Two Things 4/16/24
Two Things 4/16/24
Iran's miscalculation. Elite marriage mindset. Plus Kirk Cherry's lecture, secular blasphemy, and spurious scholarship.
Coffee this Friday, April 19, at the usual time and place.
(1) Miscalculation: Israel, the United States, and other allies intercepted about 99% of Iranian missiles and drones aimed at Israel on Saturday night. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan write at the Institute for the Study of War that Iran’s goal was indeed to harm Israel—and it miscalculated:
The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect….
Ukrainian air defenses have averaged interception rates of only about 16% of Russian ballistic missiles during recent large strikes. The Iranians likely expected that Israeli rates would be higher than the Ukrainian rates but not above 90% against such a large ballistic missile salvo—the Russians, after all, have never fired close to that many large ballistic missiles in a single strike against Ukraine…. The Iranians thus likely expected that at least some of their drones and cruise missiles would interfere with Israeli targeting of incoming ballistic missiles, whereas apparently none did….
Israel’s air defense system has a number of obvious advantages over Ukrainian air defense, but the full implications of some of those advantages might well have been unclear to Iranian strike planners…..
The other hopeful sign emerging from the weekend was the assist Israel got from Sunni Arab states in the region, including Jordan and, to some extent, Saudi Arabia. As Judith Miller writes at City Journal, “Jordan’s assistance suggests that what Israelis and Americans are calling the Middle East’s ‘new security architecture’—the strategic alliance of moderate Arab states and Israel against Iran and other members of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’—may continue to expand.” But Carter and Kagan urge continued vigilance: “Iran will learn additional lessons from the failed April 13 attack that it can leverage to launch more successful attacks in the future…. Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.”
(2) Marriage: I attended a talk last night, part of the Lighthouse Voices series, by Dr. Brad Wilcox, Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and author of Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization, published this year. Dr. Wilcox is doing remarkable scholarly work on the benefits of getting married and having kids, what makes marriages and families strong, and how a culture that denigrates marriage especially harms young men. One of his most intriguing concepts is what he calls the “inverse hypocrisy” of elites—sexually faddish in public but normies at home. He explains at The Public Discourse:
[Patrick T. Brown]: … [S]ome left-leaning provocateurs have rolled their eyes at the idea that getting married is “defying the elites.” They point out, I think fairly, that college-educated Americans who skew left and make up a large share of what we might consider “the elite” do get married, and often more stably, than Americans without a college degree. What are they missing?
[Brad Wilcox]: I laughed when I saw this point making its rounds on Twitter. I’ve written a ton about elite marriages, so I know that elites, in their private lives, tend to get and stay married.
The problem is what they do in their public capacities as cultural, business, and political leaders. Our elites often “Talk Left, Walk Right” when it comes to marriage and family, privately embracing a marriage-minded way of life even as they deny the importance of marriage and the two-parent family in public. And there are now good polling data showing that no group of Americans is less marriage-friendly than college-educated liberals when it comes to their public attitudes.
The pushback was especially funny because the very people who objected to this phrase from the book’s title, like the journalist Matt Yglesias, were exactly the elites I was thinking about in writing the book…. If our elites used their power to tell the truth about marriage—in schools, universities, media, pop culture, and on social media—we’d have a much healthier family culture.
Other Things and Community Haps
Tour of Holy Theophany Orthodox Church: this Thursday, April 18, at 12:30 p.m., part of our “Holy Places” series.
A Brief Tour of C.S. Lewis’s Moral Philosophy: a lecture by Kirk Cherry at First Congregational Church (20 E. St. Vrain 80903), this Sunday, April 21, at 11:00 a.m.
Tyler Vigen is the “Spurious Scholar,” using AI to dredge up correlations between random variables, like the strong statistical connection “between air pollution in sunny San Diego, California, and the popularity of the name ‘Kirk’” and the “intriguing relationship between milk consumption and the divorce rate in Colorado.”