Mossad terrorists keep killing civilians.

[regexcellent]

This "my country holier than thou's" fight is simultaneously hilarious and depressing. Does it really matter?

edit: Az beat me to it.

[Aeson]

Yah, white guilt leads to us doing stupid things. It's how we got Isreal after all.

[regexcellent]

Yah, white guilt leads to us doing stupid things. It's how we got Isreal after all.

White guilt over things that happened 3 years ago is very different from white guilt over things that happened 150 years ago.

[Zevico]

Yah, white guilt leads to us doing stupid things. It's how we got Isreal after all.

"White guilt" did not make hundreds of thousands of Jews settle in Mandate Palestine, establish a state, and fight a war for its existence and win. Israel owes its existence to its people first and foremost. The presumption that a United Nations vote "created" the state in any sense is a gross exaggeration of its importance in Israeli history.

[Aeson]

White guilt over things that happened 3 years ago is very different from white guilt over things that happened 150 years ago.

Naw, it's still just feeling guilty for something you didn't actually do.

[Al B. Sure!]

"White guilt" did not make hundreds of thousands of Jews settle in Mandate Palestine, establish a state, and fight a war for its existence and win. Israel owes its existence to its people first and foremost. The presumption that a United Nations vote "created" the state in any sense is a gross exaggeration of its importance in Israeli history.

UN Resolution 181.

[DaShi]

Ignore him. He just wants the attention.

[Az]

UN Resolution 181.

Did not create the state of Israel, the Israeli war of Independence did.

[Kuciwalker]

So we (or a client state of ours) can assassinate Iranians at will, but if they retaliate, that's bad. Bunk.

Of course it's not bunk. To use a much more extreme example, it was good when we killed German soldiers and bad when they killed ours. Killing German soldiers was not only permissible but our moral obligation; killing Allied soldiers was actively evil. This is because killing Germans advanced causes that were well worth their lives, while killing Americans impeded those same causes in addition to its inherent badness.

The two sides here (the West, Iran) are treated by different standards because they have different goals, and those goals are not morally equivalent.

I have seen #133. I find it unconvincing.

Really, Arrian? Iranian nukes aren't something we should be losing sleep over, but the price we pay to prevent/delay them is really small in perspective. For example, US federal speed limit laws are probably way more consequential than all of this combined.

I still don't think delaying Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons is worth acts of war, though. Nukes would indeed make them less susceptible to Western pressure. That I buy. Sure. Ok, but that's not so bad as to warrant assassinations, bombing or invasion. There's a point at which the cure is worse than the disease.

This cure is really, really cheap.

[Kuciwalker]

(Sorry for responding to this late. Yesterday kind of got out of hand for me.)

I, uh, have a lot of problems with what you're suggesting here. But to begin, given that there is an organ shortage in the United States, is it acceptable for young people who would die without organ transplants to murder old people and take their organs?

I say this because it seems you are valuing the extra month of life the Israeli population would get over the few decades of life the Iranian scientist would get if allowed to live. I suppose the math works out. This scientist only had another ~36 years left to live, whereas Israel is losing ~652,000 years of life if it's nuked one month earlier.

I approve of you trying to get a handle on the proportions here the important thing isn't the exact numbers or probabilities so much as the knowledge that one of those is much, much bigger than the other.

But this is, really, an abominable calculation to make.

We (effectively) make this calculation all the time. We avoid explicitly computing it by pre-computing a bunch of rules to use in various situations, rules that approximate it pretty well. (Sometimes the rules serve an extra purpose, where following the rule provides locally suboptimal outcomes but globally optimal outcomes.) This describes observable human moral intuitions really, really well.

And I think the reason it repulses people so much is because it ignores the idea that there may be other solutions.

No, it doesn't! It looks at all of the solutions, and judges this to be the best one! Less violent solutions are reasonably estimated to result in overall worse outcomes, in expectation.

Relations with Iran don't exist on a scale between nuked now and nuked later (or never). There are other axes. But because we're so mired in the **** of past decisions when it comes to foreign policy, it seems very hard to see another way to operate. We look at awful situations around the world, realize we only have so many resources and so much time, and do what little we can to mitigate the negative effects of one situation or another.

And sometimes this works. And sometimes it doesn't. Often it doesn't work because if you're attempting to act precisely in a complex situation, hidden variables are going to **** you over. It's why we're very bad at predicting weather precisely more than a week or two out, or why there's been almost no effort made to control weather.

This paragraph is a combination of logical fallacies and empirically false claims.

Yet climate science exists, and we know (with some confidence) that global warming is happening. The reason for this is that, despite the complexity of weather, it's relatively easily to see and predict broad patterns and changes. And it's also relatively easy to make big, loosely defined things happen. We can't control the weather precisely, but all we have to do to raise temperatures worldwide is pump green house gases into the atmosphere.

This is a hell of a tangent, but there's a point. The point is that it may well be impossible to know what value we get out of killing one Iranian scientist, because the variables are so many and so hard to disentangle that we might actually hasten the effect we're attempting to delay. (We kill Iranian scientists; Iran decides to buy or steal nukes instead and doesn't wait to complete their nuke projects before giving a bomb to a terrorist.)

Of course it's impossible to know. But, as per above, we can get a very vague idea of the relative magnitudes, especially if those magnitudes are very different. And we can say with a fair amount of confidence that one magnitude is much larger than the other, in expectation.

Yet it could very well be possible for us to make big, broad decisions that make everything more or less better. A full scale invasion of Iran is one such solution, but I don't personally support that because I'm pretty much universally opposed to war.

"pretty much universally" betrays your entire argument. You've admitted that you are willing to do a cost/benefit analysis and, if the benefits sufficiently outweigh the costs, abandon your principle. That's a perfectly reasonable position that necessarily concedes that cost/benefit analyses are legitimate moral calculations.

But a solution such as completely reworking our foreign policy so that we no longer give other countries reasons to be pissed at us might be possible, too. We might suffer casualties along the way, but that might be worth it if in the end we can achieve some sort of lasting peace.

Yes, except the vast majority of informed people have reasonably concluded that this isn't possible and/or would involve costs much larger than our current stance.

Yes, hypothetically depending on a bunch of parameters the actions here may have been wrong! But if we look at this realistically they probably weren't.

[Aeson]

Yes, except the vast majority of informed people have reasonably concluded that this isn't possible and/or would involve costs much larger than our current stance.

Bull****. We only have to look at how colossally stupid our foreign policy has been in the region the last decade or so to see just how inapplicable the "reasonably" of your statement is. The people driving our nation into perpetual war in the region are ****ing nutjobs. And their analysis isn't based on what you're espousing either, it's based on what gets them the most campaign contributions (or viewership if you want to include various pundits as "informed").

[Zevico]

As Michael Totten points out, it's by no means certain that the Israelis carried out this attack. In fact, the safest conclusion is that we don't know who did.

http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/

Andrew Tabler lived and worked in Damascus for years. He visited Beirut most weekends—you would, too, if you had to live in Damascus—and that’s where I met him.

He came up with a great phrase to describe the utter inscrutability of the Syrian regime. He called it “the blackness.” “Fog” isn’t the right word because fog eventually clears. No, what went on behind the scenes among the elite was utterly dark even to Andrew who had excellent connections with the elite.

Syria is hardly the only place in the Middle East shrouded in blackness. Just look at Iran. Somebody killed an Iranian nuclear scientist yesterday with a car bomb.

Who?

The first country that came to my mind when I read that was Israel. The second was the United States.

But car bombs aren’t exactly the modus operandi of either. Who else, though, wants so badly to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program that they’d send someone in there or recruit somebody local to whack scientists?

I suppose it might have been the Saudis, but that’s a wild stab. I have no evidence.

Maybe the Iranian government thought the scientist was spy? Maybe the scientist was a spy?

I do not know.

This sort of thing happens a lot, not just in Iran, but also in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Conspiracy theories are common in the Middle East for all sorts of reasons. This is one of them.

[Elok]

As a strict theocracy, shouldn't Iran be killing their own educated class anyway? The lazy Persian bums are letting Israel do their work for them.

[Zevico]

UN Resolution 181.

Az already made this point for me, but I'll repeat it. UN Resolutions are texts. They are not enforced by people unless it is in their interest to do so. Who enforced this Resolution, if anyone? The Arab States? The United Kingdom? The United Nations?
The Arab States ignored that Resolution and sought Israel's destruction.
The United Kingdom allowed the Israeli state to arise and left Mandate Palestine--but it did so because it had no interest in fighting a conflict against the Israeli Haganah and more broadly, Israeli society. It did not enforce the dicates of the UN--it simply left. The recipients of strategic positions, for example, are documented as having been received by Israelis and Arabs depending, at least partly, on the whims of the commanders on the ground. There was, in short, no policy of pro-Israeli or pro-Arabism iinherent in the withdrawal itself. Mroeover, the UK's occupation of Mandate Palestine arose not from its obligations to the UN or, indeed, to the former League of Nations, but because of its perceived interest in encouraging Israeli settlement in Mandate Palestine--an interest which, in its view, had to be balanced in order to maintain relations with the Arab states.
Various nations decided to provide aid to the Arabs and the Israelis at this time. They did so not because of a UN Mandate commanding them to aid Israel or destroy it but because they thought it in their interest to do so.
Nor did any of the institutions of the Israeli state arise or depend on this resolution. Israeli civil society and semi-governmental organisations existed before 181 and after it.
The UN had no troops on the ground, no money, no aid, nothing. It was, institutionally speaking, irrelevant to the inception of the State. Until the situation is to the contrary there is no point to UN Resolutions except where their enforcement is in the interests of member states.
In short we can attribute very little to UN Resolution 181 per se. We still basically live in a world of nation-states borne of the Treaty of Westphalia.

[molly bloom]

Not just from diseases. The (non-Mesoamerican North) American Indians were less advanced, obviously, so couldn't sustain as large populations.

I'm aware of the estimates of lower population levels in North America.

I believe the idea was that the nasty ol' Brits were supposed to have killed countless (large) numbers of indigenes in genocidal slaughter.

In fact diseases to which the indigenes had no resistance had already killed a great many of them, in what are now New Mexico, Florida and Arizona, but in the North East certainly, some early Puritans thought nothing of killing the natives because they were seen as being irredeemably ungodly. This doesn't amount to a British governmental policy of genocide.

Once the War of Independence had been won, the United States did pursue policies designed to minimize the indigenous presence in the way of settlement:

"You will be fully justified in their utter extermination."

William Sherman, during the Modoc War, for instance.