In Lebanon, Israel set a trap for Iran and itself

By Marc Champion

The soldier-turned US President Dwight Eisenhower once said that when he couldn’t solve problems, he made them bigger, so he could. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have taken the advice to heart. Unable after almost a year of war to deliver on his pledge to simultaneously rescue hostages in Gaza and eliminate Hamas, he has expanded the fight to take on the group’s allies Hezbollah and Iran. And it’s working for him.

With confirmation on Tuesday of the death of Hezbollah’s missile force chief Ibrahim Muhammad Qabisi, Israel has now killed at least three of the organization’s top commanders, together with many of their senior officers. Hundreds of other fighters were killed or wounded by booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, severely damaging its communications. An unknown number of rocket launchers and missiles have been destroyed in the most intensive Israeli aerial bombardment since its 2006 invasion. Make no mistake, Hezbollah is being very badly damaged.

This is all the result of years of intelligence gathering and amounts to the kind of shaping operation that would precede a ground invasion. That’s the case even if the hope is a weakened Hezbollah will back down, without Israel having to put boots on the ground. This is an organization that has a history of terrorism and is despised by most Lebanese outside the Shiite community, so were it not for the significant civilian collateral damage, there would be nothing to mourn here.

The painful anniversary of Oct. 7 — the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust — is just days away. So at home, these successes against Hezbollah will help buffer Netanyahu from inevitable accusations of his failures a year ago, and in Gaza since. Already, polls suggest that withered support for his ruling Likud party has recovered sharply since he started taking a harder line on Hezbollah and Iran.

By contrast, both Tehran and its Shiite clients in Lebanon are in a tough corner. To withdraw from the border and halt rocket attacks as Israel is demanding would admit a humiliating defeat. It would eviscerate the aura of strength Hezbollah relies on to justify maintaining a private army in Lebanon, a linchpin of the arc of proxy forces that Iran uses to project power across the region.

As Hezbollah reels, there was something hapless about Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s tough talk at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. He declared Israel defeated in Gaza and said nothing could repair the damage to its image of invincibility. Well, that’s happening in Lebanon.

Much more convincing — at least for now — was Pezeshkian’s statement to reporters that Iran doesn’t want an all-out war with Israel and is willing to lay down arms if it does the same. Ali Vaez, Iran program director at the International Crisis Group, describes Netanyahu’s Lebanon gambit as an October surprise that leaders in Tehran had anticipated and feared. That’s because, at least until the Nov. 5 presidential election in the US, Israel has a near-guarantee of American backing for any wider war it might start.

Not doing so would risk the issue hijacking a tight election campaign, allowing Republican candidate Donald Trump to claim Democrats had abandoned Israel out of weakness. Yet if the administration were forced to get involved, that too would create cannon fodder for the Trump campaign, as Democrats embroiled the US in yet another Middle Eastern war. “The Iranians see a war in October as the definition of a trap for Iran and Hezbollah,” because a Trump presidency is something Netanyahu wants, but Iran doesn’t, Vaez says.

Pezeshkian, after all, was elected because even Iranians who dislike the regime turned out to vote for his promise to reenter nuclear negotiations with the West, get sanctions lifted and restore economic growth. Amid all the boilerplate Iranian hostility of his UN speech, his call for talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump abrogated while in office also rang true.

Iran’s problem is that getting sanctions relief while at war with Israel — let alone the US — is a nonstarter, no matter who is in the White House. Yet sitting on its hands for the next six weeks while Israel pounds its prized foreign policy asset to dust may prove impossible. On Wednesday, the escalation continued. Israel’s military said it hit a further 60 targets in Lebanon. It also shot down a ballistic missile that Hezbollah — in a first — fired at Tel Aviv, targeting the Mossad intelligence agency headquarters.

Israel’s success in Lebanon can, however, easily turn to failure. As in Gaza, it won’t matter how many Hezbollah fighters are killed if there’s no feasible strategy in place to turn these tactical gains into strategic ones. And even though Israel’s case for striking back at Hezbollah is strong — it’s been attacking Israel for a year — doing so now is doomed to be tainted by the excesses and suffering of Gaza.

Already, civilian casualties in Lebanon are becoming the primary focus of reporting outside Israel. Israeli airstrikes killed 558 people on Monday and Tuesday, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. That number will certainly include Hezbollah fighters, but there were also women and children. Many will have been civilians.

Netanyahu’s definition of victory in Lebanon— making northern Israel safe for its residents— can again, as with Gaza, be met by only adding diplomacy to his arsenal in ways he has yet refused to do. Hezbollah doesn’t have support beyond the Shiite community in Lebanon, but an invasion that turns much of the country into a Gaza-like wasteland would either change that or make it irrelevant.

Eisenhower, after all, had another good piece of advice: to distinguish the urgent from the important, because they are so rarely the same. Halting Hezbollah’s rocket attacks so the tens of thousands of residents evacuated from northern Israel can return for the school year is certainly urgent. So was punishing Hamas after Oct. 7. But what ultimately matters most is to create a path to lasting security for Israel and its neighbors.

The lesson of Gaza and still more so Ukraine is that while a dominant military can make big gains on the battlefield, crushing an enemy to the point of capitulation is a lot harder. A war that draws in Iran and ends with three brutalizing Israeli occupations — in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon — would offer the antithesis of long-term security to the world’s only Jewish state.