On one side: Iran warns of ‘all-out war’ if US retaliates in wake of Saudi oil facility bombings.

And then the other: Trump warns Iran of ‘severe’ defeat if military conflict broke out.

This is the real thing. The Americans, or at least the American President does not want war. But if the Iranians, along with the Deep State, insist, they will have one. And if they do, I expect it to be over in a week with a lot of damage but not very many civilian casualties. But I’d still rather not have a war. Two Clauswitz quotes come to mind:

“Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst.”

“Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction. This tremendous friction is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance. Moreover, every war is rich in unique episodes.”

The only way the Democrats can win the next election is if the US enters a war which then goes badly. That is why the Deep State has brought us to this point.

The only person in the Trump White House I trust on policy is Donald Trump himself. Not that I think he gets it right all the time, but that I think his instincts are right almost all the time, and he really wants the same outcomes that I do. Meanwhile, we find Bolton unloads on Trump’s foreign policy behind closed doors. I understand – but who can know from here – that Bolton had actually been leaking to the media his disagreements with the President. Out he had to go for that reason alone. But the linked article tells you just how intemperate Bolton is.

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s fired national security adviser, harshly criticized Trump’s foreign policy on Wednesday at a private lunch, saying that inviting the Taliban to Camp David sent a “terrible signal” and that it was “disrespectful” to the victims of 9/11 because the Taliban had harbored al Qaeda.

Bolton also said that any negotiations with North Korea and Iran were “doomed to failure,” according to two attendees….

Bolton also said more than once that Trump’s failure to respond to the Iranian attack on an American drone earlier this summer set the stage for the Islamic Republic’s aggression in recent months.

PDT had a few words of his own.

“Well, I was critical of John Bolton for getting us involved with a lot of other people in the Middle East,” he told reporters during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego. “We’ve spent $7.5 trillion in the Middle East and you ought to ask a lot of people about that.“

“John was not able to work with anybody, and a lot of people disagreed with his ideas,” Trump added. “A lot of people were very critical that I brought him on in the first place because of the fact that he was so in favor of going into the Middle East, and he got stuck in quicksand and we became policemen for the Middle East. It’s ridiculous.“

So we have this.

During the Q&A session, Dershowitz told the crowd that it was “a national disaster” that Bolton had been booted from the White House, to what the attendee described as “thunderous applause.”

I’m with Churchill on this. To talk is not to surrender. To go to war over someone shooting down a drone is insane. As for “national disasters”, let’s see who’s president after January 2021.

From Quadrant Online: Feckless ‘conservatism’. From an unexpected source, the real feel for the Brexit catastrophe. Traitors everywhere in our their midst.

The UK’s Country Squire magazine (‘making country life better since 1902′) is not the first and most obvious publication in which one might expect to gain an understanding of the Brexit mess and why, three years after the electorate voted 52/48 to quit Europe, the voters’ will remains frustrated. Yet there it is in a recent edition, one of the most acute analyses of the two major parties’ drift from both base and principle, and a polarised electorate’s disgust with each and both. Author David Eyles puts it this way:

The Fabians believe in gradual change by attrition rather than open revolution. As a result of this thinking, one Labour policy was to get 50% of school leavers to attend a university. As a result, all tertiary education centres such as teacher training colleges, polytechnics and technical colleges converted to call themselves ‘universities’ more or less overnight. On paper, it gave third or fourth rate tertiary education institutions the same status as Oxford, Cambridge, the ‘Red Brick’ universities, the great northern universities and the London Colleges. A generation has now passed through this system, taught mostly by Left-leaning Postmodernist professors and lecturers. This has created an entire structure of Leftist, so-called ‘progressives’ who now dominate the Civil Service, Local Government and most of the large charities, think tanks and, importantly, the media…..

…. By contrast, the Conservatives do not really have any core philosophies except for some rather vague ones … Indeed many actions of this and the last Conservative government suggest that they are still following the path set out for them by Tony Blair. Former soldiers are still being questioned over actions for which they were acquitted many years ago. Children are increasingly being taught about sex and LGBT issues at very young ages – there is a sense that not only is their innocence being lost far too early, but that this is sowing the seeds of confusion for their adult lives. The police are questioning, cautioning and prosecuting people for “hate crimes”. Free speech is being shut down. The Conservative journey to the Left is a long one. In political distance, it is longer than the similar one undertaken by the Labour Party.

As Eyles observes, illustrating his point with the chart reproduced above,

The Conservative Party have failed the country on three counts. The first is their failure to recognise and stop what Postmodernism and the mass move to the Left amongst our establishments have achieved. The second is their own movement to the Left because they have tried to pursue the Leftist Establishment. In so doing, unforgivably, they have abandoned their core voters. The third is their failure to achieve Brexit.

Whatever else you might read about Brexit, Eyles’ insights should not be overlooked.