James M. Redwine

Middle East

Civilization Not Annihilation

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The most dangerous character trait an advisor to a narcissistic megalomaniac can have is honesty. Speaking truth to power is what a true patriot does before falling on her or his sword. Those around Rome’s Caligula found that out between 37 and 41 AD before he was assassinated. On the other hand, our country has a desperate need for words of wisdom and humanity to be whispered into President Trump’s ear and, more importantly, for him to believe those truths and put America over personal pouting. Of course, if the ruler surrounds himself with sycophants, the advice is more damaging than the facts.

Humanity has unfortunately had numerous examples of people who clearly saw and warned of a dark future but whose forecasts were ignored. The most famous of these cautionary voices came from Cassandra of Greek mythology. Cassandra was the daughter of Troy’s King Priam. She proclaimed the disasters that would befall Troy, but she was dismissed as mad and Troy was conquered by the Greeks in a senseless ten-year war over Helen’s affair with King Priam’s son, Paris.

On March 17, 2026 Joseph Kent, who had been nominated by Trump to serve as the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, sent the President his letter of resignation. Kent had served twenty years in the army, had been awarded six bronze stars, was an army ranger and green beret and had seen several combat deployments to the Middle East.

Kent correctly foresaw the future of America’s destruction of Iran. After our unprovoked attacks in June 2025 and February 2026, Joseph Kent, at great self-sacrifice, implored President Trump to put America first:

“President Trump,

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term. Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.

In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars. You demonstrated this by killing Qasam Solamani and by defeating ISIS.

Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.

As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.

I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for. The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.

It was an honor to serve in your administration and to serve our great nation.”

Gentle Reader, you already know that Kent’s prescient warnings went unheeded. President Trump has publicly threatened to destroy forever the entire civilization of Iran if it does not, UNCONDITIONALLY, adhere 100% to Trump’s demands. Iran has 90 million people and a civilization over 4,000 years old. Also, as Kent stated, Iran has never been a threat to America and could not be if it wanted to be. To exterminate an entire segment of humanity is to violate every moral position we say we stand for.

The Strait of Hormuz had never been blockaded by Iran until the United States and Israel decided to unilaterally and without warning, while in the midst of negotiations, bomb Iran twice and demand total regime change and capitulation. President Trump portrayed our actions as a means of helping the Iranian populace to revolt against the radical theocracy controlling Iran. But, if we kill everyone and eliminate their culture, how is that to their benefit?

Now, as we supposedly want a “deal” with Iran, what does Iran have to give? President Trump says we obliterated all their nuclear capabilities in June 2025 and February 2026. We and Israel have completely decimated Iran’s air force, navy and economy. All Iran has left is the Strait of Hormuz and their devastated lives, while we demand unconditional capitulation. Iran has nothing else to concede. So, how can this “negotiation” end?

Just as the Greeks after the Trojan war, I suggest we declare victory, we get in our ships and sail home; that is what a properly heeded Cassandra would advise. And we should thank Joseph Kent for having the wisdom and courage to choose the harder right over the easier wrong. The President should recognize Kent’s service to America and choose duty over duplicity.

 You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

Epic Fury Revisited

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“Peg, Peg, are you awake?”

“I am now that you have poked your elbow through my ribs. What are you laughing about?”

“I just solved President Trump’s kerfuffle in the Middle East. It came to me in a dream; I knew you’d want to hear it. It has everything. No blood, no money and no more angst. Do you want to get up and have a hot chocolate or just lie here and be amazed?”

“What I want is to go back to sleep, but apparently that’s not an option. So, go ahead; let’s hear what, if anything, is going on in your head.”

“Oh, good. The country needs my help. Listen up, I think this borders on brilliant; it’s kinda like something Trump, Hegseth, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio might have thought of on their own, if they’d thought of it.”

The Dream Solution

President Trump summoned Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to the oval office after he saw a FOX NEWS report of a portion of Hegseth’s prayer at the Pentagon directed to the war against Iran:

“Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence.
….
[L]et justice be executed swiftly and without remorse.”

“Now, Pete, that is a real prayer. Where in the world did you come up with that?”

“Mr. President, I took that straight from the Bible. I am sure you are familiar with Psalm 144 that holds: ‘Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle.’”

“Oh, sure, I used to be referred to suggested passages, but then I found Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to be rather D.E.I. in its approach so, I quit wasting time on such by-gone thinking. The world now looks to me to solve these things. After all, I am the peacemaker.”

“Anyway, Pete, I just wanted to commend your attitude of all out victory and run an idea by you as to how we might land on our feet in this Iran thing. What do you think about a little diversionary tactic such as finding a country we can get to surrender without any more blood or tax dollars wasted? We need an enemy we can truly subdue in a couple of days, you know, one we can blame for criticizing our righteous invasion of Iran. I have one in mind based on what this guy from Chicago just said on March 26th about the war. No, no, it wasn’t that slob J.B. Pritzker who wants to run against me in 2028. He is in Illinois, but I mean that other Chicago preacher who used to be called Robert Francis Prevost but now dresses like a mullah or an Arab Sheik. Just this past Palm Sunday he said our ‘… hands are full of blood and that God does not listen to our prayers because we are waging war and using religion to justify violence.’”

“I think the fellow does not like my policies and is challenging my authority. Doesn’t he realize I represent 350 million people? Of course, he touts his leadership of 1.4 billion Catholics, 5 ½ of which are on the U.S. Supreme Court, but most of those people do not even own one golf course. And he lives in the smallest country on earth with the smallest army. Do you know there are only 135 members of the Swiss Guards and their last military engagement was at the sea battle of Lepanto in 1571? Further, they dress funny with their red, yellow and blue pantaloons and their only weapons are long sticks. How long could they last against our troops or even one Abrams tank?”

Photo by Peg Redwine

“Most importantly, I bet if I decided to take over the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV would just turn the other cheek. Then we could raise really huge campaign contributions by converting the Sistine Chapel into a really high-end rental suite like the Lincoln bedroom. We could also sell off that depressing Pieta thing and replace it with a statue of me.”

“What do you think, Pete? It would be easier than Venezuela and a whole lot less trouble than Iran. Also, the Pope doesn’t have any way to restrict access to the Mediterranean Sea or even to the Trevi Fountain. Okay, that’s enough planning, let’s go for it this afternoon! This should really divert attention from Iran and Epstein. Let the games begin.” 

“To sleep, perchance to dream.”
Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1

Photo by Peg Redwine
Photo by Peg Redwine

“What a dream. What do you think? The solution was right there in my head and now I just need to get the President and the Pope to sit down for some real Trump-like deal making. I’m pretty sure the Pope will be amenable to a Trump negotiation calling for unconditional surrender. What’s the Pope going to do, run over the President with that funny little golf cart?”

“I can’t speak for the Pope, but if you don’t shut up and let me go back to sleep, you won’t need to worry about it.”

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

One Thousand Years

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Photo by Peg Redwine

The first Olympic Games were held at Olympia, Greece in 776 BC. They were held at Olympia because they were a paean to Zeus who supposedly presided there. The games were designed to be held every 4 years until the Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great ordered them stopped because his Christian sensibilities were offended by the worship of Zeus. Theodosius was born in 347 AD and ruled from 379 AD until his death in 395. Rome had finally conquered the Achaean League (Greece) in 146 BC after about a century of strife.

What became known as Greece was a conglomeration of city states, Corinth, Athens, Sparta and the Kingdom of Macedonia, that competed and cooperated for several hundred years until the Romans used wily diplomacy and military stratagems as fatal wedges to divide the Greeks. However, the ancient Romans, much as contemporary peoples yet today, adopted much of Greek culture, such as art, literature and philosophy. That included the Olympic Games.

The theory of the Olympic Games that the ancient Greeks put into practice with their Greek neighbors was that a sacred truce, in the name of Zeus, would be declared if the neighbors were at war and peace would reign during travel to and from and during the games. Even after Rome took over, the games were not a problem for over 500 years. Then the flame was extinguished until the “modern” Olympic Games were reignited in 1896.

There were probably many fractures in the 1,000 years of laying down swords and beating them into ploughshares. However, the concept of feats of athleticism replacing warfare, even for a day or a couple of weeks, must have helped the Achaeans live in relative non-belligerence for many years. Also, this state of truce surely encouraged the interchange of cultural benefits. Perhaps this attitude of “Hey, can’t we all just get along?” if even for a short time every 4 years, helped the Greeks lay the foundation our Founders built upon.

After 4 years of war between Russia and Ukraine and battle lines being in place over much of our known planet, using the old “Champion System” where soldiers sheath their weapons and vie for medals that stand for physical excellence, not dominance or survival as those Greek heroes did, might assuage our wounds. It makes more sense than endless negotiations over the shape of the table as in our war with Viet Nam, or who gets to claim another Pyrrhic victory such as the endless bloodletting in the Middle East. This will be especially obvious soon when President Trump gleefully girds our military’s loins up about him and once again attacks Iran on Benjamin Netanyahu’s orders.

Father Knows Best

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Back in the days when TV was black and white the show Father Knows Best starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt as father and mother Jim and Margaret Anderson dished up weekly lessons of morality and common sense. Father Jim could always be relied on to give thoughtful and caring analysis that mother Margaret would inculcate in their children. The show’s premise was based upon a family seeking and receiving sagacious advice from a respected father much as our nation had received from the Father of our country, George Washington.

Just as most of us have from time to time neglected our parents’ guidance to our chagrin, the United States has sometimes strayed from our Founders’ hard-earned wisdom to our mutual detriment. Our current fall from grace in the Middle East could use a stern parental lecture as set forth in Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796. Among his thoughtful and prescient cautions to us were his observations on dangers to our own country from unjust and unwise foreign entanglements:

“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations, cultivate peace and harmony with all. … give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.

“…. Nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations (Iran?) and passionate attachments for ochers (Israel?) should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or its affection.”

Washington’s advice stands in sharp contrast to our long myopic view of the Zionists unjust actions towards the people who long inhabited the land that was created as Israel in 1948. America has always been the main supporter and enabler of what can no longer be denied as an effort by Zionists to eliminate Palestinians from their ancestral homes. And it is Zionism not Judaism that should be condemned.

Jewish people as all other peoples have the right to live in Israel or migrate to Israel if it is done according to international law and justice. There are countless Jewish people throughout the world, including in Israel, who believe the Zionists in Israel are both legally and morally wrong to prosecute a genocide against Palestinians. The trope of calling criticism of Zionist crimes antisemitism or of speaking or protesting against the Israeli government’s actions is just an attempt by Zionists to divert attention from their immoral actions.

As for America, we should consider the wisdom of our Founders and the special place America has held in the world since WWII. We should stand up and call out the “passionate attachment” we have allowed to subvert our basic principles. It is never too late to do the right thing.

Perhaps a simpler guide than Father Washington’s sage advice might be an old adage about self-reflections. If one person calls us an ass, we can laugh it off, but if almost everyone does so, then we better look in the mirror. Such is America’s denial of its immoral enablement of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We may not be dropping the bombs on innocent children, but we are providing them along with the existential political threat to use our military might to support Zionist atrocities.

We appear blind to the evil Zionists call self-defense. Starving civilians, destroying hospitals, murdering journalists and stealing land is genocide, not self-preservation or any type of legitimate response to any former attack. As for America, we should not take up arms against Israel, but we should cease aiding Israel to take military action beyond its borders. And its borders should be those established by the United Nations in 1948.

 The United States and Great Britain were the main reason there is an Israel. We found reasons to create Israel in the great evil done to Jewish people by WWII Germany. But that evil was not done by Palestinians or Arabs or Iranians. Such sympathy was certainly understandable. However, to commit another great wrong out of sympathy just doubles the evil; it does not expiate it.

America should first cease our complicity in this modern-day holocaust then we should assert our world leadership to help re-build and realign Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Our decades long culpability in this tragedy and our unique status and stature demand that America stands for what we say we believe and what George Washington called for. Peace and stability are possible in the Middle East; however, it will not come from bombs but from the principles we hold dear.

Anti-WWIII

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To be anti-Nazi is to be neither anti-Teutonic nor anti-Germany any more than to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. The United States and our WWI allies, such as Great Britain, should have required Nazi Germany to abide by its 1919 Versailles Treaty obligations and perhaps there would not have been a WWII. While it is correct that the treaty ending WWI was needlessly vengeful towards Germany and woefully shortsighted by the victors, at least Hitler’s illegal re-occupation of the German Rhineland in 1936 should have alarmed us.

Instead, the world did nothing but dither while the Nazis invaded Poland (1939), Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France (1940), then Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941. The United States did finally react in 1941, but that was because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and, as we declared war on Japan, Germany declared war on us.

But as the Nazis invaded its defenseless neighbors and even slaughtered its own citizens, the world’s democracies, mainly the U.S. and Britain, fiddled. Surely, we learned that the slippery slope from a self-described victim such as Germany to a genocidal invader such as the Nazis must not be appeased, or worse, enabled. Yet, the United States not only helped create Israel in 1948, we have since enabled the Zionists to bomb Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran.

Just as students did in the 1960’s and 1970’s when the United States bombed Viet Nam and Cambodia, today’s students at many colleges and universities are exercising their First Amendment rights to address their grievances to our government. Our government has responded by bombing Yemen, deporting scholars and further enabling the Zionists. The American people have a right, even a duty, to call anti-Zionism what it is and not be intimidated from calling out what it is not, anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism.

The Zionists want to prevent Iran or any other Middle Eastern country from being able to defend themselves as Israel already can, with nuclear weapons. As Hitler began his hegemony gradually, the Zionists are steadily invading and occupying Gaza, Yemen, Syria, the West Bank and Lebanon.

WWII may be what the world thought WWI was, the War to End All Wars. Unfortunately, about 50 million people died during WWII. If Israel, with our full knowledge and support, starts WWIII by bombing Iran, we will have once again failed to learn from history.

I suggest we own up to our myopic view of the Zionists, not the Jewish citizens of Israel, and that we not allow the shouted tropes of anti-Semitism to still our voices for fairness, understanding and peace. Hitler, unlike the Zionists, did not have nuclear weapons. If we want to prevent a true eve of destruction, as we discourage Iran from procuring nuclear weapons, we should dismantle Israel’s.

A Turn From The Right To The Right

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According to CNN this morning, 13 November 2024, President-Elect Trump will nominate former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee, to be United States Ambassador to Israel. Mr. Huckabee was quoted this morning as denying the existence of a Palestinian people, referring to Palestine as Canaan and Palestinians as Canaanites. As the Republican Party will almost certainly have the majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives in 2025, Mr. Huckabee will likely be confirmed.

United States foreign policy in the Middle East will likely continue to be one of aggressive support for Israel, as it has been since Israel was created out of Palestine in 1948. But, it may turn from a philosophical position to a dynamic one. From a war more of words and increasing military materiel backing to one that shifts from old people making threats and spending our national treasure to our young people bleeding and dying. We have recently traveled this one-way road in Viet Nam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan and the Iraq War. Now is the time to change both our direction and our moral position.