RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://jinsa.org/tragic-mistakes-are-common-during-war/

Tragic mistakes happen in wars—particularly those fought in dense urban areas against adversaries who hide behind human shields—but they are not a reason to end conflicts before they are won. That is especially true when those wars are justified, fought by law-abiding, professional militaries, and waged again barbaric adversaries. Israel’s unfortunate, accidental strike that killed seven aid workers only shows how important it is that Israel finish the job against Hamas, not finish the war now.

Even though the advent of precision-guided munitions, GPS, satellite imagery, and other high-tech tools, couple with discussions of surgical strikes, can make modern warfare seem like its sterile, accurate, and infallible, as battlefield commanders we know otherwise. The reality of high-intensity warfare in a compressed battlefield is that commanders make rapid-fire decisions on sometimes imperfect information. The awful and brutal fact is that mistakes happen, even among the most advanced, law-abiding, and careful militaries in the world.

Indeed, in every conflict since the introduction of precision-guided munitions, the United States military has still made regrettable and tragic mistakes. In Operation Desert Storm, over 400 civilians were killed when the United States bombed what intelligence indicated was a command-and-control bunker but turned out to be an air-raid shelter. Rather than a Yugoslavian military target, in 1999 the United States mistakenly hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

The margin for error has only grown smaller as the United States and our partners turned to fight adversaries that wear no uniform, respect no laws, and hide among civilians. In Afghanistan, for example, the United States mistakenly struck a hospital in Kunduz, believing it was harboring Taliban fighters.

Such mistakes are not a reflection on the evil character or intentions of the military that commits them. Instead, militaries should be judged not on whether they commit mistakes, but on the steps they take in the aftermath of such tragic incidents.

https://www.jns.org/us-rift-with-israel-emboldened-iran-to-attack-directly-analysts-say/

On April 14, Iran for the first time broke with its longstanding policy of attacking Israel only by proxy. The question is, why?

Analysts offer a variety of explanations, but all agree that Iran’s perception that the United States had distanced itself from Israel was a key driver.

While Iranian proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria did participate in Saturday night’s attack, the vast majority of the more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles launched at Israel came straight from Iranian territory.

“This is a very strange event. Iranian strategy is to send someone else to get killed,” said Eyal Pinko, a researcher and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, who served for years in Israeli intelligence services.

Iran’s pretext for the attack was retaliation for the April 1 assassination of one of its generals, a targeted killing attributed to Israel. However, Pinko told JNS, “Iranian generals have been killed before. It doesn’t explain the change in doctrine.”

According to Pinko, “Iran perceived Israel as weak on several fronts, foremost among which is that it saw a significant decline in U.S. support.”

He noted the Biden administration’s growing criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas, culminating in America’s failure to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, told JNS that there’s “no doubt” that Iran concluded that it could attack Israel directly without fear of U.S. reprisal.

“It’s the number one reason,” he said. “Iran calculated accurately that there would be huge American pressure on Israel not to respond.”

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/p/world-seeks-stability-israel-seeks?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

“[Israel’s] leaders and people are forever being entreated to avoid escalation and to act proportionately. They are hectored, lectured and told to act responsibly. No other country in the world is required to behave in this way when it is attacked by states that want to wipe it off the face of the earth.”

So said a Telegraph editorial on April 14, the morning after Iran’s massive missile and drone attack on Israel. The Telegraph’s retort was aimed at an instantaneous US and European reaction to the events of the early morning hours of the 14th—“Israel, it’s terrible that you should be attacked this way. Now, don’t do anything!”

An Israeli military retaliation to the attack would be seen, of course, as a threat to “stability”—than which, unfortunately, a worn-out, dissolute West sees no higher value. “Stability” means allowing Iran to continue spreading its tentacles throughout the Middle East, creating a ring of fire around Israel, arming, training, funding, and inciting its terror proxies, and marching along almost untrammeled toward nuclearization.

That approach is evident in the US–British very limited, ineffectual warfare on the Houthis’ assault on global shipping in the Red Sea. The unspoken rule is that Houthi targets alone get hit—but no targets on the soil of the Houthis’ sponsor, Iran. Even the Iranian spy ship in the Red Sea that helps guide the Houthis’ attacks is out of bounds. (Update: the ship is now reported to be heading back to Iran for fear of an Israeli strike.)

Worried European leaders indeed trooped to Israel this week to hector and lecture its leaders not to do anything in response to an unprecedented Iranian onslaught of hundreds of projectiles, including a swarm of 120 enormous ballistic missiles some of which were intended to destroy Israel’s Nevatim airbase.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20586/the-better-civilians-of-gaza

Among the so-called innocent “civilians” who Hamas claims have been killed by Israel, there are thousands of guilty and complicit civilians without whose assistance Hamas could not have succeeded in their barbarisms.

When Hamas provides its self-serving numbers of those allegedly killed by Israel, they refuse to distinguish between combatants and civilians. They certainly do not identify complicit “civilians,” nor do they indicate how many were killed by the “friendly fire” of Hamas and other terrorist groups, whose rockets routinely misfire and land within Gaza. In a deliberate effort to mislead, Hamas instead purports to list the number of women and children who have been killed. But they include terrorists under the age of 19 as “children” and female terrorists as “women.”

All in all, the number of absolutely innocent Gazans — babies, children and adults who are not complicit in Hamas crimes — is a fraction of those claimed by Israel’s enemies, including so-called human rights groups.

It is time for a thorough and objective investigation of the actual status of all those allegedly killed by Israeli military actions. The results will show that Israel has achieved a remarkably low and unheard of ratio of combatants and complicit civilians to innocent civilians.

“The crimes committed by the Germans are horrible and one hears on every corner of the misery and losses they have intentionally brought over the peoples. The strangest thing is that even the better people among the Germans are not conscious of their heavy responsibility for all these crimes committed by the government they have chosen themselves, and that the outside world is rather inclined to forget about it.”

Those words were written by Albert Einstein on September 16, 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, in a letter I was fortunate enough to acquire.

That letter could have been written to the so-called innocent adult civilians in Gaza. They too bear “a heavy responsibility for all these crimes committed by the government they have chosen themselves.” They elected Hamas and, according to recent polls, continue to support it and would vote for those terrorists again.