This is a tale of one 2011 White House photo contrasted with a series of seven photos from June 21, illustrating presidential dysfunctionality vs. competent leadership.
The 2011 photo was from an annex off the White House Situation Room, during the operation to eradicate Osama bin Laden. Only one person appears contented: Defense secretary Robert Gates (in the foreground), a Bush holdover. The rest are clearly uncomfortable. In the background, President Obama cowers in a windbreaker. The smallest individual in the scene, he appears to have lost sleep. He seems like a bystander in a room of anxious spectators.
This was a candid photo, unstaged. Once OBL’s death was publicly celebrated rather than condemned, it must have been thought appropriate to release. There clearly was no forethought of managing postmortem messaging — probably because there was great hesitancy to act. Initial White House messaging was hardly celebratory. OBL’s body was disposed in the ocean. Romans would have adorned the Coliseum with it, upside-down, as it was lowered to lions.
The current photo series was posted online (7,6,5,4,3,2,1) immediately after the bombing. These originate from the Situation Room and speak for themselves. Formal attire, flags, red tie, and presidential seal. Wearing a MAGA hat was out of character for Trump’s White House apparel but no accident. Only one person stands — Your Favorite President.
It’s 180° from the 2011 photo. A president focused on branding and imaging realized that this defining moment of his administration possessed great value. The boss is seen in command, thus scoring political mileage and sending global punks a message. His merchandising skill set is unrivaled. Rubio plays the ruthless consigliere, warning enemies of consequences and smacking down domestic critics.
Threats are core to Trump’s doctrine and are reinforced by periodic demonstrative applications of force, a policy colloquially known as FAFO. Examples of force include killing the Iranian general Soleimani, bombing several hundred Russian troops in Syria, and dispatching the neo-caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Houthis Fooled Around and Found Out consequences.
None of these examples of Trump’s big-stick applications elicited Woke Right kickback from podcasters, but when Israel entered the equation, doomsayers appeared among hysterical elements of the right. Enforcing FAFO requires fortitude to withstand consequences. Israel now displays fortitude, essential for existential survival. Trump’s June 21 address admonished Iran against learning if he’s serious. The Iranians shouldn’t doubt him. The Taliban believed him. No Americans died during the final 18 months of his Afghanistan watch.
Trump’s doctrine incorporates appropriate advertising, including imagery. Such imagery includes Tulsi Gabbard’s professionally produced Hiroshima/Nagasaki travelogue, widely (mis?)interpreted as a puzzling freelance peacenik project. More likely, it represents the administration’s domestic messaging, depicting the horrors of a nuclear Iran. Roger Stone reports that allegations of a rift between Trump and Gabbard are bogus, are Deep State attempts to oust her.
Chattering MAGA podcast hosts seek to hold foreign and military policy hostage to their tirades. They exhibit pothead-level logic, willful ignorance of credible threats. WWII’s takeaway was that appeasement, the first refuge of cowards, proves fatal. Then came post-9/11 neocon wars, and history was forgotten. Obama, Biden, Kerry, Blinken, and Europe practiced wholesale Iranian appeasement, flying in pallets of cash. The Woke Right, increasingly rendered irrelevant by events, advocates benign appeasement by willfully and recklessly ignoring credible possibilities, including Iran detonating an EMP attack over Kansas with a nuke atop a North Korean ICBM. We are witnessing correctives to appeasements originating from the left and right, active and benign.
The only way to maintain an empire and the civilization it commands is an unequivocal FAFO code. Rome and every civilization applied this principle, making occasional examples of renegades upsetting peaceful balances among member-states.
If an outlier from global order doesn’t describe Iran, nothing does. If the imperial nation hesitates in enforcing discipline, civilization quickly unravels, and conflict replaces peace. Trump exploits Iran’s potential as a deterrence advertisement.
Lindsey Graham occupies one extreme, becoming orgasmic at the scent of military action. He requires sedation. The opposite extreme contains über-isolationists, on the left and right, convinced that force displays are taboo and becoming hysterical at their mention. They require sedation. Leftists practice appeasement because they are cowards. The right’s pearl-clutchers exhibit PTSD from Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Their defective logic recognizes that these wars were without purpose or end but progresses to “therefore, all wars must be banned.” This is beyond dumb. Dysfunctional podcasters, commanding vast audiences, have filled naïve heads with nonsense.
Teddy Roosevelt, memorialized on Mount Rushmore, codified the doctrine Trump follows. He built the Panama Canal (which Jimmy Carter discarded) and received the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese war’s ending in New Hampshire talks. Pakistan recently nominated Trump for the Peace Prize for swiftly negotiating a ceasefire in its conflict with India. Trump isn’t holding his breath, anticipating an Oslo speech. Just in case, he itemized many reasons he should be awarded.
Trump and big bombs are like peanut butter and jelly: made for each other. He previously held the record for dropping the largest non-nuclear bomb, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, AKA the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB), deployed against ISIS in 2017. Footage was released to send a message. This week’s bombs are considerably more powerful. Such weapons yield megatonnage of psychological messaging. The chances were nil that Trump wouldn’t find an excuse to make a demonstrative strike.
While discussing imagery’s political applications, Israel’s remarkable achievement in imagery’s military applications deserves mention. Although details are classified, topography of large portions of Iran was apparently mapped to centimeter-accuracy using LIDAR. LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) remote surveying mimics radar. Rather than using microwave radiation for measuring distances (or using sound for sonar surveys), laser beams are projected from airborne platforms. The Israelis fed their resulting Iran 3-D model into A.I., enabling automated interpretation (e.g., identification of things such as missile launchers and ventilation tubes of underground nuclear installations) and also to detect landscape changes. The latter replicates techniques astronomers used to detect planets. Repeated photographs of the starry background of various regions of the night sky were collected. Objects displaced between subsequent images indicated planets.
A.I. interpretation of LIDAR imagery allows Israel to detect construction activities, movement of strategic assets, etc. Detailed room and window modeling of Iranian buildings permits precisely targeting individuals. This apparently allowed them to surgically decapitate Iran’s leadership in their beds during the recent operation’s first hours. A.I. enables room-level, precision-targeted remote killings, using facial recognition confirmation. Warfare’s next phase has arrived.
Douglas Schwartz blogs on history and gaslighting at The Great Class War.
