Eliot A. Cohen: “On a recent trip to Israel, I found that Israel’s military and intelligence leaders—who in December were still stunned, guilt-ridden, and infuriated—were in a different place. They are still racked by their collective failure on October 7, 2023, but have recovered their balance. There was no lightheartedness at their exceptional military achievements, however. This was not only because their losses are felt with particular keenness in a society that values its soldiers’ lives in ways even most liberal democracies do not. It is because the Israelis now understand their war differently than they did in December.
“Then, commanders and analysts focused on Gaza and Sinwar. They intended to destroy him and Hamas, and to rescue as many of the hostages as possible. The hostilities launched by Hezbollah along Israel’s northern border—a shower of rockets and sniping every day, which had forced the evacuation of some 80,000 Israelis a few miles from the Lebanon line—were ongoing, but represented an account to be settled later. The Houthis had fired a few missiles at Israel; the major exchanges between Iran and Israel were in the future.
“The Israeli high command now sees all of these conflicts as elements of a single, multifront war with Iran. It believes that the preparation for the Hamas attack was intimately tied to Hezbollah, which is in turn an Iranian proxy. It believes, moreover, that the purpose of these attacks, over the next few years, was not to inflict damage upon Israel, but to destroy it.”
I think this war will ultimately be seen as a serious strategic mistake for Iran, and the cautionary tale on the extensive use of proxy groups.
Iran created an effective quilt of proxy groups which gave it the ability to operate across the Middle East. The problem was that they couldn’t quite control every group, so one group dragged Israel into open conflict with the proxies as a whole rather than as individual actors.
Hezbollah’s fence sitting on the war gave Israel the operational space to begin unpicking the proxy quilt one by one. On October 8, Hezbollah either had to full out attack or stay out of it, by doing symbolic attacks, they symbolically joined but lost the element of surprise and the opportunity to attack while Israel was disorganized, ultimately dooming them to being involved but isolated.
Iran’s proxies are now isolated because Iran has been shown to be pretty weak, while Israel has continued to pick apart the last 40 years of Iranian foreign policy with impunity. Seriously, even as an Israeli, Israel has had a surprisingly free hand to go after Hezbollah compared to what I was expecting.
Instead of giving Iran the distance from its actions the proxy groups have instead dragged Iran into a shooting war with Israel, essentially flipping its own strategy against it. It’s not surprising that now Israel’s strategy is to destroy the Iranian network as much as possible, to prevent such a threat being effective. What’s worse Iran gambled and lost and Trump is back, which makes this an even worse strategic setback, Iran won’t even have a half sympathetic ear in the White House, Dems were much less likely to support serious actions.
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Eliot A. Cohen: “On a recent trip to Israel, I found that Israel’s military and intelligence leaders—who in December were still stunned, guilt-ridden, and infuriated—were in a different place. They are still racked by their collective failure on October 7, 2023, but have recovered their balance. There was no lightheartedness at their exceptional military achievements, however. This was not only because their losses are felt with particular keenness in a society that values its soldiers’ lives in ways even most liberal democracies do not. It is because the Israelis now understand their war differently than they did in December.
“Then, commanders and analysts focused on Gaza and Sinwar. They intended to destroy him and Hamas, and to rescue as many of the hostages as possible. The hostilities launched by Hezbollah along Israel’s northern border—a shower of rockets and sniping every day, which had forced the evacuation of some 80,000 Israelis a few miles from the Lebanon line—were ongoing, but represented an account to be settled later. The Houthis had fired a few missiles at Israel; the major exchanges between Iran and Israel were in the future.
“The Israeli high command now sees all of these conflicts as elements of a single, multifront war with Iran. It believes that the preparation for the Hamas attack was intimately tied to Hezbollah, which is in turn an Iranian proxy. It believes, moreover, that the purpose of these attacks, over the next few years, was not to inflict damage upon Israel, but to destroy it.”
Read more here: [https://theatln.tc/NmRMGdrD](https://theatln.tc/NmRMGdrD)
I think this war will ultimately be seen as a serious strategic mistake for Iran, and the cautionary tale on the extensive use of proxy groups.
Iran created an effective quilt of proxy groups which gave it the ability to operate across the Middle East. The problem was that they couldn’t quite control every group, so one group dragged Israel into open conflict with the proxies as a whole rather than as individual actors.
Hezbollah’s fence sitting on the war gave Israel the operational space to begin unpicking the proxy quilt one by one. On October 8, Hezbollah either had to full out attack or stay out of it, by doing symbolic attacks, they symbolically joined but lost the element of surprise and the opportunity to attack while Israel was disorganized, ultimately dooming them to being involved but isolated.
Iran’s proxies are now isolated because Iran has been shown to be pretty weak, while Israel has continued to pick apart the last 40 years of Iranian foreign policy with impunity. Seriously, even as an Israeli, Israel has had a surprisingly free hand to go after Hezbollah compared to what I was expecting.
Instead of giving Iran the distance from its actions the proxy groups have instead dragged Iran into a shooting war with Israel, essentially flipping its own strategy against it. It’s not surprising that now Israel’s strategy is to destroy the Iranian network as much as possible, to prevent such a threat being effective. What’s worse Iran gambled and lost and Trump is back, which makes this an even worse strategic setback, Iran won’t even have a half sympathetic ear in the White House, Dems were much less likely to support serious actions.