Most ways of conducting urban warfare bode very ill for the population. The article seems to conclude they'll use a prolonged siege and artillery/rockets approach, and contrasts with the Western approach which is large-scale aerial bombardment.
Precisely, World War II urban warfare is over romanticized in retrospect. It was apparently gruesome. High attrition, inhuman conditions, really nothing for the people on the ground fighting or defending or just living neutrally.
Any "gains" fall to the brass, the people who would likely never see real fighting, but readily order battalions of men to "take" a town or city to play the probabilities game of death with the objective of "winning" the objective.
There's no need to go as far back as WW2, where the aerial bombardment, targeting, and radar/counter-radar technology was instrumental to the war, but is still thought of as rather primitive. Even with incredibly advanced technology and adaptations to tactics, the Western approach's effect on urban centers today is still arguably the worst of all, comparatively. US allies in the middle east commonly inflict high civilian casualties, but also, from the article itself:
> In 2004 fighting between American forces and insurgents in Fallujah, in Iraq, damaged or destroyed 70% of the city’s buildings. When a coalition including Iraq, America and others liberated Mosul, another Iraqi city, from the Islamic State group in 2016-17, over 10,000 civilians were killed—around 3,200 of them by the coalition—and two-fifths of the civilian population had to flee. It was also lethal for those on the ground: Iraq’s army suffered 10,000 casualties.
I think it's indisputable that the Ukraine war and the 2003 Iraq war are/were completely unjust, and our feelings about the Ukraine war should guide our future policy about other supposedly "just" wars.
That was a strategic bombing campaign, and an anemic one by the standards of the later war. Also bad, but not properly urban warfare, and I think a case could be plausibly made that urban warfare is meaningfully worse.
Really? I won’t claim to have exhaustively surveyed it but it sure felt like it was widely recognized as a brutal ordeal with random sudden death never far away. Most of the “greatest generation” imagery was grounded in the idea of slogging through it anyways.
> World War II urban warfare is over romanticized in retrospect
At least for me WW II urban warfare is all but synonymous with the Battle for Stalingrad, which is arguably the nastiest battle in human history. Who is romanticising that?
I am not the OP but I had my view on this kind of changed by watching YouTube essay "Lies of Heroism – Redefining the Anti-War Film" [1]. Whey you think about movies like for example Enemy at the Gates, they show the gruesome reality of the battlefield, but it is usually interpreted in a way that makes the suffering feel meaningful, heroic. Contrast that with Come and See, where there is no heroism, no ultimate meaning of the suffering, just meaningless hellish nightmare.
Someone who is unlikely to die in the next hour needs to be making those strategic decisions though. What is the alternative? (besides simply not having wars anymore)
The clearest indicator is that Russia suffered major losses in the first Chechen war when they opted for a short siege of Grozny. The second Chechen war under Putin saw a longer siege with more shelling, more civilian deaths and minimal losses for the Russians. It’s unlikely they’ve forgotten the lesson.
To prevent their atrocities from being broadcast they’ll probably prioritise cutting the internet.
Media in Kyiv and other places have plenty of satellite communication and in normal wars more protection from shelling (the IDF for example will blow Gaza to hell, but they won't say hit the building Reuters are in)
Whether Russia cares about the bad PR it would cause by blowing up international media (including crews from places like CCTV) is another matter.
Yes, exactly, destroying Associated Press and Al-Jazeera offices and equipment (and endangering lives). And despite all the protestations about concrete evidence that it was a "Hamas cyber HQ", and all the claims that the corresponding evidence had been given to the US, there hasn't been any such evidence released publicly, and as far as we know, not even privately to the US (the US denied receiving such evidence when the claim was made).
These reports use unnamed sources, but there are reports that it was almost entirely a PR move to destroy large structures, and that decision makers weren't aware of the presence of Associated Press and Al-Jazeera until after the "knock" bombs were already hitting the roof (it's my understanding that these offices are prominently registered with the IDF in order to prevent such events). https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-idf-only-discov...
> However, he added, the IDF was aware that Hamas was winning the PR war in Jerusalem, in mixed Arab-Jewish cities in Israel and in Lebanon. Moreover, its rocket fire at Israel was escalating. Consequently, he said, both the politicians and senior army officers “were looking for a victory picture.”
> ...
> This source linked the strike on Al-Jalaa to an earlier attack on Hamas’ underground tunnel network, “which began well, but afterward it become clear that it hadn’t succeeded, so they were looking for something to give the public, some victory, even a small one. That’s why the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit was so quick to release pictures and videos of before and after the attack on the building. The IDF didn’t understand the implications of this incident and released the pictures of the building’s ruins as a public relations victory.”
There’s no such thing as an unbiased news source. Al Jazeera is a prominent source for news about matters in the Middle East, and I want to read what they have to say, as do other HN users.
Constructive discourse requires differing perspectives on reality, many of which may be uncomfortable. For example, I can’t begin to understand the situation in Ukraine without also understanding how Russia is portraying the matter. While we can’t stop you from requesting censorship, the answer will always be “no.”
Al Jazeera is an excellent news source on Middle Eastern affairs, also its telling how you shifted the conversation to the source (this story has been confirmed by the AP and other sources as well) when your false claim about he IDF was proven wrong.
The IDF are war criminals, worse than the Russians
I think calling them 'excellent' is taking it a bit far. I'd view Al Jazeera as structurally similar to many other 'regime broadcasters', for example, the BBC. However, the regime they are broadcasting for is the Qatari dictatorship, which is marginally more liberal than the Saudi dictarship[0]. So there's actually a pretty big difference there: it's representing a state (in the broad sense), and unless you have some really biblical political opinions, it's not a state you have much in common with. Aside from the usual depravities (stoning, slavery, etc), the taliban were headquartered in Doha in recent years.
I also occasionally read AJ for a sort of 'third opinion', but I think the people they represent are some of the worst in the world. It's marginally more reliable than RT, and then only because Qatar is more of an ambiguous global player. It's worth always remembering that AJ is the english language, liberal-compatible face of a regime that murders gay people, imprisons women, and flogs people for adultery.
Is it telling? Let's say a true story were reported in a paper you think is garbage but also in a reputable one. Someone posts a link to the garbage one. Wouldn't you tell them to avoid the garbage site?
I think you and GP disagree on whether Al Jazeera is trustworthy or garbage, but I don't see the problem you seem to be implying exists.
Google curates your search results based on your past behavior. If you’re constantly looking to biased, false reporting for news, that’s what you’ll get in the future, everyone downvoting me for saying AJ is biased doesn’t like to look in the mirror.
They all think “the other side is the one that reads fake news, all my news sources are impeccable.” No, you’re just in your own echo chamber that you’ve got telling you the exact things you want to hear. Sharing a story from AJ on Israel is like using RT for the state of Ukraine’s nazi agenda. You’re gonna get a very false picture of reality.
You make a good point. Please excuse my offtopic aside: could you use better news sources than the NY Post? We have, for instance, active discussion of the story on this site, via a Politico story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30482998
