Alright, I'll make a somewhat serious thread on what this assassination means - at least to my mind.

Back in old hippie America, there emerged a saying about psychedelic drugs: "if you buy the ticket, you gotta take the ride". The meaning of this saying was simple: once you took psychedelic drugs and swallowed the magic mushrooms, you were locked into your trip, no matter how bad or scary it turned out to be. The time to back out was *before* choosing to do those drugs, there were no takebacks.

In the middle of an escalating series of completely CRAZY wars (Ukraine has like >500.000K dead on the hohol side alone), with *NEW* wars starting or being planned (Lebanon, Taiwan), stuff like this isn't so much a cope as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1806038691598758362

If you had said five years ago, "the US will withdraw catastrophically from Afghanistan. Then the biggest european war since WW2 will start, NATO/US will lose, also the middle east will explode, the US will lose control there too" you would have been a collapsetard.

The chaotic violence the Israelis rained down on top of Gaza might end up looking fairly placid and orderly when one compares it to the insane, bitter intra-Israeli violence that might be coming down the pike.

Few countries can boast more fertile soil for civil war than Israel. This isn't a Tinkzorg Original Thought(tm), by the way. Alastair Crooke - who is a man who speaks from experience like few other living men here - is absolutely convinced that trying to dislodge the settlers would result in, and I quote "a sea of blood" inside Israel.

Again, people are underselling just how politically destabilizing this current Gaza military crisis is. The point of Rafah was as part of a narrative of imminent victory.

Now, that is not just impossible, but all previous "victories" have been made illegitimate as well.

https://twitter.com/ME_Observer_/status/1791679850278776846

The immediate response from Israel is likely to be to try to continue the model of "extend and pretend" with regards to starving the civilian population of Gaza, achieving a demographic victory where they can't achieve a military one. But that's kind of a dead-end strategy now.

Let's stop posting memes for just one second and cut through the bullshit, because it doesn't take a genius to figure out how this is going to go.🧵

*Obviously* this attack is in some sense "symbolic". It is about restoring deterrence, which is why it was telegraphed. But given the reports of explosions from multiple locations in Israel, both to the south and to the north, it's clear that this was not a toothless gesture. This was not a simulated attack, it was a real one.

Moreover, it seems to have been coordinated with the wider axis.

This red sea blockade has been a masterstroke for the Ansar Allah movement, in machiavellian political terms. It has allowed them to deflect any internal economic dissatisfaction, and it has massively consolidated their nationalist legitimacy (even in the eyes of their enemies). If you are a yemeni fighting against the Ansar Allah when they are being bombed by the US for standing up for their muslim brothers in Palestine, you are now forced to choose between Yemeni patriotism and fighting the Ansar Allah. The results of this are predictable.

I've had a few disagreements with comrade Mercouris in the past months on the middle eastern crisis, but those are minor quibbles, considering that he easily is one of the most insightful thinkers on these issues alive today. Some notes on this below:

Many lesser commentators have portrayed the Austin affair as a case of "incompetence" or "laziness" or similar. But Mercouris is quite right: this is not how incompetence looks; this is a clear symptom of extremely serious - paralyzing, even - factional infighting.

This entire situation is rapidly spinning out of control, politically, diplomatically, militarily. The people who thought this entire war could be kept under control are morons.

It wasn't the Gaza fence that Hamas smashed on October 7th. It was the Berlin Wall.

https://twitter.com/Real_EF_News/status/1724991331616133338

The cracks are spreading, multiplying. The Labour party in the UK is in crisis because of this. The spat between Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro is just a small, small volcanic eruption; underneath it all is a boiling sea of magma: all the contradictions are now slowly manifesting.

I get the sense that the institutional GOP is essentially completely blind to the brewing - and already quite serious - US military crisis in the middle east. They all think it's still 2003, with no notion of constraints, nor any respect for or even knowledge of the US' enemies. The US "deep state", on the other hand, is very aware of how precarious the situation is. So is the Biden admin. The very obvious tell here is contrasting Tony Blinken's recent actions to Lloyd Austin's statements. If you see what's going on there, you see their growing concern.

The West's unwillingness to really embrace cheap drone tech and loitering munitions is just indicative of how consumed by hubris and lack of imagination we are.

The IAF's big problem is that all airbases in Israel are well within reach of Hezbollah drones and cruise missiles.

https://twitter.com/DefensePolitics/status/1718145282591039861

Knocking out the IAF's ability to generate a high amount of sorties (by striking hangars, runways, and other airbase infrastructure such as fuel dumps) is way, way easier than knocking out Hezbollah's ability to launch missiles or drones.

Alright, this is a pretty complicated question so the answer will have to be fairly long. Thread-length, actually. Let's start with where Israel is at, tactically and strategically.🧵🇮🇱 🇵🇸

https://twitter.com/Vigilant27/status/1715403681481560238

Right now, the Israeli politican system is deeply dysfunctional and in mental crisis mode. The Hamas operation inflicted more casualties on Israelis than it suffered in previous Wars, meaning that Israel's status quo - settler state in conflict with the natives - is looking grim.

Because some people like reading my longer threads, and we're currently in a situation of incredible tension re: Israel's northern border and whether the US will be dragged into a regional war, I'll do a thread on a very underappreciated factor that points toward broader war. Israel is at an incredibly large risk of becoming the target of a de facto "Jihad". This isn't necessarily because Muslims are wacky in some way and just like holy wars: a jihad in the narrow sense (a concerted military conflict sucking up volunteers) isn't unique to Islam.

There's basically no state in the middle east that is interested in talking about Hamas' "crimes" at this point. Right now, Hamas is basically like the IRA fighting for Irish independence from Britain - an organization like that doesn't commit "crimes", it wages war. Obviously, the continental Army under Washington or the IRA can still commit atrocities - war crimes - and so can the IDF, but Hamas doesn't have the right to "arrest" IDF commanders to "bring them to justice". The IDF is part of a (nation)state.

It's going to be interesting to see (many years from now, probably) just how meticulously planned and, perhaps even more importantly, how regionally integrated Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (the name of the Hamas offensive) was. My sense - and it is just a sense at this point - is that it was a gamble, but that Hamas had consulted all the regional players, who probably told them that the conditions were becoming increasingly auspicious. But Hamas was in the driver's seat, they weren't a cat's paw.

War is the continuation of politics, and it's quite likely that this is precisely the intended outcome Hamas is banking on. Assumptions that Hamas are going to experience strategic surprise by Israel counterattacking (and killing lots of civilians) are questionable to my mind.

https://twitter.com/witte_sergei/status/1710761825661579595

Politics is the highest level of human activity: the Americans like to remind the Vietnamese that that they won every real battle in the Vietnam war. The Vietnamese like to remind the Americans that it didn't actually matter. Both sides are correct, but only one side won.