Many of the republicans I know sit in a gray area in between, they definitely don't want us involved but they also don't have a strong opinion on the wars either way and see them as someone else's fight. That definitely isn't the main narrative I see in the media, but I personally know very few republicans who care strongly about one side of either war.
That view is a bit like a libertarian anti-war view in my opinion. Its antiwar without attempting to get involved in anyone else's business.
Expect the money to stop flowing to Ukraine, and to keep going to Israel, and try to divine a logic for that.
Maybe you just don't know enough Trump voters?
It’s always “your hypocrisy is worse than my hypocrisy” because even if they admit the hypocrisy exists (not a given) they just chalk it up to “both sides.“ We’ve seen this song and dance for a decade straight.
repubs aren't pro russia. they are just anti-getting-involved in there.
They sure are for the right price.
This only matter if we think that the Republican party still exists, and was not silently replaced by other party carrying its blood stained skin. Is GOP still alive? Is a serious question.
I have a lot of doubts about the real independence of republicans in this situation. The man at charge is obviously pro Russia and the republicans can't do a s*t about this. They will be replaced one by one. Anything that would try will be pushed out of the road.
I heard Mitch McConnell called a RINO a few weeks ago. That says it all.
1) Cult to the leader, Image printed on coins, posters, everywhere on TV and media. Fanatism
2) Religion serves the King. Divine intervention to justify power take. "God choose me in a divine mission to fix this mess" is a central part of the speech in every new monarch crowning. Trump is yet talking about that.
3) Exceptionalism and isolationalism, we are the best country and is cold and rainy out of my frontiers. Frontiers are very important for Kings as symbolic element of protection.
4) Extravagant behavior. Trump did all sort of outrageous things that would put anybody else in the jail, but got unscathed all the time. All kings do this. This is made to reinforce the idea of a special "superhuman" status.
4) Laws. This special status imply also that the law does not apply to the King and people will be carefully taught about that.
5) Killing competitors to the crown ("Hang Mike Pence" was metaphorical, but also works in a symbolic plane).
6) Wicht hunt behavior. As the King can't do wrong, scapegoats are required, normally on minorities.
7) Useful idiots. Extensive use of expendable pawns that are promised to enter the court, became famous, gain influence etc if they do a favor for the King. Those promises will never deliver.
8) Sucession. I would bet that the next elections will not have Trump as a frontman but a son of Trump will be the sure and only candidate. Every step will be taken to assure that not other has an opportunity inside the party. There will be a strong temptation and a lot of space to cheat in elections also.
9) And a component that is not still here, but I expect to see in the future is to disarm people that could pose a treat, weapon control but only for a part of the population. All Kings do this.
Of course, it took what, 70, 80 years of US influence to weaken the European armies to the point where we're highly reliant on them for defense, deterrence, tech and material. The Crimea invasion should've been the catalyst for the massively increased spending and prioritization of the military in Europe, not the 2022 escalation. I hope for Ukraine's sake that Europe has been able to catch up and restart production of equipment and that they can supply it asap, because after Ukraine it'll be Moldavia and Georgia, which already have pro-russian separatist movements / areas. Poland has invested a ton in updating their military at least.
I hope the US doesn't have veto powers to stop article 5 from being enacted if it does come to that.
They can't and they won't.
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-weapons-shells-european-unio...
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-ukraine-military-aid-2026/a-69...
Sending more munitions to Ukraine means it takes the Russian military longer to overcome the Ukrainian army by force of arms. The unstated aspect that is often glossed over is that this requires more and more Ukrainian men to be forced against their will to die for the territorial integrity of the country (because in 2024 the Ukrainian military is fueled overwhelming by conscription, not by volunteers). It's bizarre to me that is considered a "pro-Ukrainian" take. It's like egging on Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance to keep fighting, no matter if ~70% of your male population dies in the process. Just don't surrender!
Americans and Western Europeans cheer for Ukrainian sovereignty, but seem disinterested in Ukrainian lives. I think the bulk of Ukrainian men would rather trade the Blue&Yellow for the Russian tri-color, and keep their balls/legs/arms attached.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/39622
https://www.ft.com/content/b9396112-585a-4f7e-9628-13d500c99...
No. We don't want to be world police. We want to make money and grow our families.
Israel's diplomatic position would be much weaker if they didn't believe that the US would keep supporting them no matter what they do.
Why do you feel that Israel's diplomatic position needs to be weaker?
And how would the Palestinians' diplomatic position be, without the support of Iran, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Turkey, Lebanon, Libya, Tunis, and the USSR and now Russia?
Gee I wonder why. Every single US senator takes AIPAC lobby money.
Most are anti palestine because Hamas is a terrorist. Sorry I won’t support terrorism and support what Israel is doing.
I support Ukraine because I know what Russia needs Ukraine for.
Do I want to see people shooting? No because I’ve been to war and seen how ugly it is. Sometimes you have to defend yourself though.
I still voted for Trump.
This just means you support State Terrorism instead of non-state terrorism.
> Sometimes you have to defend yourself though.
Unless you're Palestinian. In which case defending yourself isn't authorized. Just ask the West Bank residents being regularly killed by armed illegal settlers pre-October 7th how laying down their arms has worked out for them.
I'm suggesting murdering people at a music festival occupies the same space, morally, as bombing entire families with aviation ordnance. One of them is painted as wrong, and the other isn't, because state terrorism is tacitly approved in the Western mainstream information space....depending on the perpetrators. When Hamas (or Russia) does it, it's "kidnapping", when Israel does it, they are "detaining suspects". From August 2023 (before the Hamas attack) AP News was reporting Israel had 1,200 detainees without charges. Why aren't they called hostages? ( https://apnews.com/article/israel-detention-jails-palestinia... )
The two regions are both enclaves of Palestine, engaged in a joint struggle for emancipation. There were 100+ Palestinians killed in the West Bank in 2022: ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63073541 ) and 200+ killed in 2023 before the October 7th attack ( https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/08/1139922 ). Clearly disarmament and NOT being ruled by Hamas is not working for the West Bank Palestinians. I'm sure if you asked any of the various Palestinian militant groups, yes they are engaged in a joint defense of their people. After all, the primary purpose of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to try to capture enough Israelis to force a prisoner exchange and get their own people back (similar to snatching Gilad Shalit and trading just him for 1,000 Palestinians). They suffered from "catastrophic success" mixed with undisciplined follow-on echelons (Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as others) who inflicted far more civilian damage than just a cross-border snatch & grab....and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
Then I'll address that. You are again, 100% correct. Bombing entire families with aviation ordnance would be abhorrent.
When the Gazans set out to attack a music festival, they did so with the explicit intention to murder civilians. When Israel drops a JDAM on a civilian home in Gaza, one of two things happen: Either the target is a high-ranking militant, and unfortunately the civilians he lives with (like everybody else, they have families) are collateral damage. Or, the target is military infrastructure in those civilian homes, and the home gets warnings to evacuate before the bombs fall.
Let's be clear: Israel has been willing to cause far more collateral damage since the 7th of October last year than beforehand. Every Israeli I know mourns the civilians killed as a result. I am certain that there exist Israelis who celebrate Gazan civilian deaths, I see them online. But nobody that I've ever met - and I served in a combat unit here - has ever felt that way.
If you really feel that bombing entire families is wrong, you should know that a rocket from Gaza fell not far from my apartment in November 2012. We had just a broken window, but other neighbours had far more damage and one was critically injured. The rocket fell where one of my daughters was playing just as the sirens rang - that siren saved her life and others.
This is a dishonest take. The innocent civilians now being bombed didn't do this. That you try to commingle them into Hamas' actions tells a lot about you.
22,000 bombs dropped in 6 weeks: https://truthout.org/articles/israel-used-22000-u-s-provided...
How many thousands of "high ranking" militants were there that had to be killed while with their families? Was no pattern of life analysis done to enable killing them outside of their homes? Let's just say 10,000 bombs were dropped on these high-ranking guys. That leaves the balance of ordnance of ~12,000 targets. So you are telling me Israel had TIMELY and ACCURATE intelligence on the locations of ~12,000 pieces of military infrastructure in Gaza....but couldn't anticipate that Hamas's attack plans were serious? That you know the location of damn near every RPG under some guy's floorboards....but couldn't rapidly locate and recover your abducted citizens in the same battlespace? I've seen the Joint Prioritized Target List for the Korean Peninsula and even though North Korea has been digging underground facilities since 1953, I don't think that List has ~12,000 targets on it, and North Korea has 330 times the land area of Gaza. And we KNOW that the targeting process isn't accurate and timely, because we get incidents like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c985y78d0g1o
Anyone who has planned aviation support and executed a targeting lifecycle can tell that this doesn't pass the sniff test.
> I am certain that there exist Israelis who celebrate Gazan civilian deaths, I see them online. But nobody that I've ever met - and I served in a combat unit here - has ever felt that way.
I served in a National Guard infantry battalion before I commissioned, and we definitely had a few sociopaths in our company. How does nobody in the IDF know anyone malevolent, yet we get a constant stream of self-incriminating IDF war crimes on social media?
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/i-killed-him-with-four-bu...
> If you really feel that bombing entire families is wrong, you should know that a rocket from Gaza fell not far from my apartment in November 2012. We had just a broken window, but other neighbours had far more damage and one was critically injured.
Do you feel that your neighbor was "just collateral damage"? Probably not, right? It's such a dehumanizing euphemism.
General terror bombardment of residential areas is morally wrong and even militarily stupid in my opinion. It's wrong when Hamas and Hezbollah do it, and it's wrong when the IDF does it. Whether that is Greater Israel or Greater Palestine, neither will accomplish their objective by blindly chucking ordnance at people's houses.
You can't possibly believe this when there are numerous confirmed reports of entire families being massacred with 0 hostages taken. If your purpose was really to take hostages; those could have been easy bargain chips; instead they raped them, murdered them and paraded their bodies in front of cheerful crowds.
If the central point of the operation was to grab hostages; their whereabouts and well being (or at least survival) would have been central to the whole ordeal; instead the were disseminated with little to no proof of life. It doesn't even appear that the Hamas leadership knew what to do with them, or even had them accounted for and located.
The goal of the attacks was to inflict a major blow to the Israeli government by forcing a strong military response that would delay the normalisation of the relations between Israel and other arab states. To do so Hamas was wiling to sacrifice civilian blood which is exactly what is happening now. They placed their hideouts in schools hospitals, and NGO headquarters to maximise the political cost of any military operation. Hostages were "nice to have" as they were supposed to further increase the pressure on the Israeli government by people who would be pushing for their return.
They did not anticipate how far BiBi was willing to go and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
But this war specifically, not the conflict in general, was very clearly launched by Hamas.
Are you deliberately trying to conflate conflict with war to push an agenda?
Your heart is in the right place. But you've been manipulated.
No they weren't. Absorbing bombs when you have a missile defense system that ensures zero to tens of casualties, then responding with the same bombs when you know they will cause hundreds to thousands of casualties is doing exactly what I said. No one lied to me. I saw the facts and saw my money being sent to people who think this is okay, and like every other sane American, I said it should stop, and soon it will.
All of this was a decade ago, back when Israelis used to set up lawn chairs on hills overlooking Gaza and cheer as bombs dropped. Tell me how this was a lie too:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer...
Look, all this aside, you're probably a nice guy. You're probably worried for your family.i get that. I've been there. But 20 years and trillions of dollars spent on wars that did nothing to secure us, nothing to change the region, taught me that fighting back isn't always the path to success. You have to fight right, and you have to fight smart too. The US had a ton of goodwill from the world after 9/11 and squandered it so bad that Trump, who has now been elected resoundingly twice as a Republican, said on stage, in front of tons of Republicans that Republican President Bush was one of the worst presidents and his wars were disastrous mistakes and we should have never gone. Cheney, who architected those wars, and his family, are now global pariahs basically. Lashing out and wasting money and causing more problems and expecting a wallet refill? I saw that for 2 decades, and I'm done with it here, and I'm done with paying for it somewhere else too
It's not realistic at all though. No country with the means to respond militarily would decline to do so. And no army in the world has ever disengaged from a conflict once casualties became asymmetric. If the allies did that in WW2, Europe would look very different today.
The most one can reasonably expect is general adherence to international laws, which includes the principle of proportionality. Even that occasionally becomes impractical, for example since Hezbollah disregarded UNSC 1701 and noone enforced it against them, it's not realistic to expect Israel to strictly comply with it.
None of this is true. The UK did exactly this in Ireland during the IRA insurgency.
Interesting that you end your comment with flimsy justification for targeting and killing UN workers and peacekeepers, which Israel is now doing.
You basically ignored most of my comment. I never said anything about morally right, I argued from the realism of the past 20 years of counterterrorism. It leads me to think you're not responding in good faith. Like I said earlier, I have seen and am no longer willing to support wasting billions of dollars on ignoring the root of terrorism, ignoring the diplomatic means which worked with other terrorist groups (IRA, Taliban, ANC, Irgun, etc.) Maybe one day you will too
I never said anything about UN peacekeepers, don't put words in my mouth.
They are pro-Israel and anti-Palestine.
They are pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine.