series of graphs, just to ensure that this "Ned" Everest climb took on an interminable length:

Apologies, but it's the pond's duty to show the reptiles in all their PowerPoint glory, as "Ned" resumed his natter:

Trump, meanwhile, is engaged in a project to defy recent history. After past failures in Iraq and Afghanistan – given the disreputable tag the “forever wars” – he seeks to demonstrate that a sustained aerial campaign without “boots on the ground”, in lockstep with Israel, assisted by winning control of the skies and applied over a short period, can deliver strategic and political transformation where previous regional interventions failed or were discredited.
As his presidency unfolds Trump succumbs more and more to the great man theory of history. Whether the Iran war inflates or burns this trait remains to be seen. But Trump is only in the second year of his four-year term and is engaged in a process of presidential rediscovery. The Iran war, for example, is not how he won the presidency. In this 2024 triumph, Trump said: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” In his inaugural address, presumably with Ukraine in mind, he said he wanted to be judged by “the wars we never get into”.
Trump, as usual, will have no trouble turning on a dime and saying that defeating what he calls a “very wicked radical dictatorship” is the path to peace in the Middle East. But presenting as a strongman comes with risks.
He told the regime’s military to “lay down your weapons” or “face certain death”. This was phony bravado. On day three of the war he announced he had “fulfilled” his promise to the Iranian people – yet the regime was still in place with its capacity to kill unarmed civilians. Again, it was just showmanship.
The next day Trump was all over the place. He said the worst-case scenario was putting in power somebody “who’s as bad as the previous person” – ironic given the prospective father-son transition.
After meeting Trump, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said: “The American government does not have a clearly formulated strategy for the future civilian leadership of the country.”
That’s a polite way of describing it. Meanwhile US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said getting people to overthrow the government was “not the objective”.
Two contradictory truths
There are two contradictory truths here: no other US president would have launched this war and no other US president would have been so cavalier about the process. Might Trump’s war actually fail? After one week, that’s hard to see but it cannot be dismissed.
The more relevant question is: how successful will it be? Regular repeats of this war, say each two years, cannot be the future. Trump needs a new political alignment in Iran. Unless the ayatollahs are deposed, it is difficult to imagine the nuclear agenda being shut down.

There came a last AV distraction: President Donald Trump has warned the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to surrender or face "guaranteed death" as US strikes devastate Tehran's military capabilities. Trump made the remarks at an event with the Inter Miami soccer team at the White House on Thursday, local time. Trump claimed Tehran was reaching out to the United States about making a deal amid US and Israeli strikes on Iran. "They're calling, they're saying 'how do we make a deal?' I said you're being a little bit late," he said.

A final saucy doubt crept into "Ned's" narrative:

Given the Trump-Netanyahu goal is to ensure Iran cannot develop nuclear weapons, then unless they secure a major change to the regime the war ultimately may be judged a failure.
Might the IRGC outlast Trump’s war? Who has the greater threshold to absorb pain? It is unlikely to be Trump. That’s why he needs military results and needs them quickly.
Even if the regime survives, Trump’s justification will become the removal of Iran’s missile capacity and industry and the substantial demolition of its nuclear agenda. Trump, at the minimum, must be able to deliver on these military justifications for the war.
This is a far more serious venture than anything Trump has done before. Hubris and posing won’t cut it. The exhortations from Hegseth are hardly reassuring given his mid-week rant that the Iranian regime “are toast and they know it, or at least soon enough, they will know it”.
In reality, the future lies on a spectrum of unpredictability that may range from Iran fracturing as a society, to a pro-Western government or the mullahs holding things together in an Iran locked into a cycle of despair. On the regional and global stage, the downside is how much this war reinforces the degeneration to a “might is right” world disorder that ultimately benefits the authoritarian powers such as China and Russia.
Israel is entrenched as a regional superpower, but looking beyond Iran, what does this mean for a Palestinian peace given Netanyahu opposes a two-state solution? The idea that Trump might restrain Israel on the West Bank is remote.
What this means for Australia
The strategic interest for Australia is obvious: we need a short war, a reconstructed Iran, a refocus as soon as possible by the US on the Indo-Pacific and a prioritising on competition and balancing Chinese power.
The critique that Trump is waging an illegal war will mobilise much of the progressive class. Indeed, they may have a narrow sense of the law on their side, but they don’t have common sense or a better world.
Consider the position: Iran for decades has waged wars by proxies killing Israelis, spreading terror across the region, funding terrorist organisations, being responsible for the deaths of thousands, killing and torturing thousands of its own people, and seeking to acquire a nuclear capacity so it becomes invulnerable.
The message implicit in the legal critique is that Iran cannot be touched because it poses no imminent threat to the US while it is apparent that neither persuasion nor diplomacy – only force – will change its declared missions. Such legalisms keep the door open for Iran to develop its nuclear capacity with devastating consequences – the spread of nuclear weapons across the region, a far more dangerous fate for Israel and a manifestly more dangerous world.
This argument fails on morality and practicality. You cannot expect leaders in a democracy to follow a legal prescription that assists a terrorist regime to expand its terrorism and the number of peoples and countries it can threaten.
The US President couldn’t care less about international law but the international legal case against him is one of the weakest arguments against his tactics.
Trump is giving Australia a big message. The old world is disappearing; the new world is about power realities. This must be dawning on the Albanese government, the question being: When will they do something about it?

When will they do something? What can they do?

Why they must become Crusaders, and sing along with Faux Noise ...

Speaking of Crusaders, the bromancer was also out and about on a war footing:

The header: American air power and weakened ruling elite not enough to guarantee Iran’s regime collapse; Democracy doesn’t seem the most plausible best outcome, given the circumstances of the Islamic Republic and the specific paths generally taken when authoritarian regimes fall.

The caption: The majority of people of Iran, repeatedly betrayed by broken promises and shattered dreams, want an end to the ayatollahs’ rule.

The good news was that while he was on a war footing, the bromancer only managed five minutes of regime change, surely enough time to fix everything ...

How would regime change in Iran actually happen?
In Iran, the state is at war with the society. Iranian society embodies something of Persian cultural richness over 2½ millennia. (Fun fact from Persian history: more than 2000 years ago, Cyrus the Great freed the Jewish people from Babylonian slavery and enabled the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.)
Iranian society exhibits courage, idealism, poetry. It has the energy of youth and the wisdom of the ages. Iranian filmmakers, mostly dissidents, produce exquisite films, either non-political or slyly anti-the ayatollahs’ regime. The Iranian diaspora in the West, not least Australia, are hugely successful – doctors, therapists, technicians. In short, Iranian society has the culture.
The Iranian state, however, has the guns. In our brutal world, guns routinely beat culture, at least in the short term.
How Israel killed Khamenei with a missile from space
The US and Israel, and all civilised people, want regime change in Iran. But there’s still every chance of the ayatollahs’ regime surviving, though it’s unpredictable. The ayatollahs’ rule could indeed collapse. That’s possible too. The majority of Iranians want this. How could such regime unravelling come about?
In the Cold War, when the Americans wanted to effect regime change somewhere, they looked for regime enemies, whom they then funded, advised and equipped, a move they’re now trying with Iranian Kurds. They seldom undertook direct military intervention.
They never tried regime change just from the air. American air power is awesome. The lesson of all conflicts since World War II is that with US air power on your side, you cannot lose, provided you have some ground force. But without a ground force at all, it’s extremely difficult to destroy a regime.
Yet the Islamic Republic has never been weaker. If ever it’s going to fall apart, surely it’s now.
Dictatorships, authoritarian regimes generally, fall in a few specific ways. They start to liberalise and liberalisation gets out of control. That happened to the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. Or the ruling elite, in response to domestic or international pressure, moves intentionally to some kind of democracy. This happened with the end of Suharto’s rule in Indonesia. The democratic elections that followed were held under the old authoritarian constitution. Similarly, the rulers of white, apartheid South Africa voluntarily ceded power to majority rule, meaning black rule. This went reasonably well, notwithstanding contemporary South Africa’s problems, because of the grace and magnanimity of Nelson Mandela.

Sssh, don't mention Israel's attempt to help out by selling nuclear weapons to South Africa, instead a ghoulish moment, A still from a video taken January 9-11 shows bodies and mourners outside a morgue in Iran, following a crackdown on protests in Tehran province Kahrizak. Picture: UGC/AP

The bromancer continued to dance around, as much in hope as certainty:

Dictatorships can be replaced following total military defeat, as happened with the Nazis in Germany, and the military in Japan, after WWII. Internal regional hostilities can become unmanageable and lead to civil war. That’s how the artificial communist dictatorship of Yugoslavia ended.
More commonly, a state’s security forces simply refuse to shoot civilians. This was crucial in the collapse of communism in Poland. So far, Iran’s security forces readily kill civilians in huge numbers. The regime is also yet to display any debilitating internal divisions, though the regular army resents the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, itself internally factionalised. Are there CIA clients in the IRGC?
What about Islamic models? Iran has been a Shia, theocratic, Islamist state since the 1979 revolution Ayatollah Khomeini led. But the emphasis has switched. It’s become a national security state, dominated by the IRGC. Pakistan has long balanced Islamism with the military, with the military predominating. That was the equation in Indonesia under Suharto.
The other way a dictatorship unravels is if there’s fatal conflict within the ruling elite.

The reptiles decided to fling in another AV distraction, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong reacts to reports of some Australian mosques mourning the recent death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “In relation to the mourning of the Ayatollah that’s been reported … I’m really disappointed that people would want to do that,” Ms Wong said. “This is a man who has led a regime which has caused death in many parts of the world. “It is a regime that engineered … attacks on Australian soil and a regime that killed its own citizens.”

The bromancer apparently wanted to feel an irrational surge of hope in his warrior, crusader loins, and yet:

The ayatollahs’ rule could conceivably succumb to any of these dynamics. But it has a few automatic stabilisers as well. Shia Islamist ideology has lost a lot of fervour, but it’s still genuinely held by a significant minority of Iranians. Even in distant Australia some Shia mosques mourned and eulogised Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one of the longest-serving dictators in the world, and one whose rule was brutal and savage. The Iranian state has murdered tens of thousands of its protesting citizens this year alone.
Belief, even if irrational, is powerful. There’s still an Islamist-believing base in Iran. Secondly, the regime has become spectacularly corrupt. The IRGC, somewhat like the old Indonesian military but on a bigger scale, has become an economic colossus. A lot of people with a lot of money don’t want fundamental change.
On top of that, the Iranian state has not only murdered tens of thousands of its own people, it has spread the act of killing far through the society, not only by IRGC troops, but also the Basij militia. Many thousands of Iranians have been actively complicit in murder. These folks know if Iran ever became free, a democracy, the families of all those murdered could well demand accountability and justice.

Another interruption, Israel took the decision to kill Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in November and was planning to carry out the operation around six months later, Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday (March 5)

The bromancer began to sound as befuddled as the King himself:

They also know that as devastating as the US and Israeli military campaign is, it has its own fairly severe time limits. They hope to wait it out. Only about a quarter of Americans support Donald Trump’s military action. Barely half of Republicans support it. Democrats are running hard on the financial costs of the military campaign.
If Iran manages to kill some more Americans, or injure the global economy in a way that registers as higher prices for American households, this will affect even Trump’s resolve, as congressional midterm elections approach.
The maximum time Trump has suggested is four or five weeks.
There’s another paradox. Although Iran has still a well-educated population and a sophisticated middle class, it doesn’t have much meaningful recent history of democracy. In the past hundred years it’s been ruled by four men – two shahs and two ayatollahs, all four dictators. Iran has been repeatedly betrayed by broken promises and shattered dreams. The first of those two shahs modernised Iran and produced rapid economic growth. His son ran a murderous security state, though they were amateurs compared with the viciousness of the ayatollahs’ regimes.

In case you missed that line in the bromancer's screed, The maximum time Trump has suggested for the campaign is four or five weeks. Picture: Mandel NGAN / AFP

The bromancer ended on a note of cautious optimism, though shying away from a big bet:

At first the ayatollahs liberated Iran from the shah’s secret police and offered something of Islamic idealism, but quickly revealed themselves to be obscurantist theocrats, totalitarian ideologues and savage in their suppression of dissent. If Khamenei’s son, Mojtada, becomes long-term ruler, the ayatollahs will have transformed themselves into a dynastic thiefdom, a la North Korea.
Another problem is that, internationally, democracy doesn’t enjoy such great prestige these days. It’s no longer the obvious route to modernisation and peace. Even in Australia, fewer than half those aged 18-24 think democracy is always the best form of government.
Nonetheless, sustained US and Israeli strikes may so destroy the ability of the Iranian state to function that it succumbs to internal disorder, perhaps an element of ethnic break-up, especially centred on the Kurdish minority. The worst outcome is a North Korea-style Iran. You could get a wildly nationalist leader, an Iranian Vladimir Putin.
Trump surely thinks the most plausible good outcome is simply a more reasonable dictator, the so-called Venezuela solution. The ideal would be what political scientists call a “repressive-responsive” regime. This would eschew the nuclear program altogether, concentrate on economic development and, while maintaining strict political control, allow a wide degree of personal autonomy, while responding to people’s needs.
It’s a reasonable hope. But don’t bet your house on it.

And so much for the hapless, repressed people of Iran: "A more reasonable dictator"

Much like King Donald himself ...

Oh they do regime change in style at the lizard Oz.

And so, if you're a trinitarian, on to the Holy Ghost, which is to say the unreformed seminarian known as the Ughmann:

The header: War, energy security and the brutal lessons of power: Despots know the truth: cripple energy, and everything collapses. War choking the Middle East is showing us how the world really works and what fuels it runs on.

The caption: A fire blazes in the oil depots of Shahran, northwest of Tehran. Picture: Atta Kenare /AFP

Usually the pond would attempt some analysis, perhaps even offer the odd counterpoint, but the reptile strikes this day are so massive, the pond so intimidated, that all the pond could manage to was record the reptiles laying it out for the hive mind.

It turned out that the Ughmann was just your old-fashioned realpolitik dude, a man to gladden the heart of Bismarck and Mao:

The current Middle Eastern war underscores how the world really works and what fuels it runs on.
First, as Chairman Mao Zedong put it, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
International law is a mirage that middle powers cite, evil powers exploit and superpowers honour in the breach. If you have the guns and are willing to shoot, you make the law. There is no international police force and no penalty for starting wars beyond the unimaginable consequences that flow from them and the high risk that you will shoot yourself in the foot.

Just to hammer home the unreformed seminarian's tastes, the reptiles flung in a reminder, Chairman Mao Zedong.

That reminded the pond that it was in the presence of another cult:

Sorry, the Ughmann is busy with listicles and it was rude to interrupt:

Second, the world runs on hydrocarbons. This is also real power. The troika that delivers more than 80 per cent of the world’s primary energy is still coal, oil and gas. Energy security is essential and green energy an aspiration. With the war choking off one-fifth of the world’s supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas, the price of both has spiked. So has the price of coal because it can be substituted for gas in power production. If this persists for any length of time, the world will rediscover a brutal truth: energy shortages spread quickly from stalled tankers to inflation, industry and politics.
Europe has seen its natural gas prices surge by 70 per cent because it has decided it is best to import every molecule of the fuel that is essential to keep the lights on in its weather-dependent electricity system. To lose one gas supplier may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.
First, Europe bet on the goodwill of a gangster in sourcing gas from Russia, then on enduring stability in the Middle East as it switched sources to Qatar.

The reptiles next flung in a bigly AV distraction, MST Financial Senior Energy Analysis Saul Kavonic warns Iran’s attacks on key oil and energy infrastructure could be globally detrimental. “We’ve basically got Iran in an extensional threat situation, lashing out at everything, threatening passage through the Strait of Hormuz and directly targeting key oil and energy infrastructure in the gulf,” Mr Kavonic told Sky News host Steve Price. “Basically, entering the apocalypse scenario for energy security, which has been war-gamed by nations going back 50 years. “The market is severely underestimating the risk here. “We’re looking at the biggest energy price shock in generations.”

The pond doesn't usually gloat, but if you happen to have an EV, you won't be getting the same sort of ticker shock as gas guzzlers. 

Sure, if the world's economy goes to hell in a handbasket - King Donald's tariff plan all along - electricity prices will rise as will the cost of everything else, but if you followed the reptiles down the renewables denialist road, and stayed true to gas and oil, you'd currently be in a pretty pickle:

Energy security is national security, and Europe is an energy vassal. That Australia is determined to mimic it is an act of supernatural stupidity.
In passing, let’s also add that Iran is specifically targeting energy infrastructure right across the Middle East as it lashes out in self-defence. Here it is following a playbook used by Russia in its war on Ukraine. This underlines the fact that despots understand what our government does not: energy is the economy. Cripple a nation’s power supply and everything else collapses. Note that no one is blowing up wind farms.
Finally, no one knows where this conflict will lead and there is every chance that 25 years from now we still will be kicking through the rubble, marvelling at what new horror has slithered out.
When God banished Satan from heaven in Paradise Lost, the Prince of Darkness simply set up shop in hell, determined for the rest of eternity: “To do aught good never will be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight.” Humanity was collateral damage. Satan no doubt has welcomed Iran’s recently arrived supreme leader to Hades as a handy utility player on Team Damnation.
Working on a documentary marking the 30th anniversary of the election of the Howard government served as a timely reminder that wars bleed into each other.

There's a passage to remind correspondents of the true depths of the Ughmann's analysis, as the reptiles prodded him to relive ancient times, US marines take position near a portrait of late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. Picture: Christophe Simon /AFP

Sure enough, the Ughmann went there, and even worse, decided to drag in the King, the lying rodent and Lord Downer:

The 2003 US-led coalition that deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein removed Iran’s main rival in the Persian Gulf and reshaped the region’s balance of power. Tehran exploited the vacuum by backing Shia militias in Iraq and expanding a network of proxy forces across the region, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen. This entire edifice was aimed at erasing Israel from the river to the sea.
No less an authority than Donald Trump agrees. At the February 2016 Republican debate in South Carolina, he called the Iraq war “a disgrace and an embarrassment”.
“I said it loud and clear,” Trump said. “ ‘You’ll destabilise the Middle East.’ That’s exactly what happened.”

Time for a snap of the King in his early glory, Donald Trump during a rally in 2016. Picture: AP /Steve Helber

What a relief not to be reminded of his aspirin paws, his strange neck marking, and his bonespurs ...

And at that point, the Ughmann went there, still fighting a completely useless war, bringing out the antipodean equivalents of Tony Bleagh ...

There is no doubt John Howard sincerely believed the US and British intelligence assessment that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction when he committed Australian forces to the fight. In an interview with Sky News, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the war was a massive mistake but defended Howard’s reasoning.
“John always had this view, rightly or wrongly, that the British had insights into the Middle East because of historical connections that were separate and, in some respects, better than those of the United States,” Turnbull said. “So, he was comforted by the assurances he was getting from London more than he was comforted by the assurances he was getting from Washington.”
The Iraq war was a case of imperial overreach that did great damage to the US domestically and internationally, and the consequences echo to this day.
But it should be remembered that president George W. Bush followed a long and public road to it. Congress authorised the invasion, the UN gave Iraq a final warning to comply with weapons inspections or face “serious consequences” and secretary of state Colin Powell made the case before the UN Security Council.
Howard believes his decision to support the US was right.
“I think both as a foreign policy decision, but also as an expression of our closeness to the United States,” he told Sky News. “I mean, we expected them in a pinch to help us, and although they didn’t physically need us, they wanted … a coalition of the willing.”
That coalition grew to 49 countries that supported the operation, though only a handful contributed combat troops. It is timely to remember that one of those countries was Denmark, which deployed a combat battalion to Basra and lost seven soldiers during four years of fighting.
Former foreign minister Alexander Downer believes “it was a great thing to get rid of Saddam Hussein”.
“I think that the counterfactual is the world would have been more unstable and worse with Saddam Hussein remaining in power, even though I can see the Americans handled the post-invasion period very, very badly,” Downer said.

Thank you Lord Downer, as full of wisdom and insight as ever, as the reptiles flung in a last AV distraction, Iran has targeted energy facilities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia – a major escalation in the conflict which could threaten the global supply of oil and gas and drive up prices. An oil refinery in Saudi Arabia was damaged by debris from drones, which were intercepted but fell onto the facility. Meanwhile, Qatar had to shut down the world’s largest natural gas plant after it was hit by Iranian missiles.

Then the Ughmann produced a rousing finale ...

That they did, and those errors linger to this day. Now there is another war to fix the problems left by the last and we are promised this one will go better, though no one in the Trump administration can say with any clarity what better looks like. Time will be the only judge.
We cannot foresee the future but we know this much: we live in a more uncertain world than the one we thought was enduring after World War II. In many ways it has returned to type: the powerful do as they will and the weak suffer as they must.
This world demands prudence and that is an enduring value that this era could learn from the Howard government.
It began with budget discipline. On day one of its tenure, treasurer Peter Costello discovered he had inherited an $11bn deficit, despite the Keating government insisting the books were in surplus. That shortfall was about 2 per cent of GDP. The government took out the razor, made tough choices and two budgets later delivered a surplus. With persistent surpluses, net debt was reduced from 18 per cent of GDP in 1996 to zero a decade later. For a few brief years the commonwealth was worth more than it owed.
Now the budget has a decade of deficits ahead of it and net debt stands at about $620bn, or roughly 21 per cent of GDP. We are in no fit state to deal with a crisis. Budget repair is a national security priority.
And the Howard government understood that defending a nation began with defending its borders. It took a hard line on illegal boat arrivals, insisting that control of Australia’s borders was not a matter of sentiment but sovereignty.
Those decisions were bitterly contested domestically at the time and deplored in the polite parlours of Europe and denounced in the UN. Now most nations understand that deciding who comes to a country and the circumstances in which they come is a bedrock function of the state.
Nations that cannot control their finances can’t afford to defend themselves. Nations that cannot defend their borders risk societal collapse. And energy-poor nations are just poor.

It's the Xian law of the jungle, primal tooth and claw, with the power-mad feasting on the wretched like a lion munching on a lamb.

Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. 
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back —
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip; drink deeply, but never too deep;
And remember the night is for hunting, and forget not the day is for sleep.
The Jackal may follow the Tiger, but, Cub, when thy whiskers are grown,
Remember the Wolf is a Hunter — go forth and get food of thine own.
Keep peace with the Lords of the Jungle — the Tiger, the Panther, and Bear.
And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the Boar in his lair.
When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle, and neither will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken — it may be fair words shall prevail. (The rest here)

Fair words? Prevail?

Not if they've been befouled by the Ughmann.

And so again the pond apologises for presenting reptile talking points without submitting them to the occasional lash, check or balance, but all up that was some twenty minutes of reptile tedium, and there seemed to be no reason to add to the burden.

There have to be gentler ways to begin a weekend.

In the end, it was more than enough to simply complete the climb, so that punters could say, "there, I read that, and now I'll need the weekend to recover."

And in any case, soon enough there'll be an announcement and all will be well, except if you happened to stray into the path of a bomb ...