Benedictus Qui Venit in Nomine Domini, Hosanna in Excelsis, part thirty

Do you know what President Donald John Trump’s ultimate goal for what he now calls a “military excursion” is?

I do not, and I do not think that President Trump knows, either, something that even a newspaper fully supportive of “Operation Epic Fury,” the New York Post, has noted very clearly:

Somewhere between the White House and the Pentagon, the nation’s leaders need to start giving the public a regular, clear, concrete sense of how Operation Epic Fury is proceeding.

Right now, regular Americans and experts “closely monitoring the situation” have good reason to feel confused.

That includes the hundreds of thousands of people with friends and loved ones doing the fighting.

Team Trump provided solid briefings in the first weekend of the war, but then dropped the ball.

Beyond the occasional in-depth presentation by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it’s as if the administration expects the public to think the occasional high gloss social-media video is enough.

And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s slams at and allergic reaction to the media (however justified) do him no favors with his larger audience.

Between Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, plus Hegseth and other top Pentagon figures, plenty of gifted communicators can and should be filling in the details around President Donald Trump’s emphatic headline statements.

This communications failure lets Iranian, anti-American, anti-Israel and/or anti-Trump actors fill the void — especially on social media.

Tell America how many sorties our planes flew today against how many targets; what munitions are most in play (and what new weapons we’ve deployed); keep up the info on how much we’ve reduced the enemy’s missile fire and drone deployments.

What, as best you can say, happened on the “most intense day so far”, as Hegseth declared it would be Monday?

Everyone knows the president’s communications style won’t change: He’s going to sound definitive even when he’s just making a minor point, and share the possibilities — many of them actually quite remote — that he weighing as he speaks.

He’ll chat with one reporter or another, saying (as Wednesday with Axios) that there’s “practically nothing left to target” in Iran, and “Any time I want it to end, it will end” — all of which is true in some sense, but none of which adds up to It’ll all be over next week.

His underlings have a duty to provide the context and the concretes beyond those remarks.

As in: Some targets need a lot more hitting to meet Epic Fury’s central goals.

For example, one of the chief nuclear-program bunkers is deeper underground than even the hardened facilities US megabombs destroyed last year.

In today’s media environment, a vast pack of outlets (including the enemies noted above) all struggle for clicks and reputation-boosting scoops.

Of course plenty needs to remain in the dark: Secret ops must stay secret; leave our enemies guessing on what they most want to know.

But this is America’s war not the administration’s private war, and Americans need to know more.

A public that feels it’s being leveled with, as much as possible, will be a lot more patient than one that feels needlessly kept in the dark.

Give the nation one daily report that emphasizes the big picture and provides enough of the smaller one to build confidence.

Minor details like “we sank 16 mine-layers yesterday” aren’t remotely enough.

Yes, this is a tricky communications job — but the country and Team Trump will be far better off once the administration steps up to get it done. (Team Trump needs to start lifting the fog of the Iran war for the US public.)

Left unmentioned in the New York Post editorial is the fact that the Trump administration is not providing any degree of transparency about the numbers of American military personnel who have been injured by Iranian attacks, information that the American public, whose taxpayer dollars are being used to pay for this preemptive war of choice in violation of the precepts of the Just War Theory, has a right to know:

An Iranian drone attack in Kuwait that killed six U.S. service members in the early hours of the war with Iran was more severe than has previously been revealed, with dozens suffering injuries including brain trauma, shrapnel wounds and burns, multiple sources told CBS News. At least one may require the amputation of a limb. 

Sources described a grim and chaotic scene in the aftermath of the strike on a tactical operations center at the Shuaiba port outside Kuwait City on March 1. Smoke quickly filled the building, making it difficult to rescue those inside. 

More than 30 military members remained in hospitals Tuesday night with battle injuries from the Kuwait attack — one at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, 12 at Walter Reed Medical Center in suburban Washington, D.C., and about 25 at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, sources said. 

Of those, about 20 arrived on a C-17 military transport aircraft at Landstuhl on Tuesday with injuries the military designated as "urgent" and requiring evacuation, including traumatic brain injuries, memory loss and concussions, three of the sources said. 

More than 100 medical personnel were sent to Landstuhl to assist, one of the sources said. 

Defense Department officials initially didn't specify how many had been hurt in the Kuwait attack, but said on March 1 that five were seriously wounded and "several others sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions."

Two of the service members were missing after the attack and were later found under the rubble, sources said. 

The Pentagon has a process to notify wounded soldiers' family members and seeks to shield them from learning from press releases about how extensive the injuries were.

The military defines a serious injury as one that "requires medical attention, and competent medical authority declares that death is possible but not likely to occur within 72 hours."

Speaking at the Pentagon last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, described the strike: "You have air defenses, and a lot's coming in, and you hit most of it. Every once in a while, you might have one, unfortunately, we call it a squirter, that makes its way through. And in that particular case, it happened to hit a tactical operations center that was fortified, but these are powerful weapons."

At least one American was killed in a separate strike in Saudi Arabia March 1. It is unclear how many others may have been injured in that attack.

On Tuesday, the 11th day of the war, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said about 140 American service members had been injured so far, without specifying where or when they were wounded.

"The vast majority of these injuries have been minor, and 108 service members have already returned to duty. Eight service members remain listed as severely injured and are receiving the highest level of medical care," Parnell said in a statement. 

The military has robust air defenses shielding all U.S. personnel in range of Iranian attacks, sources told CBS News. 

Pentagon spokespeople did not immediately respond to questions on Tuesday about service members' injuries or where they were sustained. (Dozens of U.S. service members in Kuwait suffered serious injuries, including burns, brain trauma and shrapnel wounds, sources say - CBS News.)

Remember, one of the predicates of the Just War Theory is to have clearly stated, achievable goals after all means of avoiding war have been exhausted, but this does not matter to Donald John Trump or to his Secretary of War, Peter Hegseth, who has boasted that the Americans will not fight according to "stupid rules of engagement" as he has promised "death and destruction" in Iraq.

The problem is, of course, that the Trump administration’s security team itself is unsure of Operation Epic Fury’s ultimate goal or whether it can act to end the conflict independently of the Zionist State of Israel’s “Operation Rising Lion” as the “military excursion” was, after all, begun at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been screaming like Chicken Little about for over thirty years about Iran being close to developing nuclear weapon (please see Late Breaking News Sent from a Reader for a great mockery of this claim), who has been egging Donald “No More Wars” Trump into attack Iran so that he, Netanyahu, could get closer to the realization of his life’s wretched work, the “Greater Israel Project.”

As has been noted in many commentaries on this website, including the “Sober Up” series that I started immediately after the presidential elections on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, Donald John Trump has supremely unlimited confidence in his own abilities, and it is this egotism that rejects all notions that any of his decisions could be mistaken, which a writer for The Atlantic has noted is a major reason that he miscalculated the resolve of the believing Mohammedans to hold on to their power in Iran while seeking to impose the maximum amount of damage as possible to American troops, and installations as well as to the civilian population of Israel and the world’s supply of oil, much of which is shipped from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran controls:

In the least charitable—and probably accurate—view, President Trump went to war with Iran out of a delusional faith in himself. He believed that the worst-case scenarios that have deterred past presidents from attacking Iran wouldn’t come true for him, because he is Donald Trump.

In the most charitable—and probably accurate—view, the president had reasons to believe that all of the catastrophic warnings about the most hair-raising consequences of an attack wouldn’t come to pass this time. The 12-day war, which Israel and the United States fought last June, demonstrated that they could strike Iran without provoking catastrophic retaliation. Having endured that assault on the country’s military infrastructure, and then wave after wave of protest by its own citizens, the Islamic Republic was isolated and weak. So why shouldn’t Trump exploit that fragility to land a death blow against a murderous adversary?

I could nearly convince myself of these arguments, except that almost no other foreign-policy question has been studied harder over the past 20 years or so than the likely effect of U.S. military strikes on Iran. The many years spent pondering and preparing for a potential attack on Iran are the reason that the first days of the war were, for the most part, a bravura display of American power. Yet all of that study also pointed out the risks: spiking oil prices, the spread of violence throughout the Middle East, civilian casualties of the sort now evidenced by an apparent U.S. missile strike near an Iranian elementary school. When past presidents balked at the possibility of war with Iran, they weren’t just dodging a hard choice; they were deterred by all of the obvious reasons a conflict could perilously spiral. Nobody should be shocked that the expected is now coming to pass.

To begin, there’s geography. Just 35 miles across at its narrowest, the Strait of Hormuz links the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world and is surrounded on three sides by Iran. One-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied-natural-gas supply passes through an Iranian turkey shoot. Fighting for its survival, Iran has the capacity to choke fossil-fuel markets by launching sporadic attacks on passing tankers, enough to deter companies and their insurers from justifying that risk. A hard fact of geography was always going to be a hard fact of war.

Another daunting obstacle to victory is the nature of the Iranian regime, a theocracy that celebrates martyrdom and has spent its entire history preparing for what it considers an inevitable war with the United States. Every time protests fill public squares, I allow myself to believe that the terrible government in Tehran will crumble. But its willingness to kill to survive is the biggest obstacle to its toppling. And Trump intervened after the regime killed tens of thousands of its most determined foes. Calling for revolution after the revolution has been crushed is belated timing, to say the least. Perhaps the Trump administration will succeed in further weakening Iranian authoritarianism—the attacks will certainly set back the country’s already struggling economy—so that after the bombs stop falling, regime opponents will rush into the streets. But, thus far, decapitating the regime has succeeded only in replacing one Ayatollah Khamenei with another. By all accounts, the son is no less fanatical than his father and believes with theological certainty that the most brutal means justify his righteous ends.

Because airpower isn’t likely to dislodge the regime, the crucial question was always going to be “How does this end?” The lesson that the Trump administration seemed to learn from the failed planning for postwar Iraq is that planning isn’t worth the effort at all. When asked what comes next, Trump can manage only several contradictory answers, sometimes in the course of a single sentence. But the most plausible of these answers is that the administration finds a faction in the government willing to cut a deal favorable to the United States, an Iranian version of Delcy Rodríguez—the Venezuelan official who quietly negotiated her government’s survival after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro. Such an outcome would undercut every promise that Trump made to protesters about help being on the way. It’s hardly encouraging that the administration doesn’t have a plausible candidate for this job after nearly two weeks of conflict—and that the existing regime hasn’t begun suing for peace, even though it’s fighting for survival.

By trumpeting unachievable objectives—unconditional surrender, regime change—as his war aims, Trump has given his enemies the opportunity to claim survival as victory. He’s left himself with no evident end point to what he recently called a “short-term excursion.” If he had wanted to weaken Iran’s ballistic-missile threat—a worthwhile aim—he could have focused U.S. strikes on launchers and production sites. Much as he did after attacking Iranian nuclear facilities last year, Trump could have declared that limited goal and walked away a victor a few days later. Or he could have allowed Israel to carry out attacks, with U.S. support, which might have limited fallout in the Gulf.  If he wanted to topple the regime, he could have helped organize and support the opposition, nurturing and supplying the movement to better equip it to succeed. Instead, Trump ignored the obvious and went to war. Now the obvious is seeking its revenge. (The Obvious Is Taking Its Revenge on Trump.)

Donald John Trump is repeating some, although not all, of the mistakes made by the simple-minded neoconservative buffoon named George Walker Bush prior to the start of his unjust, unconstitutional, and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq twenty-three years ago this month, who thought that the American overthrow of the corrupt thug Saddam Hussein, who did not pose any kind of imminent threat to the national security of the United States of America and who did not possess chemical weapons of mass destruction as he had used those, much of which was given to him by Ronald Reagan’s Special Middle East Envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, in 1985 during the Iran-Iraq War, against the Kurds after “Operation Desert Storm” in 1991, would bring “peace” to the Middle East, unending security for the State of Israel, and prosperity to the United States of America.

Similarly, Trump miscalculated the Iranian response as he believed his “military excursion” would go off as smoothly as his overthrow the mass murdering Communist Nicolas Maduros two and one-half months ago. He was wrong as he underestimated the willingness of believing Mohammedans to sacrifice themselves and kill as many of their enemies as they could in the effort to preserve themselves in power:

On Feb. 18, as President Trump weighed whether to launch military attacks on Iran, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in energy markets.

Even during the Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran last June, Mr. Wright said, there had been little disruption in the markets. “Oil prices blipped up and then went back down,” he said. Some of Mr. Trump’s other advisers shared similar views in private, dismissing warnings that — the second time around — Iran might wage economic warfare by closing shipping lanes carrying roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.

The extent of that miscalculation was laid bare in recent days, as Iran threatened to fire at commercial oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which all ships must pass on their way out of the Persian Gulf. In response to the Iranian threats, commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans.

The episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran sees as an existential threat. Iran has responded far more aggressively than it did during last June’s 12-day war, firing barrages of missiles and drones at U.S. military bases, cities in Arab nations across the Middle East, and on Israeli population centers.

After Trump administration officials gave a closed-door briefing to lawmakers on Tuesday, Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said on social media that the administration had no plan for the Strait of Hormuz and did “not know how to get it safely back open.”

Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war. But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.

Mr. Trump has laid out maximalist goals like insisting that Iran name a leader who will submit to him, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have described narrower and more tactical objectives that could provide an off-ramp in the near term.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the administration “had a strong game plan” before the war broke out, and vowed that oil prices would drop after it ended.

“The purposeful disruption in the oil market by the Iranian regime is short term, and necessary for the long-term gain of wiping out these terrorists and the threat they pose to America and the world,” she said in a statement.

This article is based on interviews with a dozen U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations.

‘Show Some Guts’

Mr. Hegseth acknowledged on Tuesday that Iran’s ferocious response against its neighbors caught the Pentagon somewhat off guard. But he insisted that Iran’s actions were backfiring.

“I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” Mr. Hegseth said at a Pentagon news conference. “I think it was a demonstration of the desperation of the regime.”

Mr. Trump has displayed growing frustration over how the war is disrupting the oil supply, telling Fox News that oil tanker crews should “show some guts” and sail through the Strait of Hormuz.

Some military advisers did warn before the war that Iran could launch an aggressive campaign in response, and would view the U.S.-Israeli attack as a threat to its existence. But other advisers remained confident that killing Iran’s senior leadership would lead to more pragmatic leaders taking over who might bring an end to the war.

When Mr. Trump was briefed about risks that oil prices could rise in the event of war, he acknowledged the possibility but downplayed it as a short-term concern that should not overshadow the mission to decapitate the Iranian regime. He directed Mr. Wright and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to work on developing options for a potential spike in prices.

But the president did not speak publicly about these options — including political risk insurance backed by the U.S. government, and the potential of U.S. Navy escorts — until more than 48 hours after the conflict started. The escorts have not yet taken place.

Mr. Wright, the energy secretary, caused a market commotion Tuesday when he posted on social media that the Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. His post drove up stocks and reassured oil markets. Then, when he deleted the post after administration officials said no escorts had taken place, markets were once again thrust into turmoil.

Efforts to resume shipments have been complicated by intelligence that Iran was preparing to lay mines in the strait, one U.S. official said. The Iranian operation was only in its earliest stages, but the preparatory efforts spooked the Trump administration. The U.S. military said on Tuesday evening that its forces had attacked 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near the strait.

As the conflict has roiled global markets, Republicans in Washington have grown concerned about rising oil prices damaging their efforts to sell an economic agenda to voters ahead of the midterm elections.

Mr. Trump, both publicly and privately, has been arguing that Venezuelan oil could help solve any shocks coming from the Iran war. The administration announced on Tuesday a new refinery in Texas that officials said could help increase oil supply, ensuring that Iran does not cause any long-term damage to oil markets.

A Potential Off-Ramp

The confidence that White House officials had that the shipping lanes could stay open is surprising given that Mr. Trump authorized a military campaign last year against the Houthis, a Yemeni group backed by Iran, that had used missile and drone attacks to bring maritime commerce in the Red Sea to a halt.

In a social media post last March announcing he had authorized military strikes against the Houthis, Mr. Trump said that the attacks had cost the global economy billions of dollars, and that “no terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the Waterways of the World.”

But since the start of the war in Iran, Mr. Trump has not offered a consistent message. In private, his aides have said they feel frustration over his lack of discipline in communicating the objectives of the military campaign to the public.

Mr. Trump has said both that the war could go on for more than a month and that it was “very complete, pretty much.” He also said the United States would “go forward more determined than ever.”

Mr. Rubio and Mr. Hegseth, however, appear to have coordinated their messaging for now on three discrete goals that they began laying out in public remarks on Monday and Tuesday.

“The goals of this mission are clear,” Mr. Rubio said at a State Department event on Monday before Mr. Trump held his own news conference. “It is to destroy the ability of this regime to launch missiles, both by destroying their missiles and their launchers; destroy the factories that make these missiles; and destroy their navy.”

The State Department even laid out the three goals in bullet-point fashion, and highlighted a video clip of Mr. Rubio stating them on an official social media account.

The presentation by Mr. Rubio, who is also the White House national security adviser, appeared to be setting the stage for the president to bring an end to the war sooner rather than later. In his news conference, Mr. Trump boasted of how the U.S. military had already destroyed Iran’s ballistic missile capability and its navy. But he also warned of even more aggressive action if Iranian leaders tried to cut off the world’s energy supply.

Matthew Pottinger, who was a deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration, said in an interview that Mr. Trump had indicated he could decide to pursue ambitious war goals that would take weeks at least.

“In his press conference, I could hear him circling back to a rationale for fighting a bit longer given that the regime is still signaling it won’t be deterred and is still trying to control the Strait of Hormuz,” said Mr. Pottinger, now the chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that advocates a close U.S. partnership with Israel and confrontation with Iran.

“He doesn’t want to have to fight a ‘sequel’ war,” Mr. Pottinger added.

The search for pathways out of the war has gained urgency since the weekend, as global oil prices surge and as the United States burns through costly munitions. Pentagon officials said in recent closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill that the military used up $5.6 billion of munitions in the first two days of the war alone, according to three congressional officials. That is a far larger amount and munitions burn rate than had been publicly disclosed. The Washington Post reported on the figure on Monday.

Iranian officials have remained defiant, saying they will use their leverage over the world’s oil supply to force the United States and Israel to blink.

“Strait of Hormuz will either be a Strait of peace and prosperity for all,” Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, said in a social media post on Tuesday. “Or it will be a Strait of defeat and suffering for warmongers.” (How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War.  Also see Iranian Military Shows It Knows How to Adapt, U.S. Officials Say and Iranians to target American banks and commercial centers in the Mideast.)

Yes, President Donald John Trump miscalculated because he thinks that all world leaders want to make a deal, but the Iranian devils do not want to cut a deal with him as he hoodwinked them into negotiations that almost averted the “military excursion” even though he was fairly convinced that he would start what he called at first a “military strike”:

For centuries, modern nations had generally conducted their wars in rather gentlemanly fashion, usually making efforts to comply with all the laws and international treaties regulating such conflicts.

A war might often begin with a downcast ambassador delivering a diplomatic note to the accredited government, informing its political leadership that unless certain crucial demands were immediately met, a state of war should be assumed to exist by noon the following day. After performing that doleful duty, the diplomat and his staff would return to their embassy, pack their bags, burn their secret documents, and take the next train to the frontier.

Even Japan’s infamous December 7, 1941 surprise attack at Pearl Harbor had supposedly been intended to preserve all these legalistic niceties. From what I’ve read, the Japanese ambassador and his aides had been instructed to personally hand-deliver a declaration of war to our president perhaps five or ten minutes before their country’s planes were scheduled to begin dropping their bombs on our anchored fleet at the other side of the world, thereby complying with the letter of international law though massively violating its spirit. But delays in decoding diplomatic instructions or other such accidental errors led to a snafu in which the military attack actually came before the official declaration of war that legally enabled it, resulting in a lasting legacy of hard feelings between our two countries.

However, America has always prided itself on its innovations, and in recent years we have applied this approach to the initiation of military conflicts, following the lead of our Israeli mentors in that regard. A perfect example came in how we began our current war against Iran.

Iran was extremely eager to avert such a military conflict, so just as in the past we successfully lured them into several rounds of lengthy peace negotiations with the personal envoys of President Donald Trump.

According to media reports, considerable progress had been made in the talks, and the Iranians had already agreed to many of our demands. They were considering doing so on others as well, making greater concessions than anyone had originally expected. The negotiations therefore adjourned for a couple of days, and were scheduled to resume on the following Monday.

The Iranians naturally had to think long and hard before agreeing to all our terms. Therefore, they held a full meeting of their top leadership to decide whether to do so.

But prompting the Iranians to hold such a high-level meeting had apparently been the underlying goal of our entire negotiating strategy. As the New York Times reported the next day, with so many of Iran’s leaders thus gathered together in one place, they were all killed by an Israeli missile strike, an attack that essentially constituted our official declaration of war:

Israel, using U.S. intelligence and its own, would execute an operation it had been planning for months: the targeted killing of Iran’s senior leaders.

The United States and Israeli governments, which had originally planned to launch a strike at night under the cover of darkness, made the decision to adjust the timing to take advantage of the information about the gathering at the government compound in Tehran on Saturday morning.

The leaders were set to meet where the offices of the Iranian presidency, the supreme leader and Iran’s National Security Council are located.

Israel had determined that the gathering would include top Iranian defense officials, including Mohammad Pakpour, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; Aziz Nasirzadeh, the minister of defense; Adm. Ali Shamkhani, the head of the Military Council; Seyyed Majid Mousavi, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force; Mohammad Shirazi, the deputy intelligence minister; and others.

That same Times article published a helpful chart showing just how much of Iran’s top military and national security leadership had been eliminated in that sudden, unexpected missile attack.

Led by the heavy coverage in the Times and the Wall Street Journal, all of our subsequent mainstream media accounts emphasized the devastating nature of the blow that America and Israel had struck against Iran’s political and military leadership, immediately followed by the massive bombing campaign that was unleashed in its wake. All these articles suggested the total success of our military strategy, while naturally soft-peddling the completely illegal and rather treacherous aspects of using the ruse of peace negotiations to launch a surprise decapitating strike, killing so many of Iran’s top leaders. (Is America Winning or Losing the War With Iran?.)

Donald John Trump’s administration did indeed use deception to delay military action, which must be used as an absolute last resort in situations where an aggressor poses an imminent threat to the national security of a country whose leaders are contemplating the onset of warfare, until the Israeli’s were ready to begin their own offensive, but Trump is indeed deceived about the state of the non-Western world, and this myopia is typical of many Americans in general and many of her elected officials in particular, something that the Soviet dissident, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, made clear in his commence address at Harvard University on June 8, 1978, in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of utterly destroying the other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. These deep manifold splits bear the danger of equally manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom—in this case, our Earth—divided against itself cannot stand.

There is the concept of the Third World: Thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this category China, India, the Muslim world, and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as uniform. For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its special character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in Communist captivity. And while it may be that in past years Japan has increasingly become, in effect, a Far West, drawing ever closer to Western ways (I am no judge here), Israel, I think, should not be reckoned as part of the West, if only because of the decisive circumstance that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but usually with contempt for any possible values in the conquered peoples’ approach to life. It all seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden the twentieth century brought the clear realization of this society’s fragility. We now see that the conquests proved to be short-lived and precarious (and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests). Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.

But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this.

The anguish of a divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between the leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too, and this can hardly suit anyone.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, in my examination of the overall pattern of the world’s rifts I would have concentrated on the calamities of the East. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the contemporary West, such as I see them. (Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address.) 

Most American policymakers of the "left" believe that the mistaken foreign policy presuppositions of the "right" can be "corrected" by being obsequious to the real-life enemies of the United States of America.

None of those on the false opposites of the naturalist "right" or the naturalist "left" understand that nations can never be made secure when their citizens are at war with the true God of Divine Revelation by means of persisting in their own sins unrepentantly and by promoting one abject evil after another both at home and abroad. Empires have collapsed because of the decadence of the citizens and the overreach of emperors.

None of those on the false opposites of the naturalist "right" or the naturalist "left" understand or accept these plain words found in Pope Pius XI's Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, that have been quoted so many times on this site but are worth repeating yet again:

Because the Church is by divine institution the sole depository and interpreter of the ideals and teachings of Christ, she alone possesses in any complete and true sense the power effectively to combat that materialistic philosophy which has already done and, still threatens, such tremendous harm to the home and to the state. The Church alone can introduce into society and maintain therein the prestige of a true, sound spiritualism, the spiritualism of Christianity which both from the point of view of truth and of its practical value is quite superior to any exclusively philosophical theory. The Church is the teacher and an example of world good-will, for she is able to inculcate and develop in mankind the "true spirit of brotherly love" (St. Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, i, 30) and by raising the public estimation of the value and dignity of the individual's soul help thereby to lift us even unto God.

Finally, the Church is able to set both public and private life on the road to righteousness by demanding that everything and all men become obedient to God "Who beholdeth the heart," to His commands, to His laws, to His sanctions. If the teachings of the Church could only penetrate in some such manner as We have described the inner recesses of the consciences of mankind, be they rulers or be they subjects, all eventually would be so apprised of their personal and civic duties and their mutual responsibilities that in a short time "Christ would be all, and in all." (Colossians iii, 11)

Since the Church is the safe and sure guide to conscience, for to her safe-keeping alone there has been confided the doctrines and the promise of the assistance of Christ, she is able not only to bring about at the present hour a peace that is truly the peace of Christ, but can, better than any other agency which We know of, contribute greatly to the securing of the same peace for the future, to the making impossible of war in the future. For the Church teaches (she alone has been given by God the mandate and the right to teach with authority) that not only our acts as individuals but also as groups and as nations must conform to the eternal law of God. In fact, it is much more important that the acts of a nation follow God's law, since on the nation rests a much greater responsibility for the consequences of its acts than on the individual.

When, therefore, governments and nations follow in all their activities, whether they be national or international, the dictates of conscience grounded in the teachings, precepts, and example of Jesus Christ, and which are binding on each and every individual, then only can we have faith in one another's word and trust in the peaceful solution of the difficulties and controversies which may grow out of differences in point of view or from clash of interests. An attempt in this direction has already and is now being made; its results, however, are almost negligible and, especially so, as far as they can be said to affect those major questions which divide seriously and serve to arouse nations one against the other. No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. It cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages this law was often violated; still it always existed as an ideal, according to which one might judge the acts of nations, and a beacon light calling those who had lost their way back to the safe road.

There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

No President of the United States of America has ever governed according to principles of Catholic truth, no less to do what civil leaders are supposed to do, namely, foster those conditions wherein citizens can better sanctify and thus save their souls as members of the Catholic Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order. The state of nations depends upon the state of the souls of its citizens, and no amount of ranting or raving about how our current situation domestically and internationally has spiraled out of control because most men in most nations around the world have souls that are captive to the devil by means of what are Mortal Sins in the objective order of things—and thus affect the intellects and wills of those who commit them whether or not they know it—and/or are held captive to the devil by means of Original Sin. In actual fact, of course, there are far more unbaptized souls around the world than those who are genuinely baptized, and the numbers of the baptized who are in states of Sanctifying Grace are infinitesimally puny in comparison to the over six billion people alive today.

This is, as has been noted again and again, a chastisement for the sins of those who think that they can remake the world in their own warped images and for the sins of us all.

We need Our Lady’s help not to be unnerved by the events that are unfolding around us. We just have to remain secure in the crossing of her arms and the folds of her mantle as we beg her to send us the graces during this Lent to make good Confessions to a true priest so that her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who is Our Divine Physician, will heal our spiritual infirmities as the saints who are commemorated today, Thursday of the Third Week in Lent, on this Feast of Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Saints Cosmas and Damian, healed bodies in their work as physicians according to the Mind of the Divine Physician Himself:

This day brings us to the middle of Lent, and is called Mid-Lent Thursday. It is the twentieth of the forty fasts imposed upon us at this holy Season by the Church. The Greeks call this Thursday Mesonēstios, that is, the mid-Fast. They give this name to the entire week, which, in their Liturgy, is the fourth of the seven which form their Lent. But the Thursday of this week is, with them, a solemn feast, and a day of rejoicing, whereby they animate themselves to courage during the rest of the Season. The Catholic nations of the West, though they do not look on this day as a Feast, yet have they always kept it with some degree of festivity and joy. The Church of Rome has countenanced the custom by her own observance of it; but in order not to give a pretext to dissipation, which might interfere with the spirit of fasting—she postpones to the following Sunday the formal expression of this innocent joy, as we shall see further on. Yet it is not against the spirit of the Church that this Mid-Day of Lent should be marked by some demonstration of gladness; for example, by sending invitations to friends, as our Catholic forefathers used to do; and serving up to table choicer and more abundant food than on other days of Lent, taking, however, that the laws of the Church are strictly observed. But alas! how many there are, even of them that call themselves Catholics, who have been breaking, for the past twenty days, these laws of abstinence and fasting! Whether the Dispensations they trust to be lawfully or unlawfully obtained, the joy of Mid-Lent Thursday seems scarcely made for them. To experience this joy, one must have earned and merited it, by penance, by privations, by bodily mortifications; which is just what so many nowadays cannot think of doing. Let us pray for them, that God would enlighten them, and enable them to see what they are bound to do, consistently with the Faith they profess.

At Rome, the Station is at the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in the Forum. The Christians of the Middle Ages (as we learn from Durandus, in his Rational of the Divine Offices) were under the impression that this Station was chosen because these two Saints were, by profession, Physicians. The Church, according to this explanation, would not only offer up her prayers of this day for the souls, but also for the bodies of her children: she would draw down upon them—fatigues as she knew they must be by their observance of abstinence and fasting—she would draw down upon them the protection of these holy Martyrs who, while on earth, devoted their medical skill to relieving the corporal ailments of their brethren. The remarks made by the learned liturgiologist Gavantus, in reference to this interpretations, lead us to conclude that although it may possibly not give us the real motive of the Church’s selecting this Station, yet it is not to be rejected. It will at least suggest to the Faithful to recommend themselves to these Saints, and to ask of God, through their intercession, that they may have the necessary courage and strength for persevering to the end of the holy Season in what they have so far faithfully observed. . . .

Sequel of the holy Gospel according to Luke 4:38-44

At that time: Jesus rising up out of the synagogue, went into Simon’s house. And Simon’s wife’s mother was taken with a great fever, and they besought him for her. And standing over her, he commanded the fever, and it left her. And immediately rising, she ministered to them. And when the sun was down, all they that had any sick with divers diseases, brought them to him. And devils went out from many, crying out and saying: Thou art the Son of God. And he, rebuking them, suffered them not to speak, for they knew that he was Christ. And when it was day, going out, he went into a desert place, and the multitude sought him, and came to him; and they stayed him that he should not depart from them. To whom he said: To other cities I must preach the kingdom of God; for therefore am I sent. And he was preaching in the synagogues of Galilee.

Let us here admire the goodness of our Redeemer, who deigns to exercise his power for the cure of bodily infirmities. How much more ready will he not be to heal our spiritual ailments! Our fever is that of evil passions; Jesus alone can allay it. Let us imitate the eagerness of these people of Galilee, who brought all their sick to Jesus; let us beseech him to heal us. See with what patience he welcomes each poor sufferer! Let us also go to him. Let us implore of him not to depart from us, but abide with us forever; he will accept our petition, and remain. Let us pray for sinners: the days of the great Fast are quickly passing away: we have reached the second half of Lent, and the Passover of our deliverance will soon be here. Look at the thousands that are unmoved, with their souls still blind to the light, and their hearts hardened against every appeal of God’s mercy and justice; they seem resolved on making their eternal perdition less doubtful than ever, by neglecting both the Lent and the Easter of this year. Let us offer up our penances for them; and beg of Jesus, by the merits of his sacred Passion, to redouble his mercies towards them, and deliver from Satan these souls, for whose sakes he is about to shed his Blood.

The Mozarabic Liturgy offers us this beautiful exhortation. It will inspire us to persevere in our Lenten penances and duties:

Looking forward, dearly beloved Brethren, to the hope of the Passion and Resurrection of the Son of God, as also to the manifestation of the glory of our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ: resume your strength and courage. Be not daunted by the labor you have to go through, but remember the solemnity of the holy Pasch, for which you are so ardently longing. One half of holy Lent is over; you have gone through the difficulties of the past, why should you not be courageous about the future Fast? Jesus, who deigned to suffer fatigue for our sakes, will give strength to them that are fatigued. He that granted us to begin the past, will enable us to complete the future. Children! He will be with you to assist us, who wishes us to hope for the glory of his Passion. Amen. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year, Thursday of the Third Week of Lent.)

May our fidelity to Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary and our devotions to her Most Chaste Spouse, Our Good Saint Joseph, help us to enjoy health and body, especially by the intercession of Saints Cosmas and Damian, and much more importantly, that of the soul upon whose state our eternity depends.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us now, and at the hour of our death, and pray for the day when all men will be converted to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order, and exclaim with joy:

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dóminus, Deus Sábaoth. Pleni sunt cæli et terra glória tua. Hosánna in excélsis. Benedíctus, qui venit in nómine Dómini. Hosánna in excélsis.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, pray for us.

Saints Cosmas and Damian, pray for us.