A Terrorist Mastermind’s Career Comes to an End

Last week, one of Hizballah’s highest-ranking military commanders, Mustafa Badreddine, was killed in Damascus under mysterious circumstances. But, writes Clifford May, whether he was brought down by an Israeli airstrike, by rivals within his own organization, or by any of the Lebanese and Syrian organizations that would have liked to see him dead, his demise is good news for Israel and the U.S.:

In 2005, the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, a vocal opponent of Bashar al-Assad’s attempts to dominate Lebanon, was assassinated. . . . In 2011, the UN-established special tribunal for Lebanon indicted Badreddine, calling him “the overall controller of the operation.”

Badreddine launched his career in terrorism while still in his teens. Family connections may have helped: his cousin and brother-in-law was Imad Mughniyeh, for years Hizballah’s top military commander. The two worked together to plan the 1983 bombing of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 servicemen. Additional attacks followed, including at the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait. . . .

Two years ago, the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, regarded by President Obama as a leading Iranian “moderate,” laid a wreath on Mughniyeh’s grave in Beirut. And on Friday, in a message to Hizballah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, Zarif expressed his government’s condolences on the death of Badreddine, saying he had died “defending the ideals of Islam.”

Read more at Washington Times

More about: Bashar al-Assad, Hizballah, Iran, Israeli Security, Lebanon, Politics & Current Affairs

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF