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Crazy news out of the Middle East today.
While Iran plots its big revenge via Hezbollah, Israel isn't just waiting around for them to strike. They're pre-emptively disrupting their operations. And today's attack is next-level.
Somehow, Israel hacked the pagers used by a couple thousand Hezbollah members. And then they made the pagers explode simultaneously, leaving over 200 of them seriously injured.
People on Twitter are speculating that Israel confiscated the pagers, then implanted explosives, and then returned them to Hezbollah who stupidly continued to use them . It seems unlikely that a software hack could make a battery explode. Edit: A better explanation is that Israel somehow intercepted the pagers during shipping and implanted explosives.Whatever happened, its more evidence of both Israel's ability to strike at its enemies, and also the incompetence of those enemies.
From a strategic standpoint, it seems that Israel is now grimly determined to win the war militarily as they (accurately) perceive their enemies as unreliable partners in peace.
On one hand, it's impressive that they actually could pull off such a scheme that seems like it's straight out of the movies; on the other, it's clear that there would be a lot of collateral damage, and I can't help but think that my feeling of being impressed is very similar to how I felt about the 9/11 attacks. I can't imagine this having a positive effect on the levels of sympathy towards Israel, which was already fairly low, among the all-important Western public, no matter how much supportive media coverage they get. Is this a sign that they do want to accelerate the timeline towards a big showdown, perhaps thinking that delaying it for longer would only make their enemies stronger (Iran getting the bomb?) and their allies weaker/more distracted (derivative of public support in the West negative anyway, plus US/EU might get occupied by Russia and eventually China)?
Really? I don’t know, this just seems too badass and super-competent to not inspire some level of positive reaction among people who are not already committed to the pro-Hezbollah position. Having seen a video of one of these pager bombs going off, the explosions don’t seem large enough or destructive enough to cause significant collateral damage to anyone who wasn’t carrying such a pager on his body. How much evidence do we have that a large number of individuals who aren’t Hezbollah employees/members/contractors were harmed?
Some of us don't want a regional war, but Israel obviously does. What is the point of this except provocation? Intermingling hidden explosives among civilian populations is not impressive, it's called terrorism.
Israel intermingled explosives among the enemy combatants. Intermingling said combatants among the civilian population was, as usual, the decision and the primary tactic of their enemy.
The precision repeatedly shown by Israel in such conditions is, indeed, impressive.
What war has ever contained enemy combatants entirely separately from the civilian population? Even when a massive percentage of the military is deployed to a warzone, there are certainly plenty of personnel who still go home to their families each night.
It seems to me that the real argument becomes what qualifies as a warzone, and when.
Please. There's the usual grey-zone mixing of combatants and civilians, and then there's the Western islamophilic media front that the Palestine and co primarily fight on as opposed to the physical warzone.
Gaza is roughly 141 square miles, with around 15.6k inhabitants per square mile. It's not like they'd have room for a military base even in the upside-down world where Israel allowed them to. They've been fenced in and treated like literal prisoners. So obviously any militant uprising is going to be near civilians by virtue of having zero alternate choices.
None of this should surprise anyone, and none of it should have happened in the first place.
True, but it’s also true that for many years the status quo was that Palestinians could live and work in Israel relatively freely until they started committing large numbers of terrorist attacks against civilians.
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I mean this is just one more permutation of the classic problem in the Middle East, which is that in many of these countries terrorists (or people who are employed by terrorist organizations) are walking around intermingled with the civilian population, and therefore fighting those terrorists inherently risks significant harm to civilians. I’m sympathetic to the position that in such a scenario, it should be considered unacceptable to expose those civilians to risk even if it means forgoing a clear tactical victory, but I’m also equally sympathetic to the opposite view. I don’t particularly care if there is a “regional war” or not, provided that nobody I personally care about gets conscripted to fight in it, but I’ve made my weakly pro-Israel position clear, and this certainly didn’t move the needle away from that position for me.
That's a really silly perspective. So if it causes a lot of damage to your home country- economically, politically, geopolitically, militarily, you don't care as long as you don't know someone who was conscripted?
Yes, it's called nationalism.
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It’s not clear to me that such a war would cause all of that damage to the United States. It seems like it could go all sorts of ways! I simply do not feel as though I have a strong enough grasp of all of the possible outcomes to have a strong opinion on the issue. When faced with this level of uncertainty and complexity, I think it’s pretty reasonable for a person like me - a random civilian whose job and livelihood seem not to stand much of a chance of being seriously impacted either way - to throw up my hands and say, “Not my problem!”
Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria all being strong data points that ME war has negative effects on the home-front doesn't persuade you? Or maybe you don't think Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syrian wars have had negatives impacts on the US and Europe?
Iraq and Afghanistan had terrible effects on the home front in America primarily because American troops themselves were fighting those wars, at great expense to the United States.
Syria doesn’t appear to have had any massive negative effect on the American home front. It has had a very bad effect on Europe, because European countries pursued incredibly stupid immigration/refugee policies. (I know, you likely believe that Israel or Global Jewry strong-armed them into those policies, but I just don’t think the evidence is there.)
I don’t see that previous wars in the Middle East - say, the Iran-Iraq War, or the wars Israel fought against its neighbors in the 60s and 70s - did actually have a significant long-term negative impact on countries outside of the region. Perhaps I’m simply too ignorant about the subject.
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I don't know, I thought that the whole Mossad/Krav Maga memeplex of Israeli hypercompetence had already persuaded those who would be attracted by strength regardless of the ends. Would you say the same thing about 9/11 with respect to people who were not already committed to the pro-America position? If anything, there it was more realistic that there would have been converts, because Arabs were not known as legendarily competent while you can't swing a cat in memespace without hitting some form of hostile or friendly praise for Israeli skill.
There was the video of the pager exploding while being placed on the counter at a grocery store, which at least suggests that the owners do not always keep them on their body, and reports of injured hospital staff (who would plausibly be handed pagers if the de-facto rulers obtained a large stash of them) and children. I'm sure Israel and media allies will deny and cast doubt upon those as only reported by Hezbollah (as it's not like there's some other agency on the ground keeping track that could not be painted as biased), but my sense was that even in cuckold countries like Germany people have lately been dismissive towards the routine Israeli claims that only militants were hit as those appeared a little too automatic and unrealistic.
Support for the 9/11 hijackers outside of the Arab world seems pretty nonexistent, largely because the primary target (or at least the target that ended up getting all the news coverage) was a pair of buildings occupied by thousands of civilians. If they’d just stuck to ramming planes into the Pentagon and the halls of government in DC, I frankly think that there would have been a much larger sense of “Holy shit, I don’t agree with these guys’ worldview, but that was extremely impressive.” Instead people can’t really separate the means from the ends because of the very visually-evocative optics of a bunch of middle-class office workers leaping to their deaths or crushed under rubble. Similarly, while even people who broadly support Zionism still mostly squirm over the carnage in Gaza, I doubt many people feel all that bad for guys who work for Hezbollah.
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