Western meddling in the ME is the cause of much/most of the instability there,
not least Britain's enabling of the settler colonisation of Palestine by European Jews.
Today America is supplying the munitions for Israel to indiscriminately bomb the people earlier displaced by that colonisation. Yes, thanks a bunch America.
I don't buy that. Without western intervention, after eliminating Israel, the arabs would just continue fighting amongst themselves with more Iran and Saudi funded proxy wars.
I'm not sure why/when "anti colonialism" became a free pass to kidnap, rape, and slaughter innocent civilians, but if that's what it means now, I'd prefer it to even be a British colony than whatever the "anti colonialists" want.
What's your solution then? Almost 75% of Jews live in Israel, formerly a British Territory, formerly Ottoman Empire, formerly Mamluks, Mongols, battlefield for Christians and Muslims in the crusades, Arab Muslim rule, Byzantine Christian rule, the Roman Republic, etc.
During much of this unstable history Jews occupied this land and for some of it were killed or enslaved en masse.
There never was a coherent Palestinian state, it was completely understandable for Jews to want their own state here after one of the more successful attempts at genocide orchestrated by Hitler and the third Reich, and many if not most Jews would gladly live in peace alongside Palestinians, while they elect Hamas, who according to their own charter will not stop until Israel is destroyed:
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."
To be clear, it is an absolute tragedy what innocent Palestinians are suffering as a result of the terrorists in charge are doing. Those monsters livestreamed their war crimes and hold innocent Palestinians hostage as human shields. They teach their children to hate Jews and shoot AK-47s. They divert international aid money from their poor to build tunnels.
If Hamas stops there is peace. If Israel stops there is no Israel.
You need to brush up on your facts as well as your timelines and stop parroting Zionist slogans.
Jews formed a very small proportion of the Palestine in the 19th century.
It was also never a "British" territory as such.
Britain simply had the League Of Nations mandate to prepare it for independence, elections etc. The locals were supposed to have a say in which Great Power was given the mandate and they most certainly didn't want it to be Britain, being aware of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Britain, in cahoots with France, brushed all that aside at the time to get the mandate and have the aims of the Balfour Declaration incorporated into the mandate.
Britain's goal was to have a Jewish client state in a sea of Arabs to guard the Suez Canal, the passage to its Indian Empire.
For that reason no elections were ever held as Balfour stated that Britain wasn't going to even pretend to consult the native population, let alone give them a real say, while Churchill was happy to see an inferior civilisation replaced by a superior one.
During the mandate period the proportion of Jews rose from a few percent to almost a third, against the wishes of the indigenous population.
This finally resulted in a uprising by the Arabs in the 1936 to 1939 period which was brutally suppressed by Britain and its Jewish armed militias leaving the Arabs rudderless.
After the war the Jews, being aware of the weakness of the Arabs couldn't wait for the British to depart, to the extent of waging a terrorist war against their former patrons to hurry them up.
Finally the Arabs (Palestinians) having no diaspora to lobby for them in the West were done up like a kipper at the UN.
I contest the use of the word "native" in that regard.
People have immigrated constantly throughout history from place to place. Many palestinians bare the names of their 19th-18th century origins. Last names such as "Al-Masri" (The Egyptian), "Halabi" (Of the city of Haleb in Syria) are very common, to name a few.
The tragedy here, is the continued refusal of the palestinian leadership during the 1940s to accept any partition of the land, which led to a catastrophic result on their part. Had they accepted the 1947 partition plan, Israel and Palestine could have been a free, peaceful countries.
Aah, the Palestinians never existed argument, the successor to the long discredited land without people for a people with land one and just as derisory.
The actual tragedy here is that Western Powers facilitated settler colonisation to create a Jewish State which by definition required the expulsion of the people already living there. Further, the Zionists never had any intention of sticking to the share of Palestine "gifted" to them by the the UN. They had prepared detailed plans for the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine. The only reason they didn't take the West Bank in 1948 was that there, they were up against the British-trained Arab Legion.
Would love to see evidence for such a "plan" for ethnic cleansing.
It would be a rather absurd plan to cleanse a territory in which you are not only a minority, but also surrounded by Arab countries which were pretty adamant about refusing to accept the jewish state.
In practice, what had happened is that the jews accepted the partition plan. The reason the arabs didn't accept it, is because they simply wanted it all to themselves, not because they feared ethnic cleansing.
Using the term "settler" or "Colonializm" to characterize jewish immigration to Israel is racist and antisemite. As I mentioned, Arabs immigrated en-masse to the land of Israel throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, yet you refer to them as natives.
Did you actually read the article?
" ... The issue is subject to much controversy, with some historians asserting that it was defensive, while other historians assert that the plan aimed at the expulsion, sometimes called an ethnic cleansing, on the grounds that this was an integral part of a planned strategy."
"Other historians assert... " is hardly an evidence. More like an opinion. In truth, Israel today has more than 2 million Arab citizens.
I've read books on it.
The 2 million Arabs are the descendants of the 20% of Palestinians who were internally rather than externally displaced, ie the ethnic cleansing was only 80% effective.
The moral equivalence argument is not compelling. Israel is home to most of the world's Jewish population, and is a country which upholds Western values.
"[Israel] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
Compared to Hamas:
"The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"
Do you really wish for Islamic terrorists to succeed in their stated goal of Jewish genocide? If you were a woman or ethnic/religious minority, which country in the Middle East would be more hospitable than Israel?
> While downing the first drone – believed to be launched by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen – [the destroyer USS] Carney saw a ballistic missile land near MV Unity Explorer, a Bahamian-flagged bulk carrier. The destroyer then sailed to the bulk carrier once it put out a distress call. According to an initial account of the incident, several hours later, Carney was evaluating the damage to the carrier when it shot down another drone.
Iranian backed Yemen military forces shooting an Iranian missile into American ships means the USA needs to respond. The question is how proportionally. Last time Iran attacked a US warship they lost half their navy in eight hours.
This time we seem to be trying to de-escalate and not trying to pull them into a larger war.
Not that Israel and Saudi Arabia would hate to see the military capability of Tehran neutralized…
Yeah. It also says that the US showed mercy after hitting the other frigate with a 500lb bomb and allowed it to limp away. They've edited their post- they originally claimed Iran had two ships in their navy.
Why are we in the area to begin with, inserting ourselves into these volatile conflict zones? We keep doing that and then acting surprised when we get caught in the crossfire =/
How much are you personally paying for transportation (powered by petroleum), energy (whether home heating oil, or inexpensive electricity made possible by an energy market whose rock-bottom price depends on petrochemicals being pumped out of the ground), plastic tchotchkes (which depend on petrochemicals being inexpensive)?
If prices become higher in China/Europe it’ll lead to prices being higher by us. It’s a global economy where large impact in China/Europe will impact the states to some extent.
They've already shot down multiple ballistic missiles / drones targeting Israel and is a counter balance so Hezbollah and Syrian militias don't get involved which will create a situation where a much bigger US response will be needed. Deterrence usually reduces conflict more than instigates it.
They are also protecting commercial civilian ships being targeted. China has warships there too and they didn't bother.
Houthi are going after Israeli stuff anyway and only targeting the US because they completely neuter their capabilities. If the US isn't there missiles will still be flying over the Red Sea and civilian ships being hijacked.
Our warships were apparently (escorting? defending? wink wink? wasn't super clear to me) the Israeli merchant vessels. They weren't exactly neutral bystanders, especially not to Israel's enemies.
They were there 'cause the US knew they'd be needed. I don't think they've been anything besides shooting down drones attacking shipping... but they don't really exist to be neutral bystanders.
Yeah, but we don't get to play both sides of that narrative. Either we stay out of it and mind our own business, or if we jump into the fray to defend Israel, we're just combatants and valid targets. We don't get to be some sort of faux peacekeeper that only protects one side.
Merchant ships aren't just innocent bystanders though, they're part of the supply chain, economy, and war effort. How is this different than U-boats sinking our merchant marines, or our blockades stopping supplies to other countries?
Another comment said that shipping lane is used by other nations' vessels too, but the Houthi are specifically targeting Israeli ships (and by extension their American defenders, but only because we choose to be involved).
Ships from all sorts of countries sail the world, but it's not an innocent coincidence that ours are routinely targeted by Israel's enemies...
It's silly for us to play the victim when we put ourselves in harm's way specifically to defend Israel against these threats. It's like sailing through the Taiwan Strait with a carrier group and acting surprised when it annoys China.
We use our force projection to play global police, but then turn around and pretend like we're innocent... we're far from it. These are self-inflicted casualties because we're picking sides.
> Merchant ships aren't just innocent bystanders though, they're part of the supply chain, economy, and war effort.
Sure, I agree with you there—although Israel isn't at war with the Houthi rebels. Again, the Houthi are fighting the Yemeni government and the Saudis. Although "Death to Israel" is part of their charter, so there is that.
> It's silly for us to play the victim when we put ourselves in harm's way specifically to defend Israel against these threats.
I don't know that we're playing the victim here; our ships are clearly there to do exactly what it is that they're doing. Overall it's probably a net win for us—we get practice in anti-drone warfare.
Their “navy” consisted of 9 “ships”, of which 6 were speedboats. Like the kind you go fishing on. The US probably spent more money on the ammunition to sink them than they were worth.
Based on current accounts, it seems that the adversaries of the US have evolved much that the US can’t pull stuff it pulled before. That and they are leveraging asymmetric warfare as much as they can.
George Washington will not respond to appeasement. Let’s not repeat the mistake of our forefather with a “peace in our time” type of approach.
By all accounts Iran has many reasons to view the U.S.A as a violent oppressor. Personally I disagree with many parts of the ideology the Iranian regime is pushing. But comparing that situation to Nazi Germany and ww2 is very misguided and uninformed. I'd argue the closest to wide scale genocide that I'm aware of was recently in Ethiopia in the Tigray. Right after the President had received a nobel peace price. And we didn't see the U.S.A lift a finger. Viewing the military campaigns as bringing freedom and "western" values to savages is the kind of provably false propaganda the US military wants you to believe.
These are the kind of events that may lead to a greater expansion of the Israeli/Hamas war. These Iran-backed Houthi rebels are increasing bold as is Iran's military actions around the region.
They've done this several times now, has there been any significant retaliatory strikes? Isn't this a threat to international shipping? How is this not a bigger deal?
It is a big deal, but what do we do in return? Iran is using their Houthi proxies to carry out these attacks. So do we attack Iran? Attack the Houthis who are pretty much living in similar circumstances to people in Afghanistan?
Without turning this into a regional, all-out war, how do we respond? Now if something like the USS Cole attack happens it will be out of our hands, we'll have to respond and damn the consequences, but until then we'll probably do things covertly.
That's very true, but you're assuming that they're rational, especially with their "supreme spiritual leader" rumored to be so old he needs a stand-in.
I'm not sure what you're basing this on? The US' overarching military strategy for decades now has been to prepare for a two-front war with both China and Russia. I'm not seeing how a rounding error on the US defense budget, mostly in the form of mothballed munitions, is materially reducing readiness. Never mind the capacity of the US to switch to wartime munition production.
If you have some sources talking about how how the US can't launch a regional conflict I'd love to see them.
> The US' overarching military strategy for decades now has been to prepare for a two-front war with both China and Russia.
The two major regional contingency capability (which was not a strategy, but a principal notionally underlying national security strategies for a couple decades) was concocted in 1993 as, basically, political cover for massive defense cuts -- that is, it was saying "despite the cuts, we will retain this capacity" -- and was very quickly recognized as a largely fictitious capability [0] especially as the US fought major regional contingencies after that point and it was clear that it could at most prosecute one effectively and be prepared to engage in a holding action elsewhere [1], even when "major" was much smaller scale than war with Russia or China, and was formally abandoned in 2012.
[0] Part of why this recognition was because the formal documents outlining the concept and how the capacity would be met had caveats which indicated that it wasn't really a capacity to fight two MRCs effectively and simultaneously.
[1] "Win one, hold one" was described as the likely best-case actual capacity years before the overlap of Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts concretely demonstrated the lack of genuine two-MRC capability against much less capable foes than Russia/China.
There is no proof that Iran ever coordinated anything with the Houthis. Most scholars in this area say that the "Iran-backed" label is completely misleading. Iran sees that the actions of the Houthis are aligned with their own and so they may send them low-tech weapons as well as design blueprints, but the Iranians don't tell the Houthis what to do.
In Yemen Saudi-Arabia leads - with help from the US - an intervention supporting the internationally recognized government against a terrorist group backed by Iran. So, who should retaliate here? The government that asked for help?
Terrorists can not retaliate, at least not rightfully. They can gtfo of Yemen though.
They are targeting ships with an Israeli link. I think people (countries) have just accepted that and moved on. Why retaliate and make your ships a target?
US and Europe are already very much in the process of detaching from China. We as conscientious consumer just have to help speed it up. China is also already retreating into itself. China won't matter in 20 years.
Restraint is not necessarily a show of weakness. The rebels behind the attack claimed only to have attacked two Israeli vessels but did not claim (possibly did not know) an intended attack against the US ship. Retaliating in this case would definitely escalate the fight, there are many good reasons to avoid doing that.
Well the US Navy has already been attacking pirates there, in addition to weapons and military advisors to the Ukraine, patrols in the South China Sea and paying for (for the first time since Nixon visited China) weapons to Taiwan, plus occupation costs in Guantanamo Bay against the Cuban government's wishes, troops stationed on the North Korean border, naval patrols off the Venezuelan coast as New sanctions are considered, and the navy also sending more ships to the Persian gulf recently -
there are still those (like yourself) who want even more money given to the military industrial complex in pursuit of US worldwide imperial goals. Of course they monetarily benefit from.this (as you yourself said you do).
Myself I would rather the money go to fix bridges and schools in the US than bomb Gazan children etc.
"there are still those (like yourself) who want even more money given to the military industrial complex"
I didn't say that. It doesn't cost anything for the Commander in Chief to authorize the troops to defend themselves. The weapons are already bought and paid for.
Generally deterrence is most effective when acted upon immediately.
Nations are like children or criminals, if they do something wrong, you need to immediately act, in proportion to the action, to punish the bad behaviour. If you wait, people think they get away with it, and then when the eventual punishment catches up with them, they take it personally rather than attributing it to their actions.
And you, please read a few things beyond the "theory of punishment". Read some things about international relations. Read some things about game theory. And read what a Pyrrhic victory is.
For anyone who doesn’t want to bother searching Wikipedia [0]:
> The slogan of the Houthi movement (officially called Ansar Allah), a Shia Islamist political and military organization in Yemen, reads "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam" on a vertical banner of Arabic text. It is often portrayed on a white flag, with the written text in red and green; the pro-Islamic statements are coloured green while the statements about the United States, Israel, and the Jewish people are coloured red.
Well, perhaps have some basic knowledge of the topic at hand before oversimplifying the matter by simply paraphrasing "cui bono", effectively hinting at heinous Jewish scheming being the crux of the matter.
There's a lot of overly simplistic and just plain wrong thinking by WEstoids when it comes to the US. Most notably, Muslims and Arabs in particular are viewed as a monolith. This is Islamophobia and racism, pure and simple. For example, there is the Sunni vs Shia split. There's also the Arab (Saudi Arabia) vs Persian (Iran) split. It's dangerous to make policy decisions on this basis.
Here are some things worth considering:
1. US support for Israel by itself creates negative sentiment and blowback in the Middle East. This is actually by design. The US seeks to destabilize the Middle East. It's one of America's "unsinkable aircraft carriers" [1] but it's more than that. Biden is on record as saying "If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one." [2];
2. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are also of key strategic importance to the US. Turkey is in NATO and is a key force against Syria, Iraq and Iran. The US placing nuclear missiles on Turkish territory also instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis; Saudi Arabia is a key counter to Iran's influence in the region;
3. US arms were used with the blessing of the US in a genocide in Yemen against these same Houthi rebels. The point here is that the Houthis have their own reasons to be mad against both Saudi Arabia and the US that have nothing to do with Iran;
4. Iran is not an irrational actor. They seek both to counter US influence in the region and increase their own influence. They're doing nothing that the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia aren't guilty of doing. Iran is used a bogeyman by US propaganda to deflect away from atrocities committed by the US and its allies in the region. Iran wants normalization of relations but won't become a client state to do it. Nor should they have to. Let's not forget, the US played a huge role in the creation of the fundamentalist government of Iran by supporting the 1953 coup.
It seems like the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia have no concept of the idea of blowback. Committing and supporting genocide is always going to have huge negative consequences.
> Committing and supporting genocide is always going to have huge negative consequences.
Lets not down value the meaning of Genocide. There’s not a genocide ongoing in Gaza or Yemen.
War sucks, and the civilian casualties are roughly in line with other conflicts. You do realize significantly more civilians have died per militant death in ww2, Vietnam, Korea, Mosul, afghan/iraq, etc? The Israel-Gaza conflict has a fairly low Civilian-casualty ratio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio
Thank you to the U.S. soldiers and all others who risk their lives to allow us in the west to live in relative peace.