I think that sense has driven some of the choices. But I think it may have been, overall, um, a mistake. It’s true there would be stupid, vicious scandals over every misstep. 1/

Think AOC’s college dance, Obama’s tan suit. But the net effect of that kind of scandal is often net positive, beyond the disingenuous already-opponents who gin them up. 2/

By walking into scandals like that, tolerating them, moving forward, a person comes to seem authentic — uninhibited rather than guarded — and therefore known, trustworthy. 3/

Harris managed this beautifully with criticism of her laugh early on, turned stupid scandalmongering into an advantage, a likable quirk. /fin

North Korea is not a victim of the United States. It did start the war by invading the South. But the prosecution of a justified war was rendered… problematic by the extent of destruction. Something like 20% died in three years. www.wilsoncenter.org/article/new-...

(I don't know the comparable figure for the South. Perhaps it's unfair to blame the US, if the other side was just as brutal. It was a weird war, with the South almost completely overrun—so brutalized—then the North the same, then back to close to status quo ante. Perfect for pointless destruction.)

Time is a salve, for sure. And changes of leadership can restore innocence. The US in North Korea, Cambodia? Nothing Israel has done measures down to that. It seems like ancient history, and the region broadly is a friendly trade partner. North Korea has neither forgiven nor forgotten, though.

For the past to become prologue though, it has to become the past.

Again. Maybe there's a kind of success. But there's a cost. From my vantage, Israel's behavior in the West Bank, from which 7.10 did not emit, has deeply discredited any claim that its behavior broadly has been necessary and justified. It looks to me like brutal opportunism.

Maybe these are opportunities worth taking. Obviously they are from some people's perspective. But among the costs is the regard of large groups of people who were once torn but broadly favorably disposed towards Israel. Many of us just no longer are.

Maybe AIPAC and other elite-level work can mitigate those costs can mitigate those costs, from the perspective of the people who perceive these opportunities as worth it. Maybe we are "large groups" that ultimately don't matter. Maybe not, though.

And putting aside realpolitik, surely we are not alone in perceiving the costs that we perceive. Most Israelis are not Smotrich.

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