The message in Lee Smith’s brilliant article in Tablet Magazine this week is that the U.S. must stop losing wars. We create and fund and staff our military to protect us and it’s time to do that:
Only a fool could be blind to the fact that the Pentagon way of war, three decades into the 21st century and a world away from the United States’ last conclusive victory, means death for all who pursue it.
If Washington and the Europeans are appalled by Israel’s campaign over the last two weeks, it’s because the Israelis have resurfaced the ugly truth that no modish theories of war, international organizations, or even American presidents could long obscure. Wars are won by killing the enemy, above all, those who inspire their people to kill yours. Killing Nasrallah not only anchors Israel’s victory in Lebanon but reestablishes the old paradigm for any Western leaders who take seriously their duty to protect their countrymen and civilization: Kill your enemies.
Before I discuss any more about this, I’d like to briefly summarize this week’s astonishing news, news which puts paid to the idiotic Obama, Biden/Harris notion that appeasing and paying off the master of Middle East terrorism, Iran, and forcing Israel to ever more concessions with Iran’s proxies, is the pathway to peace. Indeed, the consequence of Israel’s continued audacious dismantling of Hamas and Hezb’allah — the very opposite of what the angels of death — the U.S. and Western European diplomatic establishment — advance is the only way to bring peace and prosperity to that long-embattled part of the world.
On Friday, Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations. Countless delegates walked out before he spoke and the U.S. Ambassador to the UN did not attend, signaling once again the administration turning its back on our ally.
There is only one majority Moslem country in Europe, Albania. Its prime minister Edi Rama showed more solidarity with Israel than did the U.S. He pointedly wore a yellow ribbon in his lapel, the symbol of those wanting the hostages in Gaza returned. (Albania, by the way, was one of the very few places where Jews fleeing the Nazi death squads found safe shelter.)
Little did the performative actors who walked out — or in our case, never showed up — know, but in a sense Netanyahu’s appearance was a feint to let Nasrallah feel safe enough to come out of hiding. Before Netanyahu left for New York, his cabinet authorized a strike against Nasrallah as soon as there was “operational feasibility.” Shortly before his speech he was advised that opportunity had arisen and he approved the strike, which was carried out minutes after the speech ended. At least one observer (Elliot Steinmetz) likened this to the baptism scene in The Godfather. Certainly, it is the stuff of movies, if Hollywood ever gets off animations and Star Wars rip-offs.
His speech should become as classic and historic an address as Haile Selassie’s 1936 speech to the League of Nations. He openly attacked the UN, which, in truth, needs to be extinguished and replaced by a community of real, democratic nations, not a corrupt, richly-endowed anti-Western, anti-democratic, antisemitic chowder society. Here are some highlights:
“In this swamp of antisemitic bile, there’s an automatic majority willing to demonize Israel on anything,” he noted, calling it an “anti-Israel flat-earth society.”
“In Lebanon, he noted, Hezbollah had violated United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, dragging the country into war. He appealed to the Lebanese people, telling them Israel was not at war with them, and not to let Hezb’allah drag them into the “abyss.” He added that Israel will never again allow Hezb’allah to return to the border, where it could carry out an October 7-style attack. “We won’t rest until our citizens can return safely to their homes,” he said.
Hezb’allah’s terrorism around the world is unmatched. And even this list is incomplete, because it fails to list the kidnapping, 15-months torture, and murder of our CIA station chief in Beirut William Francis Buckley, whose agony was taped by his tormentors and given to us by them.
Eliminated in the massive airstrike in a deep underground lair on Beirut were Nasrallah, his entire remaining leadership (apparently the replacements of the replacements, people who had not been entrusted with the pagers). Also eliminated in this strike were officers and commanders with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG), including Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, the Deputy Commander of Operations for the IRGC as well as the Acting Commander of Quds Force Operations in Syria and Lebanon.
Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei called an emergency meeting of his National Security Council and is reportedly in hiding. A cargo plane used by the IRGC attempted to land in Beirut after Friday, but Israel apparently commandeered the communications of the airport tower, warning them that if they attempted to land, the plane would be blown up, and the plane returned to Tehran.
The ubiquitous availability of mobile phones with their photographic and video-capable features means that one can see the joy in the Middle East among Sunni Moslems, Christians, Druzes, and Israelis at the destruction of Hezb’allah and the gelding of Iran, whose people hate the theocratic monsters who rule them: videos from Azaz and Idlib in Syria and Christian and Sunni areas of Lebanon show the joy. Elsewhere in Lebanon, people are beating up fleeing Hezb’allah operatives trying to escape into their neighborhoods or fire missiles from them.
At the same time, Iran’s weaker proxy, the Houthis, fired missiles and drones at our Navy destroyers, damaging three Navy warships, and we, who have far greater resources than does Israel, seem satisfied with only defensive measures, when in a couple of hours this threat to our Navy and international navigation could be resolved.
As Lee Smith notes, Israel acted and demolished Hezb’allah as an international terrorist threat after it “turned a deaf ear to their superpower patron for more than half a century. But at this stage, heeding Washington’s advice is like taking counsel from the angel of death.”
This Administration not only won’t fight, but won’t even let our allies do it, and he details the extreme measures Biden-Harris has taken to prevent the Israelis from taking down those who repeatedly and savagely have attacked them.
By ordering the strike on Nasrallah while attending the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored the Jewish state’s independence from the global consensus that has resolved not to confront terrorists but rather to appease them, whether they’re plotting in the Middle East or living among the local populations of Western nations, including the United States. Israel’s attack also shows that almost everything U.S. and other Western civilian and military leaders have believed about the Middle East for the last 20 years was simply a collection of excuses for losing wars. The questions that senior policymakers and Pentagon officials, think-tank experts and journalists have deliberated over since the invasion of Iraq — questions about the nature of modern warfare and the proper conduct of international relations in a multipolar world, etc. — can now be set aside for good because they have been resolved definitively.
The answers are as they ever were — at least before the start of the “global war on terror.” Contrary to the convictions of George W. Bush-era neoconservatives and the pro-Iran progressives in Barack Obama’s camp, securing a nation’s peace has nothing to do with winning narratives, or nation-building, or balancing U.S. allies against your mutual enemies for the sake of regional equilibrium, or any of the other academic theories generated to mask a generation’s worth of failure. Rather, it means killing your enemies, above all those who advocate and embody the causes that inspire others to exhaust their murderous energies against you. Thus, killing Nasrallah was essential.
You’re probably thinking, that’s just common sense. Because it is just common sense, but unfortunately common sense seems to be absent in the leaders of our country and most of Western Europe.
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