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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.
You said "this is about as great a scenario that we could possibly ask for from Israel", which actually flies against everything you have said in this comment? Who is "we" in that context? Not the country at large or its interests? By "we" did you mean the sideline popcorn-eaters? Why would it be the best they could ask for?
Yes, the popcorn-eaters. I’m sure this has been a headache for the U.S. foreign policy people who have to deal with whatever fallout comes from this. But as someone who finds organizations like Hezbollah pretty repellent, it’s very difficult to be unhappy to see their efforts stymied and their operatives harmed and humiliated.
And as someone who has a lot of fatigue and angst about seeing Arab civilians wantonly killed, both by Israel and by various other actors in the region, it’s nice to see an effort like this for a change that seems to spare civilians while still achieving strategic goals. It gives me a glimmer of hope that maybe future efforts by both Israel and others will look more like this and less like Gaza.
I'm trying to put myself in your state of mind- you think this action by Israel is an attempt by Israel to avoid what happened in Gaza to happen in Lebanon? And that if you want that, this is the best you could ask for? It's just not grounded in reality. If you don't want what happened in Gaza to happen in Lebanon you would not be cheering this on because it's obviously a major escalation of the conflict in that direction.
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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.
Has the CIA done this in the war on terror? No, it hasn't. You know who has done this? Insurgents and Mossad.
The US was apparently not even in the loop on this operation, also making this another demonstration of Israel's insolence. The CIA would not have approved of this attack and it has not done similar attacks in its own War on Terror.
I would vastly prefer that it did. I would much, much rather they attempt to eliminate a terrorist with a half-ounce of high explosive than a twenty-five-pound warhead. I would much rather they deliver that explosive by secreting it into a target's personal items, rather than aiming a hundred-pound supersonic missile at some part of a building from ten miles away through a low-resolution thermal camera.
You are consistently playing language games. These aren't "IEDs" any more than a hand grenade is an IED. This isn't "terrorism" any more than any other state-sanctioned use of force is terrorism. The CIA probably would not have approved of this attack, but that is not to the CIA's credit; they've routinely approved of far, far more objectionable attacks. This is doubtless very inconvenient for the US government, and is a great example of why we should not be involved in any of this, but that doesn't actually make the attack itself objectionable on any fundamental level.
The purpose of an IED is to deceive people into thinking a bomb is an ordinary object. A hand grenade is a weapon of conventional warfare. Why are you so loathe to admit that this is obviously an IED, and not a hand grenade? Why detach yourself so much from reality? To pretend like this is just another chapter in the military history of hand grenades is just laughable. It's unprecedented.
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The CIA isn’t facing an enemy which has a viable, if unlikely, path to destroying the US (it doesn’t handle nuclear policy between great powers).
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