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Notes -
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.
Israeli Terrorism?
It dovetails with our recent discussion of how Israel has normalized the practice of assassination as a core strategy of warfare. And now watching these videos of pagers exploding reminds me of the videos I've seen of Islamic terrorism: Life going on as normal in a marketplace or something, then an explosion with women and children around. We will get more details about the deaths/injuries, but there are rumors of an Iranian ambassador being injured and there will most likely be injuries among women and children across Lebanon and Syria.
I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front. It's just a terrorist attack. Is the US going to publicly disavow this, or is rote terrorism now going to be normalized by Israeli operation in the region?
Yeah, Israel should have been good boys and waited around for Hezbollah to attack them as they promised to.
As others have pointed out, this is about the least collateral damage that could be imagined. But no matter what it does, Israel can't win with its critics. What the critics really seem to want is for Israel to stop defending itself. As if Hezbollah would deliver one final punch and then both sides are even and the boys won't fight anymore.
Israel can defend itself and stop trying to use terrorist tactics to draw the United States into another ME war.
This is Israel defending itself against a group which has, over the past 11 months, fired tens of thousands of explosive rockets (you know, explosive devices) at random into civilian areas (i.e. your definition of "terrorism"), forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Israelis from hundreds of square miles of territory.
We have ZERO evidence that the U.S. was involved in any way in this, and since I'm given to understand the U.S. generally sucks at the types of infiltrations that sabotaging all of Hezbollah's pagers would have required, I place a low likelihood on the U.S. being significantly involved.
Does it? I know nothing about this area, but I'd have assumed the US would have the resources to become top performers in any field related to national security.
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