Moment of Truth for The Iranian 'Axis of Resistance' (video)

Edited by Sam Thielman

I'M WRITING THE NEXT IRON MAN SERIES FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PREORDER IT, I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF! FOLLOW THE PROCEDURE AT THE LINK AND THEY'RE YOURS!

MSNBC'S AYMAN MOHYELDIN invited me and my old boss Peter Beinart onto his show yesterday to talk about Israel's U.S.-enabled assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and what comes next for the wider regional war. Here's the segment: 

Thanks to Ayman for hosting the discussion. Both my three-year old and my nine-year old got a kick out of it. 

There's never enough time on TV news to make all the points you want to make, so here are a couple more. The War on Terror provides many lessons for the past year's Mideast devastation—you'll read a piece from me about that very soon at Zeteo—but above all, it's that decapitation strikes buy the decapitator a little bit of respite and that's it. But at the same time, decapitation undersells what Israel has just accomplished militarily. 

Israel has not just killed Hezbollah's leader. Over the past several weeks, and especially the past week-plus, Israel has taken out not only Nasrallah, but practically the entire next tier of Hezbollah's military command, and, with the pagers attack, some unknown-to-me but substantial amount of its operators, logistics and support elements. It has done so through terrorizing Lebanon, killing more than a thousand people in something like a week and setting into effect a large internal population displacement, reminiscent of Gaza. But there's no denying that Israel has shattered Hezbollah's prestige as a resistance movement, and not only theirs. 

Something that this past week has brought home to me is that I haven't sufficiently taken into account the importance of Iran's new and untested leadership. We've discussed Iranian restraint after April's kabuki drone-and-missile deployment. But Iran's famed Axis of Resistance coalition has taken nothing but Ls this entire summer, to include the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, and only the Houthis are shooting back. (To which Israel has responded with airstrikes on the Port of Hodeidah, which is crucial for getting food, medicine and fuel to the impoverished Yemenis in Houthi-controlled territory.) The Iranians are not looking like they have the stomach for further escalation. That will embolden Israel to intensify its devastations of both Lebanon and Gaza and its West Bank crackdown, and to skewer Iran on the horns of a dilemma: abandon Gaza through shutting down the southern Lebanon/northern Israel front; or risk its ability to project power from its Iraq-Syria-Lebanon arc (Yemen is a different story) that it spent the War on Terror building. 

That seems to me like it has full U.S. backing. Over the past 72 hours, the Biden administration has conspicuously muted its ceasefire talk, a staple U.S. objective for Lebanon over the past year, in favor of ardent support for Israel and mumbling some perfunctory nonsense about escalating to deescalate. "Secretary Austin made it clear that the United States supports Israel’s right to defend itself and reinforced that the United States is committed to deterring Iran and Iranian-backed partners and proxies from taking advantage of the situation or expanding the conflict," was how the Pentagon read out Lloyd Austin's Saturday call with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.  That's not we don't want escalation. That's you are to accept this escalation passively. The U.S. shares with the Israelis the objective of cleaving the Iranian coalition from Gaza and leaving the Palestinians on their own. 

This was the point I was trying to make at the top of Ayman's show. The U.S. has bolstered its naval and air power off the Levantine coast, and is taking the opportunity afforded by the Israeli offensive to see how far Iran's coalition can be militarily degraded, even forced into retreat. It is not only Israeli triumphalists who say Iran looks deterred. All eyes are going to be on Iran this week to see if it will do anything to change the equation. It's a hell of a time for the U.S. to pressure the Iraqi government to accept an enduring military presence. But as with Iran's responses to the Israelis, Tehran's counterweight to that U.S. maneuver is not evidently materializing.  

It would be a mistake to think Hezbollah is defeated. Whatever its personnel and leadership situation is after this weekend, it has an estimated arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles. While it will take time to reconstitute its personnel and return to the tactical expertise its brigades possessed a week ago, Israel provides all the incentive necessary to render that reconstitution inevitable. This whole weekend I was thinking that the airpower-and-intelligence-heavy IDF offensive in Lebanon indicates that the Israeli general staff has learned the military lessons of the 2006 war, when IDF armor drastically underperformed and the invasion of Lebanon was the most disastrous part of Israel's campaign. But the Israelis keep talking about reinvading. 

If Israel invades, they will hasten Hezbollah's regeneration, as well as the choice Tehran faces—to act now or accept defeat. Precisely this dynamic is why I have been writing for a year that active deescalation was crucial to avoid the frightening circumstance we face. One side feels backed into a corner after showing what, to its mind, was restraint, but was nevertheless interpreted by the other side as simultaneous aggression and weakness. 

FOR MORE ON NASRALLAH, check out my friend Thannasis Cambanis' Foreign Policy piece. Thannasis has reported on Hezbollah up close for decades. Something that was obvious but I hadn't quite put together until I read his article is that Hassan Nasrallah was Israel's most successful adversary… ever. Nasser of Egypt never beat Israel on the battlefield. Nasrallah did it twice, in 2000 and in 2006. Israel killed three Hamas leaders (Yasin, Rantisi and Haniyeh) in the span of Nasrallah's leadership. We still don't know who will lead Hezbollah next. 

MY FRIEND LAILA AL-ARIAN OF AL JAZEERA, who produced the unforgettable documentary The Night Won't End, is back with another emotionally devastating report, Starving Gaza. Warning: this documentary begins with the death by starvation of a five-month old baby. But it's important to watch it, as the documentary reports, among other things, "systematic attacks" by Israelis on bakeries and other critical infrastructure like schools and shelters for the transference of "aid" into food. 

Starving Gaza comes on the heels of ProPublica revealing that USAID and the State Department's bureau of Population, Migration and Refugees assessed the obvious—Israel, a massive recipient of U.S. largesse, is blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza in violation of the so-called Leahy Law surrounding that largesse—only for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to publicly contradict them so U.S. arms support for Israel can continue.

One of the people in the State Department who resigned over such institutional deceits, Stacy Gilbert, is interviewed in Starving Gaza. "The subject-matter-experts were removed and the reports were moved to a higher level," she explains to al-Jazeera. "We were told, 'You will see the report when it is released publicly." Growing emotional, Gilbert recounts that her resignation email told her bosses, "That report will haunt us."

But her most affecting quote, to my ears at least, was this one: "Famine is not a foregone conclusion in a conflict. Famine happens when assistance is blocked. It is the outcome of a deliberate decision." And everyone heard Gallant say a year ago that Israel would deprive Gaza of food, fuel, water and electricity.

SANA SAEED, the third friend name-dropped in this edition of FOREVER WARS, has just launched a newsletter you have to subscribe to, Views My Own. Her introductory post is a really elegantly crafted cold-open. And it even reveals what a late-night hang with me is like: 

Following the panel, a few hours before our flights home, Ackerman and I were walking with other colleagues along the corniche in Doha, on the lookout for some chapatis with karak chai - the perfect way to spend your 1 am, along a breezy coastline of an Island. Ackerman, working on a column for The Nation on Saudi/Israel normalization efforts, asked me - as one casually does - what I thought about the potential deal.

NAME-DROPPED FRIEND number four is the big one: Ta-Nehisi Coates. As soon as I heard him talk about his time in Palestine, I've been awaiting his forthcoming book The Message. Now I've read it, and you have to. My mind has been racing since I finished it last week, so a full review is going to have to wait until I can wrestle what I want to say about The Message into coherence. But this is one story that spans a Howard University classroom, Senegal, South Carolina, Palestine and Israel. If the book accomplished that and nothing else, dayenu. Yet The Message is so much more: It's a methodical prying open of a moral imagination, the sort of thing that is Ta-Nehisi's superpower. And that makes The Message an event.

As a matter of craft: Ta-Nehisi is so good and so disciplined a writer that it overshadows how good and how disciplined he is a reporter. However parochial it is to say this, no reporter can read The Message and fail to recognize the sheer tenacity and thoroughness its production required. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.