Meanwhile, the IDF carried out two separate airstrikes in Beirut last night, one of them hitting the city proper, rather than the Hizballah-dominated suburb of Dahiya. In trying to make sense of the progress of Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, I found very helpful both this in-depth conversation and this essay by Eran Ortal, even if much has happened since the latter was published two weeks ago. Among much else, Ortal puts the war in the context of IDF’s own history:

In the decades since the 1990s, with the exception of Operation Defensive Shield, [which crushed the second intifada], Israel has refrained from embarking on decisive military moves. Operational decisiveness, let’s remember, is an original Israeli-military concept. Israel has never aimed for absolute victory and the evaporation of its enemies as political bodies—only for the removal of an immediate military threat. The war on terror, which focused on terror groups rather than armies, accustomed the IDF to a pattern of surgical (and eternal) pursuit of terrorist leadership on the one hand and deterrence operations from the air, usually according to the “steps of escalation” method, on the other.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.