In the early 2000’s we weren’t as connected as we are now and people relied a lot more on cable/network news.
But also, and this is really important to understand, the civilian casualties from the Iraq war were over much larger areas, populations, and time. In the same time frame the rate of casualties was far lower. Coalition forces also did their best to avoid civilian casualties by not targeting hospitals, not kettling civilians, and certainly not doing a concerted bombing campaign with large bombs into highly populated areas.
A lot of what’s happening with the rate of civilian casualties is because the IDF has thrown all of those protections out the window. They’re specifically destroying the food, water, and medical infrastructure of Gaza. When people inevitably try to evacuate they can only do so further into Gaza. The IDF doesn’t allow them to evacuate through their lines into cleared areas. This means people can never actually get away from the fighting. Those are all large scale war crimes designed to increase the number of civilian casualties. But they aren’t removing troops credibly accused of war crimes from the area either. In fact they’ve shown no willingness to prosecute tactical level warcrimes such as shooting clearly marked journalists in a quiet area in broad daylight.
Just today the report landed on NPR radio that the IDF opened fire into a crowd waiting for food aid. The IDF is of course claiming the crowd was threatening. But we’ve known how to securely disperse food aid for decades. Those soldiers may very well have been threatened, but their officers set that situation up. Also of note is just how fast this gets out to the world in the era of social media.
And we haven’t even talked about the immense amount of war weariness in the US.
In the early 2000’s we weren’t as connected as we are now and people relied a lot more on cable/network news.
But also, and this is really important to understand, the civilian casualties from the Iraq war were over much larger areas, populations, and time. In the same time frame the rate of casualties was far lower. Coalition forces also did their best to avoid civilian casualties by not targeting hospitals, not kettling civilians, and certainly not doing a concerted bombing campaign with large bombs into highly populated areas.
A lot of what’s happening with the rate of civilian casualties is because the IDF has thrown all of those protections out the window. They’re specifically destroying the food, water, and medical infrastructure of Gaza. When people inevitably try to evacuate they can only do so further into Gaza. The IDF doesn’t allow them to evacuate through their lines into cleared areas. This means people can never actually get away from the fighting. Those are all large scale war crimes designed to increase the number of civilian casualties. But they aren’t removing troops credibly accused of war crimes from the area either. In fact they’ve shown no willingness to prosecute tactical level warcrimes such as shooting clearly marked journalists in a quiet area in broad daylight.
Just today the report landed on NPR radio that the IDF opened fire into a crowd waiting for food aid. The IDF is of course claiming the crowd was threatening. But we’ve known how to securely disperse food aid for decades. Those soldiers may very well have been threatened, but their officers set that situation up. Also of note is just how fast this gets out to the world in the era of social media.
And we haven’t even talked about the immense amount of war weariness in the US.