Intelligence failures are never about the details. In Israel’s case, the operational and conceptual failures that led to Saturday’s massacre are even more disturbing

it’s by Norman Samuels, and was published yesterday — https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/konceptsia-intelligence-failure

Because everyone who isn’t an antisemitic savage was revolted by the Iranian-backed terrorism, so they have to allow a little time for the narrative to change to “Isn’t it horrible what Israel is doing to Gaza”.

This supports sdferr’s view of “utter gaslighting hogwash”. The ONLY acceptable stance for the Biden administration would be to immediately terminate all negotiations with Iran permanently because the regime is outside the pale of civilized nations. Although it still would not come close to reversing the damage already done, most prominently the recent massacres. Obviously Obama who is really running foreign policy now will not do that.

sfeff:

I don’t.

You needn’t take it for anything more. Sources such as the current administration through the NYTimes and such don’t hold water for me, as I think they’re simply lying to tell what well meaning uninformed people would like to hear.

It’s as I’ve said before, a sham, a pose, a slight of hand, a lie, simply put.

Want to stop Iran getting it’s mitts on these misbegotten funds? Take them away, send them back to ROK where they came from! But no, that’s not what’s being done; instead a patty-cake game is held out as the alternative. Bullshit.

sdferr:

Cite? Reasoning? Anything?

Perhaps the announcement isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Nonetheless, I find it interesting that the Biden administration feels obliged to claim that the funds have been refrozen.

And if it’s “gaslighting” now that the Iranian funds are frozen, were the funds ever truly frozen?

The expert class labored under similar delusions. “It wasn’t so much a misreading of what was in [Hamas’] hearts as it was the sense that they had accommodated to reality,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush, including the period when Hamas won the only Palestinian parliamentary elections in history and took over the Gaza Strip. “They understood they couldn’t destroy Israel, and that their real goal in these 15 years was to take over the West Bank as they had taken over Gaza—to create the maximum amount of violence and terror in the West Bank, and to protect their rule in Gaza. You have to look fairly widely to find someone who didn’t basically accept that view.” Abrams did not exempt himself from this group.

The irony is that I am not even that opposed to the general summary of this, but there are massive caveats.

“They understood they couldn’t destroy Israel YET.” They wanted to take power in the West Bank without sacrificing control of Gaza, but also to establish powerful alliances to sustain a war. I am just an autist history nerd but I immediately concluded that Hamas actions were fundamentally shaping operations designed to gradually bring the True Dream closer, mixed in with some pinpricks to make the Jews bleed, Fatah look worse, and maintain the blood lust support. I have a Bachelor’s Degree n a Frankenstein Degree partially of my own design from a community college and am not considered much of an expert by anybody that matters on the grand scheme of things, and I certainly have gotten things wrong (such as Putin escalating the war), but I could very clearly see this.

The horrifying thing is that in some ways, Hamas’s leadership IS pragmatic and realist. They are just operating under a very different incentive structure and values system than we are. And now we all pay the price for this folly, some more than others. And it never crossed my mind that Hamas leadership WOULDN’T delight in videos of mass murders of children for its own purpose as well as that of Jihad; I’ve studied too much Pallywood to know that. So the question I have is: what now?!?

It seems the $6 bil of Iranian funds has indeed been refrozen, though it’s not clear how much may already have been transferred to Iran for “humanitarian purposes.”
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Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, told House Democrats that Iran would no longer have access to $6 billion in funds that had been negotiated as part of a prisoner release deal last month.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/world/middleeast/us-qatar-iran-prisoner-deal.html

Israeli troops who entered the Gaza Strip on Friday to conduct “localized raids” found and recovered the remains of people who have been missing since Hamas’s shock terror massacre on Saturday, according to reports in the Hebrew media.

Haaretz reported Friday that armored and infantry forces who went into the Palestinian enclave, where an estimated 150-200 people are being held hostage by Hamas, retrieved the bodies of an unknown number of people and found some items belonging to people still missing since Saturday’s surprise assault when Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel by land, sea, and air, and rampaged through Gaza border communities and a music festival, killing more than 1,300 people, a majority of them civilians.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/troops-on-localized-raids-into-gaza-said-to-recover-bodies-items-of-missing-people/