What Next in the Middle East?

October 07, 2024

One year after Hamas launched Iran’s “Ring of Fire” strategy with a barbaric attack against Israeli civilians, the Middle East has changed significantly. Now, the world awaits Jerusalem’s response to Tehran’s ballistic-missile attack last week, the largest such attack in history. It was the current war’s second military assault directly from Iranian territory against Israel, the first being April’s combined drone and ballistic/cruise missile barrage. We do not know how Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu will respond, but it is nearly certain Israel’s answer will be far stronger than in April.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Ring of Fire is clearly failing. Israel is systematically destroying Hamas and Hezbollah, two critical foundations of Iran’s terrorist power. Whatever now happens between Jerusalem and Tehran, Iran’s efforts to debilitate Israel — and potentially the Gulf Arab states — with terrorist and conventional military assets may well suffer irreversible defeat.

According to Israel, 23 of 24 Hamas combat battalions have been destroyed, and what’s left remains under attack. Numerous Hamas leaders have been killed, not the least being Ismael Haniyeh in a supposedly secure compound in the heart of Tehran. Yahyah Sinwar remains at large; Hamas still holds Israeli civilian hostages; and Gaza’s enormous underground fortress is still partially in Hamas hands, but the ending is increasingly clear.

Hezbollah is still in the process of being destroyed. Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrullah is already a turning point in Middle East history, so great was the shock in Lebanon and beyond. As effectively as against Hamas, or perhaps more, Jerusalem is relentlessly decapitating Hezbollah’s leadership, eliminating officials even as they are being promoted to the fill vacancies left by dead colleagues. Israel also claims to have destroyed half of Hezbollah’s enormous arsenal of missiles and launchers. That estimate seems high, and in any case leaves significant work remaining against Hezbollah’s estimated inventory of up to 150,000 missiles. Nonetheless, with Nasrullah’s demise and with its leadership decimated, Hezbollah is reeling.

The Gulf Arab states and others should now be considering what the future holds for the people of Lebanon and Gaza without Hezbollah and Hamas. What has been unthinkable for decades may now be within sight. As long as Hezbollah, the world’s largest terrorist group, controlled Lebanon and its government, there was no possibility to achieve political freedom and stability. Given the prospect of Hezbollah’s eradication as both a political and military force, urgent attention is required to the possibility of a society without intimidation and control from Iran. Lebanon with Hezbollah could and should be a very different place.

Gaza, although smaller, is more complicated. Palestinians are the only major refugee population since World War II that has not benefitted from the basic humanitarian principle of either returning to their country of origin or being resettled. Palestinians are, unfortunately for them, the exception, not the norm. The international community needs to confront the reality that Gaza is not and never will be a viable economic entity, even if some distant day combined as a state with “islands” on the West Bank. Far better, once Hamas is on history’s ash heap, to treat Gazans more humanely than simply being shields for their terrorist masters. It makes no sense to rebuild Gaza as a high-rise refugee camp. The most humane future for innocent Gazans is resettlement in functioning economies where their children have the prospect of a normal future.

Although Gaza and Lebanon have something to look forward to, the same cannot yet be said, sadly, for Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Yemen’s Houthi terrorists and Iranian-backed Shia militias in Syria and Iraq remain largely untouched after October 7. That should change.

Although the Houthis have launched missiles and drones against Israel, and Israel has retaliated, the Houthis main contribution to Iran’s Ring of Fire has been effectively closing the Suez Canal-Red Sea maritime passage. This blockade has been extremely harmful to Egypt through lost Suez Canal transit fees, and has hurt the wider world by significantly increasing shipping costs. A clear violation of the principle of freedom of the seas, the major maritime powers would be fully warranted to correct it through force, with or without UN Security Council approval.

For the United States, freedom of the seas has been a major element of national security even before the thirteen colonies became independent. In the last two centuries, America and the United Kingdom led global efforts to defend the freedom of the seas, and should do so now, eliminating the ongoing Houthi anti-shipping aggression. Cutting off Iran’s supply of missiles and drones is a first step, coupled with destroying existing Houthi stockpiles. Washington’s opposition to prior efforts by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to defeat the terrorists was misguided and should be reversed. Destroying Houthi military capabilities would afford Yemen the same opportunities now opening for Lebanon and Gaza, and should be urgently pursued.

In Iraq and Syria, as Iran’s power fades (and may well fade dramatically after Israel’s coming retaliation), action against the Iran-backed Shia militias should be the highest priority. In such circumstances, Baghdad at least may well think twice before demanding that the few remaining US forces still in Iraq and Syria be removed.

For Iran itself, loss of its terrorist proxies, after having invested billions of dollars over decades to build the terrorist infrastructure, will be a dramatic reversal of fortune. If Iran’s nuclear program is similarly devastated, the threat Iran has posed by seeking to achieve hegemony in the Middle East and within the Islamic world will likely be impossible for the foreseeable future. In these circumstances, the people of Iran may finally be able to achieve the downfall of the ayatollahs and the creation of representative government. It is far too early to be confident of such an outcome, but it is not too early to hope for it.

This article was first published in Independent Arabia on October 7, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Lasting Middle East peace requires regime change in Iran

October 07, 2024

October 7, 2023, is truly “a day which will live in infamy,” to borrow Franklin Roosevelt’s
memorable description of Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
But what Hamas did to innocent Israeli civilians on October 7 and thereafter is the more
infamous for its outright barbarity, savagery committed with malice aforethought, the
very definition of terrorism.
Stunningly, however, and sadly, many Westerners, one year later, still fail to grasp the
full implications of the Iran-Hamas attempted holocaust.
October 7 initiated Iran’s “Ring of Fire” strategy against Israel, “the little Satan”. The
immediate response from Iran’s Western media and think-tank apologists was to deny
Iran’s central role.
They pointed to US intelligence that elements of Iran’s leadership were unaware Hamas
was about to blitz Israel. They argued there was no “smoking gun” evidence of Tehran’s
command-and-control over the Hamas terrorists. But even if these assertions are true,
they do not refute the logic and reality of Tehran’s responsibility.
Why should anyone expect that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which takes
orders directly from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, would tell anyone who didn’t have
an urgent “need to know” what was to happen? The Quds Force and its ilk are not
exactly communicative; they are not like US or other Western bureaucracies. Among
those quite likely kept in the dark would be Iran’s foreign ministry and even higher
authorities.
Iran’s October 1, 2024, barrage of 180-plus ballistic missiles against Israel corroborates
the point that civilian Iranian officials are not in the decision-making loop. The New York
Times’s Thomas Friedman reported that day, citing Israeli sources: “The Iranian
president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was not informed of the attack until shortly before it
began, the sources said, indicating that the Iranian regime is divided over the operation,
which will probably add to the fractures in the government.” If the President himself was
blindsided by the enormously significant second missile attack on Israel, it is no stretch
to conclude many were iced out before October 7.
Nor is the failure of Israeli and other intelligence agencies to uncover an Iran-to-Hamas
“execute order” surprising. No Western intelligence agency detected the impending
Hamas attack, a massive failure all around. Missing the “execute order” is simply one
piece of a more profound intelligence debacle.
This history is critical. It helps explain, although certainly does not justify, the larger
Biden administration failure, shared by all European governments, to react strategically
against the real threat: Iran.
The past year has not been a Palestinian war against Israel, nor an Arab war against
Israel. It has been an Iranian war against Israel, fought directly by Tehran’s own military
and through its numerous terrorist proxies, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad,
Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and Iraqi and Syrian Shia militia groups. And behind the
terrorist storm troopers lies Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme, seeking to produce the
world’s most dangerous weapons. This is the ring of fire now directed against Israel, but
readily convertible to a ring of fire around the Arabian Peninsula’s oil-producing
monarchies.
The Arab governments at risk are acutely aware of the dangers they face from Tehran.
They understand that their strategic assessment is essentially identical to Israel’s,
explaining the basis for the Abraham Accords to establish full diplomatic relations with
Israel.
Further progress on more Abraham Accords is now on hold for the duration of the
conflict, but many believe the possibility of broader recognition of Israel in the Islamic
world was what motivated Iran to implement the “Ring of Fire” in the first place.
One year into the conflict, Israel is doing well. Hamas is nearing complete elimination of
its top leadership and organised military capabilities. Hezbollah is well on the way to the
same fate. The Houthis, for inexplicable reasons, are still largely untouched, despite
their broader threat to the basic principles of freedom of the seas that Britain and
America have sought to defend for centuries.
The blame for failing to destroy the Houthi military capabilities can be laid on US and
UK incompetence rather than on Israel. The same applies to Washington’s failure to
decimate Shia militias in Iraq and Syria that have repeatedly attacked American civilian
and military personnel since October 7.
Israel’s schwerpunkt, however, has been and undoubtedly remains Iran itself. After this
April’s missile-and-drone attack, the Biden administration forced Israel to “take the win”
and respond with only one pin-prick strike. That piece of brilliance has obviously failed.
Now, Israel is deciding whether to retaliate against Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme,
oil infrastructure, top leadership, military facilities, or a creative mix-and-match
combination. We will know shortly what Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Cabinet
decide.
Israel’s next move is on behalf of everyone in the world who rejects terrorism from Iran,
or any other source. We can only wish Jerusalem the best, hoping it encourages the
people of Iran to take their fate into their hands, beginning the overthrow of Tehran’s
mullahs.
Whatever Israel does now, the only durable outcome for Iran is ousting the Islamic
Revolution of 1979.

Effects of the Haniyah Assassination

September 28, 2024

Ayatollah Khamenei should increase his security protections. Whoever assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a supposedly secure compound in Iran’s supposedly secure capital sent an unmistakable message to Khamenei, Iran’s citizens, its terrorist proxies, and the world at large: No one is safe in Iran.

Not the Supreme Leader, not Qassem Soleimani, and not the lowliest Basiji militiaman. This grim reality should lead all Iranians not lost in religious fanaticism or authoritarian ideology to reconsider their own future under the mullahs. Whether Israel (or whomever did the deed) used a bomb planted two months before detonating during Haniyeh’s visit, or fired a precision-guided weapon, the result was the same. Haniyeh is dead, and Iran stands humiliated.

What now? Almost a month after Haniyeh’s demise, Iran has not retaliated, although Israel’s pre-emptive August 25 strike against Hezbollah may have thwarted part of Iran’s plan. The situation remains fluid. The United States, committed to defend Israel, had acted earlier, deploying the USS Abraham Lincon carrier strike group to the Middle East, overlapping with the USS Theodore Roosevelt group before it returned home. Also now on station is the nuclear-powered USS Georgia, a cruise-missile submarine. Together with already present American military capabilities, this is a force to be reckoned with, offensive and defensive. Its presence alone could be delaying Iran’s response(https://www.wsj.com/opinion/israel-iran-u-s-force-pentagon-biden-administration-gaza-hamas-dcf393a1?mod=opinion_feat1_editorials_pos3).

While no one can ignore a US carrier strike group in their backyard, the main cause for Iran’s hesitation in again attacking Israel, as it did on April 13 with 320 missiles and drones, is the decidedly unpleasant strategic conundrum it faces. Humiliated, presumably by Israel, the mullahs must undertake devastating reprisals to reestablish credibility and deterrence. This time, a pinprick attack on Israel, which is all Hezbollah’s Sunday attack amounted to, will not suffice.

Moreover, some observers are dubious about Iran’s April strike, asserting that it warned Israel in advance, thereby enabling Israel’s defenses to blunt the assault. In turn, in President Biden’s words, Jerusalem could “take the win” and respond minimally. This analysis is speculative, and there are reports Iran suffered massive failures in its ballistic-missiles launches(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-launches-drone-attack-toward-israel-idf-says/). Whichever version is true, Iran caused only minimal casualties and physical damage. That will not be nearly enough this time, whether the response comes from Iran itself, Hezbollah, or another terrorist proxy.

However, a truly punishing attack is what creates Iran’s strategic conundrum. Iran fears that an emboldened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not bend to Washington’s pressure this time, as he did in April. With Biden now a lame duck, and the US presidential election in doubt, Israel could conclude that this is precisely the moment to launch a debilitating response, not just take out a few missile-launching sites. To start, Jerusalem could level Iran’s air-defense capabilities. Then, Netanyahu could target Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile programs; its oil terminals and loading facilities in the Gulf; or major IRGC and regular military facilities countrywide. This time, the Supreme Leader might also be a target.

If Israel caused serious damage, the entire 1979 Islamic Revolution could be in jeopardy, which the ayatollahs will not want to risk. Their hold on power domestically has never been so unsteady, with substantial, long-brewing political, economic, and social discontent. Wrestling with the competing imperatives of striking Israel savagely but not being overthrown is paralyzing the regime’s decision-making. Trying to make a virtue out of necessity, Tehran claims to be withholding revenge to avoid jeopardizing the Qatari-led effort to establish a Hamas-Israel cease-fire in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages. With the negotiations seemingly stalled, the mullahs welcome further delay, not out of altruism for the combatants in Gaza, but because it affords Tehran precious additional time to untangle its strategic dilemma.

If the cease-fire negotiations do collapse, Iran will have no satisfactory way to escape the unpleasant alternatives it faces. That is a problem of its own making, having forged its “ring of fire strategy” against Israel over decades, and for reasons still unclear, launching it with Hamas’s barbaric October 7 attack. Tehran may have miscalculated the effect of Hamas’s blitz, which clearly did not crush Israel’s resolve. Instead, Netanyahu is now close to achieving his stated goal of eliminating Hamas’s political and military capabilities.

Moreover, with chaos in Gaza so extensive, Israel can now reopen the decades-old issue of what to do next with Gazan civilians, and whether resettlement to third countries is now in order. Following World War II, tens of millions of refugees who, for whatever reasons, could not return to their home countries were resettled. Only Palestinian were exempted from this outcome, treated instead as hereditary refugees, weapons against the very existence of Israel. That already-obsolete plan met its demise thanks to the Iran-Hamas October 7 assault.

Iran could choose to do very little, hoping its reputation as a regional power with nuclear capabilities will not suffer greatly. Its terrorist surrogates, however, will then question the basic terms of their dependence on Iran. If the ayatollahs can’t protect terrorist leaders in Tehran, what are their incentive to do Tehran’s bidding in a dangerous and uncertain future? Might not Tehran’s timidity inspire Iran’s domestic opposition? Seeing weakness externally, might not the regime’s domestic enemies conclude that their moment to oppose the legitimacy and very existence of the mullahs’ regime is at hand?

The clock is ticking for the ayatollahs. They do not have forever to decide.

This article was first published in Independent Arabia on September 26, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Operation Grim Beeper

September 24, 2024

Israel’s stunning attacks on Hezbollah via exploding pagers and walkie-talkies demonstrate both the creativity and cunning of its intelligence and defense forces, and their capacity to strike deep into the heart of its adversaries’ domains. The casualties among Hezbollah’s top leadership (and allies, like Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon) plus the significant near-term degradation of Hezbollah’s internal command-and-control, make it conspicuously vulnerable.

For Americans, the death of senior Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Aqeel is especially significant. He was responsible for the 1983 bombings of the US embassy in West Beirut, and of barracks for US Marines and French soldiers participating in a multilateral peacekeeping force, at the government of Lebanon’s invitation. At least partial justice has been done.

Together with the recent elimination of Hamas leader Ismael Haniyah in a supposedly secure compound in Tehran, Israel has almost certainly unnerved Iran, its principal enemy, as well as the terrorist proxies directly targeted. While the future is uncertain, now is a perfect opportunity for Israel to take far more significant reprisals against Iran and all its terrorist proxies for the “Ring of Fire” strategy. Iran’s nuclear-weapons program may now finally be at risk.

Where does the Middle East battlefield now stand?

After “Operation Grim Beeper,” as many now call it, Jerusalem launched major strikes against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. Whether these strikes have concluded, or whether they are the opening phases of a much larger anti-terrorist efforts, is not clear. These and other recent kinetic strikes have caused further damage to Hezbollah’s leadership and its offensive capacity.

Nonetheless, Hezbollah’s extraordinary arsenal of missiles, largely supplied or financed by Iran, plus their ground forces and tunnels networks in the Bekka Valley and elsewhere in Lebanon, make it a continuing threat, more dangerous near-term to Israel than even Iran. The CIA publicly estimates the terrorists could have “as many as 150,000 missiles and rockets of various types.” Many believe it is a matter of simple self-preservation that Israel must neutralize Hezbollah before any significant military steps are taken against Iran itself.

Since October 8, the day after Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel, Hezbollah’s constant missile and artillery barrages into northern Israel have forced approximately 60,000 citizens to evacuate their residences, farms and businesses. Because of the extensive economic dislocation, and the continuing danger of further destruction of the abandoned properties, on September 16, Israel declared that returning those forced to flee from the north to be a national war goal. That could well signal further strikes. Israel has maintained near-perfect operational security for nearly a year; no one on the outside can predict with certainty what is coming.

As for Hamas, a less-reported but equally significant development is that the Biden administration seems to have largely given up hope of negotiating a cease-fire in the Gaza conflict, at least before November’s presidential election. In fact, Israel and Hamas had opposing goals that could not be compromised. Israel was prepared to accept a brief cease fire and releasing some Palestinian prisoners, in exchange for its hostages, whereas Hamas wanted a definitive end to hostilities, with all Israeli forces withdrawing from Gaza. Almost certainly, there was never to be a meeting of minds.

Accordingly, Israel’s pursuit of Hamas’s remaining top leadership and the ongoing efforts to degrade and destroy its combat capabilities will continue. Moreover, operations to destroy Hamas’s extraordinarily extensive fortifications under Gaza will also continue, aimed at totally destroying every cubic inch of the tunnel system. Thus, at least for now, Iran’s initial sally in the Ring of Fire strategy is on the way to ignominious defeat. Tehran’s dominance in Gaza has brought only ruin.

By contrast, Yemen’s Houthi terrorists, with Iran’s full material support and political direction, continue to close the Suez Canal-Red Sea passage to most traffic, while also targeting US drones in international airspace. This blockage us causing significant economic hardships. In the region, Egypt is suffering major declines in government revenue from lost Suez Canal transit fees, which can only increase economic hardships for its civilian population. Worldwide, the higher costs of goods that must now be transported around the Horn of Africa are burdening countless countries, all with impunity for the Houthis and Iran.

Allowing Tehran and its terrorist proxies to keep these vital maritime passages closed is flatly unacceptable. Even before the United States was independent, freedom of the seas was a key principle of the colonies’ security. As with many other aspects of Iran’s Ring of Fire strategy, the Biden administration has been wringing its hands, not taking or supporting decisive action to clear these sea lines of communication. Whether the next US President continues the current ineffective approach will obviously not be known until after January 20, 2025.

Similarly, the United States has failed to exact significant retribution against Iran and the Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, also largely armed and equipped by Iran, that have conducted over 170 attacks on American civilian and military personnel since October 7. The Biden administration has effectively left these diplomats, soldiers and contractors at continuing risk, especially as tensions and increased military activity in the Ring of Fire area of operations escalate. An Iranian or Shia militia attack that inflicted serious American casualties, which is unfortunately entirely possible due to the Biden administration’s passivity, could prompt major US retaliation, perhaps directly against Iran.

Tehran’s mullahs remain the central threat to peace and security in the Middle East. As its terrorist surrogates are steadily degraded, and the Ring of Fire Strategy increasingly unravels, the prospects for direct attacks on Iran’s air defenses, its oil-and-gas production facilities, its military installations, and even its nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs steadily increase, Moreover, as Iran’s deeply discontented civilian population sees increasingly that the ayatollahs are more interested in religious extremism than the welfare of their fellow citizens, internal dissent against the regime will increase. The real question, therefore, is whether Iran’s Islamic Revolution will outlast its current Supreme Leader.

This article was first published in Independent Arabia on September 24, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

The Diplomatic Demons of Despair Battle Securing Strategic Victory in Israel

August 22, 2024

By Dr. David Wurmser[1]

In the summer of 2002, I was sent as a US diplomat to assess and correct the damage done by our negotiating team at the end of the 2000 Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference. In 2000, the overarching goal within our diplomatic corps was to reach a deal with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to expand NPT membership reach universality. So central had this goal become that it became a fixation to the point where the original mission of the NPT was obscured. The non-Aligned Movement believed self-imposed pressure was so great among Western diplomats to achieve such universality that they could be blackmailed and seduced into shifting the nature of the treaty from its original purpose of controlling nuclear technologies to responsible actors who could use it for peaceful purposes to become instead a disarmament treaty focused on disarming Western nuclear weapons arsenals, undermine Israel, and to establish a goal as well as to eliminate Western structures of missile defense. The vehicle of this attempt was to forward an unrealistic list of demands – which eventually became known as the Thirteen Points under Article VI of the NPT.

The NAM read US and British diplomats correctly. Both the US and UK diplomatic teams had indeed descended into such despair that they had crossed into an obsession. In a final act of surrender, all resistance or rejection by US and British diplomats on the 13-point plan was surrendered by the US negotiator as he physically collapsed from exhaustion and was wheeled away to a hospital in a life-threatening condition. He literally signed the agreement from the stretcher. The US had in effect signed away its (as well as the British and French) nuclear arsenals and any right to missile defense. The French felt betrayed since they had not even been consulted or coordinated, intentionally because the US and British teams knew that France understood more soberly than they that its residual claim to superpower status had just been erased.

It was a lesson that entered historical annals about diplomatic obsession and loss of proportion. Diplomatic goals were detached and prioritized over national interest, and diplomatic décor and sober policymaking were sacrificed at the altar of an agreement at all costs. The noble early intention to expand the NPT had descended into a possessed obsession.

Sadly, we have come to this point once again with the ceasefire/hostage deal negotiations over Gaza. The ceasefire/hostage deal talks began many months ago and are based on assumptions and parameters that originated from the very different reality of early Spring 2024 of pre-Rafiah, pre-Philadelphia Corridor period of Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza. But instead of assessing the tectonic changes, US diplomacy is redoubling its effort to the point of obsession while losing sight of the overall strategic picture, and even its more narrow goal of freeing the hostages.

The current diplomatic effort was born in a different reality. In April 2024, Israelis believed that the only way to get the hostages out— any of them — was a deal that came at a steep price. That difficulty of accepting a dear price, moreover, seemed offset by the difficulty and impasse of the situation. Israel controlled only about a third of Gaza in early May, and the U.S. demanded a ceasefire because of the mounting humanitarian cost and the assessment that any further advance of the IDF would trigger an unfathomable humanitarian catastrophe, as well as escalate to general war with Hizballah.

Iran, Hizballah, Hamas and Gazans themselves read the writing: Israel had stalled. Israel was unprepared to fight a war in the north against Hizballah, especially given how much of its force was still bogged down in Gaza, and was thus eager to end the fighting in Gaza to redirect more of its power northward.

Internally, Israel’s government teetered at the edge of collapse and was expected by most to fall within weeks as the crescendo of voices calling for early elections was deafening. The anti-government demonstrators who over the last two years had gathered at Kaplan street – starting with opposition to legal reform but morphing into essentially a lobby for a hostage deal in hopes that it would weaken the Netanyahu government enough to topple it — was back on the streets with confidence. It rode the tail wind of genuine universal Israeli anguish over the Israeli hostage issue as well as broad-based disappointment in the reigning government, leveraged overt US support, and tapped into the international outcry over the humanitarian “crisis” which had became the focus of all attention.

The majority of the war cabinet and Israel’s flag-rank defense establishment, let alone the world of retired generals for a parade of reasons, echoed the demands and outlook of the U.S. administration. The coalition of air power the US had gathered to parry Iran’s robust missile attack on Israel on April 13 moreover reminded Israel that its entire defense doctrine for decades had drifted into resting dangerously on a US regional strategic umbrella rather than its traditional doctrine of self-reliance and preemptive/preventative defense. And the umbrella came with its price of deference to American demands.

Hamas read all of that and dug in, believing time was taking its toll on Israel, the US was successfully manipulated into furthering its demands, and in the battle of wills, it was winning.

Given those realities, the only deal possible to get hostages back was essentially an Israeli surrender managed under American auspices – end the war and withdraw from Gaza – leaving Israel with the only hope that it will be able to return to fight another day. Some of the most prominent commentors of former generals on TV echoed that point, and insisted that victory was impossible; the only course was to surrender, leverage international support to find a more palatable Palestinian Authority to which it might be possible to turn Gaza over, and bring some – about a quarter at most — of the hostages home.

That is the reality when the fundamental assumptions and framework of the deal began being set. If hostages were to be brought home, which remained one of the two main Israeli goals, that was realistically the only way. And moreover, it was aligned with Israel’s local, regional and geopolitical strategic reality, as unsatisfying as those realities were.

But reality now is vastly different. Israel finally invaded Rafah and took control of the Philadelphia corridor, which severs Gaza from Egypt, with almost no loss of civilian life. Hamas lost its lifeline, its “oxygen supply,” from Egypt as long as the Philadelphia Corridor remains under Israeli control. Indeed, the capture of the Philadelphia corridor revealed a dark truth: Egypt’s government had over recent years failed, or was unwilling, to meaningfully govern the traffic entering and exiting Gaza to the point that Hamas had unfettered access and logistical support from the outside. Now, Hamas is suffocating and seems to be slowly dying.

Internally, the Israeli government is now stable and will survive at least into 2025. Almost all of the strongest voices within the Israeli governmental structure for U.S. administration positions, especially Benjamin Gantz and Gadi Eisenkott – who was among the strongest advocates for yielding and proponents of the view that victory was impossible — have left and the security cabinet is essentially replaced by the coalitional government cabinet. In Gaza itself, there is no genuine humanitarian crisis and the level of civilian deaths is a trace of what it had been.

The ground that shifts tectonically as a result of these dynamics has also shifted how one best can secure the release of the most hostages. Indeed, the best way to bring home the most hostages is no longer through the deal conceived by American diplomats, but through accelerated military pressure to create the realization among Gazans that total Israeli victory is inevitable. At that point, Gazans will despair of Hamas, and even those on the ground holding the hostages will see greater value in their own preservation rather than join Hamas in its collapse and demise. The remaining hostages acquire immense value at that point, since personally for Gazans they become the only asset they have to barter and save their skin under the inevitable Israeli victory. Not only will they keep them alive, but Gazans likely will begin to come forward either to release them to Israel as the IDF draws close, or to leak operational intelligence that can help locate hostages. People will cut their deals with the Israeli victor. In short, the greater the certainty of Hamas’ collapse and loss of control, the greater the chance of getting any or even all hostages back to Israel.

Under those circumstances, the parameters of discussion regarding a ceasefire as construed by US diplomats right now actually undermines the real dynamic that would lead to the release of hostages since it creates the idea that Hamas will be saved, and that there will be no collapse. Gazans thus will not risk their lives to abandon Hamas, given the inevitable resurrection of Hamas that the current parameters of the agreement guarantees. There will also be no intelligence divulged to Israel. There will be no hostage holders who give up their hostages to save themselves. Simply, there will be no Gazans who help the IDF until they are sure that Hamas will not survive.

Moreover, the broader regional strategic context surrounding the Gaza war has changed. And so has Israel’s strategic imagery now that the immediacy of the Gaza war has yielded to reflection on the nature of the overall defense of the nation. Indeed, Israel is slowly turning the geostrategic tide not only in Gaza, but in Lebanon and Iran too — and for the worse for Hamas, Hizballah, Houthis, Iraqi militias and the whole Iran axis. The longer the war goes on, the more Israel weakens, and will eventually defeat, the evil axis.

But Israel’s close-in strategic realities have also changed. In Gaza, dozens of hidden cross-border tunnels have now been exposed, some large enough for constant truck traffic even. The strategic supply of Hamas by Iran had been unrestrained until May – bringing the front line of Iran’s attack into the heart of Israel only 25 miles from the center of Tel Aviv. Israel now, however, controls that border. Nothing passes into Gaza now without traversing Israeli lines. And Gaza itself has been divided, with nothing from the south being able to move into the northern half without also going through an additional, robust Israeli line. Essentially, the Iranian threat had been pushed outside of the Mandatory border – the border established in 1921 by the League of Nations to define what was earmarked to become Israel, but after 1948 was partially controlled by Egypt and Jordan in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and then captured entirely by Israel in 1967. The closest Iran can get is in the chaos of the Sinai Peninsula on the Egyptian side of the border with Israel.

On the negative side, Judea and Samaria (West Bank) have become an active front, more dangerous now than even Gaza. The reason for this is that Iran has used the Iraqi militias, the collapse of Syria and the weakness of the Jordanian state to penetrate Israel’s border in the Jordan Valley. It is able to smuggle significant material and event agents, and is attempting to trigger a dangerous new front that reaches into areas at the heart of Israel adjacent to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.[2] As a result, Israel is rapidly and urgently building a far more robust defense structure in the Jordan Valley to prevent a similar reality as had been in Gaza until May, when Israel took the Philadelphia Corridor, to separate Judea and Samaria from the Iranian pincer coming in via Jordan.

Essentially, Israel has rediscovered what it had neglected for at least three decades: The territory within Mandatory Palestine is a single strategic theater. Whoever maintains its borders — whether the Jordan Valley or the Philadelphia corridor and the whole Egyptian border to Eilat — strategically dominates all that transpires within the territory.

And the only way to control a border is operational control and presence over it. And such control – not only monitoring but enforcement against what the monitoring uncovers – can only be achieved by robust physical presence. The issue is not detection, but reaction to violation. Even if the IDF detects dangerous cross-border activity, reentry into an evacuated area is prohibitive — even to the point of Israel’s being deterred — and thus relies on cooperation from the Palestinian Authority and Egypt, both of whom are as much part of the problem as its solution. If Israel is present with boots on the ground in operationally capable levels, then reaction is automatic and hardly governs a second thought.

In other words, Gaza and Judea and Samaria all had become entirely part of the larger Iranian effort to penetrate into the heart of Israel using the Palestinian Arab populations. And thus it has become imperative that the IDF holds the Philadelphia corridor and the Jordan Valley corridor with a real, operational force that maintains positive full control as the only way to prevent the drift back to October 6 in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria (West Bank).

As such, the paradigm that informs US establishment thinking and which informs the current content of all American diplomacy, including the ceasefire deal – that Israel can subcontract to the Palestinian Authority and Israel’s neighbors the control of either the Philadelphia Corridor in Gaza or the Jordan Valley in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) — is now collapsing and rejected in Israeli strategic thinking.

So, the entire hostage ceasefire framework has become obsolete and highly counterproductive. Indeed, its terms of reference try to preserve the realities of an Israeli defeat, which had been the only way out before Rafiah and Philadelphia, instead of an Israeli victory, which is what is emerging not only locally but potentially regionally.

And yet, even as the diplomatic effort as currently defined becomes ever more detached from reality, US diplomats redouble their effort to realize the unattainable. And the watershed issue is the Philadelphia corridor. Hamas, desperate to reestablish its lifeline to Iran, demands Israel leave the corridor. Israel, of course, now refuses. The U.S., however, is trying to bridge the gap by trying to reduce IDF presence to a meaningless symbolic level, such as a handful of observers to PA control, in the Philadelphia Corridor. It is an unbridgeable gap since it symbolizes and embodies who will win this war and define the post-war strategic reality: Israel or Hamas and Iran.

In their despair to reach a dead-letter deal, US diplomats are inching ever closer to trying to birth the sort of spectacle I had to help clean up in the 2002 NPT preparatory conference in Geneva by walking back the 13-point surrender plan delivered by a similar obsession and resulting despair possessing our diplomats in the 2000 NPT Review Conference.

[1] David Wurmser is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC as well as at both the Misgav Institute and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in Jerusalem

[2] https://x.com/wurmserscribit/status/1825094588047986854?s=48

Reflections on where things stand in the Iran-Israel war

August 01, 2024

If press reports are accurate, not only Hizballah, but Iran itself is preparing to launch an all-out attack on Israel. Reports are such an attack could include up to seven fronts, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen let alone Iran itself, Gaza and the West Bank. Clearly, it is likely that we stand on the precipice of the next phase in this war — the phase of the great and direct showdown between the Islamic Revolution of Iran regime and Israel.

And though the grave reality seizing headlines across the world, astonishingly most appear to be still missing how big this moment is.

Iran faces a classic sunk investment — whatever money has been made is history, the net balance is now a loss and further clinging, let alone sinking, of more money into it is a growing loss. Such is Iran’s great “ring of fire” war against Israel. The war started on October 7^th with an Iranian victory via proxy and immense growth of stature and influence — and an especially successful seizing of the direction of the region’s strategic and geopolitical momentum toward itself, its axis of rogue states, and its geopolitical great-power allies of Russia and China. But since Israel entered Rafah and severed Gaza off from the rest of the world by seizing the Philadelphia corridor, Iran’s successful war to redefine the region around its eclipsing power has crossed into retreat.

The IDF is beginning to operationally reach peak performance, much as the U.S. armed forces did by the late spring of 1942.

The IDF is now fielding weapons that did not exist half a year ago. It is a heavily trained force, well equipped, and morale remains astronomical. It is fielding power that is unimaginably far beyond anything it was in October 2023.

Any further conflict — any form of Iranian escalation — thus invites an Israeli response that delivers gallopingly increasing marginal returns that ravage Iran’s assets and strength — from its proxies to forces on its own territory.

Given how dangerous Israel has become, and given how the relative balance of military power is shifting toward the IDF, Tehran should be desperate to cut bait and walk away. It should “take the win of October 7” and shut everything down.

But it cannot. The humiliation at this point of these recent hits — Israel’s seizing the Philadelphia corridor and Rafiah, Muhammad Deif’s demise, Fouad Shukr’s demise, Ismail Haniyah’s demise, several top Hizballah operational sector heads’ demise — all devastated Iran’s initial success and have shifted the strategic momentum in this war.

As such if these defeats are left unanswered by Iran’s regime, it exposes Tehran’s weakness, which in turn leads the Iranian people — who long ago divorced from their regime — to smell fear and impotence. That is how repressive regimes fall.

So, the ayatollahs of Tehran have to act and sink more into their investment of destroying Israel. But the more they do, the more Israel musters yet further defeats and humiliations, the more Israel strengthens, the more it seizes strategic momentum and emerges as the strong horse of the area. This in turn whittles away ever more or outright demolishes Iran’s assets, real strength and reputation.

The only thing that can save the regime in Tehran is an imposed ceasefire, which it might try to claim hampered it from its inevitable victory — which is receding faster than Yul Brenner’s hair line.

But the Ayatollahs cannot accept a ceasefire that leaves their most recent humiliations without retaliation, for which Israel is waiting to respond — likely in devastating ways against Iran itself. So they face a Hobson’s choice with no good path forward.

Moreover, Iran has always managed to survive and strategically win by being far more sophisticated in the arts of manipulation and strategic seductions than their opponents. They are the masters of playing strategic chess, unrivaled by any on the face of the earth. But all these strategies that are anchored to manipulation depend on an opponent that is predictable, sane, and rational. Israel’s strategic behavior is increasingly possessed – – the genies have seized the mind of Israel to create a parenthesis much known” – – and this is unpredictable, wild, dangerous, and impossible to manipulate. It is in a moment like that, that the normally strategically sophisticated and supremely controlling Iranian strategy leads to a moment of frozen paralysis. Iran is forced to fall back on a pattern of what has worked before, but that is precisely what Israel’s being possessed by the genie has rendered useless. Iran is thus strategically seized up and finds itself reacting to an unpredictable and unmanageable deadly rival — precisely the position it always wants to impose on its opponents rather than have imposed on it by them. Iran thus finds itself upside down and can only act — or rather react — out of habit rather than strategic intelligence.

We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the Iranian regime emerging since a regime whose sole currency is based on the employment of a reign of terror, burn whose impotence is being exposed, and facade weak, defeated and humiliated is a regime not long for this world.

And if that happens …..

What Netanyahu’s visit showed about the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship

July 31, 2024

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to America last week reflected long-term pluses and minuses for the U.S.-Israel relationship. The historical relationship between Israel and the Democratic Party hit its lowest point ever, while that between Republicans and Israel has never been stronger. Driving these developments are tectonic shifts of power and demographics among Democrats and, even more importantly, tectonic shifts in Israeli public opinion about how to achieve lasting peace and security.

Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress echoed both alterations. His Gaza objectives were clear: “Israel will fight until we destroy Hamas’s military capabilities and its rule in Gaza and bring all our hostages home. That’s what total victory means, and we will settle for nothing less.”

The prime minister rightly laid responsibility for the threats facing Israel on Iran, the principal menace to Middle Eastern stability. This reality has still not sunk in with Democrats, particularly in the Biden White House. In Israel today, whatever Netanyahu’s personal popularity, there is little debate on these points.

America’s core national interest in supporting Israel against Iran and its terrorist surrogates is more than religious, historical and cultural. Iran’s nuclear and terrorist threats both currently manifest themselves in the Hamas war against Israel, the “little Satan,” but Tehran also targets America, the “great Satan.” Gaza is not the main battleground, but merely one front of Tehran’s threat, which Netanyahu spelled out clearly, yet again. And yet again, the Democratic establishment didn’t get it. Fortunately for Israel, most Americans do.

Netanyahu’s meeting with President Biden was apparently workmanlike, focusing on Biden’s continuing, misbegotten pursuit of a cease-fire-for-hostages deal between Hamas and Israel. Ominously for Netanyahu, however, Biden has already moved far away from the “ironclad” support for Israel he pledged shortly after Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7 attack. Inevitably, the leaders’ meeting reflected the unrelenting, unprecedented pressure the White House has put on Jerusalem to end the Gaza conflict.

When still a candidate for reelection, Biden wanted the Middle East (and Ukraine) off the front pages, hoping to conceal the spreading global chaos caused by his own foreign policy’s grave weaknesses. Biden also wanted to avoid offending tender Iranian or Russian sensitivities, lest increased global oil prices reignite inflation, thereby diminishing his waning chances of victory in November. Although Biden is now a lame duck, his and Vice President Kamala Harris’s interests still converge on this point.

For Israel, Biden truly is a transitional president, the last vestige of President Harry Truman’s pride that the U.S. was first to recognize Israel’s independence. Those days are over. As Netanyahu said to Congress, Biden described himself as “a proud Irish-American Zionist.” Vice President Harris is not a proud Zionist of any variety, which, if not already clear, became so in her Netanyahu meeting, evidenced by her frosty manner and both her public and private remarks.

Afterward, Harris said, “let’s get the deal done so we can get a cease-fire to end the war.” Easy to say if eliminating Hamas’s threat (let alone Iran’s) isn’t your foundational objective. But Harris wasn’t finished. She proclaimed that she would “not be silent” about suffering Gazans, although if suffering Gazans were her true concern, she would be pressuring Hamas, not Israel.

Hamas, after all, turned Gaza into an underground fortress at the expense of its civilians, whom it has used ruthlessly as human shields. Failing to acknowledge this reality effectively endorses a terrorist veto against Israel’s right of self-defense. Let Harris explain that during the campaign’s final 100 days.

The Democrats’ split with Israel mirrors Britain’s new Labour Party government. Labour has a long, disturbing history of antisemitism and doubtful support for Israel, and once again disdains the Jewish state. Last week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer pleased Labour’s hard left by lifting U.K. objections to the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and others. Another question for reporters to ask Harris: Does she support Biden’s continuing opposition to the warrants?

Netanyahu’s meeting with Donald Trump was no picnic either. The day before, Trump said, “I want him to finish up [in Gaza] and get it done quickly. They are getting decimated with this publicity. Israel is not really good at public relations, I’ll tell you that.” It suits Trump politically to pretend that his personal relationship with Netanyahu was always good, and the meeting provided Trump an excellent opportunity to recall his presidency’s pro-Israel decisions, like moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The risk underlying these comments, like similar Trump remarks recently, is not abstract concern about Israel losing the propaganda war with Iran and Hamas. Instead, Trump fears that his pro-Israel stance is now bringing him political costs rather than benefits, which is not how Trump thinks the world should work. His interests alone dictate his political positions, so Israel needs to shape up and stop troubling his already difficult presidential campaign.

Post-visit, Netanyahu and Israel have a better picture of the troubling tendencies of America’s three most important political leaders before Election Day. Whether Harris or Trump wins, Jerusalem’s relations with Washington will be more difficult. This is not the road America should be on, but these are the candidates we have, and one of them will prevail in November.

This article was first published in The Hill on July 30, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

The New Iranian President and Donald Trump

July 16, 2024

Masoud Pezeshkian probably never expected to become Iran’s President, nor did most of his countrymen, nor the outside world. Whatever the reasons for his success, Pezeshkian’s victory means only that Tehran now shows a smiley face to foreigners rather than a mean face. Beneath surface appearances, nothing substantive has changed.

Westerners especially have long misunderstood that Iran’s elected Presidency does not hold decisive political power, certainly not on Tehran’s critical national-security priorities like nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and supporting innumerable terrorist groups. Ayatollah Khamenei is the Supreme Leader, like his predecessor and father of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. “Supreme Leader.” That title tells you everything.

Elections for Iran’s presidency are hardly free and open. To start, only candidates satisfactory to the Guardian Council may run, and the Council has never been slack in applying rigid ideological standards. The races are ultimately never more than hardline-hardliners running against moderate-hardliners. If the Guardian Council had wanted to exclude Pezeshkian from the election, they could have. If they wanted to ensure he lost, they could have allowed multiple “moderates” in the race and only one “hardliner.” Instead, they did the opposite, and Pezeshkian prevailed. If the regime had really been worried about such an outcome, it would simply have stolen the election, as in 2009. Interestingly, voter turnout figures remain hotly disputed, so we may never know exactly how many people legitimately cast ballots.

Until the regime finally issues a definitive statement on why Pezeshkian’s predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter crash, questions about regime stability will linger. Whatever the cause of the crash, Pezeshkian is an accidental President. For Raisi, the presidency may well have been but a steppingstone, given Khamenei’s age and infirmities. He had been fingered by the Supreme Leader and others as potentially Iran’s third Supreme Leader upon Khamenei’s death or incapacity. Pezeshkian, by contrast, seems to be a temporary fill-in, even more of a figurehead than other Presidents, until the key ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard decide how to proceed.

Over 45 years, Iran’s two Supreme Leaders, through successive presidencies, have never deviated from their fundamental national-security precepts: (1) pursuing nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile delivery capabilities; and (2) creating and enhancing multiple terrorist proxies across the Middle East and globally. These have been foundational both to Tehran’s hegemonic regional ambitions and its broader aspirations for dominance in the Islamic world. No mere substitute President is going to obstruct that strategic vision.

What Pezeshkian does for the mullahs is to provide what Russians call “maskirovka”: camouflage that disguises Iran’s real foreign policy. Like other puppets and front men Tehran has used over the years, including former Foreign Minister Javid Zarif and Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator now nestled comfortably at Princton, Pezeshkian is a walking, talking disinformation campaign. Susceptible Westerners, longing for resumed nuclear talks with Iran, now have a straw to grasp at. Nothing will come from any resumed diplomacy, of course, because there is no sign Iran the Supreme leader has made a strategic decision to change course.

Ironically, therefore, the mullahs have scored a public-relations coup by having an empty suit like Pezeshkian replace Raisi, widely called “the butcher of Tehran” for his judicial role in ordering executions of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of political prisoners. If Pezeshkian chooses to attend the UN General Assembly opening in New York this September, one can imagine the welcome America’s credulous media and academic institutions will afford him. He smiles, he waves, he acts informally, perhaps he likes progressive jazz, maybe he drinks a little Scotch whiskey in private (who knows!), he must want to make a deal the United States!

US liberals and the Biden Administration can dream about this scenario, but they may not be in office after November’s election. Even if they were, of course, the compliant Pezeshkian they imagine would not be making nuclear-weapons policy, nor would his Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, chief negotiator of the 2015 nuclear deal. Americans are all too apt to succumb to the diplomatic phenomenon known as “mirror imaging,” where negotiators look across the table and see people just like themselves: reasonable men and women simply looking to find practical solutions to shared problems. That’s exactly opposite from how the Islamic Revolution views the outside world.

Instead, if Donald Trump wins, now more likely than ever after the failed July 13 assassination attempt, his propensity to treat national-security issues simply as opportunities for making deals could lead to a Trump-Pezeshkian get-together. French President Emmanuel Macron almost seduced Trump into meeting with Zarif on the margins of the Biarritz G-7 in August, 2019. Trump’s “zeal for the deal” brought him within an eyelash of seeing Zarif, and foreshadows a contemporary version of that meeting early in a new Trump term. It may take second place to Trump visiting North Korean leader Kim Jung Un in Pyongyang to reopen nuclear negotiations, but it suits Trump’s singular focus on personal publicity.

Thus, while Pezeshkian’s election as President may not have been conscious Iranian maskirovka, there is no doubt the Supreme Leader and his cohorts can take advantage of the opportunity presented if they so choose. Such circumstances do not mean a new nuclear deal would emerge, since that would certainly not be Tehran’s negotiating objective. Instead, the mullahs would be playing for more time, which is uniformly beneficial to would-be nuclear proliferators, hoping to achieve a nuclear-weapons capability, and then to decide how to employ it. The same would be true for Iran’s terrorist objectives in the region and beyond. Trump would not even realize he was playing according to the Supreme Leader’s script.

Although the unsuspecting Masoud Pezeshkian may not realize it, he may be exactly the gift the ayatollahs never thought to ask for.

This article was first published in the Independent Arabia on July 16, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

The Gaza conflict as the West’s Rorschach test

July 15, 2024

Israel’s war in Gaza has become a Rorschach test for elites to examine their strategic assumptions and vision. While not a monumental war across several continents, the Gaza war has become a watershed in the evolution since World War II of how we think about war.

World War II was a defining event of the 20^th century. It also was a seminal moment in the history of war. It was a dramatic total war. It ended with the delivery of absolute victory by the allies and vast destruction of our enemies, including widespread suffering. And it resulted in the annihilation and eclipsing stigmatization of the underlying ideologies of evil that caused the war.

The successful prosecution of that war provided at first a template for understanding war and strategy going forward – a set of understandings Paul Nitze captured in crafting the national security strategy of the United States which was codified in the NSC-68 document in 1948. The strategy assumed a twilight struggle with the Soviets, the strong possibility of an eventual total war, and an aggressive plan to win and ultimately to collapse and annihilate the underlying idea of communism. Even containment at first was an aggressive strategy that sought victory, not by invasion but by forcing the implosion of communism onto itself to eliminate it.

Although World War marked the greatest moment of American power, success and purpose – as well as the solidifying of its moral standing — ironically, within a decade, despite the precedent of World War II, elites in the West abandoned the basic template forged from World War II and have ever since rejected their own legacy and instead confidently concluded that total war is an immoral affair. They concluded as well that victory itself is no longer a valid objective in war. Moreover, despite the utter disrepute in which Nazism and Mikadoism had been relegated, war nonetheless began to be seen as futile as an instrument to defeat evil ideas, or even that ideas themselves can be evil and cause war.

Indeed, the conclusion that ideas cannot be vanquished in war underpins a conclusion that the aim of war is no longer to vanquish your enemy. Instead, war is part of a negotiation to moderate the enemy’s ideas enough to come to an accommodation.

Behind this shift is the idea that nations, especially their populations, do not go to war. Governments, or even sub-cliques in governments, do. Of course, this places a bloated emphasis on employing force so surgically that it guarantees “zero civilian causalities” — the standard indignantly demanded of Israel last month by Secretary of State Blinken. This is a truly impossible standard that gives overwhelming moral and tactical advantage to immoral, cynical and grotesque enemies, such as Hamas. Indeed, it makes the intentional slaughter of their own population a highly effective strategic imperative of such ideologies anchored to martyrdom and its cult of death.

Of course, if one needs in the end to defeat not even a government, let alone entire population, but only a sub-clique within the government, then war must be sharply harnessed and calibrated to allow for some sort of accommodation with your enemy to end the conflict. Undoubtedly it is generally advisable and moral to desist from debasing one’s adversary in ways to the point that it diminishes them as humans. There are many cases in which seeking such a humiliating victory – or seeking deliberately disgracing terms of victory over the defeated — indeed can dishonor a nation culturally to such an extent that it strips it of the confidence to reconcile to its defeat peacefully. Largesse in victory has its role.

And yet, the idea that war has evolved to such a surgical and refined point and demanding that absolute standard is both unrealistic and indeed often unhelpful. Moreover, to apply an antiseptic standard that rejects as valid the aim of defeating a nation and extend it even to a prohibition on inflicting a stunning defeat in war to its government as well, becomes highly problematic.

The idea of displaying largesse in victory and rejecting total dehumanization in his defeat has mutated in the last six decades into a prohibition altogether of victory as a valid goal and discarding entirely the subjecting of an enemy to obvious defeat. This evolution emerges from the idea that seeking victory and imposing defeat undermines those among our enemy who seek to moderate the offending ideology while at the same time vindicates those hardliners – the sub-clique within government which is ultimately guilty for causing or prolonging the war and who see the conflict in Manichean terms within which only one side can emerge as survivor. The world then is divided not between our nation and its ideas against its enemy population or even an enemy government and the ideas or cultural attributes that animate it, but between the sub-cliquish “hardline” advocates of a Manichean struggle to the death on both sides (ourselves and the enemy) against the “moderates” on both sides (ourselves and the enemy) who seek to reform their respective ideas to reach accommodation. In these terms, the goals of victory and the aim of defeat are then viewed not only as inappropriate, nor even just as irresponsible, but as dangerous, immoral and bloodthirsty. The battlelines thus are drawn between moderates and hardliners, not between ideas, government and nations.

The drift in strategic imagery among Western elites — which stands in stark contrast to the experience of World War II – proceeded until October 6, 2023, inexorably toward a universally (among Western elites) refined view of the world.

But then came October 7.

For Israelis, October 7, however, represented a collapse of the accumulated ideas of the last half century. An evil erupted in reality that had lived only in memory and generationally bequeathed trauma – or so the Israelis had thought. All attempts to moderate Palestinian nationalist ideology had failed. Israeli peace activists and those who reached out to Palestinians and railed against their own countrymen’s nationalism (against the hardliners) were butchered, raped and kidnapped without mercy. The savagery was cheered on by the very “moderates” on the Palestinian side that were imagined to be the partners in peace and accommodation. Nor was it just the Israeli memory and generational trauma bequeathed that was suddenly a reality. Internationally, the global left peace movements and camp – the progressive left which so many Jews imagined was their ally — turned on the Jews with animated hatred that confirmed that Hitler’s ghost had suddenly sprung back to life. Frenzied Jew-hatred became fashionable, and it was led not by an uniformed mass, but by elites and elite institutions. And left-leaning governments wholesale failed their Jews, leaving them unprotected in their streets against the raging mobs.

The Israelis and the Jews, thus, suddenly found themselves not in a conflict that resembled any affecting Western countries in the last eight decades, but in a conflict that resembled 1935-1945. Every horror a Jewish parent and grandparent had told their decedents about which we all were warned but nonetheless believed modern Western society had finally transcended were suddenly alive, insatiable and rampaging.

And the idea of the enemy, of Hamas, of Palestinian nationalism itself, was irreconcilable. Hades himself had emerged from his tunneled netherworld. Every action taken not only by those whom Israelis imagined as hardliners, but by those whom they regarded as moderates, and in fact the entire population, proved to be part of a carefully laid incremental strategy vectoring toward the final goal of destroying the Jewish state. Every attempt at moderating the idea of Palestinian nationalism had resulted in deepening violence, radicalization and finally unimaginable wholesale slaughter. If in the 1980s, Western elites contemplated the practical solutions that might allow Arab populations under Israeli control to exercise self-governance or even freedom, the Palestinian Arabs had now birthed an age in which Western elites rejected the very validity of the continued existence of the Jewish state itself, and implied – and increasingly overtly screamed for — the acceptability of a second Holocaust of its Jewish inhabitants.

In short, Israel found itself in total war, engaged in a twilight struggle to the death, with an enemy animated by an implacable ideology and supported by an entire population that was mentally and materially mobilized, as well as obsessively and entirely focused on the Jewish people’s destruction. Israel was fighting its modern World War II, and not an American war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or even a French war in Algeria. It was not fighting a Soviet-inspired proxy army or an insurgency seeking some sort of exit from a colonial structure. It was fighting to survive a total onslaught by a whole people animated by a genocidal cult of death and martyrdom.

In this moment, the sanitized rules of war, the very playbook of war, that had informed elites in the West thus since World War II was rendered vastly unaligned with the realities of the war Israel faced.

But Israel was torn.

On one side, it knew the war it had to fight, and it mentally transitioned (almost instantly) to an outlook akin to the allies’ image of their mission in World War II. Israel understood it had to restore its regional image of power, eliminate Hamas from controlling any part of Gaza and avoid any path to its reconstitution by controlling the Gaza border with Egypt, and to weaken and distance Hizballah a dozen kilometers or more form the northern border to reestablish a demilitarized buffer zone in Lebanon rather than the current de facto evacuation of norther Israel as a buffer zone so that Hizballah cannot launch a surprise attack. It knew it was in total war with not only Hamas, but the majority of the Palestinian population. It knew that war was not only necessary, but that unequivocal victory in it was the only path to peace and security.

But on the other, Israel labored under the refined and antiseptic standard that Western elites demanded. It was still dependent on US arms supply, so it had to pay homage to the consensus of Western elites detached from the strategic realities and determined to secure a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control of at least a substantial portion of Gaza and Hizballah still tactically positioned to conduct of much larger and more deadly October 7-like attack at will. In short, Israel was not allowed to seek victory, let alone seek total defeat of the idea animating its adversary – an adversary that was both the majority of Palestinian Arab people and the government of Iran.

Israel in its war with Iran – fought through the arena of the Gaza strip and likely Lebanon too – has had to navigate a narrow, even a knife’s-edge width, path.

Essentially, Israel found itself having to seek the sort of victory, the validity, wisdom and justness of which Western elites reject. It must destroy Hamas in its entirety, leaving nobody within Hamas with whom to negotiate, but only to accept terms of unconditional surrender. It must inflict a generational realization among Palestinian Arabs of the self-destructive insanity of fighting to destroy the Jewish people and the futility of ongoing questioning of the permanence of Israel. It must fight to the point at which the very ideas underpinning Hamas, and indeed the ideas of its mentors in Iran, are seen as so suicidal and disgraced that they are taboo, as were Mikadoism and Nazism discredited and taboo after World War II.

Thus, Israel must achieve so total, decisive and absolute victory that it destroys Hamas as an organization and fatally wounds the idea animating it, while the West insists on its impossibility. Israel must deliver such an unrestrained blow to its enemies that even the population of its opponents realize that Israel is so strong that it is futile to attack it and thus discredit radical voices, while the West believes radical voices are defeated only by restraint and compromise.

In short, the very concept of war and conflict informing the West for the last half century is on trial by this war. If Israel actually does emerge victorious wherein Hamas collapses entirely, Hizballah is forced to retreat and Iran is left reeling and ripe for a “1982 Falklands-like meltdown for the Junta” scenario, it disproves so much of what Western elites so firmly believe.

Which is why so many elites in the West — even those elites in Israel who identify with these global elites — cannot fathom, let alone countenance, a total Israeli victory over Hamas in Gaza, cannot accept that Israel is at war with a people at this point (all polls confirm this) nor can tolerate even slightly the means or results that would deliver it.

But Israel does not live in the world of theories. The war it is fighting and the threat of destruction it faces is very real.

So the world is divided between elites who received and internalize the warning, wake-up call and sobering lesson of Israel’s agony, and those who retreat yet deeper and with more determination to preserve the paradigm of war that had defined in the last half century the West’s elites.

The war in Gaza – and how one relates to the idea of Israel’s quest for victory — has laid bare onto which side one falls.

Biden Goes to Extremes to Appease Tehran

June 05, 2024

The world has truly turned upside down when a U.S. president begs America’s allies to have a United Nations agency go easy on a terrorist nuclear proliferator. The Biden administration’s reported pleading on behalf of Iran isn’t merely a tactical error about yet another biodegradable U.N. resolution. It’s a persistent strategic blindness that existentially threatens key U.S. partners and endangers our own peace and security.

Iran’s largely successful effort to conceal critical aspects of its nuclear-weapons complex from scrutiny by the International Atomic Energy Agency and Western intelligence services is nearing culmination. IAEA reports about Iran’s uranium-enrichment program—and Tehran’s disdain for IAEA inspections, extending over two decades—finally have the Europeans worried.

Instead of welcoming this awakening, President Biden is reportedly lobbying European allies to avoid a tough anti-Iran resolution at this week’s quarterly IAEA board of governors meeting. The administration denies it. But limpness on Iran’s nuclear threat fits the Obama-Biden pattern of missing the big picture, before and after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, including cash-for-hostages swaps with Iran as recently as last year.

Mr. Biden has two objectives. The first is to keep gasoline prices low and foreign distractions to a minimum before November’s election. The second is the Obama-Biden obsession with appeasing Iran’s ayatollahs, hoping they will become less medieval and more compliant if treated nicely. Both objectives are misguided, even dangerous.

Election worries about gas prices have also weakened U.S. sanctions against Russia, which are failing because of their contradictory goals. It simply isn’t possible to restrict Russian revenue while keeping U.S. pump prices low. The ayatollahs don’t worry about elections, but they know weakness when they see it, including Mr. Biden’s relaxed enforcement of sanctions on Iranian oil exports.

Mr. Biden’s greater mistake is refusing to acknowledge Iran’s “ring of fire” strategy to intimidate Israel and achieve regional hegemony over the oil-producing monarchies and other inconvenient Arab states. The foundational muscle for achieving these quasi-imperial aspirations is Iran’s nuclear program, precisely the issue at the IAEA. Starting in his 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden repeatedly alienated Gulf Arabs, especially Saudi Arabia, which felt particularly threatened by his zeal to rejoin the failed 2015 nuclear deal. Mr. Biden’s willingness to exclude Israel and the Arabs from negotiations with Tehran, as Mr. Obama did, convinced Arab governments that Washington was again hopelessly feckless. Israel concurred.

Arab leaders privately see the need to eliminate Tehran’s terrorist proxies. Saying so publicly, however—even quietly—requires political cover, which Washington has failed to provide. The Biden administration could have sought to destroy, not merely inhibit, the Iran-backed Houthis’ capacity to close shipping routes in the Suez Canal and Red Sea. Since the U.S. failed to do so, rising prices from higher shipping costs increase the risk of a de facto Iran-Houthi veto over freedom of the seas. Not surprisingly, Iran now threatens to blockade Israel itself.

Mr. Biden decided to concentrate world attention on Gaza rather than on Iran as the puppet-master. Doing so has helped obscure that Gaza is only one component of the larger ring-of-fire threat. Many Israelis, including several members of the war cabinet, have long focused on the close-to-home threat of Palestinian terrorists rather than the existential threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. This joint failure enabled Tehran’s propaganda to outmatch Jerusalem’s, leaving the false impression of a moral equivalence.

Had the U.S. and Israel explained the barbarity of Oct. 7 in such broader strategic terms, they would necessarily have concentrated attention on Iran’s coming succession crisis. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is old and ailing. President Ebrahim Raisi’s still-unexplained demise has already launched a succession struggle that could transform Iran. The U.S. and its allies should help the Iranian opposition fracture the Islamic Revolution at the top. Instead, Mr. Biden, who couldn’t conceive of overthrowing the ayatollahs, has dispatched envoys to beg Iran not to stir things up further before November.

Sending Tehran what diplomats call a “strong message” from the IAEA isn’t much, but treating Iran as if it calls the shots is far worse. Praying that Mr. Biden wakes up to reality may be the world’s only hope.

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on June 4, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

JRB_MiddleEast/NAfrica