[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Kazuaki Shimazaki II

Without getting into whether it should be "allowed success", I see that you have silenced yourself on the point of it being "military aggression".

Split hairs if you want, I again point to two media sources I already referred to earlier, where the authors said it in right these words that international law would rate the breaking of a blockade as a military agressive act, an act of military aggression. And I agree with that and I say it makes no reasonable sense to argue different. It simply ignores the definition of "blockade" and "braking a blockade".

At risk of oversimplifying, in a nutshell. The Soviet interpretation of the term "innocent passage" is that it applies only to merchants, and they have to follow the navigational regime of the nation who owns the territorial waters (makes sense to me). The American interpretation allows for warships & merchantmen, and they can be allowed to do almost anything short of opening fire (technically, the American position does not allow surveillance, but let's get real, in these days of electronic steered, radome-covered devices how can you easily tell, and even a active radar can easily be covered in the name of "navigational safety" while conveniently recording down intelligence).

And what has this to do with declaring a blockade? A Sea blockade is an act that is formally regulated and accepted by international laws. you have to announce where it is, from when to when it lasts, the precise area, and you have to be at war with the side you are hitting with the blockade. Shortly summarised. There are total blockades, and blockades that filter, inspect and limit the flow of goods. Gaza is the latter. And where there is a blockade announced under the above conditions, it is a legal thing to enforce that blockade. If a ship is allowed to ignore it, then it would not be a blockade.

But all this is academic. For Israel it is a thing of vital, existential importance to try to interrupt military deliveries to it'S enemies who are at war with it.

Anyway, the Americans decided to assert their position in their "Freedom of Navigation" program (which in this case is more a "Freedom to be an *sshole" program IMO) and sent Yorktown and Caron to loiter in Soviet Black Sea waters. The Soviets eventually sent two frigates to bump (literally) them away. The Americans bawled - they argue that even if there was a violation it should be handled in court...

USSR and USA were not at war. So, the Russians could not have declared a formal blockade under the above terms. So while I learn what the Yorktown incident was - thanks for the explanation, btw. - it nevertheless has nothing to do with the situation at Gaza, therefore, and I wonder why you even need to bring it up.

So, if we accept that a running a blockade is military aggression, by extension so would this little violation (especially since Yorktown and Caron are after all, very modern large warships) of national waters - thus they may be legitimately sunk. It is quite clear regardless of the legal specifics, if they were sunk, it would have been a incident instigated by America. Yet I just don't see NATO not standing by America if this scenario did come to pass...

Yes, but you just said it yourself: the Yorktown thing was about "national waters" - not formally announced sea blockades against a war party.

And there you go - it was supposed to let humanitarian items through, and we have commandos.

Purpose of this blockade is to inspect that it is humanitarian items indeed. they need to interdict naval smuggling, like they have smuggling at the Egyptian border in those many tunnels the dig over there (and which they occasionally bomb when they know their locations).

That's the distinction you picked, hmm? What the Israeli military does is a non sequitur in this case - if Turkey tried to disguise its warship as merchantmen there might be something to it...

I wonder what is so difficult in understanding that once you have choosen a side that fights, and line up with it, you are no longer a neutral party yourself, but are attached to that side even if you do not pick up a weapon yourself. You actively contribute your share to that side'S militarily relevant success. The disguising of warships as merchantmen - I wonder again why now this you bring up. It does have no importance for the simple fact I just described: if you choose a side, you are not to be considered neutral anymore. Neutral you are if you refuse to be linked to any side, and do not help any side to gain it's objectives. In order to be considered a non-combatant, it is inevitably a precondition that you refuse to support the fighting of any side, and refuse to dirctly or indirectly assist the ambitions the engaged sides are fighting for. Since you can contribute to the acchieving of military or terrorist goal without needing to fire a weapon yourself (by just boarding a blockade runner, for example, in a bid that your presence makes it untouchable), by that passive contribution to that fighting'S goal you neverthelss "fight" - just that you do not do it with a weapon. the controller in an AWAYCS, the radio operatore in a C3I network also does not fire a weapon, but he sure as hell is a combatant, and a valid military target - due to hwat he does (additionally to the fact that he wears a uniform). If you give one side an advantage by manning one of it'S boats in order to make it "untouchable" by your presence, you already are not a neutral anymore, and since breaking a blockade is an aggressive act, that makes the former neutral person now a non-neutral part of it. Or a combatant, in other words.

As for civilians, for one thing, it is very highly disputable as to whether a civilian becomes a combatant just for running a blockade. I guess the Lusitania just never knew its death was perfectly legitimate and it was actually a military aggressor on the mere grounds it was running a German sub blockade.

Violating a blockade and not knowing it, and knowingly trying to break a blockade, are two different things, and i would recommend different procedures for the side enforcing the blockade. Which does not mean that the unknowing violator should not be stopped and controlled. the blockade is in place, whether the violator knows it or not. Part of the blockade is that you do not just trust in something or just beleive anything or just make assumptions - but that you control what's going in and out.

In another point, we get into a bunch of horny questions over how close the alignment has to be b/f it is valid to shoot them. After all, the average Israeli citizen is a conscript and reservist (even the women though they IIRC have shorter programs), and in any case they all pay taxes contributing to a Apache firing into the Gaza.

Because they are the intended targets to be killed by Hamas. Israelis are not neutral in this, they cannot be, because they are as a nationality, ethnicity, social group, nationl community, the intended target of Hamas that they favour over any other. Hamas does not fight for limited goals and does not only fire against military installations. It tries to kill and destroy everyone and everything Israeli, because the ultimate destruction of Israel itself and the killing of chasing away of it's inhabitants are its goal.

Now tell me in how far Israel has declared war against Henning Mankel's Sweden, or against the Germany the half a dozen communist members of parliament and SED sympathesizers were coming from...? It's even better: german TV investigation report some days ago confronted them with new information that there were even rightwing extremists onboard these ships. These useful left idiots claimed to trust in the humanitarian ambition of the mission - but fell silent before the camera when being confronted with evidence that European rightwing radicals had lined up with the fleet - and that the turkish IHH (linked to fundamentalist fanatic organisations itself, and to the so-called Grey Wolves) and the heads of the AKP knew it.

http://www.swr.de/report/-/id=233454...6iy/index.html

German commies and SED-sympathisers, rightwing extremists and Turkish Islamists in one boat - what a great mixture, glued together by their common sentiment of anti-semitism! FAN-TAS-TIC !

In a third point, if some Israeli civilian runs across the street to help, for example, some Israeli wounded soldier or to bring him some food, will you really feel nothing as some Hamas fella guns him down (knowing he's a civvie) on grounds that he just "voluntarily lined up" with the IDF, that he knew what was coming ... etc?

Do you know what the neutrality of the Red Cross in war bases on? That it has no associations with any of the fighting sides, and treats wounded from both, no matter their side. If such a neutrality would demand the intended target of Hamas terrorism - the civilian Israeli i this case - to sit still while being fired upon, then I think this is hardly soemthing one could seriously exoect them to do. But right this is what the international community tells Israel time and again to do whenever it gets hit by rockets - to do nothing and suffer in quiteness. probably a demand of piety to not kill the well-meant illusions about the peace that is there to come (if only those damn Jews would accept to not defend themselves).

Choosing sides, in most people's books, does not equate to becoming combatants...

it depends on active versus passive engagement. I refuse to be neutral in this conflict, I do not hide that I sympathise with the Israelis here. that is my opinion, but that does not make me a combatant. A combatant I become the moment I go over there and join an Israeli military unit - or board a ship that is set to break a blockde announced by Hamas (what Hamas legally cannot do, but you just take the picture). so, being combatant or not is linked to being actively engaged or not on the scene of action. If you collect money for Israel or Hamas in europe, that does not make you a combatant, but you are no neutral anymore, and depending on your authority and importance for the one or the other side's inner network, eventually you nevertheless can be a valid target to be eliminated. Not becausue you collected money in the street, but maybe because you are a big number in whitewashing money for Hamas, or organising weapon deals.

That may be your position. The average guy in the West thinks differently however, or they'll be total hypocrites as they cry out against terrorists. And Israel is not willing to pay the political price to use your definition.

That's why they failed in gaza and lebanon, and got a bloody nose especially in lebanon. the unwillingness to fight the war as is needed to fight it - and that means to kill the enemy at all costs, everyhwere - has led to the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. It refuses to recognise that Pakistan is no ally but an enemy trying to protect the Taliban for several imoportant reasons. While writing this, they still try to extinguish the fires on those 140 vehicles in that NATO convoy - Not at the Afghan border, but in the heart of Pakistan, right outside of Islamabadh... there are so many military ambitions that failed because of self-restraint based on this idea that war and civilised order to be brought into conformity. The UN's military missions also failed for the vast majority of them, for this reason. Having good intentions - is just not enough.

My ideas about war may not be nice, but they express in the end nothing but recognition of the bitter reality. The more humane a war appears to be, the more liekly war becomes, the more acceptable it appears, the more often all sides engaged get surprised by how nasty it actually becomes. The reality is that war is never just (it's always also innocents suffering), never civilised, and is never an order that could be described by categories from peacetime, but that it is the explicit absence of such order - it's the incarnation of chaos and destruction. War is never just, but always unfair, that is part of its nature and definition. I only differ between wars of need/necessity, and wars of choice and desire. I strongly recommend to stay away from the latter at all costs.

Very likely that the wars "I would fight" would be much more dirty and brutal than the wars you have on mind. But I promise you I would have a lot of a wars less than we have in the present due to our civilised self-restraints and confused ideas about "just wars". I am not about being brutal as a self-quality. I am about unwavering, focussed, uncompromised determination to destroy the enemy as fast and as complete as possible. what is done because it is needed to acchieve that, must be done. What gets done although it is not needed for achieving that goal, must not be done.

either you decide to fight a war, then make sure you can stay with your motives for accepting that decision: be sure, damn sure, of your reasons. Or you decide not to fight a war. just this madness of having just a bit of war, but not too much, and have a little bit of peace in it as well, and a little hope, and a little human quality, and a bit of this and a bit of that, and never too much blood - this idiotic back-and-forth that espeically amongst politicians is so very popular - does not help to limit wars and make them less harmful, but it prolongs them and makes them affecting more people in the long run, and increases the suffering of those affected.

And if you believe there is no civility in war, again, there is nothing left to condemn a terrorist with.

The civility lies in the standards by which somebody decides whether or not to go to war. In other words: the main part of civility is BEFORE the war is declared or not declared. Also, in war, the military and the terrorist have different target priorities. And here again lies a massive difference between both. the more the military degenerates to the "target acceptance levels" of a terrorist - intentionally targetting the civilian poulation - , the more it goes in loss of any claims for being more civilised than the terrorist, here you would be right. I think of some of the war crimes of the Russians in Chechnya, where great atrocities had been committed, intentionally targetting the civil population that could not escape the presence of russia's enemies, or did not actively support them. But that does not compare to the general procedures and ways the British or Amerikans have established in Iraq or Afghanistan.

If the civilian population does not assist my enemy's fighting force (by giving food, joining forces by night, tracking radio comms, intel activity, sabotage or voluntarily giving enemy fighters a hiding), there is no need for me to intentionally target and kill these civilians, for they have no military relevance for me and thus I do not see a valid military target in them.

However, if there is this bunker with weapon storages under their village's school, or a SAM site on the roof of their hospital, or that important bridge behind the market place that allows the enemy faster supply, then I will aim at these three objects and destroy them. That is not intentionally targetting civilians, but targetting a target of military relevance that is considered to be high enough so that the presence of civiliance will not hinder me to go after these targets nevertheless. If possible without risk to mission success or increased security risks to my own troops, I can delay the action until the number of civilians in the target vicinity has reduced. but priority has the destruction of the military target. civilian casualties in this scenario are called collateral damage. they are not wanted, but are accpeted in the meaning that they cannot be avoided.

If, however, I do not limit my targetting to targets of military relevance, but intend genocide, or intentionally target the civilians themselves and in the first, making not military targets but civilian population the delcared target of my killing action, then this is what qualifies as terrorism.