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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.
Exactly, but now it's a war against belligerent states instead of a heavy handed action by an occupying power. Egypt was begging to be allowed at a peace table after Israels counterattack in the Yom Kippur war, and so will the gazans when they discover the jew is not in fact a weak coward.
Why would it make a difference that they're a de jure state rather than merely a de facto one? Gaza was not occupied in any real sense before 10/7.
Gaza was getting power and water and open borders for aid from Israel because Israel is an 'occupying power'. As a foreign state it is entitled to nothing, much less as a hostile one.
Yes, but the inevitable result of them becoming a hostile state de jure is no different than them being a hostile state de facto. Israel wages war against them, wins, and is then once again an 'occupying power' with the obligations that entails.
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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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