Tag: Middle East

The IDF has officially invaded Lebanon for the third time since 1982.

The Israeli military last night confirmed that it has launched a ground invasion of Lebanon, as fears mount that the escalation could plunge the Middle East into all-out war.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it had begun ‘localised and targeted raids’ against Hezbollah enemies in southern Lebanon.

“These targets are located in villages close to the border and pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel,” the military added.

It added that the operation will continue “according to the situational assessment and in parallel to combat in Gaza and in other arenas”.

It appears the USA finally gave in and submitted to the inevitable. Like the Palestinians in Gaza, Hezbollah has no choice but to engage now. The big question now is if Iran will sit tight and continue to rely upon attrition or if it will directly assist its proxies in Lebanon. Based on the discipline demonstrated so far by the major powers, I would assume that it will follow NATO’s lead by providing resources and material support from afar rather than take the fight to Israel now.

So, I very much doubt all-out war is presently on the cards, which does not mean things might not get to that point sometime next year. The last IDF-Hezbollah war lasted 34 days; presumably this one will go longer, but I doubt it will escalate to a region-wide conflict.

One thing that is worthy of note here is that Iran clearly has not made modern air defense systems available to Hezbollah, which means that unlike the Russians or the Ukrainians, the Israelis can make use of air strikes and air support.

UPDATE: The Lebanese Army has reportedly pulled back 5km from the border to avoid a direct confrontation with the IDF ground forces. So, it’s possible that this is a limited, short-term incursion meant to expand the buffer zone, although that seems like a pointlessly short-term exercise.

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Israel won a grand victory over Hezbollah, if the reports are to be believed:

It was later reported that the Israel Air Force attacked and destroyed 59 stationary medium-range Fajr rocket launchers positioned throughout southern Lebanon. Operation Density allegedly only took 34 minutes to carry out but was the result of six years of intelligence gathering and planning. Between half and two-thirds of Hezbollah medium-range rocket capability was estimated by the IDF to have been wiped out. According to Israeli journalists Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff the operation was “Israel’s most impressive military action” and a “devastating blow for Hezbollah”. In the coming days IAF allegedly also attacked and destroyed a large proportion of Hezbollah’s long range Zelzal-2 missiles.

“All the long-range rockets have been destroyed,” chief of staff Halutz allegedly told the Israeli government, “We’ve won the war.”

Those reports are 18 years old, from the prelude to the failed 2006 ground invasion of Lebanon. Assuming that a war is all but over in the aftermath of an initial series of air strikes is reliably wrong. Eliminating Nasrallah is an achievement that one presumes would be positive for the Israelis, but does anyone seriously believe that if Hezbollah was to eliminate Netanyahu, the war would be over?

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Israel is pursuing an essentially non-military strategy of attacking the enemy’s leadership rather than attempting to defeat them on the battlefield:

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has claimed it eliminated Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of the Hezbollah paramilitary group, in a strike on Beirut, Lebanon. In a statement on Saturday, the IDF confirmed media reports that the top official was killed in the bombing of an underground compound belonging to the militant group in the Dahiyeh suburb of the Lebanese capital. “Hassan Nasrallah will no longer be able to terrorize the world,” it added.

According to the IDF, Nasrallah “was responsible for the murder of many Israeli civilians and soldiers” as well as numerous other “terrorist activities.” “The IDF will continue operating against anyone who promotes and engages in terrorism against the State of Israel and its people,” the statement warned.

Hezbollah has confirmed the death of Nasrallah.

The reason most military strategists don’t recommend utilizing this strategy is that it usually doesn’t work very well outside of circumstances where the king, or khan, exerts sole control over the military and its use. Russia, for example, could have easily eliminated the Kiev regime’s leadership in a similar fashion, but has elected not to do so. China could do the same to the leadership of its estranged island province, if any such leadership were to exist.

I should probably explain that’s a bit of a diplomacy joke. You see, China’s foreign ministry recently informed reporters that the new Japanese head of the LDP could not have visited “the leader of Taiwan” as he was reported to have done in the past because “Taiwan is a province of China and there is no ‘leader of Taiwan.'” This is why I don’t do stand-up; I’d have to schedule an additional half-hour to explain why the jokes would have been funny if the audience had only possessed the information required to appreciate them.

The problem is that one has no guarantee that whatever leadership succeeds the previous leadership is not guaranteed to be less capable, or less inclined to escalate the conflict. Of course, if Israel’s goal is to escalate the conflict, as I suspect it is, then it had nothing to lose by removing Nasrallah from the equation since he was both a) capable and b) maintaining a disciplined strategy of attrition through restraint. A younger, less patient replacement who is more enthusiastic about engaging in direct war might be the best result that Israel could reasonably hope to accomplish.

That is why I think it’s too soon to have any opinion, one way or the other, about the wisdom of pursuing this Head of the Snake strategy in these particular circumstances. Sometimes, it’s impossible to know if a given course is the ideal one until a time well after the fact.

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This three-month-old report on Hezbollah’s methodical degradation of the Israeli air defense system may explain why the Netanyahu regime is hell-bent on invading Lebanon and engaging in the sort of ground war that the IDF has been assiduously avoiding for the last decade. Obviously, I can’t verify its accuracy, and it is of a strongly anti-Israel bent, but it does help put the puzzle together.

‘Israel’ has completely lost the north of occupied Palestine. It’s under fire and on fire every day now. Hezbollah has methodically eye-poked ‘Israel’s’ intelligence outposts and is literally blasting them in the nuts every day, on camera. The map above shows the new line of control for occupied Palestine, as reported by the thinking man’s Der Stürmer, Haaretz. ‘Israel’ has lost it.

It’s fascinatingly boring how Hezbollah did this. For months their videos have been methodically mundane, blowing up this communication tower, that building, that listening station. It seemed like a bunch of nothing, but it adds up. Hezbollah had a list of ‘Israel’s’ eyes and ears in the north and has spent months methodically eye poking them, like Odysseus and the Cyclops. Now—however big the IOF might be—they’re effectively blinded.

As Hezbollah opens bigger and bigger gaps in ‘Israel’s’ air defenses, they can send bigger and more missiles in, with better and better penetration. For ‘Israel’, this attrition is a compounding problem. Their air defenses are a connected system and the network is increasingly returning 404… Hezbollah has fire control over the north, while ‘Israel’ is retreating further and further.

Pager bombings and air strikes are insufficient to change the attritional equation here. And Israel doesn’t have the room to retreat much further than it already has, which means that in order to restore its air defense systems to full functionality, it has no choice but to go in on the ground and provide Hezbollah with the invasion that it apparently has been seeking to provoke regardless of what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, or Ukraine.

Which, presumably, is why the USA now has more than 40,000 troops, the 101st Airborne, and several carrier groups in position to reinforce what would appear to be an incipient Israeli invasion of Lebanon. If the report of the systematic degradation of the Iron Dome system and the removal of 60,000 settlers is correct – and I’m confident that the latter, at least, is, on the basis of similar Israeli reports – then I don’t see any way that another war in Lebanon can reasonably be avoided short of a long-term ceasefire that would give the Israelis the time to reconstruct its air defense systems.

UPDATE: The report and the logic that follows from it would appear to be sound.

Israel’s army chief has told his forces to prepare for a ground invasion of Lebanon as the Middle East spirals towards a seemingly inevitable wider war. Herzi Halevi told soldiers during a drill near the Lebanese border in northern Israel: ‘We are attacking all day, both to prepare the ground for the possibility of your entry [into Lebanon], but also to continue striking Hezbollah.’ He added: ‘Hezbollah today expanded its [range] of fire. Later today, it will receive a very strong response. Prepare yourselves.’

UPDATE: An Israeli general says Israel can’t even hope to last as long as Ukraine has in a war of attrition.

The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss. If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year.

That would certainly explain why Clown World is apparently going to risk rolling the dice, despite the fact that it’s possible neither Israel nor the USA will survive the consequences. The problem is that the whole strategy for both Ukraine and Israel relies upon somehow getting the US military to fight with and for them, but neither regime fully comprehends that thanks to decades of self-serving foreign rule, the US military is no longer capable of defeating either Russia or Iran, much less both of them at once.

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The US is sending more troops, specifically, the 101st Airborne Division if the rumors are correct, to the Middle East:

The US is deploying a “small number” of additional troops to the Middle East after Israel launched a large-scale military operation against Lebanon, The Pentagon has announced. Spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder announced the move on Monday but declined to provide further details on the number or mission of the American troops.

”In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional US military personnel forward to augment our forces already in the region,” Ryder said. “But for operational security reasons, I’m not going to comment on or provide specifics.”

The US currently has around 40,000 troops stationed in the Middle East, along with several Navy warships and aircraft carriers, including the USS Harry S. Truman and the USS Abraham Lincoln. The assets are positioned in multiple locations to respond to potential attacks against Israel or American interests.

It appears that the USA and its Greatest Ally are not going to wait much longer for Hezbollah and Iran to break discipline and give them an excuse to claim that they had no choice but to go to war. Which means another false flag is almost certainly in the works, presumably one in the United States.

However, Spain clearly doesn’t want any part of it. There is noticeably less enthusiasm in Europe for war on behalf of Israel than there has been for war on behalf of the Kiev regime.

“The Spanish government expresses its deep dismay and condemnation of the Israeli bombardment of southern and eastern Lebanon today, which has left hundreds dead, in response to Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel over the weekend. The spiral of violence must stop.” – the Spanish Foreign Ministry

UPDATE: 101st Airborne confirmed.

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Ron Unz suspects that the pager attack was supposed to be a preemptive first strike to disrupt a Hezbollah attack that never came:

Mossad certainly achieved a brilliant tactical victory, one that its members and pro-Israel partisans surely intend to boast about for years. But many aspects of the attack seemed very puzzling to me, and experienced military analysts wondered whether any long-term gains had been achieved.

After Israel invaded Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas raid last October, Hezbollah and its Israeli enemies soon began trading cross-border fire, bombarding each other with missiles, rockets, drones, and artillery shells, and those exchanges have now continued for nearly a year. As a result, some 160,000 civilians on both sides of the border have fled their homes, with perhaps 60,000 of these being Israelis.

With so many tens of thousands of Israelis having become internal refugees, displaced from their communities in the north of the country and spending the last year living in temporary accommodations, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under enormous political pressure to attack and invade Lebanon in order to drive the Hezbollah forces away from the border, thereby allowing those Israelis to return home. In addition, the most extreme religious elements among his supporters regard portions of southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s God-given lands and wish to see them conquered and annexed, with their local Lebanese residents expelled and replaced by Jewish settlers.

However, the last time the Israelis launched a ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006, their forces suffered a severe defeat at Hezbollah’s hands, and during the last eighteen years that organization has become far more powerful, with many of its troops having gained a great deal of military experience during their successful intervention in the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, a year of fighting against Hamas in Gaza has left the IDF exhausted, so despite Israel’s command of the air, it’s not at all clear how well such a ground assault would go. Moreover, Hezbollah has reportedly amassed an enormous arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles, and these could be used to inflict devastating damage upon most of Israel’s cities and towns if it chose to do so.

The combination of these two conflicting factors has led to repeated indecision on Israel’s part. For months, media leaks have reported that Israel had made the decision to invade Lebanon and that the attack was imminent. But nothing has ever happened, presumably because the military risks of such an operation were considered too great.

Those booby-trapped pagers and other devices might have played an absolutely crucial role in an Israeli ground invasion. If they had all been detonated at the beginning of such an attack, Hezbollah’s forces would have been left dazed and confused, with their entire communications network knocked out, thereby preventing them from mounting an effective defense or retaliatory measures. This would probably have allowed the IDF to win a major initial victory on the ground.

But instead those explosions occurred alone, with no invasion taking place. So Hezbollah has merely licked its wounds and is surely now putting in place a replacement communications network, presumably based upon a large shipment of carefully vetted pagers received from Iran or China or Russia. Israel thus lost the element of surprise, with little to show for it except wounding a large number of Hezbollah members. Thus, the exploding pagers merely produced a tactical victory instead of a potentially strategic one.

This raises the obvious question of why the Israelis chose to shoot their bolt when they did instead of waiting until the pagers could be detonated in conjunction with a major invasion.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that it is Israel that desperately wants a war while Hezbollah and Iran understand that time is on their side. Now that the technological attack has failed to spur either of the latter into action, Israel has proceeded to engage in another round of air strikes against Lebanon.

Israeli missiles slammed into the Lebanese capital of Beirut in a strike said to be targeting a senior Hezbollah commander this afternoon, after the southern suburbs were buffeted with hundreds of missiles. Hezbollah commander Ali Karaki was the target of strikes late Monday as Israeli attacks edge deeper into Lebanon, according to a security source speaking to Reuters.

Attrition warfare always favors the more numerous side. It appears that China isn’t the only one learning from watching how the Russians execute their strategies.

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