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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.
I'm not the most familar with the story here, but I'm pretty sure the Houthis are the Iranian proxies. The Saudis were fighting a war with the Houthis until the Biden administration removed their designation as terrorists and loudly brokered a ceasefire. While I'm not going to question that terrible humanitarian things were going on, this seems like another example of poor statecraft by Biden (or his advisors) coming home to roost. The choice to weaken sanctions on Iran sure has made everyone involved play nicely.
I really don't like violence. It's always a terrible option, but it does feel like for all our advanced weapons (see "Prosperity Guardian"), we -- or at least our current leadership -- are unwilling or unable to actually bring them to bear to serve The Greater Good (or at least Pax Americana, which I'd argue is a pretty great good) against various powers that largely sell themselves as fetishistic death cults, because someone might get hurt. I don't like people getting hurt. I really don't. But to allow the enemies of Peace-Loving Western Civilization to dictate the terms of conflicts because of it might produce some tearjerking journalism seems like it's demonstrably causing worse outcomes for everyone.
It seems to me with a growing frequency that a willingness to wield The Big Stick and strike back hard, rather than dribbling out anti-materiel strikes peacemeal might sometimes be a better strategy. If you want to put "Death To America" on your flag and take pot shots at US-flagged warships, nobody should be surprised when we return the favor. In spades. If you want to invade foreign nations, why should we trickle in aid while the body counts stack up? At some point, it saves lives to swing the stick around more heavily: say, mass forces at the border, issue an ultimatum to withdraw, or we send you Back to God. If you want to take American (or Western, more broadly) citizens hostage, you should be prepared for a reckoning from a civilization that cares about its own -- because that's what I'd want my leaders to do for me in that situation.
But that doesn't seem to be the times we live in: our mealy-mouthed leadership, and to be honest, a decent fraction of the electorate, seem more interested in de-escalation and appeasement even at the cost of actual peaceful outcomes. It doesn't feel like it's working: it feels like we're spending lots of effort tracking local focus groups opining on faraway violence and choosing the action that polls best, and pat ourselves on the back while conflicts simmer and boil over.
I'm not here to endorse any particular candidate or platform, merely voicing frustration. I don't want an aggressive foreign policy, but I'm also tired of what feels like peaceful overtures being taken advantage of.
Peace comes through cessation of conflict, and belligerents need to get smacked over the head enough to realize it isn't worth it to continue fighting someone who is able to ruin you effortlessly. Armenia stopped resisting when Azerbaijan overran Nagarno-Karabakh effortlessly, Gaddafi died ignobly following NATO airstrikes, Serbia got its shit pushed in. Peace IS achievable through war; you just have to hit hard enough. A different conversation on whether someone is actually capable of hitting hard enough against a sufficiently motivated target does exist, but it does remain that surgery is less effective than amputation for decisive deescalation.
An enduring mentality in a large number of liberal-minded circles is that everyone globally actually wants peace, and that all they need to embrace peace is to feel safe, for once there are no guns pointed at them they will put the guns down themselves. Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis and other ostensibly well-meaning socialists likely do sincerely believe that peace is hindered by warmongering westerners who have the agency to choose to war, and by choosing not to war all other parties can therefore be free to choose peace.
This is, quite obviously, untrue. Plenty of people choose to signal conflict against the West not because the West is bellicose, but precisely because the West is restrained and limited by its internal forces. Screaming 'DEATH TO AMERICA' on your flag wins plaudits from the american political establishment tripping over themselves to justify why the houthis might think that way, screaming 'DEATH TO RUSSIA' would see Lavrov threaten nukes and FSB contractors magically installing windows right in front of you to fall out of. The West is powerful but restrained, a perfect enemy to rail against to rally internal actors to ones own agenda. The Houthis signal opposition to USA and Israel not to actually hit back at them - that is a fanciful andd fevered objective - but to rally more of the internal population to their ranks against the true enemy, the Yemeni government in Aden.
That is perhaps the greatest blind spot of liberals regarding all the various bellicose agents all over the world that strike against USA or Britain or Australia or whoever opportunistically - the moral cover they cite of grievance-originated warmongering is just the excuse which sticks in the actual local conflicts they are intent on prosecuting, with or without the involvement of externals. Plenty of people are willing to commit crimes against their neighbors without the shadow of the West, so the restraint of the West is not facilitating any peace.
The problem with this comes when you have belligerents who can't win but also won't ever realize that no matter how often they get smacked over the head. The only way to get peace there is to permanently remove their ability to wage war, which means fairly oppressive occupation or genocide. I don't know if the Houthis are that stubborn, but the Palestinians in Gaza sure seem to be.
I keep going back in my mind to the scenes of Gazans cheering as Israeli hostages were dragged through the streets last October.
And, now, 9 months later, Gaza is in ruins. Tens of thousands are dead. Food and clean water are scarce, and they cry to the international community for help.
Regardless of what you think of the morality of the situation, it's hard not to see just how incredibly stupid the Gazans are. What did they think would happen? The consequences to the attack were inevitable.
And when Israeli finally washes its hands of the situation and leaves Gaza, it will probably happen all again.
It's kind of the same with the Houthis with their recent escalation attacking Tel Aviv. Did they expect that Benjamin Netanyahu wasn't going to respond?
Retaliation falls on the idiots pulling the triggers and civillians downstream The other Houthis don't care, the people suffering are peasants. These people do not care about each other, that's why they have a civil war!
Hamas is full of well fed young men, Houthis gorge while Yemenis starve, Kim Jong Un GAINED weight while Norks slave to preserve every head of cabbage. All these claims of humanitarian crises being inflicted by big meanie western sanctions or kinetic action are levelled by actors who hate the west and are using any excuse possible to castigate the west.
Since impoverished foreign peasants burning Chinese-made US flags have zero impact on western government actions, it falls on western internal dissidents to effect change in policy. Calling a kinetic strike against dual-purpose military targets is only a humanitarian punishment, not a response to a fucking INTERNATIONAL ATTACK.
Not like the houthis themselves complain about their ports being targeted. The excuses being generated are made by westerners, not houthis. It is the internal dissident who can really create change when the kinetic capabilities of the houthis are so anemic. The USA couldn't burn Southeast Asia enough to destroy the North Vietnamese, there is zero chance a few dozen shitbottles will drive out the jews.
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