This is, remember, the pier that they claimed they didn't make contingency plans for any heavy storms. In the Mediterranean.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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I don't know enough about the Mediterranean climate to know if this was a bad idea, but it sounds like they didn't either
Let me put it this way- large chunks of The Odyssey are Odysseus being caught in a big storm at sea. So you would think the U.S. military would have heard about something that's been known since the bronze age.
It's almost like they had to make compromises because their options were limited by materials, time, and access to the site.
It's almost like Biden should have forced israel to let in aid through the land crossing like the ICJ ruling required israel to do.
Exactly, it was (very relatively) cheap and quick. And they figured when, not if, it breaks, it will be again quick to repair. And it is interesting tech that could be useful down the line that they may figure is worth the cost in training alone.
The piece of shit cost $230 million and lasted 10 days
Modular military engineering materials are both obscenely expensive, and temporary. They are meant as a bandaid to quickly solve transportation problems to enable logistics.
Also, being modular, they can be replaced easily and quickly.
If you want a hardy lifetime dock, you're going to need months to years under ideal circumstances. And then Isreal could "accidentally" blow it up with a "rogue" strike, and there would be no option but to scrap the whole thing. Because most permanent docks aren't meant to handle military strikes.
But yeah, let's just ignore that the building constraints around this are just about the worst case imaginable. Let's just keep whining about how a solution isn't perfect and therefore worthless like all the other Leftist comments on Lemmy
They barely delivered any aid. This was a boondoggle.
It's amazing the military ineptness people excuse.
It's not ineptitude. Their hands are tied by the government from providing aid in any effective way.
Are you seriously saying that the U.S. has no leverage over the Israeli government?
I never said anything like that.
You said their hands are tied. That means they don't have leverage they could use.
"They" is pretty clearly referring to the military, as that's what we were discussing.
What's your solution, then? Overnight peace in the middle east?
I'd say the U.S. not offering Israel any more support until they open the borders to aid would go a long way to solving things.
But apparently that's going way beyond the pale.
And how exactly will that put food in the hands of the starving Palestinians?
Again with the "if it's not perfect, it's not worth doing" bullshit I'm so tired of hearing about this conflict.
Sorry... how will letting aid trucks into Gaza put food in the hands of starving Palestinians?
You know what aid trucks are, right?
Look we either spend a billion a year rebuilding this thing or we start looking for actual solutions to the problems we've caused. Do you want that? I thought so.
You can't be dense enough to believe that if the US stops sending Isreal aid, that suddenly Isreal will suddenly magically be completely disarmed, and aid trucks will suddenly be able to move freely. Aid trucks aren't even on the table.
Since that's not even close to what I said, no, that's not what I believe.
And what other conclusion is there to your answers?
Me: How would YOU put food into Palestinian hands?
You: Stop sending aid to Isreal.
Me: How does that put food in Palestinian hands?
You: Aid trucks
If that was what I said, you would be right. However, this is what I said:
I’d say the U.S. not offering Israel any more support until they open the borders to aid would go a long way to solving things.
I'm not sure why you think that sort of thing doesn't motivate a country we're giving billions of dollars in aid to, but it does.
However, this is what you said in response:
You can’t be dense enough to believe that if the US stops sending Isreal aid, that suddenly Isreal will suddenly magically be completely disarmed, and aid trucks will suddenly be able to move freely. Aid trucks aren’t even on the table.
I said nothing about disarming Israel. And I know aid trucks are not on the table, because no one is motivating Israel to put them on the table. Again, withholding the billions of dollars in money and weapons we're sending to Israel would go a long way to getting them to let aid trucks in to feed people. You seem to be suggesting that not sending them more weapons than they already have is disarming them. Which it is not.
Or are you saying Israel doesn't need American money and weapons anyway? Then maybe America should just stop giving them money and weapons regardless.
My point is that stopping aid to Isreal won't put food in Palestinian bellies any time soon. And when they're starving right now, it's a useless gesture.
Actually doing what CAN be done right now, which is bypassing land chokepoints by building a non-perfect dock to offload millions of lbs of food, is the best solution I've heard of thus far, to actually stave off the immediate problem of starvation.
I'm not saying I approve of continuing to send military aid to Isreal. We can attack this from multiple fronts, but getting food and medical aid into Gaza is the most urgent need. And I don't find your efforts to undermine the most effective, if flawed, means of getting those supplies into Gaza to be helping the Palestinian's plight in the slightest.
You are either completely unknowledgable about the situation there or arguing in bad faith. But giving you the benefit of the doubt. There is more than enough aid waiting since months just outside the borders. Israel took over the Rafah crossing to Egypt, murdering two Egyptian soldiers in the process. There also enough aid is waiting.
By stopping to arm Israel the US might not provide food literally tomorrow, but within short time. That pier took over two months to build. More than enough time for the US to pressure Israel into behaving.
Again Israel could let in aid today if they wanted to. They could stop bombing hospitals, ambulances, aid workers, refugee shelters right now if they wanted to. The US could make them want that. And if simply cutting weapons wouldnt be enough the US could declare a no fly zone and break Israels chokeholds on the border crossings by force if necessary. The US could threaten and employ a sanctions regime that would threaten to vaporize the Israeli economy, making any government resign within days.
But the US doesnt do that. The US doesnt want that. The US wants to cover for this genocide and just pretend doing something about it, which is why they build an expensive pier for months that doesnt deliver aid and then breaks apart, while watching the single attempted aid delivery to be denied by the Israeli genocidal forces.
You claim I'm arguing in bad faith, but all your points make insanely huge assumptions on what the US is plausibly capable of forcing, and in an insanely short timespan. Particularly taking into account how little Isreal has been willing to negotiate in good faith currently and in past.
The Pier took 2 months to build. It took two weeks to repair. So claiming this to be an "insanely short time span" is already wrong. And it is not enough. The US would need to build another 5 of the same piers to bring in enough aid on that route, ignoring the need to distribute it, which Israel again is blocking. So would you rather build piers for ten months instead of stopping to send arms to the people who block the available land routes?
I would rather do both, because I find it incredibly unlikely that stopping arms shipments today would do anything at all to dampen Israel's ability to blockaid the land routes for a very long time. I also don't think Isreal is incapable of finding weapons suppliers outside of the US if push comes to shove.
So you're saying the U.S. has zero leverage on Israel?
No. I'm saying that relying on that leverage completely, and expecting a fast and complete solution, and allowing the Gazians to starve to death if that hailmerry doesn't work, is completely asinine.
And that's not even taking into account what the absolute 180 on foreign policy WRT Isreal will cost us in the short and long term. It could very possibly give the entire election over to the Republicans. Which would obviously be even worse for Gaza.
Fast and complete? This pier took two months to build. They could have spent that two months pressuring Israel to open aid corridors for trucking.
And I'm sorry, "we have to aid Israel in its genocide to stop the Republicans from winning" is a bullshit excuse.
They could have spent that two months pressuring Israel to open aid corridors for trucking.
And most likely have nothing to show for it. At least the dock has already achieved getting millions of pounds of aid into Gaza, and hopefully many more millions before it breaks again.
And I’m sorry, “we have to aid Israel in its genocide to stop the Republicans from winning” is a bullshit excuse.
Maybe to you, but it's a real risk. Not everyone lives in this progressive bubble of yours. I have zero confidence in the voting public, and I have far less confidence that the Republicans won't actively encourage genocide in Gaza and beyond given the president and a majority in the other branches.
Why "most likely?" Based on what evidence?
And if you feel that you need to aid another nation to continue slaughtering children to save your own, maybe you don't have much worth saving.
Why “most likely?” Based on what evidence?
See: the entire history of Isreal, and the middle east as a whole.
And if you feel that you need to aid another nation to continue slaughtering children to save your own, maybe you don’t have much worth saving.
Geo-politics are complicated, and more complicated when your own country is currently fighting a fascist movement.
You dismiss the very notion that all but declaring war on Isreal could possibly have negative effects on the Dems political standing. And let's not mince words. Declaring no fly zones, DMZs and enacting sanctions, as you literally explicitly suggested, is one step away from declaring war.
~~And yet I've been accused of arguing in bad faith.~~ Right.
I didn't accuse you of arguing in bad faith, what are you talking about?
I did ask you for evidence, though, and you didn't provide any, so maybe I should accuse you of that, but I have not done so, so I'm not sure why you're suggesting I did.
There was a branch in this thread where someone else made the accusation. But fine, I retract the statement. It wasn't your words, so no point bringing it up.
I find the request for impossible evidence to be absurd. Since the US did not take the measures you proposed 2 months ago, there is no evidence to present for either of our sides.
I point to Netanyahu's recent and past decisions and complete unwillingness to make concessions, as well as how this conflict has been beneficial to his standing.
But obviously, we can't know for sure what would have happened. But Isreal has never been known to be easily forced, or even compromise to anything not vastly in their favor.
I point to Netanyahu’s recent and past decisions and complete unwillingness to make concessions, as well as how this conflict has been beneficial to his standing.
All of which has been done because U.S. aid has been given unconditionally this entire time, which was my point. The U.S. has leverage and isn't using it.
And your proof that using that leverage will achieve the desired result in a 2 month time frame is...?
I suppose the same level of proof that you have except that what I suggested has never been tried. Maybe it's time to try it now rather than wait another two months and hope for the best.
The fuck does someone's political alignment have to do with this shit?
The tendency to make Perfect the enemy of Good.
It's a tired theme here on Lemmy, particularly WRT Gaza, and particularly in criticism of Biden's policy towards Isreal.
We don't want a hardy lifetime dock. We want Israel to stop committing genocide and to allow aid by land and air routes.
Ok. And how has that negotiation been going?
I prefer to actually do what can be done in the short term, while we continue to work on long term solutions in tandem. Not just put all your eggs in the long term basket, and let the Palestinians starve if it takes too long, or doesn't happen at all.
Aid by land and air can be done in the short term, a lot faster then building a dock and shipping by sea. The only thing stopping that is a pure policy decision by Israel.
Personally, I think the US should continue with aid airdrops. Hell, I think they should load up trucks and roll through Rafah or any available crossing in Gaza.
And then Isreal could "accidentally" blow it up with a "rogue" strike
Yeah maybe they should stop giving rockets to the rogue state that keeps blowing up their shit.
Let's just keep whining about how a solution isn't perfect
The only thing this is a solution for is to the problem of "what's a good way to pretend we're humanitarians while genociding the people we're pretending we care about", so yeah, it's worthless if you don't want that to happen.
What is the population of Gaza? Maybe 2.1 million in the Gaza strip? Various search engines give results between 1/2 million and 5 million, a rather wide variance. This article says the U.S. hopes to deliver 1 million pounds of food every 2 days. The average person eats between 3 and 5 pounds of food per day. It's not enough food even for the lowest population estimate. OTOH, every bit of additional food helps and is good news.
If im not mistaken, when the pontón was originally planned, israel wasnt suppose to enter Rafah... maybe thats the origin of the problem?
Oh, I hadn't realized it was already being used. A million pounds every two days is a lot, so I'm surprised I hadn't heard until now.
It is because it broke down after the first delivery and the first delivery got blocked by the IDF and wasnt distributed. So the Pier didnt really deliver anything yet.
It is also still far too little and the US could force Israel to open all borders to let in as much aid as is actually needed by stopping to send them weapons and provide diplomatic cover. Plus if the US would apply sanctions, Israel could be forced to retreat from Gaza and finally start upholding international law within a few days.
When will it be accidentally, we are so sorry, this wont happen again, bombed?