Put a permanent tripwire force of at least a few thousand NATO international troops in Eastern Ukraine. Works in the Baltic states.

I think realistically if you wanted to create two viable states, you'd need some big land swaps to make both of them geographically contiguous.

I'd personally try to find some way to give Eilat to Palestine so it would have a port the Israelis couldn't blockade so easily.

You'd get the job half-done before the voters got bored and shafted you in the mid-terms. Then the opposition party would cancel all your appropriations, shut down your preparations, then blame the stalled progress on your lack of gumption. You become a one-term President for being "soft on Iran."

If the US devoted like 2-3 years to generating substantial ground forces, assembling a "coalition of the willing," filling their magazines and laying the logistical ground work, they could do it.

But that'd be hard and the political will just isn't there. Even a non-moron President would struggle.

That's the point, really. The pilot's intent is unclear, and there's a reasonable chance that his actions were the result of a mistake or systemic failure for which he is not to blame.

The section commander's intent is not really in doubt.

Yeah. To use a somewhat more extreme example: A pilot who drops a bomb that kills ten kids and an infantry section commander who orders his men to line ten kids up behind their school gym and shoot them have both killed the same number of kids.

But I bet you'd react differently to the second guy.

The legality of starting the war and the legality of conduct during a war are separate questions. www.icrc.org/en/document/...

As in, if you show up off the coast of e.g. Indonesia in a boat with a bunch of guns and American flags on it and start detaining fishing boats, the Indonesians are going to call the US Ambassador and ask "hey, is this asshole really part of your navy?"

And his answer will be very important.

From a legal standpoint, you are a navy if the government of an internationally recognized state officially recognizes that you are their navy.

From a practical standpoint, you are a navy if a national government funds you, directs your actions and considers you to be one of their representatives.

They're all talking about a ceasefire, but there doesn't seem to actually be one in effect. Iran's blockade was never lifted, the US blockade was declared a week ago and strikes by various parties across Iran, Lebanon and the gulf states have continued mostly uninterrupted.

International law recognizes the existence of a state of war based on what countries are doing, not on what they say. If you're doing war stuff, you're at war and the other guy can do war stuff right back, regardless of whether or not you ever formally declared war.

When two countries are in open war against one another, they are generally allowed to capture civilian shipping flying the flag of the other side.

This is a separate question from whether the war is legal in the first place, to which (even just according to US law) the answer is "no."

That's definitely what they think, but like, the idea of a shadowy cabal of elite conspirators cooking up a master plan that relied on the cooperation of a demographic with a median IQ of 70 is almost *more* ridiculous.

Also, the most recent data suggests an average IQ of ~84 for Somalia, but doesn't give a median.

Which would be annoying if a test of 141 random people in a country of 20.3 million revealed anything important, but fortunately it doesn't so who gives a shit

Average IQ by Country 2026 (Map and Global Ranking) Average IQ by country 2026. Global ranking and world map based on 1.2M+ people who took the same standardized IQ test. Methodology and limitations.

From a bit of quick Googling, it seems like the results came from a publicly available online test. The results are published annually, most recently in January 2026.

The sample size for Somalia was 141 participants in 2025. For context, the population of Somalia is more than 20 million.

It also points to the IDF being - in some ways - spoiled by US military assistance and its own superiority in fires over all local opponents.

You wouldn't waste munitions like this if you weren't confident you wouldn't run out or get counterbattery'd. Maybe Israel ought to relearn what that's like.

It's just one data point, but given the utter impunity of the IDF following the 2022 elections (and the near-impunity it enjoyed before), it fits a pattern of increasingly undisciplined behavior and an absent theory of mind about anyone Israel deems to be an enemy.

And this seems to be part of a pattern of thinking among the hard-right segment of global politics, of which Israel is surely a member under the Netanyahu government. They view war crimes as a buff to combat effectiveness, when they are by definition are things that make wars worse for minimal gain.

So this is a case where the IDF's casual disregard for the rules of war is at odds with not just morality but basic military effectiveness. I'm sure the IDF had some rationale for its actions, but clearly the planners were very wide of the mark and their mission failed as a result.

The Lebanese military, which has sought to distance itself from the war between Hezbollah and Israel, said its units then carried out "immediate alert and defence measures", using flare bombs to detect the landing spot.

And it gets worse, because it seems like the IDF's opening bombardment put the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah on alert and triggered the former to launch illumination flares - which could well have been what compromised the Israeli raid in the first place!

And while some of the Israeli strikes were carried out in reaction to the discovery of Israeli troops by Hezbollah and the Lebanese Army and subsequent firefight, the IDF had also conducted an opening barrage before the Israeli commandos arrived. Already a bit much to go retrieve a corpse!

But Ron Arad's widow Tami urged Israel's leaders not to put IDF soldiers' lives at risk. "We understand that our words until now have not been understood by the decision-makers and therefore it's important for us to clarify: Our desire to know what happened to Ron stops as soon as there is risk to IDF soldiers," she wrote on Facebook. "In our eyes, the sanctity of life comes before the commitment to return the remains of a fighter for burial."

While there are cases where compliance with Rule 14 is a matter of interpretation, it's pretty safe to say that the military advantage from recovering the body of a guy who died in the 1980s is roughly zero.

Even the deceased's family said it wasn't worth it (but in the most Israeli way possible).

Rule 14. Launching an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.

This opens Israel up to some pointed questions under Rule 14: Proportionality of attack.

Basically, attacks that might be expected to put civilians at risk must be justified against the military advantage the attacker is trying to achieve.
ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary...

The Lebanese military said it had observed four Israeli aircraft appear by Lebanon's border with Syria late on Friday night, with two of them landing and deploying special forces soldiers onto the ground. A "large-scale aerial bombardment" began at the same time, it said.

Hezbollah and local residents said Israel had conducted some 40 airstrikes in the area to give cover to the special forces soldiers and allow them to withdraw.

Locals who were in the town at the time of the military operation, and others who had been staying elsewhere, gathered around the large crater on Saturday to assess the damage and make sense of what had happened. "They bombed everything. This is crazy," said Ali Shakur. "I think they were surprised by who was here because when they bombed they thought that everyone had evacuated." Another man in the town said people had evacuated their children but others had stayed, believing that any strikes would be similar to ones they had experienced before. "Usually they hit two or three houses but [this] was different. It was non-stop. You can see how big it was," he said. "But we are a resistance here and we resisted." A woman walking around the destroyed houses screamed: "Israel is attacking us unjustly. We are Hezbollah and we will prevail."

But I think when this story surfaced, the debate over possible Israeli perfidy distracted from a much more clear problem: the IDF carried out at least 40 air strikes on a Lebanese village, killing dozens of people and taking some casualties themselves as part of a mission to find a dead body.

Several commenters described this as a war crime, but it's not actually clear that this is correct - the Israelis do not seem to have used the red cross/crescent and the purpose of the raid was not to engage in combat. Customary IHL allows the use of enemy uniforms in some cases but not in others.

Witnesses told the BBC that the Israeli soldiers had arrived disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hezbollah's Islamic Health Organization. The Lebanese army chief later confirmed this to local media, but the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not respond to BBC requests for comment about this allegation.

This raid was notable for a few things, and I think it's an interesting case study of the IDF's relationships with both the laws of war and the concept of military strategy in general.

First of all, Israeli troops came disguised as Hezbollah personnel and drove vehicles disguised as ambulances.

Dozens killed as Israeli special forces raid Lebanese village in search of 40-year-old remains Overnight, one Israeli operation saw at least 41 people killed and 40 injured, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

I keep thinking of this story about an IDF raid in Lebanon in early March. Israeli special forces attempted to sneak into a Lebanese town to retrieve the body of an Israeli pilot who had been killed in one of Israel's six previous invasions of Lebanon. They were discovered and fought their way out.

The Kahanists don't get how favorable the status quo before they were invited into Bibi's coalition was for IDF war criminals.

AFAIK Israeli courts pre-2022 convicted ~5% of IDF members accused of war crimes - the bare minimum to keep up appearances - but apparently even that was too much for them.

You can kill two birds with one stone by doing a brewery tour

Hey, which country do you live in? Because if it's the US, the parties don't choose who runs on their ticket. The voters do.