Israel is Settling All Family Business, That it Can
...who isn't playing is important too...
Less than a week since the invasion of Israel from Gaza and the resulting pogrom that witnessed the largest one day murder, rape, kidnapping and tortures of Jews since World War Two—it is clear that Israel has decided that it was finally time to reset and repair the damage from decades of bad international theory and delusion.
There are really two international delusions we are seeing in play, one Israel has more control over, one has yet to be fully revealed to be the folly it is.
You can see the threads heading back decades earlier, but the first delusion hit its peak during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, the withdrawal from the Southern Lebanon security zone in 2000, and finished its summit with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
The delusion was that The Smartest People in the Room™ in DC, New York, Brussels, and Tel Aviv could, if they talked enough, wished enough, and said nice things to each other enough, would find a way to get the various Palestinian. Hope, wishes, and a mistaken trust in international organizations convinced Israel to give peace a chance.
Peace had a chance, and it culminated on October 7th, 2023.
Now, it appears, Israel will take the world as it is, not as it and others wished it to be. The key part of “this world” that some schools of international security affairs for decades have refused to recognize is the common, evil thread connecting them all: The Islamic Republic of Iran.
Gaza
Hamas was always a proxy for Iran. It could not have been able to be the threat it was without two things: 1) Iran; 2) UN. There can be no returning to the world of October 6th, 2023.
Whatever status Gaza winds up having in the future, it will not be like the past. While there remains much hard work to be done in Gaza, the hardest military part is done. It will be pacified thoroughly, and then the really hard part—what will happen to the population and territory of Gaza—will have to be worked out.
Egypt wants nothing to do with it. The Arab nations have already let it be known they don’t want that radicalized population, and Israel cannot let another Hamas like governance take over that strip of land that points in to Israel like a dagger.
It appears that Israel is following a variation of my COA-A I posted four days after last year’s attacks. The bitter fruit of a half-century of bad theory will have to be fixed, somehow.
Lebanon
From its birth as a Shia militia boosted by Iran, Hezbollah has, even more than Hamas, been a proxy for Iran. Only vaguely connected to the Palestinian cause, it has simply become an advanced military force for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
For a year, well over 60,000 Israeli citizens have been internally displaced from their homes in Northern Israel due to unending rocket attack from Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. As they rightfully focused on the war in Gaza, (as President Lincoln advised, “One war at a time”), Israel took the blows with minimal response until the last few weeks.
The formerly Christian led government of Lebanon cannot police their own nation, and have not been able to for decades, and the UN is more of a problem than a solution, Israel will have to take steps to secure her own safety.
Like the Gaza situation, this will create problems down the road because the hostile population is not going anywhere. That is an issue for later. For now, the rockets must stop.
Yemen/Houthi
The same malignant theories of how the world works that begat the present problems in Lebanon and Gaza also managed to encourage Saudi Arabia, UAE, and others to disengage from the Yemeni civil war—enabling the Houthis to become a threat to international shipping in the Red Sea and the seas around the Horn of Africa. When they make a mistake of successfully attacking Israel, Israel responds accordingly. The rest of the international community “led” by the USA is not so good at keeping this sub-4th-rate power from being a threat. Unless there is a significant policy change, this will continue to fester only because we allow it to.
Sunni Arab Nations
The greatest effort towards peace since the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s was the Abraham Accords during the Trump Administration. The Gulf Arab nations, modernizing at a break-neck pace, simply want to be part of the modern world. Part of that modern world is normal relations with Israel and the good that can come from it. The big prize is Saudi Arabia. She isn’t officially there yet, but if you read some of the reports of how the Saudis are distancing themselves from the events of the last year, odds are they will when the time is ripe. Their major focus, rightfully, is…
Iran
We are all suffering from one of the greatest fails of The Smartest People in the Room™ during the Carter Administration—the enabling of the creation of The Islamic Republic of Iran. While at the end of the first quarter of the 21st Century shows the scourge of Sunni Wahhabi fundamentalist threats to modernity waning (mostly), the Shia terror from Iran and her proxies continues unabated. We have also seen two occasions, the second over the last couple of days, of Iranian direct attacks on Israel. The second round looked better planned than the first, but reports are incomplete. Israel will respond, at a time and place of her choosing, but I hope she keeps to the “one war at a time” patience. It would be helpful if her best friend, the USA, had a different foreign/defense policy team with a better understanding of how the world works, but we have what we have.
USA
The USA has not abandoned Israel by any measure. Just the opposite. We continue to deploy tens of thousands of service members to the area, and are keeping the balance of our deployable naval units in the Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf. During the latest attacks, reports have USS Cole (DDG 67), and USS Bulkeley (DDG 84), launching over a dozen SM-3/6 against Iran’s ballistic missiles. More valuable range time, but unsustainable until we drastically expand our production capacity. I am sure the expenditure numbers of the last year are only on the high-side, but I’d bet a year’s paid subscription to this Substack that it exceeds our annual production in 2024. Israel will need everything from spare parts to bombs to artillery ammunition over the course of the next few months. With their historic antisemitism leavened by imported Jew-hating populations, most of the European leftist governments, will with few exceptions, not help Israel and if anything will support her enemies. Europe is split, which means inaction. The new Labour government in the UK is problematic in this regard as well.
It is up to the USA to back Israel. That’s OK. It is the right place to be, but there is this important point. Israel is doing well and it knows what needs to be done. There are indications and warnings that for much of the last year, the 3,000-mile screwdriver from DC is hamstringing many of her efforts to do what must be done. That needs to end.
So, Israel, little Israel, is about to head in to her second year of war. The Gaza front at a slow boil, the Lebanon front in a rolling boil, the Houthis a pebble in the shoe, and Iran, in the distance, glaring and planning its 3rd wave.
Like it or not, the USA will be right in the middle of it. We should be in it to win it just as Israel might.
No more second chances for bad international theory. It had its few decades. There is a lot of work to be done to repair the damage.
The greatest geo-strategic beneficiary of all this? The People’s Republic of China.
Absolutely right on. Thank you. Now,about those "Deplorable naval units"--is that a typo or Freudian slip?
CDR Sal, one of your best, IMO. Well done, drawing the juicy bits out of a WW III stew. Thoughts, yeah, got a few. Great last line to the article: "The greatest geo-strategic beneficiary of all this? The People’s Republic of China." Concur...Umm...So far. Consider the "what next" in this seemingly slow motion catastrophe (we're a year into this!?!): China imports 91% of Iran's oil. Israel could...could... degrade Iran's ability to ship oil (via Kharig Island, a single point of failure). Degrade to zero should they choose, I suspect. Insert economic impact here. Suspect backdoor channels exist between Israel, Russia, China, EU, USA, requiring a game of "telephone" with how things get communicated to Iran...great possibility for "misinterpreted" messages here. Israel has to suspect (with very good intelligence) Iran is close to a nuclear breakout, and knows once they have it, the dynamics of the region will change in ways beyond prediction. Thinking way high level, if Iran breaks the nuclear "seal" that has kept that particular brand of WMD in the bottle all these years, can Ukraine be next? Taiwan?
Guam? Soooo...what Israel is doing for its own survival, impacts the region, the world, and as members of the world, all of the Smartest People In the Room (TM) in the U.S. government. Not sure I'm feeling real good about this...