There is a reason why no other country has a system like the Iron Dome, they simply don't need it. They prevent such a problem from arising in the first place by moving the battle into enemy territory and using a disproportionate response.
Example: 9/11 terrorist attacks which killed 3,000 people in the US, resulted in 800,000 people killed and 37 million people displaced in the Middle East and other parts of the world.[2] There are no more repeat Al-Qaeda attacks on US.
Now imagine that the US response to 9/11 attacks instead was building and deploying a better air defense system, and not moving the fight to the enemy (and their allies') territory.
With each additional private jet hitting a building in NYC, they would incrementally improve their air defense capabilities. At first they would ignore attacks hitting the neighborhoods like Harlem, and only really respond to attacks on Manhattan.
But even a response on Manhattan attacks would've been bombing some sand dunes in the desert, and politely asking terrorists and their families to vacate caves before bombing them from the air.
Eventually the system will become "good enough", so it will become possible to ignore all attacks altogether, and convince the public that they have to live with the small civilian casualties from time to time.
Al-Qaeda would become a specialist in the creation of third-generation kamikaze stealth aircraft, while OBL would constantly brag on Al Jazeera how he brought Big Satan to his knees.
Of-course this scenario seems more SciFi-y than Iron Dome's Star Wars-like fireworks.
And that's because unlike Israel, US is a normal, healthy, and strong country, with better thinking and decision making processes.
Wow, and here i thought your other comment was leading towards some unrealistic, if everyone made hugs not guns nobody would need armies. Guess i misjudged that.
> There are no more repeat Al-Qaeda attacks on US.
Would there otherwise have been? Its not like there were a bunch of 9/11's prior to 9/11. I think its risky to assume thd usa's plan worked when there are a lot of other factors involved like if they even had the capability to do a repeat performance at all. And the (long term) cost to the usa has been high. America's over-reaction to 9/11 may even eventually cost it its place as the world's sole super power as geopolitical rivials take advantage of the mistrust it has sewn.
Regardless, what are you suggesting? - that Israel should pacify the region by extreme force, crushing it under its heel to whatever end? Because, even ignoring the humanity of that, it sounds tactically stupid when you consider the geopolitical situation in the region. They'd essentially turn themselves into the world's common enemy, and that's usually a bad play unless they're desperate.
Israel also does disproportionate response, and moving the attack to enemy territory, and preventing accumulation of materiel in geographically-near adversaries' hands. And they have Iron Dome, because they still have missiles shot at them from time to time.
I live in Israel and I'm not aware of any disproportionate response since Ariel Sharon times (but even then they were very limited, one-off cases).
The Israeli government just putting a show for the international media and for the Israeli civilians. They have to show that they're doing at least something, like bombing sand dunes and empty buildings.
And Iron Dome is the main enabler for this show.
John Oliver and Trevor Noah - the great philosophers of our time were right - Israel should provide Hamas with the Iron Dome to level the playing field ;)
The operative definition of proportionality is not between attack and counterattack, as most people seem to think. It's between the military benefit and the likelihood of non-combatant casualties. Since the military benefit of Israel's actions was quite small and the likelihood of non-combatant casualties was extremely high, it's nearly impossible to argue that such proportionality was respected.
> The Israeli government just putting a show
212 dead, including 61 children, is not "just a show" from a human standpoint. If you meant that it was "just a show" from a purely military standpoint, that's practically an admission that Israel's actions were disproportionate.
> Since the military benefit of Israel's actions was quite small and the likelihood of non-combatant casualties was extremely high
I think its unclear (to us, the public) what the military purpose/need of the strikes were, so its unclear how porportional they were. As pointed out elsewhere,iron dome is really expensive to operate and probably has limited capacity. If the military goal was to get the rockets to stop before iron dome ran out of ammo, that doesn't seem disporportionate to me, especially if Israel took steps to minimize civilian casualities where possible.
I dont know enough to say if they actually did or not,i just dont think its as clear cut as you make it out to be that it was disporportionate.
"Show" means fake / not real / severe under-proportionate response, not disproportionate.
Do you really think that Israeli Air Force was acting in its full unrestrained force?
It uses the same american fighter jets, only with much much better Israeli electronic warfare equipment.
> 212 dead, including 61 children, is not "just a show" from a human standpoint. If you meant that it was "just a show" from a purely military standpoint, that's practically an admission that Israel's actions were disproportionate.
128 civilians (per UN OHCHR)[20]
80–225 militants killed (low est. per Hamas, high est. per Israel)
About 20-30 of the Gazan civilians were killed directly by the Hamas' own misfired rockets.
And all of them were indirectly killed by the Hamas who used them as human shields.
Plus we can't trust their numbers, as they're inflating them in order to solicit donations and monetary aid from the world.
I guess many photographers in Gaza are making a living from selling stock photos and videos. Some of these photos are clearly staged, i.e. a single kid's toy nicely placed in the center of the demolished building, or a kid holding a teddy bear, etc.
Anyway you can't compare this with atrocities done by NATO in the Balkans or by the US and their allies in the Middle East, there are several orders of magnitude difference in the number of civilian casualties.
I'm not talking about WW2 or Chechnya war, were carpet bombings were used.
Give me a single example of any other military force in the world who uses Roof Knocking[1], all the other armies have orders of magnitude higher civilian casualties.
There is a reason why no other country has a system like the Iron Dome, they simply don't need it. They prevent such a problem from arising in the first place by moving the battle into enemy territory and using a disproportionate response.
Example: 9/11 terrorist attacks which killed 3,000 people in the US, resulted in 800,000 people killed and 37 million people displaced in the Middle East and other parts of the world.[2] There are no more repeat Al-Qaeda attacks on US.
Now imagine that the US response to 9/11 attacks instead was building and deploying a better air defense system, and not moving the fight to the enemy (and their allies') territory.
With each additional private jet hitting a building in NYC, they would incrementally improve their air defense capabilities. At first they would ignore attacks hitting the neighborhoods like Harlem, and only really respond to attacks on Manhattan.
But even a response on Manhattan attacks would've been bombing some sand dunes in the desert, and politely asking terrorists and their families to vacate caves before bombing them from the air.
Eventually the system will become "good enough", so it will become possible to ignore all attacks altogether, and convince the public that they have to live with the small civilian casualties from time to time.
Al-Qaeda would become a specialist in the creation of third-generation kamikaze stealth aircraft, while OBL would constantly brag on Al Jazeera how he brought Big Satan to his knees.
Of-course this scenario seems more SciFi-y than Iron Dome's Star Wars-like fireworks. And that's because unlike Israel, US is a normal, healthy, and strong country, with better thinking and decision making processes.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_best_defense_is_a_good_off...
[2] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human