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Notes -
"Your honor. I spent hours meticulously crafting these. To call them 'improvised' explosives is an insult."
Jokes aside, yes, it is very clearly closer to a drone strike than to an IED, and it is not particularly close to a drone strike.
You can think of it in terms of energy-in-the-system. IEDs in a middle-east context are generally remote-detonated artillery shells, suicide vests, or vehicle bombs. Drone strikes are usually a hellfire missile. In any of these cases, we're talking about dozens of pounds of high explosive and almost always significant added fragmentation. Recently, the US has been deploying the R9X hellfire, which trades the HE warhead for deployable blades, relying on pure kinetic impact... but even that is less discriminate than these pagers; people standing within arms-length of one of these are extremely likely to be unharmed. These are not "bombs in a market", because that implies that the market, in general, suffers the harmful effects of the bomb. They are literally bombs in someone's pocket. The fact that the person might be in a market when they go off is irrelevant; unlike IEDs or hellfires or even the r9x, the market and the other people in it will almost certainly be fine.
You can think of it in terms of discrimination in lethal effect. arty-shell bombs, suicide vests and car bombs are all designed to maximize lethal effect across the widest radius possible. Hellfires are not optimized for lethal radius, but their warhead and kinetic energy often deliver a similar effect. The R9X is directly intended to minimize lethal radius, and these pager bombs take it to about the minimum possible value while maintaining effectiveness. This minimization is possible because the attacker delivered these bombs in a way that maximized the chance of intimate contact with the target before detonation. IEDs are "to who it may concern"; these are, again, literally in the targets' pockets. And again, the Israelis did this blind, so they can't guarantee that it's a Hezbollah guy holding the hot potato when it pops. But you can't guarantee that the target of a sniper attack doesn't turn out of the line of fire at the last second, and you hit someone in the background instead. Mistakes happen, but this method seems to be quite optimized for minimizing them.
A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not. So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command. Apparently the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was injured, was the Iranian ambassador a target? There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.
The insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan also planted many well-placed IEDs which only harmed American military personnel. That is regarded as a terrorist tactic regardless. And obviously this attack is closer to an attack by IEDs than it is to a drone strike.
Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point? It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.
I think it's probable that these bombs were better targeted than the average drone strike. The chain of command observably sucks at identifying and designating targets, and often resulted in significant collateral damage. I care about striking particular people at particular places because I want harm to bystanders minimized. These bombs seem likely to have done a very good job of minimizing harm to bystanders.
This would concern me if they had been randomly airdropped by a helicopter. It would concern me if Israel simply put charges in every pager in the country, and then detonated them all. But the story at the moment is that they compromised Hezbollah's pager supply specifically, which means that anyone harmed by one of these pagers is overwhelmingly likely to either be a member of Hezbollah, or was gifted a pager by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe that impression is mistaken, in which case I'll happily agree that my assessment is invalid. But if it is accurate, I think my assessment stands.
I don't particularly think that schools, hospitals, diplomatic facilities, or indeed crowded markets are intrinsically off-limits to war. They are vulnerable and valuable, and efforts should be made to minimize harm to or within them... But if the above holds, then the reason these areas were bombed is because an active member of Hezbollah entered them. Further, the places themselves were not harmed in any significant way. If the Iranian diplomat was injured, it sorta raises the question of how he got within area effect of a bomb this small, likely being held by a Hezbollah operative. My sympathy is limited.
Could you unpack the word "accountability" in this sentence? What "accountability" applied for drone strikes, and how does it differ from the accountability applying here? Some agent of a government did both. If either kills innocents, there's going to be negative consequences, but probably not serious ones. What's your model here?
That the market structures, contents, or occupants generally were harmed by the physical effects of overpressure or fragmentation, which are the central examples of "harm" caused by a "bomb". Here's some examples of the destruction caused by central examples of "bombs" in a market.
War tends to cause disruption, panic and potentially injury to bystanders, as well as fear and instability. If you don't want that, avoid war.
If you think the people hit weren't actually Hezbollah, say that. I'm willing to believe it if there's reasonable amounts of evidence.
If you think the people hit were Hezbollah but this method of hitting them was inappropriate, I'm curious as to what a more appropriate method would be better. This method seems on the order of individual bullets from a sniper, which is pretty damn selective.
Depends how they inserted the pagers. Did they rig a specific batch bought by the Hezbollah office supplies department? Or did they send them to a reseller "known to supply to Hezbollah"?
If it was done the second way a lot of these could have been sold to totally random people.
It's also possible that the pagers were sold much more widely but only the ones that were eventually pinned to Hezbollah agents were triggered today.
Yeah, my guess is that it's probably an "and" operator. The old joke about US cyber attacks is that you can always tell when it's the US, because the code looks like it's written by lawyers. Israel is not terribly far behind on that front; they're still pretty sensitive to collateral damage. My guess would be that they were both pretty confident that this supply chain was serving Hezbollah, specifically, but they also had a cyber vulnerability. They must have had some sort of cyber vulnerability, since they were able to trigger them remotely. This access, combined with other SIGINT methods, probably allowed them to have a second filter, identifying all of the devices that had a second indicator of being used by Hezbollah, specifically, and they only triggered these ones.
The tradeoffs for this plan would be that you would essentially be leaving some "unexploded ordnance" out in the wild. A mitigating factor would be that it's highly likely that there's been enough publicity that if anyone else has one of these things unexploded, they're probably highly likely to "do your EOD for you". That said, if there are any left, it is also possible for Hezbollah to try to stage some PR stunt/false flag by killing some innocent person with it and claiming that Israel still did it (or was at least negligent in creating the circumstances, yadda yadda...).
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Entirely true. I'm happy to see evidence either way.
Allegedly, the specific pagers were purchased through a single kinda-sketchy reseller:
I'd expect there's serious problems trying to separate sales from Hezbollah from non-military sales in Lebanon, and the total sales number probably means a lot more individual items than it looks at first, but this doesn't look like the sort of outfit that does a company that has the capacity to do many 3-10k batches of assembly at this scale.
Of course, that assumes they were compromised by BAC. A compromise further up the supply chain would be much less targeted, one downstream would probably be much more.
Thanks, I'd heard rumors that was the case, but no evidence.
They need to take lessons from Hamas and intertwine their procurement with humanitarian groups. Mossad can't make your stuff explode if it was bought by the red cross and half the pagers went to the Charity Home For Puppies and Photogenic Orphaned Children Who Don't Want Their Dicks Blown Off
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That these particular bombs were a threat to anyone in the market, other than their intended targets.
That is absurd, obviously a bomb in a crowded place is a danger to people standing near the person with the hidden bomb. We don't have any numbers on civilian casualties yet, the ideas that these bombs didn't harm anybody standing near them strikes me as extremely improbable.
Assuming that this video depicts what it is purported to depict, I see three guys standing literally right next to the guy with the pager, and none of them are harmed.
Another follow-up, the Guardian is reporting that of the 9 killed, one was a 10-year old girl. I'm not trying to "won't someone think of the children!" here, I'm pointing out that Israeli IEDs don't magically not pose a threat to the civilians in the areas in which they are planted.
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This is incredibly disingenuous Hoffmeister. In the first place because, a single video instance is not enough to prove the statement "these explosives were not a danger to anybody standing near the person holding them". But even more so because you have no idea what injuries the people around may have suffered. Just because someone runs away doesn't mean they aren't injured.
What I find hard to understand is why don't you just admit that these explosives do create danger for the civilians around them, and then just say it's justified? We don't have any notion for how many non-Hezbollah may have been injured. But we have video evidence of one detonating within a few feet from children.
If those children were standing on the other side of that fruit stand, they would have been head-level with the bomb. So say it was "no threat to them" is just an obvious lie.
I didn’t claim that it is. However, it shows that it’s actually quite plausible that these bombs did not do widespread harm to uninvolved bystanders, because the explosion just isn’t that big or destructive. Hell, in this video, even the guy with the pager is still alive afterward, still has both of his legs, etc. It’s nothing like the kinds of suicide bombs we see in Kabul or Baghdad that absolutely shred and annihilate the people nearby. Yes, it’s possible that the guy next to him who ran away sustained some fairly minor shrapnel injuries, but I think it’s very unlikely that he will even require hospitalization. The other guy who starts the video out of frame appears literally completely untouched by the blast.
Because I don’t have enough information to say that’s true! Assuming that every one of the blasts was as small as the one in this video, I just don’t see a mechanism by which they could have created serious threat of death and dismemberment to a large number of people who were not intended targets. Obviously they created some non-zero level of danger; I would be horrified to learn that some random guys walking around at a concert or bake sale I’m attending are carrying miniature explosives. But in terms of minimizing civilian exposure to danger while still measurably impacting an enemy terrorist organization, I think this is about as great a scenario that we could possibly ask for from Israel.
Why didn't they make the US aware of it, then? Because they know the US would have opposed it to avoid escalating the conflict. So "this is about as great a scenario that we could possibly ask for from Israel" is so far from the US foreign policy position on this conflict, where are you even getting that from?
Why is the US foreign policy apparatus intent on avoiding escalation into a regional conflict but you're indifferent to it?
Because I’m not a member of the US foreign policy apparatus. It’s not my job to fret over complex geopolitical consequences of events like this. I have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines with popcorn. I’m not significantly emotionally-invested in this region. I understand why the American foreign policy establishment wants to limit conflict in the region, and I don’t even disagree with them! I get just as distressed by mass civilian casualties as anyone else does. That’s why when the Israeli military does an operation like this which seems extremely targeted and designed to limit civilian casualties relative to pretty much every action the Israelis have taken since 10/7, I think they should be commended for that. I’d like to see more of this and less carpet-bombing of city blocks.
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The militant : civilian casualty ratio is likely far better than that in many military actions you’d consider just.
Actually, the practice of using hidden/planted IEDs has had a terrible civilian casualty ratio which is why the United States does not use this tactic. That's not to say every single instance has harmed civilians, many IEDs in Iraq only killed Americans. But as a practice it's not considered good to flood public/civilian areas with hidden explosives, that is a terrorist tactic.
That’s because many IEDs are improvised bombs in a crowded marketplace in Mogadishu or Baghdad that kill 50-300 civilians alongside a handful of security staff or military personnel. As far as I know there’s zero evidence of a casualty ratio anywhere near that in this case.
FYI these were improvised bombs detonated in crowded marketplaces. That's why I said they are terrorist tactics. This is not a tactic the US has engaged in in its war on terror.
I don’t know, is there not a difference between carpet bombing a shopping mall that a target is in and killing a thousand civilians and precision droning his car, killing the occupants of his vehicle and an unfortunate motorcyclist nearby, but otherwise nobody else? I think the CIA would probably fairly argue there is.
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