America's lawlessness makes Iran look good and Israel look lawless

Plus: Mamdani eats New York

Editor’s note: I’ve struggled to finish this article over three or four days. This is why I’ve been relatively quiet though there’s plenty of news, if not reason to be bullish on the market. Here it is, and then I can move on.

Friends, it’s Travelogue Time. Join me in Southeast Asia, where we will find maximum law and order.

Singapore is arguably the most lawful country on earth. The tiny city-state could fit into the Atlanta metro area about 30 times, but has the same population (about 6 million), bringing its population density to a steamy 21,350 sweaty humans per square mile. In order for a place like that not to fall quickly into “Lord of the Flies,” there must be law and order: Maximum law and order.

Singapore requires all its citizens to serve in its military. It maintains an army of about 45,000 troops. The SAF is known as the most technically advanced armed forces in the Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) states. It boasts about a dozen F-35B advanced fighters, and eight F-35As. Singapore must protect its interests, as it cannot support itself with food, water, or other resources. It is heavily dependent on Malaysia for water.

In Singapore, the Misuse of Drugs act mandates the death penalty for a variety of drug crimes, including possession of 15g of heroine, 30g of morphine, half a kilo of marijuana, or 250g of methamphetamine. Murder always yields a death sentence, as well as kidnapping, gang violence, or assisting a youth or impaired person to commit suicide. The Arms Offenses Act makes use of a firearm in the commission of a crime a death sentence. Terrorism in Singapore is punishable by death. If you want to live in Singapore, don’t do any of these things. Lesser crimes are punished by physical violence, like caning.

Yet, you won’t find the SAF invading other countries. It’s not really needed, as Singapore is rich, and other nations respect its sovereignty. Begun as a British colony in 1819, it remained in the empire until 1942, when the Japanese occupied it during World War II. After the war, political support for independence led to self-governance in 1959, but its dependence on other Southeast Asian nations forced an unwanted union with Malaysia in 1963, which lasted less than two years—Malaysia expelled Singapore from its federation due to cultural and ideological chasms that could never be reconciled.

Singapore goes it alone and the nations leave it be.

Not so with Israel, or Iran. Or America for that matter, at least these days.

Image: Grok

Iran is also a lawful country, inside its own borders, and by that I mean Sharia law. There are all kinds of civil laws, but the ones with bite are the ones that prohibit women from going out in public without wearing a hijab. A woman cannot legally obtain a passport or travel document without their husband’s approval. A man can legally marry a girl as young as 13, and fathers can bind their daughters to marriage even younger than that, with court approval.

When it comes to its own sovereignty, meaning the ruling regime’s authority, Iran is lawful to the extreme. Anyone, under “wartime conditions,” which is basically anytime the Supreme Leader says so, the authorities can arrest anyone suspected of standing against the authority of the state. Since the end of February, over 6,000 have been arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or executed. And use of force in Iran is perfectly legal, meaning killing tens of thousands of its own people who gather in unity against the regime.

It’s also legal in Iran for the state to fund the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Constitution of the Revolutionary Guards, adopted in 1982 defines IGRC’s mission as protecting the Iranian Revolution, guarding its achievements, and ensuring the integrity of the Islamic Republic. Note that has nothing to do with the civil state of Iran, among nations. The IRGC recognizes no national boundaries in its mission. It can operate wherever it needs to: Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, or underground in western nations. The IRGC reports directly to the Supreme Leader, and is separate from the army (Artesh).

What Iran does is perfectly legal according to its own laws. Closing the Strait of Hormuz is considered their legal right, in their own law.

International law is quite another thing. Flat out, Iran doesn’t recognize it, as it falls outside the regime’s religious foundation. What other countries agree to is useless when the nation’s entire regime is informed by Islamic law and the vision of their religious leaders. Yes, Iran will abide by laws when it benefits the regime’s goals, but those laws are for other nations which are founded on, let’s just say other principles.

So when Iran goes to negotiate “deals” with the U.S., which the U.S., by its own law, when it says it is removing all oil sanctions against Iran, will generally keep (at least for today), Iran doesn’t have to keep any of its own promises, and according to its own law, that’s completely legal.

The U.S., by the standards applied to Iran, is a lawless nation. We make laws and then the very government that passes them, breaks them, ignores, them, subverts them, subrogates their enforcement with parties not constitutionally charged with authority for that purpose, and overall just acts criminally.

I don’t have time, room, or inclination to fill page after page with all the times and deeds of the first, and the current, Trump administration’s violation, trampling, or just plan ignoring, this country’s laws, and getting away with it because Congress doesn’t do a thing about it. From demolishing the East Wing of the White House, starting a war with Iran, renaming the Kennedy Center and then when a judge orders Trump’s name removed, obscuring the building with a tarp. Or attempting to fire the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or to appoint people to run agencies who have not been confirmed by Congress. Of course, Trump is not the only president to do such things, which is why we have the Supreme Court to clip the executive’s wings (or push back on Congress when it does something counter to the Constitution). But the sheer volume and intensity of Trump’s indiscretions and flooding the zone with illegal acts is—well, admirable, that is if you’re a caudillo in a banana republic.

What the U.S. does tends to affect the world. If we erect massive tariffs on foreign goods, as the biggest consumer nation in the world, that affects global commerce. If we bomb a nation that can mine a 28-mile wide strait through which about 50 percent of the world’s raw materials flow, in one form or another, then that nation ends up closing the strait, and the world suffers. If we apply our prodigious special forces capabilities against a South American regime, then that leader ends up wearing a prison jumpsuit.

It is vitally more important to the world that the U.S. be a lawful nation, and not just lawful, but, as so many role-playing character games term it, lawful-good. That we use our laws to do good things, not to advance barbarism, or the religious visions of one sect that seeks to bring about a paradise for their own followers, but death to all others.

I’d go so far as to say that in the post-WWII world order, the United States is the most important nation in the world for the maintenance and validity of international law. If we acted like Iran, not only would we violate our own laws, but we would irreparably damage international law. Said another way: Iran acting like Iran does not affect international law, but we do.

When America decides to attack boats in international waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, because we suspect the operators of those boats to be drug runners, we are not only violating our own laws, which protect the rights of those accused with criminal action, but international law, which protects the rights of civilians against being struck by another nation’s military. These laws get stretched a lot when it benefits whoever is in the White House’s plans. For example, when President Barack Obama ordered drone strikes against a U.S. citizen living in foreign nation.

When the U.S. military does such actions, they are guilty of murdering civilians, but that guilt flows down from the top. The Trump administration calls the 200-plus who have been killed “narcoterrorists,” but that has not been established by any of our laws, judges, or juries. It’s simply a designation that the administration uses to mean “people we want to kill.” That’s lawless.

And when the U.S. is lawless, then international law suffers. And that hurts our ally in the Middle East, Israel.

Depending on who you ask, either Israel is an empire-seeking apartheid state, or it is defending itself from historical and continual efforts to wipe it off the map, along with all its Jewish inhabitants and the diaspora Jews around the world. If pressed, I am certainly in the second category. If you lined up 20 18-year-olds, dressed similarly, with 10 from Israel and 10 from Gaza or the West Bank, I don’t think most Americans, and even Israelis or Arabs, could pick who is who based on appearance. This is why Israel has to be so strict on checkpoints. If it was easy to pick out Palestinian terrorists from Israelis based on eyeballs, it would be a simple matter to remove terrorists from Israel’s streets. But that’s not so at all. Semitic, Middle-Eastern races look the same. It is the Eastern European and lily-white American Jews who stand out to Tzabrim (Sabras, or native Israelis) as well as Palestinians.

Israel keeps the division of land it controls because it must for its own security. It does a poor job dealing with Israeli settlers building in uninhabited West Bank areas (the land plan based on the Oslo Accords is complicated). It does a poor job protecting the rights of law-abiding, peaceful Palestinians. But so does the Palestinian Authority do a very poor job of protecting those rights, never mind Hamas, who uses its living citizens as human shields, and the dead ones as propaganda. Israel’s situation doesn’t make an apartheid state, where one race believes in its inherent superiority over another. Yes, there are racists and religious zealots in Israel, but they are not the majority. In the Palestinian areas, those who wish to see Israel destroyed and believe that Jews should all be killed are in fact, the majority.

Does Israel have the right to defend itself against this threat, a permanent gun to its head? Of course. Under international law, Israel’s war in Lebanon is legal, and it is supported by the United Nations charter. Not everyone agrees with that conclusion, however. But their objection is not over the fact that Israel should defend itself, it is in the proportional nature of the response versus the threat. The assumptions inherent in the objections don’t hold water, in my opinion. They assume that peace is possibly if Israel does something to appease Hezbollah or Hamas. They assume that since Israel has massive capacity to destroy both civilian and terrorist infrastructure, that it should destroy neither and pull back within its borders, because Lebanon cannot defend itself from the IDF.

What will that accomplish? Hezbollah and Hamas will rearm, and resume their attacks on Israel, and one day, another October 7th will happen again, to the children of those who suffered through the one in 2023. The cycle can only be broken if Hezbollah and Hamas are completely obliterated. Either that, or they win and commit a real genocide against the Jews. The assumptions baked into objections is that those attacking Israel would not commit genocide if they won. I fail to see anyone who can provide the slightest proof of it, as Hamas and Hezbollah have put that particular goal in writing as part of their founding documents. The opposing theory is already proven, however: if Israel wanted to commit genocide and kill every living thing in Gaza, it could and would already have done so. It could similarly make southern Lebanon into the equivalent of the Berlin Wall, with dead-man lines and no-mans land, killing anything that dares to cross.

Israel would rather have a buffer zone, where it controls security but does not kill everything. This has been tried for decades with the U.N. and it has been not only ineffective, but the U.N. “peacekeepers” have been on the payroll of Israel’s enemies. What should a nation do in this situation?

Back to my original point here. If the U.S is busy sinking speedboats in the Pacific, murdering the people on the boats, in violation of international law. If the U.S. is disingenuously attacking and then giving away the store to Iran, Israel’s neighbor, then what good is acting within the good faith of the U.N. charter, or relying on international law to provide a framework for self-defense?

It’s no good. If the U.S. resorts to “jungle rules,” or more accurately, the way of the Cosa Nostra, to get “a piece of the action” in every situation, then there is no moral foundation for Israel to rely upon. It’s totally an emotional, or racial, or historical argument, and nobody wins those.

At least Iran can say they are being consistent within their own worldview, and hewing to their own laws, if not the world’s understanding of them. The U.S. is breaking its own laws, and trashing the international order to bring about chaos. Perhaps some of the end goals of this are valid—but the methods are not. I can debate policy, but not murder on the sea, or backstabbing allies.

If Israel cannot rely on the U.S. to uphold and validate international law, then it cannot rely on its own morality and laws to protect itself. Our intransigence has betrayed all the goodwill we’ve shown toward Israel. We should repent of it before things get beyond repair.

The Democratic Socialists have won three Congressional districts from Tuesday’s elections in New York, all endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. From the AP:

The mayor said it was a question of electing “better Democrats” who would “put working people back at the heart of politics.” The approach consternated some in Democratic leadership, but the outcome showcased Mamdani’s rising influence.

What does that mean? It means the insanity will continue on both sides of the aisle, at least for a while. It is also bad for Israel.

There is reason to hope, though. Congress, in a rare show of bipartisan unity, passed a housing bill. Maybe the good feelings will warm hearts and they’ll decide they really can work together again.

Even in the Senate, some Republicans crossed the aisle to rebuke President Trump and his proto-war in Iran, which we’ve already surrendered. Voting to stop a war that we’ve lost before Congress can even act seems an empty victory to me. But at least they are voting for something together, and that’s important. Isn’t it?

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