The first gulf was so effective it saved countless Iraqi lives. Presenting airpower so goddamn unfair thousands just ran into the desert rather than stay and get killed. It really is as fast and humane as it can be, as long as the execution is perfect
He didn’t really have nothing to do with the execution of the attack, gen Schwartzkopf or however the fuck his name is written was in charge of that. I mean I know you’re memeing but I’d just like to make that point. Really interesting guy too check out his memoirs.
People didn’t like this post, but the truth is unpopular. It’s not like I’m encouraging war crimes after all, but you just haven’t been paying attention if you think they don’t make additional war crimes easier.
War crimes have definitions, though, so lots of terrible things aren’t war crimes… they’re just war.
The comments on that article are really missing the point that leveling a city block to kill a few terrorists almost invariably means you created more terrorists than you killed.
Unfortunately I'm not so sure they're missing the point. I'm afraid there's quite a few people who are just excited to see their scheduled genocide put into motion.
Far too many people seem to be itching to find an enemy, all so they can justify their desire for vindictive bloodlust.
Finding an enemy, anyone, to rally angry and hate-fueled people has been a solid political staple for at least the last decade or so. The only “new”-ish part is that a lot of people are dying as a direct result of that now.
The ultimate tragedy of the last few weeks is that the average Israeli will only be more radicalized against Palestine, while the average Palestinian will only be more radicalized against Israel. It's a perpetual cycle of anger and violence that has no end in sight, and I don't feel any hope for a better future for the region and the innocent people on either side of the conflict.
What should have happened, like yesterday, should be obvious to anyone with a brain and a heart: Hamas should free all of their hostages and turn over anybody who participated in the terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, and Israel should cease fire immediately, call all settlers back and return the Gaza borders back to what they were a month ago. Terrorism and genocide are inexcusable, and the simple fact is that both sides have the blood of the innocent on their hands, all because of the politics of greed.
We shouldn’t be.
The only solution to the region is a Palestine that is prosperous and free. So long as people have nothing to lose, they will continue laying down their lives.
Hamas wants “peace” in the form of a repressive Islamic state which is run by Sharia law. They are not friends to the Palestinian people. They are Iranian puppets.
Wow look at all those downvote for stating a fact. The pro-Israel crowd sure is sensitive when facts that don’t agree with their propaganda are mentioned.
Like in any war of occupation: the ever more militarized government of the occupier and the ever more militarized force of the occupied are objective allies.
The first thing that should have happened is the dethroning of Netanyahu. The fact the guy who let it happen is still in charge is by far the biggest cause of this.
They know this, that’s the point, they want a biting dog that you can euthanize instead of the calm golden lab everyone will be upset with you for putting down
In the past Israel beloved that. But the organization of Hamas has scared them. They believe that they need to destroy the Command and Control infrastructure Hamas has for its 40k person military or Hamas will simply organize followup slave raids.
Is this the only thing that troubles you? Hamas creates terrorists anyway. Palestinians are being told they need to kill Jews in order to become heroes, which will get them money they really need. It’s not much different from Russia where people are led by propaganda but ultimately decide to abandon peaceful life for a chance to get big money.
You prefer calling a truth you don’t like useless? Because it’s the truth that hamas will not be able to achieve its goals (kill all jews and destroy Israel) using what they have and receive as aid, even if they build tons of missiles they usually build. This is not how you “fight for freedom” because the freedom will never be the result of it. They need to change a lot in order to even try better. For example build defenses along with missiles for a change etc.
There’s an onion news parody video from the future and they show the Israeli - Palestinian conflict and it’s just 2 guys left fighting over a stray cat they both claim youtu.be/iKC21wDarBo?si=GKs9RdTDMk-p0lZQ
I did this kind of work for a bit. I really do think this was more of a 9/11 slash Pearl Harbor kind of thing. It has that feel all over it. I think it was an epic and world (or at least region) changing fuckup.
I do not doubt the current government of Israel has used Hamas as a cat’s paw. I think the constant low level violence cost them little and produced huge political returns for the most far-right government in the history of the country. But I think this was unanticipated in scale and scope, and that both the attack and the response were far beyond what anyone - Israel and Hamas included - would have intended.
There will always be the Monday morning quarterbacks who will quite rightly point out that the information was just there. Looking backwards, we can reverse-solve the problem and say that we could have (or even did) know about Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or Oct 6. The truth is that we know shitloads of things, all the time. We have a constant flow of information, from all corners of the world. We even have constant fire hoses of information from our allies and even our own citizens.
The paradox of the panopticon is that when you’re looking everywhere, you’re really looking nowhere. There’s not ten thousand people in a bunker in North Dakota watching monitors. There’s a few thousand people in cities like Langley around the world who commute to work and get there around 9, and read through what happened yesterday and overnight, and write up summaries that themselves get summarized. If they have too many sources of information, it’s all processed algorithmically first, but it’s still a process of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
We need to fix that. We cannot surveil everything, even with our best and brightest working on technical solutions. But at the end of the day, these are human in the loop systems, and sometimes people fuck up. Sometimes they fuck up royally, and they lose the playoffs or they start a war.
I think it’s done at this point. The system fucked yo, and now a lot of people are going to die, afraid and in pain, because that’s what we do and we just don’t have it in us to stop doing that kind of thing quite yet. I quit the business and know others that did, but at the end of the day there’s still people who think other people need to be killed, and a second group of people who buy the argument and are good with doing it.
I think that the conspiracy theories will continue to fly as they tend to do, but this really just smells like a colossal fuckup in which 20-30k civilians are going to die, and it’s just a train that doesn’t have the ability to stop at this point.
I appreciate your well thought response, but I think the comparisons with 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are weak.
For 9/11, the USA had no incentive to let 9/11 happen. And it was a very novel attack that nobody was predicting. Conspiracy theories on 9/11 have no credibility for those reasons.
Pearl harbor is a little bit different. The USA was definitely pushing Japan and could have expected them to respond. But US leadership thought the Japanese wouldn’t want to drag the USA into the war through an obvious act of war. History is clear that US leadership could have expected it, but gambled on Japanese leadership making a different choice.
This attack is different. The only surprise is the extent of the success.
Israeli leadership has been baiting and nurturing Palestinian terrorism for decades in order to have support for land grabs and ethnic cleansing.
This time they just got burned harder than they expected.
Yo we spent like 4 trillion dollars on war. What the fuck do you mean there was no incentive? The billionaires accumulated like half of the countries GDP for 2 decades.
There’s a few thousand people in cities like Langley around the world who commute to work and get there around 9, and read through what happened yesterday
You're speaking as if Palantir etc didn't exist. In a world where every 10 year old in the West can get Chat GPT to help with homework, why would we believe that govt level networked surveillance is like something straight out of an old John Le Carré novel?
If only because no way Bibi would actually bomb his political career forever, and go down in history as a failure, for this. This current government is finished, they will put the keys on the table. The majority of Israel already wanted them out of office, especially Bibi, now? They’re responsible for the worst event in Israel’s existence, to its existence…
There are warnings all the time. The intelligence failed, the protections failed, and we paid the price.
Even if this is true, which… I mean I have no salt left anymore…
That would be the target you want to take out. But no, that refugee camp, that school with children in it? Yeah that’s the target because… uhh “Hamas are using civilians as shields”.
Unfortunately for the Israelis, 0% of Benjamin Netanyahus think he should take responsibility for October 7. Public opinion doesn’t matter much when you’re spiraling towards a dictatorship.
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” Guterres said.
He later added that “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
It kind of sounds like they’re deliberately misinterpreting what he said.
When you’re a thin-skinned fascist conducting ethno-religious cleansing, any criticism must be met with absolute resistance. Fascism requires extreme black-and-white thinking and complete rejection of nuance.
We see the same pattern in the US with the MAGA movement, where even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Liz Cheney get demonized for “betraying” their “side”. Facts and nuance are rejected, and the only thing that matters is team loyalty.
They openly say antizionism is the same as antisemitism, even that Jewish peace groups protesting at the US capitol for a ceasefire weren’t Jews.
Having experienced the news cycles for the previous 3 escalations of this conflict, this time around it’s very different. The Israeli press and propaganda is making it very obvious how they’re trying so hard to control the perception of this conflict, and that alone draws suspicion because it’s of such low quality.
And that’s exactly why “we” shouldn’t let that kind of behavior slide.
The impulse for revenge is understandable, but a statesman shouldn’t use the diplomatic equivalent of autistic screeching as a political tool. That’s pathetic on a personal level and not helpful on a political level.
timesofisrael.com
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