Sep. 30, 2024: Goodbye, Nasrallah

U.S. saved Nasrallah in October; U.S. leaks Israeli invasion plan; Kris Kristofferson, 1936-2024

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The Big Story

Shortly after Friday’s edition of The Scroll went out, Israel confirmed that its massive strike on Hezbollah’s underground command center had hit its intended target. Hassan Nasrallah—the leader of Hezbollah for the past 32 years and the handpicked protégé of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—is dead. Rejoice! The “powerful orator” who “maintained that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians” (all quotes from The New York Times) is no more. He has ceased to be. He has expired and gone to meet his maker, etc. 

The Scroll reached out to Tony Badran, Lee Smith, Jacob Siegel, and Tablet’s geopolitical analyst for some perspective on the powerful orator’s untimely passing. 

For the geopolitical analyst, the Nasrallah strike was important not merely for its strategic significance, but as an indication of Israel’s willingness to act on its own:

Nasrallah has been going in and out of his bunkers for nearly 20 years. The fact that Israel chose to kill him now therefore represents a break—a healthy one—with past assumptions. It would be interesting for a future disinterested scholar to weigh the evidence of how and when these assumptions were made and what kept them in place and to what extent they were hallucinated by the Israelis or foisted on them by a succession of delusional U.S. presidents, from George Bush to Barack Obama to Joe Biden.

Being able to think and act on its own seems like a minimum requirement for Israel’s survival as a nation. I’ve been saying for months that the minimal baseline for asserting that Israel has achieved that capacity after a year of grueling, painful war would be killing Nasrallah. For me, that’s the most meaningful thing about Nasrallah’s death—the break with U.S.-backed assumptions and strategies that amounted to a form of slow-drop euthanasia accompanied by pious falsehoods about “deals” with Iran and establishing a “Palestinian state.” 

By killing Nasrallah, Israel has very publicly told the euthanizers to fuck off. It has also established itself as potentially the only country on earth with the technological capacity, the military power, and the political will to actually win a war.

Lee was hopeful that the death of Nasrallah—and nearly every other high-level Hezbollah commander over the past two weeks—would help drain the swamp in Washington … of the army of glorified Hezbollah propagandists masquerading as Lebanon “experts” and “analysts.” As he wrote in an email:

Interesting to me is how it will shape academic research—universities and think tanks—on the Middle East. Over the last 40 years there has been a huge buildup of Hezbollah researchers, mostly Lebanese, who’ve filled positions throughout Western universities and think tanks in D.C. and other Western capitals, especially London and Paris. Most of these people were agents of influence, many working directly for or with Hezbollah. These are the people whose names we saw in the press, as well as in academic journals, explaining the character of the “resistance,” how it doesn’t really hate Jews, only Zionists, etc.

The decapitation not only proves them wrong, it makes them irrelevant. It appears likely that Hezbollah is on the verge of becoming a historical subject because it is no longer a living entity. These people will no longer appear in the press because Hezbollah won’t be in the press, because it is no longer a real thing. Perhaps most importantly, this class of experts will no longer be asked to share their insights with Western officials because, again, Hezbollah has been decapitated. While removing this disease will not entirely heal Western policymakers, the effects will nonetheless be salutary.

Lee added, however, that Nasrallah’s death …

underscores the dangers of what U.S. leadership has done to our country the last eight years. The assassination of Nasrallah and other high-level figures is likely to inspire attacks here in the United States. Americans could rest easier if we knew federal law enforcement was vigilant against such threats. Instead, starting in 2016, the Department of Justice and the FBI have run an ongoing campaign against the leader of the opposition, Donald Trump, and his aides and supporters. The resources the national security apparatus is supposed to deploy to protect have instead been turned against half the population. To make matters worse, the Biden administration has kept our borders open the last three-plus years. It would be reasonable to expect that immediately after the assassination of Nasrallah, the White House would see it as an occasion to enhance border security, if not close the borders entirely, but there is no evidence of anything like that. The men and women sworn to protect us have instead exposed us to terrible danger. 

Tony, who is from Lebanon, also focused his ire on the “D.C.-Beirut Corridor” and cautioned Americans and Israelis against caring about “Lebanon” or getting scammed into sending it more money:

It’s been simultaneously amusing and nauseating, following Nasrallah’s killing, to watch D.C. think tankers, or what I like to call the “D.C.-Beirut Corridor,” pivot in unison and start churning out talking points about what U.S. policy should be now. Hilariously, it is precisely the same policy they were advocating before Nasrallah was taken out: namely, that the United States should increase its financial and political investment in Lebanon and involve itself even deeper in the chimera of political engineering and nation building in that fictional place. That is to say, these people—some of whom literally were advising against Israel decapitating Hezbollah days before the Nasrallah strike—will push for the same policies irrespective of the corresponding reality. Because Lebanon analysis, like Lebanon itself, is fake. It is merely a string of sounds and phonemes that invariably lead to the same place: Pay us. 

Hence, the consensus starting to take shape in the D.C. swamp leads back to the status quo ante: reaffirming the U.S. protective umbrella over Lebanon that would allow Iran to reconstitute Hezbollah. This consensus will evoke things like the Lebanese Armed Forces, UNIFIL, and UNSCR 1701—all of which are simply instruments to halt and once again constrain Israeli freedom of action. Meanwhile, what happens to Lebanon and the Lebanese—all their silly melodrama about their “politics” and “state project” and “elections”—is entirely irrelevant both to the United States and Israel. The only thing that matters is Israel’s ability to strike at will anywhere in Lebanon whenever it identifies new Hezbollah leadership cadres, missile/UAV storage, and Iranian weapons shipments, whether by land, sea, or air.

Jacob argued, meanwhile, that the elimination of Iran’s “crown jewel” offers the United States an opportunity to cut bait on the delusional, destructive U.S. policy of directly subsidizing forces that want to kill us and our allies:

One other point to add here. With Hezbollah effectively incapacitated, Iran is now reportedly looking to activate Shiite militias in Iraq to attack Israel. Leaving aside that this is a fantasy and these groups lack the force projection to back up the threats, consider that the United States directly subsidizes these groups with the quarter billion dollars of annual military aid it sends to Iraq. For years the U.S. policy toward Iraq has been a method of indirectly paying off Iran. This includes sponsoring Iranian-backed militia groups—the so-called Popular Mobilization Forces—who killed more than 600 American soldiers during the U.S. occupation of Iraq and have repeatedly attacked American soldiers since the war ended. 

Nominally, this made sense according to the delusional Obama-Biden logic that saw Iranian forces throughout the Middle East as too powerful to contain and sought instead to buy their accommodation. But if Hezbollah, the crown jewel in Iran’s regional army, has been neutralized, what possible sense does it make to continue paying protection to the groups? It makes no sense, clearly, especially while leaving American soldiers stationed in the region as easy targets for their reprisal attacks. Nevertheless, the payouts are certain to continue under a Harris administration. Donald Trump, however, is more likely to see the wisdom in cutting off these payments and should be pressured to do so at once if he is elected

As Jacob summed it up: “In other words, Israel’s success against Hezbollah ought to free America from the expensive and humiliating ritual of paying off a paper tiger that hates us.”

IN THE BACK PAGES: Liel Leibovitz on why the Jews should stand with Eric Adams

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The Rest

→A weekend article in the Financial Times, which offered a fascinating window into the world-class intelligence capabilities that the Israelis built to monitor and ultimately destroy Hezbollah, confirmed Tablet’s theory of the case: that Nasrallah, up until Friday, had been operating under U.S. protection. Citing Israeli officials, the paper wrote:

In the days after October 7, Israeli warplanes took off with instructions to bomb a location where Nasrallah had been located by Israel’s intelligence directorate Aman. The raid was called off after the White House demanded Netanyahu do so, according to one of the Israeli officials. 

The Israelis, to their credit, did not make the same mistake twice. On Friday, they “tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed.” The Americans were not informed until it was too late for them to intervene. 

Read it here: https://www.ft.com/content/6638813e-e246-4409-9a38-95bf60a220a8

→Israel has informed the United States that it is planning a “limited ground operation” in Lebanon that could begin “imminently,” The Washington Post reported late Monday morning, citing a U.S. official. According to that official, the planned operation will be smaller than the 2006 war with Hezbollah and will be designed to “clear out militant infrastructure along the border to remove the threat to Israeli border communities.” The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Israeli special forces had already begun limited cross-border raids into southern Lebanon to probe and gather intelligence ahead of the invasion. The Lebanese Armed Forces, meanwhile, have withdrawn north to the Litani River. 

→Another, equally true way of writing the previous item would be: The United States leaked to The Washington Post that the Israelis are planning a ground invasion.

→Image of the Day: 

That’s a Monday announcement from Hamas mourning the death of its leader in Lebanon, Fatah Amin Sharif, aka Fatih al-Sharif, in an Israeli airstrike on Sunday. Mr. Sharif was better known to the public as the leader of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) teachers union in Lebanon—a role for which he was awarded a “certificate of appreciation” by UNRWA Lebanon head and former Amnesty International Secretary General Claudio Cordone in 2019. Who could have seen this coming? Anyone with a pulse, but more specifically, Hillel Neuer of U.N. Watch, who identified Sharif as a senior Hamas member to UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini on dozens of occasions over the past year and who named Sharif in a June report to the Dutch parliament on terrorist penetration of UNRWA. In a Monday statement, UNRWA said that Sharif had been on administrative leave since March pending the results of an investigation into his “political activities.” 

→Which leads us to a special Scroll policy prescription, offered to the governments of the world free of charge: No more talk of the “deradicalization” of UNRWA, Hamas, Gaza, or the Palestinians, all of which are fool’s errands. The goal should be a de-internationalization of the conflict, i.e. the ejection of parasitic NGOs, UN bureaus, and other international organizations from the Levant. We can even agree to offer Lazzarini and his boss, Lusitanian trickster Antonio Guterres, immunity from RICO or terror financing charges, as long as they pack their bags and go. No doubt a Harris presidency would be happy to grant UN employees asylum on Occupied Turtle Island, and while President Trump might be less welcoming, we’re confident that UNRWA’s $1.5 billion annual budget could pay for sufficient office space in Paraguay or Burkina Faso, with plenty to spare for halal catering.

→Do you love your country, citizen?

We’ve come a long way since Feb. 18, 2018, when The New York Times proclaimed in a headline that “National Identity Is Made Up,” or for that matter since Aug. 19, 2019, when the paper launched the 1619 Project, informing readers that “our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written” and that henceforth “slavery and its consequences” would be at “the center of the American national narrative.” But now patriotism is back in. So if you want to live up to the false ideals of a made-up slavocracy, cast your ballot for Kamala!

→Among the vice president’s patriotic achievements is Today’s Stat of the Day: 28,910

That’s how many illegal aliens on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement non-detained docket have either homicide (13,099) or sexual assault (15,811) convictions, according to ICE data provided to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX). The non-detained docket refers to aliens with final removal (i.e. deportation) orders who are not currently in ICE custody. Not all of them entered under the current administration; however, as Fox’s Bill Melugin reported on X, the number of people on the non-detained docket has more than doubled under the current administration, from 3.2 million at the end of financial year 2020 to more than 7.3 million today. 

→The country singer, songwriter, and actor Kris Kristofferson died Saturday at his home in Maui at the age of 88. Best known for the hits he wrote for others—“Me and Bobby McGee” for Janis Joplin; “Sunday Morning Coming Down” for Johnny Cash—Kristofferson also showed early promise as a writer, athlete (he was featured in a 1958 issue of Sports Illustrated for his athletic prowess at Pomona College), and military man, training as a helicopter pilot and earning a Ranger tab before quitting the Army to pursue music in 1965. Kristofferson released several albums of his own music, but his greatest success was as a songwriter, penning tunes for Cash, Joplin, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gladys Knight, and many others. Starting in the 1970s, he also had a successful second career as an actor, starring in films by Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorcese and earning a Golden Globe for his role alongside Barbara Streisand in A Star Is Born. As prodigious in love as he was in other pursuits, Kristofferson is survived by eight children from three marriages.

Here, from 1978, is a recording of Cash and Kristofferson singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down” from The Johnny Cash Christmas Show:

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TODAY IN TABLET:

Back in the USSA, by Will Tanner

In America as in postapartheid South Africa, an obsession with ‘racial justice’ can be a harbinger of social and economic collapse

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Killing Nasrallah

Israel shows America how to win wars

By Lee Smith

Friday evening in the Levant, Israel targeted buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut killing Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. This operation represents a dramatic shift in Israeli strategy. Not only have they finally liquidated an adversary they’ve long been capable of killing, they’ve also turned a deaf ear to their superpower patron of more than half a century. But at this stage, heeding Washington’s advice in war is like taking counsel from the angel of death. Just as the U.S. is no longer willing or able to win the wars it commits Americans to fight, the Joe Biden administration won’t let U.S. allies win wars either.

By ordering the strike on Nasrallah while attending the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored the Jewish state’s independence from the global consensus that has resolved not to confront terrorists but rather to appease them, whether they’re plotting in the Middle East or living among the local populations of Western nations, including the United States. Israel’s attack also shows that almost everything U.S. and other Western civilian and military leaders have believed about the Middle East for the last 20 years was simply a collection of excuses for losing wars. The questions that senior policymakers and Pentagon officials, think-tank experts and journalists have deliberated over since the invasion of Iraq—questions about the nature of modern warfare and the proper conduct of international relations in a multipolar world, etc.—can now be set aside for good because they have been resolved definitively.

The answers are as they ever were—at least before the start of the "global war on terror." Contrary to the convictions of George W. Bush-era neoconservatives and the pro-Iran progressives in Barack Obama’s camp, securing a nation’s peace has nothing to do with winning narratives, or nation-building, or balancing U.S. allies against your mutual enemies for the sake of regional equilibrium, or any of the other academic theories generated to mask a generation’s worth of failure. Rather, it means killing your enemies, above all those who advocate and embody the causes that inspire others to exhaust their murderous energies against you. Thus, killing Nasrallah was essential.

Taking down officers demoralizes a force. Wiping out its chain of command cripples it. Hezbollah is a function of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and if allowed to survive the Lebanese militia will be replenished and trained by the IRGC to replace the fallen. Nasrallah issued from a different source. He was the protégé of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Their tenures—until now—were roughly coterminous: Khamenei replaced the founder of the Islamic Republic Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 and chose Nasrallah to lead Hezbollah in 1992. The Iranians built around Nasrallah not only a network of proxies stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf but also a comprehensive worldview—permanent resistance. Killing him marks a defining moment capping the end of a 30-year reign of terror.

Israel’s campaign went into high gear on Sept. 17 with the detonation of Hezbollah’s communications devices, which Israeli intelligence had booby-trapped with explosives, decommissioning thousands of the terror organization’s medical and logistical support staff as well as fighters. Because Hezbollah’s communications infrastructure, as well as its supply chain, was compromised, senior officials were forced to meet in person. Consequently, Israel was able to liquidate senior operations commander Ibrahim Aqil—who took part in the 1983 attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Barracks in Lebanon—and other top commanders from the elite Radwan force in a strike in the southern suburb of Beirut on Sept. 20. In attacks on Hezbollah strongholds across Lebanon, Israel has killed hundreds of fighters and destroyed thousands of long- and medium-range missiles and launchers. With Nasrallah and virtually all of its senior command dead, Hezbollah has been decapitated.

Israel’s immediate goal is to get the 60,000 Israelis who have been displaced from the north since Oct. 7 back into their homes. Therefore, say Israeli officials, Hezbollah forces must be driven north of the Litani river, roughly 20 miles away from the border. The Biden administration says the Israelis can’t reach their goals through force and the only way forward is through diplomacy. In fact, the harder Israel struck Hezbollah, specifically showcasing its ability to eliminate its leadership, the more desperate the White House became to end IDF operations. The Biden team took advantage of the U.N. General Assembly to work with France on a statement calling for a 21-day ceasefire that would shut down Israel’s campaign and protect Nasrallah.

Even if Israel weren’t proving the White House wrong hourly about its ability to win its goals on the ground, the fact is that U.S. diplomatic assurances regarding Hezbollah are worthless.

U.S. officials brought an end to the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701. It stipulated that there were to be no armed personnel or weapons south of the Litani, other than those of the Lebanese government and the U.N. peacekeeping force. The resolution was a farce, as Hezbollah’s presence and capabilities in south Lebanon have only grown in the two decades since it was passed. Obviously, there is no chance the Lebanese government will ever take action against Hezbollah, which controls the government. Nor will the U.S., France, or any other power enforce UNSCR 1701—except to endorse the Lebanese demand for an end to Israeli overflights and indulge Beirut’s border claims.

For Israel, the even bigger problem with 1701 is that since 2006, Hezbollah has become capable of launching missiles from virtually anywhere in Lebanon, as well as Syria, to reach every part of Israel. Pushing Hezbollah off the border would make it harder for the militia to mount a cross-border invasion like Oct. 7, but it would still leave all of Israel under threat from its long- and mid-range missiles. Reports Friday that the Israelis will continue to conduct strikes on the southern suburbs indicate that Jerusalem knows the core issue isn’t on the border but is rather in Beirut, Hezbollah’s capital.

Netanyahu was aware that if he meant to do more than just degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities until it regrouped and resupplied, he had only a small window of time. The Biden White House had done everything in its power to stop Israel’s campaign against Hamas, like withholding ordnance that would have spared Israel risking the lives of its combat troops, while also openly opposing an Israeli campaign in Lebanon. Therefore, it was 11 months before Netanyahu could turn north. But since the delay coincided with unprecedented developments in the U.S. domestic arena—a president retired from active duty and a vice president campaigning for the top spot by hiding from the press—the Israelis seized the opportunity to lay siege to Hezbollah while the Oval Office was effectively vacant.

Unsurprisingly, Israel’s success against Hezbollah the last two weeks alarmed the former Obama officials staffing the current administration. After all, Obama’s strategy to realign U.S. interests with Iran was predicated on the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which put Iran’s nuclear weapons program under the umbrella of an international agreement guaranteed by the United States. The Iranians armed Hezbollah with missiles in order to deter Israeli action against their nuclear facilities, which is to say that the Lebanese militia serves not only Iranian interests but also those of the Obama faction.

The Biden team tried to stop Netanyahu from continuing his Hezbollah campaign by outlining how it intends to punish Israel in the period between the November election and the January inauguration with sanctions and other anti-Israel measures. But by telegraphing its intentions, the White House inadvertently incentivized Netanyahu to act quickly. Since a Harris victory ensures four to eight more years of a White House filled by Obama aides determined to protect the Iranians and their proxies, and a Donald Trump win means Biden’s punitive actions go away, Israel saw it had nothing to lose in either case. So on Friday, Netanyahu brought the era of permanent resistance to an end by killing the cult leader the Obama faction so desperately wanted to but could not keep alive.

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In the past, Israeli officials warned against targeting the terror chief. They feared it might bring about an even more ruthless leader just as Israel’s 1992 assassination of then-Hezbollah chief Abbas al-Mussawi elevated, in their eyes, the more effective Nasrallah. But what made Nasrallah special, what gave rise to the personality cult around the man whose name means “victory of God,” was his relationship with Khamenei.

In 1989, Nasrallah left Lebanon for Iran, where the 29-year-old cleric was introduced to Khamenei. In the vacuum left by Khomeini’s death, Khamenei was working to consolidate his power, which included taking control of Hezbollah, Tehran’s most significant external asset. He saw Mussawi’s assassination as an opening to put his own man in place, and with Hezbollah’s operations against Israeli forces in Lebanon, Nasrallah’s legend steadily grew. Even Israeli officials credited Hezbollah for driving Israel out of the south in 2000, a singular triumph worthy of the name Nasrallah, a victory against the hated Zionists that no other Arab leader could claim.

But the myth of Nasrallah as Turban Napoleon was dispelled with the disastrous 2006 war which he stumbled into by kidnapping two Israel soldiers. Later he said that had he known Israel was going to respond so forcefully, he’d never have given the order. And yet despite the thousands killed in Lebanon, Hezbollahis and civilians, and the billions of dollars worth of damage, he claimed that Hezbollah won just because he survived. Before his demise, he’d been in hiding since 2006.

Israel’s recent demonstrations of its technological prowess show that Nasrallah survived this long thanks only to the sufferance of the Jerusalem government. Netanyahu and others seem to have hoped the Hezbollah problem would resolve itself once the Americans came to their senses and recognized the threat Iran posed to U.S. regional hegemony. But the Israelis misread the strategic implications of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The George W. Bush administration’s freedom agenda gave Iraq’s Shia majority an insuperable advantage in popular elections. And since virtually all the Shia factions were controlled by Iran, democratizing Iraq laid the foundations for Iran’s regional empire as well as Obama’s realignment strategy, downgrading relations with traditional U.S. allies like Israel and building ties with the anti-American regime. Even Trump, whose January 2020 targeted killing of Iranian terror chief Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi deputy Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was far and away the most meaningful operation ever conducted by U.S. forces on Iraqi soil, couldn’t entirely break the mold cast by his predecessors and which the Pentagon protected like a priceless jewel.

U.S. forces are still based in Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS and any other Sunnis the Iranians and their allies categorize as threats to their interests. The detail seems almost like a medieval curse imposed on the losing side in a war. After the Iranians killed and maimed thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq, and helped kill and wound thousands more by urging their Syrian ally Bashar Assad to usher Sunni fighters from the Damascus airport to the Iraqi front, America’s best and bravest are condemned to eternal bondage requiring them to protect Iranian interests forever.

The idea advanced by conspiracy theorists from the U.S. political and media establishment on the left as well as the right that Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. into a larger regional war with Iran—a thesis sure to be cited repeatedly in the aftermath of Nasrallah’s assassination—is absurd. The Obama faction, of which Biden and Harris are a part, is in Iran’s corner. Moreover, only a fool could be blind to the fact that the Pentagon way of war, three decades into the 21st century and a world away from the United States’ last conclusive victory, means death for all who pursue it.

If Washington and the Europeans are appalled by Israel’s campaign over the last two weeks, it’s because the Israelis have resurfaced the ugly truth that no modish theories of war, international organizations, or even American presidents could long obscure. Wars are won by killing the enemy, above all, those who inspire their people to kill yours. Killing Nasrallah not only anchors Israel’s victory in Lebanon but reestablishes the old paradigm for any Western leaders who take seriously their duty to protect their countrymen and civilization: Kill your enemies.