Yes please (though I doubt it was sarcasm). It’s not a big deal ! I just argue bluntly in response to him expressing why I think his thinking is wrong, no one is angry here (certainly not me)
I don’t want a gang up on Ifhtikar, who is a very kind and gentle man. There are also completely valid reasons for hoping Hezbollah inflicts enough damage on the IDF under an invasion so that it doesn’t bog down into a 25 year occupation (which I think is highly likely to happen). If Al Qaida had attacked a Russian military installation, I wouldn’t have “supported” Al Qaida, but I would think it a positive event, depending on other geopolitical factors.
I thought Wyld’s post was excellent regarding binary thinking and just about everything he wrote, but I want to add something:
Personally, I was thinking more about Lebanon in my response to Ifthikar. Because there are 2 countries in the Middle East that are desperate for long term peace and stability (more than others) and those are Syria and Lebanon. To then invite an israeli invasion upon your homeland is such a grotesque betrayal of the people you claim to fight for and their needs and their hopes and aspirations. So my perspective is what Hezbollah’s actions means for Lebanon and the lebanese people, who are pawns that get crushed by Hezbollah’s (and really Iran’s) cynical actions.
There is an extraordinary steep human cost inviting an invasion by the regional, now unfettered, Mad Dog. It is in fact a great, great, great crime against your own state and people, to invite an invasion and future occupation by the Regional Mad Dog against the wishes of your state and the majority of the people in Lebanon. Because that is what they did, knowingly and (maybe not so) willingly.
Yes, that is my point. It is one of the countries in the region that is barely breathing, still rebuilding after the last war and the consequences of the Beirut blast and much more. It is a completely dysfunctional state, where the state is hostage to the will of a proxy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. In Lebanon, people are absolutely desperate to avoid this invasion by Israel and only Hezbollah’s hardliners wants to invite it.
It’s a bit more complicated than US giving direct funding to Bin Laden, who was just a warrior (and very wealthy, so funded his own trip to Afghanistan to wage jihad) and not exactly in charge of the Mujaheedin, but sure. Technically they funded Bin Laden.
Absolutely not. There isn’t even half decent indisium for this claim, but a hell of a lot of indisium as well as evidence, of the opposite.
Yes. And no. Re closing the Strait; it’s a contravention of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea regarding freedom of navigation. It’s not a war crime however. That falls under the Geneva Convention and is not the same thing.
It doesnt matter nothing will be done about either attacks.
Yet in legal ideological terms, Russia have been targeting Ukraine infrastructure for a few years. Nothing has been done. Putin was indicted for war crimes, but confined to the trafficking of children. Nothing about damage to energy systems.
The test is are the attacks justified by military necessity. Which they are not. So there is potential for being held to be a war crime, but it does not appear there is any binding case law on this in existence. It’s then a risk for the ICC and complainants to run a test case.
It is doubtful that Iranian blockade of itself is a war crime, but could be escalated to such, upon actual targetting of civilian vessels, assuming there are fools who’d dare to run the gauntlet.
Still nothing will be done at the iCC about any of this.