ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
The_barBEARian said:
ATL Bear said:
boognish_bear said:
Or walk away and just let them do their thing and stay out of it. We could have left Iran decimated two+ months ago with no other action or negotiation required and let them sort it out. Crazy idea I know, but we're being extorted for a bad deal that has us no closer on anything we had prior to taking action, and now are indelibly intertwined with the Hezbollah/Israel situation.
If Trump said we are washing our hands of Israel and they are on their own, they'd be completely screwed...
The idea we are holding Israel back from single handedly crushing the entire middle east is laughably stupid.
While we get angry about the brutality of the idea of flattening Southern Lebanon, if missiles were coming out of Juarez or Tijuana and hitting El Paso or San Diego, what do you think we'd do to those populated areas?
It would largely depend on whether we were precisely targeting a terrorist threat or depopulating the areas in advance of long-term occupation.
Why do you ask?
Why does precisely matter? If you must hold ground against an enemy to stop their attacks, you have to occupy.
Assuming you must, you can take ground without flattening populated areas. Israel is barely even pretending to do so. They're openly comparing it to Gaza in the sense that no holds are barred (which is a cute admission about Gaza after the fact).
Not when the enemy uses homes, basements, farm storage units, buildings, and tunnel systems linking the aforementioned to hide and move combatants and munitions for their attacks. They also use it to exploit political and legal law fare because of the human cost created by their tactics. They are very effective at that as your continued "genocide" speak displays.
That's what DC referred to as "urban warfare." You'll notice there's not much of it going on. It's relatively rare to see the IDF shooting at anything that's shooting back. Painful to see them in action, too. No muzzle awareness, no assigned fields of view, just disorganized grab-assery. There's no telling what could be done with a professional army.
Israel is recognized as one of the most effective asymmetrical warfare and counter-insurgency militaries in the world. Probably better than us.
They're a clown show. Can't control an area the size of Detroit after almost three years. They blow up civilians because it's pretty much all they're good at.
Realitybites brought up Fallujah. We didn't have full control for several years, at least until the tribal leaders decided that AQI needed to be gone.
Fallujah is a smaller area than Belton, Texas, with about 15% the population of Gaza. The reason it is so difficult is the efforts to limit human casualty.
Which the IDF is not doing in the least. Their attitude to civilian casualties has ranged from blank indifference to the grotesque celebrations that finally got them ordered to stay off social media.
By that same standard of application, every Gazan has raped and massacred Jews.
Not at all. No one is saying that every Israeli has raped and massacred Palestinians. But there is abundant evidence that Israeli war crimes are committed as a matter of policy, not as isolated acts.
Because some bad acts by individuals or units? Again, if you're making broad brush applications like that, my assertion fits then.
Accusing a government or military of systematic war crimes isn't broad-brushing. It's not accusing every citizen. That would be like saying every Palestinian man, woman, and child is a terrorist. Some people do believe that, but it's illogical and wrong.
For Hamas, the citizens are the military and the government by extension. Or at least the large percentage that support them.
Now that's broad-brushing.
I have sympathy for Gazans as many are forced into service either through coercion or the Dahwah network. But if your home is a tunnel entry or underground munitions cache, you are a legitimate military target. So when the apartment complex is droned and a family is blown to bits, you accuse the Israelis of war crimes whilst the real cruelty and crime was performed well before any missiles were fired.
Israel doesn't just target tunnel entries or munition caches. They take out whole complexes and multiple families as a form of collective punishment. And it's not just an apartment here and there. They do it at such scale that they've mostly succeeded in depopulating the north of Gaza and rendering it uninhabitable. I won't talk about the destruction of the health care and humanitarian aid systems, which have been covered on other threads.
"The citizens are the military" is the kind of reasoning that's used to justify collective punishment. The same argument has been made about Israel, i.e. that there are no Israeli civilians because practically everyone serves in the military and supports the government's actions. If it was wrong then, it's wrong now.