Excellent point William. To your point; splitting Germany into four, and dropped a nuke on the Japanese worked out well for all. There couldn't have been better results.
So maybe Israel's slaughtering 35,000 mostly women and children in order to get at 25,000 Hamas military . . . might be worth it. Alas, so far, Israel has killed only 6,0…
Excellent point William. To your point; splitting Germany into four, and dropped a nuke on the Japanese worked out well for all. There couldn't have been better results.
So maybe Israel's slaughtering 35,000 mostly women and children in order to get at 25,000 Hamas military . . . might be worth it. Alas, so far, Israel has killed only 6,000 Hamas soldiers. So doing some math . . . they need to kill 110,000 more women and children to get at the 19,000 Hamas soldiers that remain. Hopefully they don't need to go that far and the Hamas soldiers will give up. 145,000 divided by the population of Palestine is less than 3%. That's about the same ratio as Lincoln caused to die in his Civil War. And everyone (but me) thinks that was worth doing.
I am rooting for revenge to be a bad thing. If it was bad, it would be a good reason to keep revenge away from government. But if revenge is a good thing and the feud nature of revenge ends up wiping out the inferior genes, then by all means it should be conducted by the government.
It is and has been the declared aim of Hamas to render the land of Israel "Juden rein" and, to that end, to kill as many Israeli Jews as possible. An opinion poll indicates that a solid majority of Gaza residents approve that objective and, more specifically, approve the October 7 massacre. Some 300 Israeli civilians taken hostage in October have not been returned, and their chances of survival, if not freed by the IDF, are slim. Hamas has deliberately sited key military installations in and under schools, hospitals, and civilian population centers in order to maximize collateral civilian casualties from any military attack against its forces and consequently galvanize condemnation of such attacks and demands for cessation. If the IDF stops short of rooting out Hamas, however, past experience abundantly indicates that it will resume its ruthless war of attrition. In light of this, I think the Israeli government has ample justification for continuing the current offensive, despite the mounting toll of Gazan civilian casualties (which may not be as numerous as Gazan authorities and fellow-travelling NGOs would have us believe).
But that's not to say that all-out war is an appropriate or justified response to every provocation. World War I was a disastrous debacle, for instance, brought about by mulish adherence to ill-considered treaty obligations. US military intervention in Vietnam and Iraq accomplished nothing that justified the consequent cost in lives and treasure. And it's not clear to me that the US has any vital interest at stake that warrants further involvement in the current conflict in Ukraine -- the unacknowledged aim of which, I suspect, in the minds of proponents is simply to maximize Russian casualties, seeing consequent further Ukrainian casualties as an acceptable tradeoff.
PS I started a SubStack site some weeks ago and have a grand total of 1 subscriber and 9 followers to date. Here's a link to my maiden post in that space, which has generated 0 replies so far. https://substack.com/chat/2308350
Feel free to drop by and weigh in. Somebody? Anybody??
Excellent point William. To your point; splitting Germany into four, and dropped a nuke on the Japanese worked out well for all. There couldn't have been better results.
So maybe Israel's slaughtering 35,000 mostly women and children in order to get at 25,000 Hamas military . . . might be worth it. Alas, so far, Israel has killed only 6,000 Hamas soldiers. So doing some math . . . they need to kill 110,000 more women and children to get at the 19,000 Hamas soldiers that remain. Hopefully they don't need to go that far and the Hamas soldiers will give up. 145,000 divided by the population of Palestine is less than 3%. That's about the same ratio as Lincoln caused to die in his Civil War. And everyone (but me) thinks that was worth doing.
I am rooting for revenge to be a bad thing. If it was bad, it would be a good reason to keep revenge away from government. But if revenge is a good thing and the feud nature of revenge ends up wiping out the inferior genes, then by all means it should be conducted by the government.
It is and has been the declared aim of Hamas to render the land of Israel "Juden rein" and, to that end, to kill as many Israeli Jews as possible. An opinion poll indicates that a solid majority of Gaza residents approve that objective and, more specifically, approve the October 7 massacre. Some 300 Israeli civilians taken hostage in October have not been returned, and their chances of survival, if not freed by the IDF, are slim. Hamas has deliberately sited key military installations in and under schools, hospitals, and civilian population centers in order to maximize collateral civilian casualties from any military attack against its forces and consequently galvanize condemnation of such attacks and demands for cessation. If the IDF stops short of rooting out Hamas, however, past experience abundantly indicates that it will resume its ruthless war of attrition. In light of this, I think the Israeli government has ample justification for continuing the current offensive, despite the mounting toll of Gazan civilian casualties (which may not be as numerous as Gazan authorities and fellow-travelling NGOs would have us believe).
But that's not to say that all-out war is an appropriate or justified response to every provocation. World War I was a disastrous debacle, for instance, brought about by mulish adherence to ill-considered treaty obligations. US military intervention in Vietnam and Iraq accomplished nothing that justified the consequent cost in lives and treasure. And it's not clear to me that the US has any vital interest at stake that warrants further involvement in the current conflict in Ukraine -- the unacknowledged aim of which, I suspect, in the minds of proponents is simply to maximize Russian casualties, seeing consequent further Ukrainian casualties as an acceptable tradeoff.
PS I started a SubStack site some weeks ago and have a grand total of 1 subscriber and 9 followers to date. Here's a link to my maiden post in that space, which has generated 0 replies so far. https://substack.com/chat/2308350
Feel free to drop by and weigh in. Somebody? Anybody??