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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25230 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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This actually ties in well to that recent overkill conspiracy theory post. Surely the Israelis had to have known the US would figure out they did it, did Egypt even have any airforce left by that point in the war?

If Israel expected the US to figure out they were responsible, they would have to be absolutely confident in American subservience to them, that they would take such an attack lying down. But if they were absolutely confident in American subservience, why do they care if Americans hear about them killing some POWs? Wouldn’t it just be easier to count on American loyalty to look the other way on POW executions, as opposed to relying on Americans to look the other way on sinking their own ship?

Any way you slice it sinking a US warship is more likely to piss off the USA than executing Egyptian POWs. So doing the former to cover up the latter is nonsensical. Classic overkill conspiracy theory

It’s not necessarily overkill. If the Israelis were confident that A) committing deliberate war crimes would piss off the Americans and cause them to drop their support, and B) attacking an American spy ship would be chalked up as an accident due to fog of war, resulting in no real change to the status quo, they—or more realistically, a single officer—could have decided the risk was worth it.

Afaik most of the survivors think that's what happened. You can suggest a better motive if you want, but these counterfactuals don't prove that they really thought it was an egyptian ship.

Most of the survivors were grunts with no understanding of geopolitics, why should their opinion carry any weight as to the cause of the incident?

Killing potentially 50+ US sailors to cover up something that countless US allies (and the US itself, if we’re just considering torture of prisoners) did regularly throughout the 20th century just doesn’t make sense.

Id be willing to wager that there are a lot of "grunts" who have a better grasp of geopolitics than the median State Department official.

After all its his ass that's on the line.

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