Israel’s Competence Penalty

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, September 21, 2024

 

Evidently there were no fraudulent letters fabricating evidence of Russian influence operations to sign this week, so former Obama-Biden CIA director John Brennan — that notorious jurisprudent of jihad — had time to scold Israel over its ingenious “grim beeper” operation against Hezbollah.

 

Is there any bottom point at which our cabal of “nonpartisan” former national-security officials will refrain from further squandering the intelligence community’s reputation in the service of progressive Democrats and their alliance with Islamists?

 

Curtis Houck has posted the following exchange between Brennan and NBC’s Craig Melvin:

 

Melvin: “[I]s detonating a wireless device — is that an acceptable form of warfare?”

 

Brennan: “Well, I don’t, I don’t believe so because there’s no way the Israelis would have known who was going to have these pages at the time, which is why we see that there were some children and others who were killed. It’s basically almost a fire and forget mechanism that the Israelis engaged in here… [Y]ou have to question whether or not this is a strategically wise in terms of what it might do in terms of just further emboldening Hezbollah’s interest in trying to lash back against Israel, including on the international terrorist front[.]”

 

This is claptrap. And Brennan knows it — lest we forget his role as President Obama’s drone-whisperer, racking up an impressive number of civilian casualties in wartime strikes against terrorist targets. (The oh-so-humane Obama administration resorted to kill shots when its opposition to law-of-war detention complicated the option of capturing and interrogating terrorists.)

 

As Rich Lowry and I discussed on the podcast this week, this is not peacetime. Israel didn’t wake up on Tuesday and say, “Let’s do a number on Hezbollah” — or, as the Hezbollah spin that Brennan echoes would have it, “let’s do some indiscriminate attacks against Lebanese civilians.” (Hezbollah’s narrative is that Israel seeks to destroy Lebanon, which therefore needs Hezbollah as its guardian, a distortion of the reality that Iran, with Hezbollah as its enforcer, holds Lebanon hostage in order to maintain a strategic perch on Israel’s northern border.)

 

While Brennan proceeds with his long-standing search for the “moderate elements” of Hezbollah, the rest of us might remember that “the Party of Allah” (Hizb Allah) has been designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law for three decades (i.e., since the designation process was enacted into law) because of its dedication to Iran’s global jihad and its habit of killing Americans.

 

Hezbollah was established in 1982, based in Lebanon to confront American forces massed there as “peacekeepers” after Israel expelled Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. According to its manifesto, Hezbollah is

 

the vanguard . . . made victorious by Allah in Iran [in 1979]. There the vanguard succeeded to lay down the bases of a Muslim state which plays a central role in the world. We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and faqih [sharia jurist] who fulfills all the necessary conditions: [Ayatollah] Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini.

 

I’ve previously recounted Hezbollah’s early years of waging Khomeini’s jihad:

 

Hezbollah’s founding quickly resulted in a spate of kidnappings, torture, and bombing. (See this useful timeline from CAMERA.) In April 1983, for example, a Hezbollah car bomb killed 63 people, including eight CIA officials, at the U.S. embassy in Beirut. More infamously, the organization six months later truck-bombed a military barracks in Beirut, murdering 241 United States Marines (and killing 58 French soldiers in a separate attack). These operations, like many other Hezbollah atrocities, were orchestrated by Imad Mugniyah, long the organization’s most ruthless operative. [Mugniyah was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli intelligence operation in 2008.]

 

On December 12, 1983, the U.S. embassy in Kuwait was bombed, killing six and wounding scores of others. The bombers were tied to al-Dawa, a terror organization backed by Iran and leading the Shiite resistance against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime (with which Iran was at war). . . . Among the “Dawa 17” convicted and sentenced to death for the bombing was Imad Mugniyah’s cousin and brother in law, Youssef Badreddin. (Badreddin escaped in the chaos of Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.) [He was eventually killed in Syria in 2016, where, for five years, he’d been running Hezbollah’s military operations to prop up Iran’s ally, the monstrous Assad regime.]

 

Meanwhile, in 1984, Hezbollah bombed both the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut, killing two, and a restaurant near the U.S. Air Force base in Torrejon, Spain, killing 18 American servicemen. On March 16 of that year, Hezbollah operatives kidnapped William Francis Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Beirut. He was whisked to Damascus and onto Tehran where he became one of the hostages whose detention led to the Iran/Contra affair. Under Mugniyah’s direction, Buckley was tortured for 15 months, dying of a heart attack under that duress.

 

Hezbollah hijackers seized a Kuwait Airlines plane in December 1984, murdering four of the passengers, including two Americans. Six months later, Hezbollah operatives hijacked TWA Flight 847 after it left Greece. The jihadists discovered that one of their hostages was a U.S. Navy diver named Robert Stethem. They beat him severely and then shot him to death before dumping his body onto the tarmac of Beirut airport. In early 1988, Hezbollah kidnapped and ultimately murdered Colonel William Higgins, a U.S. Marine serving in Lebanon.

 

When al-Qaeda formed in the 1990s, it struck an alliance with Iran and Hezbollah — the mutual determination to wage jihad against the “big Satan” and the “little Satan” (America and Israel) always leads jihadists to set aside Islam’s internecine Sunni/Shiite belligerence. I’ve recapped this, too:

 

Iran had an alliance with al-Qaeda beginning in the early 1990s. It principally included training by Hezbollah . . . and such joint ventures as the 1996 Khobar Towers attack, in which 19 U.S. airmen were killed (and the FBI’s investigation of which was obstructed by the Saudi government). Toward the conclusion of its probe (and thus without time to investigate the matter fully), the 9/11 Commission learned that Iran had provided critical assistance to the suicide hijackers by allowing them to transit through Iran and Lebanon as they moved from obtaining travel documents in Saudi Arabia (Saudi passports and U.S. visas) to training for the attacks in al-Qaeda’s Afghan safe havens.

 

Indeed, we now know that Iran’s assistance was overseen by none less than Imad Mugniyah. . . . In October 2000, Mugniyah went to Saudi Arabia to “coordinate activities” (as the 9/11 Commission put it) with the suicide hijackers. (See 9/11 Commission Report at page 240, as well as affidavits of former CIA officers and a 9/11 Commission staffer, here and here). Thereafter, Mugniyah and other senior Hezbollah members accompanied the “muscle hijackers” on flights through Iran and Lebanon.

 

By enabling the hijackers to cross through these countries without having their passports stamped — an Iranian or Lebanese stamp being a telltale sign of potential terrorist training — Iran made it much more likely that the jihadists’ applications for Saudi passports and U.S. visas would be approved, as they were.

 

Pretty moderate, no?

 

The 9/11 Commission urged that the federal government further investigate Iran’s and Hezbollah’s role in the suicide-hijacking attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were slaughtered. Alas, U.S. officials have been loath to draw attention to this subject, thanks to their delusional quest for rapprochement with Iran, despite the jihadist regime’s death grip. Not content with willful blindness, the administration in which Brennan was the top intelligence official affirmatively abetted Iran, putting it on a glide path to nuclear weapons and filling its coffers with oil revenue — the billions it has in turn poured into missiles and other material support for Hezbollah and other anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Western jihadist groups. The Biden-Harris administration has revived this suicidal policy.

 

From its strategic stronghold on Israel’s northern border, Iran’s Hezbollah forces form the spear tip of the jihad unabashedly aimed at Israel’s annihilation. A day after Iran’s comparatively backward Hamas proxies unleashed their October 7 barbarities, Hezbollah commenced sporadic missile attacks on Israel that have continued at varying intensity levels ever since. (Hezbollah’s arsenal is believed to include over 150,000 Iranian-manufactured ballistic missiles.) The result has been the forced evacuation of northern Israeli communities. The government evacuated 60,000 people, and thousands more have had to follow as the skirmishes intensify.

 

This has forced Israel to fight an ever-expanding, multifront war. To repeat (see, e.g., here, here, and here), Hezbollah’s operations in the north, complementing Hamas’s attacks (abetted by Egyptian jihadists) in the southwest, have been supplemented by (a) Iran-backed jihadists on Israel’s eastern border (over a dozen jihadist “battalions,” including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades) in the West Bank; and (b) the Houthis (Ansar Allah), Iran’s proxies in Yemen, who conduct bombing raids from over the horizon. One of the Houthis’ Iranian-made missiles was struck by an Israeli interceptor missile before hitting Tel Aviv just a few days ago. (Israel has denied early reports that this was a hypersonic missile. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has reportedly developed such missiles, which travel at extraordinarily high speed and with maneuverability in flight, making them difficult to track and defend against.)

 

The war is constricting Israel’s territory. In the West, we are largely uninformed about the effect this is having. That’s not just because we are not experiencing it ourselves. Israel’s forces and defense measures are so effective that the jihadists arrayed against them have been unable to carry out an attention-grabbing, mass-casualty strike since last October 7.

 

In Israel, however, the intensifying war in the north means a second school year has now begun with a significant slice of the population forced out of their communities, schools, and homes. This is increasing the pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — a fragile coalition that was already under political duress due to the pre-October 7 controversy over a proposed overhaul of Israeli courts and the stunning intelligence failures in the lead-up to Hamas’s attack, in which nearly 1,200 were killed, 251 were taken hostage, and hundreds more maimed, raped, and wounded.

 

In the transnational-progressive echo chamber, Israel suffers from a competence penalty: As a tiny island in a sea of hostiles, it has become adept at homeland defense. Consequently, it is hamstrung by the Left’s distortion of proportionality. This principle of warfare is actually not a bean-counting exercise in which Israel’s combat operations must be constrained by how many Israelis its enemies succeed in killing.

 

In war, the objective is to break the enemy force’s will so that the fighting ends. That — victory — is the surest way to minimize casualties. It is far preferable, in this grim calculation, to the “international community’s” appetite for cease-fires that enable terrorists and their state sponsors to regroup for future murder, mayhem, and repression of civilian populations, rather than being defeated conclusively.

 

The laws of war do not outlaw victory. It is not expected that an honorable military force will cause no civilian casualties. Notice that in the Obama years, Brennan defended himself by stressing — quite correctly — that U.S. precision drone strikes assassinated terrorists while minimizing collateral damage. He didn’t claim to have eliminated civilian deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure. The only way to do that, when confronted by an enemy that flouts the laws of war by embedding in civilian areas, is to surrender. Instead, honorable combatants are expected to make reasonable efforts — not the herculean efforts Israel customarily makes, but reasonable efforts — to limit civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure while nevertheless killing and capturing enemy fighters and demolishing enemy assets.

 

Proportionality is a matter of trying to ensure, within reasonable military judgment, that the degree of force used is commensurate with the military significance of the target, recognizing that there will inevitably be collateral damage — even a great deal of damage if the target is sufficiently valuable.

 

Needless to say, Hezbollah has no interest in the Western conception of civilized warfare . . . except insofar as it can be used against Israel and the West.

 

In just the last two months of its war of aggression, Hezbollah killed twelve Israeli Druze children in a missile strike that hit a soccer field. Israel responded with a targeted air strike that killed Hezbollah’s senior commander in Lebanon, Fuad Shukr — only to be lectured about “escalation” by the Biden-Harris administration, notwithstanding Shukr’s leading role in the afore-described 1983 attack in which 241 U.S. Marines were killed. As ever, Hezbollah proceeded to launch regular barrages of rockets at northern Israel, leading up to August 25’s attempt to fire in excess of 2,000 missiles simultaneously, a major attack thwarted at the last minute by Israel’s preemptive strike (in which about 100 IDF warplanes took out nearly 300 of Hezbollah’s missile launchers, among other targets in Lebanon). With that gambit having failed, Hezbollah tried again less than two weeks ago, with a more modest barrage of over 200 rockets and drones; but on alert, Israel managed another preemptive aerial blitz that rendered the attack a failure.

 

Following the smashing success of the grim-beeper operation, Hezbollah launched another 120 rockets on Friday. As usual, the barrage had little effect, except in underscoring that the constant missile fire has left northern Israel scarcely inhabited. Netanyahu, however, had better steel himself for another “escalation” lecture by the Biden-Harris administration because the IDF followed this enemy attack by killing Ibrahim Aqil, yet another Hezbollah commander, who was complicit in both the Marine barracks and U.S. Embassy bombings in 1983, along with about 20 other jihadists in what they mistakenly thought were their Beirut safe houses.

 

This is the daily reality for Israel. From every side it faces jihadists who are trying to kill its citizens. But under the competence penalty, we’re supposed to consciously avoid the annihilationist intentions of these enemies — who are also committed enemies of the United States — and hand-wring about collateral damage from pagers exploding on terrorist hips.

 

Of course there was no way Israel would know exactly where those hundreds of pagers were going to be positioned when they were detonated. But because it knew Hezbollah assigned pagers to its operatives, Israel, in its defense, devised a scheme that maximized discrimination — unlike the jihadist aggressors, who murder indiscriminately. The operation had a very high chance of taking out Hezbollah fighters without causing too many civilian casualties. It was proportionate. As a matter of practice, moreover, the IDF has gone to historically unprecedented lengths to avoid civilian casualties, at the expense of the safety of its own troops, and with the knowledge that these measures allow some number of jihadists to evade capture — jihadists who will use this new lease on life to plot and execute future attacks against Israeli civilians and troops.

 

Even given the low expectations that attach from John Brennan’s years in the Obama-Biden national-security orbit, it’s astounding to hear him fret that Israel’s brilliant surgical attack on Hezbollah jihadists may not have been “strategically wise” because it ran the risk of “further emboldening Hezbollah’s interest in trying to lash back against Israel.” What part of “Death to America and Death to Israel” does our nation’s former top intelligence official not get?