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Notes -
Netanyahu speech to Congress
Wonder what his goals were here - are 2000 pound bombs really that necessary still? Getting republicans to clap like seals while his own generals are telling him to make a peace deal isn't going to do much to advance real war goals. Biden also gave his own speech hours later, perhaps intentionally to overshadow it - full respect to joe if that's what he was going for.
Seriously though why do Rs love this guy so much? He has like a 20% approval rating in Israel. Is it just because of his historical track record of disrespecting dems?
It's just good Republican strategy.
Just this very day in DC we saw protestors – many of the white and overeducated variety – take down the American flag, burn it, and then raise the Palestinian flag in its place.
If Democrats are the Palestine party then Republicans are the Israel party. They don't really care about Netanyahu specifically. But the war has driven a wedge between key Democratic Party interest groups. So many of our nation's richest and highest performing people are Jewish. The leftist fetish for Palestinian terrorists has been eye-opening to a lot of Jews who would have previously counted themselves as important Democratic donors and allies.
At some point Kamala will have to make a statement. And whatever she says is going to piss off a lot of her supporters. The contradictions in the Democratic Party are too strong. It's a brilliant wedge issue for the Republicans.
To piggyback on this comment rather than starting a new thread....
Lost in news last week, we just saw a major development in the Middle East conflict.
First, a little background... Yemen is a country just south of Saudi Arabia. It has territory on the eastern end of the Bab Al-Mandab strait, a 20km passage through which ships must cross to go between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. For over a decade, Yemen has been in a civil war between Shias and Sunnis. The Shia were supported by Iran, the Sunnis by Saudi Arabia. In any case, despite great odds against them, the Shia group (known as the Houthis) were able to hold out. Today, they control the capital and most populous regions of Yemen.
Caring naught for money or comfort, only the glory of paradise, the Houthis are trying to fight Israel in their own stupid way. Ever since the start of the Israel/Palestine war last year, the Houthis have been on a nuisance campaign against shipping in the Red Sea. They have attacked dozens of ships and managed to sink 2 or 3. As a result, transits through the Red Sea have fallen off a cliff. Instead, ships are forced to travel all the way around Africa adding significant time to their voyage. As a result, shipping rates are skyrocketing, approaching levels seen during the post Covid crisis of 2021/22.
The U.S. tried to stop the Houthis by sending the USS Eisenhower into the Red Sea in operation "Prosperity Guardian". This did approximately nothing. After a few months, the Eisenhower sailed back to the U.S. and the sailors all got medals. No worse for wear, the Houthis continued to attack shipping using cheap suicide drone boats.
Many thought the Houthis would stop after Israel and Palestine had a cease fire. For awhile, that looked close at hand, as Israel has killed a significant percentage of Hamas leadership. Then the Houthis directly attacked a Tel Aviv high rise with drones. They only killed one person, but it was a shocking development, as Yemen is 2000 km from Israel.
Israel retaliated on Sunday, bombing and incapacitating Yemen's largest port in a massive air attack which employed U.S. made F-35s. This is the port through which Yemen imports most of its food. It is devastating to Yemen, and by far the largest escalation so far.
In any case, the Red Sea is closed for a lot longer now. Israel must not only defeat Hamas, they must defeat the Houthis, over 2000 km away, who had previous fought and won against Saudi Arabia. Iran seems eager to give the Houthis drones and other supplies. There are rumors that Russia might supply them with hypersonics.
And just last week, U.S. secretary of state Blinken suggested that Iran was only weeks away from being able to make nuclear weapons.
Israel has defeated Hamas, but they still have to contend with Hezbollah, the Houthis, and ultimately Iran. Things are going to stay interesting in the Middle East for quite awhile still.
It's absurd that Israel is the only place with the guts to flatten the Houthis. Like, come on, this is literally a country which has decided to engage in generalised piracy; they are effectively at war with the rest of the world. Depopulating the Houthi areas would plausibly be worth it to end this craziness, and definitely would be when you consider the deterrent effect; there may be better options, but even this one beats "sit back and let the barbarians come in the gates".
I think Yemen has the Afghanistan problem. They're poor and militant. So there are two ways to stop the Houthis, both awful:
Boots on the ground
Attacks like this one which punish the population but do nothing to prevent further attacks
Drone technology is a game changer here in that it lets the Houthis have outsized influence. Iran can spend a few tens of millions of dollars giving them drones which can do hundreds of billions in damage to world trade.
I wasn't actually being hyperbolic when I said "depopulating"; I was suggesting slaughtering the entire population of the Houthi-controlled areas, which would presumably stop the attacks. Although, if it's only hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, I retract my claim of that being "definitely" the lesser evil; we are talking like 20 million people, after all.
Obviously, I would very much prefer a third option, assuming one exists.
...Given the state of the powers-that-be, how badly do you actually want them to prove that they possess highly efficient insurgency-suppression tech? Such a capability would not be a net win in my opinion.
You make a reasonable point, but I think we might be getting into a self-contradictory hypothetical here; a country willing to do this would not be a country in the grasp of SJ.
I am not confident that SJ and "let's just methodically and efficiently bomb and shoot all the Bad People" are mutually exclusive. There have been a lot of previous "Social Justice" movements that demonstrated a notable capacity for liquidating undesirables, even those cohesive enough to offer coordinated resistance.
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