OPINION:
“There’s an old saying,” President John F. Kennedy said in 1961. “Victory has 100 fathers, and defeat is an orphan.”
Kennedy was speaking to reporters about a failed U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Both press and policymakers would be well advised to heed this admonition when considering the looming war in the Middle East between Israel and Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has been launching rockets at Israel for nearly a year. The U.S.-designated terrorist group calls for Israel’s destruction. And after the Hamas-led massacre last Oct. 7, Hezbollah saw an opportunity. Less than 24 hours after Hamas attacked Israel and perpetrated the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, its fellow Iranian proxy lent a helping hand.
Hezbollah’s barrage of rockets has murdered and wounded dozens of Israelis. A July 27 attack left 12 Israeli Druze children dead.
Israel has responded with targeted strikes, taking out top Hezbollah operatives and carrying out what urban warfare expert John Spencer called the “most audacious and unprecedented counterterrorism precision attack in military history.”
For several days, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded across Lebanon and the Middle East, killing and wounding Hezbollah terrorists. On Sept. 27, Israel took out the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with other top Hezbollah apparatchiks in a Beirut strike.
Israel was sending a signal. Jonathan Conricus, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a retired lieutenant colonel in the Israeli military, said that “it’s the last call for Hezbollah to opt out of war. Israel won’t ask again.”
Indeed, the Jewish state has been patient, enduring thousands of rocket attacks from genocidal terrorists while fighting a war with another terrorist group on another front. An estimated 70,000 Israelis have been forced to flee their homes near the northern border.
As Mr. Conricus points out, Hezbollah has “achieved an unprecedented feat, creating a de facto buffer zone inside Israel” and managed to “inflict tangible military, social, and political damage without escalating events beyond its desired intensity and risk.”
No other nation would be expected to tolerate what Israel has tolerated.
Israel’s patience is, in part, strategic; its military has sought to avoid a multifront war, and the Biden administration doesn’t want a wider conflict, particularly in an election year. But war is not a one-way street, and the enemy gets a vote. Iran is determined to “fight to the last Arab” and use its proxies in its bid to wipe Israel off the map. Hezbollah is at the tip of the regime’s spear.
A war between Israel and Hezbollah would be cataclysmic. The terrorist group has more than 150,000 missiles, many of them precision-guided. This is more armaments than many European nations have.
Moreover, Hezbollah relies on what former Pentagon official Douglas Feith called a strategy of human sacrifice. Like Hamas and other Islamist groups, Hezbollah uses civilian communities to plot and launch attacks and to hide fighters and weapons. This includes schools, mosques, hospitals, U.N. buildings and entire villages in southern Lebanon. Hiding behind civilians to attack other civilians is a double war crime.
Israel has done its best to carry out precision strikes against a depraved enemy. In addition to surgical operations, Israeli forces called for civilians “located in and next to buildings and areas used by Hezbollah for military purposes, to immediately move out of harm’s way.”
But as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein in January, thousands of missiles ago, long before Israeli children were slaughtered on a soccer field: “We are getting close to the point where the hourglass will turn over.” Time is running out.
A war between Israel and Hezbollah would be catastrophic, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Hezbollah is clear about its objective: a Middle East with no Jews. Hezbollah has been steadily building up its arsenal for years to fulfill this ambition. And it has done so in full violation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701, both of which call for the group to be disarmed.
Yet the U.N. has failed to enforce these provisions. Ditto for the U.S.-backed Lebanese military, which has been caught collaborating with Hezbollah on several occasions. Both the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon and Lebanese forces receive support from the United States. For years, both have failed to do their jobs. If more blood is spilled, they’re complicit. But they’re not alone.
The international community has been fooling itself about Lebanon for years, dumping billions of dollars in international aid into a state that is de facto controlled by a terrorist organization. The results — waste, corruption, assassinations, political repression — were predictable. From the Taliban in Afghanistan to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, terrorist groups are not known for good governance.
Blame for the ongoing and impending disaster in Lebanon extends beyond Hezbollah to entities, many awash in American cash, that have fueled the very sort of crises they were tasked with preventing.
• Sean Durns is a senior research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
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