Nurse! nurse!, Elucidator is on the loose!
Good to see you again.
If he runs over my toe and then aims a katyusha rocket in my face, you better believe I’m going to disembowel the motherfucker.
Wanna bet?
What are the stakes? In the real situation at hand, as opposed to the bad analogy you propsoed, the stakes are survival.
Well, yeah, I’ll admit my analogy is exaggerated if you will admit yours is perfectly ridiculous!
Are you seriously suggesting that Israel is under dire threat from fucking Lebanon? They couldn’t take Belgium in a fair fight! And does it not strike you as obvious that an air assault on a civilian neighborhood in Beirut is unlikely to directly affect a missile emplacement in southern Lebanon? They’re quite far away from each other, you know. You could look it up.
(My “bet” post was a mild jape regarding your habit of offering bets, no offense was intended. That said, if its a scrap you want, I’m your huckleberry.)
[hijack]
elucidator! My cromulent cupcake! My huckleberry pie, brought back from seeming oblivion! Tra-lee, tra-la!
[/hijack]
“First, 'twas the Hatfields; and first, 'twas the McCoys; or maybe 'twas the other way about.”
Yes, because killing 51 Israeli civilians is just like having your toe run over, as is having several hundred rockets fired into your cities, and having your borders breached, your army attacked, and your soldiers kidnapped. Hell, that’s nothing! Why even get upset?
Just so everyone understands the bias here, imagine what the anti-Israel folks would be saying if Israel used a dispute with, say, Egypt to send a commando team in to capture a few Egyptian soldiers as bargaining chips, and as soon as Egypt began to make threatening noises, started firing rockets loaded with ball bearings into Egyptian cities. Do you think there would be that many cries for ‘restraint’ if Egypt responded in pretty much any way?
Oh, and just for fun, let’s pretend that Israeli citizens hated Egyptians, their schoolboks were full of racist nonsense about Egyptians, and the Israelis made routine speeches in which they claimed that they would never rest until every Egyptian was dead or driven out of the Middle East, that all non-Jews were pigs and monkeys and infidels, and that eventually Judaism would spread throughout the world and people would live by its laws - or else.
Oh, and let’s also say that Israel had attacked Egypt numerous times in the past, and that America was providing the rockets and American politicians were going on the air routinely egging Israel on and talking about the ‘Egyptian menace’.
Where do you think world opinion would fall in that little conflict?
I’m either going to lose sleep trying to get that image out of my head, or thank Og for a new trove of whackoff material. Haven’t decided. 
To be fair, Israel is not under dire threat from anybody in the sense that nobody who hates Israel stands a serious chance of destroying it as a state. OTOH, losing even a few of your citizens to terrorism every year can be mildly annoying even when you’ve had decades to get used to it.
Splitter! Splitter!
“Why did Kennedy order a blockade of Cuba? I mean, come on! It’s CUBA. They couldn’t whip Venezuela in a fight. So what’s it gonna hurt to have a few missiles there?”
This isn’t just a fight against Lebanon. Israel is fighting Iran and Syria. Hezbollah is a proxy. Israel IS in a fight for its very survival. It is a tiny country. It is surrounded by huge countries that would like nothing more than to see it destroyed. Its biggest threat is a huge, powerful, fanatical regime that has declared on numerous occasions that its goal is the destruction of Israel, and which is frantically working to build a nuclear arsenal. And the combatants in this particular battle of the larger conflict are firmly in Iran’s camp.
Any analysis of this situation that doesn’t take into account the wider conflict and the true actors at play here is completely irrelevant. Israel is sending a message to Lebanon that it will NOT tolerate the Lebanese looking the other way while a powerful enemy of Israel’s builds an army inside the country.
Yes, showing your human side. They’re wreaking wanton civilian destruction because of mild annoyance. Damn, they should be numb to it by now.
[QUOTE=Sam StoneThis isn’t just a fight against Lebanon. Israel is fighting Iran and Syria. Hezbollah is a proxy. [/QUOTE]
They may be a proxy but also are they not citizens of Lebanon, represented in government? Are they not comprised of the fathers and sons of Lebanese mothers? If so, Israel is justified to be at war with Lebanon, not just a proxy army.
Recalibrate irony meter. Repeat as needed. In your case, that should keep you too busy to post for at least a week.
Hezbollah, which Israel is clearly at war with, is comprised largely of Lebanese civilians. It operates with the blessing of the Lebanese government, received government aid to help it arm itself. It was elected into the government by the people of Lebanon. When Israel demanded that Lebanon’s army do something about Hezbollah, it refused. The U.N. passed a Security Council resolution demanding that Hezbollah be disarmed, which was ignored. 1300 feckless U.N. peacekeepers did absolutely nothing.
If the rules of engagement are, “Hey, it’s not the fault of the people of Lebanon, so no matter what Hezbollah does to you, your response must be mild and limited”, then that’s just an invitation for more of the same. You allow those to become the de facto rules of conflict, and Israel’s enemies suddenly have a huge tactical advantage.
Let me add that we killed millions of innocent people in WWII. The U.S. and Canada were never under the kind of threat to our existence that Israel is. Japan wanted its ‘sphere of influence’ to extend over most of Asia. Hitler wanted Lebensraum in Europe. There was never any danger of North America being invaded across the ocean. And yet, we obliterated, firebombed, and nuked millions of innocent civilians to win.
As usual, Israel is being held to a different standard than everyone else.
Meaning Israel will have to maintain a buffer zone on her own? I can’t see any other force being remotely effective, can you?
Tsk, Sam, you’ve gotten sloppy in my absence. Cuban Missile Crisis? Unless I’m very much mistaken, didn’t that involve actual honest to Gosh nuclear weapons? And didn’t JFK threaten invasion without actually commiting invasion? (Was he bluffing? Dunno. Don’t think so. I’m just glad he had so recently read The Guns of August. Think GeeDub has? Recently? Ever?..)
So I’ve heard, from sources I have reason to regard as unreliable. Quite.
If they want to send a message, they have diplomats for that sort of thing. If they want to increase the likelihood of a horrendous conflagration, they should proceed as they are. In the case of war, blood and horror are the medium and the message.
Yes, but the principles are remarkably similar. The U.S. ALREADY had nuclear missiles aimed at it. What it could not tolerate was missiles that were right off the coast, and a neighboring country essentially being turned into a proxy of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t just about nukes - it was about sending a message that the Soviet sphere of influence would not be allowed to extend to the U.S.'s borders. For that matter, that’s what the proxy wars in Central and South America were all about in the 70’s and 80’s, too.
And let’s not forget Britain starting a war over the Falkland Islands. Do you think that was just about that far-away piece of rock? No. It was about sending a message to the world that Britain’s borders WILL be defended. It is the duty of a sovereign state to do so.
Yes, because diplomacy against terrorists and fanatics has a tremendous record of success. And Israel has never tried diplomacy before.
But now if there was a U.N. resolution calling for the disarming of Hezbollah, that would solve everything!