Western media have been eager to send journalists, but denied permission. (That's mad, given how wantonly Israel has treated journalists, aid workers, etc.) You+Israel's govt fear that if journalists had access they'd be snowed. Maybe. Maybe not. But you can't pretend they do have access. They don't

There's just no defending the character of Israel's behavior in this conflict, under contemporary moral commonplaces.

Maybe for Israel it has been strategically correct. Maybe "consciousness searing" and "Dahiya doctrine" are a path to Israel's security. But those strategies have a real cost, in terms of regard for people who understood what civilized behavior means in a way that would exclude these practices.

There is no density of journalists in Gaza. Western journalists complain they don't have access. Gazan journalists are targeted and killed. The only information we have about Gaza is the "ministry of health" terrible tick-tock.

Of Lancet's 600K due to violence, only about a third were attributed to direct violence from coalition. That might be an underestimate, because some are unattributed. And that was as of 2006, after three years of war.

The Lancet studies (at least the ones I know of) are excess death studies, not directly killed studies. (God this is morbid.) Far from an apples to apples comparison. Excess deaths in Gaza will likely be far higher than the ~2% so far directly killed, if there is ever information enough to model it.

The cost of war stat is a tally of directly killed, the closest comparable. (I hate every word of this.)

You'd have to use excess death calculations to justify that equivalent. Over 20 years since 2003, the direct death toll in Iraq ia about 300K from "direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces". watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/c... 1/

That's a much broader tally than US troops killing Iraqis in war, spread out over a much, much longer period, and would amounts to roughly half the proportion killed computing aggressively against a 2010 Iraq population for all of them. /fin

i think there's something a bit new here. the US killed people, more of them and sometimes just as wantonly, in Indochina and Korea, but the media environment was such that the US public only understood that slowly, only understood it fully long after the fact. 1/

one can believe that is the scale and brutality of US actions had been fully public in real time, they would have been politically impossible. 2/

during the Gulf and Middle East wars, the US was carefully attentive to perceptions of atrocity. again, of course there was atrocity anyway. there always is in war. 3/

but the scandals of the period, perhaps paradoxically, suggest a great deal of success. the biggest scandal of the Iraq War, the one that basically ended any possibility of "success" nation-building a democratic demonstration project, was Abu Ghraib. 4/

it was one facility, a relatively small number of perpetrators and victims, and it was a profound, earthshocking, incredible scandal that completely overthrew an epistemological deference, domestically, about how we were conducting the war and what our role was there. 5/

perhaps I am being unfair here, but my perception is that Abu-Ghraib-level torture and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees and worse is routine conduct in some Israeli facilities, and that this is something US publics basically know and now tolerate. 6/

(again, to distinguish, this is not waterboarding of high-level intelligence targets or the kind of ticking-time-bomb scenarios sold to the public to blur black and white views about torture. these are low-level, mass detainees.) 7/

there have been incidents not so far from Gaza that the US perpetrated — Mosul, Raqqa. but real time information about whatever degree of atrocity occurred was largely suppressed, and even ex post, one can distinguish their characters, no population was trapped. 8/

US publics have swallowed something quite different with Gaza and now Lebanon, a style of warfare promising to a certain degree to pay some attention to civilian life, but visibly offering a very high threshold for "proportionality", and intentionally eliminating civilian infrastructure. 9/

We've swallowed it with little more than a shrug. Which I understand given particulars about particular political realities, domestically and diplomatically. You could say it's only happening because the stars are particularly (mis)aligned. 10/

But it is happening. It's a kind of precedent. Hypocrisy was always at best the tribute vice pays to virtue, but I'd much rather we keep at least that tribute. A more "honest" embrace of atrocity we never completely eschewed does not strike me as a positive development going forward. /fin

after reading Lee Drutman (and thinking about eg Israel), i think it's probably best to design a system so it gravitates to something like six parties, plus or minus.

oh, he's here! @leedrutman.bsky.social