Nasrallah is dead, assassinated by the Israelis. There have been significant bombings in Beiruit, and escalation between Hezbollah and Israel are clear.
First, let’s state the obvious. Israel’s intelligence has seriously comprised Hezbollah, much more than they ever did to Hamas. I suspect this is a result of not taking Hamas particularly seriously and the differing nature of Lebanon and Gaza. Gaza, by all accounts, was a fairly tight knit community, united in their opposition to Israel. Lebanon is not, it’s a sectarian state with a great deal of internal divisions.
There was a lot of anger in Iran and Hezbollah that Hamas did not forewarn them of October 7th, but it’s clear they were right not to. If they had, Israel would very likely have found out, and this is especially true if Hezbollah had been told.
As for the assassination, it’s much less important than people make out: decapitation strategies don’t significantly degrade strong ideological organizations like Hezbollah. The real question is how much knowledge Israel has of the actual military infrastructure. Nasrallah was a well loved leader, but he was a very cautious man and much less interested in fighting Israel than many make out. The new leadership, and given Israel’s success at assassination, it is almost all new, will be far more willing to fight.
Intelligence, airpower and its alliances with American and other Western nations are Israel’s strengths, and they are not small matters.
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That said, those who are panicking, often hysterically, are premature. Hezbollah defeated Israel militarily in 2006, and before that when it won a guerilla war against Israel’s occupation and forced them out. They are much stronger now than they were then. They have more missiles, more men, who are well seasoned fighters, and they have dug in to a far greater degree than Hamas ever could.
Israeli intelligence and the airforce are impressive, but the actual ground forces Israel have are weak: not in equipment, but in morale and competence. To accomplish Israel’s goal of pushing Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon they will have to go in on the ground, and when they do I very much doubt their ability to win.
Unlike Hamas, Hezbollah’s supply lines cannot be cut: the posturing about Beiruit’s airport is ludicrous, the supplies come in by land and there is no possibility of interdicting most of them.
If Hezbollah does need reinforcements, they will have them, from Iraq’s militias and from Iranian “volunteers.” Manpower will not be an issue, though Hezbollah is unlikely to ask for many men at first, since they are not trained to operate in the Hezbollah manner.
Nasrallah was a cautious man, and Hezbollah has been holding back. Their missile force can output far more and better missiles than they have been using in the past, and the end of the old leadership almost certainly means the gloves will come off.
Further, Hezbollah has done great damage to Israel already. The reason Israel is turning to Lebanon is that Hezbollah has displaced hundreds of thousand of settlers, causing an internal refugee problem, and combined with Yemen’s naval blockade, has massively damaged the Israeli economy. And this is with them holding back, because they did not want a general war.
But the only way to truly defeat Israel is to defeat their military, and the best way to do that is for them to attack into Lebanon. Hezbollah, hopefully, will ramp up its attacks to force Israel to do just that, if it isn’t intending to already (which they almost certainly are), and if it is already intending to, to make it happen sooner.
The war, then, is still in its early stages. Do not fall to doom and gloom (if you support the resistance), nor optimism (if you’re pro-genocide). Wait, and see. The real battles, which will determine the outcome of the war, have not yet happened.
Oakchair
They came for Palestinian and I did nothing
Because I was not a Palestinian
Then they came for the Lebanese…
and what did
your government do?
and what did
you do?
j
Killing bin Laden did not end Al-Qaeda, nor did it have any effect on the war in Afghanistan. There will be others to step in, and they know what the mission is about.
All eyes will be on the new leadership though, and they will be expecting for something to be done about the assassination, the pagers, and of course Gaza.
So the new leadership will feel they are to be legitimized by what they do about these. A lot will depend on how hot or level their heads are.
mago
While I’m unqualified to weigh in on the intricate political and motivational aspects of this horrific destruction and carnage, I’ve read a mountain of commentary on the situation.
What are the opening lines of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ again?
Israeli mad dogs running.
Also there’s a falcon gone rogue out there and the center doesn’t hold.
Slinking to Bethlehem or something.
I can’t remember anymore.
Lebanese cuisine rocks.
Give me your floppy pita your crispy lamb your parsley garlic olive oil hummus concoctions with olives and couscous along with an exquisite green salad. Some feta, too if you’ve got it. That’s Greek, but never mind.
Broken hearts broken minds in a broken world.
May all embodied beings find cessation from violence and aggression.
Let’s break bread not bones.
Willy
While most diehard conservative evangelicals proclaim Israel’s critical importance in the metaphysical scheme of things, the Trumps see undeveloped Israel as an investment opportunity. What both share in kinship is their belief that it’s the land which is critical, while all current residents are disposable.
In the mid 2010’s I knew teens from a family of evangelicals who did their church’s obligatory missionary service in Kenya. The church made sure to include a sightseeing adventure in Dubai as part of the package, which their parents made sure to brag about. When I asked why the stopover / sightseeing adventure hadn’t been the Holy Land instead, both teens and parents said that would’ve been far too dangerous.
IMHO, continuously calling those kinds of cultural values “bipartisan” only confuses the mess. It only serves to continue the PTB sanewashing that plutocracy=prosperity=peace for the rest of us, and that fighting for what’s right is only for the suckers and losers.
Carborundum
Al Jazeera reporting IAF strikes on power generation and cargo handling facilities at the Yemeni Red Sea ports of Ras Issa and Hodeidah. If accurate, a significant shift in strategy and some interesting indicators. This is a pretty deep strike, at least 1,800 km from home base (I think the longest strike they’ve ever run [?] – I’m not recalling anything further than the 80s strike into Libya, though this would be less complex), necessitating significant tanker support. They would have flown down the Red Sea and there seems little chance that the Saudis didn’t know they were there, given the orientation of their warning radar network (back in the 90s their backscatter systems used to pick up everything coming out of Beersheba as soon as they cleared 1,000 AGL). In totality, I suspect some messages being sent – by multiple players – to Iran and other “outer periphery” players.
More related to the subject of Hezbollah, I would note that this is now less a decapitation strategy (e.g., periodically killing al-Qaeda’s 2IC) than it is a counter-network strategy, focusing on upper tiers of management. They are clearly keeping the pressure on and have conducted several waves of follow up strikes; probably up over two or three dozen key personalities have been taken off the board now. I suspect this is going to have more impact than many outside observers think: a) the scale is pretty broad, and b) Hezbollah isn’t the usual radically decentralized thinly led ad hoc network folks have become used to thinking about. They’ve developed into a much larger and more intricate organization than they were over the past couple of decades, with much more developed admin functions. It will be interesting to see whether they can adapt to slough that off and keep core functions going effectively. Things change far more than most Western commentators re-stating generalist consensus belief based on lessons of the last conflict admit (and that’s assuming they know anything specific at all – most of what I’m seeing bandied about doesn’t even rise to that level; the statements mostly read / sound like they’re recycling old material, searching on “ISIS” and replacing with “Hezbollah”).
Additionally, I don’t think force regeneration is not going to be as simple as recruiting outsiders from Iraq and Iran. Hezbollah is first and foremost a Lebanese resistance movement. It’s not, contrary to what some Western ideologues trying to bill themselves as terrorism experts say, the Lebanese chapter of an international proxy movement. Outsiders are going to stick out like a sore thumb in Lebanon and their presence would spark a significant political backlash, which matters a lot to the Hezbollah of today. I guess it could happen, but I would view that as an indication that they are really hard up against it.
different clue
@mago,
That isn’t from Tale of Two Cities. That is from William Butler Yeats’s poem ” The Second Coming”.
https://poets.org/poem/second-coming
Dan Kelly
Thank you Ian.
‘I believe Israel can be defeated conventionally, the problem is their nukes.’
https://www.ianwelsh.net/consequences-of-the-israeli-pager-explosions-attack/#comment-154365
Yes.
So, is there a way to remove Israel’s nukes? Has any alleged ‘international peacekeeping’ force removed nukes from any nuke country to date?
Sean Paul Kelley asked us about NATO a couple weeks ago. In what is currently the last comment to the piece, Willy sort of makes the point, in his own unique way, that the entire question itself is silly and irrelevant:
https://www.ianwelsh.net/short-take-reforming-nato/#comment-154139
What needs to be abolished is the UN, which the United States never joined when it was still the League of Nations because it was correctly seen at the time as a precursor to these sort of secretive ‘international’ bodies that have no ‘we the people’ oversight whatsoever.
And that is quite obviously by design.
Both Russia and China are parties to the UN and they never make any noise whatsoever about abandoning them entirely, which would absolutley be in the interest of nations, cultures and smaller entitites the world over.
China, Russia, France, the US and the UK are the five ‘permanent’ members of the UN Security Council. They are in effect ‘the gods’ who everyone else must ultimately answer to.
The UN ‘Security Council’ is set up such that each of these ‘permanent UN security members’ have absolute veto power over both <b<each other and everyone else.
It was set up this way ostensibly because giving this power to each of the ‘five permanent security’ members individually would prevent a potential future grouping of any of the others from ‘ganging up’ on one individually.
A few things immediately stand out: Why five? Why these five? How were they chosen?
But those questions are really neither here nor there. The immediate question to ponder in the interest of we the masses of the world is this:
How and why do these unbelievably powerful entitites, despite fiercely intractable differences incessantly blared to the masses publicly, nevertheless remain in effect ‘secretly’ tied to each other via this all-powerful ‘public international’ institution that in effect operates in the dark and simply meets ‘publicly’ every now and again to spew out grand announcements to the world?
The UN ‘Security Council’ is currently much more dangerous than the General Assembly, but be wary of those now calling for a move to make the GA more powerful. This will simply serve to rebrand the hidden-in-plain-sight center of world power.
All of these ‘world’ institutions are infinitely dangerous. Simply consider the IAEA: Atoms for Peace!
And Bobby Oppenheimer was a great guy.
What are we all stupid?
Returning quickly to the fact that, ‘The UN ‘Security Council’ is set up such that each of these ‘permanent UN security members’ have absolute veto power over both <b<each other and everyone else.’
And: ‘It was set up this way ostensibly because giving this power to each of the ‘five permanent security’ members individually would prevent a potential future grouping of any of the others from ‘ganging up’ on one individually.
Do you also see that this arrangement not only protects the most powerful members at the top from each other but also from any meddling whatsoever from anywhere outside this all-powerful bloc?
So, in effect, it can only work as a unit.
The only way out of this is to abandon it.
Why would Russia remain part of an entity that contains three members who we are told are hell-bent on its destrcution? Russia and China are powerful enough to just walk away.
But they don’t. Why?
Please don’t insult what little intelligence I have by suggesting it’s because they care about ‘the resistance’ and are working from within the power center in order to change it. That is pure unadulterated BS.
———————————–
Have the UN’s ‘United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon’ honestly and seriously helped ‘the resistance’ in any way going all the way back to ‘Security Council Resolutions’ 425 and 426, all the way to thr more recent 1701?
This arrangement simply allows for continual Saad Haddad State of Free Lebanon type scenarios.
And these ops are run by both sides, leaving ‘we the people’ screwed permanently.
No more permanent anything. Period. And no more international bodies. Even for the alleged ‘good things’ like ‘Atoms for Peace!’
Enough.
Duncan
You’d think they’d have learned from the last time they assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, which resulted in Imad Mughniyeh aka al-Hajj Radwan being put in charge of military operations, who went on to lead arguably the most effective guerilla war since Mao took over China.
mago
Thanks different clue.
My juxtaposition was a bit confusing.
I first tossed out the reference to the best of times and worst of times then in the next line referenced Yeat’s WW1 poem “The Second Coming”.
Btw, I live in the intermountain West, kinda sorta, where potatoes proliferate and troubles melt like lemon drops (just kidding about the lemon drops).
Carborundum
Times of Israel now citing foreign reports (this is the standard technique to get around the IDF censor) that IDF special operations forces have been engaged in ground operations within Lebanon. This sounds a lot like battlefield shaping…
different clue
@ Dan Kelly,
I can’t answer the bigger questions you pose. But I can offer an answer to the technical-detail question you pose about the Security Council . . . ” A few things immediately stand out: Why five? Why these five? How were they chosen? ”
The UN Treaty and its mechanics were being worked out by the Allied Powers in World War II in the hope that if they won the war and the Axis Powers lost it, they would be able to move this Treaty into reality and application. The Five Allied Powers were US/ UK/ France/China/USSR. France? Well . . . the Free French Government in Exile in hopes that it would return to govern France again. And the China seat was to be held by the Chiang Kai Shek National Republic of China government. And even after the Communists took all of China except for Taiwan, the National Republic of China government held the China seat on the Security Council, so far as I know. ( I don’t remember just how or when the China seat was eventually taken from Taiwan and given to PRC in recognition of basic reality.)
Dan Kelly
I can’t answer the bigger questions you pose. But I can offer an answer to the technical-detail question you pose about the Security Council . . . ” A few things immediately stand out: Why five? Why these five? How were they chosen? ”
Hi different clue,
That question was rhetorical. I then continued:
“But those questions are really neither here nor there. The immediate question to ponder in the interest of we the masses of the world is this:
How and why do these unbelievably powerful entitites, despite fiercely intractable differences incessantly blared to the masses publicly, nevertheless remain in effect ‘secretly’ tied to each other via this all-powerful ‘public international’ institution that in effect operates in the dark and simply meets ‘publicly’ every now and again to spew out grand announcements to the world?”
I then asked this non-rhetorical question which has yet to receive an answer because of the profound truth well-elucidated in John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’:
‘Why would Russia remain part of an entity that contains three members who we are told are hell-bent on its destrcution? Russia and China are powerful enough to just walk away.
But they don’t. Why?’
In a more recent thread I asked a similar question:
‘Armenia is both a NATO member and a member of the CSTO which is a military alliance with Russia. It also participates in the Joint CIS Air Defense System with Russia.
How does that work exactly? I mean, Russia et al and NATO et al are sworm enemies. All we hear all day and all night long…here, there and everywhere..is about irreconciable differences between the two that will lead to nuclear annililation.’
https://www.ianwelsh.net/iran-hammers-tel-aviv-israel/#comment-154574
I concluded with the only conceivable conclusion a rational actor could come to given the ‘known knowns’ we’re privy to:
‘We would need to know a lot more about the inner workings of these organizations to have any idea what in fact is going on.’