The Price of Strategic Slovenliness
Episode Notes
Transcript
Eric welcomes Eliot back from his long travels who reports back on his trip with a bipartisan delegation of national security experts to Israel and recounts the ongoing trauma that both the Israeli public and national security elite are experiencing over the attacks on October 7 and the ongoing saga of the hostages. He describes the comprehensive nature of the failures (intelligence, political, operational and tactical) that Israel experienced that day and over the next several weeks as well as the resilience with which Israeli society and the IDF have reacted. They discuss the adjournment of politics in Israel while the war is underway, how long that will last and Bibi’s political prospects in the long run (spoiler alert: Eliot thinks Bibi will go at some point). They discuss the rules of engagement, how Israel is fighting the war, the prospects for a ceasefire and hostage exchange, the dangers of escalation in the north with Hezbollah, and the links that Eliot believes exist between the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine and the prospective conflict over Taiwan.
https://sonofadiplomat.substack.com/p/2024-a-year-of-global-consequence
Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
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Welcome to shield in
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the Republic of Secret Podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Littman during World War two. That a strong and balanced foreign policy is the necessary shield of our Democratic Republic. Eric Edelman, a counselor at the center for Teagic and budgetary assessments, a Bulwark contributor and a non resident fellow at the Miller Center, and I’m rejoined by my partner in this enterprise after long travels around the around the globe to the antipodes and beyond, Elliot Cohen, the Robert Eazgood professor of strategy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in the Arleigh Burke Chair at the center for strategic and international studies. Welcome back Elliot after long, long travels away.
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Well, thanks Eric. It’s, good to be back. Forgive me if I, hack a little bit. I’ve got, just getting over the flu. I don’t know that was travel induced or not.
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But in any case, I’m not I don’t not quite sure I feel like saying happy new year. I just hope it’s a better year. Jonathan Last from the point of view of international politics.
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Yes. And domestic politics. So, Yeah.
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Well, that that’s a given.
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I absolutely agree. I don’t know whether your flu is travel induced. I know mine was, earlier, in December. So I feel your pain. But, I wanna hold your reflections on the, antipodes since you were down, you know, in Southern hemisphere, for a later podcast when we can, bring that to bear in a discussion of China.
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But because you’ve spent, I think what about ten days?
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Yeah.
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In in Israel, I think, talking about what, what is going on in, in, the Middle East Gaza, the war, what’s going on inside Israel would be of great interest to our listeners. So, I know you’re working on a piece that’s gonna appear in the Atlantic soon. Why don’t we start there? And tell us a little bit about about, how you’ve been thinking about, the conflict from the, you know, from the beginning.
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So, thanks. Let me just begin by describing the trip. The Israelis’s, indicated to me through a a friend who’s in the foreign ministry, that they would be willing to welcome a small delegation of national security and military experts. And I agreed to lead it the condition was that we would fund ourselves. So I was able to get some external American fundings.
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We didn’t have any Israeli funding. But the Israelis facilitated lots of meetings, both on their own and with help from various connections that I had and some members of the group. So a very small group, about seven or eight of us. Some people from CSAS, from Rand. It’s bipartisan.
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We had a former deputy National Security Advisor under, Barack Obama. We did we had, our friend, Mick Ryan, who we’ve had on the show before retired Australian major general, and one or two others. So it was a very expert group. I’d say most of the people were quite familiar with Israel. Couple were not.
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And it was extraordinarily intense, but as soon as we got off the airplane, we were in, dinner with some senior Israeli military planners, we spent on half the time in Tel Aviv, half the time in Jerusalem. Lots and lots of meetings with current and was gonna say retired but in Israel that never quite retire. Senior military and intelligence officials, We also had, meetings with, politician with Julie Edelstein, who’s the chairman of the Conesset Foreign Affairs and, security committee. That’s it’s really like, the armed services committee and the foreign relations committee and the intelligence committee’s all all wrapped into once who is actually a very, very powerful and influential legislator. A couple of, some of the best, Israeli journalists in both the defense field and the Arab Affairs field.
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And then two day trips, both quite long and Pretty profound. We spent a day on the Gaza border. We went to two of the kibbutzim that were overrun on October seventh Kibbutz Berry and, Kibbutz near Oz, and, that was it was deeply moving. I mean, the there’s no longer, human remains, but the the destruction looks very fresh, and it’s pretty wrenching. Particularly, we were shown around in each case by survivors of the attack who, you know, were describing.
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Okay. So and so lived here. This is what happened to her. This is what happened. Tour two children and and so forth.
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They then we went to a, like, kind of a weapons exploitation area where they were going through some of the technology that Hamas had with them, which was actually pretty sophisticated. And then to cap, it was a pretty hard day. We saw this forty seven minute film, which you, may have heard of. So for those of you who haven’t heard of it, it’s it is Simply a compilation of dash cams and body cams and closed circuit TV and selfies and things like that. There are English subtitles.
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But those are really translations. There’s no commentary at the end. Some of the footage was taken by victims, some by perpetrators. And one of the things that was pretty fiendish about the Hamas attack they’re very deliberately filming all this stuff, including, lots of atrocities. And, it was I have to tell you the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen a fair amount of bad stuff.
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It was truly the the barbarity, the cruelty, the torture, rape. I mean, it and at the end of it, the thing that that shatters you is they say, okay. This was ten percent of the murders that happened that day. We had another one day excursion, which was to the northern border, which was fascinating. We really got pretty close.
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I don’t think we could get that close today because that border’s getting hotter and hotter, meeting with different military commanders, outposts, senior planners, and so forth. We ended up on the Golan Heights, which has actually also been heating up because, Iranian backed militias and Hezbollah are active in the Mount Herman area. So, all in all, really, it was a nonstop. It was fascinating. It was draining.
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And it did give me some, I think, some pretty profound insights. Let me just put out one and then you you react to it and tell me where you wanna go with the conversation. I think the thing first thing to understand is this is a traumatized society. You see it as soon as you get off the airport where there’s a long line of pictures of hostages. You see it in the expressions on people’s faces.
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You know, the hotels are have really they have some solidarity missions there, but most of the people staying there are refugees from the, the two borders in the south and the north. Israel has a substantial internally displaced person. Problem about two hundred thousand people all told. And and that that, you know, that’s really the the psychic burden is one that I think a lot of Americans may not fully appreciate. I in this Atlantic piece I’ve mentioned, I proposed the role, the rule of thirty, if you wanna understand this.
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So the rule of thirty is whatever the Israeli suffered, multiply it by thirty, and you have a sense of what that would mean to the United States. So instead of twelve hundred dead, imagine thirty six thousand. You know, instead of two hundred and forty hostages, imagine seven or eight thousand. And so on, instead of couple of hundred rapes, thousands. I mean, it’s it is not surprising that there is a profound trauma.
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The num rough numbers were something like about fifteen nine elevens on one day. And think back to where we were after nine eleven. But the other thing that I would say is that there’s a particular kind of trauma that afflicts the Israeli National Security elite. I mean, a lot of these are people I’ve known for a long time, some of them I consider friends. And so I have a pretty good idea of what their baseline demeanor is.
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You know, some reserves, some embullient Some very cocky, some very mild mannered, and in just about every case, people were way off baseline. You know, some of the most arrogant people that I knew, remarkably humble now. Some people who are pretty mild mannered actually quite aggressive. And and the thing is that beyond the the trauma that all Israelis feel and all Israelis know people were who are either killed on that day. They’ve been killed since.
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They all have either serving themselves or have kids or service have been called up
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very few degrees of separation.
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There are very few degrees of separation. But for members of the national security elite, there is on top of that a layer of guilt and shame, and rage that they failed and that they betrayed a trust. And that’s gonna go very, very deep. It does go very deep. And I think as, you know, as we work with the Israelis through this, it’s it’s very important that we in the United States understand that’s what that elite is going through because it’s gonna color all of their decisions.
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You know, I have some experience of that myself having, been in the White House on nine eleven and, talking with Bob Gates who you and I talked to a couple of weeks ago on this show. And when he came in talking about one of his observations about all of us who had been involved in the government on nine eleven was the determination that everybody had to not let this happen on our watch again. And, yep, and that I don’t wanna get into what that may or may not have, you know, affected in terms of people’s judgment. But, I, you know, I’m familiar with the phenomenon well, look, my, for what it’s worth, not having been to Israel myself, but having spoken with a number of Israelis over the last, two and a half months, seventy five days or so, whatever the number is since since the event. I too have detected just, you know, this profound as you say, traumatization, of Israeli society and and for all the reasons you outline, it’s completely understandable.
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I guess, I think you’re in the Atlantic piece. You’re writing really about both the nature of the failure and kind of, you know, how the Israelis are recovering. Why don’t you talk about that a little bit?
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So the, let’s start with the bad news. And the failure, this is it’s not just that this is a major watershed in Israeli history, which it is. This is undoubtedly the greatest failure. In the history of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, and there’s intelligence establishment to include the Kipper war. And I I include the Kipper war because that occurred far away.
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There was time and space to recover. The losses, although severe, were not, you know, primarily civilian losses. And in the horrific circumstances that, occurred, and the and the failure was not oh, the failure had some comprehensive elements to it, but much more comprehensive in this. There’s a political failure. That’s the failure of the Netanyahu government, which thought that it would be a great idea.
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To have cutter shoveling lots of money into Hamas. And then for them to let in eighteen to twenty thousand Palestinian workers, and then occur occasionally mow the grass as the saying goes, some retaliation when there’s some rockets fired, and to think they had it under control, which they didn’t. It was a strategic failure In that, the high command seems simply not to have taken seriously that there would be a threat if, you know, the the gossip order was radically under under defended, most of the forces have been shifted over to the West Bank. There was simply not an appreciation that this would be could be a serious challenge. The on the intelligence side, there were some warnings that they had the plan, but the plan was dismissed as aspirational.
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Not as something that they could do and some of the warnings tragically from some of these young women, who operated the observations stations on the border, were disregarded. I think either whether it’s because they were women or more likely because there were conscripts that was serious. There was a operational failure in several respects on three o’clock in that morning on, that Saturday, October seventh. There was a phone call because the intelligence was picking up some serious alarms. The chief of staff, the head of the Southern Command.
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I think the head of the domestic security service, the Shabbak. At the end of the conversation, the Shabbac had alerted his counter terrorism force, and then the other two just went back to sleep. It was an operational failure. The Israelis had positioned. They have a division, the Gaza division, which controls all the units immediately in the vicinity of the Gaza strip.
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That headquarters and the headquarters of its two subordinate brigades written a base called Rahim, which is only a few kilometers from the border. It was overrun in the very beginning. And the result some soldiers were killed in their beds. And, What then happened was the the soldiers at the base were so busy fighting for their lives. They weren’t able to exercise command and control.
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Over the rest of the situation. So it was a chaotic several days of fighting along the Gaza strip with the result that, for example, near Rose, Kibutz that I mentioned, a, the guy who was showing us around said not a single bullet was fired by the IDF here. These guys left on their own. A similar story at, a place called Naho’s. We we met This amazing retired major general No t bone, who gets a call from his son who’s in that keyboardist.
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You know, there are terrorists outside, and he dashes down with his wife and a pistol. An incredible story. They leave Tel Aviv around seven fifteen. They get in to the kibbutz, I think, at two thirty. He was the first IDF soldier to get there.
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So operationally, a disaster. Practically, Also a disaster. I mean, the some of the people at Sam were able to put up a fight. Actually, those that were able to have their internal security committees alerted were able to usually do a lot better than some of the others. The the Hamas knew where to go, for the armories of the, kind of local watch group.
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They had excellent, intelligence from the Palestinians who had been, the Gods who had been working there. But you know, what then happens is a lot of Israeli soldiers go rushing on their own down south, including from a lot of their elite units. The problem is that it’s it’s not done in a particularly coordinated way, and in a number of cases, in one case, at least, they ended up going into a hot landing zone. So, so an elite unit comes in on a helicopter. They, you know, they thought this was a limited and incursion.
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And the helicopter gets shot down. And, Hamas had sent they had sent ambushes outside these, he would assume. So Sayerant Matkal, which is their equivalent of US Army Delta, lost more soldiers in third in one day. Than it had in the previous thirty years. So, all across the board, this is a comprehensive failure.
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Now The good news, if one one can speak of such, is, as is so typical in Israeli history, and this is a repeated pattern. They recover very quickly. A tremendous tremendous amount of spontaneous self organization. You know, reserve units began showing up over strength because Guys who have been out of them for a long time, put on their old uniforms and show up. The Israelis are able to, in very short order, mobilize three hundred and fifty thousand troops.
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They eventually can restore order it. By the way, the last terrorist was killed two and a half weeks after October seventh. He’d gotten as far as beersheba. You know, as we all know, they go into the Gaza strip. They’ve done I, you know, I think you have to say on a kind of military technical basis pretty well, given the difficulty of the circumstances that they’re going into a very dense urban environment, which has been carefully fortified and prepared.
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So, you know, the end of society has been tremendously resilient. You know, it’s a remarkable thing that this disaster happens and, the the the planes are full not leaving the country. The planes are full getting into the country, which says something, but it’s, When you step back, it’s just a colossal colossal failure, and they know it. I mean, they don’t need anybody to tell them that.
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Given that colossal failure, in the past, you mentioned, nineteen seventy three, Obviously, there was the Agronaut Commission, you know, after after that, which led to a big shakeup in Israeli politics, actually really led to a a gigantic shift in Israeli politics within a few years in nineteen seventy seven is sort of the end of the labor left dominance of Israeli politics. And the beginning of the period of, you know, right wing dominance in Israeli, politics from nineteen seventy seven on with a couple of minor exceptions. The same after the Sabra Chatela massacre in nineteen eighty two have another commission after the two thousand, six war, the Vineegrad Commission also led to, you know, big shakeups Resignation of the chief of defense, etcetera. What, you know, what’s happening now? I mean, you get the sense that politics has been adjourned And that certainly suits BB.
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Because you would like to keep it adjourned and, you know, put off this reckoning that presumably will come. But just, yeah, I know in the last twenty four hours, we’ve had a decision of the higher court to throw out the judicial reform that was passed, in the summer. That was at the behest of of, BB’s, government, which divided Israeli society in enormously So is the adjournment of politics about to end and politics about to bubble up even in the midst of a war? What’s your sense and What’s your sense of of, you know, BB’s longevity? I mean, a lot of people think he’s done ultimately, but, you know, he’s been fairly resilient himself as a politician.
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So I think, you know, politics has been put on pause, but as you as you said, I mean, that pause may be coming to an end. Mean, it the the loathing of BBi is now pretty much universal. You may have a few loyalists still in the league could, but I don’t think he has many. I mean, the issue is more people in the really hard right. Like, into my bin fear and what’s the name of Smotrich?
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The the conundrum is that there’s no immediate mechanism for getting rid of him. On the one hand, on the other hand, the the popular outrage is so profound that it’s inescapable that he gets driven from power. Mean, this is just there’s no question about it, I think. You know, you mentioned these commissions. I’m sure there’ll be another one.
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After this, it’ll be unsparing. It’ll be brutal. A lot of people will resign. Actually, a lot of the senior military people have already indicated that I take responsibility, and I’m gonna resign when this is over. You know, what one of our interlocutor said, look, there’s gonna be demonstrations with a million people in the streets of Jerusalem government won’t be able to function.
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People are so mad. And I I tend to think that that’s right. But somebody else said, but a line, which I think was is very apropos. He said, you know, after a really big earthquake, they’re usually big aftershocks. And the aftershocks are as consequential as the earthquake sometimes.
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I think that’s the case here too. I think it’s too early to tell what realignments of politics is going to cause. Yeah, I have a hunch that you’ll see new new actors entering politics. That’s one thing that I think will happen that, you know, some of these reservists when they come back from Gaza who will be absolutely infuriated. Some of them, and they’re who are public spirited bunch, by and large.
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Some of them will enter politics to maybe new parties. This is gonna completely reshuffle the deck. So I think it would be a mug’s game trying to predict that. I don’t think BB can last. I mean, there is there is something almost sociopathic in his refusal to accept any kind of responsibility.
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Mean, he, as sometimes happens with sociopaths, he was you know, he actually tried shifting the blame to other people early on, and the reaction was so ferocious that even he deleted the tweets or whatever it was, But I think he generally doesn’t he probably generally thinks this is unfair, somehow. So I I think he this is not somebody who is in the normal range of politicians at this moment. As a perilous situation for the country, because, you know, you’re you’re in the middle of a war with the political leader that nobody trusts. And he’s got a group of people around him. His work cabinet, who are quite capable, but they don’t trust him either.
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You know, one of the things that has been part of the political scene for weeks now are the demonstrations from the relatives of the hostages demanding another ceasefire with Hamas and another exchange of of hostages. Now, I mean, I guess there are a couple of questions I have here. One is how many of the hostages do we think are actually still alive? I mean the Israelis themselves have said they think something like thirty either died in captivity or were killed. I think that still leaves something like about a hundred and thirty or so hostages.
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Gutter, Turkey, others have been for the French, have been trying to promote the idea of a ceasefire to allow for a return of, of at least some, if not all of the remaining hostages, there does seem to be some pressure building, Hamas has basically said, not unless it’s a comprehensive ceasefire and, you know, and we stop all this. You know, they’re not gonna go along with that. There seemed to be some tensions between the internal leadership, which I I have to I have to think are under enormous, the physical pressure right now because the Israelis are closing in on them, yahya, sinwar, and Muhammad Diif, among others, Marwanissa. What, as opposed to the guys living in Dubai and and shuttling to Cairo who are, you know, still kind of live in the high life. What’s your sense of this?
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I mean, is there gonna be another ceasefire? Will there be another hostage exchange? Did you ever lose do they lose momentum from, you know, this is I wanna get into the some questions about the operation itself, but It strikes me that if you stop and pause, it allows Hamas reset to refresh.
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Yeah.
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They launched a big a barrage of rockets to ring in the new year, into Israel. What’s your sense of all that?
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Well, the, you know, the the some of the least satisfying conversations I have to say were when we talk to the Israelis about, war aims, You know, they have a list of six objectives, but, you know, when you begin poke poking at them is with all war objectives in any war that I’m familiar with, you find that they’re either vague or contradictory. Biggest challenge right now is There is unfortunately a terrible tension between the desire to destroy Hamas as a military entity as a political entity ruling Gaza, and the desire to recover the hostages because you probably won’t be able to do both. And, you know, no Israeli would would openly say, unfortunately, it’s much more important to destroy Hamas But some of them probably think that. They wouldn’t even say that to us, I think. But I I’m sure that some of them, you know, with deep pain in their hearts, believe that.
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So I think that’s a problem. You know, of course, the other problem is Can you actually destroy Hamas? Can you I mean, they’ve inflicted a lot of damage. I mean, they may have killed over half of their operatives. They’ve wiped out a lot of senior leadership.
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But, you know, to some extent, it’s an ideology. It’s, you know, it’s an outgrowth of the Muslim brotherhood of Egypt. And the Israelis are not willing to simply, you know, keep a quarter of a million troops in Gaza and kinda comb the place from end to end. Indefinitely, which is probably what it would take if you were really to, you know, exterminate every last one. So I think they’re they’re in a hard spot, and I’m not sure how well set up they are to really face that.
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Now I think what would ease their situation somewhat is if they manage to kill Senwar and Muhammad Dave and, Marwanissa, and one or two others. In other words, it’s kind of the absolute top Echelon. I think that would give them the kind of political coverage to pull back a bit. But in any case, However, this plays out, and I, you know, I wouldn’t presume to call it, beyond that. I mean, they will never have a real ceasefire with come us.
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They will have a pause. But I think from now on, you know, if they see a Marwanissa or Mohammed Deep or any of these guys, out in the open, and it really won’t make a difference where they are. They’ll kill them. You know, if they see Hamas units training out in the open as they saw, in the months and years before October seventh, you know, they’ll open fire on them. If they see, you know, demonstrations in Gaza on behalf of, Hamas, the open fire on those two.
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I mean, they’re The, you know, the the key thing is, I think from the Israeli point of view, the existential issue is in some ways on the table again. And so they’re playing by World War II kinds of rules. And this, by the way, I think this also speaks to the issue of Palestinian civilian civilian casualties. It’s not that the Israelis are callous. You know, they have their military lawyers, the way we have our jags.
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Who and they do shape targeting. I think they’ve have loosened the rules of engagement to put it mildly, but they still have rules of engagement they pretty much adhere to those and so on. But at the moment, I think the way they think about, You know, civilian casualties is probably the way British civilians thought about German civilian casualties in nineteen forty four. Or we thought about Japanese civilian casualties in nineteen forty four, which is not that we’re out there trying to kill civilians, but you know, it’s that kind of war.
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Yeah. I was reading an interesting article actually this morning about Israeli US and UK kinda attitudes towards both public and, you know, elite, legal opinions about the tension between protecting forces and risk of collateral damage and civilian casualties. And perhaps not surprisingly, as you might expect, the Israelis lean very heavily on the side of protecting their forces but, you know, whatever that, does to, you know, civilian casualties. The US is a little bit kind of in the middle and the UK is at the extreme end of you gotta protect the civilians even if it, you know, means you’re running risk. And you and I experienced that when, you know, British lawyers would stop strikes in Iraq kind of, you know, it’s just at the moment we were about to hit people.
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Or their guys were about to hit people.
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You know, that the re the relevant comparison, I think, would have been if you could only survey in the United States or Great Britain the parents or, husbands or wives of military personnel. Right.
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Yeah. And
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then I bet you would have gotten very
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different
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different answer. I mean, they, you know, one of the things that really does strike me about this whole episode as as with Ukraine, by the way, and I think maybe we can get into what some of the connections because I think there are connections. These are wars like World War two, and they are existential. They are against an enemy who is credibly cruel and duplicitous and just evil. And we’re not used to that.
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You know, Iraq, I mean, they were evil. Alcotti Interrock with plenty evil. This was far away. It was not existential. You know, it was a small kind of section of American society that was fighting it.
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It could go on for a long period of time without damaging the economy or anything like that. So our our framework is just completely completely out of whack, and it I think it it helps account for some of the really poor analysis that you’ve had. I mean, as long as I’m just on that, if I and maybe we can talk about this too, you know, our hometown newspaper, the Washington Post, which is really sort of rebranding itself as Algesira on the potomac, I think, you know, has been just awful in its understanding of what the Israelis are going. I mean, you know, I don’t think they’re even trying. And instead, it’s a, you know, it’s simply a litany of, humanitarian reporting.
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Some of it very bad, and some of the things they’ve had to retract, including a story about mothers being separated from their babies where they didn’t even bother to check with the Israelis. And they, you know, had to fess up that they completely misreported that. But I think it’s because you have reporters who, for whatever reason, just can’t conceive of the kind of war that the Israelis or in a different way the Ukrainians find themselves, fighting.
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Let me let me ask about that. I I look, I take point completely about the, World War two like quality of this. I do get the sense And, I mean, maybe I’m wrong, but that the Israeli that the Israelis, although they now are developing better intelligence, when they went in, did not have great intelligence. I mean, so for instance, what I’ve heard I’d be interested in what you’ve heard is that the tunnel network is much deeper, more ramified, more sophisticated
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than even they had, suspected,
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beforehand. They’re dropping lots of, I mean, crazy amounts of ordinance. And my sense is a lot of that is because there trying to destroy the tunnels from above rather than try and fight below ground to destroy. And then that the inevitable consequence of that is collateral damage and horrible visuals that the Israelis have to to deal with So I’m curious whether that you think that’s correct reading. And the second point I would, ask you about is I’ve been surprised at how much leash the Biden administration has been giving Israel.
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I mean, my sense is privately they’re pressing them to be more targeted to to, you know, stop dropping all the bombs and missiles and to, you know, go towards more kind of targeted killing, of, you know, Hamas senior leaders, perhaps in a in hope that as you were suggesting the Israelis can then declare victory and stop. But in general, I’ve been pretty impressed by you know, the resupply, you know, the, very quick and quiet resupply even while there are these clearly some tense conversations going What’s your sense of of all of that?
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Sure. Those are two different things. I think on the intelligence side, they they have been surprised by the as you say, the depth and ramifications of the, gossip Metro as they call it. You know, part of the intelligence failure appears to have been a very heavy, reliance on visual intelligence and on signals intelligence and and in on imagery. I mean, one thing we were told which I found sort of jaw dropping is they closed their open source intelligence operation.
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In that part of the world, I think it was Bernard Lewis said, you said, it it I think that’s the great Middle East expert said, you know, in some parts of the world, you, don’t pay any attention to what politicians say in public, but you believe what they say in private. In this part of the world is the reverse. You pay no attention to what they say in private. And every and all attention to what they say in public. And there were, you know, there were a lot of warning signs and things that were publicly available.
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In terms of Xinwar’s speeches. So, so for example, they made a television series in Gaza showing how they would break through at multi many different points and do these things. Ron DeSantis gave the producers some sort of award and makes a big speech saying, yeah, this is exactly what we’re going to do. And it got away from them. I also think I’d, another one of our agent lockett who said there’s probably a human intelligence failure here too that you know when they’re
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doing I think that has maybe some some possible lessons for us because we’ve also freaky valued open source intelligence in our own intelligence.
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I I think they’re enormous lessons for us, and we we would be fools If we just said, well, that shows you that these relish are not competent because the truth is, at the end of the day, despite everything and everything that I’ve just said, they’re very smart, you know, they’re very serious. They’ve put a lot of effort and resources to it, and they still got fooled. So, you know, we need to think about what that means for us because I think it does have profound implications. The one thing I’m saying on the intelligence side, I think it’s true in any war, that as you get into contact with the enemy, you develop more intelligence. I mean, if you remember back to the First Gulf War, I think we started with two Iraqi nuclear targets, and we ended up with either twenty four twenty six.
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I forget how many. You know, he just the rubbing up of forces against each other, whether it’s on the ground or in the air, generates intelligence. In this case, the Israelis, if they’ve been capturing people who they interrogate, they’ve been capturing laptops and telephones and, you know, Godna, and they probably implanting sensors and different things. So I’m sure they’re they’re learning a lot more. And and, you know, the great strength of the Israelis is not necessarily getting it right in advance because I I’m not sure that they’re any better than anybody else at that.
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But they’re really good at learning fast. And I think you’re seeing that. On the administration, I I think the the heart of this is Biden himself. You know, I shudder to think what this would be like if Barack Obama was president. I think Biden has a deep visceral sympathy for the Israelis.
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He, he has enormous credit over there. I mean, they love him.
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He’s more popular than BBi. That’s for sure.
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Oh, he I mean, he no. I mean, one of them said he would we would elect him president in a heartbeat. You know, by showing up there, in the middle of a war, kind of, you know, metaphorically put his arm around the country, that made a huge difference. And, you know, the question is what he’ll do with that political capital, but but the main thing is he did it, and I think it was in serums from the heart. I suspect that, you know, there’s a general pattern out there, which is, I think governments are more sympathetic to the Israelis than populations.
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I think the governments are because they know what the enemy is like. I mean, you know, most Americans or anybody else for that. That’s a really good thing about people, you know, ISIS or movements like this. And, you know, what you see there is something that’s clearly recognizable. This kind of reveling in the most barbaric forms of cruelty and publicizing it and delighting in it, not being ashamed of it, but really proclaiming it.
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I mean, we all, you know, everybody who who’s had that sort of experience during the, the wars of the last twenty years is, oh, yeah. No. I’ve seen that one before. And I know which side I’m on. So I think that that helps explain it a lot.
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Where where I think the administration fall down, actually, I’d be really curious to know your view is. You know, I don’t Iran did not know this was coming. I think that’s pretty clear. His ball did not know it was coming. If they had, there could have been a very dangerous moment where they would have jumped into the war.
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But for sure, Iran is playing a very large role. When when we looked at the Hamas weapon stocks striking how many of them had come through Iran striking at the design of the improvised explosive devices, the drones. I mean, the the Iranian hand is all over this. And of course Iran is all over Hezbollah. It’s all over the shiite militias in Syria and of course all over the Houthis.
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And I think the mistake that we’re making is we’re, so far at any rate, not doing anything to really hit the Iranian hard enough to tell him to knock it off. I mean, again, you know, this goes back to I mean, you you and I remember you know, the the difficulty the Bush administration had and agreeing to do anything to the Iranians, but when you did, they backed off
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Right.
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You know, there’s there’s a great metaphor here when we’re getting briefed on the the front, the Lebanon frontier. There are infiltration attempts all the time. So he asked, okay. How’s it happened? They said, well, the Iranians will train Palestinian Islamic jihad, which is kind of a smaller group that operates in Gaza.
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And they will the, you know, the Iranians will kind of lead them right up to the fence. And they’ll say, see, you can get through right over there. Go for it, guys. We’ll be rooting for you the whole way.
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Yeah. We’re, you know, we’re behind you a thousand percent.
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Right. And, you know, they invariably get swacked, but, you know, the ratings are undoubtedly cheering them all the way. So I think that that’s where you know, the the administration is making a mistake. It’s, you know, it is just another version of something you and I have kind of torn out our thinning hair about for some time that the administration does sort of the right thing, but too little too late. Too hesitantly and too fearfully.
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And because I think their understanding of escalation dynamics is is very flawed and, you know, particularly here with the Iranians, you know? Yes. I you know, look, I it’s I think it’s inexplicable in some sense, you know, because for all the reasons you just articulated Elliot. I mean, obviously, if you don’t, you know, impose costs on the Iranians, you’re gonna get more of this behavior because they’re accomplishing their ends and it’s not costing them very much. That seems just very, you know, hard to understand.
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I I think that there’s a kind of psychological obstacle that a lot of the folks in administration have, possibly including the president. And that is that they believe deeply in their souls that the Bush administration made terrible mistakes by going into iraq and getting the United States way too involved in the Middle East and that, you know, we’re over committed there and we need to get you know, out of the Middle East ultimately so that we can concentrate on the pacing challenge of China, etcetera. And I think that is, you know, fundamentally disabling because it it convinces them that anything they do that would be along the lines you and I suggest would be to repeat the mistakes of the Bush administration. Yep. And and so I think they find it very hard, you know, intellectually to get there.
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Number one. Number two, I think there is another issue that is more real, which is the Saudis, as you know, I’ve been trying to negotiate with Hutte’s a, a kind of ceasefire that would allow the Saudis to extricate themselves from Yemen, which is something that you know, this administration has been, you know, advocating for a long time, as well. And has a lot of political support to Democratic Party, by the way. And so they’re, you know, the administration folks in administration will tell you that the Saudis are telling us not to whack the, you know, the houthis, you know, because that’ll just lead to escalation. It’ll derail this, you know, incipient agreement.
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My reading of this and I haven’t talked to the Saudi, so what do I know? But my reading of this is that it’s similar to some other discussions that you and I had, you know, back in the old days, which is what the Saudis don’t want is the administration to do some pinprick, quote, proportional retaliation that stirs up the houthis and leaves the Saudis with the problem.
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Right. Exactly.
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But but doesn’t solve.
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Exactly. I
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think that’s exactly right. And and that’s what, you know, if you at the record of these guys, that’s exactly what you would predict they would do. Yep. I I find it interesting that the UK is actually suggesting that it’s prepared to actually strike the Hutis, and I’m wondering whether the administration is gonna basically say, yeah, fine. Go ahead.
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Knock yourselves out.
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I mean, that would be appalling if so. No, the and the whole the houthi thing is incredible. And it and it’s, you know, you don’t have to invade, you know, if you had a couple of b two passes in the middle of the night, blew up a whole bunch of Houthy leadership and stockpiles and not coincidentally hit, some of their Iranian advisors, I think, would have a very salutary effect. But I agree with you. I don’t think the administration is willing to to take that that risk.
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And, you know, the one other part of this is when this gets to, I think, a deeper phenomenon in international affairs. People only think about the risk of action. They don’t think of, well, what are the risks of inaction. No. And and the truth is that inaction carries its own risks and you need to weigh those as well.
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But I don’t think that’s how they how they think about it. Having said all that, I I give them I give them credit. I think they are giving the Israelis room to maneuver. And and that’s and that’s really important because if the Israelis don’t come off with some sort of success, you are really setting up some much larger Middle East wars. Yes.
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Possibly to include a nuclear component. I mean, I’d I think the idea that, you know, nuclear weapons will always remain merely in the background in all this, particularly if Israel feels that it’s up against in Iran that has nuclear weapons. I I don’t believe that.
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Which, of course, they may be on the cusp of because if you look at what the I IAEA is reporting about enrichment levels, you know, essentially the Iranians are creeping out of the restrictions that have kept them from. Yep. Having a nuclear capability. So, you know, I I agree with that. You know, look, I think, again, the administration, I think, is very concerned about the, prospect of escalation into a, you know, larger major war, and that’s not an unreasonable concern.
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But I think it doesn’t take into account the degree to which Iran you know, as you were suggesting in your comments, they’re willing to fight to the last Palestinian, but, do they wanna give up Hezbollah which they see as their, you know, trump card against, you know, Israeli escalation and attacks on their nuclear program. I’m not sure. You know, I I think that they will be very reluctant to do that. And we can see that in their behavior. I mean, they’re poking, and there’s danger in that because obviously that could lead to a miscalculation and escalation.
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I think it’s also feeding. Tell me whether I’m wrong about this. I think it’s feeding a sense among the IDF leadership, and the broader security leadership in Israel that we’re gonna have to take care of this problem in the north at some point because we can’t live forever with his ball of sitting there with a hundred fifty thousand missiles and and rockets, you know, ready to overwhelm our defenses you know, even if we get away from just kinetic interceptors, which is we’re already on the kind of wrong side of the cost and position curve, But even if we go to, you know, some kind of directed energy missile defense, which is a lot cheaper, we just can’t live with this forever. We’re just gonna have to go and eliminate it. Which is my final escalation.
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I and and, I let me just reinforce that. So, one of the things that the war has shattered has been that part of the Israeli National Security conception or strategic conception. Which has been around a very long time in many ways since the early days of Israeli independence, which is that you’re gonna have strategic warning. That if you invest enough in really good intelligence, you can tell when the other guys are about to do something, and that’ll give you the time to launch a preemptive strike. That is to say they’re about to throw a punch.
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You throw a punch just before they throw their punch. I think they’ve now, you know, they’ve had two debacles now, seventy three, and then this, which make them realize, forget early warning. You may not get early warning. Second thing is bear in mind, it’s not just the missiles. So the when Hamas attacked, and it was a very elaborate, very professional, operation.
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They came in three waves. The first wave with the Nukba, which are their kind of trained light infantry, You could see those guys on the video. They moved like professional soldiers. They were disciplined, good fire discipline. You know, you could the movements were tactical.
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Then they had a second wave of the Casom brigades were more kind of you know, a kind of poor quality infantry type, and then just mobs of gazans who wanted to come out and loot and murder and rape. Well, if you look at Hezbollah, what Hezbollah has is they’ve got something called the Raduan. The Raduan are basically the notebook. It’s the same idea. That is to say a very highly trained light infantry.
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They’re deployed very similarly. That is to say all along that frontier, which, by the way, these relays
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violation of US security council resolution. Completely. You know, one, which was negotiated while you and I were in government.
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Right. And they were re remember they were supposed to be north of the Lettone River. Well, they’re right on the border. Where there are a whole bunch of Israeli settlements, and they have the same concept of operation, which is you attack simultaneously. You overwhelm the settlements.
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You know, you take hostages, and then you pull back, plus they have all the missiles, plus there’s a kind of a maritime component too. They have a kind of a an amphibious capability. So the Israelis are just not gonna be willing to talk that. And so I think that, you know, the the thing that we have to face is the Israelis for entirely understandable reasons are thinking about and will be thinking about preventive war. Not preemptive war.
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And there’s a, you know, it may just sound like the differences of VIN in a a couple of consonants, but it it’s not. It’s it’s a completely different concept. And it that makes it a much more dangerous situation. I one of the things I came away thinking was that there’s a pretty good chance that there will be a Hezbollah war. I mean, there already is.
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You know, it’s and again, it’s it’s it’s striking to me that, you know, if you look at, I mean, I’ll beat up on the Washington Post some more. You know, if you were to read simply read the Washington Post, you wouldn’t think that there’s been this continuous low level war which is entirely caused by Hezbollah. Nobody says this because the Israelis have been doing anything.
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Right.
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It’s because Hezbollah wants to get in on the act at some level. It continues and escalates.
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Or at least to be seen to be getting in the act.
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To be seen to be getting into it. And, you know, that’s just not gonna be wouldn’t be tolerable to us. Sure. And it’s not gonna be tolerable to the Israelis.
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I guess my my own sense is, has been that timeline for this. Right? It’s all a question of like what the timing is gonna be. And my sense was the Israelis have a lot of business to finish in in Gaza before they, you know, take on a kind of two front, war. My sense, you know, my sense had been in the next twelve months, maybe thirty percent chance of a a war, you know, in the north.
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But after they moved the five brigades out or announced the movement of five brigades out of Gaza, my kind of antenna went up a little bit, and I’m I’m thinking maybe it’s like forty percent chance.
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I I I think that’s right. I might even put it a little bit higher.
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Yeah. We’re running short of time. I have one final issue I wanted you to address because you raised it. And that is the links between what you observed and learned in your trip to to Israel and Ukraine and other conflicts going on around the world.
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So, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I’m gonna, at some point, try to put this into writing. You know, this past year, I went to Ukraine. I went to Israel, and I went to Taiwan. And, which is not a war zone yet. Thank goodness, but could easily become one.
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And I think in all cases, I found things that are somewhat similar and disturbing, which is there’s kind of a coalition operating in each case, and the other guy’s coalition is getting closer and closer together. It’s interesting that the Russians, and the Chinese have really tilted towards Hamas here. For example. These are conflicts where the other side really has no compunctions. About international law or even elementary decency of of any kind.
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There are conflicts where the way it’s not that the West doesn’t react. We react, but we don’t do enough. So I, you know, as you and I’ve talked about the nineteen thirties a lot. You know, it’s not that the West did nothing when the Italians invaded Ethiopia or after the Marco polo bridge incident in nineteen thirty seven or Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland in nineteen thirty six. They didn’t do enough.
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And and there’s just this sense that people are not almost not paying attention. And there’s a kind of complacency. And if, you know, if there’s if there’s one lesson everybody should take away from what happened in, on October seventh in Israel’s, you know, that’s intolerable. My My friend, Mc Ryan, he he’s letting me quote this in the, the article said he said that he thinks every political and military leader should have to watch that horrible movie. Be said because so that they know what the price of strategic slovenliness is.
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And I believe that. I mean, this is, and it applies to us every bit as much as it applies to Israel or Ukrainians or Taiwanese or Taiwan or anybody else?
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Well, that’s an appropriately gloomy note on which, shielded Republic can kick off the new year. It’s gonna be a very, it’s gonna be a very consequential, year. Our our producer is actually, on his sub stack. Son of a diplomat is actually posted about that. I’ll send it to you.
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It’s there’s gonna be a lot at stake this year, both at home and abroad. And so, stay tuned to shield of the Republic. We’ll try and eliminate it all for you.
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And I’ll I’ll try to be more cheerful next time. Yeah. Eric, I promise.
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Alright. It’s good to have you back, Elliot. Get well. And, we’ll talk next week.
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Very good. Look forward to it. See you.
