These are adults or military fighting age, not babies, 3 year olds, 5 year olds, 8 year olds, you get my point. Do you not know what a child is???
Kobal:
And WP is used because it’s simply dramatically more effective than other smoke rounds.
For instance, an hexachloroethane round provides cover/concealment/marking for roughly 2/3 of a minute to a minute and a half.
Even given maximum effectiveness of HC, WP at its minimum effectiveness lasts more than three times as long.
Given maximum effectiveness of WP versus maximum of HC, WP is ten times as long lasting.
Given minimum of HC versus minimum of WP, WP is over seven times as effective.
Give minimum effectiveness of HC versus maximum effectiveness of WP, WP last more than 22 times as long.
Yes. I know it’s allowed. I said so. However, the ethical problem comes into play when (or rather, if) the WP is used for its secondary effects rather than the primary. Just because it’s legal, doesn’t make it right. I don’t know for fact that it is, mind you - I merely said it wouldn’t surprise me one bit, because all militaries since the invention of the club have embraced the loathsome “end justifies means” philosophy, and found new and interesting uses for every tool.
And for the record, I don’t think efficiency is a good enough reason to keep on using it in this case. Israel is a wealthy nation. The IDF’s supply lines are about as stretched out as my pubes. So what if whatever safe alternative doesn’t smoke as long ? Fire another safe shell. End of problem.
I also don’t really see what use smoke is in their operations in the first place - they’re not exactly charging the machine gun nest up the hill under sniper fire, are they ? :dubious: If anything, with their trained and coordinated soldiers, armor support, arty support and air support, fighting against isolated shooters and looking out for booby traps, visibility works entirely *for *them.
But this may be fodder for another thread. As to this one, I really don’t think Holocaust comparisons are a smart idea, if only because, as this thread is proof, it only helps the pro-Israeli side. Israel’s actions certainly are questionable, some of 'em despicable even, and many of those pictures are downright shocking (the little girls painting messages on bombs ?! Seriously, WTF ?), but the Shoah it ain’t.
What does it matter anyway ? Does persecution have to rate high on the Hitler scale before we are horrified by or revolted against it now ?
Well, you did say that the military claimed that they were. Not simply that they were.
Against military targets, I see nothing wrong at all. Targeted against civilians, even rocks and stick would be a war crime. (Yes yes, ethics not legality, I’m getting to that). Even under the 1949 Geneva Protocol
Which calls for nations to:
I would contend that is not just legal, but moral as well.
Are we agreed on that point?
If so, then even if the IDF used WP deliberately against Hamas/Islamic Jihad/etc positions, the question would remain as to whether or not there were other means and methods of attack which would have created a lower risk for civilians. Without knowing more about the targets hit and the weapon systems which were available to hit those targets at those specific times, we can’t really know that. Imagine, for instance, Hamas was launching rockets from the roof of a building. Firing an HE round would most likely destroy the building, send shrapnel/debris flying and kill some if not all of the inhabitants in the building. WP, on the other hand, might burn the rocket launcher crew off of their position and while it might ignite the roof, any people inside would most likely have time to flee with their lives.
I’m not saying this is what always happened or for that matter, that this ever happened. I’m just saying that we need more facts before we can determine if the action was one which would have minimized civilian casualties or not.
I’d also note that from what I read during the conflict (and I may have missed something) there were estimated to be roughly a couple dozen WP burn victims. As Israel said it used roughly 20 WP shells against military targets in civilian areas, one or two bystanders effected per strike seems very low to me. I think that we need to know what comparable casualties would most likely have been with other weapons, in order to make an informed judgment.
Except, you can’t just keep lobbing shells once you’ve committed infantry. With a WP shell, you might have upwards of 15 minutes during which time your troops can deploy, move through sniper infested chokepoints, whatever. With HC shells, they have a maximum of 90 seconds. And just firing new shells doesn’t work if your troops are already in the target zone. You don’t, after all, want to hit your own soldiers with shells even if they’re not HE shells. The simple amount of kinetic energy can fuck a person up. Not to mention that the smoke from one round can dissipate/be blown by the wind, leaving your troops vulnerable to sniping before a new shell lands on the field.
It’s urban combat, the most brutal and destructive form of combat known to mankind. Snipers can be behind any and every window. Soldiers with RPG’s can post up on rooftops and rain death down on troops who are tightly packed with no route of escape. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that WP smoke can obscure IR tracking, making anti-tank missiles virtually useless.
Well, not all shooters were isolated, for whatever that’s worth.
Additionally, let’s say that you, personally, had to cross a wide open space and you knew that there were snipers somewhere in position to shoot you. You knew that they were in one of several buildings, but you didn’t know which one. Given that situation, would it be better to drop a smoke round so that you could advance under concealment and storm the buildings, advance with no concealment, or order in strikes to level one (or all) of the suspected sniper’s nests?
Would you have felt the same during the second world war if a teen girl had painted “fuck you Hirohito” on a US bomb?
What, exactly, is the outrage of a girl painting a message on a bomb dedicated for Hezbollah?
Additionally, IIRC, the girls writing on the shells lived in Kiryat Shmona. Hezbollah fired, against IIRC, roughly 1000 rockets at that town. Why, then, is it at all wrong for them to wish that the bombs found their mark and blew Hezbollah members into tiny little bits?
The prohibition against gas attacks, incendiary attacks, torture and the wide gamut of “shit too downright repugnant to use, seriously” as defined by the various conventions applies to soldiers as well as civilians. If not, there would be no clause restricting such and such weapon, merely a general one condemning use of weapons on civilians.
If they indeed are raining smoke shells on Hamas positions in order to burn or poison them, that is against both letter and spirit of the agreements. Also, if you know of a way to positively insure an artillery shell designed to scatter burning crap over a large area won’t endanger civvies and only hit the bad guys, you should patent it.
Well, if they said so, it must be true ;). Also, while “a couple dozen victims seems acceptable”, it ain’t if you’re one of the dozen. Or your child is. Especially if they could have been avoided by, say, sending soldiers with rifles. Who can aim.
Airburst ? Smoke rounds from a tank ? Other tactics not involving smoke ? I’m not a military expert, I’ll grant you that, but again, given the inventivity of war chemists, inventors and tacticians, it doesn’t seem to me that “WP arty is the only option” is a sensible position.
Which is why soldiers have smoke *grenades *that can fog up an entire street in short order, long enough that one can haul ass across. And again, visibility is good in urban combat - if you can’t see the sniper or RPG guy, he gets to shoot at you (who are tighly packed with no route of escape) at random, while you don’t know where he is. Smoke also makes it kinda hard to see the booby traps. As to the IR missiles, :rolleyes:. The Palestinians have rocks, unguided homemade rockets and IUDs. They’re not the Reds, they’re not even Saddam’s troops, and that’s an unkind thing to say :p.
Are you serious ? You don’t see how utterly fucked up that is ? You really, really don’t ?
The Israelis are not as bad as the Nazis. But pointing out that they don’t hang people who shelter the criminals is beside the point. The Israelis are using many of the deplored methods that the Nazis used in dilution of severity. Moral blame will attach to the United States as long as we financially support these actions and as long as we give propaganda cover. There are individual terrorists who are blameworthy in the extreme, but their criminal conduct does not attach to a whole people. The pictures are propaganda making a point. Palestinians are dying and starving and the Israelis are in part responsible. And so are we.
Give proof of the starvation rate among Palestinians.
Kobol:
In the interest of fighting ignorance, I need to debunk one of your earlier claims that I missed. WP fumes are not highly toxic. They are, if anything, rather mildly toxic. Troops are expected to run through the smoke, after all.
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Yes, but as we’ve already agreed WP is not an incendiary weapon. The point I was making was that targeted against civilians, any attack is a war crime. But as long as the weapon is legal and certain provision are obeyed, military targets are fair game.
This is glaringly false, as the treaty I’ve already cited specifically allows for actual incendiary weapons, as opposed to WP, to be used against military targets.
Your snark is unappreciated and ignorant. Artillery shells are fused depending on the parameters of their use. You can fit a shell with a proximity fuse, and they’ve been around since World War II. You can, specifically, set it to explode close to the ground (thus creating a smaller area of effect). You can even fit them with an impact fuse, which scatters it along the ground rather than via air burst.
You’ll also note that nowhere did I talk about it “only hitting the bad guys”, so don’t pitch straw and pretend you’re engaging my claims.
This is a repeated claim, and every time it’s made I have to marvel. Is your claim, honestly and truly, that sending in ground troops to fight house to house in order to get to a position within a dense urban environment is less damaging than to send in one precisely targeted strike? Can you provide any example of a fight in a dense urban environment against an enemy which wears no identifying markers or uniform, where the casualty count was significantly better than 1:1 civilians to military targets?
Air busting rounds deploy their payload higher over the battlefield than those fused to explode close to the ground. Higher deployment equals a larger deployment area. Putting tanks into city streets is not a viable tactic until you’ve cleaned out/suppressed/negated anti-tank crews, as no tank can keep itself continually shrouded in smoke. I’m not sure what ‘other tactics’ you’d advise, either.
The kind of smoke grenades which provide effective cover are WP smoke grenades.
Rolleyes right back at you.
So you can’t explain why you think that it’s a bad thing?
Nothing wrong. It’s perfectly natural to encourage little girls to write messages on bombs. What else could children possibly do with their time? :rolleyes:
Teens are not “little girls”. And do you have proof that they were ‘encouraged’ rather than wanting, of their own free will, to extend the ol’ single digit salute to Hezbollah?
And, you’re still unable to explain what exactly is wrong with girls who’ve been hiding in bomb shelters, wishing for the people who’ve been bombarding their homes to be bombed, themselves. Evidently what they should have been “doing with their time” is sitting scared in bomb shelters and not being pissed off and wanting the people who were targeting civilians to be dealt with.
Is it really your contention that teenagers (or is it just girls?) are doing something wrong when they hope for a military solution to terrorism? What metric do you use to determine this?
Does your scorn extend, say, to Anne Frank, who was glad to hear about military victories against the Nazis? Why or why not.
You’ve agreed alone. I’m of the opinion that it’s nominally a smoke device that can absolutely and efficiently be used as an incendiary weapon.
I don’t care what kind of genius strike planner you are, working with guys who could shell the wings off a fly, you can’t foresee where every burning strip will land, nor guarantee none will land on innocents. Or is hitting a few civilians per strike acceptable, then ?
One should think the rifles, RPG launchers and mortars would be dead giveaways.
And ? Should smoke be needed, surely even more smoke can’t be a problem ?
Incorrect. Putting tanks alone is not a good idea. Tanks covered by infantry, on the other hand, isn’t preposterous.
One small grenade thrown at a defined point, with the WP burn reaction occuring mostly inside the shell. Hundreds of open-air burning strips covering a large area , falling pretty much at random and possibly fired offensively rather than for cover purposes. See the difference ?
Actually, I’m rather flabbergasted that I should even need to explain it. If you need someone to tell you why telling children wishing death upon their neighbours is A-OK if it’s vengeance and teaching them to doodle on fucking bombs is sick, I can’t help you.
Heh.
Also nice to see how you acknowledged that you’d made a mistake on your claim that the Palestinians didn’t have anti-tank weaponry, retracted it as inaccurate and then analyzed what caused you to make a statement based on ignorance. Or your claim that WP fumes are highly toxic. And so on, and so on.
Oh, wait, no you didn’t.
You just kept on trucking.
Definitely not going to play this game.
Appeal to emotion.
Always a quality fallacy.
No, you can’t ‘help me’ with such a dishonest gloss.
Her “neighbors”? She was wishing that the people who’d been lobbing rockets at her village would be stopped. “Vengeance” does not include trying to get someone to stop rocketing you, while they are rocketing you.
Evidently you simply can’t argue for why a teenager is wrong for wishing that the people trying to kill her would be stopped via military force.
While we’re at it:
How awful.
Well, at least she didn’t write that down.
Oh…wait.
Well, at least she didn’t write it own a missile. That would’ve been just horrible!
For the record, I’ve fired smoke shell from mortars and thrown smoke grenades, and up until last week I had no idea that some of them contained phospherous. I always assumed that they were filled with, I dunno, compressed smoke or something.
My point is that I doubt that the IDF really realized at first they were firing WP. After all, they also had actual WP rounds (which they didn’t fire), and those were labed “WP”; the smoke rounds were labeled “Smoke”, so they had to be OK.
sigh Yes, legally, WP shells aren’t considered incendiary weapons. Their usage is allowed for smoke purposes. They can be used *as *incendiary weapons, which is not their primary nor proper role. That’s the whole point. That’s what the IDF is accused of. Is that not clear enough ? Or do you absolutely want to turn this into a Cheney-style wordfuck ?
I was mistaken about WP fumes. You corrected me accurately. What is there to add ?
Then you countered an offhand “Palestinians don’t have IR guided missiles” with an anecdote of a single incident that may or may not have involved one (the article merely states “an antitank missile”. A rocket-propelled grenade or ballistic rocket *is *an antitank missile) and we are assured by IDF people that they “have non negligible amounts of them - just because we can’t prove it or find them when we look for them doesn’t mean they don’t exist”. I didn’t acknowledge it as relevant, and filed it in the same mental bin as WMDs, of which Saddam has copious amounts, trust us on this ; that’s all. In any case, I didn’t see the need to belabor a silly and on the whole completely irrelevant detail. That better spelled out ?
The relevant point (which you did skip) was : OK, if we assume they do need smoke for cover purposes, why would safe airburst shells be absolutely out of the question ?
Cause Palestinians = Nazis is just pristine rethoric ? :rolleyes: I do however apologize for introducing those icky emotions and human sentiments in your hard black/white logic. I guess caring about and at the same time being repulsed by *both *sides is a moral failure. I just suck that way.
Which brings up an amusing question : if Palestinians fired WP shells at IDF soldiers, hoping to burn them up in creatively horrific ways, would that be fine by you ?
This explanation is just so disingenous it is laughable on its face.
I suppose the Palestinians can also claim they have rockets which contain candy and others which contain explosives and they just get them mixed up.
UN investigator sees evidence of war crimes in Gaza
I’m willing to buy that. Now they know. And knowing is half the battle :D. And for the record, just because I’m willing to bash the IDF over this (among many other things), doesn’t mean I absolve Palestinian rockets or whatever crap *they *pull. Like I said in the previous post, I’m angry and revolted by both sides. I’m also sad about the losses and tragedies on both sides.
Falk? 9/11 ‘truther’ falk?
So in addition to seeing evidence that we didn’t get the true story about 9/11, he sees evidence that there have been war crimes… without even observing the actual battlefield.
Yeah, great source.
It would be a defensible tactic that is not prohibited by the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. I would still prefer that they didn’t simply because I want them to fail utterly, but it would be a significant step forward from their usual tactic of targetting civilians with rocket artillery.
Er… no. Claiming ignorance of the chemical process used in a smoke round is not the same thing as treating rockets like weapons and then pretending that you didn’t think they were weapons.
It would deprive him of the opportunity to express anti-semitic sentiments. I suspect he has a quota to meet.
There’s a reason we call them college kids, not college adults. Legal status as an adult able to make his own decisions does not a mature grownup make. You’re being deliberately disingenuous here.