So much to unpack from this thread, been a busy week at work though.
Still a bit surprised by both the fact that Israel and their border security had grown so lax and complacent. There are several stories about current or former soldiers, to include at least one retired General, hopping in their cars and driving down from Tel Aviv or elsewhere to lead counterattacks hours after the Hamas attacks began. And you gotta wonder about the thought process of having a rave just across the border?
I've seen a lot of speculation about about why Hamas may have done this, and as of right now it just looks like they wanted to kill and capture Israelis which is pretty much their stated reason for being. It wasn't an overly complex plan but a well planned and executed one, so I think speculation that it was planned in conjunction with Iran or that it was part of some larger scheme to derail Israeli-Arab relations are just theories right now.
Israel doesn't really have a choice but to respond to this attack, and unfortunately Hamas has entrenched itself into Gaza so firmly that civilian casualties are all but unavoidable. It is going to be a mess.
As for who is ultimately responsible for the mess that is the Israel-Arab conflict, it is a bit of the case where everyone sucks to one degree or another. I do believe we are on the right side, as flawed as Israel is, but Israel does shoulder a lot of blame for backing the Palestinians into a corner with very few if any options to get out of it. Why is it a surprise when you give folks no options? They will act out like they have nothing to lose...because they don't...and you get a very severe response. History is replete with examples of what happens when you give folks no real options.
But...none of that excuses what Hamas did. As I mentioned earlier it appears so far the main purpose of the Hamas attack was to kill Jews, period. Didn't matter the age, if they were a threat or even if they were Jewish (several third-country workers were killed too). They just wanted to kill, and they gleefully did it while filming it all in HD. In a broader sense, the continued internal exile of Palestinians to refugee camps along with rampant and casual anti-Semitism across the Arab world don't really help things much either.
We used nukes on Japan so that we could beat the Russians to invastion.
This is history 101.
Not really. People seem to forget that we dropped the nukes as soon as we made sure it was a viable weapon, we didn't really waste any time at all when you look at the time it took to deliver the two bombs we used and the targeting process. As I saw someone put it in an article about the decision to drop the bombs, can you imagine the shitstorm that would have ensued if Truman didn't utilize a weapon that could have ended the war almost immediately and saved thousands of American lives? He did, and it did and thousands of lives on all sides were saved.
That's a bit disingenuous. We weren't looking for a nuclear bomb, but the things we did eventually find (that you've noted) weren't evidence of an active program. At the end of the day, what the Bush admin claimed was there wasn't. That's just not debatable.
Brett has already addressed most of it, but the vast majority of stuff we did find in Iraq after invading was left over from before the Gulf War in '91. Their weapons accountability was so poor they didn't honestly realize that they still had shells with chemical weapons warheads still in bunkers. Simply put, their WMD programs were either non-existent or on hiatus when we invaded in '03.
www.airandspaceforces.com
