With Biden administration still in thrall of Iran, Israel goes it alone — and scores a huge victory

Reprinted with permission from Tablet magazine:

Friday evening in the Levant, Israel targeted buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut killing Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. This operation represents a dramatic shift in Israeli strategy. Not only have they finally liquidated an adversary they’ve long been capable of killing, they’ve also turned a deaf ear to their superpower patron of more than half a century.

But at this stage, heeding Washington’s advice in war is like taking counsel from the angel of death. Just as the US is no longer willing or able to win the wars it commits Americans to fight, the Joe Biden administration won’t let US allies win wars either.

By ordering the strike on Nasrallah while attending the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored the Jewish state’s independence from the global consensus that has resolved not to confront terrorists but rather to appease them, whether they’re plotting in the Middle East or living among the local populations of Western nations, including the United States.

Israel’s attack also shows that almost everything US and other Western civilian and military leaders have believed about the Middle East for the last 20 years was simply a collection of excuses for losing wars. The questions that senior policymakers and Pentagon officials, think-tank experts and journalists have deliberated over since the invasion of Iraq — questions about the nature of modern warfare and the proper conduct of international relations in a multipolar world, etc. — can now be set aside for good because they have been resolved definitively.

The answers are as they ever were — at least before the start of the “global war on terror.”

Contrary to the convictions of George W. Bush-era neoconservatives and the pro-Iran progressives in Barack Obama’s camp, securing a nation’s peace has nothing to do with winning narratives, or nation-building, or balancing US allies against your mutual enemies for the sake of regional equilibrium, or any of the other academic theories generated to mask a generation’s worth of failure.

Rather, it means killing your enemies, above all those who advocate and embody the causes that inspire others to exhaust their murderous energies against you. Thus, killing Nasrallah was essential.

Taking down officers demoralizes a force. Wiping out its chain of command cripples it. Hezbollah is a function of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and if allowed to survive the Lebanese militia will be replenished and trained by the IRGC to replace the fallen.

Nasrallah issued from a different source. He was the protégé of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Their tenures — until now — were roughly coterminous: Khamenei replaced the founder of the Islamic Republic Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 and chose Nasrallah to lead Hezbollah in 1992. The Iranians built around Nasrallah not only a network of proxies stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf but also a comprehensive worldview — permanent resistance. Killing him marks a defining moment capping the end of a 30-year reign of terror.

Israel’s campaign went into high gear on Sept. 17 with the detonation of Hezbollah’s communications devices, which Israeli intelligence had booby-trapped with explosives, decommissioning thousands of the terror organization’s medical and logistical support staff as well as fighters.

Because Hezbollah’s communications infrastructure, as well as its supply chain, was compromised, senior officials were forced to meet in person. Consequently, Israel was able to liquidate senior operations commander Ibrahim Aqil — who took part in the 1983 attacks on the US embassy and Marine Barracks in Lebanon — and other top commanders from the elite Radwan force in a strike in the southern suburb of Beirut on Sept. 20.

In attacks on Hezbollah strongholds across Lebanon, Israel has killed hundreds of fighters and destroyed thousands of long- and medium-range missiles and launchers. With Nasrallah and virtually all of its senior command dead, Hezbollah has been decapitated.

Israel’s immediate goal is to get the 60,000 Israelis who have been displaced from the north since Oct. 7 back into their homes. Therefore, say Israeli officials, Hezbollah forces must be driven north of the Litani river, roughly 20 miles away from the border.

The Biden administration says the Israelis can’t reach their goals through force and the only way forward is through diplomacy. In fact, the harder Israel struck Hezbollah, specifically showcasing its ability to eliminate its leadership, the more desperate the White House became to end IDF operations.

The Biden team took advantage of the UN General Assembly to work with France on a statement calling for a 21-day ceasefire that would shut down Israel’s campaign and protect Nasrallah.

Even if Israel weren’t proving the White House wrong hourly about its ability to win its goals on the ground, the fact is that US diplomatic assurances regarding Hezbollah are worthless.

US officials brought an end to the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war with UN Security Council Resolution 1701. It stipulated that there were to be no armed personnel or weapons south of the Litani, other than those of the Lebanese government and the UN peacekeeping force.

The resolution was a farce, as Hezbollah’s presence and capabilities in south Lebanon have only grown in the two decades since it was passed. Obviously, there is no chance the Lebanese government will ever take action against Hezbollah, which controls the government. Nor will the US, France, or any other power enforce UNSCR 1701 — except to endorse the Lebanese demand for an end to Israeli overflights and indulge Beirut’s border claims.

For Israel, the even bigger problem with 1701 is that since 2006, Hezbollah has become capable of launching missiles from virtually anywhere in Lebanon, as well as Syria, to reach every part of Israel.

Pushing Hezbollah off the border would make it harder for the militia to mount a cross-border invasion like Oct. 7, but it would still leave all of Israel under threat from its long- and mid-range missiles. Reports Friday that the Israelis will continue to conduct strikes on the southern suburbs indicate that Jerusalem knows the core issue isn’t on the border but is rather in Beirut, Hezbollah’s capital.

Netanyahu was aware that if he meant to do more than just degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities until it regrouped and resupplied, he had only a small window of time.

The Biden White House had done everything in its power to stop Israel’s campaign against Hamas, like withholding ordnance that would have spared Israel risking the lives of its combat troops, while also openly opposing an Israeli campaign in Lebanon. Therefore, it was 11 months before Netanyahu could turn north. But since the delay coincided with unprecedented developments in the US domestic arena — a president retired from active duty and a vice president campaigning for the top spot by hiding from the press — the Israelis seized the opportunity to lay siege to Hezbollah while the Oval Office was effectively vacant.

Unsurprisingly, Israel’s success against Hezbollah the last two weeks alarmed the former Obama officials staffing the current administration. After all, Obama’s strategy to realign US interests with Iran was predicated on the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which put Iran’s nuclear weapons program under the umbrella of an international agreement guaranteed by the United States.

The Iranians armed Hezbollah with missiles in order to deter Israeli action against their nuclear facilities, which is to say that the Lebanese militia serves not only Iranian interests but also those of the Obama faction.

The Biden team tried to stop Netanyahu from continuing his Hezbollah campaign by outlining how it intends to punish Israel in the period between the November election and the January inauguration with sanctions and other anti-Israel measures. But by telegraphing its intentions, the White House inadvertently incentivized Netanyahu to act quickly.

Since a Harris victory ensures four to eight more years of a White House filled by Obama aides determined to protect the Iranians and their proxies, and a Donald Trump win means Biden’s punitive actions go away, Israel saw it had nothing to lose in either case.

So on Friday, Netanyahu brought the era of permanent resistance to an end by killing the cult leader the Obama faction so desperately wanted to but could not keep alive.

In the past, Israeli officials warned against targeting the terror chief. They feared it might bring about an even more ruthless leader just as Israel’s 1992 assassination of then-Hezbollah chief Abbas al-Mussawi elevated, in their eyes, the more effective Nasrallah.

But what made Nasrallah special, what gave rise to the personality cult around the man whose name means “victory of God,” was his relationship with Khamenei.

In 1989, Nasrallah left Lebanon for Iran, where the 29-year-old cleric was introduced to Khamenei. In the vacuum left by Khomeini’s death, Khamenei was working to consolidate his power, which included taking control of Hezbollah, Tehran’s most significant external asset. He saw Mussawi’s assassination as an opening to put his own man in place, and with Hezbollah’s operations against Israeli forces in Lebanon, Nasrallah’s legend steadily grew.

Even Israeli officials credited Hezbollah for driving Israel out of the south in 2000, a singular triumph worthy of the name Nasrallah, a victory against the hated Zionists that no other Arab leader could claim.

But the myth of Nasrallah as Turban Napoleon was dispelled with the disastrous 2006 war which he stumbled into by kidnapping two Israel soldiers. Later he said that had he known Israel was going to respond so forcefully, he’d never have given the order.

And yet despite the thousands killed in Lebanon, Hezbollahis and civilians, and the billions of dollars worth of damage, he claimed that Hezbollah won just because he survived. Before his demise, he’d been in hiding since 2006.

Israel’s recent demonstrations of its technological prowess show that Nasrallah survived this long thanks only to the sufferance of the Jerusalem government. Netanyahu and others seem to have hoped the Hezbollah problem would resolve itself once the Americans came to their senses and recognized the threat Iran posed to US regional hegemony.

But the Israelis misread the strategic implications of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The George W. Bush administration’s freedom agenda gave Iraq’s Shia majority an insuperable advantage in popular elections. And since virtually all the Shia factions were controlled by Iran, democratizing Iraq laid the foundations for Iran’s regional empire as well as Obama’s realignment strategy, downgrading relations with traditional US allies like Israel and building ties with the anti-American regime.

Even Trump, whose January 2020 targeted killing of Iranian terror chief Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi deputy Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was far and away the most meaningful operation ever conducted by US forces on Iraqi soil, couldn’t entirely break the mold cast by his predecessors and which the Pentagon protected like a priceless jewel.

US forces are still based in Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS and any other Sunnis the Iranians and their allies categorize as threats to their interests. The detail seems almost like a medieval curse imposed on the losing side in a war. After the Iranians killed and maimed thousands of US troops in Iraq, and helped kill and wound thousands more by urging their Syrian ally Bashar Assad to usher Sunni fighters from the Damascus airport to the Iraqi front, America’s best and bravest are condemned to eternal bondage requiring them to protect Iranian interests forever.

The idea advanced by conspiracy theorists from the US political and media establishment on the left as well as the right that Netanyahu is trying to drag the US into a larger regional war with Iran — a thesis sure to be cited repeatedly in the aftermath of Nasrallah’s assassination — is absurd.

The Obama faction, of which Biden and Harris are a part, is in Iran’s corner. Moreover, only a fool could be blind to the fact that the Pentagon way of war, three decades into the 21st century and a world away from the United States’ last conclusive victory, means death for all who pursue it.

If Washington and the Europeans are appalled by Israel’s campaign over the last two weeks, it’s because the Israelis have resurfaced the ugly truth that no modish theories of war, international organizations, or even American presidents could long obscure.

Wars are won by killing the enemy, above all, those who inspire their people to kill yours. Killing Nasrallah not only anchors Israel’s victory in Lebanon but reestablishes the old paradigm for any Western leaders who take seriously their duty to protect their countrymen and civilization: Kill your enemies.