On Nasrallah's Strategic mistakes
Regular readers know I am very reticent to blog about Zionism and Israel and the wider Middle East during intense bouts of fighting. I don’t think philosophers should cheer on war, which is a time of deceit and intense propaganda, and punditry is not our comparative advantage. Attentive readers know how I think about war crimes. If you care to know what my political orientation about the wider conflict is recall (this) rather well read piece, and this companion piece on Hamas (recall here), alongside (this) post written during the cease-fire of November 2023. These pieces have held up surprisingly well. If you want to know how I think about the Manicheism inherent in treating Israel as a colonial or foreign entity (recall here).
When on October 8, 2023, Hassan Nasrallah, decided to open a second front “in solidarity" (Reuters, 10/8/23) with the Palestinian people he acted recklessly. As even moderate attention to the Israel press would have revealed, the Israeli political and military leadership have been waiting for an opportunity to revisit the 2006 War for close to a generation, especially because Hezbollah had systematically ignored security council resolution 1701 and not withdrawn its forces to the Litani river. To be sure, that’s not the reason why I call it ‘reckless.’
Rather, Nasrallah’s decision effectively handed Hamas a veto over when Hezbollah could return to an (informal) ceasefire with Israel. Anything else would be a betrayal. This is reckless because one doesn’t have control over the most important bit of one’s strategic future. This is, of course, compatible with many other excellent leadership qualities. In what follows I emphasize Nasrallah’s strategic errors, but his endurance and successes make him a worthy object of study in contemporary practices of charismatic leadership against the odds.
The folly of this (oct 8) decision started to appear as the months unfolded. While Israel’s response to Hamas was clearly improvised and not well calibrated, the response to Hezbollah showed clinical and cold efficiency. After the evacuation of Israel’s border communities (roughly 60,000 people [including some of my distant cousins]), it clearly was imposing non-trivial damage on Hezbollah’s fighters. The disparity of outcomes between the fronts was so large that at various points I wondered to what degree Hamas’ militia was being fought by the IDF with relatively under-trained reserves and Hezbollah with the crack fighting units.
Now, Nasrallah clearly didn’t think he was being reckless. He must have felt that Hezbollah (perhaps with Iran’s backing lurking in the background) had sufficient deterrent capability to contain Israel’s reaction to it. Throughout the past year as the mutual reprisals intensified, it was clear that Hezbollah didn’t want a full-scale war. This left the initiative to Israel, which its military doctrine emphasizes. It also meant that Hezbollah could not marshal any of the ordinary advantages of asymmetric warfare, and Israel could exploit superior firepower and (arial) mobility.
Then in June Hezbollah published footage gathered from its surveillance aircraft of locations in Israel, including Haifa (Israel’s third city and main port). The temptation to do so is readily understandable: it projects strength and is a key piece of psychological warfare to create uncertainty and fear. The problem is if you don’t want full-scale war, you should not signal your offensive, but your defensive capabilities. Hezbollah was just incentivizing a first strike against it. In fact, it became increasingly clear that Hezbollah has no real answer to Israel’s air and naval superiority. This was illustrated from late December onward by Israel’s streak of many successful assassinations of Hezbollah and Iranian (and Hamas) military commanders in Syria and Lebanon. This also showed that Israel had much better, even astonishing, intelligence.
While one may debate the legality of the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, they turn out to have had a clear military logic behind it (in addition to its role in psychological warfare). They forced Hezbollah and its Iranian military advisers to end all non-face-to-face discussions out of fear that the Israelis were listening in and could pinpoint location. This was ruinous for Hezbollah because it allowed Israel to take out a number of commanders at the same time each time Hezbollah commanders gathered. So, for example, when Israel killed Ibrahim Aqil earlier in the week, it simultaneously killed “as many as 10 other senior commanders of the movement's Radwan special forces unit.”
This led to a fateful final reckless decision: Nasrallah’s meeting with his remaining commanders and leading Iranian advisors (including Brig. gen. Nilforoushan) in a bunker built under civilian buildings. By calling this meeting Nasrallah endangered himself and many innocent others.
As an aside, Israel’s critics, including leading figures in the international human rights community, generally discounts its claims about the use of human shields by its enemies or treat it as bad faith. But that’s evidently not always so even if it offers no justification for war crimes.
Be that as it may, Nasrallah’s continued threats against Israel mid-week and Hezbollah’s policy of increased retaliation — including launching a Qadr 1 missile at Tel Aviv — was not based on the reality principle on the balance of strength. And because it had given Hamas operational veto over its most strategic decisions, it had no way to signal to Israel that it would credibly retreat and, thereby, give Netanyahu his victory in the North.* As I write this, Hezbollah is still being attacked with near impunity by the Israelis.
As regular readers know, I view Israel’s policy toward Hamas and the Palestinians as a cul-de-sac. For, even a decisive military victory over Hamas will be squandered if there are no political aims that include reparations, the flourishing, and dignity of Palestinians with whom Israelis share land. For, absent Palestinian buy-in, the safety of Jews in Israel turns out to be an illusion.
But inhumane and compassionate-less foolishness on one side doesn’t excuse recklessness on another. Hezbollah alone has no credible political claim against Israel.+ In most of its communications about Israel, it views Israel as wholly illegitimate and Israel’s Jews who arrived after 1948 as illegitimately present. It dooms itself and Lebanon to open-ended warfare against superior fighting power.
Nasrallah was Lebanon’s powerbroker without allowing a genuinely independent Lebanon, which de facto lacks sovereignty over its own territory and is incapable of providing many basic services. By holding on to its weapons and separate institutions, Hezbollah has massively contributed to the continued dysfunction of the Lebanese government and Lebanese sectarian politics. Hezbollah’s main political achievement of the last decade, arming and saving Assad’s tyrannical regime (even by its own lights) from defeat in a bitter civil war is nothing to be proud of.
After last week Hezbollah risks further defeats and internal strife about leadership positions and strategy in the coming period. The Shiite people of Lebanon, which it has helped emancipate, make powerful, and which it has served with such distinction now risk enormous political defeats, casualties, and displacement.
And this points to the ultimate recklessness of the past year: Hezbollah was widely viewed as a pawn of Iran’s (and also Syria’s) strategic interests. And this perception was strengthened by that fact that rather than making true peace with its Lebanese compatriots Hezbollah successfully dominates it by physical force since 2008 (see here). It, therefore, also makes a true peace between Lebanon and Israel (which share not a few common interests) impossible.
There is a wider lesson here. When militias ‘win’ (as Hezbollah did a generation ago) they have to make a fateful and baleful decision: to convert their gains in an ordinary political process in which (the threat of) military force is set aside. The IRA managed this successfully. Hezbollah never dared do this and chose ‘resistance;’ ‘glory;’ and ‘martyrdom.’** It is to be hoped that Nasrallah didn’t lock his successors into a similar narrow path.
*Some other time, I will write in depth about President Biden’s diplomatic ineptness throughout the past year. But the midweek ceasefire proposal was foolish because it did not allow Israel to secure any gains from its tactical victories and had no credible way to secure compliance by Hezbollah or to prevent it to re-take initiative.
+The Shebaa Farms are claimed by Lebanon and Syria, but were held by Syria when Israel conquered it.