Dead Palestinian children? Oh no please stop we’ll send Blinken down, we gotta do something, I don’t know, what do you want to do, this is a pretty thorny issue. I’m not really sure what we could do though. (It could be also be dead Kurds or Iraqis or any number of people who weren’t doing anything; it’s not unique to the Gaza situation)
More expensive stuff for us? Warships and bombs, right away. Sort that shit out. Don’t even wait for congress. Just bombs.
I get that it’s not as simple as taking the motivation from #2 and switching it over to happen any time there’s a #1. I’m being a little unfairly reductive you could say. But also, that is exactly the behavior and it’s hard not to be struck by it.
The problem is that those are legitimately more thorny issues - not for moral reasons, but diplomatic ones. As much as I, personally, would love if our position was “Israel is bombing Palestinian children in Israeli occupied land? We will be bombing the IDF until they stop”, that’s a much harder sell by international law and public opinion than “Our civilian ships and the ships of our allies are being attacked in international waters by a recognized terrorist group. We will be bombing them until they stop”
I think part of the issue the user is describing is the wording of the article, and how it starts by talking about prices of consumer goods in Europe.
It’s a very complex situation, there are a lot of interconnected factors, and this probably wasn’t the intent of the writer. I assume the article has been through a bunch of edits already
Still, wording choice and the order of points might make some readers feel a particular way
In all honesty, I think the writer was just being bluntly honest about what’s considered an emergency and why in American decision-making circles. If they’d thought a little more, they might have remembered to disguise what they’re talking about a little bit (“international law” “absolutely necessity to protect civilian vessels from harm” something like that), but as it is it was mostly just, welp, we’re losing tons of money now, like enough to impact us, no way in hell can we have that.
Again, not even saying it’s a bad thing to jump into action when someone’s cutting our trade routes and attacking merchant ships. Just contrasting.
Okay, you have the president pull out all the stops, including ones of ambiguous legality, to stop supply of aid to Israel. Most voters are opposed and raise an outcry. Congress overrides his limited authority and restores aid, and now the opposition party wins the upcoming election. They send even more aid to Israel’s genocide.
Wanna explain to me how that’s a better outcome?
We operate in a democracy. If you disregard the will of the voters when making decisions, all you’re doing is pissing away effort and influence in exchange for further losses at the ballot box, and little or no alleviation of the problem you wished to address, and very likely an aggravation of it.
Okay, you have the president pull out all the stops, including ones of ambiguous legality, to stop supply of aid to Israel. Most voters are opposed and raise an outcry. Congress overrides his limited authority and restores aid, and now the opposition party wins the upcoming election. They send even more aid to Israel’s genocide.
Wanna explain to me how that’s a better outcome?
the most recent aid package, so to speak, was Biden acting unilaterally to send more arms. this was entirely unnecessary. You’re right that he can’t (and shouldn’t) go against congress in terms of funding.
Doesn’t mean he needs to go around them to get them even more weapons. Doesn’t mean he needs to be pledging unconditional aid. Doesn’t mean he needs to be asking for aid from congress. And aiding Israel doesn’t necessarily mean we have to send munitions and other military hardware, either. they have one of the strongest militaries in the world- thanks to that long history of receiving our aid. one of if not the strongest military in the region.
We don’t need to be supporting genocide. We do, however, need a president with enough moral integrity to say that.
Yeah. Ships of our allies > out-group civilian children. I know. (Both in terms of our response, and in terms of deciding which actions lead to a terrorist group getting that little “recognized” label.)
I’m gonna let it go at that, because this isn’t a Gaza thread and kind of not the place for it. And yeah, I do 100% agree with you on the counterbalancing factor that it for-real isn’t as simple as I’m trying to make it sound. It just irked me the naked realpolitik of the beginning of the article speaking in hushed and urgent tones about how important this all is, because it’s directly affecting the money.
I mean, when prices spike, considering that food prices are already high because of the Russo-Ukrainian War, plenty of people in the third world are going to suffer from malnutrition. Same with meds and equipment, same with businesses failing and unemployment rising. People like to act like money is an abstract that only matters to the greedy, but things are much more direct than that.
If the motivation was to prevent malnutrition and third-world unemployment, there are much more direct ways that take fewer warships. Also:
“European consumers will feel the pain … It will hit developed economies more than it will hit developing economies,” the Dubai-based logistics company’s finance chief added.
Not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with protecting your and your allies’ economic interests. That’s completely fine, it’s the responsible thing for a government to do, and I’m not saying it’s not. It does impact people all over the world, as you point out, and the folks on those boats are civilians, too. I’m just saying that at a certain point of first-world not-literally-starving comfort it starts to become selfish to become so protective of it, while pointedly not doing anything as-yet-effective about an unfolding horror of humanity just a little ways down the exact same waterway.
Surely that seems like a reasonable thing to say? Maybe not. (And just to be clear I’m not talking about bombing the IDF or anything remotely like that. I have no idea what the actual solution is or would look like. Just struck by the contrast; that’s all.)
(Edit: I think I’m gonna stop responding now unless there’s something really new; I feel like I’m repeating myself and genuinely don’t want to try to hijack this story to start talking about Gaza.)
If the motivation was to prevent malnutrition and third-world unemployment, there are much more direct ways that take fewer warships.
I mean, the point isn’t that it’s their motivation. The point is that that’s the effect. I’m pretty sure the motivation of the Houthis in this is to raise their reputation, not save Palestinian children.
Surely that seems like a reasonable thing to say? Maybe not. (And just to be clear I’m not talking about bombing the IDF. I have no idea what the actual solution is or would look like. Just struck by the contrast; that’s all.)
I guess that’s where the difference between our positions comes in. For me, there’s a solid solution to stopping the Houthis with minimal costs, while the number of practical solutions to stop the ongoing Israeli genocide is… smaller, and all of the options have much higher costs - not simply monetary, but diplomatic and in human life - and require much wider consensus to implement in terms of getting the government to act. “The Commander-in-Chief is the Commander-in-Chief - we are authorized to retaliate to defend our civilian ships and ourselves” is much easier than “The Congress which can’t even pass a budget at the moment needs to strip Israel, a long-term ‘ally’ which has bribed 2/3s of our government, of all assistance until they stop their genocide against people we have no authority over or especial legal responsibility to protect”
(Edit: I think I’m gonna stop responding now unless there’s something really new; I feel like I’m repeating myself and genuinely don’t want to try to hijack this story to start talking about Gaza.)
While fair, it is connected to Gaza insofar as it’s the Houthis’ claimed reason for their terrorism.
smaller, and all of the options have much higher costs - not simply monetary, but diplomatic and in human life
I think the reality is that we like having Israel as an ally in the region, because it helps us get done stuff we want to get done, and helps destabilize the region preventing a single unified anti-US coalition from arising, and so we like it, and that’s that. And dead or starving children are not a factor.
I think that’s pretty fucked up, is the whole root of why I’m saying this. It’s one thing to neglect some situation of injustice or misery somewhere in the world; it’s a whole new type of thing if we’re actively helping create it with our military aid. Although I’m not an expert on any of this by any means, I think laying down some rules for Israel if they want to continue to rely on that support would be a realistic thing for us to do. I don’t really buy that today politicians in the US would pay too heavy a price for not supporting Israel (in the past, I think yes), or that we would pay any real diplomatic price with other countries. I think it would actually help us a lot, lot more than it would hurt if this kind of thing stopped happening.
I think the reality is that we like having Israel as an ally in the region, because it helps us get done stuff we want to get done, and helps destabilize the region preventing a single unified anti-US coalition from arising, and so we like it, and that’s that. And dead or starving children are not a factor.
But does it, though? Like, speaking purely from an amoral, realpolitik perspective, Israel is actually… really unhelpful to US interests. For most Arab states, the point that sticks in the craw of aligning with the USA (which they generally do reluctantly anyway) is the continued support of Israel. Israel sells our military secrets, leeches off our money, damages our international reputation, and isn’t even in a particularly useful position for our international political goals, unlike Egypt, Turkiye, and Iraq.
I agree dead and starving children aren’t a factor. But my point is that our continued support of Israel isn’t related to the benefit they give to the US itself - this is the Iron Law of Institutions in action. Our continued support of Israel is related to the benefit they give to US decisionmakers. And that is, namely, the utilization of unlimited dark money and a massive and successful popular propaganda arm amongst voters.
I think that’s pretty fucked up, is the whole root of why I’m saying this. It’s one thing to neglect some situation of injustice or misery somewhere in the world; it’s a whole new type of thing if we’re actively helping create it with our military aid. Although I’m not an expert on any of this by any means, I think laying down some rules for Israel if they want to continue to rely on that support would be a realistic thing for us to do. I don’t really buy that today politicians in the US would pay too heavy a price for not supporting Israel (in the past, I think yes), or that we would pay any real diplomatic price with other countries. I think it would actually help us a lot, lot more than it would hurt if this kind of thing stopped happening.
I mean, honestly, my position is that all aid for Israel should be revoked. But my point is that I also understand why it’s not done; even if one wishes to at the moment, it would be a strategic disaster that would crater whichever party tried it and encourage further bootlicking support of Israel.
If we want to change this state of affairs, we have to start with public opinion - and only then can we meaningfully change policy.
Disclaimer: I have no idea. All of this is just based on my own capacity for bullshitting my way through the topic. That being said, here’s what I think:
But does it, though? Like, speaking purely from an amoral, realpolitik perspective, Israel is actually… really unhelpful to US interests. For most Arab states, the point that sticks in the craw of aligning with the USA (which they generally do reluctantly anyway) is the continued support of Israel
Yeah but they keep things unstable. Think of, like, if a bunch of aliens came to the US and took over Kansas, and they arbitrarily enslaved everyone in Missouri, and every so often there was a war, and we just couldn’t get rid of them. Would it make us more effective, or less effective, on the world stage? I mean even if we knew that the Russians were allied with the aliens, or something, we’d hate the Russians for it, but the bottom line is we’d be significantly distracted with them to the detriment of our ability to organize and get shit done. The Russians would benefit a lot even if it made us hate them.
It is not a perfect analogy by any means. But you get what I’m saying hopefully. I think it keeps things chaotic and fractured, more so than if Israel didn’t exist or just kept to itself. I think whatever we do, the Arab world is unlikely to start cooperating with us fully, especially since “cooperating with us” in our eyes is usually pretty exploitative. The US government isn’t really bothered by positive or negative feedback from the rest of the world.
And that is, namely, the utilization of unlimited dark money and a massive and successful popular propaganda arm amongst voters.
I think that used to be true. Around the 1980s when a lot of our Israel policy crystallized into its modern form, there were still a lot of literal holocaust survivors running around, people in general in the US were a lot more tribal in their mentality and politics, and so even a whiff of not supporting Israel was a death sentence domestically. I feel like what you’re talking about is a huge part of how our Israel policy got to be the way it is, but I feel like it’s just not that way anymore. I feel like people’s mentality and the blocs that do or don’t support things are just radically differently structured now. Again I base this on nothing but my own bullshit, so you’re free to disagree with me.
If we want to change this state of affairs, we have to start with public opinion - and only then can we meaningfully change policy.
I think that’s happening. Israel has done plenty of real fucked up things from time to time for decades now and it feels like the backlash now is a lot more loud and sustained than it was. Maybe it’ll produce some results in how the US government deals with them; I hope so.
There’s a school shooting actively going on. It’s been for a few hours, people are still dying, and the cops are simply nowhere to be found, because the school shooters are close friends with some of the cops’ family and it’s a “thorny issue” how to get them to stop without hurting anyone’s feelings (and also because some but by no means all of the victims of the shooting were involved in an unprovoked aggravated assault against the shooters earlier, that touched the whole thing off).
After quite a while of that happening, someone robs a business right next to the school. The cops all of a sudden show up, guns blazing, arrest the perpetrator, and stand around the business making sure nothing else happens. While, in the distance, gunshots can still be heard from the still-ongoing school shooting.
Is stopping robbery a good thing? Sure. Absolutely. Will letting the robbers get away with it save any of the kids? Absolutely not. But you see how that’d be a little weird?
Lets fix your analogy. There is no connection between commercial shipping and the School shooting and total idiots want us to ignore terrorist attacks on a highway near by because the idiots are idiots.
I’m not sure there’s really anyone who thinks that the terrorist attacks on shipping (i.e. the highway, i.e. the robbery) should get ignored. Obviously stopping the robbery is a good thing, as I literally just said in the message you’re replying to.
Would you say that stopping the deaths of innocent people (i.e. the school shooting) is also a good thing? That’s my whole point. I wouldn’t think that would be all that controversial.
What I meant by that was:
Dead Palestinian children? Oh no please stop we’ll send Blinken down, we gotta do something, I don’t know, what do you want to do, this is a pretty thorny issue. I’m not really sure what we could do though. (It could be also be dead Kurds or Iraqis or any number of people who weren’t doing anything; it’s not unique to the Gaza situation)
More expensive stuff for us? Warships and bombs, right away. Sort that shit out. Don’t even wait for congress. Just bombs.
I get that it’s not as simple as taking the motivation from #2 and switching it over to happen any time there’s a #1. I’m being a little unfairly reductive you could say. But also, that is exactly the behavior and it’s hard not to be struck by it.
The problem is that those are legitimately more thorny issues - not for moral reasons, but diplomatic ones. As much as I, personally, would love if our position was “Israel is bombing Palestinian children in Israeli occupied land? We will be bombing the IDF until they stop”, that’s a much harder sell by international law and public opinion than “Our civilian ships and the ships of our allies are being attacked in international waters by a recognized terrorist group. We will be bombing them until they stop”
I think part of the issue the user is describing is the wording of the article, and how it starts by talking about prices of consumer goods in Europe.
It’s a very complex situation, there are a lot of interconnected factors, and this probably wasn’t the intent of the writer. I assume the article has been through a bunch of edits already
Still, wording choice and the order of points might make some readers feel a particular way
In all honesty, I think the writer was just being bluntly honest about what’s considered an emergency and why in American decision-making circles. If they’d thought a little more, they might have remembered to disguise what they’re talking about a little bit (“international law” “absolutely necessity to protect civilian vessels from harm” something like that), but as it is it was mostly just, welp, we’re losing tons of money now, like enough to impact us, no way in hell can we have that.
Again, not even saying it’s a bad thing to jump into action when someone’s cutting our trade routes and attacking merchant ships. Just contrasting.
it’s not particularly thorny to be like “yeah, we can’t support that.”, though.
In a vacuum I’d agree. But in the context of most Americans still ignorantly in support of continued Israeli aid, it becomes… much thornier.
It’s not, though.
Israel is committing genocide. We’re supplying the weapons. We don’t need to supply the weapons.
You’re missing the point.
No im not missing it. Im actively disagreeing. You’re arguing that we should compromise on genocide for the sake of political expediency.
You have good intentions, which makes you a great road-paver.
Okay, you have the president pull out all the stops, including ones of ambiguous legality, to stop supply of aid to Israel. Most voters are opposed and raise an outcry. Congress overrides his limited authority and restores aid, and now the opposition party wins the upcoming election. They send even more aid to Israel’s genocide.
Wanna explain to me how that’s a better outcome?
We operate in a democracy. If you disregard the will of the voters when making decisions, all you’re doing is pissing away effort and influence in exchange for further losses at the ballot box, and little or no alleviation of the problem you wished to address, and very likely an aggravation of it.
the most recent aid package, so to speak, was Biden acting unilaterally to send more arms. this was entirely unnecessary. You’re right that he can’t (and shouldn’t) go against congress in terms of funding.
Doesn’t mean he needs to go around them to get them even more weapons. Doesn’t mean he needs to be pledging unconditional aid. Doesn’t mean he needs to be asking for aid from congress. And aiding Israel doesn’t necessarily mean we have to send munitions and other military hardware, either. they have one of the strongest militaries in the world- thanks to that long history of receiving our aid. one of if not the strongest military in the region.
We don’t need to be supporting genocide. We do, however, need a president with enough moral integrity to say that.
Yeah. Ships of our allies > out-group civilian children. I know. (Both in terms of our response, and in terms of deciding which actions lead to a terrorist group getting that little “recognized” label.)
I’m gonna let it go at that, because this isn’t a Gaza thread and kind of not the place for it. And yeah, I do 100% agree with you on the counterbalancing factor that it for-real isn’t as simple as I’m trying to make it sound. It just irked me the naked realpolitik of the beginning of the article speaking in hushed and urgent tones about how important this all is, because it’s directly affecting the money.
I mean, when prices spike, considering that food prices are already high because of the Russo-Ukrainian War, plenty of people in the third world are going to suffer from malnutrition. Same with meds and equipment, same with businesses failing and unemployment rising. People like to act like money is an abstract that only matters to the greedy, but things are much more direct than that.
If the motivation was to prevent malnutrition and third-world unemployment, there are much more direct ways that take fewer warships. Also:
Not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with protecting your and your allies’ economic interests. That’s completely fine, it’s the responsible thing for a government to do, and I’m not saying it’s not. It does impact people all over the world, as you point out, and the folks on those boats are civilians, too. I’m just saying that at a certain point of first-world not-literally-starving comfort it starts to become selfish to become so protective of it, while pointedly not doing anything as-yet-effective about an unfolding horror of humanity just a little ways down the exact same waterway.
Surely that seems like a reasonable thing to say? Maybe not. (And just to be clear I’m not talking about bombing the IDF or anything remotely like that. I have no idea what the actual solution is or would look like. Just struck by the contrast; that’s all.)
(Edit: I think I’m gonna stop responding now unless there’s something really new; I feel like I’m repeating myself and genuinely don’t want to try to hijack this story to start talking about Gaza.)
I mean, the point isn’t that it’s their motivation. The point is that that’s the effect. I’m pretty sure the motivation of the Houthis in this is to raise their reputation, not save Palestinian children.
I guess that’s where the difference between our positions comes in. For me, there’s a solid solution to stopping the Houthis with minimal costs, while the number of practical solutions to stop the ongoing Israeli genocide is… smaller, and all of the options have much higher costs - not simply monetary, but diplomatic and in human life - and require much wider consensus to implement in terms of getting the government to act. “The Commander-in-Chief is the Commander-in-Chief - we are authorized to retaliate to defend our civilian ships and ourselves” is much easier than “The Congress which can’t even pass a budget at the moment needs to strip Israel, a long-term ‘ally’ which has bribed 2/3s of our government, of all assistance until they stop their genocide against people we have no authority over or especial legal responsibility to protect”
While fair, it is connected to Gaza insofar as it’s the Houthis’ claimed reason for their terrorism.
I think the reality is that we like having Israel as an ally in the region, because it helps us get done stuff we want to get done, and helps destabilize the region preventing a single unified anti-US coalition from arising, and so we like it, and that’s that. And dead or starving children are not a factor.
I think that’s pretty fucked up, is the whole root of why I’m saying this. It’s one thing to neglect some situation of injustice or misery somewhere in the world; it’s a whole new type of thing if we’re actively helping create it with our military aid. Although I’m not an expert on any of this by any means, I think laying down some rules for Israel if they want to continue to rely on that support would be a realistic thing for us to do. I don’t really buy that today politicians in the US would pay too heavy a price for not supporting Israel (in the past, I think yes), or that we would pay any real diplomatic price with other countries. I think it would actually help us a lot, lot more than it would hurt if this kind of thing stopped happening.
But does it, though? Like, speaking purely from an amoral, realpolitik perspective, Israel is actually… really unhelpful to US interests. For most Arab states, the point that sticks in the craw of aligning with the USA (which they generally do reluctantly anyway) is the continued support of Israel. Israel sells our military secrets, leeches off our money, damages our international reputation, and isn’t even in a particularly useful position for our international political goals, unlike Egypt, Turkiye, and Iraq.
I agree dead and starving children aren’t a factor. But my point is that our continued support of Israel isn’t related to the benefit they give to the US itself - this is the Iron Law of Institutions in action. Our continued support of Israel is related to the benefit they give to US decisionmakers. And that is, namely, the utilization of unlimited dark money and a massive and successful popular propaganda arm amongst voters.
I mean, honestly, my position is that all aid for Israel should be revoked. But my point is that I also understand why it’s not done; even if one wishes to at the moment, it would be a strategic disaster that would crater whichever party tried it and encourage further bootlicking support of Israel.
If we want to change this state of affairs, we have to start with public opinion - and only then can we meaningfully change policy.
Disclaimer: I have no idea. All of this is just based on my own capacity for bullshitting my way through the topic. That being said, here’s what I think:
Yeah but they keep things unstable. Think of, like, if a bunch of aliens came to the US and took over Kansas, and they arbitrarily enslaved everyone in Missouri, and every so often there was a war, and we just couldn’t get rid of them. Would it make us more effective, or less effective, on the world stage? I mean even if we knew that the Russians were allied with the aliens, or something, we’d hate the Russians for it, but the bottom line is we’d be significantly distracted with them to the detriment of our ability to organize and get shit done. The Russians would benefit a lot even if it made us hate them.
It is not a perfect analogy by any means. But you get what I’m saying hopefully. I think it keeps things chaotic and fractured, more so than if Israel didn’t exist or just kept to itself. I think whatever we do, the Arab world is unlikely to start cooperating with us fully, especially since “cooperating with us” in our eyes is usually pretty exploitative. The US government isn’t really bothered by positive or negative feedback from the rest of the world.
I think that used to be true. Around the 1980s when a lot of our Israel policy crystallized into its modern form, there were still a lot of literal holocaust survivors running around, people in general in the US were a lot more tribal in their mentality and politics, and so even a whiff of not supporting Israel was a death sentence domestically. I feel like what you’re talking about is a huge part of how our Israel policy got to be the way it is, but I feel like it’s just not that way anymore. I feel like people’s mentality and the blocs that do or don’t support things are just radically differently structured now. Again I base this on nothing but my own bullshit, so you’re free to disagree with me.
I think that’s happening. Israel has done plenty of real fucked up things from time to time for decades now and it feels like the backlash now is a lot more loud and sustained than it was. Maybe it’ll produce some results in how the US government deals with them; I hope so.
No Palestinian children are involved in shipping nor would be saved by stopping shipping.
Let me use analogy.
There’s a school shooting actively going on. It’s been for a few hours, people are still dying, and the cops are simply nowhere to be found, because the school shooters are close friends with some of the cops’ family and it’s a “thorny issue” how to get them to stop without hurting anyone’s feelings (and also because some but by no means all of the victims of the shooting were involved in an unprovoked aggravated assault against the shooters earlier, that touched the whole thing off).
After quite a while of that happening, someone robs a business right next to the school. The cops all of a sudden show up, guns blazing, arrest the perpetrator, and stand around the business making sure nothing else happens. While, in the distance, gunshots can still be heard from the still-ongoing school shooting.
Is stopping robbery a good thing? Sure. Absolutely. Will letting the robbers get away with it save any of the kids? Absolutely not. But you see how that’d be a little weird?
Lets fix your analogy. There is no connection between commercial shipping and the School shooting and total idiots want us to ignore terrorist attacks on a highway near by because the idiots are idiots.
I’m not sure there’s really anyone who thinks that the terrorist attacks on shipping (i.e. the highway, i.e. the robbery) should get ignored. Obviously stopping the robbery is a good thing, as I literally just said in the message you’re replying to.
Would you say that stopping the deaths of innocent people (i.e. the school shooting) is also a good thing? That’s my whole point. I wouldn’t think that would be all that controversial.