War Aims

Israeli troops are in Lebanon for “limited, localized and targeted raids.” Or for boundless, generalized and indiscriminate bloodletting. Check back in six months to find out which.

Tuesday’s incursion was presaged by a series of in-and-out, cross-border reconnaissance operations. The IDF spent the last week softening up the terrain with an unsparing air campaign that killed dozens of civilians, injured scores and sent locals scurrying north, where safety was tragically hard to come by amid escalatory Israeli strikes on Beirut targeting Hezbollah’s leadership ranks.

The IDF isn’t limiting those strikes to Dahiya anymore, by the way. On Monday, Israel hit central Beirut for the first time since the last full-on war with Hezbollah in 2006, prompting all-too-familiar laments for the plight of disoriented civilians. “[D]isplaced families came to this area thinking it’s safe,” a UN official told NBC. “We were shocked this area was bombed.”

I don’t know why anyone would be “shocked” after observing the conduct of the war in Gaza over the last 12 months. Israel’s repeatedly, deliberately and in some cases admittedly, bombed “safe” zones in the decimated enclave, including those where the military itself instructed Gazans to go. In the simplest — and unavoidably callous — terms: The human shield strategy doesn’t work when the people dropping the bombs are perfectly willing to kill civilians on compassionate days and delight in the massacre on all the others. People in Beirut are sleeping in the streets hoping, at least, they can spare themselves being buried under the rubble of a toppled residential building.

To be “fair,” Israel would rather not kill civilians, but all that really means in this context is that if there’s a high-value target in the IDF’s gun sights, they’d prefer there weren’t a lot of innocents standing around. Maybe they’ll send automated text messages to the phones of everybody in the vicinity half a minute before the meting out of “righteous” justice: “Dear civilian: Run” with an Israeli flag emoji. But the bombs are getting dropped regardless.

According to the UN, Israeli airstrikes have displaced more than a million people across Lebanon. 100,000 — give or take — fled to Syria, according to the same update, published earlier this week. Local entrepreneurs are offering charter boats to Cyprus. And some Lebanese will doubtlessly try to make it to Turkey, where Recep Tayyip Erdogan isn’t amused. On Monday, he “modestly” suggested the UN forcibly compel Israel to cease and desist from military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. “The Lebanese people are the latest target of a policy of genocide, occupation and invasion carried out by Israel since October 7,” Erdogan seethed on social media, reading from his usual script following the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah. “No person with a conscience can accept, excuse or justify such a massacre.”

The situation’s going to get worse — probably much worse — before it gets any better. Israel’s stated goal for the ground operation in southern Lebanon is to clean out any remaining Hezbollah positions and destroy “infrastructure” such that displaced Israelis can return to their homes in the north. Facilitating that return became a stated war goal for the IDF in early September. A few days later, Mossad started blowing up pagers. The rest is history.

It’s easy enough to suggest the ground operation will end like the last one: In a stalemate. A stalemate will always count as a victory for Hezbollah. That may well be the outcome, and it’s anyway hard to imagine a scenario where Israel doesn’t end up trying to occupy a few miles of Lebanese territory to create a buffer zone. Israel’s — how should I put this? — not opposed to occupying territory that isn’t theirs in the name of God and their version of Manifest Destiny.

I’ve said again and again over the past week that Hezbollah’s only hope is, somewhat ironically, an Israeli ground operation. In theory, they can bog the IDF down in an asymmetric nightmare again, in the process reclaiming some shred of lost “dignity.” If the IDF does hang around in southern Lebanon, and certainly if they get drawn into urban combat in Beirut, there will be funerals in Israel. Severely degraded though it is, Hezbollah’s not Hamas. Indelicately, they will send dozens (hundreds, probably) of Israeli troops home in bags. That’s just the harsh reality of prolonged, close quarters combat with a well-trained guerrilla army. A long-term occupation of Beirut isn’t feasible at all, and I can’t imagine anyone in the Israeli military command’s entertaining that, let alone convinced it’s a good idea.

To reiterate: Hezbollah has a sprawling political machine, a bureaucracy and a vast patronage network. Yes, it’s in many respects a “terror army” (as Benjamin Netanyahu put it at the UN last week), but it’s more than that. A lot more than that. Infinitely more than that. This is absolutely a case where cutting out the tumor risks killing the patient. The tumor’s Hezbollah. The patient’s Lebanon. And she’s almost dead already.

Reading some of the generic commentary published by mainstream media in recent days — including some shoddy, paint-by-numbers OpEds — it occurs to me that otherwise intelligent, well-informed observers might not fully appreciate the existential nature of the losses Hezbollah’s incurred. The top three (at least) layers of the military command are gone. That’s never happened before. I won’t pretend to know how that impacts the group’s capacity to conduct itself on the ground, but from a 30,000-foot strategic view, it’s positively devastating. Anybody who tells you any different doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s just that simple.

More broadly, it’s worth asking what the real goal is for Israel. Hezbollah’s function — in many ways its raison d’être — is to fight a never-ending, low-level war with Israel on behalf of Iran. We talk a lot about Israel’s “deterrent” and the need to reestablish it in consideration of the security failures around October 7. Well, Hezbollah is Iran’s deterrent. In that regard, the group’s not especially effective on some interpretations. It didn’t stop Mossad from assassinating Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, for example. And it didn’t stop the US from assassinating Qassem Soleimani. I could go on. And on, and on. Volumes have been written on the history of assassinations targeting Iranian officials and those of the regime’s proxies. Still, Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s northern border arguably served its purpose: It dissuaded Israel’s worst regime change impulses vis-à-vis the theocracy in Tehran.

But when push came to shove, it was a bluff. Hezbollah’s “military,” for all its missiles and rockets and parades, and despite having many of the trappings of a real army, was just a militia. And its threats were by and large empty. The events of the last two weeks — from the pager bombs to the near-daily strikes against high-ranking officials and commanders to the brazen assassination of Nasrallah himself to, as of Tuesday, ground maneuvers in south Lebanon — betray a clear plan to reduce the group to a remnant incapable of coordinated action on behalf of its sponsor.

You can’t kill an idea. But you can kill damn near everybody associated with implementing an agenda when all of those people are corralled in a de facto prison (i.e., Hamas in Gaza) or overly-concentrated in one area of an anyway very small country (in the case of Hezbollah in Dahiya). And you can do so — kill people — with relative impunity when the places out of which your enemies operate aren’t capable of providing for their own defense above and beyond the militia you’re targeting, and when those places have no sway at the supranational level.

With Hamas decimated and a humilitated Hezbollah reeling from what was, without debate, the single-most devastating month in the group’s history, Ali Khamenei and his inner circle are vulnerable in a way they weren’t a year ago. On Tuesday, reports suggested Khamenei was prepared to risk another missile attack on Israel. If he does, he might be signing his own death warrant.

Consider the following. Russia isn’t going to war with Israel in the event of Khamenei’s demise from unnatural causes. Neither, obviously, is China. What — or, more to the point, who — is stopping Mossad from cutting the head off this particular snake? The IRGC? How? With missiles the US and the UK will just shoot down? The Quds? How? Are they going to out-intelligence Mossad? Bashar al-Assad? Erdogan, NATO member? Qatar? Kim Jong-Un? The ghost of Soleimani? Who’s coming to save Khamenei and his regime?

On Monday, Netanyahu recorded a video message addressed specifically to the Iranian people. “When Iran is finally free — and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think — everything will be different,” he said.