So Pol Pot was actually killing something like 40,000 - 45,000 a month, compared to roughly 3,600 a month for IDF including militants, based on Gaza Health Ministry numbers.
(1,270 a month based on IDF numbers.)
Doesn’t seem comparable. That’s not to say that the situation in Gaza is fantastic (I’m not exactly clamoring to visit or anything) but it doesn’t seem comparable to Pol Pot.
Did I screw up what you meant, or did you? Do I need to remove the leading “all”?
Thanks for the serious response. It’s hard to be too critical of that rationale. The whack a mole strategy does a nice job of limiting army casualties but at the expense of civilian death tolls. Same mistake US made in Viet Nam. And in the end, it means an extended conflict that ends in disappointment.
Hmmm, it’s probably not an absolute but maybe sort of close.
If an Israeli soldier randomly kills a Palestinian child who is in no way impeding or threatening the soldier, merely for shits and giggles, while on his way to attempt to rescue a hostage, I think most people would say that is not the fault of the hostage-takers, even though the taking of the hostage led to the circumstances that resulted in the child’s death.
Opting to kill 100 people, many innocent civilians, to try to accomplish a military objective involving hostages is a bit grayer and people are likely to disagree on what is justified. We’re still trying to decide if dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified, so we probably won’t reach agreement on every death in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict either.
With the bombings in Japan, I think the argument was if it brought an end to the war it could save lives compared with slugging it out a few more years. JD Vance argued in the last week that we restrained Israel too much for them to have a quick war. I think he has an actual valid point in that. I am not sure there was a realistic path to a short war and recovery of the hostages alive with a lasting peace treaty. If Israel blew up 50k people on October 8th, would it have ended and we would have a path forward now?
I’m not advocating that as the right decision, and there are plenty of reasons to immediately call it nonsense, but it is interesting from the perspective that someone will pause and think about the consequences and morality of the choice compared with what we have right now which seems to be almost a blank check in the name of pulling out hostages one or two at a time.
It certainly saved American and Chinese lives.
Total lives is a different question altogether.
I don’t have time to do all the research and cite all the pertinent figures - I’ve got 3 hours of work to do before cutting loose for the weekend - but even while Truman agonized over authorizing the use of the A-bomb he recognized that it was going to save hundreds of thousands of lives over trying to invade Japan and fight all the way to Tokyo, where women and children who’d been trained by the government to fight with whatever they had on hand were going to fight to the death to defend the homeland.
After the experience of the prior 3 years where the U.S. Navy and Marines tried to clear islands in the Pacific and were met with fierce resistance and seeing the Japanese fight to the last man hiding in any nook and cranny available, and having watched the Japanese otherwise send men in kamikaze missions to kill Americans or commit suicide rather than being captured, the U.S. military expected massive casualties on both sides trying to finish Japan off on its home soil. From that standpoint, the deaths of a couple hundred thousand people was seen as “more humane” even if inflicted from a devastating weapon than invading the homeland and practically wiping out an entire population.
Re: restraining Israel - did we? Yeah, probably. But what would a quick war have looked like? Probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians dead, Gaza in complete ruins, and still no guarantee that Hamas had been exterminated - and, Hezbollah watching it all happen and using it as a recruiting tool while adapting tactics accordingly while using the obliteration of Gaza as justification for the obliteration of Israeli settlements. And, probably the rise of a new militant group in the place of Hamas, and the same assurance as now [none] that Israel would go take care of the Palestinians who survived.
The biggest way that the so helpful and important “international community” has kept the war in Gaza going has been to not allow the removal of the civilian population from the conflict zone.
If the Gazan civilians had been gotten out of the way and the gloves then taken off the IDF, this would have been over in less than 6 months. No danger of famine, close to 0 aid workers killed, certainly less civilian casualties, and likely less overall infrastructure damage.
By now the civilians would be back home and the rebuilding and reconstitution of a (hopefully non-terrorist) governmental structure begun.
Interesting article postulating that the A-bomb did not end the war. There were more lives lost (than Hiroshima) in a conventional bomb attack on Tokyo 5 months earlier and they kept fighting on. The article contends that it was Soviets declaring war on Japan that initiated surrender.
WRT the A-bomb and its impact . . . it wasn’t just the number of lives lost that was a key factor for Japan’s emperor decision. There was a pretty devastating impact on the living that suffered from radiation poisoning (the prolonged death).
There is a reason why attacking/sabotaging nuclear facilities is a pretty strong taboo in modern warfare.
I would find this easier to believe if he observed this over a number of weeks but it was only 4 days after the bomb that he surrendered. Did he mention the radiation suffering in his speech?
My impression is Israel has a poor record on allowing Palestinian civilians return to their homes after wars.
I think it’s more unreasonable to not think that, if we expect him to act similarly to the past with regards to Israelis settling on Palestinian-owned land with and without government assistance (but ultimately with their support in the vast majority of situations.)
According to new information from a captured Hamas operative, the reason why Sinwar is opposing Israeli control of the Philadelphi Corridor is because he wants to use it to escape. He recognizes that Hamas is nearing its end, but wants to save himself (despite claiming that the deaths of all the others are necessary for the resistance). He also wants to try and smuggle out the hostages, and eventually get himself and the hostages to Iran, where he thinks he’ll be safe.
Predictably poor analysis.
Yes because “refugee camps” the world around are often such ringing successes.
Still better than living in an active combat zone.
Drop this shit or I will start calling you out in kind.
I don’t know how much the fallout impacted the decision, but certainly the bomb was cited as a reason for surrender.
And my understanding is that we dropped the two close together because we wanted Japan to think there were lots more where that came from when the reality is that it would have taken months to get more materials prepped. So it seemed that strategy worked in bringing about surrender.