tptacek 10 months ago

First a style point: I don't think you get very far with things like "the only conclusion we can draw is that I'm right". I know I never sound like it, but the one thing I can confidently state in these kinds of discussions is that nothing is unambiguous. When it comes to conflict in the Middle East, if I have to be potentially wrong about things, so do you!

As I've remarked several times on this thread, the standard I'm using for this attack isn't one in which no innocents (or even innocent children) are harmed or killed. I don't like war and would happily confiscate every firearm in North America, but that standard is one no active military in the world meets. Rather: the "state of the art" in targeted strikes is air-to-ground weaponry, which routinely kills civilian bystanders at ratios far exceeding 1:1.

Here, my guess is that the ratio is something far south of 1:100, making this strike --- I think? --- unprecedented in precision in the last 100 years of warfare. We'll learn more as the day goes on, and if/when I'm wrong, I'll certainly say so.

"Terrorism" has nothing whatsoever to do with my thinking on this. Hezbollah is a large, sophisticated, organized, well-supplied combatant force, a military peer to its neighbors, and it is in open armed conflict with Israel.

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  • runarberg 10 months ago

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    • tptacek 10 months ago

      We'll see, but I don't think it's very likely that Hezbollah school teachers are carrying Hezbollah pagers. There were a bunch of news stories written about why Hezbollah fighters are carrying pagers. Ordinary Lebanese people, from what I can see (I actually looked up market data here) carry Android phones like everybody else does. And I don't think Hezbollah is handing out pagers to random janitors in Dahieh.

      Note Reuters reporting on the concentration of reports of strikes here: it's not uniformly spread across the population of Lebanon.

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