There is only one crime in war, and that’s the losing of it

One of the most controversial episodes of the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is “In the Pale Moonlight,” in which Captain Benjamin Sisko, plagued by the mounting casualty lists in the interstellar war between the United Federation of Planets and Klingon Empire against the Cardassian Union and the Dominion, concocts a plan to bring the Romulans, then technically neutral, into the war on the side of the Federation. The plan involves lying, forgery, deception, and in the end, murder. The story is told in a series of flashbacks, in which Captain Sisko confronts his series of moral choices, and in the end, he confronts the violations of his fundamental principles, and concludes that, with the goal of bringing the Romulans into the war changing the power dynamic, and helping the Federation to reverse the losses it had been sustaining, he can live with his actions.

Curtis LeMay was put in charge of our strategic bombing command, and he was the one who switched much of our bombing attacks on Japan from some relatively ineffective high-altitude bombing to the incendiary night attacks which devastated the island nation’s highly combustible cities. From Wikipedia:

LeMay was aware of the implication of his orders. The New York Times reported at the time, “Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the B-29s of the entire Marianas area, declared that if the war is shortened by a single day, the attack will have served its purpose”. The argument was that it was his duty to carry out the attacks in order to end the war as quickly as possible, sparing further loss of life. He also remarked regarding the morality of the air effort against Japan, “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.” This opinion was also reported by Robert McNamara in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War.

And so we come to Operation Midnight Hammer. Trudy Rubin, the war-mongering neoconservative columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer when it comes to Ukraine, but definitely not where Iran is concerned, wrote:

I frequently heard Ukrainians call the U.S. president “TACO Trump,” an acronym for “Trump always chickens out.” They referred, of course, to the president’s constant refusals to impose new sanctions on Russia. Many said they also expected him to chicken out of his “two week” deadline to Tehran.

She published that Saturday morning, before news of Midnight Hammer broke. What actually happened was that the President, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the military engaged in deception. Remember how in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan — have you guessed that6 I’m a Star Trek fan yet? — Admiral Kirk and Captain Spock used simple deception when communications were monitored, using “days” to mean “hours”? President Trump’s two weeks actually meant two days!

There were reports of B-2s leaving Whiteman AFB, seen flying west toward Guam for pre-positioning, when, in fact, the attacking B-2s flew east toward their targets. No Democrats were notified of the operation with any time left for them to spill the beans, and, for once, complete operational security was maintained. Vice President Vance even publicly opposed a strike on Iran; was that also a feint?

Serious communication issues had to be overcome. Part of the operation was executed by nuclear powered attack submarines (SSNs or SSGNs), and there are significant difficulties in communications with submerged submarines. We have an ELF — extremely low frequency — system for doing so, but the system is compromised by a technical limitation on the complexities of such communications. That SSN or SSGN had to have detailed plans, already on board, for targeting and execution, including precise time markers, with ELF communications simply being the execution orders.

So, did Mr Trump lie when he said that the Iranians had two weeks to negotiate a peace agreement which eliminated their nuclear weapons programs? Perhaps he could and would have called off the attack if Iran had responded positively, but this was another factor in making an anticipated bombing a surprise nevertheless.

Today’s left have been raising all sorts of ‘moral’ issues, over Israel’s blockade of supplied to the poor, poor Palestinians, to the President sending in the bombers without first getting an authorization from Congress. But the only crime in war is the losing of it, and the only true war criminals are the losers.

I would have preferred a different method of attacking Iran’s nuclear weapons program, preferably done by the Israelis rather than us, but the fact remains that it had to get done, and the United States had the capacity to get the job done in ways Israel does not. Maggie Haberman of The New York Times reported:

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized the Trump administration’s message that the U.S. military’s strike on Iran was a surgical one, and that what comes next is up to Tehran. Rubio said “it doesn’t matter if the order was given” by Iran to develop a weapon, arguing that the enrichment levels that Iran had were far beyond anything for civilian use. Pressed on what the intelligence from the U.S. actually showed, Rubio called a description of the March intelligence assessment that Iran was not in process of building a bomb an “inaccurate” representation of the intelligence. While Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, believes that Iran can achieve a nuclear weapon in 15 days, American spy agencies believe that it could take several months, and up to a year, for Iran to make a weapon.

Intelligence estimates vary, but if Mossad have the right estimates, was there really any time to wait for Israel to do this?

Naturally the Iranian leadership waxed wroth, and swore vengeance, lobbing ballistic missiles at some American bases in Qatar and elsewhere, but achieving nothing. The Iranians love to get in the last volley, even if its wholly ineffective, so their leaders can trumpet that they struck the last blow against the Great Satan America and “Zionist occupiers” of “Palestine.”

Now we get this from the Associated Press:

U.S. President Donald Trump claimed on social media Monday that Israel and Iran have agreed to a “complete and total ceasefire” to be phased in over 24 hours.

Iran’s foreign minister said Iran will stop its attacks if Israel stops its airstrikes by 4 a.m. local time Tehran. Israel did not immediately acknowledge any ceasefire.

Earlier Monday, Iran launched a missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, retaliating for the American bombing of three key Iranian nuclear facilities. The U.S. said no casualties were reported.

Will it hold? Has Iran been chastened enough? One thing is obvious: without the United States attack, there’d be no ceasefire. I may not like the fact that the United States had to do this, but at least at the moment, it has turned out to be the right thing to have done.