Tomorrow is another important anniversary, also tied to a military victory: the 80th anniversary of D-Day, when Allied forces made their heroic landing on the beaches of Normandy. David Spector recounts the remarkable and moving story of Nathan Baskind, one of many American Jewish soldiers who lost their lives in that massive and bloody effort—and his recent Jewish burial:

Now, eight decades after his death on June 23, 1944, Lieutenant Nathan Baskind will finally receive a proper burial. Baskind, the son of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants who settled in Pittsburgh and owned a wallpaper business, was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 at the age of twenty-six. . . . “He came from a successful family, he could have gotten out of [the war] if he wanted to,” said Shalom Lamm, co-founder of Operation Benjamin, a non-profit that identifies Jewish U.S. war veterans buried under mistaken religious designations at American military cemeteries.

Baskind commanded four M-10 tank destroyers—modified Sherman tanks—in the U.S. army’s 899th tank-destroyer battalion during the bloody D-Day invasion. . . . As U.S. troops engaged in fierce battles with Nazi soldiers, who were ordered by Adolf Hitler to hold the city at all costs, Baskind went behind enemy lines accompanied only by his driver on a reconnaissance mission. They were ambushed.

In 2022, a U.S. genealogist touring the German Marigny cemetery happened to notice that among the names of seventeen German soldiers on a plaque at a burial mound was one name that didn’t seem to belong—Baskind’s.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.