Israel-Palestine escalation live: Gaza under bombardment after Hamas attack

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Randy

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Drew said:
Every once in a while someone asks what your favorite conspiracy theory is, and if push came to shove I'd probably say that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor but allowed it to happen to justify entering the war. We intercepted communications from the Japanese 24 hours before, but allegedly didn't translate it in time to get it to Washington in time... and yet, almost the entire Pacific Fleet was on an unannounced training episode that morning, when the Japanese struck. Do I believe this? Honestly, I don't know. But America in 1942 is a very different place than America in, oh, even 2001, and I don't believe the same about 9/11.

But, yeah, when you're talking an autocrat... even here, I could see Trump allowing some sort of attack to occur if it would help him entrench his grip on power, and if it primarily hurt a "blue state." Arguably that's exactly what he did with covid, treating it as a political and not a public health crisis, and passing the buck to urban coastal blue states until it was too late and went national. :shrug:
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I'd say we're in full alignment there.

The one additional thing I'd add is that there's a lot of moving parts and layers of interests that could've intervened on 9/11 (DoS, FAA, DoD, USCBP, TSA, airport security, each interested municipal police agency, airline security, etc). That includes the entire migration and training of the hijakers within the US. It would've been VERY hard to give a single stand-down order on 9/11 and have everyone with the power to stop something just walk away. It's also notable how the attack itself was carried out from within and against civilian infrastructure.

By contrast, the October 7th attack was an assault that came directly THROUGH what's essentially the state controlled security frontline of Israel. It was an attack that ensnared a ton of civilians, but was functionally an attack on the government of Israel and the IDF (act of war by the neighboring authority), with a military response carried out by the government of Israel and the IDF. There's a lot less moving parts from interested parties there.
 
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Drew

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StevenC said:
My favourite is that Truman just loved needlessly nuking civilians.
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Nagasaki, or Hiroshima AND Nagasaki?

The rationale behind Nagasaki was that we believed we needed to convince the Japanese that Hiroshima was repeatable, and that we had the capability to keep hitting them and move through the country city by city until they surrendered. And, that the two together were still far fewer casualties than the sort of ground invasion that would have been required to get the Japanese to surrender otherwise.

This is obviously neither the time nor the place, but I'm not sure how persuaded I am, particularly with that first point. From what I've read, it was a pretty, well, horrifying experience for Japan, for a city to be just wiped off the map with a single bomb, and their Emperor was already considering surrender when Nagasaki was struck. They capitulated almost immediately after... but I have to wonder if we'd instead just obliterated an abandoned knoll out in the ocean within sight of Japan and told them the third bomb would have hit a city, if would have gotten to the same point... and if that could have worked, then why not just start by flattening a desolate mountain somewhere in Japan and call it a warning shot?

The cost of a ground invasion in human life would have been astronomical, and the US belief that we'd have to take the country street by street fighting civilians defending their homes is probably accurate. But, you gotta wonder if some of the alternatives we left on the table could have worked too...
 
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Drew said:
Pretty tense Biden/Netanyahu call today about the latter's lack of regard for civilian lives, and the story making the rounds earlier today about how the US had approved more weapons for the Israelis the same day as the strike that hit aid workers buried several pages in that the approval happened several hours before the raid. Meanwhile, one of Netanyahu's own cabinet members is now calling for an election.
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I haven't heard the details on that yet, but the first thing I heard on the news quoted Biden as "pledging his unwavering support" so I just shut the radio off after that.
 
StevenC

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Drew said:
Nagasaki, or Hiroshima AND Nagasaki?

The rationale behind Nagasaki was that we believed we needed to convince the Japanese that Hiroshima was repeatable, and that we had the capability to keep hitting them and move through the country city by city until they surrendered. And, that the two together were still far fewer casualties than the sort of ground invasion that would have been required to get the Japanese to surrender otherwise.

This is obviously neither the time nor the place, but I'm not sure how persuaded I am, particularly with that first point. From what I've read, it was a pretty, well, horrifying experience for Japan, for a city to be just wiped off the map with a single bomb, and their Emperor was already considering surrender when Nagasaki was struck. They capitulated almost immediately after... but I have to wonder if we'd instead just obliterated an abandoned knoll out in the ocean within sight of Japan and told them the third bomb would have hit a city, if would have gotten to the same point... and if that could have worked, then why not just start by flattening a desolate mountain somewhere in Japan and call it a warning shot?

The cost of a ground invasion in human life would have been astronomical, and the US belief that we'd have to take the country street by street fighting civilians defending their homes is probably accurate. But, you gotta wonder if some of the alternatives we left on the table could have worked too...
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The Japanese wanted to surrender before the bombs dropped. Their main concern was keeping the emperor which they didn't think anyone would accept and were willing to die on that hill, literally. Their Russian envoy kept telling them everyone would agree to their terms, but that was ignored by the Japanese.

Russia was on the move east to help with an invasion, and the Americans thought they needed to do something to cut them out of reparations. But didn't want to, like, talk to the Japanese about surrendering because they thought they'd never surrender. The "bombs were used to end the war sooner" is pretty much a rewrite of history to make America seem less like fucking monsters.

This video covers it really well, but is quite long:

 
Drew

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StevenC said:
The "bombs were used to end the war sooner" is pretty much a rewrite of history to make America seem less like fucking monsters.
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Well, we won, so rewriting history is only our right! :crooks:

I kid, I kid. I obviously have some pretty big reservations here, too.

EDIT, really, we got rid of :crooks: For anyone not part of the old guard here, picture the Republican elephant logo squatting to take a shit.
 
narad

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StevenC said:
The Japanese wanted to surrender before the bombs dropped. Their main concern was keeping the emperor which they didn't think anyone would accept and were willing to die on that hill, literally. Their Russian envoy kept telling them everyone would agree to their terms, but that was ignored by the Japanese.

Russia was on the move east to help with an invasion, and the Americans thought they needed to do something to cut them out of reparations. But didn't want to, like, talk to the Japanese about surrendering because they thought they'd never surrender. The "bombs were used to end the war sooner" is pretty much a rewrite of history to make America seem less like fucking monsters.

This video covers it really well, but is quite long:

Click to expand...


Eh, if not factually untrue, this paints it as if any country has a single mind, and not the mix of different motivations and momentum and conflicting viewpoints that it is. This has been discussed (and will be discussed) for forever, but I find that some general mistakes are:
1) looking at things with perfect hindsight
2) having no skin in the game
3) not having an understanding of cultural differences and values

I would say to point (1), in hindsight, with complete information, such as the reactions to the bombs by the reigning military council, points a lot towards the bombs being somewhat unnecessary in bringing about total surrender. But who would have thought a priori that the most powerful weapon created by man would have elicited a meh response (strategically, anyway) by exactly those who it was intended to impress the most?

And then (2) to be in 2024 and play armchair general is a safety that allows for considering really unnecessarily compromising options that you probably wouldn't be considering if you had any personal emotional investment in the conflict. I think the scenarios that you play out where you, the omnipotent decision maker, has nothing to lose and can approach it basically like a computer prioritizes certain strategies that are basically not what an actual human in the conflict might rationally. I would personally love to try in some simulation "everyone look to the east at 3PM tomorrow" 0 casualty show of force, but it's not how anyone would be playing their trump cards.

And (3) even now, in 2024, it's always amazing the extent to which cross cultural differences matter in the most mundane things. To think that this is 70 years of westernization later, and I can still be shocked by behavior/decisions of Japan just highlights to me how little American decision makers must have actually understood about the country in 1945. Of course there's the wikipedia level understanding of, "oh, if we kill the emperor, people are going to possible literally lose their minds" that they did have, but there are a lot of deeper understandings that would be important to strategy that you can't get from some military brief or intercepted communications. Maybe they at least understood how little they understood.

Anyway, that can be a whole thread, but I'd recommend Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East series.
 
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narad said:
Eh, if not factually untrue, this paints it as if any country has a single mind, and not the mix of different motivations and momentum and conflicting viewpoints that it is. This has been discussed (and will be discussed) for forever, but I find that some general mistakes are:
1) looking at things with perfect hindsight
2) having no skin in the game
3) not having an understanding of cultural differences and values

I would say to point (1), in hindsight, with complete information, such as the reactions to the bombs by the reigning military council, points a lot towards the bombs being somewhat unnecessary in bringing about total surrender. But who would have thought a priori that the most powerful weapon created by man would have elicited a meh response (strategically, anyway) by exactly those who it was intended to impress the most?

And then (2) to be in 2024 and play armchair general is a safety that allows for considering really unnecessarily compromising options that you probably wouldn't be considering if you had any personal emotional investment in the conflict. I think the scenarios that you play out where you, the omnipotent decision maker, has nothing to lose and can approach it basically like a computer prioritizes certain strategies that are basically not what an actual human in the conflict might rationally. I would personally love to try in some simulation "everyone look to the east at 3PM tomorrow" 0 casualty show of force, but it's not how anyone would be playing their trump cards.

And (3) even now, in 2024, it's always amazing the extent to which cross cultural differences matter in the most mundane things. To think that this is 70 years of westernization later, and I can still be shocked by behavior/decisions of Japan just highlights to me how little American decision makers must have actually understood about the country in 1945. Of course there's the wikipedia level understanding of, "oh, if we kill the emperor, people are going to possible literally lose their minds" that they did have, but there are a lot of deeper understandings that would be important to strategy that you can't get from some military brief or intercepted communications. Maybe they at least understood how little they understood.

Anyway, that can be a whole thread, but I'd recommend Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East series.
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I absolutely don't mean to paint the country as a single mind. I absolutely mean to paint the Imperial government and military as all wanting to maintain that structure.

Also, skin in the game arguments are shitty. Don't make them. They only serve to end conversations people are uncomfortable being challenged about. It's an argument from authority.

But yeah, that's my whole point. Americans didn't understand the Japanese goals in the end phases of the war. It's pretty clear that the country whose whole thing is independence from a monarch, didn't considered the importance of maintaining a monarchy. I know a lot of people IRL who think monarchs are good and right and important (but then you shoot down this type of argument and make it in the next post), and I honest to goodness don't understand it. The Japanese establishment got what they wanted after the bombs dropped anyway.

But crucially, atomic bombs were used in a specifically non-tactical way. They didn't attack anywhere with any useful infrastructure because they intended to do a bunch of colonialism in Japan, so blowing up factories was counterproductive. The problem is there were very similar civilian bombing campaigns in Europe (Dresden fire bombings is the main example, or the Blitz), and they didn't have desired effect at all in those instances. The Americans dropped the bombs because they wanted to.

Watch the 3 hour video.
 
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soliloquy said:
So the Euro-Med Human rights Monitor had been quiet for the last 40 days. They just updated this last night:

day 180
- 122,500 completely destroyed homes
- 269,700 partially destroyed homes
- 177 destroyed/damaged press headquarters
- 443 destroyed industrial facilities
- 647 damaged mosques
- 3 churches damaged
- 301 healthcare facilities destroyed (29 hospitals; 69 clinics; 203 ambulances)
- 200 heritage sites destroyed
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Wow... that's a whole lot of hidden Hamas bunkers.
 
Randy

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StevenC said:
The problem with Hamas bunkers is that they're all underground and so Israel has to demolish all of Gaza before they can excavate.
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And also redevelop the entire region and build condos to make sure theres nothing down there
 
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Randy

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So even in the IDFs explanation of bombing the aid convoy, they low-key blamed them? "One of the workers was carrying a bag over their shoulder that looked like a gun".

Oh, well thanks for clearing that up.
 
Drew

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Randy said:
So even in the IDFs explanation of bombing the aid convoy, they low-key blamed them? "One of the workers was carrying a bag over their shoulder that looked like a gun".

Oh, well thanks for clearing that up.
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Yeah, because what POSSIBLE reason could an aid convoy have to be carrying bags?

I suppose firing two members of the army involved with the attack IS the biggest admission of fault I've seen from Israel's government on pretty much anything here, so there's that...?
 
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Drew said:
Yeah, because what POSSIBLE reason could an aid convoy have to be carrying bags?

I suppose firing two members of the army involved with the attack IS the biggest admission of fault I've seen from Israel's government on pretty much anything here, so there's that...?
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I don't know, I'm seeing "removed" and "reassigned" from some sources, which doesn't quite sound like they were "fired."
 
Randy

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StevenC said:
We're now at the "OK, it was a genocide, but they deserved it" stage of spin:

www.haaretz.com

Hamas laid a genocide trap for Israel | Opinion

***
www.haaretz.com www.haaretz.com
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The irony here is that, based on the headline, thats literally exactly what the rational people in this thread were saying by October 8th.

Hamas orchestrated the attack with intention of getting Israel to overreact, and they did it anyway.
 
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