"When I first heard about U.S. airstrikes in Yemen a week ago resulting in 6 Houthi deaths, my first thought was: 6? Did the bombs totally miss? Shouldn’t that number be 6000, at least?"
War is *a lot* more capital intensive these days. The marginal benefit for additional military capital is almost always higher than for additional labor, especially minimally-skilled labor like Houthi militants. The same applies to the the enemy when deciding how to literally get the most bang for the buck in a strike. It's far, far more important to take our critical intel or comms platforms or drone / missile warehouses than to take out barracks. It often doesn't even make sense to report how many people were killed in a strike as for many operations it's entirely incidental and irrelevant as regards the objective of hitting overall capability to fight. This trend has been going on a long time and will continue to do so as we quickly approach the time when wars are matters of robots vs robots until one side runs out and is immediately conquered.
It would seem that Hamas has hit on an effective strategy for protecting its military infrastructure: embed it among civilians, especially hospitals, and dare you to bomb it.
The embedding is not the most important contributor to Hamas capability, it's just the most visible part that gets the most political, media, public attention, but precisely because it is visible, the rest of the more important stuff being invisible is the definition of an intelligence failure. It's also usually only visible as a location that is abused for these defensive properties in the last phase of a process or sequence, either short term for shoot-and-scoot deployment, or longer term as a headquarters cell for coordinating operations.
There is a little bit of "manufacturing" in terms of assembly of some small and simple weapons, but the vast majority of the most destructive pieces can only be covertly stockpiled, distributed, and hidden in many secret arms depots as it takes too long to build them in real time during war or must be smuggled in because the facilities which manufacture them cannot be easily hidden.
The ability to import or manufacture a huge amount of this materiel over years and hide it successfully practically under Israel's nose - even apparently in buildings dedicated to the purpose and which had no other civilian use - until the moment they choose to initiate an attack, and the construction and proficient use of an incredibly well- designed and developed tunnel system - are the real strengths Hamas was able to leverage with alarming success. The defensive abuse of civilian sites later has certainly helped them to some degree but has not proven to be much of an impediment at all to Israel gradually destroying them one at a time while clearing Hamas militants out and inching its way unrelentingly towards Egypt.
Bottom Line is the Hamas most effective strategy was to leverage their capacity to successfully defeat Israel intel for the years it took for them to prep for this attack.
This intel failure was Israel's most devastating error, and I don't think they will allow any post-war situation to emerge where it could even remain possible for them to be surprised in this way. However that is accomplished, it won't be compatible with genuine Palestinian self-rule in Gaza in the manner of an independent state.
One final related point is that every single person who complained over the last two decades about the Palestinians not enjoying geographic contiguity and/or uninspected transit between Gaza and the West Bank is now revealed to be naive at best and, if they haven't confessed this error and what would have been its disastrous consequences yet, an evil idiot besides. Had Israel allowed it to happen the entire West Bank right up to the outskirts of Jerusalem would have been equally permeated with tunnels, weapons, and civilian attack sites.
This strategy on Hamas' part puts Israel in the impossible situation that it can never have a lasting peace unless it exterminates everyone in Gaza, including all civilians not willing to be relocated far enough away to render them harmless to Israel.
If that were the whole picture, Israel should go ahead and do it and blame the Gazans.
But add in the nonsense of the "oppressor-oppressed axis" and you spread enough undeserved hostility toward Israel that third countries will join in a mass jihad if Israel does.
If I lived anywhere in the Middle East, on any side, I'd be on the next boat to anywhere else. Because the fighting there has lasted through all of recorded history, and that is likely still to be true 10,000 years from now.
We weren't bombing the Houthi because they launched some drones at various cargo ships. We were bombing the Iranian missile emplacements (and the Iranians manning them) that had launched missiles at US Navy ships performing escort duties.
But did we? As far as I can tell, we struck at locations from where missiles were launched, but I can't tell if the equipment was still there when we struck back.
I spent a year in Iraq serving in the infantry, 2005-2006. Your opinions and insight are as valid as any I’ve heard on this difficult subject. Go Home sounds nice, but it always comes down to, “you may not be interested in war, but wat may be interested in you.” No easy answers.
The US is really good at conventional warfare. It is stupid about choosing wars, counterinsurgency, and nation-rebuilding. From all I've read about it, the choice to attack Iraq was incredibly senseless and stupid (I'd go further and say 'criminal') on almost every level but the temptation to do it anyway was irresistible because after getting crushed in the Gulf War and then further weakened by a decade of sanctions, knocking over what remained of the Iraq military was going to be a rapid cakewalk, maybe a hundred or thousand times easier than invading, say, Iran. Maybe only Syria would have been easier. Indeed it was just so, the invasion progressed so fast some units had to effectively pause just to let the logistical lines of communication catch up, US fatalities were just 140 (equivalent to a single company of troops) and Baghdad fell in fewer than three weeks. Knowing the major combat operations phase would play out that way completely blinded all the decision makers into everything else wrong about the decision and planning.
I agree with your friend. There was no vital US interest at stake in Iraq. Sure, Saddam was troublesome, but he was contained. And he was a counterweight to Iran. How’s it working out for us now...
I don't think any group in history has ever behaved well when others did their work for them. Which is what happened there.
This is not meant as a simplistic "servant and master" thing. It is trivially obvious that in England, even in France - even on the eve of Revolution - the busy and the industrious and the inquiring - outnumbered the wastrels, among the aristrocracy. A shorthand way to think about it is: some people work during the day, some people work at nights or "weekends". Only a raving Marxist doesn't get this.
No, what I mean is - take the classic example of the South. It was wrong for people to make other people do their work for them. It was bad on all counts, obviously, but one of the ways it was bad, one that is less mentioned - was that it was bad for that ruling class. Some of them even perceived this. Lee did.
I think it is pretty much always wrong for people to make other people do work they themselves won't do. It is bad for the character. This is why I am turned off by UBI talk, and no amount of tax code rigmarole can move me on it.
Sure, the Middle East didn't invite this trouble upon themselves. But they have benefitted and benefitted, and it is one of the keys to their population growth - they basically owe their existence to it.
It breeds laziness and a lack of purpose, of course, and out of this resentment.
I doubt that will ever go away, so you are very likely right that we ought to keep our distance insofar as we can, or wish to. I differ from you in that I see Israel as a 51st state or something. There's no other way to account for its importance to everybody, positive and negative.
"But it does not matter if 99 percent of a population is peaceful. In the absence of strong, firmly-established institutions to keep order, a determined violent minority will shape everyone’s experience."
This would appear to be consistent with the broken window theory of policing. In that vein, one might ask if October 7, 2023 actually began back in 2001 when the Gazans started launching missiles at Israel and getting away with it more or less for two decades without suffering a sufficiently firm and strong response.
Call me crazy, but firing missiles seems like it is the sort of thing that demands an overwhelming response, no? How has this gone on for so long? It boggles the mind.
Imagine what the US response would be if missiles fired from Cuba started landing in Florida, perhaps after kidnapping a bunch of people from Key West. Maybe the US would respond like Israel responds to Hezbollah in Lebanon with tit-for-tat air strikes, or maybe not, instead just a call for a cease fire and diplomatic solutions. Either response would likely prolong the missile launching. With someone else as President perhaps we might see an overwhelmingly violent and decisive response? And wouldn't the latter be the better option in that it would more likely prevent a frozen or unresolved never-ending conflict?
Why would counter-battery fire with large thermobaric weapons not be the militarily appropriate and legally justified response to concealed missile launches from any location in Gaza or Lebanon? Just shooting down missiles does not deter further launches nor does it provide safety and security to Israelis. Not to offer an overwhelming and crushing military response to missile launches is in legitimize military use of civilians as shields which is something that would best be opposed, no?
Perhaps someone can explain why Israel responding to Gazan missile attacks with Israeli-manufactured GBU-43/8 MOABs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-43/B_MOAB ) is not the most ethical and humane strategy?
The eventual response after repeated missile attacks is to escalate up to a Dresden level annihilation. I am not blaming Israel, but this will not stop until they go all out to stop it.
I live within missile distance of Mexico. If some radicals there decided they wanted San Diego back (after all we really did take it from them by force — my house actually looks out over the end-place of the final battle), and they started crossing the border and killing women and children and then firing missiles every night, the appropriate response would be the elimination of Tijuana. Full stop.
"With someone else as President perhaps we might see an overwhelmingly violent and decisive response?"
I had thought when it seemed evident that Hillary Clinton was going to be president, that it would be interesting to see what her response to e.g. a terror incident would be.
I had a gut feeling she would unleash holy hell. The fact that she might in some sense, as probably many commenters here believe, "hate America" did not dissuade from this feeling. If anything, it rather bolstered it.
Yes, her famous/infamous braggadocio about Gadaffi and Libya - "We Came, We Saw, He Died" - certainly helped project a tough persona. And her role in the Obama Administration and its shameless interference in elections around the globe certainly gives one the impression that she is/was committed to realpolitik over any other principle. In Honduras, for example, Wikipedia tells a story::
""Now that President Zelaya is back it would be opportune to restore him to his position under appropriate circumstances – get on with the election that is currently scheduled for November, have a peaceful transition of presidential authority and get Honduras back to constitutional and democratic order."[84] At the end of October, Clinton took a leading role in convincing Micheletti to accept a deal – which she termed an "historic agreement" – in which Zelaya would return to power in advance of general elections in which neither figure was running.[82] Micheletti said that Clinton had been insistent on this point: "I kept trying to explain our position to her, but all she kept saying was, 'Restitution, restitution, restitution.'"[82] That agreement broke down, despite efforts of the State Department to revive it,[85] and Clinton and the U.S. ended up supporting the winner of the 2009 Honduran general election, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, with Clinton characterizing the elections as "free and fair" and Lobo as holding a strong commitment to democracy and the rule of constitutional law." Lobo of course was eventually banned from entering the USA on allegations of corruption and his wife and son both convicted on various charges.
Unfortunately that may have been her least egregious activity as Secretary of State. In Israel she brokered a 2012 ceasefire for Gaza in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt. I don't think anyone in the Obama administration had much if any sympathy for Israel.
"Speak softly, and carry a big stick" preferably one that you use adeptly when attacked, is about what I would like to see, but I don't know who in the USA poltical world has the ability to play that game.
Attacking ships at sea is and has long been considered an act of war, an ipso facto declaration that the attacking entity is declaring war, primarily against the nation under which the attacked vessels are flagged (which signifies an extension of the flagged nation's sovereign jurisdiction). When an entity declares war, the appropriate response is not to mail an apologetic, friendly card.
The US has been aiding and arming Saudi Arabia wage war in Yemen for years and kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people. You write like there hasn't been a bloody ongoing war and nothing happened until the recent ship attacks.
Thank you for your correction. I confess to ignorance about the history in the last century. Your comments indicate that there has been a long-lasting war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and I cannot argue out of knowledge. I do recall that the house of Saud rose to dominance against the effort of other leaders in the area, and I recall that the British Lawrence was involved, but please forgive my ignorance of detail beyond these wisps of history.
I do not understand why you would lose any subscribers. I think those people you might have lost wouldn't have subscribed in the first place if they would leave over this perfectly sensible opinion.
Vietnam was a campaign of the Cold War. The Soviets paid for three armies they couldn’t afford, and got _nothing_ for it. “Don’t start a land war in Asia.” applied to the Soviets too. That doesn’t mean that the USA did a good job of the Vietnam war.
The Russians, Iranians, and Chinese governments are trying to bleed the USA, and we’re helping them do it with idiotic domestic policies and politics.
Vietnam helped us win the Cold War, never heard that one before.
We won the Cold War because we had a better system and the other side dissolved their empire willingly in order to adopt our system. All we had to do was not get conquered in the meantime, which was a given via our larger GDP and the fact that MAD made military conquest impossible.
Believe it or not, Noam Chomsky - who no one can accuse of supporting the Vietnam War - came to a similar conclusion. The logic of superpower proxy fights and "domino theory" / "containment" means that you can win strategically and globally by even when losing contested terrain operationally. The only way to make some threats credible is to send a costly signal and the audience you are trying to influence has to be able to observe you suffering that cost and also what costs were imposed on your opponents to obtain a victory. Chomsky said no other country wanted to either become like Vietnam or take the hits the north Vietnamese needed to take in order to win, so many decided better to get US help to stay in charge and crush local commies.
"so many decided better to get US help to stay in charge and crush local commies."
Who? What countries? If all the countries on your list fell to commies, would the Cold War have turned out any different? Would people in the USSR not have wanted stocked grocery stores? Would people in the Warsaw Pact not want their independence?
I'm just trying to understand why anything that happens in the third world matters EVER. The commies sold us their raw materials, just like everyone else, and it's not like we didn't have many of our own.
We didn't win the Cold War because this or that third world shithole country decided to go commie or not. We won because we were better. Literally all we had to do was shit behind our nuke umbrella and not get conquered until they got tired of being poor.
I disagree. The USSR collapsed due to its internal contradictions. It doesn’t look as though anybody had a good idea of how to replace it. The Nomenklatura led a mad scramble to steal everything not nailed down.
The North Korean people are pretty tired of being poor but that doesn't mean s*it because they figure revolt is impossible. If all those people in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe who were tired of being poor saw that every few years a new country became Marxist-Leninist, they would figure the same thing. History moves in one direction.
Do you really think people in Poland were taking stock of whether some backwater third world country they couldn't find on a map went commie, and using that to determine their course of action?
NK is a tragedy, but hundreds of millions of people in the old SU/Warsaw Pact overthrew communism. And 1.4 billion of so may have kept the CCP but also got rid of communism and got rich. That's a lot of points on the board compared to NK.
I don't think most people anywhere rationally look at what's happening in the world, tote up pluses and minuses, and then "determine their course of action". Things seem possible or impossible, hard or easy, depending of how the world is changing or not changing. If every few years, another country joins the socialist brotherhood (and the government will make sure you know that), it seems pretty unlikely that you can escape it, so you don't try and the people around you don't try.
I’m pretty sure people knew about the founding myths when the gulags and the starvation got going.
Does anyone in China believe in Marxism anymore? Yet the CCP is still in power.
The SU In the 1950s and 60s they could at least provide some semblance of economic growth by copy pasting big economic trends that already played out in the west. When that stopped people got unhappy. Even the elites felt they had shit lives compared to the west. So one day it all just ended.
If the SU had managed to pull a China it might still be around today, even is nobody was a commie anymore.
My own $0.02, A) stand up for the rights of Israelis to defend themselves with whatever means they feel necessary; B) the U.S. government should leave the region, remove the carrier groups, etc. and let Israelis sink or swim; C) stop sending U.S. government aid to Israel; D) any private groups that want to support Israel in any way are free to do so, including militarily; E) allow any and all Israelis to immigrate to the U.S.
"We probably would end up with (2), which I think for us is an improvement over (3)."
Given that we did this Libya, Syria, and Iraq and it was a disaster, I'm surprised you want to do it again with Iran.
I'm going to plead bias here, you see Iran as attacking Israel, and therefore it's got to go. As a non-Jew, even one sympathetic to Israel, I think the idea of the USA getting into a war with Iran to exact Jewish vengeance is pretty dumb and would validate every single International Jewish Conspiracy Theory that ever was.
There are two possible paths Israel can take with the Palestinians.
1) Accept that terrorism is going to be endemic and that it's just a cost of doing business. It's horrific, but it's not a threat to the Jewish state the way Arab armies decades ago were an actually threat capable of genocide. You learn to live with it.
2) Kill/deport everyone in Gaza.
I'm fine if you do #2. People will whine and scream but what are they going to do about it? Invade Israel? They would lose. Eventually they will accept it the way we've accepted every other genocide.
I think the main reason #2 isn't going to happen isn't the response of the international community. I think it won't happen because that isn't how Israeli's perceive themselves morally. Yes, they are willing to kill tens of thousands (I don't know the real number) campaigning against Hamas, but they don't want to go full Holocaust.
Given this, they are just going to have to accept #1. Nobody is going to say this. They will talk about two state solutions and people will publish think pieces about how we turn Gaza into the UAE. It ain't gonna happen, as you note. It's just not HBD aware and they don't have the oil or history for anything else.
Starting another mideast war isn't going to make that any easier.
There has been low-level conflict between the US and Iran for decades that is fully separable from anything having to do with Israel but which is complicated by the fact that Iran can derive certain political advantages from trying hard (to sell the major cover story for the pursuit of their regional ambitions and establishment as leader of a large sphere of influence over the world's most important source of energy) to manipulate perceptions and encourage events to make the matters seem as intimately connected as possible. The Sunni Arab regimes which are actually Iran's most important regional enemies do the same thing when publicly rationalizing their own direct or indirect support for militant operations. It is an illusion they are trying to fool people into thinking that anything the US does or doesn't do with regards to support for Israel will have any impact whatsoever on the violent acts by proxies that are inherent in Iran's grand strategy and will continue to manifest in the same ways over the long term in a manner that will only be contained by the necessary amount of destructive push-back.
“…the idea of the USA getting into a war with Iran to exact Jewish vengeance is pretty dumb…”
Sure is, which is why no one is seriously suggesting such a thing.
On the other hand, getting into a war with Iran because they threaten global sea trade and support multiple terrorist groups is not only not dumb, but may be a necessity we need to face like adults.
I don't think the issue of "stomach" is as written into the stars as is commonly assumed. It's really a policy held at the top, and if they change that policy, there won't be any resistance below. This government wants containment and limitation, but perhaps more importantly wants to maintain its inefficient and incompetent monopoly, the military. They are much more frightened of losing control of the post-1945 military mega-entity (the largest enterprise of any kind in the US) than they are of losing ground to enemies. The same thing goes for the immensely lucrative and corrupt controlled arms transactions between states.
You can tell that it is more important for Washington to maintain control than it is for them to win by observing the total lack of reform on the front of defense production despite universal acknowledgment that our processes are dysfunctional. Loss of control is more frightening to this class than perhaps anything short of physical destruction.
I live in the richest county in the country, and when I went to a birthday party for my kids first grade literally every single adult was either part of defense or a government defense contractor. The stacks of money are astronomical.
Guessing that they would rather have the whole country go out "on a high note" than experience any kind of competition. At a time when the country needs "more and cheaper" they are in the business of "less and more expensive."
While the US decision process over mideast policy threatens to resemble the flawed one used in Vietnam, as for the fighting situation on the ground and the element of vast amounts of external support from major powers not directly engaging in armed conflict, the war of the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems much more Vietnam-like then Israel v Hamas. The analogy is weak in any case, but less weak for Ukraine.
I support #4—a Gaza Confederation (5 cantons) which is temporarily occupied by Israel, for the third of a 3 state solution: Jewish Israel, Muslim West Bank, secular Gaza Confederation.
Non-democratic, as was Hong Kong for 99 years, and Singapore still is. But with high regard for the 30 Articles of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, temporarily not the democracy implied by #26.
Israel knows it needs to also fight a PR war at the ICC and especially in the USA.
I generally agree with your diagnosis. The main point of criticism, which I hope is constructive, is that when you say "What is required is state capacity to preserve order." you should really add "and state priorities to preserve order." I think that was one of Caplan's important insights into the whole state capacity business: just because a state can do something doesn't mean it will, and conversely just because it isn't doesn't mean it can't; won't do it is totally on the table, too. I think you get towards that with your 1 vs 3 states a little later, but it is worth saying out loud. State capacity is useful towards getting what we would like, but capacity is not the same as the desire to do something.
“Go big or go home“ - depressingly, when I consider the bureaucratic view, I think they'll arrive at the conclusion that they're going to go home at some point so there's no point going big.
I remember being shocked by Arthur in TH White’s Once and Future King (1958). In a Medieval time when war was basically a game for kings and knights, Arthur fought like a lion when forced to fight, killed knights (not just peasants) and ticked everyone off. But he made darn sure that he won when he had to win. White made a moral point out of this idea. He was a Medieval scholar and started the book in 1938, so I think it is just coincidence that it came out during the Vietnam War. Funny how history has cycled around again to a time where war is like a game that we don’t really care enough about to win.
One thing is certain: acting with relative restraint all these years - almost amounting to meddling - *because* you have the overwhelming advantage in force, does not seem to have produced any good feelings in opponents who would not so act were the positions reversed. It actually seems to inspire greater contempt and alienation.
That might be the best argument for "go home". But of course, we don't really go home. We've given Yemen $6 billion just since 2015. We feed our enemies, we essentially breed our enemies.
You throw money at a problem - it grows. That's an iron law of nature.
The Third World exists on subsidies. The Third World hates us. It's not even a matter of intentions backfiring; it's not even like the Great Society. We have no intentions. Does anyone in the US government have any idea why we want to send food and money to Yemenis? Is it a liberal policy? Is it a conservative policy? Why we have lavished billions of dollars on our enemies?
It makes these debates about this or that policy seem sort of foolish. Tweaks of something *we* have created.
For a man of many words...I'm curious as to why you didn't even consider diplomacy. Maybe ask you inquiring mind why Palestinians remain hard fast in their position as do the Israelis in theirs. Maybe both could find middle ground. Live and let live rather than submit or die.
I think it goes back to Arnold's contention that "In the absence of strong, firmly-established institutions to keep order, a determined violent minority will shape everyone’s experience."
It's not explicitly stated, but I think diplomacy only works with strong, firmly-established institutions which can keep order. It doesn't have to be a western institution, you could deal with a monarchy or even a strong tribal structure. But you can't deal with the determined violent minority which can defect from the institutions without repercussion.
Diplomacy does not work in the case of fanatics. Hamas' stated goal is to destroy the Israeli state and kill every last Jew. What diplomacy can be had with that kind of mission statement?
The US has been aiding Saudi Arabia in war against Houthis in Yemen for many years. From a few Internet searches, casualties range from tens of thousands to 377k, according to a UN report. Vox news suggested US is aiding war crimes in Yemen many years ago. Overall, the western press and public hasn't paid this much attention.
"When I first heard about U.S. airstrikes in Yemen a week ago resulting in 6 Houthi deaths, my first thought was: 6? Did the bombs totally miss? Shouldn’t that number be 6000, at least?"
War is *a lot* more capital intensive these days. The marginal benefit for additional military capital is almost always higher than for additional labor, especially minimally-skilled labor like Houthi militants. The same applies to the the enemy when deciding how to literally get the most bang for the buck in a strike. It's far, far more important to take our critical intel or comms platforms or drone / missile warehouses than to take out barracks. It often doesn't even make sense to report how many people were killed in a strike as for many operations it's entirely incidental and irrelevant as regards the objective of hitting overall capability to fight. This trend has been going on a long time and will continue to do so as we quickly approach the time when wars are matters of robots vs robots until one side runs out and is immediately conquered.
It would seem that Hamas has hit on an effective strategy for protecting its military infrastructure: embed it among civilians, especially hospitals, and dare you to bomb it.
The embedding is not the most important contributor to Hamas capability, it's just the most visible part that gets the most political, media, public attention, but precisely because it is visible, the rest of the more important stuff being invisible is the definition of an intelligence failure. It's also usually only visible as a location that is abused for these defensive properties in the last phase of a process or sequence, either short term for shoot-and-scoot deployment, or longer term as a headquarters cell for coordinating operations.
There is a little bit of "manufacturing" in terms of assembly of some small and simple weapons, but the vast majority of the most destructive pieces can only be covertly stockpiled, distributed, and hidden in many secret arms depots as it takes too long to build them in real time during war or must be smuggled in because the facilities which manufacture them cannot be easily hidden.
The ability to import or manufacture a huge amount of this materiel over years and hide it successfully practically under Israel's nose - even apparently in buildings dedicated to the purpose and which had no other civilian use - until the moment they choose to initiate an attack, and the construction and proficient use of an incredibly well- designed and developed tunnel system - are the real strengths Hamas was able to leverage with alarming success. The defensive abuse of civilian sites later has certainly helped them to some degree but has not proven to be much of an impediment at all to Israel gradually destroying them one at a time while clearing Hamas militants out and inching its way unrelentingly towards Egypt.
Bottom Line is the Hamas most effective strategy was to leverage their capacity to successfully defeat Israel intel for the years it took for them to prep for this attack.
This intel failure was Israel's most devastating error, and I don't think they will allow any post-war situation to emerge where it could even remain possible for them to be surprised in this way. However that is accomplished, it won't be compatible with genuine Palestinian self-rule in Gaza in the manner of an independent state.
One final related point is that every single person who complained over the last two decades about the Palestinians not enjoying geographic contiguity and/or uninspected transit between Gaza and the West Bank is now revealed to be naive at best and, if they haven't confessed this error and what would have been its disastrous consequences yet, an evil idiot besides. Had Israel allowed it to happen the entire West Bank right up to the outskirts of Jerusalem would have been equally permeated with tunnels, weapons, and civilian attack sites.
This strategy on Hamas' part puts Israel in the impossible situation that it can never have a lasting peace unless it exterminates everyone in Gaza, including all civilians not willing to be relocated far enough away to render them harmless to Israel.
If that were the whole picture, Israel should go ahead and do it and blame the Gazans.
But add in the nonsense of the "oppressor-oppressed axis" and you spread enough undeserved hostility toward Israel that third countries will join in a mass jihad if Israel does.
If I lived anywhere in the Middle East, on any side, I'd be on the next boat to anywhere else. Because the fighting there has lasted through all of recorded history, and that is likely still to be true 10,000 years from now.
The US has been assisting and arming Saudi Arabia to wage war against Houthis for many years. Casualties are tens or hundreds of thousands, not six.
We weren't bombing the Houthi because they launched some drones at various cargo ships. We were bombing the Iranian missile emplacements (and the Iranians manning them) that had launched missiles at US Navy ships performing escort duties.
But did we? As far as I can tell, we struck at locations from where missiles were launched, but I can't tell if the equipment was still there when we struck back.
I spent a year in Iraq serving in the infantry, 2005-2006. Your opinions and insight are as valid as any I’ve heard on this difficult subject. Go Home sounds nice, but it always comes down to, “you may not be interested in war, but wat may be interested in you.” No easy answers.
In what way is the Middle East interested in us?
A very good friend of mine also served and was wounded in Iraq. He thinks it was all a stupid waste and is glad we are home now.
The US is really good at conventional warfare. It is stupid about choosing wars, counterinsurgency, and nation-rebuilding. From all I've read about it, the choice to attack Iraq was incredibly senseless and stupid (I'd go further and say 'criminal') on almost every level but the temptation to do it anyway was irresistible because after getting crushed in the Gulf War and then further weakened by a decade of sanctions, knocking over what remained of the Iraq military was going to be a rapid cakewalk, maybe a hundred or thousand times easier than invading, say, Iran. Maybe only Syria would have been easier. Indeed it was just so, the invasion progressed so fast some units had to effectively pause just to let the logistical lines of communication catch up, US fatalities were just 140 (equivalent to a single company of troops) and Baghdad fell in fewer than three weeks. Knowing the major combat operations phase would play out that way completely blinded all the decision makers into everything else wrong about the decision and planning.
I agree with your friend. There was no vital US interest at stake in Iraq. Sure, Saddam was troublesome, but he was contained. And he was a counterweight to Iran. How’s it working out for us now...
I don't think any group in history has ever behaved well when others did their work for them. Which is what happened there.
This is not meant as a simplistic "servant and master" thing. It is trivially obvious that in England, even in France - even on the eve of Revolution - the busy and the industrious and the inquiring - outnumbered the wastrels, among the aristrocracy. A shorthand way to think about it is: some people work during the day, some people work at nights or "weekends". Only a raving Marxist doesn't get this.
No, what I mean is - take the classic example of the South. It was wrong for people to make other people do their work for them. It was bad on all counts, obviously, but one of the ways it was bad, one that is less mentioned - was that it was bad for that ruling class. Some of them even perceived this. Lee did.
I think it is pretty much always wrong for people to make other people do work they themselves won't do. It is bad for the character. This is why I am turned off by UBI talk, and no amount of tax code rigmarole can move me on it.
Sure, the Middle East didn't invite this trouble upon themselves. But they have benefitted and benefitted, and it is one of the keys to their population growth - they basically owe their existence to it.
It breeds laziness and a lack of purpose, of course, and out of this resentment.
I doubt that will ever go away, so you are very likely right that we ought to keep our distance insofar as we can, or wish to. I differ from you in that I see Israel as a 51st state or something. There's no other way to account for its importance to everybody, positive and negative.
"But it does not matter if 99 percent of a population is peaceful. In the absence of strong, firmly-established institutions to keep order, a determined violent minority will shape everyone’s experience."
This would appear to be consistent with the broken window theory of policing. In that vein, one might ask if October 7, 2023 actually began back in 2001 when the Gazans started launching missiles at Israel and getting away with it more or less for two decades without suffering a sufficiently firm and strong response.
Call me crazy, but firing missiles seems like it is the sort of thing that demands an overwhelming response, no? How has this gone on for so long? It boggles the mind.
Imagine what the US response would be if missiles fired from Cuba started landing in Florida, perhaps after kidnapping a bunch of people from Key West. Maybe the US would respond like Israel responds to Hezbollah in Lebanon with tit-for-tat air strikes, or maybe not, instead just a call for a cease fire and diplomatic solutions. Either response would likely prolong the missile launching. With someone else as President perhaps we might see an overwhelmingly violent and decisive response? And wouldn't the latter be the better option in that it would more likely prevent a frozen or unresolved never-ending conflict?
Why would counter-battery fire with large thermobaric weapons not be the militarily appropriate and legally justified response to concealed missile launches from any location in Gaza or Lebanon? Just shooting down missiles does not deter further launches nor does it provide safety and security to Israelis. Not to offer an overwhelming and crushing military response to missile launches is in legitimize military use of civilians as shields which is something that would best be opposed, no?
Perhaps someone can explain why Israel responding to Gazan missile attacks with Israeli-manufactured GBU-43/8 MOABs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-43/B_MOAB ) is not the most ethical and humane strategy?
The eventual response after repeated missile attacks is to escalate up to a Dresden level annihilation. I am not blaming Israel, but this will not stop until they go all out to stop it.
I live within missile distance of Mexico. If some radicals there decided they wanted San Diego back (after all we really did take it from them by force — my house actually looks out over the end-place of the final battle), and they started crossing the border and killing women and children and then firing missiles every night, the appropriate response would be the elimination of Tijuana. Full stop.
"With someone else as President perhaps we might see an overwhelmingly violent and decisive response?"
I had thought when it seemed evident that Hillary Clinton was going to be president, that it would be interesting to see what her response to e.g. a terror incident would be.
I had a gut feeling she would unleash holy hell. The fact that she might in some sense, as probably many commenters here believe, "hate America" did not dissuade from this feeling. If anything, it rather bolstered it.
Yes, her famous/infamous braggadocio about Gadaffi and Libya - "We Came, We Saw, He Died" - certainly helped project a tough persona. And her role in the Obama Administration and its shameless interference in elections around the globe certainly gives one the impression that she is/was committed to realpolitik over any other principle. In Honduras, for example, Wikipedia tells a story::
""Now that President Zelaya is back it would be opportune to restore him to his position under appropriate circumstances – get on with the election that is currently scheduled for November, have a peaceful transition of presidential authority and get Honduras back to constitutional and democratic order."[84] At the end of October, Clinton took a leading role in convincing Micheletti to accept a deal – which she termed an "historic agreement" – in which Zelaya would return to power in advance of general elections in which neither figure was running.[82] Micheletti said that Clinton had been insistent on this point: "I kept trying to explain our position to her, but all she kept saying was, 'Restitution, restitution, restitution.'"[82] That agreement broke down, despite efforts of the State Department to revive it,[85] and Clinton and the U.S. ended up supporting the winner of the 2009 Honduran general election, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, with Clinton characterizing the elections as "free and fair" and Lobo as holding a strong commitment to democracy and the rule of constitutional law." Lobo of course was eventually banned from entering the USA on allegations of corruption and his wife and son both convicted on various charges.
Unfortunately that may have been her least egregious activity as Secretary of State. In Israel she brokered a 2012 ceasefire for Gaza in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt. I don't think anyone in the Obama administration had much if any sympathy for Israel.
Her masculine-stereotype bravado was remarked upon even back when she was running against Obama: https://www.spiked-online.com/2008/06/03/hillary-clinton-a-man-in-a-womans-world/
"Speak softly, and carry a big stick" preferably one that you use adeptly when attacked, is about what I would like to see, but I don't know who in the USA poltical world has the ability to play that game.
Attacking ships at sea is and has long been considered an act of war, an ipso facto declaration that the attacking entity is declaring war, primarily against the nation under which the attacked vessels are flagged (which signifies an extension of the flagged nation's sovereign jurisdiction). When an entity declares war, the appropriate response is not to mail an apologetic, friendly card.
The US has been aiding and arming Saudi Arabia wage war in Yemen for years and kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people. You write like there hasn't been a bloody ongoing war and nothing happened until the recent ship attacks.
Thank you for your correction. I confess to ignorance about the history in the last century. Your comments indicate that there has been a long-lasting war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and I cannot argue out of knowledge. I do recall that the house of Saud rose to dominance against the effort of other leaders in the area, and I recall that the British Lawrence was involved, but please forgive my ignorance of detail beyond these wisps of history.
I do not understand why you would lose any subscribers. I think those people you might have lost wouldn't have subscribed in the first place if they would leave over this perfectly sensible opinion.
Vietnam was a campaign of the Cold War. The Soviets paid for three armies they couldn’t afford, and got _nothing_ for it. “Don’t start a land war in Asia.” applied to the Soviets too. That doesn’t mean that the USA did a good job of the Vietnam war.
The Russians, Iranians, and Chinese governments are trying to bleed the USA, and we’re helping them do it with idiotic domestic policies and politics.
Vietnam helped us win the Cold War, never heard that one before.
We won the Cold War because we had a better system and the other side dissolved their empire willingly in order to adopt our system. All we had to do was not get conquered in the meantime, which was a given via our larger GDP and the fact that MAD made military conquest impossible.
Believe it or not, Noam Chomsky - who no one can accuse of supporting the Vietnam War - came to a similar conclusion. The logic of superpower proxy fights and "domino theory" / "containment" means that you can win strategically and globally by even when losing contested terrain operationally. The only way to make some threats credible is to send a costly signal and the audience you are trying to influence has to be able to observe you suffering that cost and also what costs were imposed on your opponents to obtain a victory. Chomsky said no other country wanted to either become like Vietnam or take the hits the north Vietnamese needed to take in order to win, so many decided better to get US help to stay in charge and crush local commies.
"so many decided better to get US help to stay in charge and crush local commies."
Who? What countries? If all the countries on your list fell to commies, would the Cold War have turned out any different? Would people in the USSR not have wanted stocked grocery stores? Would people in the Warsaw Pact not want their independence?
I'm just trying to understand why anything that happens in the third world matters EVER. The commies sold us their raw materials, just like everyone else, and it's not like we didn't have many of our own.
We didn't win the Cold War because this or that third world shithole country decided to go commie or not. We won because we were better. Literally all we had to do was shit behind our nuke umbrella and not get conquered until they got tired of being poor.
I disagree. The USSR collapsed due to its internal contradictions. It doesn’t look as though anybody had a good idea of how to replace it. The Nomenklatura led a mad scramble to steal everything not nailed down.
The North Korean people are pretty tired of being poor but that doesn't mean s*it because they figure revolt is impossible. If all those people in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe who were tired of being poor saw that every few years a new country became Marxist-Leninist, they would figure the same thing. History moves in one direction.
Do you really think people in Poland were taking stock of whether some backwater third world country they couldn't find on a map went commie, and using that to determine their course of action?
NK is a tragedy, but hundreds of millions of people in the old SU/Warsaw Pact overthrew communism. And 1.4 billion of so may have kept the CCP but also got rid of communism and got rich. That's a lot of points on the board compared to NK.
I don't think most people anywhere rationally look at what's happening in the world, tote up pluses and minuses, and then "determine their course of action". Things seem possible or impossible, hard or easy, depending of how the world is changing or not changing. If every few years, another country joins the socialist brotherhood (and the government will make sure you know that), it seems pretty unlikely that you can escape it, so you don't try and the people around you don't try.
The USSR collapsed because _nobody_ believed in its founding myths anymore. They couldn’t. They had been told too many obvious lies for too long.
I’m pretty sure people knew about the founding myths when the gulags and the starvation got going.
Does anyone in China believe in Marxism anymore? Yet the CCP is still in power.
The SU In the 1950s and 60s they could at least provide some semblance of economic growth by copy pasting big economic trends that already played out in the west. When that stopped people got unhappy. Even the elites felt they had shit lives compared to the west. So one day it all just ended.
If the SU had managed to pull a China it might still be around today, even is nobody was a commie anymore.
My own $0.02, A) stand up for the rights of Israelis to defend themselves with whatever means they feel necessary; B) the U.S. government should leave the region, remove the carrier groups, etc. and let Israelis sink or swim; C) stop sending U.S. government aid to Israel; D) any private groups that want to support Israel in any way are free to do so, including militarily; E) allow any and all Israelis to immigrate to the U.S.
"We probably would end up with (2), which I think for us is an improvement over (3)."
Given that we did this Libya, Syria, and Iraq and it was a disaster, I'm surprised you want to do it again with Iran.
I'm going to plead bias here, you see Iran as attacking Israel, and therefore it's got to go. As a non-Jew, even one sympathetic to Israel, I think the idea of the USA getting into a war with Iran to exact Jewish vengeance is pretty dumb and would validate every single International Jewish Conspiracy Theory that ever was.
There are two possible paths Israel can take with the Palestinians.
1) Accept that terrorism is going to be endemic and that it's just a cost of doing business. It's horrific, but it's not a threat to the Jewish state the way Arab armies decades ago were an actually threat capable of genocide. You learn to live with it.
2) Kill/deport everyone in Gaza.
I'm fine if you do #2. People will whine and scream but what are they going to do about it? Invade Israel? They would lose. Eventually they will accept it the way we've accepted every other genocide.
I think the main reason #2 isn't going to happen isn't the response of the international community. I think it won't happen because that isn't how Israeli's perceive themselves morally. Yes, they are willing to kill tens of thousands (I don't know the real number) campaigning against Hamas, but they don't want to go full Holocaust.
Given this, they are just going to have to accept #1. Nobody is going to say this. They will talk about two state solutions and people will publish think pieces about how we turn Gaza into the UAE. It ain't gonna happen, as you note. It's just not HBD aware and they don't have the oil or history for anything else.
Starting another mideast war isn't going to make that any easier.
There has been low-level conflict between the US and Iran for decades that is fully separable from anything having to do with Israel but which is complicated by the fact that Iran can derive certain political advantages from trying hard (to sell the major cover story for the pursuit of their regional ambitions and establishment as leader of a large sphere of influence over the world's most important source of energy) to manipulate perceptions and encourage events to make the matters seem as intimately connected as possible. The Sunni Arab regimes which are actually Iran's most important regional enemies do the same thing when publicly rationalizing their own direct or indirect support for militant operations. It is an illusion they are trying to fool people into thinking that anything the US does or doesn't do with regards to support for Israel will have any impact whatsoever on the violent acts by proxies that are inherent in Iran's grand strategy and will continue to manifest in the same ways over the long term in a manner that will only be contained by the necessary amount of destructive push-back.
“…the idea of the USA getting into a war with Iran to exact Jewish vengeance is pretty dumb…”
Sure is, which is why no one is seriously suggesting such a thing.
On the other hand, getting into a war with Iran because they threaten global sea trade and support multiple terrorist groups is not only not dumb, but may be a necessity we need to face like adults.
I don't think the issue of "stomach" is as written into the stars as is commonly assumed. It's really a policy held at the top, and if they change that policy, there won't be any resistance below. This government wants containment and limitation, but perhaps more importantly wants to maintain its inefficient and incompetent monopoly, the military. They are much more frightened of losing control of the post-1945 military mega-entity (the largest enterprise of any kind in the US) than they are of losing ground to enemies. The same thing goes for the immensely lucrative and corrupt controlled arms transactions between states.
You can tell that it is more important for Washington to maintain control than it is for them to win by observing the total lack of reform on the front of defense production despite universal acknowledgment that our processes are dysfunctional. Loss of control is more frightening to this class than perhaps anything short of physical destruction.
I live in the richest county in the country, and when I went to a birthday party for my kids first grade literally every single adult was either part of defense or a government defense contractor. The stacks of money are astronomical.
Guessing that they would rather have the whole country go out "on a high note" than experience any kind of competition. At a time when the country needs "more and cheaper" they are in the business of "less and more expensive."
While the US decision process over mideast policy threatens to resemble the flawed one used in Vietnam, as for the fighting situation on the ground and the element of vast amounts of external support from major powers not directly engaging in armed conflict, the war of the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems much more Vietnam-like then Israel v Hamas. The analogy is weak in any case, but less weak for Ukraine.
Great review of the bad 3 likely possibilities.
I support #4—a Gaza Confederation (5 cantons) which is temporarily occupied by Israel, for the third of a 3 state solution: Jewish Israel, Muslim West Bank, secular Gaza Confederation.
Non-democratic, as was Hong Kong for 99 years, and Singapore still is. But with high regard for the 30 Articles of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, temporarily not the democracy implied by #26.
Israel knows it needs to also fight a PR war at the ICC and especially in the USA.
See the longer version:
https://tomgrey.substack.com/p/the-gaza-confederation
I generally agree with your diagnosis. The main point of criticism, which I hope is constructive, is that when you say "What is required is state capacity to preserve order." you should really add "and state priorities to preserve order." I think that was one of Caplan's important insights into the whole state capacity business: just because a state can do something doesn't mean it will, and conversely just because it isn't doesn't mean it can't; won't do it is totally on the table, too. I think you get towards that with your 1 vs 3 states a little later, but it is worth saying out loud. State capacity is useful towards getting what we would like, but capacity is not the same as the desire to do something.
“Go big or go home“ - depressingly, when I consider the bureaucratic view, I think they'll arrive at the conclusion that they're going to go home at some point so there's no point going big.
I remember being shocked by Arthur in TH White’s Once and Future King (1958). In a Medieval time when war was basically a game for kings and knights, Arthur fought like a lion when forced to fight, killed knights (not just peasants) and ticked everyone off. But he made darn sure that he won when he had to win. White made a moral point out of this idea. He was a Medieval scholar and started the book in 1938, so I think it is just coincidence that it came out during the Vietnam War. Funny how history has cycled around again to a time where war is like a game that we don’t really care enough about to win.
One thing is certain: acting with relative restraint all these years - almost amounting to meddling - *because* you have the overwhelming advantage in force, does not seem to have produced any good feelings in opponents who would not so act were the positions reversed. It actually seems to inspire greater contempt and alienation.
That might be the best argument for "go home". But of course, we don't really go home. We've given Yemen $6 billion just since 2015. We feed our enemies, we essentially breed our enemies.
You throw money at a problem - it grows. That's an iron law of nature.
The Third World exists on subsidies. The Third World hates us. It's not even a matter of intentions backfiring; it's not even like the Great Society. We have no intentions. Does anyone in the US government have any idea why we want to send food and money to Yemenis? Is it a liberal policy? Is it a conservative policy? Why we have lavished billions of dollars on our enemies?
It makes these debates about this or that policy seem sort of foolish. Tweaks of something *we* have created.
"Go big or go home"
For a man of many words...I'm curious as to why you didn't even consider diplomacy. Maybe ask you inquiring mind why Palestinians remain hard fast in their position as do the Israelis in theirs. Maybe both could find middle ground. Live and let live rather than submit or die.
Peace brothers and sisters
Diplomacy only works when there are potentially shared goals. Most Palestinians and all of their representatives want to destroy Israel.
Even the Miss Universe contestants don't dream of world peace now
I think it goes back to Arnold's contention that "In the absence of strong, firmly-established institutions to keep order, a determined violent minority will shape everyone’s experience."
It's not explicitly stated, but I think diplomacy only works with strong, firmly-established institutions which can keep order. It doesn't have to be a western institution, you could deal with a monarchy or even a strong tribal structure. But you can't deal with the determined violent minority which can defect from the institutions without repercussion.
Diplomacy does not work in the case of fanatics. Hamas' stated goal is to destroy the Israeli state and kill every last Jew. What diplomacy can be had with that kind of mission statement?
The US has been aiding Saudi Arabia in war against Houthis in Yemen for many years. From a few Internet searches, casualties range from tens of thousands to 377k, according to a UN report. Vox news suggested US is aiding war crimes in Yemen many years ago. Overall, the western press and public hasn't paid this much attention.