Mideast War, Sitrep
As of this writing (October 6, 2024), Israel has not yet retaliated from Iran’s missile strike. That will bring about another change in the situation. But this sitrep can still note elements of the situation that the mainstream news is missing.
That news has Israel prevailing on all fronts: Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Israel itself is giddy with triumphalism. I think this is overly optimistic.
In Gaze, Israeli Prime Minister “Bibi” Netanyahu is no closer to achieving his stated war aims, the complete destruction of Hamas as a political and military entity. The problem is that those goals simply cannot be attained, as the IDF’s official spokesman publicly said. Half of Gaza’s population is under the age of fourteen, and all of the males in that category dream of nothing but joining Hamas and fighting Israel.
While Netanyahu’s war aims are unattainable, they have at least been stated. He has not even been able to do that with regard to describing some end-state in Gaza after the current round of fighting stops. He doesn’t want the PLO to run it. Egypt won’t. A permanent occupation by the IDF will create an endless guerrilla war with a steady dribble of Israeli casualties. Moving Israeli settlements back in will just make Jews easier targets than they are now. The only outcome that constitutes an Israeli victory in Gaza is the removal of the entire population followed by annexation. The obstacle to that is that Netanyahu’s coalition wants to drive all non-Jews from the West Bank and the only place to put the Arabs displaced from Gaza is in the West Bank. So if he seeks that solution his government collapses. And Bibi can always be relied on to put his personal career ahead of the interests of his country.
Moving north, Israel has dealt some heavy tactical blows to Hamas. But those successes do not get Netanyahu any closer to his strategic objective (again defined by his political needs) of letting the 60,000 Israelis displaced from their homes by Hezbollah’s rocket fire safely go back. Here, on the strategic level, Hezbollah has a much easier challenge than does Israel. All the former has to do is fire enough rockets each day, which could be as few as half-a-dozen, to leave displaced Israelis afraid to go home. Israel has the much tougher task of turning off all the rocket fire.
That difficult strategic challenge means Israel has to invade Lebanon on the ground, which it is now doing. That switches the battleground from the air, where Israel can do whatever it wants, to the ground, where Hezbollah is much stronger. Israel finds itself fighting the tar baby in the briar patch. Israel says it only wants to go a short distance into Lebanon, but it is in war’s nature to expand.
Finally, Israel is now in a direct quai-war with Iran. From the Iranian side there is a desire to keep the war symbolic. When Israel does something to which Iran must respond or look weak, Iran only does enough to check the block. Those 180 ballistic missiles hit almost nothing.
The question is whether Israel sees the missile attack from Iran as enabling it to reply in more than a symbolic way. Two obvious targets are Iran’s nuclear facilities and its oil-exporting docks. But the former are very well protected and if Israel cripples Iran’s oil exports, Iran can knock out the oil terminals in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, taking virtually all Persian Gulf oil off the world market. That could send American gas prices soaring right before an election, an election Iran does not want Mr. Trump to win.
As the situation unfolds the most important thing to keep in mind is that the main driver of events, Prime Minister Netanyahu, will continue to put himself first. What he needs most is wars in Lebanon and with Iran big enough to take Israeli voters’ eyes off the failure of his war in Gaza, failure he made inevitable by adopting unattainable war aims. Everything that happens will be a product of Netanyahu’s calculation of his political requirements, what he needs to stay in power. If you make that your touchstone, everything that happens will make sense.