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On April 14 2024 21:23 Nebuchad wrote: Netanyahu wants war though, so it's not really a mistake from his perspective, he is getting what he wants. Imo there's zero chance that he deescalates now, it's really up to Biden if he lets the US get dragged into this or not.
Netanyahu may want to be aggressive, but I don't believe he wants war with Iran. So far Israel has avoided engaging Hezbollah, and waging other mult-front war of that type, because they wanted to focus on Gaza.
Have they not just pulled troops out of Khan Younis in order to focus on Hezbollah, I thought I read that like last week
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68768948 I found this article, it seems that shifting focus to Hezbollah is just one possible reason out of multiple for Israel's withdrawal last week from south Gaza.
In the last 24h Biden has said that he won't support offensive operations against Iran, so war looks not as likely. Also, I just think it's a bad idea.
Netanjahu doesnt give a fuck what his allies want, He just banks on Irans fear of Actually ging to war. So you bet that He is currently considwring kbombing a Military base and Actually Killing afew dozen people, hoping Iran will blink first.
On April 14 2024 21:23 Nebuchad wrote: Netanyahu wants war though, so it's not really a mistake from his perspective, he is getting what he wants. Imo there's zero chance that he deescalates now, it's really up to Biden if he lets the US get dragged into this or not.
Netanyahu may want to be aggressive, but I don't believe he wants war with Iran. So far Israel has avoided engaging Hezbollah, and waging other mult-front war of that type, because they wanted to focus on Gaza.
Have they not just pulled troops out of Khan Younis in order to focus on Hezbollah, I thought I read that like last week
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68768948 I found this article, it seems that shifting focus to Hezbollah is just one possible reason out of multiple for Israel's withdrawal last week from south Gaza.
In the last 24h Biden has said that he won't support offensive operations against Iran, so war looks not as likely. Also, I just think it's a bad idea.
Biden said that about Rafah, too. Biden seems to say a lot of things that contradict his actions, so I don't know if we should care any longer what he says. I'm going to change my mind as soon as he makes moves towards cutting military ties with Israel.
Now watch as Netanyahu goes all out, this also means that a Rafah operation will happen. If history is correct it has always been Netanyahu first, Israel second, and who cares about the rest.
On April 14 2024 04:50 Nebuchad wrote: I wonder if at the start of the Iraq war it was this obvious that the US was in the wrong
Wait, so if Israel and Iran go to war, you think Israel will be in the wrong? Please explain.
I don't see the point of doing that, also I'm quite drink. But have a nice war anyway
Haha, enjoy the night brother don’t go too hard!
To answer your question re Iraq I mean it was pretty apparent, why there were some of the biggest/possibly the biggest demonstrations in many countries against it, including mine.
Initially the general tenor was ‘look Saddam’s a bad bloke sure, but they had nothing to do with 9/11 and going to war is going to kill a lot of people’.
I was a mere pup at the time, I wasn’t privy to a huge amount of geopolitical complexity. I’m pretty sure voices warned that toppling Hussein would likely unleash a lot of ethnocultural conflict as though a bastard, he and the Ba’athists kept something of a lid on it.
I can’t be sure of that to be fair but I’d assume this was warned about ahead of time by a reasonable amount of learned voices. If not it became pretty damn clear after a couple of years of that conflict.
As critical as I am on Israel and her policies, the human cost of that conflict were worse. Both directly and indirectly in terms of setting off the dominoes that lead to another destructive conflict in Syria.
Do I feel personally culpable? I mean no but still doesn’t change that my nation alongside the US and others have done worse in this century.
Been a while since I pondered on that clusterfuck, ffs the whole thing was predicated on a dubious fictitious bit of intelligence that Iraq was obtaining WMDs.
At least Israel has some mitigating factors. It is surrounded by enemies, it is frequently attacked, it suffered a pretty large one to precipitate this conflict.
Iraq? I mean they’re just sitting there minding their own business (as it pertains to the West anyway) and we just sauntered in on the pretence of non-existent WMDs and estimates vary but low end is still in 6 figures for deaths.
Yeah that makes a ton of sense. I also remembered that famous Onion article that was from before 2004. I guess at the time I was still a rightwinger so I believed dumb shit like "politics are complicated" and I didn't really read the right media (or any media, let's be honest), so that's why I didn't have the right picture about that war from the start.
Still find it odd to envision a right wing Neb haha. I suppose I never really had to hugely grapple with my base worldview all that much given my family was mostly ‘apolitical’ one side and avowedly left wing on the other. Yeah, I mean I still feel quite how big a shit show that excursion was and its long-term ramifications are kind of slept on these days by those of us who dwell in the nations involved.
Actually I think you were half right, and others who follow/followed the precept. Politics are complicated, morals aren’t is kind of my personal vague rule of thumb.
Through the mouths of babes and all that. We’ve likely all done it growing up, anyone who’s got close contact with kids will have themselves faced various questions like ‘why are there wars?’, ‘why are there poor/starving people?’
Those base instincts are largely correct, and yes of course there’s plenty of complexity around them, but I feel some worldviews lose sight of the obvious moral quandaries if they retreat too much into ‘it’s complicated’ or other specific ideological dogma
On April 14 2024 22:19 Broetchenholer wrote: Netanjahu doesnt give a fuck what his allies want, He just banks on Irans fear of Actually ging to war. So you bet that He is currently considwring kbombing a Military base and Actually Killing afew dozen people, hoping Iran will blink first.
My instinct is more that Netanyahu generally correctly assesses that whatever course he chooses his allies aren’t going to do shit. With the US being a much more important ally than most the rest combined.
Escalating things with Iran much will, methinks be a bridge too far in that regard. Perhaps not, I just can’t see the Biden administration in an election year, having already been navigating two big foreign policy headaches in Ukraine and now the Israel/Palestine escalation, wanting some major escalation between Iran, Israel and others in that theatre.
If we read between the lines, it seems to me that Israel isn't going to retaliate in any overwhelming fashion, or even right away. They're going to hold on to this and use it as a get-out-of-jail card for whenever they need to take out another target in Iran.
On April 15 2024 00:21 JimmiC wrote: I would be interested to see what the estimated targets were for all the drones and rockets. If it was their normal style of not caring about targets and just hoping for maximum terror, death and destruction, then a response will probably be fairly well supported. If they were all targeting the military bases that launched the attack on Syria then I would think no direct response would appropriate and not supported.
Israel will know that defensively they had lots of support, which should send a message to Iran who only has Russian support at the moment and they are fairly busy causing their own humanitarian disasters.
I do find it amusing how even when it is Iran directly doing the awful shit, over horrible people who planned the deaths of so many civilians deaths in Syria alone it would make Israel blush (20x). That most of the thread is instantly talking about how bad Israel is, or is for sure going to be....
Edit: It looks like most reports are saying it was targeting military bases.
A decades-long shadow war burst out into the open overnight as Iranian drones and missiles lit up the night sky in Israel and the occupied West Bank.
Tehran’s operation was highly choreographed, apparently designed to minimize casualties while maximizing spectacle.
This was a complex mission. Over 200 drones and missiles navigated above Iran’s neighbors, including Jordan and Iraq — both with US military bases — before penetrating the airspace of Iran’s mortal enemy, Israel. Israel’s allies helped shoot down the bulk of these weapons, but couldn’t prevent what was long believed to be the Middle East’s doomsday scenario, the Islamic Republic’s first-ever attack on Israel.
Israel’s fabled Iron Dome air defense system did not disappoint Israelis, many of whom took to bunkers. Only a small handful of locations were attacked, including a military base and an area in the Negev desert, injuring a Bedouin child, while the dome fended off one of the largest drone attacks in history
Yet it was an operation that seemed designed to fail — when Iran launched its killer drones from its own territory some 1,000 miles away, it was giving Israel hours of advance notice.
The symbolism of the attack did the heavy lifting. Rather than fire from one of the neighboring countries where Iran and its non-state allies are present, this was a direct attack from Iranian territory on Israeli territory. This compromised Iran’s ability to damage Israel because it robbed the operation of the element of surprise.
Yet for some four hours, the world held its breath as weapons whizzed through the night sky. They were balls of fire hovering overhead as onlookers across three different countries filmed images that seemed to harken the start of a cataclysmic war.
Considering this was a 'one and done' attack as a response to the embassy attack it makes sense to purely target military objectives. Aiming for max casualties and terror would also dramatically increase the odds of Israel feeling the need to respond.
Too bad this won't satisfy the war whoops in Israel, or US etc.
Roughly 50% of the ballistic missiles fired by Iran failed to launch or crashed before reaching their target, three U.S. officials said.
U.S. officials said that Iran launched between 115 and 130 ballistic missiles that targeted Israel. When asked for more details about those strikes, the officials acknowledged that only about half of them were intercepted successfully. The rest failed in flight and didn't reach their targets, the officials said.
"So much for the vaunted ballistic-missile capability of Iran," said a U.S. official.
On April 14 2024 19:37 Magic Powers wrote: There's no official footage of missiles hitting targets in Israel, there are only unconfirmed clips. Many of those are not from this attack, as is common practice by propgandists. We do have unverified (but likely true) footage of missiles being shot down. At the time it was unclear where that footage was taken. It is being reported that the targets were military bases.
The highest reported rate of interception by Israel is 96% of missiles used by Hamas in previous attacks (unrelated to October 7). With that in mind it's not reasonable to believe the 99% claim. There's no comparable precedent for such a high rate.
Two things to consider regarding the the 99% claim:
1. Iran is way further away than Hamas or Hezbollah are, so the missiles have to go a lot higher and be in the air much longer. That gives more time to track their trajectory and intercept them. Not to mention providing other methods of shoot down (like scrambling jets to shoot them down or letting your allies in the countries in between take them down on the way) that are unavailable for short range attacks.
2. The Iron Dome doesn't actually shoot down quite as many rockets as you may think. It calculates where rockets are likely to land before it fires. If a rocket is headed for some empty field, it just ignores it and saves it's expensive pinpoint missiles for rockets likely to hit real people or infrastructure. So if Hamas fires 100 rockets and only 4 hit anything of note, that may be called a 96% success, even if really 26 misfired in Gaza, 30 hit empty fields in Israel, and only 40 were actually shot down. I don't know that they are using the same method to arrive at this 99% number, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were. (Meaning if real videos do surface of ballistic missiles landing, it could be Israel knew about them and let them land harmlessly in open desert or the like.)
EPT
