While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Symphony D.]

There are strategic advantages to extinguishing Hamas as an organization forever or permanently neutering it, and I'd be surprised if that hadn't been Israel's goal all along.

Setting about doing it far too late and doing it the totally wrong way. Functionally indiscriminately murdering civilians just ensures Hamas is going to keep going for a long, long time. Sustained terror campaigns to force behavior modification ("Some of you will die until you stop supporting radical groups like Hamas") don't work. The only example that ever has was the threat of full-scale nuclear MAD, and people more or less totally forgot about that the moment the Berlin Wall fell even when all the same warheads and bombs were pointed at all the same places on the same alert levels. All Israel is doing in Gaza right now is building the next generation of people who hate them.

It's too late for Greater Israel or whatever it is the likes of Netanyahu and Likud want. The time for that was after the Six Day War or Yom Kippur War. They could've unilaterally expelled all Palestinians and claimed the whole thing in either instance and probably gotten away with it. Too late now. Far too late.

 

[Symphony D.]

Sips/Turps is a superior buddy cop team to Sips/Sjin.

 

[Azale]

Sips/Turps is a superior buddy cop team to Sips/Sjin.

Yep, I like Sjin but the fact that Turps can make a series with Lewis tolerable speaks to his quality.

 

[Symphony D.]

Lewis does pretty good as the straight man of Fuku Shitu Dirt Company. He's also surprisingly okay in Trouble in Terrorist Town. Garry's Mod Murder is the best series though.

 

[Perfectionist]

There are strategic advantages to extinguishing Hamas as an organization forever or permanently neutering it

You want to neuter Hamas? Drop the siege, lift the transport restrictions, and TALK to them. It worked with the damned IRA, and they were crazier and a greater threat than Hamas has ever been. I really don't get how the Israeli leadership can be so stupid and blinkered for so long without a break. It's not as though there are no examples of how to successfully handle this sort of thing. It seems like it ought to be a statistical impossibility.

I mean, I know the Israeli leadership doesn't actually want peace, but their strategies aren't getting them any closer to what they actually want either.

 

[Kozmos]

I don't think there exists a peaceful solution without a final solution.

 

[Perfectionist]

Probably not at this point. I just hope Pentagon's got a plan to neutralize Israel's nuclear capacity on zero notice. If we haven't had the NSA put kill switches on all the stuff we send them we're incredibly stupid.

 

[Jehoshua]

You don't send Israel nukes or anything to do with them it makes them unofficially and independently utilising the materials it produces at its own nuclear reactor. It also manufactures a lot of its own military equipment independently since dependence on foreign imports would be a strategic liability in their eyes.

 

[Masada]

We didn't send Iran it's nuclear centrifuges and we still managed to get those to shred themselves for years without anyone figuring it out.

 

[Perfectionist]

No, we or our allies just send them the delivery systems, or crucial components thereof. All the warheads in the world don't do you any good if your subs, fighters, artillery, and missiles don't work properly.

 

[Kozmos]

It's true guys, you can hack anything if you hold square long enough with a remote.

 

[Perfectionist]

I'm pretty sure it actually involves manipulating a series of tubes.

 

[Jehoshua]

We didn't send Iran it's nuclear centrifuges and we still managed to get those to shred themselves for years without anyone figuring it out.

A nuclear centrifuge is not a nuclear weapon good sir. Although it must be said that the virus inserted into the systems of the Iranian nuclear programme (most likely through a glorified USB) is likely to have been a collaborative US-Israeli effort.

Anyways, I've been amused enough already by foolishness, I don't think my lungs could take a second round

 

[Symphony D.]

but their strategies aren't getting them any closer to what they actually want either.

As for the Gaza Strip and its 1.6 million inhabitants, which Palestinians consider central to any future nation, the Israeli expansionists say Gaza should be abandoned to its own fate — to be eventually absorbed by Egypt or left as a hostile semi-state, run by the Islamist militant organization Hamas and isolated from Israel by existing separation barriers.

"(that Israel will bomb occasionally)" goes unsaid but might as well be there. It seems to me more like they're actually getting exactly what they actually want.

Although it must be said that the virus inserted into the systems of the Iranian nuclear programme (most likely through a glorified USB) is likely to have been a collaborative US-Israeli effort.

Almost certainly not. Stuxnet was more or less a deliberate reveal of "Hey, we have extremely sophisticated cyberwarfare weapons that can mess with weird hackjob electromechanical systems we have no good working examples of. Imagine what we could do to your digital network backbones" by a ~mysterious unknown actor~ (America). It was intended as a digital Sputnik moment to ensure we did not get Sputnik'd. Israel probably had exactly zero to do with it because you can bet with how much they steal from us we spy on them all the time and wouldn't give them what are the software equivalents of our nuclear arsenal.

And yes, if you could get in to the most secure hardware of a rival nation that hates you undetected, you could certainly get into the networks of a nation that's nominally allied. Nukes, like everything else, are hooked into networks, as are their guidance and delivery systems. It's not terribly far-fetched. On the other hand, if Israel started getting ready to fling nukes everywhere when confronted with an imminent demise, I could also just see America nuking their systems preemptively since we'd inevitably receive the blame for their actions in the aftermath.

 

[Masada]

A nuclear centrifuge is not a nuclear weapon good sir.

I don't see the difference. Both are susceptible to attack. Nuclear weapons arguably more than centrifuges because of the multiple failure points - navigation, rockets, etc.

 

[Symphony D.]

Did you know that Rachael Maddow once asked a guest "But isn't Israel America's greatest ally in the region, if not the world?" without that annoyingly chipper way she delivers sarcasm, seemingly with complete seriousness? I had stopped taking her seriously after this painful and torturous sequence I'm sure everyone on her writing staff told her was cute and engaging but it was definitely a new low.

 

[Jehoshua]

they tend to be less accessible however.

As to the article symphony linked, its doesn't really say squat beyond the US was clearly involved in it as a primary party, which is something that no one reasonably disputes. As to the analysts, there are some who support the theory that it was a collaborative exercise for various reasons, and some who don't citing the relatively low levels of military trust between the two parties. I obviously am more convinced by the former arguments, but since we aren't privy to confidential information and both states won't publically state anything, certain knowledge is beyond our capabilities to produce.

 

[Symphony D.]

Physical accessibility is irrelevant given enough time. Even if a nuclear delivery system is on a wholly isolated network, or not even on a network, it will have some form of hardware and software on board that has to be periodically checked and updated to ensure it works. If you know what that is, and you have something running around in the wild infecting everything it can in the hopes of winding up on a system that will some day be connected to it, and you made that hard enough to detect, you would stand a pretty good chance of getting into that totally isolated system. That is the lesson of Stuxnet and its precursor: every system can be penetrated.

Even if you don't have the time to accomplish that, nuclear weapons still rely on networks for things like the dispersion of authorization, telemetry, and targeting data to be armed and pointed at a target, unless they're permanently pointed at a fixed target, which Israel's probably aren't since they have relatively few of them, so many potential targets, and basically zero fixed launch sites. All of that support infrastructure becomes a potential target as well. Then there are the actual delivery systems, be they the missiles or the planes carrying the bombs. Ad nauseum.

And yes, you're right, I'm sure that out of all the countries in the world the US considers allies, it would pick Israel, an actor which has time and again proven its only true allegiance is to itself, to develop cybersuperweapons with, as opposed to more reliable and more developed countries with far greater resources like... everyone in UKUSA/ECHELON except New Zealand.

 

[erez87]

You want to neuter Hamas? Drop the siege, lift the transport restrictions, and TALK to them. It worked with the damned IRA, and they were crazier and a greater threat than Hamas has ever been. I really don't get how the Israeli leadership can be so stupid and blinkered for so long without a break. It's not as though there are no examples of how to successfully handle this sort of thing. It seems like it ought to be a statistical impossibility.

I mean, I know the Israeli leadership doesn't actually want peace, but their strategies aren't getting them any closer to what they actually want either.

What if Hamas refuses to talk?

And I think the Israeli leadership just wants control of Israel, best way to achieve it is to create an endless war where they put themselves as the only ones who can deal with it (which had been successfully done). Same to Hamas... but it's probably only correct about Bibi.

 

[Symphony D.]

What if Hamas refuses to talk?

Hamas offered a 10-year truce in the leadup to the current Gaza invasion. Hamas did the same in 2008. It had more or less the same conditions in 2006. Admittedly they go back and forth on whether they'll recognize Israel and so it always gets written off. Speaking of 2006, I'm surprised how much this article seems to describe the present, despite being written 8 years ago.

Hamas' demands may or may not be unreasonable, I haven't actually seen what they are beyond the '67 borders, but they've shown a willingness to talk for quite some time.

Hamas's conditions were the release of re-arrested Palestinian prisoners who were let go in the Schalit deal, the opening of Gaza-Israel border crossings in order to allow citizens and goods to pass through, and international supervision of the Gazan seaport in place of the current Israeli blockade.

e: These seem fairly reasonable to me.