Lawfare Daily: Exploding Pagers and Air Strikes

[Intro]

Dan Byman: But whether this will trigger all-out war, I'm not sure. I've been worried about that possibility. And I don't know whether the odds are, you know, for people like me have been debating this question really since October 7th of what are the odds of an all-out war? And I put the odds at, you know, 1 in 4, while some of my colleagues were closer to 50%. Now I'm at 50%.

Benjamin Wittes: I'm Benjamin Wittes, and this is the Lawfare Podcast with Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Dan Byman and Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson.

Scott R. Anderson: It was intending to put pressure on Israel and more than anything threaten the potential to open up another front as a way to kind of deter them, presumably, I think, in coordination with Iran who's got kind of an interest in relationship with both parties. And the United States, again, then comes in as a counterbalance to that.

Benjamin Wittes: Today we're talking Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Israel, exploding pagers, missile strikes, and whether war is now inevitable.

[Main Podcast]

Dan, let's start with just an overview of the current situation. We are recording on Monday afternoon when there are a serious and sustained set of Israeli airstrikes going on in southern Lebanon. Last week, we had exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. As Donald Trump might say, what's going on here?

Dan Byman: So, this seems to be a significant escalation by Israel designed more to weaken Hezbollah than with Israel's traditional focus on deterring it. So, Israel has killed senior Hezbollah leaders. It has done repeated and massive strikes on Hezbollah military positions. And of course, it did this extensive operation against Hezbollah pagers and walkie talkies and radios that really went after a lot of rank and file fighters. So, it's hitting Hezbollah in very different, multiple ways that is debilitating both the leadership and the rank and file. And in the past, I at least would have said, you know, many of these things are red lines. We'd see significant Hezbollah escalations in response.

But I believe the Israeli calculation is that by hitting Hezbollah so hard from so many different angles, repeatedly, Hezbollah is in a position where even if it wants to do a massive escalation, doing so, it would effectively lose, and so Israel is trying to stop Hezbollah, or at least weaken it gravely, believing that by hitting it hard, there actually won't be a major escalation. But to me, at least, that's a very serious risk.

Benjamin Wittes: The escalation appeared to start last week, but it's actually been going on for a while in that they, you know, hit quite senior Hezbollah leadership. It's kind of escalation in a trickle. How would you describe when this period of escalation has started, relative to the baseline of exchange of missiles and targeting across the international border on October 7th of last year?

Dan Byman: I would say that things really start to begin in August when Israel goes after Fuad Shukr, who's one of the most senior Hezbollah commanders. And this is the sort of thing where in past backs and forth, Israel has done significant strikes on Hezbollah, but it has avoided usually going after the most senior leaders. Again, this is in recent history. If we want to go back farther, Israel has killed the most senior leaders of Hezbollah. And so I would date this to August, but at the time, I at least thought it was more spike in what had been a low level, if sustained, back and forth rather than the beginning of a new era. But looking back, I would say we see this attack in August and we see this significant increase across the board in multiple ways in September. But this back and forth, as I think all the listeners know has been, has had ups and downs in the months since October 7th, but I think this is the, by far the most active period.

Benjamin Wittes: And how should we understand Hezbollah's posture through this? They've always maintained a, you know, a kind of calibrated response to October 7th. They want to make it impossible to live in the north of Israel, but they haven't wanted a full-scale war with Israel, which they don't think they can win. On the other hand, they have been, you know, pretty relentless about not stopping. How should we understand their position here?

Dan Byman: So Hezbollah has, since October 7th, been trying in its own view to show solidarity with Hamas. It's very hard to have a sustained massive operation against Israel, especially one that also involves a lot of dead Palestinian children, with Hezbollah sitting on the sidelines. But at the same time, it has tried in its own way to put limits on it. So we haven't seen massive barrages deep into Israel. We haven't seen international terrorism against Israel. When in April, when Iran and Israel were having a back and forth, Hezbollah largely stayed out of that back and forth, despite its exceptionally close relationship with Iran.

So, it's been calibrating things in part because it might lose in a military sense, but also Lebanon is a disaster area, even putting aside the conflict of Israel. It has had this massive economic crisis since at least 2019. Its currency has depreciated tremendously. The government is basically non-existent. And so with the country spinning out of control, the last thing ordinary Lebanese want is a massive conflict with Israel. A limited conflict is bad enough. So, Hezbollah has been trying to find that line between showing solidarity with Israel being part of the great struggle of the day, yet not having things spill over against the group massively or into Lebanon.

But this may be changing, right? The last few weeks show that really hasn't been sustainable. What I would say is when I was in Israel and I was along the north, I was talking to Israeli military officials and asking, hey, how much can I travel around without having to worry? And they said, oh, don't worry. If you're in a civilian car, it's not going to be a problem, right? Hezbollah is very much trying to target military targets. That is a logical area for them to change, as you said, to kind of go much more aggressively after a wider range of targets in a less discriminant way along the north. But that discrimination they were showing to me very much reflected their goal, was they were trying to avoid things that might justify broader conflict.

And when they did have that tragic strike that killed all those Druze children, I think it was accepted, I think, even by the most militant Israelis, that wasn't Hezbollah’s goal. They weren't saying, hey, let's kill a bunch of Druze children, that they were trying to do a military strike. But this happens, of course, when you're shooting rockets back and forth, you're going to miss. And if you shoot enough of them, you're going to miss a lot. And so, the potential for escalation was always there. But I think the big shift is more on the Israeli political side, where there's less and less toleration of a sense of risk when it comes to Hezbollah. And there seems to be fairly broad support, at least, now the things from an Israeli point of view seem to be going reasonably well for what the government is doing.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. So, all of this brings us to last week when 3,000 people or so are injured or killed in the exploding pager operation. Scott, what do we know about Operation Beep Beep Beep Beep Boom?

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah, so what we know from reporting, although I think we have to take all of this with a little bit of a grain of salt, is that several months ago, it sounds like Israel was able to essentially sell to Hezbollah, initially, there's a lot of discussion about whether somehow they had penetrated kind of the existing supply chain that was feeding Hezbollah these beepers and walkie talkies, which were also detonated in a similar operation the next day. Now, the latest reporting I've read, although feel free to update me if I've missed something more recent on this, suggests that no, in fact, these were kind of manufactured items that were then passed through an intermediary and sold to Hezbollah. So not quite the same as a manufacturing supply chain vulnerability capitalized upon. It's that they're kind of simulating the supply chain and the original source of these things with explosives embedded within them.

And the most interesting report on this came from Axios that I read about the logic behind the operation, which started months ago, has been in place for months. What Axios said is that this was an effort to essentially attach a potential kind of kill switch to the Hezbollah communications and leadership network so that if it got to the point where Israel had to launch a major military operation in the north, they would essentially kick off this operation, detonate these devices, and you would suddenly disrupt what had been the new method Hezbollah had moved towards communicating, which is using these pagers away from mobile devices that they understood have been hacked by the Israelis or monitored by the Israelis.

But, according to the Axios reporting, we know this now to be true. When this happened, there was no major Israeli military operation immediately to follow. Certainly not a ground campaign, certainly like a, not a major special forces operation, which frankly, many of us on our internal office Slack and in conversations I was having with others outside actually expected. Cause that seemed like such a logical follow on. What the Axios reporting indicated, and specifically sourced it to a senior U.S. intelligence official, said that, in fact, what happened is that the Israelis discovered that Hezbollah had gotten some sort of clue or begin to suspect that some other devices had these explosives within them, at least in the pagers, and that became a use-or-lose situation.

And that even as a representative for the Biden administration, Amos Hochstein, who is a special advisor actually for energy issues for the White House, but has become a major interlocutor for the administration, particularly around this kind of issue set of the conflict in the north in Israel. Even as they were on the ground meeting with senior Israeli officials, you have Gallant and Netanyahu and others sitting down and saying, well, what do we do with this use-or-lose situation? Do we pull the trigger? And they decided to pull the trigger essentially. A situation that I think raises a lot of questions on the legal front and on the operational front. But that happened last Tuesday, East Coast time, as I recall.

The next day we had, saw a walkie-talkie, a very similar walkie-talkie operation happen. And we've heard a limited number of casualties but including a handful of civilians and children but there's also a number of military targets. I think mostly military targets, from most of the sources I've seen. And then a large number of wounded, which includes people across the spectrum, as you would kind of expect, because these are explosive devices being carried around by people in the evening in urban areas in homes. And so a wide range of injuries in a lot of different swathes of Lebanese society and to some extent Syria as well. And some of the people injured include Iran's Ambassador to Lebanon among a handful of other fairly high-profile people.

Benjamin Wittes: And so what do we know about who the injured are? I mean, on the one hand, we've heard reports two children were killed. We've heard an Iranian ambassador had at least one and maybe two eyes destroyed. On the other hand, Nasrallah himself described it as a grievous blow to Hezbollah, which implies that from a, you know, which is not something that he normally says and kind of implies that from a military point of view, it was effective. Do either of you have a sense of how effective/targeted it was or not?

Dan Byman: I think for the most part, it was exceptionally targeted. That these were, you know, devices handed out to Hezbollah, primarily Hezbollah fighters, as far as I can tell, but also key officials. And it was very focused on individuals in the organization. The caveat is, you know, many of these people, of course, were using these devices, almost by design outside a military environment, right? Sort of thing you might bring home so you have to know if you need to report to combat, for example. And when you bring something home, you know, your kid picks it up from time to time, or it's in the wrong place and, you know, you will have innocents harmed.

So I think as these things go, it's not quite the same as bombing a purely military position where you are sure that by definition, that the people that are going to be fighters. But to me, it's a fairly highly targeted, when you think about an organization that for the most part doesn't have fighters who put on uniforms and differentiate themselves from civilians, aside from when they're deployed. So I put it in the fairly discriminate category, but certainly not perfect. I'd be curious on how Scott views that same question.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, Scott, you have some anxieties about it.

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah I'm somewhat more skeptical, mostly because of the paucity of information, and as I've tried to think through how this operation would have been executing the information we have, and I think that Israel most likely has available to it. Here's my thinking on the reason I get anxiety over this operation. The one thing we know is that these were inserted into a supply chain that is a good reason to believe is going to Hezbollah.

Now Israel might have a lot of intelligence information that suggests this whole supply chain up to the end user to a degree that would stick for several months, predominantly focused with fighters and Hezbollah. But I don't think of actually, we've actually seen any reporting or fidelity around that. You know, and Hezbollah is a pretty big, diverse organization, and I don't know exactly how they're sourcing and supply chains work. So Hezbollah has a number of people who are fighters, who particularly to take the view that Hezbollah and Israel are in an armed conflict with each other. You know, if they're fighters in organized armed group, they would be potentially legitimate targets for military operation.

Lots of other people were members of Hezbollah wouldn't be necessarily. If they are people involved in Hezbollah social service organizations, or just partisan members of Hezbollah as a pseudo-political party, well, as a political party. Or involved in a lot of other activities that Hezbollah might be well be involved, and we know is involved, in big parts of southern Lebanon in particular, then they might not, they would not necessarily be lawful targets. You would need to know in advance, like who is actually using these pagers.

Now, if you don't have a lot of fidelity on the front end saying like, here's this supply chain, we know this is like a military logistics supply chain, that the people that get these are fighters, right? And there's always going to be some risk that that's going to get worse over time that, yeah, these guys will get these things, but the corruption is a thing in Lebanon. The economy sucks. Maybe they're taking them and selling them to third parties, right? Or maybe they're disseminating, they get a new one, they give the old one to their kid or something like that, right? These things happen. And so over time, that fidelity is going to get weaker. In this case, it's a matter of a couple of months. I could see people having a high, reasonable degree of confidence that, you know, the initial person who received the distributed device probably would still have it.

In this case, they actually did before the detonation is worth noting, trigger the device, essentially have it beep as if it's an incoming message. So presumably the person who was assigned to would pick it up and then it detonated, which I do think it was an effort to try and reduce unnecessary civilian casualties and slash hit the target more effectively. But, at a certain point, the only way to really know whether these devices are actually in the hands, if you don't have high-fidelity information about how they're being distributed, would be to monitor their communications and monitor how they're being used. I don't think that's very likely that's something Israel was able to do. Because if they were, they probably had a lot more intelligence value out of that monitoring capacity than they necessarily got out of detonating them especially in a use-or-lose situation, which this appears to have been. Especially because we know, it sounds like Hezbollah caught onto the phone situation, but not onto the walkie talkies, right? And so maybe that it's worth keeping one or the other.

And they shifted to pagers from mobile devices because they thought they were more secure, be harder for the Israelis to hack. So, if you don't have that ability to determine who's using this device and how, and if you lack that sort of fidelity at the front end of the supply chain which, I am skeptical you could have a high degree of confidence that how these are being used. It's not impossible. You might, but I'm a little skeptical of that. Then you have to ask yourself, okay, there's going to be civilian harm out of this. Maybe members of Hezbollah, maybe people we don't like, but they're still not legitimate targets. They're not supposed to be people who can target with this.

That is okay in a military operation. You can have that, but you have to make efforts to limit it and it has to be justified by military necessity. If this were in military operation that was designed to be undertaken at the beginning of a major military operation, the military necessity, the tactical and strategic advantages would be substantial. You could see a substantial degree of civilian harm that was otherwise very hard to mitigate be justified by saying, yes, this is going to kill a lot of civilians who are a degree removed from Hezbollah, and that is tragic and unfortunate. But the plus side is we are going to be able to operate so much more effectively and get what we don't, need to do on the ground much more effectively.

And that military necessity element, the advantages can warrant a higher degree of civilian harm. The problem here is that this was by reporting a use-or-lose situation. And all of a sudden that degree of military necessity, that strategic advantage really begins to go out the window. And I think this becomes, if you lack that high fidelity and you lack that ability to confirm how they're used, becomes a lot dicier to justify in my mind.

Benjamin Wittes: So I want to get Dan's reaction to that. It seems to me that one possibility is that this was a prelude to a major military operation. We're just seeing the major military operation now, rather than three days ago.

Second possibility, it's a use or lose situation, but they figure, number one, it'll compromise their comms and their ability to call people up when they do these strikes. They're trying to now take out as many of the missiles as they can before they start launching. Anything you can do to take out the more senior level cadre who are going to be carrying pagers before, is going to impair their ability to do it. Or let's take Scott's and Axios' reporting at face value. What if it has nothing to do with any of what we're seeing now? It's just they realize that Hezbollah's figured it out. They're onto them. All the pagers are going to be thrown into ditch in the Beqaa Valley, and so they figure now or never. How do you understand the pager operation and the walkie-talkie operation relative to what's happening now?

Dan Byman: So, I want to say, Scott, I think raises some really important points to consider, at least that I need to consider. Let me say a few things, Ben, in response to your question. So, I think from Israel's point of view, there hasn't been an ongoing military operation for 11 months. And that question that they have is, will Hezbollah escalate tomorrow? And that's a really difficult one to answer in a general sense. But I think one, there are some really big changes since October 7th, and one of them is how Israel calculates risk. Which is I have no idea what the odds are that Hezbollah was going to make a major escalation the day before the pager operation, but, you know, let's put it at, you know, 2%, so relatively low.

I think Israel might have said in, you know, a year ago, we can live with a 2% risk. I think after October 7th, they'd say, no, we can't. And so that question of reducing Hezbollah's capability by hurting its command, by hurting its fighters to me is very much in the context of Israel's risk and how they see the ongoing operations. In addition, as you say, Ben, there is a possibility that these kind of massive airstrikes were very much tied with the beeper operation. I'm not sure about that, right? That could be-

Benjamin Wittes: I mean, I expected this set of airstrikes, I think Scott referred to our Slack channel. The pager operation happened. I expected this set of airstrikes that evening.

Dan Byman: I did, too.

Benjamin Wittes: In real time.

Dan Byman: And when they didn't happen, what I couldn't quite figure out was it, oh, we should probably, as long as we're hitting them, we should hit them again, right? You know, it's you're not going to be punished for hitting them a second time, if you know what I mean. So we may as well do it all. They're weak. They're off balance. And we're taking the international condemnation and I suppose, response. So what I didn't know was that how coordinated that was, were they waiting to see if the operation was successful?

There are two more possibilities I want to raise, both of which are disturbing, but in different ways. So one is, as we all know from the Gaza War, another significant shift in Israel's approach to operations is that question of how it considers proportionality. And here I defer 100%, Ben to you, but especially to Scott, on the question of how to think about what that means. But there, as Scott says you can kill civilian targets if there's military necessity. But the question is, you know, what is the level of military necessity and how many civilians can you kill? And Israel has dramatically raised those numbers in Gaza. So, you know, whatever the numbers were a year ago there-. I would actually, if you want to go back, I remember in the ‘90s and early 2000s, they were dramatically lower and then they were, the ratios were increased as the Second Intifada went on, and then they were increased again after Hamas seizes power. But I think we see another huge step change after October 7th.

So, that question of, you know, where we're talking about, you know, how you weigh this balance, from an Israeli point of view, is just like, this is a no-brainer. Right? That, you know, compared to some of the operations in Gaza, you know, yeah, we can get a lot of Hezbollah fighters here for relatively few civilians that even, you know, let's take the worst assumptions from what Scott, the case Scott is laying out. That a lot of these people are not with the military wing, there's a high risk of families or other people who should not be part of it. I think if you look at some of the Gaza targeting Israel would say, yeah, no problem. Right? But well that’s acceptable-

Benjamin Wittes: Well, it’s dramatically more targeted than, say, blowing up a compound with a lot of civilians in it because there are ten or seven senior Hamas guys.

Dan Byman: Exactly. Or even not even that senior, right? Even mid-level.

And the last thing I'll say, which is you know, always tricky with Israel is the question of how much domestic politics play into this. Which is, you know, these operations are very popular. It is remarkable. It's a remarkable intelligence operation, right? Whether it's strategically wise or foolish isn't a separate question, but it's no question in my mind. It's stunning, I would even say. And it, the campaign against Hezbollah is popular. And it's something that shores up the government. It shores up individual political leaders who can claim credit for it. And we've seen this government at times play politics with national security, and I don't want to immediately leap to that, but I also do think it's something that should be on the table.

Benjamin Wittes: And Scott, how do you understand Nasrallah's comments, which seemed to concede that the operation was quite effective and had rocked Hezbollah back and him personally back on his heels a bit.

Scott R. Anderson: I mean, I have no reason not to take it at total face value but the, you know, the fact that he's rocked by that doesn't itself alone mean that it's a, you know, a legal military operation.

Benjamin Wittes: Right, it doesn't mean it's legit.

Scott R. Anderson: Yeah. You got to know what the collateral damage is and a bunch of other factors and how well the Israelis were thinking about this. Dan's point about proportionality is a real one. I mean, the Israelis, they just think about proportionality different. And I think this was a point of like real academic debate before October 7th. Cause it's been a trend in Israeli military operations for better part of two decades, really, since the Second Intifada. And I, maybe before then I just wasn't, I was too young to follow stuff at that point.

But you know, from that point onward, you've seen a shift, first, kind of looking at civilian infrastructure, dual use infrastructure, to say, differently. You know, a greater willingness to target dual use infrastructure, particularly in the 2006 Lebanon War. That was a big sticking point, a point of criticism for Israeli military operations there at the time. And it's been a persistent, almost, strategy. There are international legal arguments to say that's okay, and the Israelis are very good about them. They're very informed about them and they advance them. International law, international humanitarian law around this is a framework about how to think about these things. That can't, there's no way you can actually prescribe all of the actual, what the right answer is.

It is a framework and a checklist about the things you're supposed to consider and weigh against each other. The one thing we can say with confidence is that I think a fairly high degree of confidence is that the standards the Israelis apply is unlike and way more tolerant of civilian harm than American, U.K., or other militaries apply in as close to a comparable military operations we've seen, like fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It is not a perfect comparison. People raise that point, it’s fair, like Gaza is different and in many ways more challenging. But how different is it to warrant a dramatic difference that is, you know, a potential order of magnitude. That's the question.

Benjamin Wittes: The biggest difference is that when we did Mosul, we didn't do the ground operations. And so, you know, the stuff that was most comparable to what the Israelis do was done by Iraqi Army and, you know, and partner forces that don't necessarily follow our standards. And so, we had the air and we had some of the other more standoff positions, but we actually didn't do the storming of Mosul. So, I want to focus in on what happens now. Dan, do you think that we are now, I mean, I guess we'll know over the next few days, but are we now plunged into the next Lebanon war, or is there a opportunity here for either Hezbollah or the Israelis to back off of something short of full scale conflict between them?

Dan Byman: So, I want to be careful here because I think some of my assumptions on what would trigger an all-out war were wrong. And, you know, Israel has hit Hezbollah very hard in multiple ways and so far does not trigger an all-out war. And that could be because Hezbollah still feels the risk to Lebanon is too high. It could be simply because Hezbollah thinks it'll lose, that it just won't hit Israel hard and it itself will be hit hard. I'm not sure. But so, I think there's a real possibility that obviously Hezbollah is going to keep firing at Israel and continue the conflict perhaps, you know, going slightly deeper into Israel, perhaps hitting a wider range of targets in the north.

But whether this will trigger all-out war, I'm not sure. I've been worried about that possibility. And I don't know whether the odds are, you know, for people like me have been debating this question really since October 7th of what are the odds of an all-out war? And I put the odds at, you know, 1 in 4, while some of my colleagues were closer to 50%. Now I'm at 50%. And I can still spin a case where Hezbollah, you know, feels the need to save face, but really tries to keep it limited in a way that Israel can accept. Somewhat similar to what we saw in April, when Iran did that massive salvo against Israel but telegraphed it, and otherwise tried to limit the damage of its own operations. Israel did respond, but did so in a very limited way, and both sides agreed to stand down at least temporarily. I could see something akin to that, where both sides can claim some degree of victory.

But Israel is repeatedly hitting Hezbollah. And at some point, Hezbollah will feel it's in a use-or-lose situation and is likely to feel that, okay, we're not going to be able to use these rocket systems we've developed and so on, and also feel the need to respond for its own dignity. I mean, one thing that separates out the pager operation from the assassinations of senior leaders is, the pager operation, because it affected so many people, is truly humiliating. It's an embarrassment to Hezbollah security. It's an embarrassment to the overall organization, and embarrassed organizations feel the need to save face.

So, as you can tell, I'm reluctant to make a firm prediction, but I would say, you know, at the very least, the odds of an all-out war have gone up significantly, and the rationale for Hezbollah waiting and being limited may simply be due to its own weakness. I think part of Israel's possible calculation, if we want to put a strategic spin on this, is they've gone from believing that you deter by creating a very kind of rational set of fears on the other side and uncertainty to you deter by just really making aggressive operations exceptionally difficult, if not impossible. And you do that by taking out leaders, capabilities, weapons, infrastructure, and personnel, and that's the most effective way of stopping the other side. I would have been skeptical of that because I think of Hezbollah as a very capable organization that can lose some capacity and still keep fighting, but Israel has been hitting Hezbollah exceptionally hard. And I think it'd be difficult, at present at least, for Hezbollah to mount significant major military operations because of the level of disruption they've suffered.

Benjamin Wittes: What do you think, Scott? I keep resisting the conclusion that Dan is hinting at here, which is, you know, basically that if you hit them hard, but not hard enough to trigger a major war over and over again for several weeks at a time, it amounts to a kind of a devastating pre-emptive strike. But you've never had the, you know, Egyptian Air Force on the tarmac moment, right? And so you've kind of created the same outcome without the devastation, without the one devastating moment. Is that what's happening here? Or is this just a pent up, you know, there's still 150,000 missiles that they've got and, you know, the same conditions that existed a year ago, which is that they have their own deterrence capacity exists today and we're going to see it maybe this week or maybe next week.

Scott R. Anderson: I mean, that's kind of the difficult question. I don't, I think Dan's answer is very well stated and I don't have a better one. The only thing I would add to it, I think, is that there's kind of two factors for, on Hezbollah's part, that's a little different and I do think enters into Israeli strategy. I'll say, I had a really good conversation on this podcast with Joel Bronald, who's the head of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, the day before the pager attacks. I think the podcast actually released like an hour or two after the pager attacks news went public.

And he said very much what Dan just articulated, like the Israeli mindset, particularly among the leadership, but really pretty broadly among a lot of Israelis, has really shifted much more to we don't manage a status quo. You dominate and dictate a status quo. And that's a status quo where you have a lot lower tolerance for potential risk, and that is the mindset that has become more dominant in the post-October 7th world. You just don't have a tolerance for that sort of risk. And that the way you deter people is not just by keeping them on edge. You have to dominate the field. You have to be a lot more assertive and aggressive in dictating the conditions that you want to see.

That is a perspective that, you know, has a synergy with a lot of instincts of, whether it's reprisal and retribution, whether it's just kind of like a militant nationalism a lot of other, there's a certain synergy there with, like, a lot of ideological perspectives of folks on other issues, particularly regarding the West Bank in the current government, in the Israeli government, the kind of all others in there as well. But when you have that sort of mindset, it means you're no longer a status quo party. You're willing and actively trying to disrupt and change the status quo. That's what's kind of different between Hamas and Hezbollah. Hamas revealed itself on October 7th to very much not be a status quo party, or at least elements of Hamas did, or at least they were willing to take a risk on the status quo. Because of the October 7th operation, no one could have believed Hamas doing that would have done any, let anything that different than what it did lead to, which is a pretty devastating military operations in Gaza.

Hezbollah, I'm not sure, isn't more of a status quo party. For all the rhetoric and for all the role that opposing and fighting Israel plays in the identity of it as a group, it is a entity that's building up a stronghold and has a lot of political significance in Southern Lebanon and it stands to lose a lot with a major encounter with Israel. On the one hand, that may make it less, more resistant to actually going into an all-out war. On the other hand, it also means that it may feel a need to reestablish deterrence, in so far as Israel, where it’s revealing itself to be much more willing to be an anti-status quo party and push to try and change things with these pretty aggressive strikes.

And frankly, is doing this off a window where Hezbollah, after the initial strikes in August, took a pretty muted response, a lot like the initial Iranian response, and then Israel appears to have doubled down now with several waves of additional attacks. I kind of feel like Hezbollah is going to feel the need to respond substantially and significantly. But maybe just up to the point of reestablishing some sort of deterrence by hurting Israel enough to realize that there's a downside of being this provocative, without having to go through the complete dislocation of the existing status quo, which I think Hezbollah might actually kind of be okay with, or at least not anxious to disrupt given the potential downsides for it.

And a big part of that factor it's worth noting is the risk of American military involvement as well. You know, the fact you have an aircraft carrier parked in the Gulf of Oman currently, we know another aircraft carrier and two destroyers are headed to the region, although on a regular schedule, they're supposed to sub out with the current one, but who knows exactly? There's an overhanging threat of both Iranian and U.S. involvement entering into the conflict that takes in a lot of unpredictable directions. And I just don't know how Hezbollah is approaching that. Dan, you're a much closer student of Hezbollah than I am, and I'd be curious about your thoughts about its tolerance and departure from the status quo, but I'm just, its actions have been much more small C conservative than I would have expected over the last several years, honestly. And I'm just not sure it's as anxious to have this confrontation that it's been preparing for as people kind of assume it is from the outside.

Dan Byman: No, and I too largely see it as more conservative than most people do. If we want to go back to 2006, which was the last major Israel-Hezbollah conflict before all this. This was an operation that from Hezbollah's point of view, wasn't meant to happen, in terms of sparking an all-out war. They did this cross-border operation. They kidnapped the Israeli soldiers or their bodies effectively, but in so doing, they think that's an operation that will largely spark some Israeli airstrikes and limit attacks, not an all-out war. And that actually was, I think, well-founded because that's how Israel had responded to similar operations in the past.

What had shifted was politics in Israel. And Hezbollah didn't realize that, the dramatic changes. And after the war, Nasrullah very candidly says, if I had known this was going to unleash an all-out war, we wouldn't have done this. Which is to me, actually, it's both a remarkable statement of a mistake, but in a way that shows a very confident political leader, right? He didn't feel the need to, frankly, lie to his own people. He could admit that he screwed up. And from there, you know, again, I and others were very nervous that we'd see war happen again. It didn't, right? And so this conflict, you know, continues at a very low level compared to previous years, for 18 years. And it's not until, or I should say 17 years. It's not until the Hamas attack that puts all this in motion. So not something Hezbollah did and something we now believe that Hezbollah was not aware of. And so I do see it as relatively cautious, and again, especially because of the grim situation in Lebanon itself, that it always cared about its Lebanese equities.

The one caveat to all this, though, is I would have told you before October 7th that Hamas had a lot of equities in Gaza. And would have been reluctant to do an operation like October 7th because it would trigger exactly the sort of response that Israel gave, the utter devastation of Gaza. And to me, it's hard for me to say to an Israeli, you know, look, I was wrong about October 7th, but this time I'm right. Right? So I think the risk calculation, the way that perspective in Israel has changed, even if the facts themselves have not dramatically changed. So, that's my read on both the group, but I think, as your question implies, Scott, the perception of this is probably more important than the reality.

Benjamin Wittes: Well, but there is some degree of a known reality, and it is what that while Hezbollah is further from major population centers than Gaza is, it's not that far from some of them. And it does have a very large collection of missiles and a better trained fighting force than Hamas has. So now let's fast forward a few days to a world that we hope does not arrive where this thing goes all out. What is Hezbollah, in its current state, capable of delivering in the way of an all-out war, that it was not, back in 2006?

Dan Byman: So, there are a couple of things, but with caveats. So Hezbollah has, you know, truly massive rocket and missile arsenal, and it has some precision systems within them. The scale of this is enough. Where it could probably overwhelm Israel's air defenses. So Israel's air defenses are far better than they were in 2006, but Hezbollah, simply through numbers, could go through it and the range is greater. So, even more of Israel or really all of Israel would be at risk of rocket attacks so you could have massive attacks on a scale that wasn't true in 2006, and 2006 was pretty bad, from an Israeli point of view, so it could be significantly worse.

The fighters are very skilled, but they were very skilled in 2006. And so you have a lot of combat experience this time gained from Syria. And the advantage for Hezbollah would be largely a defensive war. To take out some of the systems, especially the short-range systems, the belief is Israel would have to do some ground operations in Lebanon. And Hezbollah, it would be its home turf. It's prepared for this. We've seen, you know, how many tunnels can be hidden by Hamas in Gaza, the assumption is Hezbollah, which did this in 2006, would be doing this as well.

But, the caveat is Israel in 2006 was somewhat blindsided from an intelligence point of view about Hezbollah's military capabilities. It hadn't trained properly for operations in Lebanon. It was surprised that there were, you know, Hezbollah tunnels almost on the border with Israel. The belief is, you know, this time they will not be a surprise. They have been preparing for this since 2006. So, it's one of those things where a lot of Hezbollah's advantages in 2006 came from both an Israeli lack of preparedness, but also almost an Israeli contempt for Hezbollah, which, you know, in a way was stunning, given that, frankly, Hezbollah had expelled Israel from Lebanon only six years earlier.

Benjamin Wittes: Yes, if any fighting force in the region had earned the IDF's respect, it was Hezbollah.

Dan Byman: To me, it would be as if the U.S. went into, you know, Vietnam in 1978 and said, wow, who knew these people would fight us, right? Who knew this could happen? But nevertheless, they did. And so, I think there's a lot of uncertainty, because a lot of it depends on both what Hezbollah has learned and what Iran has learned. And, you know, part of what Israel has done through these attacks is, you know, very much disrupt Hezbollah command and control. So I think we'd see very skilled pockets of Hezbollah fighting because they're skill-determined fighters. They're very brave. I don't think there's much question about that. But how much they could coordinate their operations is to me a question mark. But I think a lot of what they would be doing here, which is rocket attacks and mortar attacks and defensive ground operations, doesn't require that much coordination. Obviously from military point of view, coordination is always better. But the, you know, fire your rockets indefinitely till you, you know, hit stuff or get blown up is not the most complex military order. And I think that would be a lot of it.

Benjamin Wittes: So Scott, one of the, one of the frustrating things about the northern front from an Israeli point of view, is that to Israelis, this has nothing to do with Gaza. And the Israelis are out of Lebanon, and they don't occupy a square inch of Lebanese territory. And so there's no reason from their point of view why they should still have a battle ongoing with this very capable force. Obviously from Hezbollah's perspective, the two battles are deeply connected to one another, and in fact, willingness to engage this fight is a major source of legitimacy for Hezbollah around the region. So, I have a pretty good sense of what the minimal Israeli demands to just deescalate this situation is. But I have very little sense of what the minimum Hezbollah demands are to deescalate this situation. Is it basically ceasefire in Gaza? And then we'll, things will calm down or is there, is it more to it than that?

Scott R. Anderson: That's a good question. I don't really have a firm sense of that either. I mean, we know the military operations essentially started with Israeli military operations in Gaza, I think relatively short after shortly afterwards, as I recall. So, you know, there wasn't, I don't think it should be surprising to anyone, but there wasn't, sort of, any acknowledgement that October 7^th gave Israel any sort of right of military response. And then they've kind of escalated, you know, again I do not see what Hezbollah's actions thus far have been, as being a like foundational game changer to the overall picture. It was intending to put pressure on Israel and more than anything threaten the potential to open up another front as a way to kind of deter them. Presumably, I think in coordination with Iran, who has got kind of an interest and relationship with both parties. And the United States again, then comes in as a counterbalance to that, right? And so, the whole idea is kind of like nested of deterrence effects.

What would the demands be for like a complete cessation of hostilities? Certainly it would be at a minimum a ceasefire in Gaza, but probably not even then. You haven't had a real cessation of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel in decades, because there's a foundational disagreement about Israel's existence and, you know, control the parts of occupied Palestinian territories, really Israel's existence foundationally, right? A lot of variety of other disputes. So, that's not the goal. The goal can't be like a complete cessation of hostilities.

Benjamin Wittes: No, but I meant to return to status quo ante before October 7th, which is to say, a relatively peaceful northern border in which both South Lebanese and Northern Israelis can live their lives.

Scott R. Anderson: You know, that all depends on what Hezbollah's threshold is. And that, that is, I think Dan's caveat, you know, about how conservative are they is a good one. You know, if I, my guess is although I would defer to Dan and other folks who follow them, all this, a little more closely, like, you know, my guess is that you can get a lot more to a status quo ante if you just accept the low-grade hostilities along the border and then deal with fairly reciprocal proportional responses. And then that's just going to be an ongoing low grade of hostilities. And it's going to be focused on military targets like it was a few months ago. It will be one that there will be civilian harm on both sides of the border, which is tragic and unavoidable, but I don't think either, either party is going to walk back from that possibility.

And that can happen even if Gaza continued. So there's a major spike in Gaza hostilities. You'll see some sort of spike of hostility of activities by Hezbollah because they have to, because they've made this rhetorical commitment. But my sense is that the situation with Hezbollah across the northern border, while the displacements were really difficult was not three months ago, foundationally unsustainable. And if you were willing to go back to that status quo, then you would, that would probably be the direction would drift in and that would be the equilibrium once both parties got whatever, you know, retribution slash deterrence restoration, they need to get out from this latest flare up. The real question is, I don't think that's where the Israelis want to go now. Like, I don't, I think they've decided, and all the recent actions suggest that they are not comfortable with that status quo, and they need to, feel a need to debilitate Hezbollah substantially. And then the real question is, what is Hezbollah's tolerance for that, I suppose. And that's a big open question. I just don't know.

Benjamin Wittes: So that brings me, Dan, to what I think the Israelis’ minimum requirement is, which is implementation of the 2006 ceasefire agreement and redeployment of Hezbollah north of the Litani, and thereby enabling Israelis in the north to go home. Is your impression that the Israelis are not going to recede to low grade cross border operations until something like that happens, or at least that's what they think they're doing?

Dan Byman: I do believe that's what Israel thinks it's doing, that it does have a, you know, I will say conception of what the situation should look like, and that is Hezbollah forces pushed significantly farther from the Israeli border. That makes something like October 7th much harder for Hezbollah. You can't simply slip across the border and do a raid. It would have been hard in general, but it makes it much harder to do. It also reduces some of the effectiveness of short-range systems, depending on where Hezbollah ends up being. And Hezbollah has a lot of short-range systems, so that's not that's not a small gain.

So I do see those as some of the broader Israeli objectives. The one caveat I'd raise is that this question, when we think about a broader war. I've criticized Israel, as have many other people, for not really having an endgame in Gaza. And it's much harder in Lebanon than it is in Gaza, because even if Hezbollah suffers significant casualties and conflict, it's not going anywhere. Israel, at least I can't imagine, is not going to occupy Lebanon. Hezbollah can simply retreat farther south and then regroup and as such control its casualties to some degree, so you can weaken Hezbollah in a war. But you're not going to displace it the way Israel is hoping to displace Hamas in Gaza. So, I do think these much more limited goals are possible.

And I actually do think they're possible through, you know, Israel's current types of campaign and diplomacy, but it does require the Hamas ceasefire. So, I think it's very difficult to get, politically for Hezbollah, to stop firing when there's still a lot of significant firing in Gaza. Now, I do think Hezbollah would take, you know, anything that could be called a ceasefire and say, sure, it's a ceasefire, even if you, the next day you still had more shooting. But you do need that declaration on both the Israeli and the Hamas side. And as we know, we're not particularly close to that.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. So, Scott, if you mentioned that we, that is to say the United States, have an aircraft carrier in a parking lot nearby, what are we doing there? And how likely is it that we're going to get dragged into this system?

Scott R. Anderson: So that's the real question, and it's a little, I don’t think the Biden administration has been crystal clear about where exactly its line is, recently. You know, we saw shortly after October 7th, the deployment of aircraft carrier and other major assets to the region, more approximately than the Gulf of Oman or the current aircraft carrier station, although again, that may yet relocate, to the region specifically discussed in reference to this kind of northern, this northern campaign, this northern front. The idea being that this is a spot where, because of Hezbollah's major military capacity because of, in addition, you know, there is always possibility of some degree of greater Iranian involvement. This is where the real escalation to a major conflict that has real regional ramifications and major ramifications on the kind of like national security, national identity, national military capabilities level for Israel would be.

If Gaza operation went seriously south, the impact on Israelis would be, on Israel as a state, will be somewhat limited. Israelis could be really hurt. Maybe you would see, you know, even another horrible October 7th attack. That's horrible. It's psychologically damaging, but Israel itself, its national security capabilities wouldn't be substantially affected or changed by it. That's very different from a major war with Hezbollah, where you're going to lose a lot of Israeli military capabilities. You're going to have some major population displacements, potentially major civilian casualties. I mean, it's a much more real, what we think of as like a major war that could be what, that's one outcome, potentially from Hezbollah, and a much more likely one than Gaza. So, the idea was the U.S. military presence is there to suggest that this is something that might happen to prevent that from happening. It's this kind of general deterrent effect.

I don't think we have a really clear sense of that, where the actual line is, the Biden administration would draw for actually doing that. I think Iranian involvement very clearly would be one. Although what that response that would incur, I suspect would be somewhat limited. And there be an effort to be proportional to the Iranians to say, hey, we're going to slap you back a few times,, don't, slap your hand from getting too close to the cookie jar. Don't think about it. I don't think anybody's anxious to kind of go to war with Tehran over it. Is there a lower threshold at which you would get involved, for the Americans? My instinct is no, certainly not now, because Israeli actions are the escalatory steps here.

And so it becomes a bigger, particularly frankly, in the lead up to the election, a bigger risk for the Biden administration. There's risks on both sides of not supporting Israel strong enough, but also of being too willing to engage in military operations. And I think that this point, at least, you know, in the initial phases of some exchange, my guess is the domestic politics, the strategic politics, everything kind of leans in favor of, let's not get involved too quickly or too hastily. But if the war proceeds, if there are major civilian ramifications or other major ramifications for Israelis, maybe, or even on the Lebanese side, although that'll be a much more diplomatic involvement, maybe you see the American step in to try and tip things one way or the other. And you might see American intelligence support and other sorts of support for Israeli military operations.

I don't think you would see that for the sort of anticipatory action we're seeing the Israelis pursue now because I think there's questions as to how acceptable or legal that is. And certainly, the Americans don't seem happy about it from an escalation standpoint. But they might be involved later if there is a much more active hostility. And what the Israelis are doing, it's easier to justify as active self defense. And at that point, it's worth noting, the president can do whatever he wants for 60 to 90 days at a minimum. That's, you know, at that point in theory, you need to go get congressional authorization. There are ways, sometimes administrations kind of weasel around it.

It'd be a little hard in this case, I think, but a 60, 90 days is a good runway for a conflict like this. And so, I don't think there's a real, realistic risk of us being an armed conflict that escalates to a, what is called a war for constitutional purposes, which is kind of the top-end constitutional limit of what the president can do. That has never actually been reached. And so within that spectrum, Mr. President Biden could do just about whatever he needs to. The real question is just like as legal matter is when does he think it's actually worth it?

Benjamin Wittes: But you think the bottom line is Hezbollah, Israel's problem, Iran, our problem?

Scott R. Anderson: I think that would be my guess in the short to medium term. You know, the, depending on that, as the conflict progresses, you could see that calculus changing. But I think in the short to medium term, yeah, that's probably right. Again, the Americans will do certain things to help the Israelis, but I don't think they're going to get directly involved.

Benjamin Wittes: I agree with that. I think it is always in the minds of American military that the one time we fought Hezbollah, Hezbollah kicked our ass.

Dan Byman: I would say that I certainly agree with Scott. The question is that activities short of war, will probably be pretty extensive. So, there'll certainly be intelligence sharing. There'll also be a lot of providing weapons and munitions. And the U.S. presence that is designed to intimidate Iran will implicitly be also trying to intimidate Hezbollah. And I think there will also be worries, somewhat correctly, that the Hezbollah and Iran will see the United States involved. Even if the United States thinks it's drawing a bright line between directly bombing and supporting Israel's bombing. And from the point of view of U.S. adversaries, that line might not be so bright. And so, whether they feel that they can legitimately expand the conflict or otherwise, the risk to the United States grows substantially in ways that U.S. planners don't anticipate. I think that's at least something that people should be very concerned about.

Benjamin Wittes: We are going to leave it there. Dan Byman. Scott R. Anderson, thank you both so much for joining us today.

Dan Byman: Always a pleasure.

Scott R. Anderson: Thanks, Ben.

Benjamin Wittes: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a material supporter of Lawfare using our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Have you rated and reviewed the Lawfare Podcast? If not, please do so wherever you get your podcasts and look out for our other podcast offerings. This podcast is edited by Jen Patja. Our theme song is from Alibi Music. As always, thanks for listening