Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be back behind the microphone taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the world at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time) for our latest Clubland Q&A. Hope you can swing by.
~So much for the G7. The war? Well, strange as it may seem on the 24/7 hamster wheel, my view hasn't changed since last week: I am in favour of Israel's victory over Iran - just as the region's Sunni monarchies are. However, I am opposed to any direct American participation because the United States is the most incompetent warmonger on the planet.
If that comes as news, well, you haven't been paying attention - since VJ Day.
Hilarious headline in today's Spectator:
Why is the US so reluctant to fight Iran?
Short answer: because it hasn't won anything that matters in living memory. Ask the 2003 anti-Saddam resistance, or the 2001 anti-Taliban Afghans. If it weren't for us, you'd be speaking Russian, ha-ha! Oh, wait, in eastern Ukraine, they are!!! Cue the corpsing.
I wish my friend Pete Hegseth all the best in his efforts, but ultimately the Pentagon needs to be razed and the ground salted, and the chiefs of staff moved to a room above a hair salon in a Cleveland strip mall with a budget that's a thousandth of what it presently is.
The inability to use forty per cent of global military spending to accomplish any strategic national objective is a disgrace. It can't all be going on Thoroughly Modern Milley's ribbons budget, can it?
~Re the above, here's the takeaway, from a panel I did with the late Bernard Lewis nearly twenty years ago:
I was on a panel with the great Bernard Lewis a couple of years ago - actually six or seven years ago - and Bernard said that the danger here is that America risks being seen as harmless as an enemy, and treacherous as a friend.
Netanyahu surely knows that. So in Israel he is rumoured to be worried that, if Trump decides to go all-in, next thing you know the Washington bigshots will be clamoring for an exit strategy before Israel has achieved its war aims. For those readers unfamiliar with the concept of "war aims", look it up in Webster's - "Amer. Engl. (obsol.)"
Israel's principal war aim was delineated here last week:
If you want to end the Iranian nuclear programme - or at least set it back twenty years - you have to have state-of-the-art bunker-busters that can penetrate all the way down at the Fordow enrichment facility just south of Qom. I'm not sure Israel has such weapons, and I doubt Netanyahu will know until they try it and it works.
The BBC today:
Military analysts say only the US has the bombers and bunker-busting bombs that can penetrate the deepest of Iranian nuclear facilities, especially that of Fordow.
Just because "military analysts" are saying it doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. For Israel, squaring that circle remains the challenge.
~The real front in the clash of civilisations remains, of course, the western front. From the indomitable Sammy Woodhouse:
A child became pregnant after being raped by the perpetrator at a mental health hospital.
A child was wrongly charged with being racist while the rapist roamed free.
Let that sink in!
For decades, I and others have told the world what was happening, and we were branded as... pic.twitter.com/eaI7rUZmEd
— Sammy Woodhouse (@officialsammyuk) June 17, 2025
So I remain wary that Starmer's new inquiry is merely the latest phase of the stitch-up. While it is true that Baroness Casey's report is by the standard of these things unusually butch, many of her "recommendations" are things that were recommended several reports back and were supposed to have been implemented a decade ago - like, say, recording the ethnicity of gang-rape perpetrators, which most county constabularies decided simply to ignore. Me three years back:
We thank you for all your kind comments on the commencement of The Mark Steyn Club's ninth year - and especially thank all our new members, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
