I’ve been ambivalent about this war against Iran — to say the least. While nothing would improve the Middle East more than a decent government taking power in Tehran, I seriously doubt that simply pulverizing Iran from the air can generate that change. I wish President Trump had consulted someone other than his gut before he pulled the trigger.
Maybe I can best explain my position by sharing a few rules that have long guided me in covering this region.
Rule No. 1: The four most dangerous words in the Middle East are “once and for all,” as in, Israel or America is going to end a threat militarily from (fill in the blank) “once and for all.”
I stated this rule in a column on Oct. 16, 2023, nine days after the Hamas attack on Israel, as the Israeli government contemplated retaliation. The only way to eliminate a military threat once and for all is through force plus politics — by creating better, self-sustaining leadership on the other side. This is hugely complicated and always requires political compromises on your side.
Consider the limits of assassinations as a once-and-for-all tool. I have watched the Israelis kill three generations of Hamas leaders. The first generation consisted of the movement’s founders, who were eliminated in the 1990s and early 2000s. These included the chief bomb maker Yahya Ayyash (“the Engineer”), who was killed in 1996; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s spiritual leader, who was assassinated in 2004; and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Yassin’s immediate successor, who was killed about a month after him.
A new tier of leaders then emerged, focusing on turning Hamas from a militant group into a governing organization with a sophisticated rocket arsenal. These included Said Seyam, Ahmed Jabari and Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, all eventually assassinated by Israel.
Then, following the Oct. 7 attacks, Israel launched a systematic campaign to eliminate the next generation of Hamas leaders. Over the last two years, it killed Saleh al-Arouri, a key link to Hezbollah; the military chief Mohammed Deif; Ismail Haniyeh, the political chairman; Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks; and Mohammed Sinwar, Yahya’s brother and successor as military leader.
Now answer this question: Who has control over the areas of Gaza today where the vast majority of Palestinians live — outside the zone controlled by Israel?
Answer: Hamas, generation four.
In sum, Israel has killed the entire Hamas leadership right next door in Gaza — three times over — but it has not been able to eliminate Hamas’s control there once and for all. Think about how hard that would be to do with the leadership in Iran, from the air, roughly a thousand miles away.
In Gaza, Israel’s decapitation strategy never finished Hamas in part because Hamas maintains deep political and cultural roots in the more religious part of the Gaza population. It was also because even a headless Hamas was able to kill or intimidate the Gazans, probably the majority now, who opposed it. And, in part, it was because the Israeli government steadfastly refused to work with an alternative Palestinian leadership, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which was in charge in Gaza before Hamas drove it out in June 2007.
Why doesn’t the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu work with the authority? Because Netanyahu’s actual goal, clearly stated in his governing coalition’s founding declaration, is to extend permanent Israeli control over the West Bank — a project it is busy doing as the war with Iran proceeds.
There are myriad problems with the Palestinian Authority leadership, but it still cooperates with the Israeli military in helping it prevent violence in the West Bank. You will never hear that, though, from Netanyahu. He wants Trump to believe that the authority is useless, and Trump has obligingly lapped it all up. Netanyahu wants every American president to believe that there is no legitimate Palestinian alternative to Hamas, which is also illegitimate, and therefore a two-state solution is impossible, and therefore Israel must permanently control the West Bank and one day annex it — once and for all. (That version won’t work, either.)
The Iran saga seems to be following a similar pattern: Bibi and Trump keep killing Iran’s leaders, and Iran keeps regenerating them. So far, the brave members of the Iranian opposition movement, which still lacks a leader and a shared agenda to take power, are staying home, intimidated by government thugs in Tehran and bombs falling from Tel Aviv.
Rule No. 2: Never drink your neighbor’s whole milkshake.
I learned early on that it is never a good idea for a nation to strip an enemy so naked of its dignity that it feels that it has nothing left to lose. It usually comes back to haunt you. Don’t drink your whole milkshake and the other guy’s, too.
I derived this particular lesson from one of my favorite pieces of movie dialogue-cum-political science. It comes at the end of “There Will Be Blood,” the 2007 classic about a ruthless silver miner-turned-oilman who would stop at nothing to accumulate more and more wealth during Southern California’s oil boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The film stars Daniel Day-Lewis as the oilman Daniel Plainview and Paul Dano as his rival, the sleazy preacher Eli Sunday.
In the final scene, Sunday approaches Plainview with an offer to sell him the last tract of land in their area that is not owned by Plainview. Plainview rejects the offer, explaining that, thanks to some clever drilling into Plainview’s property, he’d already sucked out all of Sunday’s oil.
“Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy,” Plainview tells Sunday. “Drained dry. I’m so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that’s a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room and starts to drink your milkshake … I … drink … your … milkshake!”
For years I’ve watched Israeli settlers steadily drinking Palestinians’ milkshake in the West Bank and not leaving them any possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state there. It will come back to haunt Israel, and leave it, in the long run, with only two possibilities: being a binational state, not a Jewish state, or an apartheid state, not a democratic state.
Never drink the other guy’s whole milkshake.
I understand Israel is trying to eliminate the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic regime in Iran. These are truly bad people who have put their own interests and ideology ahead of the interests and thriving of the people of Lebanon and Iran.
But if in the process of Israel trying to kill every high-level member once and for all it also destroys and occupies large areas of Lebanon and destroys Iran’s oil economy, the way it devastated Gaza, it will have done two things: First, it will have turned against Israel the very local populations it wanted to rise up against Hezbollah and the Islamic republic. Second, it will have left their countries in such an economic mess that no one can govern them. So Israel will have to stay in Lebanon forever.
A smart essay on the website Geopolitical Futures by Kamran Bokhari made this point: “While Israel’s focus is on maximum disruption — dismantling as much of the regime’s institutional and coercive infrastructure as possible to limit Tehran’s capacity for retaliation and long-term regional influence — the U.S. is trying to strike a careful balance.
“Washington aims to weaken the regime selectively, applying enough pressure to compel compliance on critical issues (nuclear enrichment, ballistic missile development and proxy activity) without provoking a full-scale collapse that could destabilize the region. This requires Washington to balance the pace and intensity of strikes to degrade the regime while preserving enough institutional cohesion to keep it in a position to negotiate or be coerced diplomatically.”
Lebanon today has the best leadership it has enjoyed since the 1975-1990 civil war: Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun. They are trying to end the Shiite Hezbollah as a military force. But Shiites are the biggest population in Lebanon, and Hezbollah has been a source of pride and power for Lebanese Shiites — not just because it fought Israel, but also because it fought for Lebanese power inside the government there.
Only Lebanese Shiites can eliminate Hezbollah politically by generating an alternative in collaboration with the Lebanese government. That will take force and politics. Hezbollah’s support is definitely waning, but if Israel just keeps bombing every building in Lebanon where a Hezbollah leader resides and takes over the entire south of Lebanon, starting that political process will be very difficult.
Rule No. 3: The power of the strong and the power of the weak are more equal than you think.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth puffs out his chest and boasts about the power of the strong — how many targets he’s blown up in Iran that day. But if we’re so strong, why has the Trump administration been so surprised by, and unprepared for, the huge spike in oil prices Iran caused by firing at ships in the Persian Gulf and oil facilities in Arab states next door? That price jump is putting huge pressure on Trump. Because in the totally hyper-connected world we live in, a weak Iran needs to launch only one drone a day from the back of a vegetable truck to choke off the oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz and send the price of oil, gas and fertilizer soaring worldwide.
This war has already had many surprises on the downside. Could there be one on the upside? If there is to be any kind of sustainable happy ending for this now global drama, it will not be because Trump and Netanyahu killed every Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian leader or stripped them of every bullet, missile and drone. Realistically, it could be because they weakened these hard men with guns enough that real politics could happen in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran — that the bad guys had no choice but to take into account their people’s wishes to enjoy the benefits of modernity, to have a say in their own futures and to not spend the rest of their lives “resisting.” That is the only way these conflicts end once and for all. But between here and there are miles and miles. If you are in a hurry, you started the wrong war.
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