The best way to end a regional war is to win it.
What Israel
has managed to accomplish over the past two weeks will long be studied by
military historians.
In a series
of brilliant operations—beginning with the simultaneous explosion of encrypted pagers belonging
to Hezbollah’s commanders, and culminating with the coup de grace on Friday
that eliminated the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and the rest of
his high command—Israel managed to decapitate the entire leadership of the
most fearsome terrorist army on the planet. In so doing, it ignored the
advice of its allies in the West, and radically disrupted the balance
of power in the Middle East.
Hezbollah’s
war is not just with Israel. It has American, Syrian and Lebanese blood on its
hands as well.
Recall that
in 1983, the group killed 241 servicemen with a massive bomb at the Marines
barracks in Beirut. The organization was also responsible for the 1994 bombing
of the AMIA Cultural Center bombings in Buenos Aires, in
which 85 innocent people were murdered. In 2012, Hezbollah bombed a
bus with young Israeli tourists at the port of Burgas, Bulgaria that
left five dead and 32 injured.
But
Hezbollah’s bloodiest campaign was reserved for Syria, where it became
the shock troops for the country’s tyrant, Bashar
al-Assad, during his brutal suppression of a democratic uprising. Hezbollah’s
forces led the ground operations in the siege of Aleppo, a vicious campaign in 2015 and 2016 that
starved the ancient city and reduced most of it to rubble.
A day after
Hamas launched its pogrom of October 7, Hezbollah began raining rockets and
missiles into northern Israel, displacing up to 100,000 Israelis. Nearly a year
later, those people have not been able to return to their homes.
With this
kind of butcher’s bill, one might think the response from the civilized world
upon learning of Nasrallah’s death would be jubilation. But Western leaders
have responded with reticence. In this they have revealed their profound
confusion about the enemy. It is not a nation-state, a terror group or even an
ideology. From Washington to Paris, they seem to believe the real enemy is
escalation.
This united
front against escalation began before the strike that killed Nasrallah.
At the
United Nations last week, twelve
countries—including America, France, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and
the United Arab Emirates—presented a plan for a 21-day ceasefire between Israel
and Lebanon without mentioning Hezbollah, the terror army that holds Lebanon
hostage. A joint statement reasoned that Israel’s offensive
against Hezbollah’s leadership presented an “unacceptable risk of broader
regional escalation.”
President Joe Biden and French president Emannuel Macron later
urged Israel to accede to a “settlement on the Israel-Lebanon border that
ensures safety and security to enable civilians to return to their homes.”
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called on “Israel and Hezbollah to stop
the violence, step back from the brink.” An immediate ceasefire, he said, was
necessary to “provide space for a diplomatic settlement.”
Even after
Hezbollah confirmed that Nasrallah had left his mortal coil, German foreign
minister Annalena Baerbock warned that the strikes “weren’t in
Israel’s security interests.” Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made sure to say that Nasrallah’s
killing provided justice to his many victims. But they too kept pushing for
de-escalation as the way forward. “President Biden and I do not want to see
conflict in the Middle East escalate into a broader regional war,” Harris
said.
The trouble
is that the Middle East is already engulfed in a regional war.
The party behind that war—Iran, which funds Hezbollah, Hamas and other
proxies—just suffered a devastating blow thanks to Israel.
Indeed, by
refusing to heed the council of Biden, Macron and Starmer, Israel has brought
the Middle East far closer to peace than it was before.
Since the
early 2010s, Iran’s strategy has been to arm and train proxies like Hamas in
Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to encircle Israel in a “ring of fire.” This strategy is not just a traditional
proxy war for Iran. It’s an insurance policy for its nuclear program, which
is perilously close to building a bomb. If Israel decides
to strike one of Iran’s nuclear facilities, Hezbollah has more than 100,000 missiles pointed at Tel Aviv, Haifa and other
major cities in the country. Knocking out Hezbollah’s leadership and targeting
its rocket and missile launchers degrades that insurance policy and makes
Iran’s nuclear program more vulnerable.
And yet if
you followed the diplospeak emanating out of Washington since October 7, you
would believe that Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran were distinct actors in this
conflict and not part of the same coordinated attack. This helps explain the
enormous pressure the Biden administration has placed on Israel’s government to
accept a ceasefire with Iran’s proxies, but refuses to pressure Iran.
“This
administration, like the Obama administration, wants an equilibrium between
Iran and Israel and our traditional Arab allies, as opposed to a strategy that
rolls back Iran’s power in the region and thereby deters their nuclear and
regional ambitions,” Mike Gallagher, a Republican who represented Wisconsin in
Congress until resigning recently to run defense programs at Palantir
told The Free Press. “The obsession with de-escalation undermines
deterrence.”
Gallagher is
not alone. A number of analysts who have challenged the conventional wisdom,
ranging from Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to
Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and his point person on the diplomacy
that produced the Abraham Accords, have been warning that the old de-escalation
playbook will only lead to war. As Kushner
posted on X Saturday evening, “Over the past six weeks or so, Israel
has eliminated as many terrorists on the U.S. list of wanted terrorists as the
U.S. has done in the last 20 years.”
This
is why the celebrations are not limited to Tel Aviv. Listen to ordinary Gazans
share their views on Hezbollah and Iran in a new video report:
The problem
with the Biden administration’s approach is that it in no way impedes Iran,
which controls the purse strings and provides strategic direction to its
proxies. It’s a great deal for the Mullahs. Lebanese and Palestinians fight and
die in Iran’s war to destroy Israel, while Iran is treated by America and the
West as an outside observer, facing few consequences other than Israel’s
occasional targeted strikes on its officers in Syria and Lebanon and its
sabotage inside the country.
Israel has
now shown its most important ally a better way. By escalating the conflict with
Hezbollah, there are now strategic opportunities to go after Iran’s nuclear
program. If Harris and Biden were wise, they would shelve their strategy of
endless ceasefire talks and instead embrace Israel’s escalation. Because the
best way to end a regional war is to win it.
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