Iran likely doesn’t want a direct war with the United States either. But the two countries are already in a low-level conflict that could accelerate in ways that neither intends, warns Michael Hirsh, a journalist with extensive foreign policy experience, in an excellent piece at Politico. The combination of an overextended American military and Iran’s inability to directly control the groups it funds means that “events are on a permanent hair trigger that is constantly threatening to explode at the slightest pressure. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, appeared to acknowledge this this week when he suggested ‘that we’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973, and arguably even before that.'”
Separately, American and British forces carried out a series of strikes Saturday in Yeman that “hit 36 Houthi targets in 13 locations,” according to the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani—the leader of the country that American troops are supposedly protecting, at American taxpayers’ expense—visited some of the militia fighters wounded by those U.S. strikes and issued a statement condemning America’s “new aggression against Iraq’s sovereignty.”
What are we even doing here, you guys?
Immigration deal? Probably not. A bipartisan group of senators unveiled a bill Sunday that would spend $118 billion on a combination of border security and military aid to Ukraine.
The deal would not grant amnesty to anyone who has already entered the United States illegally, would erect additional barriers to future amnesty claims, and would hike funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) so it could keep up to 50,000 migrants in custody. (The figure is about 34,000 today.) The proposal also calls for “effectively shutting down the border to new entrants” if the average number of migrants per day exceeds 5,000 in a given week, The New York Times reports, or if more than 8,500 try to cross the border in a single day.
Much of the spending in the bill would be directed overseas. Politico reports that the deal would send about $62 billion in military aid to Ukraine—more than the entire annual budget of the U.S. Marine Corps, Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) notes. It would also send about $14 billion in military assistance to Israel, while setting aside $10 billion in humanitarian aid for Ukraine and Gaza. Another $5 billion would be sent to various countries in the Indo-Pacific region, and about $20 billion would be directed to the immigration issues addressed in the bill.
The specifics of the deal may not matter much, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) and several other prominent Republicans have declared the bill a dead letter. |