The actual entry into Afghanistan and overwhelming of local forces was wildly fast? The majority of our time in Afghanistan wasn’t slowly advancing on Kabul. It was failing miserably to build a coherent state sympathetic to US interests amidst a mad dash of privatized MIC interests maximally extracting revenues from the US.
They’ll support Israel because the way we do it is another of the many infinite money hacks our MIC has created and entrenched deep into our politics. I really dislike this American trend to racialize the conflict. In virtually every way, Palestinians and Israelis, and Jews in general for that matter, are pretty indistinguishable but for small differences in otherwise very similar ethnic and religious cultures. Jewish culture, even across the diaspora, has been pretty clearly a Levantine originating one forever (not to mention the far deeper similarities between Judaism as a religion and Islam than between either and Christianity).
While I agree that there should be a secular, non-ethno-, state of The Levantine Union or something, there is no realistic path to that that doesn’t start from a two-state basis I don’t think. Palestine and Israel first need to comingle culturally and intertwine economically (in a mutually beneficial manner–not just Israel exploiting Palestinians for cheap hard labor) before any unification can really happen imo.
Yes, Hamas should be blamed for seizing and refusing to release hostages effectively gained via an ill conceived pogrom that no one could possibly have expected to have had any different of an outcome than it has had. The most accurate and reasonable observation that I saw after the October raid was simply, “Hamas just shot every Palestinian in the dick.”
With that said, none of this excuses Israel and the IDF’s response, regardless of his predictable it has been. Nor does it excuse an increasingly ethnofascist apartheid state.