Comment by captainkrtek 10 months ago
> You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy
I agree it’s clever, but there are reports now of thousands wounded. Feels like a lot of collateral risk, if these people who were targeted were out and about (grocery shopping, bank, etc.)
> if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed
"It's OK that Israel causes excessive amounts of civilian casualties, because in the alternative scenario Israel would also cause excessive amounts of civilian casualties"
I don't find it very persuasive to simply assume that the casualties are "excessive." Whether they are actually excessive is really the whole issue. As of right now, there is no strong evidence that I'm aware of that the injuries from today's attack are "excessive" much less those of a different purely hypothetical attack.
And even then: to judge whether casualties are excessive requires an understanding of the goal to be achieved, which is almost completely absent from this discussion.
I think the problem many people have is that Israel's goals entirely revolve around killing people.
That is: If your goal is to murder someone, and you accidentally kill an innocent bystander in committing that murder, the number of civilians killed is infinitely too high. The number of acceptable total deaths is 0.
I understand this is idealistic. But it's the judgement many will choose to make. For the record, no I don't only think it's bad when Israel murders people.
The right number? Zero. An acceptable number to help stop Hezbollah from routinely firing rockets at your northern towns and villages? That’s a harder question. Unfortunately, the hard question is the one that’s relevant.
Why isn't it better to cause fewer civilian casualties &/or those of lesser severity than a shooting fight or missile attack?[1] Given the situation has already degenerated to its current state where fighting is the status quo and all options lead to innocent casualties then minimizing those is the horrible "OK" option. Not okay in the sense of desirable, not okay in the sense that things should never have degenerate to this level to begin with, only okay as the less horrible option.
[1] Videos show the explosions highly limited in their ability to cause injuries as bad as a bullet to anyone ever a foot or two away from the explosions, much less than I would expect from anything more conventional.
"Its war on terrorists" sure. by framing what's happening in that way you've already excused away most of the things people are upset about
> Who cares what is right or wrong
Kind of an odd thing to say in a conversation with a bunch of other people who clearly care what is right and wrong.
> 400 years ago you'd have owned slaves and not think twice about it.
An oversimplification, to say the least! This is only even a little bit true if we limit ourselves to the small number of nations with chattel slavery (but why would we do that?), and actually not even true of Americans, many of whom were opposed to slavery even 400 years ago.
Israel is definitely at war with Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is of course not a country (though they're a proxy for Iran), but they occupy parts of Lebanon, so you can't attack them without attacking Lebanon.
I wonder if people are unaware that Hezbollah and Israel have been shooting rockets at each other for months. There are roughly 1000 deaths in the conflict and hundreds of thousands of civilians evacuated. If we’re talking about harms to civilians, this incident is probably small compared to the war overall.
These are Hezbollah pagers and Hezbollah only exists to terrorize Israel and it is their sole purpose. Of course there is still a danger of collateral risk, but I don't think it can get much more targeted.
"Hezbollah only exists to terrorise Israel and it is their sole purpose." This is a very curious take, what makes you think a group of hundreds of thousands of people, investing so much time, efforts and resources, exposing themselves and their loved ones to fatal risks just to terrorise Israel?
Eh, the history isn't a secret and the reason is that they are religious fundamentalists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah
> According to Hezbollah's Deputy-General, Naim Qassem, the struggle against Israel is a core belief of Hezbollah and the central rationale of Hezbollah's existence.
I tend to believe their own statement on this matter. Where do you see wiggle room for another argument? Or even to find the argument "curious"? What is curious about it?
Looks like Lebanese civilians have indeed been injured/maimed; but it appears cool to some since it is an "impressive supply-chain hack", so let's leave it at that and not call it terrorism.
You could've labeled it terrorism had Lebanon and Israel weren't at war with each other over the past 12 months, and had the people carrying those devices were random uninvolved civilians.
If you were to consider the fact that Hezbollah has been shelling Israeli cities and civilians on a daily basis for the past 12 months (killing many, also children, and driving hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes), with the UN peacekeeping force failing to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani river - then perhaps you would understand that this is likely as close as you can get to a "precision strike" on an enemy you're at war with.
This may in-fact be the most precise military strike on an enemy paramilitary group in the history of modern warfare.
You either have a very unrealistic idea of what a war actually looks like (0% civilians casualties or injuries), or an agenda.
The unfortunate thing is that regardless of politics, this will be seen as further escalation that ratchets up the risk of greater regional conflict. All wars eventually end, its just a question of how long, and how much death (both militarily and civilian) will be endured by everyone in the region. I hope there are diplomatic possibilities to de-escalate, but it seems those windows are closing.
Let's just say, I don't believe war is a cover for terrorism against any peoples, be it in the West or East, Arab or Caucasian.
Do you think that any military action with civilian impact constitutes terrorism?
no war has ever been waged without collateral damage.
Terrorism definition is independent of whether there is ongoing war or not, lets not divert the subject with simple whataboutism.
We all know what happened, on both sides, including deaths of tens of thousands of civilians including thousands of palestinian children who did fuck nothing to anybody, just were born at bad place at bad time.
What would be enough kill ratio israeli : palestinian civilian, or even better israeli civilian : palestinian kid/baby that would satiate Israeli government to stop the war? Very conservative estimates put deaths of direct US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to around 500k, meaning its 500:3 ratio and factual defeat of US army to withdraw and cut losses. So thats the threshold of civilized western world? Israel already surpassed that long time ago.
They can't and won't win with Hamas and they know it, its exactly same situation as Taliban, ISIS etc. Regroup, strike back, stronger, smarter, better equipped, more motivated. Spiral of death can go on and on till there is nobody standing on neither side.
If I had to choose where the next nuclear detonation happens it would be for me 50:50 Ukraine : Israel, and this is how you get there.
> It’s a mistake not to acknowledge civilian casualties, and not to feel sorrow and even anger.
I agree with you 100%, it's important to acknowledge civilian casualties. Many uninvolved Lebanese people don't want a war with Israel, and they don't deserve any of this. I truly feel very sorry for those people and I wish they would never have had to go through this.
But at the same time, we can't let emotions alone dictate everything.
There's a murderous paramilitary death cult operating from within the Lebanese territory that uses Lebanon for all its territory and resources to kill as many Jewish people (and non-Jews, as demonstrated recently with the missile attack that killed 10 Druze children in a football game) as possible and erase Israel. They don't care about your feelings, or who their victims are. They'll gladly kidnap and murder civilians, children, elderly - as long as they are an Israeli. It's truly tragic, but there really aren't too many ways out of this.
do you realize that nurses in hospital, civil servants workers are among people carrying this device? That not all, not even majority of Hizbollah personnel have no military responsibility whatsoever?
There's absolutely no reason for uninvolved, random and peaceful civilians to be carrying a classified wartime-ready pager issued by a paramilitary terrorist organization. If you were carrying the device you're either Hezbollah, or cooperating with them - which makes you a legitimate military target.
Israel has given Lebanon and Hezbollah enough ultimatums to stop the aggressions. This is what happens when diplomacy fails.
I doubt that was the case for these specifically hacked and weaponized devices. The operation appears to be ingenious and precisely layered in design. It very specifically targeted a group of people who were first convinced to ditch their mobile devices because they were hackable by Israel. Then the target group was provided the weaponized devices. They were bulk triggered at a specific moment of time. The weaponized device (while certainly lethal in some cases) was seemingly designed to maim and minimize damage beyond the person holding the device. And… perhaps most importantly, they were expected to be kept in a front pocket increasing the likelihood of physically emasculating the target group. It’s the ultimate “you don’t want to fuck with us”.
Its disturbing as hell…but brilliant.
Violence has been probably the biggest driver of innovation for us as a species. I would categorize thousands of weapons as "cool" viewed dispassionately. Aircraft carriers, Fighter Jets, Cruise missiles. They are all definitely cool when viewed from afar.
By that reasoning even Churchill is a terrorist.
Which they would probably agree to. Purists do not care for practical matters such arbitrating what would be the best course of action in order to have the less casualties because for them the only acceptable number of casualties is zero because any war and casualty is immoral.
I have sympathy for this kind of reasoning because it's been mine for a long time. There is something important for the preservation of the self in refusing all kinds of wrong in the world. The problem is that by refusing to engage with the world, they can affect nothing (and probably accept that, everybody should just stop being immoral, that's easy in their mind)
I have no doubt that innocent civilians have been injured. But it's also worth noting that there are thousands of Hezbollah members, so the number alone doesn't necessarily tell us much about the number of civilians injured. (Similar to the casualty figures that come out of Gaza.)
I hate the idea of any innocent civilian being injured. But it might also be instructive to consider the alternative: if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed—not to mention the Israeli civilians on the other side, whose lives also matter.