Limited thought if anyone cares. All the Israeli news coverage I see treats Hezbollah as a much bigger threat than it is, like the war in Lebanon is vital for Israel's survival or something. Their total base is a couple million Lebanese shiites with a sub-replacement fertility rate and, without control of Syria anymore, curtailed ability to rearm. They are badly outnumbered by Sunnis who view them as heretics, and their desire to retain arms is less about war with Israel and more about wanting to protect their community from Sunnis/wanting political power within Lebanon, where they are otherwise the poorest group. They are not invading northern Israel any time soon. Their power really has crested and their continued existence does not justify eternal war in Lebanon.
I hate the precedent of Iran influencing Israel's options in Lebanon, but that war should end regardless. The big priority is making peace or at least stable non-aggression with new Syria, which the Israeli rightists have predictably flubbed.
I think the issue with Hezbollah is they can launch rockets and drones into an increasingly larger portion of the country such that civilians don't want to live in the north/are evacuated. The smaller and crappier the country becomes the closer it gets to a death spiral of taxpayers leaving.
On October 6, 2023, Hezbollah had something like a couple hundred thousand rockets and the widespread perception was that they could fire thousands at once, overwhelm Israeli air defenses, do serious damage to Tel Aviv and obliterate Haifa. On October 7 they found themselves in a situation where they didn't want a full blown war with Israel (imagine what happens to Beirut in the situation where they devastate Haifa) but they couldn't be like "actually, fighting Israel is something we do for esteem. Really we want to control Syria and Lebanon; Israel is our pretext to remain armed." They found themselves sucked into a conflict where by the time they realized they were in an all out war, they could no longer coordinate large-scale rocket attacks and their arsenal was mostly blown up on the ground.
Now they have some drones that can kill individual Israeli soldiers, but their capacity to do damage is a tiny fraction of what it was pre-October 6. Maybe with new drone technology they be a bigger menace again, but Israelis lived near the border on October 6, 2023 and they are in much less danger now. What's more, Hezbollah has no need for another war, and the Lebanese Shiite population certainly doesn't. Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a consequence of two people wanting the same land, Israel-Lebanon conflict is more like unfortunate happenstance.
The post October 7th 'konzteptzia' (barf) is that deterrence doesn't work against Muslim fundamentalists, so Israel can't have any Islamist paramilitaries on its borders full stop. Which is very logical, but it's too bad.
Hezbollah's story is a strange one. A small religious minority surrounded by hostile elements, they held out by punching far above their weight militarily and cultivating a relationship with a much stronger and more populous ally. Unfortunately by engaging in unnecessary warfare spurred by nationalistic and religious considerations, they brought displacement and ruin upon their people.
There is indeed the risk from Hezbollah amassing a criticial amount of rockets they can fire en masse at infrastructure that can overwhelm Israel's defense systems. That particular risk may indeed be much reduced but assuming they get a nice long ceasefire they can rebuild that capacity. But again even absent that the ability and willingness to just lob 20 rockets or drones across the border periodically can make things functionally unliveable for people living there. Tens of thousands of them are currently evacauted.
Well they might not do this if a ceasefire is agreed and Israel complies with it. If Israel leaves Lebanon and Hezbollah starts launching periodic rocket attacks that's very different, but that experiment hasn't been run. Yes this happened October 8, but Hezbollah has paid very dearly for it, and Hezbollah was remarkably restrained despite continued Israeli bombing over the course of 2025. They don't want more wars right now.
I also think that without control of airports in Syria, their ability to smuggle in big weapons like rockets is reduced a lot. That's why not pissing off Syria is a good idea at present.
I don't know what to tell ya. We have indeed run the experiment of whether or not Hezbollah will attack Israel before Israel attacks Hezbollah and quite recently too. Hezbollah attacks Israel. Now you can come up with a nice sounding theory as to why Hezbollah may stop this time and even come up with a plausible explanation for it but ultimately it's perfectly reasonable to want some kind of proof before running that risk again.
> and whose smart fraction substantially lives in California and cheers when the country is bombed.
I think this conflates intelligence with cultural similarity. Building underground missile cities is hardly a low-IQ endeavor.
Considering birthrates, one can imagine an unlikely but very funny future in which an Iran composed of 50 year old hazel-eyed IRL Factorio players with 1.5 kids each must fend off a zerg rush of birthratemaxxed Israelis who could pass for Libyans.
Us being gay about casualties actually can be very helpful.
Anything, no matter how smart the people involved, will be terrible without some measurement.
Think that America's libs made the Claude mythos (when their measurement was making money via capitalism) and social sciences have no measurement and have not moved much since the Middle Ages.
The military is somewhere in between, where you get objective feedback by winning or losing a war. But this feedback is infrequent.
Luckily for us we have low-level war forever.
Think Iron Dome — it would never be made if our reaction to casualties was like the Russians' or Ukrainians'. This is in my opinion a big part of what makes the IDF so effective (human capital also important).
Now we are likely to make anti-drone stuff due to a small number of soldiers dying in Lebanon and we will keep trying until they stop dying.
Imagine if people died every time we did bad PR — we would be masters at this point — but since there's no measurement we suck even though we have lots of juicy human capital.
The second thing is it helps prevent catastrophes like the Russia-Ukraine war (a war for no good reason where both sides would be much better off the sooner they cucked — but their ability to take hundreds of thousands of casualties and say meh doesn't help them the slightest).
But optimising for low casualties just makes Israel's military optimised for low casualties, not strategic success. Sure, it prevents one failure mode, the pointless meat grinder (though, note, that Russia's military losses at least over the 1st year were a net gain for the country), but it clearly doesn't prevent other failure modes, like gamble the whole American relationship on a harebrained scheme to overthrow the government of Iran.
On 2, you say it a lot but I don’t see any real evidence that our aversion to casualties is what is holding us back.
For fighting Iran (and Yemen fwiw) this issue is completely irrelevant. Even if we were willing to kamikaze our entire ground army on an Anabasis-style ground invasion to conquer Tehran the logistics and geography make it impossible. The only possible way to fight on these fronts is via air and intelligence (or other long-distance methods like Steinitz and Liberman’s idea to build our own missile corp).
In Lebanon and Gaza it is relevant, but what amazingly effective tactical options would be unlocked that would change the result of the war, if only we were willing to take more casualties?
If the claim is that using ground forces would kill fewer civilians, there’s good reason to think that’s not true. As one example, pretty much the only time in the Gaza war that Israel sent significant ground troops into a fully populated area was operation Arnon. The result was much bloodier for the civilians than the average day of airstrikes. Repeating that type of thing more often would in all likelihood kill more civilians, not less.
And from an optics perspective, civilian deaths from ground forces are probably worse than those from airstrikes. There is a reason Hind Rajab is so famous.
Maybe there's an argument that it would be cheaper on a monetary level in the short term since bombs are expensive. But even setting aside moral issues, the full financial cost over time of losing lots of soldiers is likely higher.
Hind Rijab was also killed because of our extreme casualty aversion. It isn’t just the unwillingness to deploy ground troops, it’s letting them just shoot anything that moves (including Israeli hostages).
As for tactics we could use but don’t, I think you’re being Israeli (i.e. obtuse) now. We’ve spent 3 years just blowing up aimlessly blowing up everything in sight. Who else does this?
Maybe I am obtuse, but I think that even with better rules of engagement and discipline a lot of civilians would still die if we used more ground troops. It is harder to be precise in those situations, and the resulting videos would be a lot worse. But I am only half Israeli so maybe I'll get it if you explain to me specifically what benefit getting more soldiers killed is supposed to have.
Since you brought up what other people are doing, lets look at al-Jolani, who is apparently more effective as a local enforcer according to your quote from Trump (do you agree?). His guys throw people off of balconies and mow them down on their knees in city squares after humiliating them in various ways. I'd prefer to blow up empty buildings tbh.
Al-Jolani's tactics would be a big step up and clearly would lead to far fewer civilian deaths too. Syrians know that there are costs to opposing him, and benefits to cooperating. Of course, when he let his bedouin militias get out of hand that wrecked everything, just as Israel does with its airstrikes.
It's easier for non-combatants to avoid ground troops than air strikes. Civilians would still die in the fighting but 4:1 civilian to militant ratios, if we're being generous, the IDF is currently carrying out would not be happening.
This assumes that the civilians have somewhere to go to avoid the ground troops.
If we did your idea of clearing every.single.structure in Gaza without evacuating the civilians first, then it seems like at some point every.single.civilian would necessarily be caught up in an encounter with the army. The civilian casualties would therefore be very high. Even if good training and tactics could bring down the ratio from 1:4 to 1:3 (the ratio from the first battle of Fallujah when the city was more inhabited) or even 1:2, it’s a marginal difference in the scheme of things and not a gamechanger on the strategic level. The raw numbers would also be higher because we would operate in all of the territory instead of only 60 or 65%.
Evacuating the civilians first would be better, but there wasn’t a great option for doing that. Egypt was suggested at the beginning, they threatened to cancel the peace treaty. The only available option would be to evacuate them to some sterile humanitarian zone/refugee camp in Israeli-controlled areas. That would lead to international screeching that we were running concentration camps and again would leave the army in charge of managing 2 million refugees.
There’s a strong argument that we should have bit the bullet and done the second option, a lot of right-wing military critics from outside the top brass were pushing for it from the beginning. Other people (including Maskil the first time I ever argued with him) thought evacuating the civilians wasn’t feasible. But in any case this is irrelevant to the original point. Evacuating the civilians first would have also prevented Israeli casualties, not increased them, because it is easier to operate when the civilians aren’t running around underfoot. It actually makes it easier to use airstrikes and heavy weapons more effectively if you don’t have to worry about hitting civilians.
I think the bigger factor here is that the Israeli political dynamic made it impossible for Israel to either occupy and govern Gaza or hand off each part of Gaza they occupied to the PA for them to govern. They were left with "destroy a subterranean enemy as much as possible from the air" as the only option and the results are what you get.
If the IDF were willing to flood the tunnel system divide the strip into grids and clear ever. single. structure. grid by grid Hamas as a militant group would be destroyed in maybe a month. Fallujah and Mosul are good models for what that would look like. But Netanyahu has been to risk averse to try real urban counter insurgency. Clearing irregulars from a confined urban environment is not that hard, even Arab armies can do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September
No one was unwilling to flood the tunnels, it was tried but just isn’t technically feasible. In any case isn’t relevant to the discussion of the benefits of taking higher casualties. The comparables you mention aren’t great either way because those were situations where the irregulars were not as well armed, not as entrenched and the civilian population was mostly evacuated.
I pretty much agree with you that it would have been better to conquer the Gaza strip thoroughly one zone at a time. I disagree that the reason is because of casualty sensitivity, that was at most a minor factor in the decision. The more critical reasons why this wasn’t done in the last third of Gaza was because of 1. Concern for the hostages (here we really are probably overly sensitive) and 2. If the strip was successfully cleared as you suggest, the army is left controlling and responsible for the Palestinian population. The generals, probably sensibly, wanted no part of that and found every reason not to do it. The government ultimately went with their approach despite a lot of talk to the contrary. Maybe it was a mistake but that was the reason.
I don’t know, I think if he somehow attacked Gaza it would be an absolute bloodbath. His regular army also committed plenty of atrocities without the crazy conditions of tunnels and whatnot.
But I’m still missing the mechanism where we turn into a superpower if we were willing to lose more of our soldiers. I could hear it if the argument is that we would be in a better position if we killed fewer hamas people and destroyed less of their infrastructure but also killed fewer civilians and destroying fewer buildings. But this could be accomplished by just not attacking as much. I don’t see specifically what we could have gained by sacrificing more troops.
Should say that I actually don’t really think we can be a full fledged regional superpower, but that’s just because we are too small.
There's some academic literature on this that I'm looking at now, but here my rule of any comment that takes more than 10 minutes to write becomes an article, so you'll have to wait.
I'm not sure if you're framing Bibi losing the election as a good or bad thing, but if his handling of the Gaza war and related adventures has been such a disaster then that should probably be a whitepill? I thought the point to esoteric Bibi-ism was to just lock in the post-Oslo status quo, which he clearly didn't stick to, on top of not providing any coherent answer for who was supposed to administer the Gaza Strip and pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire of Zoomer-Israeli relations.
(I'm kinda rooting for the world to switch to nuclear more than renewables, FWIW, but I guess that's fairly tangential.)
It's a good thing in the sense that the new government will stop actively destroying the country, but I believe that the Right needs another 3 years to make it clear to the general population that they have failed.
"These Israeli chauvinists are so stupid and their ignorance will kill us all. Now here's a deeply uninformed paragraph about how Iran is a failed state"
Not sure I see the connection between being a super power or regional power and being casualty averse. The United States is unquestionably a super power and they're even more casualty averse than Israel.
Obviously, the casualty aversion of the US is a major handicap. If they were willing to take the same kind of casualties as in Vietnam, let alone WW2, this would have been a massive victory.
I think perhaps we are in an era where there's not a great deal of delta in being a military power instead of just a stam power. Countries that try to punch above their economic weight by focussing on the military, like Russia, just aren't doing so well (and they aren't even casualty averse). The future probably belongs to whoever can master robot warfare.
You mentioned that Iran's economy being shit is a silver lining.
Do you think that the removal of sanctions, unfreezing of assets, reconstruction fund, and potentially taxing shipping through the strait of Hormuz will be able to rescue Iran's economy?
Personally, I am not sure, as the MOU seems deliberately vague about some of these points and I feel like it depends on how far the Americans want to stretch their interpretation of its wording.
If they are really going to be able to toll shipping, then this is an incredible disaster. I just think that can't happen, after all, how is the US allowed to sign off on behalf of the rest of the world in Iran engaging in illegal piracy?
The question is who's going to stop them. Gulf states will already be paying them bribes and the US clearly lacks any will to do so, and the Europeans are even less willing. China will probably get a waiver.
It's only partially germaine to the overall convo here (which I by and large agree with, despite being *mostly* in the "we should evilmaxx more" camp), but that Trump quote is just astounding. The man truly is demented.
What do you expect him to do? Crash the economy whilst the strait remains closed anyway? US and Israel took some hard swings, failed, time to cut their losses.
You seem to say the war arose from a military delusion. I think you are forgetting the rhetoric from the beginning of the war, where both US and Israel strongly implied that there was a high chance that Iran’s government would be toppled. Fox had Reza Pahlavi on and called him “Crown Prince.” It seems the delusion came from pundits and diasporoids who pushed policymakers to believe, without evidence, the Iranian regime is much more unpopular than it actually is. The average internet Iranian grew up in North Tehran and they think they know their country. Yet the continuous high rate of cousin marriage, the reliable surveys and polls showing low support for protests, and low IQ of the country do not change the prior that Iran is nearly as conservative as its stupid neighbors.
It doesn’t matter how many basij bases the IDF bombs. 10 years, and probably 20 years from now, the IRGC will still be intact.
I basically agree that shi'ism is the only thing that can hold the country together, and probably we should have spent the past 30 years boosting relatively moderate shi'ites instead of cucking them out and deluding ourselves with Iranian emigre cope.
Yes, and for this reason, supporting Ahmadinejad was the only smart part of the Iran plan. He seems to be only leader with populist appeal to the support base of the regime. He would obviously turn on the US and Israel eventually, like he did in real life, but all that matters is that he could dismantle the Islamic Republic beforehand.
Perhaps, on a more long term level it would probably be a good idea to fund Sunni missionaries to go there. Moving them from Birmingham and Berlin to Iran is a massive Pareto win for the world.
On what are you basing your statement about surveys and polls indicating low support for the protests?
I don't have time to write a long thing right now but there's a lot of evidence (at least pre-war) for secularization of the population (e.g. most mosques closing due to low attendance), government unpopularity, and the protests happened in many cities and not just in Tehran and Shiraz like in 2009. The problem is that it's not like when your approval rating drops below 25% "the people" overthrow you. There has to be a mechanism and none existed.
This same survey shows that millions participated in the protests, as we know from real life, but for every participant, there were only 3-4 non participating supporters.
There is no doubt that Iran is secularizing, but the extent has been exaggerated. Mosque attendance is falling in every Muslim-majority country. The only source for the majority of mosques closing in the country is one senior cleric as part of anti-youth propaganda. Iran has rapidly urbanized and it’s not surprising that rural areas, where the majority of mosques are, will have them close en masse.
Gallup World, University of Maryland, and Stasis Center polling all found independently that Raisi had majority approval at some point of his presidency.
A lot of effort has been expended on falsifying these traditional surveys, but the evidence is weak. Emigres even created an alternate survey, called GAMAAN, which surveys users of a single VPN with 3 million Iranian users, and extends it to the entire country. (Unsurprisingly, it underestimates election turnout by half). The traditional surveys can predict election turnout and results. They also show that Iran is becoming less religious and that mosque attendance is low.
I have yet to see any concrete evidence backing the most outlandish claims by pundits (like that Iran is 36% Shi’ite Muslim), which is why I think they are out of touch.
These stupid GAMAAN surveys can be used for all sorts of things. Ubersoy used it to prove Iran was tolerant because of its skyrocketing Christian population and massive religious diversity.
Limited thought if anyone cares. All the Israeli news coverage I see treats Hezbollah as a much bigger threat than it is, like the war in Lebanon is vital for Israel's survival or something. Their total base is a couple million Lebanese shiites with a sub-replacement fertility rate and, without control of Syria anymore, curtailed ability to rearm. They are badly outnumbered by Sunnis who view them as heretics, and their desire to retain arms is less about war with Israel and more about wanting to protect their community from Sunnis/wanting political power within Lebanon, where they are otherwise the poorest group. They are not invading northern Israel any time soon. Their power really has crested and their continued existence does not justify eternal war in Lebanon.
I hate the precedent of Iran influencing Israel's options in Lebanon, but that war should end regardless. The big priority is making peace or at least stable non-aggression with new Syria, which the Israeli rightists have predictably flubbed.
I think the issue with Hezbollah is they can launch rockets and drones into an increasingly larger portion of the country such that civilians don't want to live in the north/are evacuated. The smaller and crappier the country becomes the closer it gets to a death spiral of taxpayers leaving.
On October 6, 2023, Hezbollah had something like a couple hundred thousand rockets and the widespread perception was that they could fire thousands at once, overwhelm Israeli air defenses, do serious damage to Tel Aviv and obliterate Haifa. On October 7 they found themselves in a situation where they didn't want a full blown war with Israel (imagine what happens to Beirut in the situation where they devastate Haifa) but they couldn't be like "actually, fighting Israel is something we do for esteem. Really we want to control Syria and Lebanon; Israel is our pretext to remain armed." They found themselves sucked into a conflict where by the time they realized they were in an all out war, they could no longer coordinate large-scale rocket attacks and their arsenal was mostly blown up on the ground.
Now they have some drones that can kill individual Israeli soldiers, but their capacity to do damage is a tiny fraction of what it was pre-October 6. Maybe with new drone technology they be a bigger menace again, but Israelis lived near the border on October 6, 2023 and they are in much less danger now. What's more, Hezbollah has no need for another war, and the Lebanese Shiite population certainly doesn't. Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a consequence of two people wanting the same land, Israel-Lebanon conflict is more like unfortunate happenstance.
Give peace a chance.
The post October 7th 'konzteptzia' (barf) is that deterrence doesn't work against Muslim fundamentalists, so Israel can't have any Islamist paramilitaries on its borders full stop. Which is very logical, but it's too bad.
Hezbollah's story is a strange one. A small religious minority surrounded by hostile elements, they held out by punching far above their weight militarily and cultivating a relationship with a much stronger and more populous ally. Unfortunately by engaging in unnecessary warfare spurred by nationalistic and religious considerations, they brought displacement and ruin upon their people.
Good thing no one else is in that situation!
There is indeed the risk from Hezbollah amassing a criticial amount of rockets they can fire en masse at infrastructure that can overwhelm Israel's defense systems. That particular risk may indeed be much reduced but assuming they get a nice long ceasefire they can rebuild that capacity. But again even absent that the ability and willingness to just lob 20 rockets or drones across the border periodically can make things functionally unliveable for people living there. Tens of thousands of them are currently evacauted.
Well they might not do this if a ceasefire is agreed and Israel complies with it. If Israel leaves Lebanon and Hezbollah starts launching periodic rocket attacks that's very different, but that experiment hasn't been run. Yes this happened October 8, but Hezbollah has paid very dearly for it, and Hezbollah was remarkably restrained despite continued Israeli bombing over the course of 2025. They don't want more wars right now.
I also think that without control of airports in Syria, their ability to smuggle in big weapons like rockets is reduced a lot. That's why not pissing off Syria is a good idea at present.
I don't know what to tell ya. We have indeed run the experiment of whether or not Hezbollah will attack Israel before Israel attacks Hezbollah and quite recently too. Hezbollah attacks Israel. Now you can come up with a nice sounding theory as to why Hezbollah may stop this time and even come up with a plausible explanation for it but ultimately it's perfectly reasonable to want some kind of proof before running that risk again.
Kinda a mid schizo thread. Hopefully you can get back to good content. Praying for you
> and whose smart fraction substantially lives in California and cheers when the country is bombed.
I think this conflates intelligence with cultural similarity. Building underground missile cities is hardly a low-IQ endeavor.
Considering birthrates, one can imagine an unlikely but very funny future in which an Iran composed of 50 year old hazel-eyed IRL Factorio players with 1.5 kids each must fend off a zerg rush of birthratemaxxed Israelis who could pass for Libyans.
Us being gay about casualties actually can be very helpful.
Anything, no matter how smart the people involved, will be terrible without some measurement.
Think that America's libs made the Claude mythos (when their measurement was making money via capitalism) and social sciences have no measurement and have not moved much since the Middle Ages.
The military is somewhere in between, where you get objective feedback by winning or losing a war. But this feedback is infrequent.
Luckily for us we have low-level war forever.
Think Iron Dome — it would never be made if our reaction to casualties was like the Russians' or Ukrainians'. This is in my opinion a big part of what makes the IDF so effective (human capital also important).
Now we are likely to make anti-drone stuff due to a small number of soldiers dying in Lebanon and we will keep trying until they stop dying.
Imagine if people died every time we did bad PR — we would be masters at this point — but since there's no measurement we suck even though we have lots of juicy human capital.
The second thing is it helps prevent catastrophes like the Russia-Ukraine war (a war for no good reason where both sides would be much better off the sooner they cucked — but their ability to take hundreds of thousands of casualties and say meh doesn't help them the slightest).
But optimising for low casualties just makes Israel's military optimised for low casualties, not strategic success. Sure, it prevents one failure mode, the pointless meat grinder (though, note, that Russia's military losses at least over the 1st year were a net gain for the country), but it clearly doesn't prevent other failure modes, like gamble the whole American relationship on a harebrained scheme to overthrow the government of Iran.
On 2, you say it a lot but I don’t see any real evidence that our aversion to casualties is what is holding us back.
For fighting Iran (and Yemen fwiw) this issue is completely irrelevant. Even if we were willing to kamikaze our entire ground army on an Anabasis-style ground invasion to conquer Tehran the logistics and geography make it impossible. The only possible way to fight on these fronts is via air and intelligence (or other long-distance methods like Steinitz and Liberman’s idea to build our own missile corp).
In Lebanon and Gaza it is relevant, but what amazingly effective tactical options would be unlocked that would change the result of the war, if only we were willing to take more casualties?
If the claim is that using ground forces would kill fewer civilians, there’s good reason to think that’s not true. As one example, pretty much the only time in the Gaza war that Israel sent significant ground troops into a fully populated area was operation Arnon. The result was much bloodier for the civilians than the average day of airstrikes. Repeating that type of thing more often would in all likelihood kill more civilians, not less.
And from an optics perspective, civilian deaths from ground forces are probably worse than those from airstrikes. There is a reason Hind Rajab is so famous.
Maybe there's an argument that it would be cheaper on a monetary level in the short term since bombs are expensive. But even setting aside moral issues, the full financial cost over time of losing lots of soldiers is likely higher.
Hind Rijab was also killed because of our extreme casualty aversion. It isn’t just the unwillingness to deploy ground troops, it’s letting them just shoot anything that moves (including Israeli hostages).
As for tactics we could use but don’t, I think you’re being Israeli (i.e. obtuse) now. We’ve spent 3 years just blowing up aimlessly blowing up everything in sight. Who else does this?
Maybe I am obtuse, but I think that even with better rules of engagement and discipline a lot of civilians would still die if we used more ground troops. It is harder to be precise in those situations, and the resulting videos would be a lot worse. But I am only half Israeli so maybe I'll get it if you explain to me specifically what benefit getting more soldiers killed is supposed to have.
Since you brought up what other people are doing, lets look at al-Jolani, who is apparently more effective as a local enforcer according to your quote from Trump (do you agree?). His guys throw people off of balconies and mow them down on their knees in city squares after humiliating them in various ways. I'd prefer to blow up empty buildings tbh.
Al-Jolani's tactics would be a big step up and clearly would lead to far fewer civilian deaths too. Syrians know that there are costs to opposing him, and benefits to cooperating. Of course, when he let his bedouin militias get out of hand that wrecked everything, just as Israel does with its airstrikes.
It's easier for non-combatants to avoid ground troops than air strikes. Civilians would still die in the fighting but 4:1 civilian to militant ratios, if we're being generous, the IDF is currently carrying out would not be happening.
This assumes that the civilians have somewhere to go to avoid the ground troops.
If we did your idea of clearing every.single.structure in Gaza without evacuating the civilians first, then it seems like at some point every.single.civilian would necessarily be caught up in an encounter with the army. The civilian casualties would therefore be very high. Even if good training and tactics could bring down the ratio from 1:4 to 1:3 (the ratio from the first battle of Fallujah when the city was more inhabited) or even 1:2, it’s a marginal difference in the scheme of things and not a gamechanger on the strategic level. The raw numbers would also be higher because we would operate in all of the territory instead of only 60 or 65%.
Evacuating the civilians first would be better, but there wasn’t a great option for doing that. Egypt was suggested at the beginning, they threatened to cancel the peace treaty. The only available option would be to evacuate them to some sterile humanitarian zone/refugee camp in Israeli-controlled areas. That would lead to international screeching that we were running concentration camps and again would leave the army in charge of managing 2 million refugees.
There’s a strong argument that we should have bit the bullet and done the second option, a lot of right-wing military critics from outside the top brass were pushing for it from the beginning. Other people (including Maskil the first time I ever argued with him) thought evacuating the civilians wasn’t feasible. But in any case this is irrelevant to the original point. Evacuating the civilians first would have also prevented Israeli casualties, not increased them, because it is easier to operate when the civilians aren’t running around underfoot. It actually makes it easier to use airstrikes and heavy weapons more effectively if you don’t have to worry about hitting civilians.
I think the bigger factor here is that the Israeli political dynamic made it impossible for Israel to either occupy and govern Gaza or hand off each part of Gaza they occupied to the PA for them to govern. They were left with "destroy a subterranean enemy as much as possible from the air" as the only option and the results are what you get.
If the IDF were willing to flood the tunnel system divide the strip into grids and clear ever. single. structure. grid by grid Hamas as a militant group would be destroyed in maybe a month. Fallujah and Mosul are good models for what that would look like. But Netanyahu has been to risk averse to try real urban counter insurgency. Clearing irregulars from a confined urban environment is not that hard, even Arab armies can do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_September
No one was unwilling to flood the tunnels, it was tried but just isn’t technically feasible. In any case isn’t relevant to the discussion of the benefits of taking higher casualties. The comparables you mention aren’t great either way because those were situations where the irregulars were not as well armed, not as entrenched and the civilian population was mostly evacuated.
I pretty much agree with you that it would have been better to conquer the Gaza strip thoroughly one zone at a time. I disagree that the reason is because of casualty sensitivity, that was at most a minor factor in the decision. The more critical reasons why this wasn’t done in the last third of Gaza was because of 1. Concern for the hostages (here we really are probably overly sensitive) and 2. If the strip was successfully cleared as you suggest, the army is left controlling and responsible for the Palestinian population. The generals, probably sensibly, wanted no part of that and found every reason not to do it. The government ultimately went with their approach despite a lot of talk to the contrary. Maybe it was a mistake but that was the reason.
Fair enough. If we’re going in that direction I understand that Uganda has offered to send troops for free.
I don’t know, I think if he somehow attacked Gaza it would be an absolute bloodbath. His regular army also committed plenty of atrocities without the crazy conditions of tunnels and whatnot.
But I’m still missing the mechanism where we turn into a superpower if we were willing to lose more of our soldiers. I could hear it if the argument is that we would be in a better position if we killed fewer hamas people and destroyed less of their infrastructure but also killed fewer civilians and destroying fewer buildings. But this could be accomplished by just not attacking as much. I don’t see specifically what we could have gained by sacrificing more troops.
Should say that I actually don’t really think we can be a full fledged regional superpower, but that’s just because we are too small.
There's some academic literature on this that I'm looking at now, but here my rule of any comment that takes more than 10 minutes to write becomes an article, so you'll have to wait.
I think Israel should hire mercenary armies.
The guy on the left is Ben Gvir’s aide.
That's crazy.
Perversely finding this out somehow made me less pessimistic. But this may be stupid of me.
I see that.
I'm not sure if you're framing Bibi losing the election as a good or bad thing, but if his handling of the Gaza war and related adventures has been such a disaster then that should probably be a whitepill? I thought the point to esoteric Bibi-ism was to just lock in the post-Oslo status quo, which he clearly didn't stick to, on top of not providing any coherent answer for who was supposed to administer the Gaza Strip and pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire of Zoomer-Israeli relations.
(I'm kinda rooting for the world to switch to nuclear more than renewables, FWIW, but I guess that's fairly tangential.)
It's a good thing in the sense that the new government will stop actively destroying the country, but I believe that the Right needs another 3 years to make it clear to the general population that they have failed.
"These Israeli chauvinists are so stupid and their ignorance will kill us all. Now here's a deeply uninformed paragraph about how Iran is a failed state"
Separatist movements in Iran are a joke.
What do you think about Matan Yaffe? I’ve watched his English captioned videos for a while now.
Not sure I see the connection between being a super power or regional power and being casualty averse. The United States is unquestionably a super power and they're even more casualty averse than Israel.
Obviously, the casualty aversion of the US is a major handicap. If they were willing to take the same kind of casualties as in Vietnam, let alone WW2, this would have been a massive victory.
I guess it's a handicap but if the US isn't a superpower, who is?
I think perhaps we are in an era where there's not a great deal of delta in being a military power instead of just a stam power. Countries that try to punch above their economic weight by focussing on the military, like Russia, just aren't doing so well (and they aren't even casualty averse). The future probably belongs to whoever can master robot warfare.
You mentioned that Iran's economy being shit is a silver lining.
Do you think that the removal of sanctions, unfreezing of assets, reconstruction fund, and potentially taxing shipping through the strait of Hormuz will be able to rescue Iran's economy?
Personally, I am not sure, as the MOU seems deliberately vague about some of these points and I feel like it depends on how far the Americans want to stretch their interpretation of its wording.
If they are really going to be able to toll shipping, then this is an incredible disaster. I just think that can't happen, after all, how is the US allowed to sign off on behalf of the rest of the world in Iran engaging in illegal piracy?
The question is who's going to stop them. Gulf states will already be paying them bribes and the US clearly lacks any will to do so, and the Europeans are even less willing. China will probably get a waiver.
The rest of the world, save for China, doesn't matter much, though.
And China can live with a toll / won't get entangled in what is to them an extra-regional mess.
The video had no subtitles and i don't speak Hebrew, what are they saying?
I think you can turn on subtitles on any video.
Who are you gonna vote for in the next election?
I don't vote.
It's only partially germaine to the overall convo here (which I by and large agree with, despite being *mostly* in the "we should evilmaxx more" camp), but that Trump quote is just astounding. The man truly is demented.
What do you expect him to do? Crash the economy whilst the strait remains closed anyway? US and Israel took some hard swings, failed, time to cut their losses.
You seem to say the war arose from a military delusion. I think you are forgetting the rhetoric from the beginning of the war, where both US and Israel strongly implied that there was a high chance that Iran’s government would be toppled. Fox had Reza Pahlavi on and called him “Crown Prince.” It seems the delusion came from pundits and diasporoids who pushed policymakers to believe, without evidence, the Iranian regime is much more unpopular than it actually is. The average internet Iranian grew up in North Tehran and they think they know their country. Yet the continuous high rate of cousin marriage, the reliable surveys and polls showing low support for protests, and low IQ of the country do not change the prior that Iran is nearly as conservative as its stupid neighbors.
It doesn’t matter how many basij bases the IDF bombs. 10 years, and probably 20 years from now, the IRGC will still be intact.
I basically agree that shi'ism is the only thing that can hold the country together, and probably we should have spent the past 30 years boosting relatively moderate shi'ites instead of cucking them out and deluding ourselves with Iranian emigre cope.
Yes, and for this reason, supporting Ahmadinejad was the only smart part of the Iran plan. He seems to be only leader with populist appeal to the support base of the regime. He would obviously turn on the US and Israel eventually, like he did in real life, but all that matters is that he could dismantle the Islamic Republic beforehand.
Perhaps, on a more long term level it would probably be a good idea to fund Sunni missionaries to go there. Moving them from Birmingham and Berlin to Iran is a massive Pareto win for the world.
On what are you basing your statement about surveys and polls indicating low support for the protests?
I don't have time to write a long thing right now but there's a lot of evidence (at least pre-war) for secularization of the population (e.g. most mosques closing due to low attendance), government unpopularity, and the protests happened in many cities and not just in Tehran and Shiraz like in 2009. The problem is that it's not like when your approval rating drops below 25% "the people" overthrow you. There has to be a mechanism and none existed.
https://cissm.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2025-01/Iran%202023%20and%20March%202024%20--%20Raisi%20era%20domestic%20issues%20%283%29.pdf
This same survey shows that millions participated in the protests, as we know from real life, but for every participant, there were only 3-4 non participating supporters.
There is no doubt that Iran is secularizing, but the extent has been exaggerated. Mosque attendance is falling in every Muslim-majority country. The only source for the majority of mosques closing in the country is one senior cleric as part of anti-youth propaganda. Iran has rapidly urbanized and it’s not surprising that rural areas, where the majority of mosques are, will have them close en masse.
Gallup World, University of Maryland, and Stasis Center polling all found independently that Raisi had majority approval at some point of his presidency.
A lot of effort has been expended on falsifying these traditional surveys, but the evidence is weak. Emigres even created an alternate survey, called GAMAAN, which surveys users of a single VPN with 3 million Iranian users, and extends it to the entire country. (Unsurprisingly, it underestimates election turnout by half). The traditional surveys can predict election turnout and results. They also show that Iran is becoming less religious and that mosque attendance is low.
I have yet to see any concrete evidence backing the most outlandish claims by pundits (like that Iran is 36% Shi’ite Muslim), which is why I think they are out of touch.
These stupid GAMAAN surveys can be used for all sorts of things. Ubersoy used it to prove Iran was tolerant because of its skyrocketing Christian population and massive religious diversity.