Don’t eat fissile cucumbers.
Don’t eat fissile cucumbers.
This is such a tired old line based on the aircraft carrier rhetoric from the 60s, outdated since the Iraq wars and our own airbases going up all over the region.
Also the idea that Saudi Arabia trades in dollars because otherwise Israel would attack them fails to take into account that much of the rest of the world uses them too, since people like a stable currency that everyone else already likes.
You guys really need to update your rhetoric.
Yeah, it was a big part of Obama’s arms control push. We slowed down due to the expense though.
Only major problem with this line of thought is it underestimates the challenges of teaching.
Teaching is about more than just providing the material, if that was enough we could have automated teaching a long time ago. A teacher has to be able to understand and diagnose the source of a students confusion, and compose a solution. This is a very complex problem, due to how much individual people vary in their thinking, experiences and knowledge base.
The word “eventually” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
The Saudis barely participated in Yom Kippur, from some brief googling they deployed a single battalion that saw a little bit of fighting in the Golan Heights. I honestly wasn’t even aware they had participated militarily.
Their much bigger impact was the oil embargo against the US, which caused rather famous gas shortages here and one of the most severe recessions we’ve ever had, during the Nixon years. Perhaps seeing the rest of the coalition demolished was enough? Though there were clear reasons for the Israeli victory that aren’t that difficult to understand. It’s far more specific than just Israel strong or something like that. That oil embargo ended up proving the power of OPEC though, dramatically strengthening the Saudi’s position on the global stage, which persists to this day.
Regarding NG, the main pipeline through the area for exporting Egyptian NG actually takes some pains to go around Israel, rather than through it.
I guess you don’t think our politicians care which of them are in charge? And I’m not so sure about ironclad, we’ve withheld aid in past decades.
I really question exactly how Israel has significant influence over Egypt. Much less Saudi Arabia, which isn’t even a neighbor and has significantly more wealth and influence than Israel does.
If Israel was that useful as a tool to control Egypt, sure would like those billions of dollars back…
And I have a feeling they’ll have some consequences. We may not all see the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict the same way, I have a feeling you’re not aware of any of the Arab atrocities from the early 20th century, before Israel was ever a nation. But this time they’ve lost a lot of support in the US for the first time in our history, and that will likely have an impact on future political calculations.
This betrays a startling lack of awareness of just how extensive US partnerships are across the globe. The US has sent tens of billions of dollars in military and economic aid to Egypt. Close ties with Saudi Arabia. Close ties with Morocco. Most Mediterranean countries are in NATO, actually. This isn’t even to speak of our own military bases littered throughout both Africa and the Middle East.
Does anything going from Asia to Africa even go through Israel? I’d think they’d usually take sea routes through the Indian Ocean. Do we really need some unsinkable aircraft carrier anymore when we have literally dozens of our own airstrips all over the region?
That said, I do agree with your first two points. Ukraine is a proxy war, and supporting Israel is the point. Not sure it’s actually more important than any actual US territory though.
It’s been interesting to me how little coverage of Israeli peace protests shows up in our Lemmy news communities.
I must admit, I thought they were full of shit when they claimed they were training dolphins to do underwater patrols, but if this is real then maybe they do have some sort of animal training program.
Hamas doesn’t have nukes. If Russia didn’t, we probably would sail into the Baltic and posture.
And yeah, you do have a point with Ukraine. We don’t have any signed treaties with them like we do Israel though. Just the Budapest Memorandum, with its very soft wording.
Well, “we have to look strong” basically sums it all up, yeah. To quote a famous American saying, “Walk softly and carry a big stick”. We’ve been doing it for centuries, google Commodore Matthew Perry for an old example. Another good example would be Reagan reactivating our old Iowa class battleships just because they looked so dangerous, even though they were basically obsolete in the era of aircraft.
Making a threat can be very useful, it’s not hard to understand. Same reason a dog growls or a cat hisses.
Power projection, maintaining our reputation and a threat. We send aircraft carriers all over the place, there will always be one or two near any ally threatened with attack. It’s why we buy them.
It’s really just Hezbollah at this point. Hamas barely has a couple brigades left, if that. Houthis are too far away to do much asides shoot at ships in the Red Sea. Not sure where the other fronts are. You think Egypt is going to invade or something? Jordan? Syria? Iran going to march through two countries to get there?
True. The military blockade allowing only a modest amount of aid in with no real assistance in distribution is also a major problem.
If Egypt was a rival, why not help hamas or leave the Gaza border open? If Jordan was a rival, why help track Iranian missiles? If Syria was a rival, why have American military bases?
Meanwhile, estimates put Hezbollah fighting strength at 60k. IDF has 300k enlisted.
Israel almost certainly has nukes.
The problem isn’t IDF propaganda, it’s your propaganda that cannot acknowledge any difficult truth, because of your pretty clear goal in aiding the Jihadist quest to reclaim all of Palestine.
edit: Oh, and I almost forgot. Hezbollah is Shiite Muslim. Most of the rest of the Middle East is Sunni Muslim. It’s a lot more complicated than some basic conflict.
Yes, Americans most certainly bear some responsibility for enabling Netanyahu, though the effects of voting for Harris remain to be seen. It would also be incorrect and propagandistic to try to say they have sole responsibility, though.
Egypt? Not an adversary. Jordan? Not an adversary. Syria? Not an adversary. On top of that, the last 3 times Israel fought them all, sometimes even simultaneously, they crushed them. All there is left is Hezbollah, with around 20% the total size of the IDF.
Oh, and now they have nukes.
And none of this is necessary to starve a captive population to death anyway.
No, our purpose is to do what the American people wish, whatever that may be. The rest is percentages of total voters.
Some people just want it at the bottom of the comment section instead of floating in the middle somewhere. If we could pin its comments to the bottom that would address this.