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This sounds like genocidal lunacy. What on earth did the average Iranian or Syrian do to deserve any of this? What should Europe do in the face of a giant refugee crisis? Create a humanitarian disaster in Jordan and Turkey? Let them starve at the border? Shoot them if they do anything else?
Maybe I'm being to hasty and my instinctive revulsion to your point of view is just a matter of ignorance on my part. Why do you say such things?
The average nobody did anything. I don't know of any nation ever where, from top to bottom, every single person was wicked. You can say they voted for it, they tacitly supported it, whatever. Germany, Japan, the Serbs, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, none of these countries were filled with vile people who "deserved" carpet bombing, starvation, embargoes, displacement, whatever. It's the nature of nations that when they get involved on the world stage, war is often the only way to get what you want.
The question is what you want, and how badly.
People roll out the World War 2 examples because they're pretty cut and dry, and the closest example in a western, developed sense we have to the present. "We want you to stop invading and conquering others, and our roughly evenly matched forces will make a push all the way into your country to make you stop." Superpowers with precision munitions (remember this part) did not exist. A global economy, such as we have now, did not exist. Cheap travel and the resultant mass migration did not exist!
Oh, and live broadcasting of the war didn't exist either.
But to the point, people will defend those wars as just - and I agree with them - despite the fact that the civilian tolls are so staggering they don't even register even with an aid. The lasting debate of civilian casualties from that war, the nuclear bombings of Japan, often dies in its throat when many of the people who consider it an atrocity don't even know that the firebombing of Tokyo produced around as many casualties as a nuclear bombing in a single night (I would much rather die to a nuclear blast than an incendiary firestorm, for what it's worth). This is to say nothing of the bombing campaigns across Germany, which were specifically designed - given the failure of precision bombing promised by the Norden bombsight and massive air casualties the Allies endured as a result - to reduce a city to being ineffective. They didn't want to kill civilians. Okay, maybe Harris did after the Battle of Britain. But generally, the purpose was not to inflict needless and horrifying casualties. It was all they could do to prosecute the war until the Germans and Japanese capitulated. Note that in Germany's case the bombing alone did not do this and it took massive ground movements to do so all the way into Berlin itself, but the bombing made those ground advances easier.
Did those civilians deserve it? It's a rhetorical question, because of course they didn't. But it's just irrelevant once you are the citizen of a nation that another nation has determined it has just cause to prosecute war against you. No amount of justification of geopolitics will make it okay to the people who die in the crossfire. They suffer and die and all their dreams are lost for something impossibly bigger than they are, that they could have not possibly changed on an individual level.
This is the reason I brought up superpowers with precision munitions, global economies, cheap travel, and the media. Because by Vietnam we lost the stomach for the same type of campaign pretty much overnight. I will find the source, but there has been a lot of talk about how North Vietnam was desperate by the early 70s. Bombings of Hanoi were driving their nation, not the guerillas, but the nation, into disaster. Had the US bombed them as mercilessly as Japan or Germany, they likely would have caused the nation of North Vietnam to fail. Whether that's enough to have killed communism in Vietnam is up to debate, and I'd say it's unlikely, but it would have prevented the immediate rolling of the conventional NVA over South Vietnam after the US withdrawal. But at this point, the war was broadcast, and things like napalm girl and the Saigon Execution photos made people see how awful geopolitics is on a micro level. Weapons were becoming actually precise, and people were asking if such things were necessary. I'd say they're only necessary if you want to actually defeat the nation you're fighting.
This is not, by the way, a defense of the Vietnam war or that it was a good idea from the outset. But once you're in the fight, and you have the objective to defeat one nation and preserve another, there's a cost. The US, via politics and bad strategy (read up on William Westmoreland if you're interested) did not do what needed to be done, so all that happened was South Vietnam fell anyway and the US took a huge hit to its credibility on the world stage.
This debate persists to now, and is even more pointed. Everything is livestreamed, and weapons are so precise that we now expect zero civilian casualties, and anything more is a massive scandal. To the point that Obama is considered a maniac because he killed an estimate of 116 civilians with drone strikes. Tell that to the average American from 1945 and they'd call him a genius on no other level.
This is, again, not a justification for untargeted mass bombardment. This is also not a defense of bad intel, or misusing precision weapons in a way that kills innocent bystanders. Again, even down to one person, what difference does the geopolitical or military targeting situation make? They're dead. They've lost everything for nothing. But I ask what a nation is supposed to do if it has determined that another nation is an enemy, and diplomacy has failed, and it has determined that it must proceed militarily to, put coldly, get what what it wants. If the idea that a civilian death is a tragedy that invalidates the righteousness of the cause, then in a sense I am happy that the average person who thinks these things is so far removed from the idea of war being an existential threat. Certainly it is not for someone living in the US or most of Europe at this point in time (the situation is different for Israel, regardless of your position; it's a fact that they have enemies within and without that are in striking distance and I suspect it's a large reason that the population wasn't clamoring for the war to slow down after October 7th). I don't mean this as a jab, either; it's a miracle we live in the world we do. But at the end of the day, going to war is going to kill a fair bit of people who have nothing to do with it in any meaningful way, because you won't achieve your objectives otherwise.
Make your accusations of Israeli excesses and I'm going to agree. Denounce bad US intel for strikes, or a bad overall strategy, and I'm game there. But this is an argument that is rolled up in more practical criticisms of wars in general and I don't find it compelling, horrible as it may sound. At the outset we know a war is going to kill innocents. But if there's an objective that can only be achieved militarily - and given the constant abuse of diplomatic agreements and funding of militias throughout the Middle East, I'm going to say there's a fair argument for Iran - that's the price.
As to your other questions, I don't have an answer. It's up to Europe to decide what its border and refugee policies are, though if I lived there I'd definitely be in "turn them back no matter what" mode no matter what. I also don't find the idea of Iran splitting into a bunch of ISIS-style warlords very plausible. It's a country that is much more united in religious and racial demographics. You aren't going to have Sunni paramilitary groups gobble up the country, nor are you going to have massive racial violence (and if you did, the Persians would just win). Syria was the last gasp of Ba'ath/pan-arab/secular dictatorship against the tribal infighting and Wahhabism that is inherent to Arab nations. I don't see them collapsing the same way.
Again, it all falls onto whether Iran is a valid target, and if it's worth the squeeze. The comment you're replying to does, and I'd be pretty happy to see the regime fall too. Civilian casualties (let me edit this and say civilian casualties on any sort of normal scale) just aren't a reason not to do it. Call it cold, but geopolitics is fuckin' cold.
That wikipedia article was an interesting read, thanks. The most fascinating thing to me is how he jumped around in rank. He went from O2 -> O4, O6 -> O3, O4->O7->O5->O8. I can't fathom a military career like that these days.
It says (temporary) under a lot of those. Temporary because he was demoted later on, or temporary by initial intention?
After all the temporary ranks he goes back to the "normal" rank. These read like wartime field promotions to me where they need someone to fill the spot and he's the only one available. I just never heard of anyone getting demoted after those. Going from colonel to captain, or general to major is mind blowing.
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We have established two important things that we agree on:
Civilian casualties bad, but will happen in war.
We need a good reason to go to war, partly because civilian casualties bad.
The two points of contention were:
Why do the Iranians and Syrians deserve civilian casualties.
What will be the result of Europe turning the refugees away.
Neither of these were answered.
What I'm looking for is a distinction between the good and the bad. Why, for instance, was Oct. 7 bad? Or 9/11? If genocide is a militarily winning strategy, was the holocaust bad?
You might want to stop me here and mention that these questions don't need to have moral answers. Things happen. The causal chain of events that drives us towards our next disaster is too vast and complex for such simple terms. And I'm perfectly willing to recognize the salience of that position. But until that is done consistently, is there any reason for me to do so? Because the mainstream line has been that all of the above were bad, Iran also bad and that America is morally good. It is especially when America is doing morally bad that geopolitical realism is trudged out, claiming that, in reality, America needs to do bad to ultimately do good!
But even then. If we set morals aside, this Iran incursion can hardly be considered a positive move on the geopolitical side of things. If worst come to wear and there is a big refugee crisis, everyone knows Europe wont say no. They will let them in. Nations that are in a very precarious position demographically. Economies facing all manner of crises. This is practically every single modern ally the US has. How can this be justified?
I touched on it a bit for Iran, but in short:
Points 1, 3, and 5 also applied to Syria, and back to geopolitics I like for there to be less nations that are economically and militarily aligned and supported by Russia and China. I am explicitly for American dominance on the world stage because that means I am more likely to keep enjoying the benefits of a giant and very defensible united land mass that is far from war in all its forms.
Presupposes a tide of refugees which I am not inclined to think will happen (I touched on this in my first comment). I'd also mention that even if it did happen, overall Iranians are a good bit more westernized, less Wahhabist (that's a Sunni thing!), less tribal, and less teen-rapey than the current stock in Europe (to oversimplify, Syrian in the mainland, Pakistani in the UK), so a few refugees from there are more likely to integrate unless they do the whole "we'll just import young and pissed off men" thing again. Even then, I doubt they're nearly as bad as what we see now.
Persians are not Arabs, and will proudly tell you so, and that's for the better.
To be clear you only oppose this on the grounds that this is harmful to US interest in the region, which you support based on personal prosperity, not that these attacks were unjustified or unrelated to US provocation that might have caused them.
To that extent I'm having a hard time aligning myself with your position from a geopolitical point of view. Iran, and tell me if our history does not match up here, wanted the same thing you want for yourself. Peace and prosperity. To that end they wanted control over their natural resources. Resources that the US and UK were making use of. This leads to a very clear incursion into Iran by these nations. Which ties into reason 3, 4 and 5. What else is a nation to do when foreign entities so clearly disrupt their process of self determination?
I get it, 'aw shucks, sucks to suck, now give us the oil' but given the cost, past failures and losses, and how far the US has moved forward, and how quickly and drastically technology has bettered our standard of living, can any of this be rationally justified anymore? It feels like a giant sunk cost fallacy. Where a list of old grievances gets trudged out to justify an evergoing tit for tat that is of no tangible benefit to American or Iran.
I don't think it will happen either. Which is why I said it would be a worst case scenario. But even then, we are comparing potential cost and benefit. The cost being overloading Europe with refugees. And there is no contingency or plan. Americas allies in Europe will be weighted down even more. Further carrying the indirect cost of American incursions in the middle east. I ask, how can this be rationally justified? I get that personal prosperity is important, but at some point the calculus stops adding up. I have a genuinely hard time believing that you believe that America is having its interest served by risking their already weak allies and their precarious position for whatever it is you think is being gained by this campaign into Iran.
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Are you comparing the holocaust to "deaths caused by military bombing/heavy weapons"?
I'm comparing things generally considered to be bad by Americans with the morally neutral geopolitical framework supplied by LazyLongposter. Which I think he is using to selectively justify Americans doing things we all known are morally bad.
As he stated, the US could have won the war in Vietnam had they just intentionally bombed the civilians harder. But because doing such things is too awful in the eyes of the public, the US stopped. Using that morally neutral standard, what is the problem with the holocaust? Killing your enemy is a winning strategy. Is it better to starve to death in camp than it is to be burned alive in a firestorm that was intentionally created by dropping incendiary bombs on wooden residential areas?
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