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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?
He has an enemy that is cartoonishly evil (Iran & Hamas) and he treats them as an enemy. These cartoonishly evil enemies of Bibi also love chanting "Death to America", a place Republicans famously are fond of.
The question is so odd when you evaluate it at like the level an alien would. Its almost like of there was some Byzantine general that kept smashing the Turks every time they tried to besiege Constantinople and asking why Athenians like him so much.
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Video and transcript links:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2v_YL_GPdsg https://www.timesofisrael.com/were-protecting-you-full-text-of-netanyahus-address-to-congress/
I don't find Bibi to be a particularly charismatic orator. He has a weird tic that almost looks like he's constantly chewing gum, and his delivery is generally too staid, as if he's narrating legalese as opposed to speaking from the heart. That said, I thought the content was solid. Doubt it'd change minds for any partisans, but it should be persuasive to those in the middle.
I do hate the custom of Congress standing and clapping every paragraph, however. If they could be 10x more selective about it, or reserve applause till the end, the speech, and perhaps any speech delivered in such a setting, would be significantly more interesting to watch. As it stands, the entire thing feels like involuntary virtue signaling for everyone in attendance who must decide when to stand and how hard to clap, which must be exhausting to decide in real time.
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There is a small faction of largely jewish neoconservatives who really, really, really hate Iran. Bibi has been very focused on the Iranians, and so is very much simpatico with this neoconservative faction. I couldn't tell you who got the idea first, but the current state of play is clear; everyone is in lockstep and the neocons (think people like John Podhoretz and the Commentary Magazine crew, or Noah Rothman at the National Review, etc.) adore Bibi.
Don’t jews in America vote Democrat at like a 70 percent rate?
Yes. The neocons are a notable exception to that trend, but as I said a small faction.
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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.
They are literally arming Israel on a massive scale and giving tens of billions in foreign aid to Israel while they are fighting an incredibly brutal war. The level of cucking required to satisfy jewish donors is just next level.
The great thing about such over the top rhetoric is I don't know what any of your ambiguous pronouns are referring to? Is it Dems or Reps being cucked? Who is fighting the brutal war?
In any case, the main problem is "humanitarian" aid to Palestine, which is just terrorist funding by another name, and since terrorism is cheap when your perps don't care about dying, it pays off at like 100k-1 compared to military aide for precision strike bombs.
Both. They might as well have come to the speech in a gimp suit.
Israel is fighting with a genocidal level of brutality.
Why would the Palestinians not put up armed resistance? I find it amazing that Americans talk about gun rights yet don't expect others to fight when they are being occupied.
Less than 2% of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza has died, that’s not a genocidal war on any level.
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Id disagree with that characterization of Israeli war efforts. They are being meek and timid from my POV.
Palestinians are not like Americans. They are like Amerindians. They had their go at it and lost. They can accept their loss gracefully or get good. I have no interest in the continued terrorism where their goal is to engender sympathy with losers in the West who think being bad at life is an indication of virtue.
Compare Israels fighting with the British in northern Ireland. The Brits weren't bombing tens of thousands of people to death. Levelling an entire city while not letting people flee is beyond absurd.
The Irish had their go many times before they won. The Algerians had their go on and off for a century before they won. There is nothing that says they won't win in the end. Israel is an infeasible nation and the Palestinian population is booming compared to the Israeli population. Combined with better tech such as drones and rockets, it is fully possible to turn Israel into a Rhodesia. If the Palestinians simply gave up, they would be genocided and removed from the area. Their best bet is to learn from the Iraqis that kicked their occupiers out.
The Palestinians appeal to us who don't want christians ethnically cleansed from the Holy land and those who don't want a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. Israel's lobby is directly damaging the west. Palestinians appeal to us who want to see people live by the spirit of the second amendment.
#1. Why would you compare an anti-terrorism operation with a war against a state's military and police forces?
#2. Israel has repeatedly informed civilians far ahead of time of their planned incursions (again, strong evidence against genocidal intent) it is Hamas police forces that prevent them from fleeing. Because, again, "civilian" deaths are the core strategy of Hamas.
No, if the Gazans gave up they would be a thing called the "Free State of Gaza" and would have open ports and free trade with the world. We need just go back to October 6, 2023. If on that day they had not been planning a wide ranging military incursion into Israel, Gazans would be much freer today. Indeed. If instead of launching the Oct 7 attack, they had instead went a whole year without launching rockets into Israel, I daresay they would be well on the way to being a respected member of the international community.
Palestinian co-ethnics are the ones who have ethnically cleansed Christians from the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. Giving them an additional territory will not improve the lives of Christians in the region. In addition, they are the force in the area ensuring there will be a refugee crisis. If they lose, apparently they threaten to flood Europe as some sort of blackmail. But if they win there will be 7 million Jews in desperate need of relocation as well.
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The most recent story I've seen about the war is US doctors talking about how many Palestinian children have been shot in the head by sniper fire, and the parents of those children say they were shot when playing, outside or inside. The story before that was the killing of Mohammad Bhar, where an intellectually disabled man was attacked by an Israeli military dog before they kicked his family out and made sure he died without receiving medical treatment (which the family discovered when they were finally allowed back to their house to see his maggot-ridden corpse).
Most people I know in real life consider those stories and the countless others like them barbaric and disgusting - we think members of our own armed forces who do those things deserve to go to prison for the rest of their life and lose all their honours and awards in the process. If that's what qualifies as meek and timid from your POV, I'd hate to see what it would take for you to actually criticise them.
Anecdotes that I am sure some of which happened (although one must be clear that "US doctor in Palestine" is an entirely self-selected group of pro-Hamas partisans). But that is not data.
I'd hope not if they are isolated incidents caused by fog of war and genuine mistakes, as I suspect is the case.
Given the urban nature of the conflict and known Hamas tactics of hiding their military targets in civilian areas, we'd expect a lot of objective carnage, in the numbers. PLO numbers (almost certainly inflated) have total casualties at 39k. That is 20x less than what we'd expect if Israel was conducting the conflict with a "genocidal level of brutality". 39k is the total casualty number from a particularly bad year for the Army of South Vietnam, a theater where most of the conflict was not conducted in cities.
Even if Israel was acting without genocidal intent, but merely a casual disregard for civilian casualties total death would be far FAR higher. There aren't many places in Gaza that aren't legitimate military targets (on account of Hamas storing all their munitions in hospitals, schools, and apartments), if Israel just dropped dumb bombs on every building that they had good intel had weapons or Hamas agents in, there wouldn't be any buildings over 2 stories tall left in Gaza.
I don't think Israel is guilty of genocide, but casual disregard for human life seems to fit the bill. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
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War is brutal. Israel has done many bad things, perhaps more than necessary, but that's how war goes. America was hardly polite and soft on Japan in WW2.
If Native Americans started randomly suicide bombing American cafes and launched roughly one attack every twenty years that would kill hundreds, how many Native American civilian casualties would you max out at before saying "no, the cost is too high to keep bombing reservations"?
This was in response to claims that the Israelis were being meek and timid - you can absolutely play the "people do bad things during war" card, but you also just wiped out the claim I was arguing against in the process.
That situation and history are so different as to make the comparison moot - and if this was an attempt at emotional appeal, I'm also not American.
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Doesn’t help that the Christian evangelical wing of the party literally worships Israel as sacred.
Which denomination?
Evangelical
Evangelical is not a denomination, it's a term for any protestant who holds to a small cluster of beliefs including relatively hardline views on biblical inerrancy(literalism or close two it), strong form of the five solas, a commitment to an invisible church theology(all true believers, not necessarily members in a particular institution), and a strict view of substitutionary atonement. The key to evangelicalism is the belief that genuine faith, usually from a specific conversion experience but not always, is the mark of a true Christian and not necessarily other things(eg membership in a particular institution, standards of behavior, profession of specific beliefs, etc). There are evangelical Baptists(this is probably a majority), evangelical Anglicans, evangelical Pentecostals, etc, etc.
You're probably thinking of dispensationalists, who are mostly evangelical, and are a protestant theological tendency which believes Israel has some sort of special role in the end times.
This is probably the best definition of evangelical that I've seen. (And accurate regarding dispensationalism.)
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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.
It's absurd that Israel is the only place with the guts to flatten the Houthis. Like, come on, this is literally a country which has decided to engage in generalised piracy; they are effectively at war with the rest of the world. Depopulating the Houthi areas would plausibly be worth it to end this craziness, and definitely would be when you consider the deterrent effect; there may be better options, but even this one beats "sit back and let the barbarians come in the gates".
I think Yemen has the Afghanistan problem. They're poor and militant. So there are two ways to stop the Houthis, both awful:
Boots on the ground
Attacks like this one which punish the population but do nothing to prevent further attacks
Drone technology is a game changer here in that it lets the Houthis have outsized influence. Iran can spend a few tens of millions of dollars giving them drones which can do hundreds of billions in damage to world trade.
I wasn't actually being hyperbolic when I said "depopulating"; I was suggesting slaughtering the entire population of the Houthi-controlled areas, which would presumably stop the attacks. Although, if it's only hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, I retract my claim of that being "definitely" the lesser evil; we are talking like 20 million people, after all.
Obviously, I would very much prefer a third option, assuming one exists.
The third option is doing something about Iran presumably.
Iran has been one of Biden's biggest blunders. In order to temporarily lower gas prices, Biden loosened sanctions on Iran and also unfroze billions of dollars of Iranian funds. They immediately plowed that money into their proxy conflicts against the US/Israel. And now they are close to obtaining nukes.
Destroying the Iran nuclear deal was probably Trumps most impactful foreign policy achievement, and spiting Trump is very much a democratic priority. Trusting Iran is obviously a mistake, and democrats need to view Iran as a a wayward good faith actor in order to justify continued concessions to their hostility.
I'd be very interested in reading an impartial analysis of the decision to pull out of the nuclear deal. Most of the time it's brought up is in the context of left-wing journalism where any decision made by Trump is axiomatically bad.
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They can’t do that. Saudi Arabia tried to do that, using all the hard handed tactics you described. Overt starvation warfare, massive airstrikes, including civilian infrastructure, using their actually pretty impressive air force. 185,000 Saudi and Saudi-allied troops on the ground. All the best gear, including M1 Abrams tanks. The CIA providing intel for airstrikes and ground operations. It didn’t work. The Saudis burned a lot of their goodwill with the umma, and the UN was up their ass for most of it. Israel doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty because their international reputation is in the toilet already. If the US tried that it would be a disaster. Iran and Russia would give the the Houthis massive support just to mess with the US. The supply lines would be difficult because there would be constant, intense missile attacks on US Navy assets in the region. There would be sympathy attacks on US bases and embassies all across the region. There’s a good chance there would be protests and rioting in the homeland. The UN would light the US up with toothless but embarrassing resolutions. There might be an oil embargo if things got bad enough. US troops would take casualties on par with the Iraq war. It’s a complete non-starter.
Saudi military is incompetent. It doesn't matter what the tech you have is of you can't fight. It's how the RPF beat the French supported government of Uganda in the 90s, because the government forces were just that pathetic and ill led.
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The Ummah doesn’t give a fuck about Yemen, certainly not if both sides fighting are Muslim. The Saudis backed out because lightly armed bands of roving Houthi militias could stage devastating cross-border drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities in the middle of the desert, thus threatening the central means for the continuing existence of the Saudi state AND because the US made it clear that it wanted peace and forced them to the table with the Houthis.
The Houthis can absolutely be starved to death by continuing the attacks Israel is doing on port facilities, which even the Saudis did only to a limited extent due to a fear that human rights enforcers in ‘the West’ (not the Muslim world) would get mad. To a greater extent the Mullahs in Tehran are able to maintain power only because, for all the general discontent among the domestic upper-middle class, they have still been middle income and safe for 30+ years.
USA was in a mood to punish Saudi Arabia following the Kashoggi slaying, and Biden made it a point to undo the designation of the houthis as a terrorist group once he came into power. I should clarify that the houthis had been unimaginably successful against the equally unimaginably incompetent Saudi forces, and continued support of the Saudis did not seem to be worth the pain. There was no indication that the Houthis would be inclined to further destroy themselves by pissing off more people. Saudi failures to engage in worse attacks on the Yemeni population largely stem from their support of the Hadi government (or what is left of it) who demand preservation of vital economic assets for the eventual potential of a government restoration.
The ummah DESPISES the saudis. The saudi government is barely able to keep a lid on its own clerics who espouse antiamerican hatreds, and the exported salafi clerics compete with deobandi and diyanet clerics who all espouse the same conservative rhetoric of 'the kuffar has subverted the arab governments'. Fervent dreams continue to exist whereby the ummah restores islamism to the political center of all their lands and expels the traitors who collaborated with the west, therefore being free to keep the spoils of their lands for themselves.
Arab politicians are happy to let the USA and Israel be the bogeyman responsible for starving out islamist terrorists because the governments are held back by their own populations eager to do Arab Spring 2.0 and cause new Syrian Civil Wars. The maghreb has been happy to export all its young aggressive shitheads to europe because europe spread its doors wide open, but the saudis and egyptians have no such easy means to let its young angry shitheads flow into other lands. The only western land rich with plunder and exploitable human rights is Israel, and the Israelis are happy to call an invasion for what it is and take appropriate action.
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...Given the state of the powers-that-be, how badly do you actually want them to prove that they possess highly efficient insurgency-suppression tech? Such a capability would not be a net win in my opinion.
The logical candidate to do this would be Saudi Arabia.
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You make a reasonable point, but I think we might be getting into a self-contradictory hypothetical here; a country willing to do this would not be a country in the grasp of SJ.
I am not confident that SJ and "let's just methodically and efficiently bomb and shoot all the Bad People" are mutually exclusive. There have been a lot of previous "Social Justice" movements that demonstrated a notable capacity for liquidating undesirables, even those cohesive enough to offer coordinated resistance.
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"The Shia were supported by Saudi Arabia, the Sunnis by Iran"
You have that backwards.
Edited thanks.
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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.
I'm generally quite skeptical that American leadership is actually that upset about civilian casualties (beyond those happening purely for cruelty's/gross negligences's own sake). I can't imagine you get to the top of the political system by being squeamish about what history has abundantly demonstrated is often necessary to protect your national interests, or those of your allies. My read is that the US judges the Houthis as too unimportant to really bother making an effort with, or to risk antagonising Iran over.
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All that is at stake for America is some small fraction of wealth that the blockade represents, and ultimately that wealth is of little importance for a country as glutted on it as America, and in any case it's probably mostly at stake for the well-off investor class rather than the broad populace.
It is in most people's best interests for state power and particularly the power of the world's elite to be constrained by various laws and conventions. Houthis are fighting against powerful and malign forces represented by Israel and the US. It is in most peoples' interests that they win over their adversaries, as this will weaken elite power and the power of the militaries they control.
I don't give a shit about America, at least, not more of an extent than America gives a shit about me, and I think what the Houthis are doing is terrible. Not on a wealth terms, but on a value destruction terms.
Wealth, at least in fiscal terms, is not my concern, and to Americans least of all given that they can just print their way out of it. But value, actual value, is fucked.
Real, genuine productivity not counted in dollars I believe is on a firm downtrend and inflating the money supply or bean counter supply doesn't have much to do with it. You can have as much money as you want but that won't turn one block of steel into two without a whole supply chain of people who are willing to mine, process and machine that block. By which count the Houthis are directly damaging value that exists in this chain and applying their own war tax on significant portions of the world economy.
If Egypt decided to use chemical weapons on the Houthis tomorrow, I wouldn't condone it. But I'd understand.
If various ecologically-inspired political parties decided to advocate for bombing Houthis, I'd understand as well. Fuel burned in global shipping is a significant contributor to climate change, and a lengthening of vessel trade routes and logistics chains stand to do more damage than several million lifetimes of plastic straws.
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To be replaced by what? Get rid of one elite or overarching entity, and what replaces that? Revolutionaries get lined up against the wall by apparatchiks who then set themselves as the new elite.
Investor classes and wealthy elites and all the other preferred terms of derogation are precisely that: descriptors meant to evoke disdain for a victim and thus give moral cover to the perpetuator. The israeli kids raped and murdered on telegram live by armed men were not people, they were colonizers. The businesses looted and burned during the minneapolis riots were not citizens, they were gentrifiers. The peasants who didn't drink away their money and who were executed under collectivization were not people, they were kulaks or antirevolutionaries.
Speaking of laws and conventions as if they are not constraining the hated west is itself a misrepresentation. There is nothing lawful about shooting missiles at civilian ships in international waters. Giving moral support to houthis impoverishes everyone except the internal enemies of 'the west' who wish to seize the reigns of power for their own specific set of hands. Most of these revolutionaries are just too stupid and lazy to take up the arms themselves and blindly trust the word of populists who shout false promises freely, confident that when the power actually resides in their own hands they will find their grips surprisongly unrestrained and unbeholden to those who ostensibly granted them such power in the first place.
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But for the Houthis you don't need precise power. You need USS Iowa and the three others. They deliver 1000kg of explosives, 20 miles inland from the shore on the cheap. Almost everything worth flattening in yemen is that close. I don't understand why war moved to "Use one million USD missile launched from two hundred million plane that costs three hundred thousand dollars to keep in the air for one hour to destroy a Toyota Hilux that costs four thousand dollars" when sometimes you just need to throw a shitload of tnt on the cheap.
I can see why it benefits the US military industrial complex profits. And decapitating strikes are fun - but the last conventional war was the gulf one. Since then there was rarely adversary that was easy to decapitate. And if you are going to kill civilians anyway - because your adversary uses them as shields or because they are intermingled - do it on the cheap. The international outrage price you will pay for killing 40 000 Palestinians in Gaza is the same you will pay for killing 400000 - there is non linear response to civilian casualties.
If you're asking seriously, it's because, while their shells were comparatively cheap, battleships were really expensive, big targets. There's some argument just how far USA procurement has gone to the expensive, precise, and hard-to-produce end of the scale. It should tell us something that most countries that can value technology and precision highly when procuring to fight peers or near peers. Ideally precision ends engagements faster, with more certainty, and are less costly. Which make wars against near peers faster, more sure, and less costly.
During GWOT the US did do some economic "value" option procurement.
Rail guns were supposed to be the more economical gun replacement, but Navy seems to have petered out on pursuing that technology? Someone can correct me. I just looked and the the newer 'small' 5 in. guns on US destroyers can 'officially' reach out to 37km with certain ammunitions. Which was the effective range of the USS Iowa's guns anyway.
I suspect the reason we haven't seen more action against the Houthis is not for a want of options. It's mostly a political, executive decision. This administration has zero desire for any sort of action that may end with escalation in an election year. Maybe they are planning to deal with it in 2025 after a win, or maybe they think the Red Sea isn't that important to US efforts and stability. Stuff like intercepting arms shipments to the Houthis is a simple, defensible action USA and allied ships could take.
That decision makers think the risk of doing so is unacceptable might tell us they really believe Iran is inkling for a major war, it might tell us they are risk averse to the extreme, that the Commander-in-Chief won't accept conflict for domestic reasons, or perhaps they just aren't that interested in the ME anymore. Could be they're right, and it's a no win situation to escalate against the Houthis. Although, it's a bit strange to send ships to patrol a place with missiles flying around, and not take sufficient efforts to deter missile shooters. I think there is a real cost imposed on risk aversion (Ukraine 2014 leading to Ukraine 2022 for recent example) but I don't think the behavior is too out of the norm for a D Whitehouse with a weak, aging leader worried about re-election.
What argument? US military procurement is full of corruption and various other concerns that have long since taken priority over actual combat effectiveness and efficiency. China has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US and the US military supply chain is full of Chinese products - if there's an actual conflict between the USA and the Global South, the US would lose the ability to repair or even maintain their current fleet of ships, let alone manufacture new ones. In the USA-vs-Russia proxy war that's happening right now the west is being dramatically outcompeted in terms of ammunition supply/manufacturing, and on top of that there's a technological gap between the US and Russia - the US still hasn't bridged the hypersonic weapons gap.
The West isn't falling completely behind there: the Army opened a new artillery shell plant in May, and within the last month the US announced operational deployment of long-range air-launched SM-6 missiles and Lockheed announced a hypersonic missile (I haven't seen any claims of deployments, though).
Yeah, Western munition production capacity is going to rise at least 4-500% over 2019 levels in the next 5 years. Whether that’s enough remains to be seen.
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I was thinking of certain missile stocks. My understanding makes me suspect something close to a "232 times" number would be net raw tonnage of all things built to float. And that would be accounted for in shipyards (most of them) building civilian cargo ships. Big cargo shipyards are important. A shipyard pumping out cargo ships is closer to being retrofitted to produce new frigates than a non-existent shipyard, but maybe not that close. US shipbuilding capacity is anemic regardless, and it could not rebuild a fleet in any reasonable amount of time. China is building many ships and will build many more! But I'm not sure any nation, even China, will be able to replace a fleet in an amount of time that a conflict may requires. You never know, though. Hopefully by the time a nation needs to rebuild a fleet of a conflict would be resolved so the world can get better. I do not look forward to such a world.
If you mean Russia pumps out more artillery shells than the EU and the US, that is true. It will still be true even when both entities reach new production quotas. But, I'm not super interested in a dick measuring contest. Regardless of how capable or wunderwaffe-y hypersonic missiles may be, or how much stronker Russia artillery production is, neither appear to be capable of stopping more droves of poor slavs from dying in the foreseeable future. And that's sad, but also indicative that all weapons carry limitations, and much of what they can do relies on many other things going right in the right places.
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Is it that strange? They can claim they're taking bold action, without running the risks of actually taking bold action.
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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.
We still don't have much evidence of their resolve absent the ability to appeal to western aid orgs. If NGOs had cut them off Oct 7 and said, "we are never coming back, in fact, we are taking any group who does straight to the Hauge in irons" I think it would be over. Hamas endures because they know trading Gazans for photo ops is a successful strategy.
As much as I like to castigate the western cheerleaders who help hamas, those are ultimately only good for optics. Qatar, Iran and the normal networks of fixers all across the middle east are perfectly capable of supplying hamas with shitbottles, knives and guns. There won't be nice fancy hospitals to be photo ops after the command center underneath is bombed and there won't be images of NGO ambulances being blasted open after Hamas uses them to evacuate fighters and weapons, but there will still be kinetic action eternally from the hamas terrorists. There are enough mosques globally spreading unlimitedly hate against jews and hawalla networks to drive donations into arms purchases.
Optics are what matters. They are losing completely the actual conflict because they are backwards barbarians inting at the windmill that is a technologically and tactically superior enemy on the battlefield.
The former is ineffective without the latter. All you are doing is funding a thousand embarrassingly ineffective versions of Pickett's Charge. Without the West funding the equivalent of the Lost Cause narrative for Hamas they are just losers constantly throwing away their lives into pillbox fire.
Preach! If we had serious leaders all of these places in the West would already be shut down or facing RICO/Terrorism charges and we'd be engaged in a systemic campaign to treat the heads of international operations similarly to how Trump treated Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
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The west funds Hamas.
Indeed
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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.
Israel SHOULD wash its hands entirely. Give a two or three state solution to Gaza and West Bank. At this time Gaza subsists entirely off Israeli power and water supplies, with Egypt contributing water. West Bank has water but their people keep undermining the water table with illegal wells, and domestic power generation is anemic.
Both territories literally exist off the Israeli provided resources. When Israel cuts off power to Gaza, I always ask why the fuck is Gaza taking power from the jews they hate so much in the first place and why Israel is obligated to continue giving free food water and electricity to a population that enthusiastically showed their desire to rape and murder civilians.
Palestinians have in fact been betrayed, but by their Arab allies and not the Jews. The arabs made promises to drive away the jew (to seize palestine for themselves in a carveup), but a combination of incapability and self-preservation saw continued action against Israel as ineffective. The betrayal is that the arabs left the palestinians in the care of the hated jew, insteaf of taking them in for themselves as per the 1948 borders, and creating the UNRWA which gives palestinians permanent refugee status so palestinians in lebanon, syria and egypt will never receive citizenship.
WHY the palestinians were betrayed is quite obviously because the palestinians are chaotic terrorist dicks who fomented terrorism and conflicts which ravaged the sinai and lebanon and jordan, but that doesn't change the fact that the arabs still washed their hands of 'their own' people. Arab israelis live far better lives than the arab populations of the other countries, and if the gazans/palestinians were not irredentist incompetent dickheads the semisecular cooperative jewish muslim utopia of progressive dreams might actually emerge. As it stands that dream is just a wistful ancient instastory rotting in the cupboard of abandoned dreams, one of many delusions that wither under the slightest exposure to reality.
This is one thing that gives me pause when people advocate for UBI: I'm sure it could be done better, but our examples in the world of populations that are entirely supported by unconditioned aid seem to, by most objective metrics, fare really poorly (see also Haiti). At some point, it seems like having at least a bit of skin in the game incentivizes thinking on something other than how to destroy the hand that feeds. There is probably an interesting dystopian novel to be written there, somewhere.
Not that the existing systems are otherwise perfect, either.
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Yeah, I agree with all of this. But it won't fix the problem long term.
Maybe in a year or two the current conflict will simmer down. Hamas will be defeated. They'll give back a few token hostages and kill the rest. The US and Europe will give Gaza like $100 billion dollars to rebuild. President Harris will win the Nobel Peace Prize. Things will approach normalcy. A round of back pats all around. Blue-eyed European aristocrats will give talks at Davos about how great the international system is.
Then Iran or someone else will give Gaza weapons, they will attack Israel, and the cycle will repeat. They just keep doing the same stupid things over and over and getting the same results. They hate Israel more than they love their own country. Until the world recognizes this there can be no peace.
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Soon after they do, they're in a war with both, and end up more or less back where they started.
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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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That’s all well and good but ever since Al Qaeda the strategy of roping the behemoth into a long and costly quagmire has been shown to be effective, particularly for Islamist groups who can play the insurgency game against a superior foe year after year. That’s what the Houthis are, that’s what all the other Iran proxies are. Going in with the attitude you describe makes it easy for these types to rope a dope into another forever conflict. Israel lives in all this and has no choice in the matter. But the US is wise to only intervene in small ways like if international shipping is affected. Stay out of it. There’s bigger threats elsewhere that are more pressing to actual American interests. It might be naive of me but I feel that we could forget about the entire region and it probably wouldn’t even matter that much.
Isn't the placement of the Roosevelt in the line of fire shooting down anti-ship missiles with even more expensive missiles already a "long and costly quagmire"? International shipping is effected, but we're choosing to ignore it because it would question our Glorious Leadership's choices a couple years back. It would make The Good Guys look bad.
I'm not even dead set that action is necessary, but if it were it should look more like Operations Praying Mantis or El Dorado Canyon (one-time, rapid, hard strikes), not Iraqi Freedom.
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I think the point being made was that our ship-based artillery would be enough to neuter Houthi capabilities and make them reconsider the ROI of trying to rope the West into their local conflict.
And it would be relatively cheap. Though artillery rounds themselves are about $10,000 each, which at first I found shocking until realizing they’re about 100 pounds, and 100 pounds of HEI ammo would cost about that much as well.
No munition is cheap. Artillery cheaper is cheaper than a missile only due to scale of production and complexity, but if you need 60 shells to decisively destroy a target you're shit outta luck compared to a high precision shell. CEP for GPS guided artillery is still not great, so precision missiles are best. The problem of course is that precision missiles are very hard to even get deployed in the area of operations, what with pilot skill and airframe being a very substantial barrier to entry.
Right now the meta is for cheap kamikaze drones, especially COTS DJI FPV kits which have the best in class flight controllers. These drones are all super vulnerable to electronic warfare, but even if that is solved the issue is that you need 1 operator per killshot. Max flight time is about 20mins per drone, so it is 1 guy for 2 shots per hour at best. An absolutely insane ROI by current military standards, but it is actually super taxing on the pilots. If you want to experience how draining it can be to be an FPV pilot try playing any flight sim game on oculus - the headset weight and physical disorientation can be extremely taxing.
A cost is borne to kill someone else. If it falls to a container full of sweaty dudes in killpods chugging DMD and an army of minions prepping new killdrones, it may be more expensive than a single fighter pilot with a full loadout.
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Why do you think that the goals of either Netanyahu or the Republicans involve ending the war?
Netanyahu will almost certainly lose power, and quite possibly go to jail, as soon as the war is over. Republicans draw political advantage from supporting Israel, not from Israel being at peace. When Israel is at peace and doing well, there's not much public supporting of Israel to be done.
There's also a subset of Evangelicals who hold a prophetic belief that Israel's wars are a signal of the end times, and aren't really interested in "peace in the middle east" because that is against prophecy and therefore some mix of undesirable and categorically impossible anyway.
Republicans, and many Democrats, want to show allegiance and friendship to Israel. Part of the Wilsonian problem of American foreign policy has been that a liberal America has no friends, other than perhaps to some extent England and Australia. It can't have friends and have morality, friendship means nothing if it doesn't super-cede morality to at least some degree. If I treat you only according to ethics when you're right and when you're wrong, you're not my friend, you're just another node in the matrix. You're a friend when I'm by your side, right or wrong. If I'm there when you're wrong you can count on me. It's precisely because Netanyahu is unpopular, and the war has gone from punitive expedition to mowing the grass to genocidal farce, that supporting it has so much value for the Zionist congress critter. He can bend the knee so much farther when Israel is already in the gutter.
Israel's next elections are scheduled for October, 2026. Once the war is over, Netanyahu has no reason at all to hold them early and his coalition isn't in incredible danger of breaking up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Benjamin_Netanyahu?wprov=sfti1
I'm not going to pretend I have a deep understanding of Israeli politics, but his coalition has already threatened to break up despite the war, and prior to October there was a consistent drumbeat in the newspapers of stories on his corruption trials closing in. Maybe it's foreign overreactions, but it seems convenient to suddenly be saying that you don't switch horses midstream.
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He is Israel's face. It could have been a scarecrow with a yamaka and they still would've clapped.
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He’s running a more or less permanent right wing government in their favorite country and has a track record of going after their least favorite people.
Who are their least favorite people? Not being obtuse, I honestly don't know. Hamas terrorists?
Democrats and Muslims.
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