Tag Archives: #Hezbollah

Together Iran and Israel are destroying Biden’s Middle East policy

This op-ed was published by The National on October 3, 2024

U.S. policy regarding the crises in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, is hanging by a thread. Reckless actions by America’s closest partner, Israel, and primary adversary, Iran, are demolishing Washington’s goal of containing the conflict to Gaza. Tehran and Israel are both driving the region towards a multi-front conflict and war of missiles that could draw in the US. This is precisely what US President Joe Biden has been striving to avoid.

Last year, soon after October 7, the Biden administration concluded that US interests could probably withstand anything arising, strictly from the Gaza war. But they feared getting dragged into a conflict that would pose untold risks.

Therefore, Mr. Biden developed a policy of conflict containment. The virtual carte blanche Washington gave Israel regarding Gaza was intended to help him restrain Israel, particularly in Lebanon.

For many months, it appeared to be working. Despite the emergence of flashpoints in Syria and Iraq, and Red Sea piracy by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Israel was focused on Gaza rather than Lebanon and fighting wasn’t spreading disastrously.

Ironically, the principal threat to this US imperative has come from Israel rather than Iran. In the week following the October 7 attacks, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began pressing for a major offensive against Hezbollah. Mr. Biden pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reject these demands and focus on Hamas. A similar scenario was repeated at least twice.

But Israel sought two imperatives that were unavailable in Gaza. Both Israel and Iran assessed that Tehran had pocketed strategic benefits at the expense of Israel, Hamas and, above all, the Palestinians. That equation couldn’t be altered in Gaza, which has no meaningful importance to Tehran, and especially since Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood organization and an unreliable ally that broke with the “axis” completely over the Syrian war.

The Israeli state badly needed a “win” to recuperate national security institutions whose reputations were damaged by the breathtaking failures on October 7. Mr. Netanyahu needed an unequivocal “victory” to restore his own reputation in advance of any future investigation into those failures.

Neither goal was going to be absolutely achieved by fighting Hamas. Instead, taking the fight decisively to Hezbollah, the prototypical and most potent of Iran’s Arab militias, offered the potential for both. But until recent weeks, Israel was largely content with gradual escalation against Hezbollah that made Washington distinctly nervous but never threatened to force the regional war the US was seeking, at virtually all costs, to avoid, although there were obviously making such a disaster ever more plausible.

When Israel’s operation in Rafah marked the end of the primary war against Hamas and transformed the continued conflict in Gaza into an amorphous counter-insurgency rather than a conceptually-coherent campaign against clearly-identified targets, Israel’s attention began to shift back north.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah expressed genuine interest in a US-proposed compromise in which the Lebanese militia would agree to withdraw its fighters and heavy equipment seven or eight km north of the border. Israel was demanding at least 20km while Hezbollah was insisting on an elusive and implausible ceasefire in Gaza.

Instead, Israel steadily increased pressure against Hezbollah and Iranian assets in Syria, while Mr Netanyahu rebuffed the intensified US efforts to achieve a four-week ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel’s extraordinary penetration of Hezbollah’s interworkings was the key to a series of devastating assassinations of much of that organisation’s key leadership while thousands of its operatives and associates were killed or debilitated by booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing air campaign severely damaged Hezbollah’s infrastructure and equipment, including its all-important rocket launchers. These assets are crucial to Iran, serving as the primary deterrent against any attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

The remarkably successful campaign culminated in the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his key deputies. But it was followed by precisely what Washington had, for a year, focused on preventing: an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.

While it is being marketed as “limited” and “targeted,” – and therefore implicitly not supposed to be the beginning of a new, open-ended Israeli occupation of parts of southern Lebanon as a “security buffer zone” – Washington understands from its own bitter experiences that such adventures are easy to launch but difficult to end or even contain.

After months of perceived passivity, Tehran finally intervened with a large-scale rocket and missile attack against civilian targets deep into Israel and the headquarters of its intelligence services. While the attack has been deemed unsuccessful by Washington, it’s unlikely that Israel will accept Mr. Biden‘s renewed calls for restraint any more than it has so many other such calls over the past few months.

The Israelis knows that the weeks before a presidential election are a time of maximum impunity from US pressure, and they are taking full and cynical advantage of this. Washington’s reticence was on full display when Mr. Biden bizarrely stated he “would not object” if Israel ended its invasion and eased its bombardment.

Israel seems unlikely to react with restraint. And the Biden administration is divided, with some senior figures privately encouraging Israel’s battering of Hezbollah and humiliation of Iran, while others increasingly fear that Mr. Netanyahu is trying to drag the US into a military confrontation with Tehran and at last secure his long-sought goal of maneuvering Washington into intervening on Israel’s behalf and bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. The US has the firepower to potentially set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back a decade or more, while Israel probably doesn’t.

But Mr. Biden has little to work with. He’s clearly unwilling to exercise the kind of US leverage that could keep Israel in check. He must now hope that Iran and Hezbollah will seek an understanding with Israel to remove militia forces from the border area, even though Israel may no longer be in any mood to compromise.

If the Israelis persist, and Iran and Hezbollah won’t employ “strategic patience” and back down, the nightmare of a multi-front regional war that could force Washington’s hand in defence of Israel – particularly in the month before a crucial election – may become a reality. This is a profound threat to US interests and goals, and would constitute the complete meltdown of Mr. Biden’s entire approach to the crises started by Hamas a year ago.

US Democrats will regard an Israeli invasion of Lebanon as election interference

This op-ed was published by The National on September 26, 2024

Just six weeks before a highly consequential election, Washington is scrambling to avoid a full-scale war in the Middle East that could be triggered by an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. US President Joe Biden’s domestic policy and legislative achievements have been remarkable, but his handling of the Gaza war has been woeful. Now US policy faces a meltdown, not at the hands of adversaries like Hezbollah and Iran, but Israel.

The Biden administration adopted a focused policy of conflict containment of the war to Gaza, hoping to manage the strategic fallout from anything deemed plausible inside Gaza. This reflected deep anxiety about the war spreading, particularly into Lebanon, which might spiral into a regional conflict potentially drawing in the US and Iran, and even setting them directly against each other.

Some in the Biden administration have long harbored suspicions that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might hope to manoeuvre tensions over Lebanon to eventually, and at long last, secure the direct US strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities that he has been demanding, without success, for almost two decades.

The Biden administration’s de facto carte blanche for Israel, particularly in the first few months of that savage war of vengeance against the entire Palestinian society in Gaza, was developed for numerous reasons. But an important factor was the belief that by supporting Israel strongly in Gaza, the Biden administration effectively positioned itself to block any Israeli impulse to unnecessarily spread the war into Lebanon.

That calculation appeared to play out precisely on several key occasions.

As early as October 12, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and other hawks began pressing for an immediate and massive strike against Hezbollah. One of the key factors thwarting this effort was a forceful intervention by Mr. Biden telling Mr. Netanyahu and others that such an attack was unnecessary, unwise and would not be supported by Washington. Similar scenarios played out on at least two other occasions in the subsequent months in which Mr. Biden was able to restrain Israel.

However, if things pan out over the subsequent days and weeks, an invasion of Lebanon could expand the Gaza war not just to Israel’s north but also potentially into an uncontrolled regional conflagration. Yet, at the time of writing, neither Israel nor Hezbollah had indicated any interest – at least in public – in a three-week pause in cross-border attacks that was being proposed by Washington and other regional and international governments.

The current standoff goes back to the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, when Hamas demanded that Hezbollah and other militias in the Iranian-managed “axis of resistance” intervene with full force against Israel. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, disappeared into virtual hiding, and when he emerged after two weeks, he clarified that while the organization would be intensifying its military activities, they would be directed at the Lebanon-Israel border area and, supposedly, in the interests of liberating two Lebanese towns still occupied by Israel.

The answer to Hamas was no, but Hezbollah did feel the need to ramp up cross-border attacks so as not to appear completely docile. But since that opening salvo, Israel has been able to establish escalation dominance, because even cautious Israeli leaders can see potential benefits from taking on Hezbollah under current circumstances.

In particular, they hope to inflict significant costs to Iran and its Arab regional militia network, which they believe have benefited virtually cost-free from the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. They would also be hoping to restore the domestic credibility and legitimacy of Israel’s national security institutions that were badly tarnished by the military meltdown on October 7.

Neither Iran nor Hezbollah see any point in a major war with Israel under current circumstances. Hezbollah’s main regional role has been to protect Iran from Israeli or American attacks on its homeland, and particularly its nuclear facilities. Tehran and Hezbollah have had no interest in a war over a place, Gaza, which has little strategic, historical or religious significance to them, or to rescue an organization, Hamas, which has proven to be an unreliable ally of the “axis of resistance” in the past (Hamas broke it over the Syrian war between 2012-2019).

The main American point to Israel all along has been that this war is unnecessary and avoidable because the other side does not want to fight one.

Israeli ambivalence appeared to decisively dissipate after the pager and walkie-talkie sabotage detonations last week. Reports suggest that Israel wanted to use those explosions in the earliest stages of a potential ground attack on Lebanon, but growing suspicions about the malfunctioning or badly performing devices prompted a “use it or lose it” analysis in Israel. Therefore, if these reports are true, the explosives were detonated independent of a specific policy goal or broader strategy.

Yet predictably enough, a cycle of escalation immediately followed.

What Israel seeks from a ground invasion is not clear, but it potentially ranges from the establishment of a new occupied “security barrier” in southern Lebanon to an all-out effort to smash the infrastructure of Hezbollah similar to that conducted in Gaza against Hamas. Either way, Lebanon has once again been dragged into a conflict that has absolutely no connection to any Lebanese national interest. Yet Israel’s escalations may help obscure that, instead restoring Hezbollah’s popularity and the perceived legitimacy of its resistance.

For the Biden administration, an Israeli ground operation in Lebanon constitutes the ultimate failure of its Gaza war policy. The conflict will have spread despite Washington’s best efforts and because of Israel’s bellicosity rather than that of Hezbollah or Iran.

Mere weeks before a US election is hardly the time any administration is going to get tough on Israel. The Israelis know this, and they are taking full and cynical advantage of the Biden administration’s priority of securing the victory of Vice President Kamala Harris over former president Donald Trump.

Indeed, a ground offensive, if it were to happen, with no urgent need and just six weeks before the US presidential election, will be regarded by many Democrats as shocking and intolerable election interference on behalf of Mr. Trump. Relations between Mr. Netanyahu and Democrats may never recover.

It could also accelerate the advent of a deeper schism between the US, or at least Democrats, and Israel in general. That’s been a long time in the making, and Mr Netanyahu appears determined to make such a bitter reckoning inevitable, and perhaps imminent.

Meanwhile, his policies could leave Israel fighting ongoing insurgencies against renewed or intensified occupations to the south in Gaza, to the north in Lebanon, and quite possibly to the east in the West Bank. Israel’s only calm border would be the Mediterranean Sea. If that’s a formula for security, it’s hard to imagine what dangerous insecurity might look like.

Iran-Israel conflict poses an existential risk for Lebanon, unless Biden can intervene

This op-ed was published by The National on April 16, 2024

Iran’s failed attack on Israel may have sealed Lebanon’s fate. Israel undoubtedly has come out the winner in the latest exchange, having killed several key commanders who are said to have played a role in directing Iran’s regional network of Arab militias to help Hamas fight Israel in Gaza and help Hezbollah prepare for a potential Israeli attack.

Israel suffered no fatalities, few injuries and very little damage in the Iranian barrage of over 300 projectiles aimed at military facilities. The US estimates about 140 of the drones and missiles failed due to malfunctions. US forces downed most of the remaining 160 projectiles, with the UK, France, Jordan and Israel’s own Iron Dome antimissile system also involved.

Iranian chest beating – and misleading news reports depicting fires from Chile and Texas as damage in Israel – aside, Iran seems to have been effectively thwarted.

Yet Iran does not appear to have intended to cause significant damage and fatalities in its attack, despite its size. Tehran telegraphed both the timing and the nature of the attack to Arab and European diplomats close to Washington well in advance. This explains warnings to Iran from US President Joe Biden, in his now-standard diplomatic catchphrase, “don’t”. Moreover, by using mainly slow, cheap drones, Iran actually may have pulled its punch. These missiles were fairly easily, and almost completely successfully, defeated.

Yet there can be little doubt that Iran could have done a great deal of damage, had that really been its intention. Not only do the Iranians have much greater capabilities than were on display in the attack on Israel, they also held back their biggest weapon, which is Hezbollah in Lebanon and its massive arsenal of over 150,000 missiles and rockets, many with precision guidance. Hezbollah’s stockpile is, if nothing else, capable of overwhelming the Iron Dome, and would have posed a huge challenge even to the US forces that did most of the important work.

So, what did Iran think it was doing? Clearly, Tehran believed that a direct strike on Israel in retaliation for the stinging assassination of its senior operatives in Syria was necessary. But it’s likely that domestic politics and political pressure from hardliners was the main factor, rather than a desire to escalate unduly with Israel. This is reflected in the failure of the Iranian attack, which is rather predictable given its structure and handling, and the obvious alternatives Iran could have used and still holds in reserve.

It appears Iran’s leaders wanted to score a “win” in the eyes of their people, while simultaneously giving Israel every opportunity to avoid feeling compelled to launch an additional new escalation. Indeed, Israeli leaders, too, can look at the score sheet and conclude that they have achieved a massive “win” over Iran. Neither side, rationally, has a real reason to push the confrontation further.

In addition, the Iranian attack was the antithesis for Israel of October 7. Rather than a shock which took the Israeli state and military completely by surprise and overwhelmed it, at least for a couple of days, this was telegraphed in advance and was easily dealt with by existing forces, even if they involved many other countries. Besides, most Israelis think their own military did the heavy lifting against the barrage. Instead of feeling violated, vulnerable, stateless and abandoned, Israelis can now feel a new sense of security, stability, predictability and that they are under the protection of a powerful and effective government that defends them and their interests against powerful foreign attacks.

The real question is, will Israel see this latest round with Iran as a sufficient “win”? Israeli leaders have been looking for such a victory since October 7, under the rubric of “restoring deterrence” but, really, in order to restore the national morale and sense of security and stability among a traumatized Israeli society. It was obvious from the outset to many, and has surely become clear to everyone by now, that such a “win” isn’t available in Gaza.

The great danger in recent months, not just to the region but to US policy as well, has been the prospect that Israeli leaders were seeking this restorative and cathartic “win” against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The group represents the most powerful immediate threat to Israel and is a much more conventional enemy than Hamas. Such a conflict would provide the Israelis with obvious targets, quantifiable metrics of success or failure, and no quagmire of having to occupy large chunks of Arab land indefinitely. They could simply pummel the group, damage and degrade its arsenal, kill some of its leaders and commanders and attack its infrastructure in relatively short order and then declare a victory that could be clear-cut in a way that no development in Gaza could.

The greatest problem with the Iranian attack on Israel is that it could well stoke, rather than mollify, the passion among some leading Israelis, like Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, for a war in Lebanon. Such hawks can point to the Iranian missile attack and claim that Hezbollah’s arsenal represents of much deadlier and intolerably dangerous version of the what Iran ineffectively flung in their direction.

The ball is now in Israel’s court. It could retaliate significantly against Iran, escalating prospects of a regional war. It could employed much more limited, or targeted, reprisals of a kind that has characterized its grey war with Tehran in recent years. Or it can decide to deliver Iran the biggest possible strategic blow by taking on, and, it would hope, taking out, Iran’s strategic trump card: Hezbollah.

If the Israelis decide the Iranian attack justifies an offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, it will be up to Mr. Biden, who has successfully held them back from such a folly on numerous occasions since October 7, to once again successfully restrain them. This will not come naturally or easily to Mr. Biden, even though he has made his opposition crystal clear. Nonetheless, his powers of persuasion with Israel may face their ultimate test in the coming weeks. It may be up to the US President to stop Israel from committing the most dangerous and readily avoidable escalation in recent Middle East history by yet again invading Lebanon.