Comment by aprilthird2021
3 days ago
> To the degree the Israel-Palestine war could have helped America, it already has
Idk, what we had to watch Israel do and fund with our own money may not have been worth all those achievements. Only time will tell... We made a lot of advancements in Iraq and Afghanistan too, and that was nowhere near as careless about human suffering as this latest flare up. And we lost all that progress extremely rapidly due to the hatred the local populace and neighboring countries had due to our actions. I think Israel (and us, since we are tied together) might face the same unforced error.
> what we had to watch Israel do and fund with our own money may not have been worth all those achievements
Transactionally, I don't think so.
Strategically, we rendered irrelevant hundreds of billions of dollars of Iranian foreign spending worthless for $20bn [1]. We also communicated that we stand by our allies. I don't think that's worth tens of thousands of civilian deaths, but it is an important factor.
(Morally, I don't think an all-out war was necessary to decapitate Hamas--surgical strikes on the leaders, over time, should have been possible without reducing the enclave to rubble. That said, I don't know.)
> We made a lot of advancements in Iraq and Afghanistan too
And then we left. Massive difference between supporting a force and building one.
> Israel (and us, since we are tied together) might face the same unforced error
Possibly. Iran and Saudi Arabia (and to a lesser degree Qatar) have been the regional mischief makers, and they all seem somewhat spent. (Israel didn't create as much disruptive mischief, ironically.) I'm honestly not convinced the Palestinian people want war any more than the Lebanese or, frankly, Iranians.
[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
Its not the existing groups going forward that will be the problem, its going to be the extremists that those groups held back. The pager bombings in Lebanon were a masterstroke but a breach of the known rules. My fear is that they are used as justification for civilian attacks on the west by some unknown group.
No to mention the Syria and Iraq dimension, Syria's new leader has a history of being a hardline terrorist and the Iraqi's understandably aren't too happy about it after their dealings with Daesh in the past.
I guess its a win(for now), which is all you can really say when it comes to the Middle east.
> pager bombings in Lebanon were a masterstroke but a breach of the known rules
What military over the past twenty years had this (or something similar) as an option and didn’t do it because it would be frowned upon?
The truth is nobody has been following the “known rules” since the 90s. Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Transnistrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Hong Kong, Crimea, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Gaza and soon Taiwan. The rules-based international order has been crumbling for years. The only governments still defending it are in Europe.
> they are used as justification for civilian attacks on the west by some unknown group
Who previously would have refrained?