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Weekly Middle East war megathread - week of October 21
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Middle East war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
Please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
Senior ministers call for new settlements in Gaza at ultranationalist conference
Israel Denies Intentional Displacement of Palestinians in Northern Gaza Amid Western Concerns
Israel bars six medical NGOs from entry to Gaza, WHO says
U.S. probing alleged human rights violations by Israeli unit at prison camp
News from just this week.
Live Updates: Israel Launches Airstrikes Against Iran in Retaliatory Attack
This just happened. Found out watching Jeopardy, because NBC cut into it with breaking news.
This might merit a full topic of its own.
Can we stop calling all of Israel's action "retaliatory". They have consistently provoked attacks and then unreasonably escalated if there is any response at all. I'm so frustrated with all the self defense framing. Hello October surprise.
"Retaliatory attack" is more accurate than "defense" - at least they're calling it an attack. I think pretty much all the violence in the Middle East is claimed by the attacker to be in retaliation for something. Not sure it needs to be in the headline, but usually the alleged justification is in the article.
Why? People have been expecting Israel to retaliate against Iran for weeks (remember when Iran launched over 200 missiles into Israel earlier this month?). Calling this a retaliation isn't controversial.
According to the linked article, Israel conducted "precise strikes on military targets in Iran”. Why do you think this is an unreasonable escalation? This seems very reasonable to me.
Not the person you replied to, but it could be considered that it's the escalation itself that is unreasonable, not that it is a particularly unreasonable form of escalation.
We want wars to end, after all. If your opponent says "This was the last attack, and we're stopping now," and you have reason to believe them,1 it's beneficial to everybody to not fire back over a desire for chest-thumping revenge.
1. Whether or not this was the case is up to you.
This is not a reasonable description of the situation. Every country is, most of all, interested in its own safety. Iran exhausted Israeli air defense to a large degree in the two huge rocket attacks just months apart, leaving it much more vulnerable to any future attack of a similar type, and this also gave Israel a legitimate reason to strike back at military targets and reduce Iranian capabilities to do so. And Iran knew very well that this was a possible outcome.
And Iran can now claim they have justification to escalate even further and attack again. This is not how de-escalation works, and thus, this is not how safety works either.
I think you terribly underestimate the importance of having working and well-stocked air defense. Even now, this second round of missiles broke through in places because Israel couldn't cover everything and had to prioritize, so it caused damage. So far only to military installations iirc, but it would be much worse next time.
Regarding escalation and de-escalation, "escalate to de-escalate" is a pretty famous Russian tactic and (unfortunately) it works pretty well in many situations. When your army is not as overwhelmingly strong as the US military and you cannot use just the wide knowledge of this as a deterrent, it is sometimes a good decision (within a bad situation) to aggressively project your power and demonstrate clear superiority and determination to act.
Especially in a situation where your enemy has motivation to be hostile in the long term, which is not the case with say Lebanon, but absolutely is with Iran. Iran is the one regional power that's intent on breaking the new status quo that was gradually emerging before last year.
This attack also had the upside of destroying a factory producing drones that are being sold to Russia and used in Ukraine, so it will most certainly save lives on that front.
Israel has no reason to believe them. They say this as they fund and support Hezbollah who has been attacking Israel for over a year now. Not to mention them being behind the October 7th attack which started this whole war in the first place.
Beneficial to everybody except Israel. No other country would be expected to tolerate what Iran is doing to them.
You sound like someone who doesn't believe Israel has done anything wrong the last year. I don't really want to talk about this with someone who believes that, especially after all that's happened as a result of the IDF. So I won't.
I will, however, speak to others reading this on one thing:
A lack of escalation is absolutely beneficial to Israeli citizenry. A lack of escalation means less likelihood of regional wars, which tend to have negative impacts on local populaces. It does nobody in Israel any favors to be in open war with their neighbors, save perhaps for warmongers who seek a casus belli.
That’s not a given. The game theory solution for the prisoners dilemma is tit for tat. Iran will never tolerate Israel’s presence regardless of what they do, and intense military retaliation is a deterrent.
I agree 100%. Unfortunately, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah have no problem escalating. It does no one in Israel any favors to just sit on their hands and do nothing while they are attacked on all sides by enemies chanting from the river to the sea.
Iran is the one destabilizing the region not Israel.
So it seems like Biden threaded the needle of getting Israel to avoid attacking Iran's oil production, which would have been an awful "October surprise" by causing a massive gas price increase.
That's a major success for him and his administration. Instead, Israel attacked missile and drone supply chain infrastructure, which is also could be boon for Ukraine.
If Iran chooses not to retaliate, I think that steering Israel to this course of action will be looked back at as a major success for the Biden administration.
I have seen some reports that the strikes were limited and (so far) no civilian casualties.