US draw down in Iraq has set the clock ticking....
Israel is made for short, high-intensity wars or long, low-intensity wars. It can do one or the other, but not both. Iran’s proxy militias of Hamas and Hizbollah have created the worse of both and put the IDF on its back foot. Still, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, is very cleared eyed about nature of fighting networked terror cells: hit the communications, and if you can manage it hit them in the balls while you are at it.
As we wrote in last week’s Flight, in a corporate body like the government, the military or any other hierarchy, you go after the command structure and the rest of it goes into chaos - chop off the head, as it were. Network warfare is a different because, by its very nature, it is calibrated to reconfigure itself. When you take out a main node, connecting edges (links) merely rework themselves as decision making is shifted to other nodes. Counter-intuitively, destroying the edges the nodes have to one another, and you start to isolate all of the nodes, eroding the network.
Killing the top echelons of Hizbollah and Hamas was irksome, but it didn’t do too much. That the top echelons suspected that they were being tracked them through their digital communications, however, partially paralyzed the group and prompted a move to analog communications like pagers and walkie-talkies earlier this year.
The question everyone has about the impressive operation is why now? Mossad isn’t saying much - they never do - but the scale of the Israeli airstrikes against some 1,300 targets, mostly weapons depots, tells us something. And it has less to do with Iran and Lebanon than it does with the US and Iraq.
Iran’s Islamic Republic and Iraq’s deranged Saddam Hussein era roughly emerged about the same time Both countries were lead by men who would have made top tier Bond villains – so naturally they hated each other.. The resulting eight year “whirlwind war” between the two was central Asian World War I with trenches, chemical weapons and absolutely nothing accomplished. The practical result was that the arch-rivals kept each other contained.
That was until a bit of French intelligence drifted to Britain’s MI6 in the paranoid days after 9/11. The Intel about “weapons of mass destruction” wasn’t bad, it was just incomplete. By the time it worked its way to the CIA and up the chain to White House and George W. Bush, it had morphed into a sure thing (sadly this happens more than you think). So Washington decided that removing the only thing keeping Iran is check was a solid idea. After installing a representative government in an aggrieved Shi’a majority country, Tehran a nice aggrieved, Shi’a vacuum to dominate. And they did.
Washington’s announcement last week that it and Baghdad had agreed to a timetable for a draw-down of US troops in Iraq in 2026 has created a second order timetable for Israel. The main weapons pipeline between Iran and Hizbollah in Lebanon is through Iraq and Syria. Without an US presence Iraq that underground railroad becomes a superhighway through to Syria, which has Russian and Iranian forces maintaining the routes to Lebanon.
In short, Israel has about eighteen months to break Hizbollah’s operational back before they are in a war of attrition that simply can’t be won without drawing the US and Iran officially into the conflict.