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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.
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?
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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