#WTH Iran is weak. Time to hit them.

And a super conversation with Gen. Frank McKenzie

🔔 Something cool, we hope: Marc and I will read and discuss selected comments from our substack on the podcast… An incentive to listen, and for us, a way to discuss different perspectives. Thanks in advance for your smart commentary.

🔔 Please think about tuning in to our October 7 event at AEI. We have a terrific panel. Details here.

Anti-Israel billboard in Tehran

After a string of utterly humiliating Israeli assaults that began with the elimination of senior IRGC forces in Damascus, continued to apace with the assassination of Hamas warlord Ismail Haniyeh, and then continued with the systematic disposal of the entire Hezbollah org chart, it’s no surprise that Ayatollah Khamenei felt a need to respond. (The Islamic Republic reserves to itself the right to kill Muslims.) Accordingly, 180-plus ballistic missiles were launched from Iran at Israel on October 1. Both U.S. and Israeli forces handily took out most of the shots, though one man, a Palestinian, was killed by falling debris. (Recall that last time the Iranians attacked Israel directly, they injured a little Bedouin girl.)

Israel has made clear it intends to respond to Iran’s attacks, though we do not know as yet when or how. Doubtless Joe Biden and Team Kamala will try to talk the Israelis out of reacting, because that’s what they did last time. I believe the Israeli government will listen politely and then go ahead exactly as planned. American counsels for “restraint” in the face of an unprecedented year of war with Iranian proxies have become tedious and pointless, “restraint” for the sake of U.S. politics, perhaps, but nothing else. Which brings us to America.

The White House has done nothing but fret about “escalation” and a “wider war” since the October 7 attacks that happened almost one year ago. Every estimate they make of widening conflict is wrong, and rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how escalation works, of how Iran and its Arab minions behave, and, sigh, pretty much everything else. For a deeper dive into just such questions, we hosted Gen. (ret.) Frank McKenzie, former Commandant of Central Command, the man who took out Qassem Soleimani and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. (We couldn’t excerpt the entire transcript here, but McKenzie is enormously articulate, and every response was fascinating. Listen or read the whole thing!)

We talked to McKenzie before Nasrallah was removed from action, but the lessons apply nonetheless. And particularly the lessons about what works in the region:

Joe Biden doesn’t get that, and neither do the people who tell him what to do inside the White House. In the wake of Iran’s strike on Israel — the largest ballistic missile strike in history — the White House was firm in its warning: Iran, the U.S. government warned, would face “serious consequences” after this “significant escalation.” And what are those “serious consequences?” No clue. One thing we know is that Biden doesn’t want them to include any strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, because… those are nice? We like Iran’s nuclear weapons program? Iran will murder a lot of Israelis? Ah yes, “escalation.”

It’s no surprise that the man who thought it was a nifty plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, not tell anyone, sacrifice a bunch of troops, and abandon billions in U.S. weaponry would not understand squat about how Israel should combat Iran. (We discuss the Afghanistan withdrawal with McKenzie as well.) But we must recognize that Biden’s weakness, and his stubborn unwillingness to use anything more than defensive power, is being taken as a green light by the world’s rogues. This is why Putin moved on Ukraine, per McKenzie, and it’s why the Middle East is on fire. We’re only lucky, frankly, that Xi Jinping is not yet ready to take Taiwan, because one can only imagine the weak-kneed response from Joe, Kamala, Jill, or whoever is actually running this nation.

Now let’s circle back to the Iranians for a moment. I wrote a quick piece for The National Interest about why I thought the Iranians had to respond, finally, to Israel. In Tehran’s ideal world, that strike would have brought fear and contrition to Israeli hearts. As it was, however, Tehran’s second major fail, that seems unlikely. Here are some questions: Clearly, Khamenei was afraid that Iran was beginning to look weak not simply in the eyes of their terror proxies (about which, whatever), but in the eyes of Iran’s people. There were public intimations that the forces counseling “restraint” inside Iran were “traitors” to the Islamic Republic.

The follow-up question is whether two embarrassing misses in the wake of the previous series of humiliations will also hurt the regime. That’s unclear. Iran will do its best in state run media to lie about the consequences of its missile barrage, but Iranians are extraordinarily well plugged in. Doubtless, everyone who wants to know what really happened will find out. Objectively, it’s safe to say that Iran’s leaders have rarely looked lamer. Which is why it’s time to hit them, and hard.

What should the Israelis do? What should the United States do? We should hit the regime as hard as possible. Take out their centrifuge cascades, their nuclear research facilities, their reprocessing facilities, their missile sites, their refineries, and everything else that keeps the regime going. That won’t take long, and Iran’s options for a response are limited, as we have seen on repeated occasions.

Remember, Iran’s forte is asymmetric attacks via proxies, not frontal onslaughts. (That has worked extremely well via the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah et al; less well when it comes to recruiting assassins inside Israel.) The time has come to remind these two-bit terrorists that there are real powers in the world who are sick and tired of their crap. Perhaps had we done so sooner, Iran and its proxies would have been cowed. As it is, they dominate the Middle East and bedevil the United States and its allies at every turn. And they’re on the verge of having nuclear weapons.

HIGHLIGHTS

What are some of your favorite stories you tell in your new book?

FM: So I would start with the decision to strike Baghdadi, who was the leader of ISIS. By the spring of 2019 when I assumed command of CENTCOM, the physical caliphate, that state that he and other members of the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria, ISIS as we know him in shorthand, had founded that was sort of centered on the Euphrates River that had expanded well into Iraq and dominated a big chunk of Syria, that had been compressed down to nothing by the actions of my predecessor. A great army general named Joe Votel. And down the southern Euphrates River just to the west of the border with Iraq, we finished the caliphate off. They no longer held ground. Well, Baghdadi was the leader of the caliphate. Some of you may recall that he pronounced the caliphate and a lot of TV coverage.

He was involved in the murder of a lot of people, including probably some US citizens. But he wasn't a guy that actually was in it till the end. He fled before we finished the fight down there, and he went out to live somewhere in Western Syria. And he took with him when he went, a couple of wives, a couple of security guys and 14 children. And the children were there for two reasons. First of all the sexual slaves, but more importantly because he knew it would make us hard to get him if he was always surrounded by children. We went out there to live in a mud-walled compound, a couple of miles from the Turkish border right in the middle of no where in some really desolate, ugly country in Western Syria. He was on the top of our list of people that we wanted to capture or kill.

And so the summer of 2019, we spent a lot of time looking for him. We, by we I mean the Department of Defense, and I also mean our partners up the river, the Central Intelligence Agency and other elements of the intelligence community. By the early fall of 2019 we had tracked him down to this location and we were pretty sure he was there. And we were pretty sure that he didn't leave except under unpredictable circumstances that made it very hard to find him out in the open somewhere. And that whenever he appeared either for prayers, exposed himself, there were children all around him. And we also knew that he wore an explosive vest or professed to wear an explosive vest. And so we looked at that problem pretty hard in the early fall of 2019, and we had a couple of options. We could have struck him from a drone, but we could never come up with an elegant enough solution where we could avoid killing children and people around him.

And so we looked at that very hard and I was not willing to go with that option. And there was a more pragmatic option. You strike a guy from the sky in the middle of nowhere, it's hard to prove you actually got him. The myth can live on if you can't give definitive DNA evidence that this is our guy and we got him. So we looked at this and I was talking to some of the best people in the world at solving this problem, we couldn't find that. So we looked at it and back and forth with my special operations task force commander, we looked at another alternative, a riskier alternative but one that would place a couple of 100 Americans deep into Syria to land around the compound, to isolate the compound, to give him the opportunity to surrender. And if he didn't, to go in and capture or kill him.

And of course, that's what we did. Now, it was a little harder than it sounds. I described it pretty flippantly in a couple of sentences, but we were in the middle in the fall of 2019. We were in a major argument with the Russians about a crossing of the Euphrates River down at Deir ez-Zur, which is in several 100 miles away from where we're talking. But the Russians were pushing across it, and we didn't want them to do that. And so we were in a pretty aggressive stance with the Russians down there. And they control Syrian Air Defense. So we were worried about flying this big package, is what we'd call it in the vernacular, helicopters and other things deep behind enemy lines. Well, we were confident that our helicopters could get in. We just felt that we would be able to shield and mask them. Nobody could see them.

But we really needed to put drones up on top of the objective. MQ-IX, slow moving, propeller driven unmanned aircraft that do a couple of three things for you. They provide communications relay, they provide fire support if you need it, and they give us video images of what's going on in the ground. They're defenseless, and if air defense wants to shoot them down they're the easiest target in the world. So we thought, we'll tell the Russians we're coming in shortly before we go in. And we talked about it. And so General Milley drew the responsibility for talking to General Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff. And we called him about 30 minutes before we crossed the Euphrates River with the package. And Gerasimov said, "Well, I'm not going to let you do it. We're going to stop you." Our calculation was he probably didn't mean it, A, and B, he would not be able to actually transmit an order down there to his guys in 30 minutes.

And in fact, he did not. We went in, we were illuminated by Syrian Air Defense radars. But the Syrians are not particularly brave, they prefer to shoot at targets as they leave rather than as they come in because they know if you shoot them when they come in, you're going to suck a radar seeking missile right back at you. They know that from long experience with us and with the Israelis. So they prefer to wait till you're leaving, fire a bunch of missiles in the air, declare a massive victory. And so we were pretty confident the Syrians weren't going to shoot. So the package goes in, I'm monitoring it from my headquarters here in Tampa. Talking to my mission commander who's forward in the theater and ultimately, pretty close up view of what's going on in the ground. My job as the theater commander is to allow the experts on the ground to do their job.

The people that are going in are the best people in the world at this. They know how to manage the risk on the ground. They know how to take actions on the ground. And they did. We set a security cordon around the compound. We did what we'd call a call-out with a colloquial Arab speaker. He did not come out. Some of his defenders, some of his security guys came out and we removed them from the battlefield. A couple of his wives came out and we shot them too. They were shooting at us, we shot back at them. And then 12 children came out and we were able to get all of those 12 children out. And so we continued to call for him to come out. He crawled into a hole in the ground underneath the house, blew himself up with two children.

And this of course is where Conan, the wonder dog enters the play. So Conan's down there with a camera on his head, not a particularly well tempered dog but then he had a pretty rough life, I would guess. But he went down there. We eventually discovered the remains of Baghdadi and were able to get enough out to do a definitive DNA analysis and demonstrate that it was him. Pulled everybody out, struck and destroyed the objective because I didn't want it to be in any way a monument to him. And we got the whole force out. So what's the lesson learned there? The lesson learned is about the American way of war. Given a choice, we're going to try to avoid civilian damage. Every time I tell this story, people say, "Well, what about the Israelis and Gaza?" And here's my answer to that. It was easy for me to do this because his house was in the desert.

There was nothing near it. If I'd gone into a city, it would've looked a lot more like Israeli operations in Gaza than what we were at. I was very lucky I was able to carry this out in what was essentially a billiard table of a desert out in Western Syria, there were no people close around. And so that gave us some advantages as we actually went in on the objective. But it was a remarkable story of American capability, American ability and American memory. We were going to bring him back, had he surrendered, we would've been happy to bring him out alive. He chose not to surrender, and in fact, of course died a coward's death killing two innocent children with him when he did it.

You mentioned you dismissed the idea of a drone strike against Baghdadi, but he did die in your operation. Would you have preferred to take him out alive?

FM: We would have preferred to bring him out. We were configured to bring him out. We would've preferred to bring him out. We had, again, colloquial Arab speakers telling him to surrender. He was wearing a suicide vest and he blew himself up. You always prefer to bring them out if you can bring them out. Sometimes you're able to do that, sometimes you're not. We got some intelligence information off that objective. Sometimes you get a real treasure trove, sometimes you don't. We got a little bit, not a whole lot off that particular objective. We got more than we would've gotten had we struck it from an aircraft.

What is your assessment of Israel’s war against Iranian proxies so far?

FM: Let me back up and take it at a very high level first and say what is remarkable about what's happened since October has been the lack of Iranian actual support for Hamas. Think about it, Iran has had opportunities to come into this fight. They have chosen not to. And let me be very clear, the Iranian attack on Israel of 13 April was not related to what's going on in Gaza. That was directly related to the fact that the Iranians had been consistently outfought by the Israelis in the proxy war they fight against each other around the region, for a couple of years. Culminating in the one April strike against IRGC, Islamic Republican Guard planners up in Damascus. Iran thought they had to fight back at Israel in a major red line crossing attack in order to try to reset the terms of the engagement with Israel.

In no way was it in support of Hamas, although they applaud what Hamas is doing. Let me be clear. They're just not providing any direct support for it, that attack failed. And Iran has had to recalculate as a result of that. So that's an important thing to know and understand. The other thing that's important to know and understand, at least up until about now, Hezbollah has not been particularly aggressive in their support of Hamas. Now look, easy for me to say that. I know there's probably 80,000 Israeli citizens that have come south from the northern tier of kibbutzes and cities that can't be in their homes now. But if LH came into the fight, unlike Iran who's for a lot of reasons their options to attack Israel are limited. LH has vast opportunities to attack Israel and cause great pain and damage. Over 100,000 weapons, tens of thousands of which can reach Metropolitan Israel, LH can go in.

LH has chosen not to do that again, because while they applaud what's going on with Hamas, they're not ready to come in. Hassan Nasrallah won't come in to fight Israel in my judgment, unless he thinks there's the possibility for a strategic victory. And LH, Lebanese Hezbollah will not be pushed into a war with Israel by Iran. It will not happen. They'll make an independent decision. And so you'll know if they come in heavy because you'll be seeing hundreds of missiles going after Israeli metropolitan areas. The Israelis will be able to defend against most of those, possibly not all of them. But also Hassan Nasrallah knows if he comes in, the Israelis have had tanks in Beirut before. They're capable of doing that again if they choose to do it. So he knows the pain they can inflict on him. And finally, when you talk about LH, Lebanese Hezbollah, their situation in Lebanon is in my judgment, weaker than it's been in a long time.

This is because the Lebanese economy is in the tank. 99.9% of the population are living hand to mouth. LH bears some responsibility for that. Additionally, the Lebanese government can't get itself seated because of the bizarre confessional nature of the government. The prime minister, the President and the Speaker of the House have to be from different sects, different religious groups. They can't see that LH bears some responsibility for that. And people in Beirut in particular still remember the Beirut port explosion, which LH didn't set off but their negligence contributed to it. So his position is weaker and he wants to take all those things into account before he decides to strike Israel. So finally, the guys that are really energized about this are actually the Houthis down in Yemen. They are the most radical of the people we're talking about.

They actually do support Hamas and have tried very hard to go after Israel. Their options to go after Israel are limited, A, by geography, B, by shot count. They can't generate enough fire to overwhelm Israeli defenses. But what they can do is close the Bab-El-Mandeb, which means closing the Suez Canal except probably to Chinese shipping. And so they've chosen to do that. And as a result, the world's economic system is under stress. We have said, we the United States have said we're going to reopen it, not necessarily because of any support for Israel but because we as a maritime nation understand the impact of free access to the global commons. We have been unable to do that. My judgment would be that we have the military capability to do that. We have not demonstrated the political will to do that. Again, let me be real clear.

The capability is there, the political will to execute that task and to make the Houthis stop doing what they're doing, nobody's willing to make that ultimate decision. So that's sort of the big picture. And the last thing I'll say about Iran is this before we go on, to understand what the Iranians are doing, you need to understand what the highest priority of Iranian statecraft is. And the number one priority is preservation of the regime. They view themselves as a revolutionary regime. And the first task of any revolutionary regime is to stay in power, export the revolution, pass it on to the next generation. So Iranians will always default to objective number one. Now, objective number two is destruction of the state of Israel. Objective number three is ejection of the United States from the region. Sometimes two and three flip depending on the day of the week and the Iranians mood. Nothing ever challenges one. And the Iranians are actually very rational calculating actors within this model of state behavior.

What do you make of General Kurilla’s letter complaining about the effectiveness of the military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen and does Washington have the will power to take down the Houthis?

FM: So let me begin with General Kurilla's letter, which I know General Kurilla, he was my chief of staff my first year in command at CENTCOM. He's a great commander, superb commander. When commanders write letters like that, they just want to be on the record with their position. I wrote a lot of letters like that, and nothing concentrates people's mind like a signed letter from a four-star combatant commander. I'm sure General Kurilla actually regrets that it was leaked. I'm confident he did not leak it and CENTCOM didn't leak it. But as you know, once it gets into the DC mix, things are leaked for all kinds of reasons, political and otherwise. But I think he just wanted to say, "Look, we're in a situation where in my observation, without knowing any of the classified details here, is you've got a situation from the Red Sea where US Navy warships are playing catch." Warships are not meant to play catch warships are meant to pitch.

You got an aircraft carrier down there that's playing catch. Aircraft carriers are not meant to play catch, they're meant to pitch. The US navy is an offensive weapon and it needs to be employed offensively. Now look, military power is a blunt, bloody, sometimes indiscreet instrument, but it can bring results if you're willing to make the decision to employ it. There are two ways to make the Houthis stop. One way is you inflict enough pain so they stop. They don't want to continue. Well, that might or might not work with people that are so motivated. The second thing is you remove their capability to take these actions. That means you go after the missile where they build the missiles, where they store the missiles, where they launch the missiles, radar surveillance sites. You go after ships at sea that might be passing information to them and you go after Houthi leadership. Both those military options are within our capability. All it requires is the political will to actually execute those operations.

What is the lesson of the strike against Qassem Soleimani?

FM: Here's the lesson of the strike on Soleimani. The Iranians will respond if you threaten them directly. We'll go back to objective one. Qassem Soleimani was a unique figure in the Iranian government. He was in the Republican guards and he commanded the Quds Force, the elite within the elite. He had a familial relationship with the supreme leader. He really could go directly to the boss, the ultimate boss, around the entire Iranian military chain of command. And he did it whenever he wanted a project advance and he was getting friction from inside the military. He was unique and the blood on his hands, there's a lot of American blood on his hands. Going back towards the end of our time in Iraq actually, nobody was more responsible in the Soleimani for introducing explosively formed penetrators or EFPs that killed a lot of American soldiers and Marines in the latter part of our operations there. Directly responsible for that.

The decision to strike Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 was because he was entering Iraq with plans to carry out significant future attacks on our embassy in Baghdad and on other US allied and friendly states in the region. So the decision to strike him was a tactical decision designed to prevent further loss of life. But at the same time, of course, you balance the strategic side of it. You know the long-term effect, and I'll talk about that in just a minute. But the argument was, and I agree with this argument completely, the risk of inaction was greater than the risk of action. And as I talk to you here today some years after that, I'm confident that more people are alive today because he died than would've been the case had he been allowed to continue.

And I would refer to one other, an external source, then foreign Minister Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister made the mistake of recording an oral history, which of course leaked. It appeared in the New York Times, and he talked about the significance of the strike on Soleimani, how much it set them back. And that's worth reading independently just to see what the Iranians they thought about that strike. So the Iranians know and understand the use of force. They respected the use of force. Their response a week later was to strike us at Al-Assad, and they were intending to kill Americans there. But it was still designed by the then to be a scoped attack, because of great action by commanders on the ground, we were able to avoid lethalities in that strike. A number of Americans did receive traumatic brain injury because it was the first time really Americans had been hit by ballistic missiles with large warheads. Sort of a new era in warfare that we're seeing more and more of use of ballistic missiles.

It hadn't happened to United States forces before. But because of that, because we were able to actually help the Iranians there by not causing loss of life, they backed away. They were finished. And what you saw was a form of deterrence reestablished. The problem is this, deterrence in the region is always short-term. It has a very short half-life, and it must systematically be reasserted if you expect the Iranians to respect it. And again, that goes back to roll the tape forward to what happened in April. The Iranians were attempting to reset deterrence, they failed. The Iranians are a little shakier than they've been in some while because of the failure of that attack. And I would also add the Israeli response was very well-thought-out. Several days later I was concerned they were going to go downtown Tehran, knock out seven or eight city blocks, kill a bunch of people. And that would've put pressure on this administration and would've put pressure on the Arab neighbors.

Instead, they went in and operated in the Tehran-Esfahan corridor brilliantly. They demonstrated clear technological superiority. They struck very limited targets, and they befuddled the Iranians. The Iranians are still trying to figure out exactly what happened in that Israeli response. They did not push their neighbors away. They did not push this administration away. It was a singularly deft response to that attack. And so that's the nature of deterrence in the region. The final point I would make is this, if you want to talk about deterrence in the Middle East, the first words out of your mouth can't be, our objective is to de-escalate. Because if your objective is to de-escalate, you need to leave. That's the natural logical end to that policy. No one wants uncontrolled escalation, no one's talking about that. But the end of your policy can't be that particular thing. We may all wish to prefer that escalation not happen, but you have to be willing to accept some possibility of escalation if you want to be relevant, credible, and have a deterring effect in the Middle East.

How did American adversaries and partners interpret the US withdrawal from Afghanistan?

FM: From Afghanistan it's viewed as a sign of weakness in the region and globally. I think it directly contributed to President Putin's decision to invade Ukraine, and I think the Chinese probably drew strength from it as well. That's my observation. I have a lot of other observations about the withdrawal itself. But ultimately when it's all said and done, however it was executed, whatever the reasons for it were, we reviewed as running in the lurch and resulting in what you see happening in Afghanistan today, which of course is very disheartening for all of us.

You’ve previously recommended that we keep a residual force of about 2,500 troops in Afghanistan before the total withdrawal. Would that have stopped the Taliban from taking over the country?

FM: If we had stayed at 2,500, which was my recommendation, the recommendation of my subordinate general Scott Miller, our four star commander in Afghanistan until July, and General Mark Milley the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at 2,500 it was my best judgment that the Afghans would've held on. And remember at 2,500, NATO would've kept almost 5,000 troops in Afghanistan. So you're not just talking about 2,500 US, you're talking more NATO forces than US forces in Afghanistan. My best judgment that the Afghans would've held on it would've been rough. We would've held Bagram and we would've been able to prosecute operations with our inter agency partners against ISIS and Al-Qaeda. So yes, I believe that to be the case. However, we also were very clear when we said this, we need to change our negotiating posture with the Taliban and be less supine and more aggressive as we talk to them.

We were not very assertive with the Taliban in our negotiations from Doha forward, and that figured large and why the defeat in Afghanistan occurred. We needed to change that. And that's not a military problem. I could just give a recommendation on that. Now look, there's another side of this coin. People say, "Well, you couldn't stay at 2,500, we would've had to put more forces in." That's a counterfactual. We can argue that all day. That's not my judgment. I don't believe that to be the case. But well-meaning people could have a different view on that, and I recognize this. But that will remain forever a subject for debate. What is not a subject for debate though is that if you go to zero, the Afghan government collapses. That's not a counterfactual, that's history. And we were very clear that that would be the outcome of going to zero.

How effectively do you think Israel is fighting against Hamas in Gaza? What is your assessment of that war?

FM: So the campaign in Gaza is a difficult fight for the Israelis because Hamas prepared the battle space beautifully, with a combination of deep tunneling and a conscious decision to shield themselves with human beings at every phase of the fight. We talk about the Israeli hostages, but the real hostages are in Gaza or the Palestinians in Gaza who are being used as shields by Hamas, that's the real larger issue that probably doesn't get enough attention. The next point would be combat in a built-up area is the most indescribably difficult military operation that a force can undertake. Casualties are high. The sense of being in an urban fight is stunning. The people that don't experience it. And you're fighting on multiple levels, you're fighting on the surface of the earth, you're fighting in the sewers, and then you're fighting in the deep tunnel system that exists there. Then you're fighting in buildings and higher buildings.

And then the low airspace where the Israelis and Hamas are both flying drones. The fact of the matter is Israelis, I would argue, have probably defeated Hamas militarily. They have not destroyed Hamas militarily because in a Western military, in the Marine Corps, in my service, if you lose 20% of a formation, we consider that formation no longer combat ready. Hamas is able to take much heavier casualties because they're not actually maneuvering communicating. They're going to position to fight into the death. So you got to really get rid of all of them there. So it makes it a very different kind of fight. And Hamas is intent on prolonging this fight as long as possible. They intend on creating as many civilian casualties as possible, they intend on creating as many dilemmas for Israeli commanders as they can. And it's just a very difficult fight. Israel has had significant success in attriting the core combat formations.

There's still combat formations left. They've had some success against the military leadership. There's still some military leadership left. They've had some success against the political leadership. But Sinwar is still alive, and I think that's a significant problem for Israel frankly, just speaking very candidly to you. And so I don't think actually Hamas has any interest in ending this fight. They would like this fight to continue as long as possible because they see the damage that it's done to Israel and the world community, and that's a good sign. But I go back to something we said at the beginning, remember that LH hasn't come in to support Hamas, and the Iranians have not come in to support Hamas. And other Arab nations have been fairly quiet on this as well, that's telling.

Full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Hezbollah Pager Attack Details Point to Supply-Chain Infiltration by Israel (Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2024)

While still in Gaza, Israel has no good options in Lebanon. But it may invade anyway (Lazar Berman, Times of Israel, September 18, 2024)

Harris says she backs Biden’s withholding of 2,000-pound bombs from Israel (Times of Israel, September 18, 2024)

Sweeping Iraq Raid Killed 4 ISIS Leaders (New York Times, September 13, 2024)

One of two US aircraft carriers in the Middle East heads home (Times of Israel, September 12, 2024)

Iran's president visits Iraq amid Middle East tensions (Reuters, September 11, 2024)

Deadly attack on U.S. troops highlights an open-ended military mission (Washington Post, January 30, 2024)

The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century (General Kenneth F. McKenzie, The National Interest, June 2, 2024)

Iran’s Attack Is a Show of Weakness (General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2024)

I Carried Out the Strike That Killed Soleimani. America Doesn’t Understand the Lesson of His Death. (General Kenneth F. McKenzie, The Atlantic, March 24, 2024)

It's Not Time for Our Troops to Leave the Middle East (General Kenneth F. McKenzie, New York Times, Feb 14, 2024)

Israel and the Coming Long War (Assaf Orion, Foreign Affairs, September 12, 2024)

America Is Losing the Battle of the Red Sea (Hal Brands, Bloomberg Opinion, September 6, 2024)

Book Review — “The Melting Point” by General Kenneth McKenzie Jr. (Jeffery Wells, The SCIF, Jun 12, 2024)

Melting Point or Breaking Point? (Elaine McCusker, National Interest, June 24, 2024)