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Israel Must Invade Now
As the decision to invade Gaza drags on, it’s becoming clear that there will be many losers in this war. We hope that Hamas will be the biggest loser by losing the bulk of its people. But it may not be an exaggeration to say the entire Middle East, if not the conditions of the world, may be at stake.
Israel is not going to make its decision freely. They now have to bow to the demands of the United States, which has pressured them not to invade. Apparently, they hope Hamas will release more hostages, and everyone should be satisfied that progress is being made. Meanwhile, we don’t know how many hostages are actually alive. Also, they have had to agree to humanitarian aid delivery, which up to this point is not subject to visual inspection and could include arms; the aid could also end up in the hands of Hamas. Israel is apparently complying with the U.S. requirements, since they have been told the U.S. could withhold essential armaments otherwise.
The United States believes it has the optimal viewpoint on dealing with Hamas, a group that has no intention of cooperating on anything unless it sets the terms. No matter how badly they are wiped out, they will never give up the fight. Never. They will never agree to an unconditional surrender and everything that would entail. But the United States, married to the idea of negotiation, will also never give up. Our leaders don’t realize that they have sacrificed their reputation and credibility on their own failed military actions. I suspect Israel is only going along with their demands because they think they must. The U.S. is also still trying to maintain a balancing act with Iran. It refuses to call out Iran, actually applying sanctions and starving the mullahs. (After all, they might get upset with us.) And there are rumors that the U.S. wants to manage the war jointly with Israel.
Give me a break.
There are no good solutions to this horrible situation. But Israel must prioritize the best options in this war:
It must invade Gaza sooner rather than later, taking out as many tunnels and terrorists as possible, knowing that the hostages may die as will many IDF soldiers.
The consequences will be terrible. The entire world will call them monsters. The U.S. will be furious, but once Israel goes in, I think the U.S. will finally give them the weapons they need; the U.S. doesn’t want to cause another Holocaust. Many people on all sides, including the hostages, will likely die.
But we have to ask the simple question: do we want Israel to survive? The main issue is existential, and all the other arguments and justifications are secondary. Israel jeopardizes its future if it does not destroy Hamas. The longer it waits, the more opportunities Hamas has to re-arm.
Israel must go in now.
Published in Military
Zackly.
If they can’t get more food etc down into the tunnels, they might have more time to set up more traps, but they won’t be “better prepared” in other important ways.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/devil-playground-urban-combat-israel-181255980.html
Except for the thing about food etc.
I’ll repost here. The southern tip of Israel (pink) is nice land separated by nasty hills (yellow) from the rest of Israel. The tip is about 200 miles south of Jerusalem. Jordan and Egypt would not be happy.
I really don’t know the best course of action for Israel, but I’m wary of invading Gaza for Israel’s sake. There are a lot of problems and I can’t see what a victory looks like.
This kind of urban warfare is dicey and could bog down Israel’s military and invite a multi- front war.Whether there’s a moral justification for an invasion isn’t what I’m considering here, just practical issues.
An invasion will inflame the Arab world. I know – they should be inflamed by what Hamas did, but they are not, which itself is disgusting – but other military and precision strike options may be a better course of action.
I like that they are going to hunt-down these monsters one-by-one.
No path to victory, plus risking heavy losses and a two- front war, and risking complete destruction tells me it’s a bad idea. If things go badly, Israel will be nuked by Iran. I can see it happening unfortunately. And would the USA retaliate in kind? Good question ( actually a bad question).
The propaganda war must be won first. The fact that the NYTimes lied so blatantly.. they should bomb them first! – almost serious. One would think the Jewish community could deal with the Grey Lady pretty easily without resorting to violence.
Deal seriously with the lies and propaganda, hunt the perpetrators and their leaders down, shut Gaza down but don’t invade, fortify the surroundings. Be prepared for attacks from the north, and apply as much diplomatic pressure as possible.
How would they shut Gaza down? It’s such an awful situation, Franco.
What they are doing now. I don’t understand the urgency of acting now. Again, I’m not at all sure of the best course of action, but since I can’t see how they win by invasion and see great peril both militarily and on the propaganda front – and I mean western news media. I think the Jewish community left and right should use all their power which is considerable to influence (to just report the truth, for starters ?) But I honestly don’t know. If they do invade I will hope for the best outcome and hope they know what they are doing.
I haven’t followed the Jewish reaction to The NY Times lies, I’ve read some sporadic reports about donors to Universities etc but no calls to unsubscribe to the Times. They’d lose 1/3 of their readers and advertisers I suspect.
I think holding journalists accountable is very important. We are seeing what all this agitprop manifests and it’s not pretty. People could at least do that. Make them retract that hospital story on their front page!
Eating….waste….living under ground. Doesnt seem sustainable.. I hadn’t thought of it until hearing a recent podcast. However I will never be surprised about the Biden administration talking out of both sides of their mouths on this.
This is the comment I recently posted elsewhere, but it fits this thread too:
Good grief. No wonder Blinken and Biden like it.
I honestly don’t care.
In WWII, not all Germans were Nazis, and not all Nazis were SS. We still killed them off pretty indiscriminately until they gave up.
edit: corrected WWI to WWII, and to say “not all nazis were SS” instead of “not all germans were SS”
Good to be reminded. Some things are evil and we must choose sides. The entire spectrum of guilt and innocence is occupied.
My napkin philosophy:
A culture that breeds and tolerates such raw evil cannot be considered valid path for humanity.
No need to proceed further in the discussion.
Another question… they would not have done the same to us? I don’t think trusting these people to control themselves, or each other, after these heinous atrocities were committed is a good idea.
Here’s a concept. The more your culture values human life the more people live and prosper.
( sorry to hitchhike on your comment but I had to get this out thx)
I’m just wondering if everyone isn’t getting their ducks in a row to hit Iran. Which might be complicated by the possibility that they already have a nuke or two. (Which, for no reason at all, I think they do.)
It’s all going to come down to the mullahs at some point. It always did.
Why would they fund Iran, only to hit Iran? Are there two different but equal groups of decision-makers in the US government?
I have read that the Israelis have stated flat out that they will never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. That sort of makes sense since Israel is small enough to be a one bomb country.
Yes, but why would the US fund Iran, and then take part in bombing it? Except perhaps to control Israel and introduce the kayfabe; disguised once again like incompetence — which it just now occurs to me — this is could just as well be why the Afghan withdrawal was so messed up.
On the other hand, someone says that Russia, Iran and China all want the US to get heavily involved in and committed to this war, and they want it too to be long and drawn out.
But — and this may be incredibly naïve, but — why would the US go along with this. If some rando — high profile but ultimately impotent — internet guy can foresee this — and there’s no way that the US can win in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan at the same time — probably can’t win even one front — why would the US sail into the trap?
Added: Maybe that’s why Blinken is so pasty-faced these days.
I don’t know. State Dept. vs DoD. A realist faction prevails. Israel presents evidence of some Iranian plan to EMP the US. I don’t know.
Maybe Iran is close enough for government work, as they say. Funding Hamas’ attack was the casus belli. Time to settle accounts.
Why would we want to control Israel? How could we even attempt such a thing?
Nah, that was just a Bidenesque clusterfarg.
Of course they do, but it’s already long and drawn out. It’s been going on since ’48. Gaza is a local operation and we’re not going to be sending ground-pounders or even the occasional Warthog to linger over Hamas tunnel exits and hamburgerize the rats after the IDF goes in the front door. Probably.
We’re not fighting in Ukraine. We’re giving them materiel and intel and training. If we wanted to really get involved we would win, by MOABing the mother-loving lot of the mobiks, hoping the overpressure detonates enough mines, demolishing the logistical-capacity in a three day campaign, blowing up the Kerch bridge in six points, and then MOABing the front line again for good measure. But that would cause . . . complications.
Likewise Israel: a full-strength attack on Iran, weapons-free, would be short, but also unacceptable to contemporary sensibilities. For good reason. Then again, the “world community” has been tacitly groping towards a hopeful scenario where Iran and Israel are locked in MAD, hoping that it freezes the conflict as it did with the US and the USSR. Conflict would erupt periodically in proxy wars that make everyone tut-tut but are preferable to a nuclear swap-meet. This assumes that the Iranians are rational actors like the Soviets, and prefer comfort and stasis to the ultimate expression of their ideological position. That’s the bet.
We can’t fight a protracted war over Taiwan, but we can backchannel to Xi the certainty that we gave them a hypersonic nuke, so, your call, dude. Or maybe it’s not hypersonic. Maybe it’s just a plain vanilla one, suitable for lighting up your entire invasion force, which, by the way, the whole world will see as “an invasion force,” since Taiwan is sitting there doing nothing but making stuff and minding its own business. Maybe they have three! Who knows. Again, your call. You can count on your broke-ass friends in NK and Russia to support you, but if you want to sell any of your counterfeit IP-stolen stuff elsewhere, you’re not going to get the same reception as you did n 2013 when everyone pretended you were just another business partner in this wonderful End-of-History global market.
Best case scenario: Russia is depleted and exhausted, Iran is no longer a malevolent Islamsist paymaster bent on humbling the Great Satan, and China tends to its knitting while we move manufacturing to the US, Vietnam, and India, and they spend a few Japanesesque lost decades dealing with their own problems to ensure continued rule of the Party. We win, they lose, as the man said.
Uhhh, the “why” part could be almost anything considering it’s FJB supposedly running things; the “how” would be because they depend on the US for a lot of supplies including the Iron Dome missiles etc.
I’ve read something about A-10s being sent there already. But just once, nothing since.
I should have said “temper” Israel.
I’m talking about the current war. Which is a real war. There have been a handful, and this is one.
We’re fighting in Ukraine. We are at war with Russia. If our goal in this war (as stated by President Bidet) is to remove Putin from power, we’re at war.
No, that would just escalate the war.
No, it wouldn’t offend Israel’s sensibilities. They would see it as a tragedy, but an unavoidable one short of suicide.
Not so. Everyone has known for decades that MAD will not work on Iran, that Iran would suffer self-immolation if it would hasten the return of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi.
And that’s why Israel knows it had to strike first or die. Which death the world, I’m sure, consider regrettable.
I don’t think so. Xi knows that the Biden administration would never use nukes first. Neither would any other president. Except, perhaps, Trump may be a wild card in Xi’s eyes.
Yup. You want aid? Come to the aid tent and be prepared for a body search on your way there.
I saw a former IDF terrorism guy last night who said that the Israelis are taking their time so that they can locate every single tunnel and somehow identify who is in each one and what they will be up against. I thought his observation was intriguing, because if I were Hamas knowing that the IDF was preparing so extensively, maybe I’d want to sneak out of the tunnels and find other refuge. And take any hostages that might be alive. What do you think?
The hostage clock is ticking. As I’ve commented before these folks are being wrecked. Everyone knows that there only bad choices from which to select. That breeds hesitation. Maybe the IDF guy is right. Maybe nobody knows nothing. When things start for real events will take on a life of their own.
I don’t know who to believe anymore. It will be a nightmare, no matter what happens.
Doesn’t mean the State Department doesn’t believe it, or pretend to believe it for money.
Grampa Bad Touch did indeed say so. Grampa Bad Touch has also said that he’s a truck driver raised in a Puerto Rican community in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
By us actually being at war.
Incompetence. Internal disagreements. Acknowledgement that funding was a mistake. Who knows for certain? And who says the U. S. would take part? Israel can act on its own.
If Israel decided to take out Iran’s nuclear capability because they see it as an existential threat, do you really think they’d be controlled by the U. S.?
Not a chance. They never ask permission. They just act.