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Notes -
I'm curious where your put-past line is. Is Trump arranging for his own assassination attempt past it? What about Macron arranging the rail sabotage?
It is worth considering in cases where relatively few civilian deaths purchase a casus belli for an important conflict, and where the actor can’t be discerned. The rail sabotage would make sense for Macron if he were intent on blaming (say) Russia and also had a strong geopolitical interest in warring against Russia. Or consider the false flags used by Russia: https://it.usembassy.gov/how-russia-conducts-false-flag-operations/
Implying that there isn’t a way to determine who launched the projectiles, it seems like a seriously attractive move by Netanyahu, and only at the expense of some Druze lives which don’t really matter to that coalition.
Unless this cozy little site has been infiltrated by paid actors, I suppose I may have to recalibrate the skepticism/cynicism Overton window of the average poster here. Not in a million years would I think it rational for Israel to false flag an attack on Druze children in the year 2024. Russia isn't the right analogy because, well, it's Russia! It's a large nuclear state that will doubtlessly continue to exist even if the rest of the world is turned into those that see it as a thug state and those that see it as a thug state that one can do business with. Israel has no such existential luxury, and so any attractiveness of creating a casus belli must be weighed down by the mortal expense of the loss of America's nuclear umbrella. The math is impossible and can only work if not only Netanyahu is crazy enough to believe it, but also the entire chain of command required to execute the false flag operation. This isn't something you can execute with three fanatical spooks.
Are we pretending that Israel doesn't have its own nuclear capability?
I'd think Israel is severely limited in its second strike capability due to its small size, awful geographic location elative to adversaries, and its strategic ambiguity around its nukes (both in count and readiness). Much better to rely on Uncle Sam for nuclear deterrence.
I'm skeptical the US ever provided nuclear deterrence for Israel. Even without the current hard pivot away from Israel that the Democrats are performing I can't imagine there's any world where the US would have nuked Iran in return if they try to nuke Israel.
If Russia nuked Estonia, I think the odds are that the US doesn't nuke Russia back, at least not unless Russia escalates further. The response instead would be limited to substantive conventional strikes, with nuclear saber rattling. Point is, the nuclear umbrella is not some kind of 100% binding dead man's switch, but instead it raises the cost of nuclear aggression significantly. Do you think Iran is a rational actor? If so, then it must be deterred from nuking Israel.
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At the risk of linking this mind-killing topic to another one that turned out to be mind-killing even relative to the normal toxic sludge nature of what we discuss here, I remember hearing a very similar line of argument for why Ukraine could not have been behind the Nord Stream bombing. Yet, when mainstream papers all over countries like Germany ran articles asserting that shockingly it was in fact the Ukrainians, the needle of public opinion regarding support for Ukraine in Germany and other Western countries barely twitched.
Regardless of whether you believe the it-was-UA theory, this should tell you that we overestimate the likelihood that people would turn on an important tribal ally for a moral transgression, even if that transgression harms said people. Just like with NS, in the hypothetical case that Israel did it, there will never be a situation where a leader will stand before a camera and swear that they ordered the attack (except in situations where it is too late for UA/IL anyway). For any evidence short of that, those who support them will surely find a way to continue believing a cocktail of "our allies wouldn't do that, their enemies are known to make things up, it wouldn't make sense for them because if it came out they would lose the support of people like me" that allows the supporter to treat the allegation as evidence for nothing except for the deviousness of the enemy's slanderous schemes.
What made the Ukraine - Nord Stream bombing story funnier, and helps explain some of that needle-not-shifting, was that it was the anti-Ukrainians/pro-Russians who most pushed in the 'it couldn't have been Ukraine' angle before the story broke, arguing on grounds that it was clearly beyond their capability and must have been the US instead, hence the credulity given to the Seymour Hersh article, while it was relatively pro-Ukrainian posters noting that the Ukrainians were potential culprits with means and motive.
The revelations that it was (probably) the Ukrainians were awkward for most people you'd expect to trumpet it, because it undercut a number of the propaganda narratives of the people previously most invested in the Nord Stream topic who you'd expect to trumpet it. The anti-Americans didn't want to acknowledge that their previous year of accusations would have been unfounded all the while, the Russians didn't want to acknowledge that Ukraine could destroy their infrastructure and thus Russia didn't have a monopoly on sabotaging underseas infrastructure to pressure the Europeans with, and the European energy-import/pro-Russia-business lobbies didn't want to have to acknowledge that the investments were far more vulnerable than previously thought (and not just from American pressure). Not only did it make previous positions wrong, but it undercut the arguments for Russia as an alternative when any 'break with the West, build a pipeline to Russia for your own interest!' project could be destroyed.
For the pro-Ukrainian factions, in turn, few of them had any major reason to be vocal about it. Setting aside that it had been inactive at the time and thus limiting the actual effect, the Nord Stream pipeline had been a long-standing friction point between Germany and most of its regional neighbors. Not only did its destruction given the German government the political cover to drop what had long been a priority project of the merkel era, it suited the interests of a number of the parties Germany had been ignoring the protests of to leave unstated that if Ukraine could sabotage such a pipeline, so could anyone else. The conspiracy theory before may have been only the Americans could, but the security-planning reality after was that anyone else could. No one, to my knowledge, has made any direct threat, but post-Nordstream Germany entered a series of substantial (and costly) policy changes to re-align itself with its neighbors.
(This is not as ominous as it may sound, and is far from the only European realignment on security / implicit capability threat terms. Political history ties the Franco-British alliance of the 20th century to the rise of Germany, but said changed also coincided with the rise in technological capabilities for the French to contest the English channel without needing a Blue Water navy thanks to torpedo boats. British-French relations shifted without an explicit threat, but with a coinciding sharp rise in the implicit relative costs if Britain chose a more confrontational approach. Similarly, the Franco-German conventional rivalry died with the advent of the French nuclear deterrent: with the value of conquest removed, cooperation becomes far more palatable than alternative arrangements. This does not mean that the French made nuclear threats to compel the Germans into the proto-EU.)
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There are some posters here that frankly hate Israel. So they will grasp for any theory to blame Israel.
You know when you have been in any forum long enough that once you see a particularly unhinged spiel you have a good idea who is the perpetrator. It is one easy way to identify bad faith arguers at the outset, which is perhaps one of the ONLY goos things Reddit had: RES allowed tagging so if any response looked unhinged or memey you could know immediately based on your own personal preferences.
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