Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/27/24: Israel Strikes Beirut, Is Hezbollah Leader Dead?

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Ryan Grim and Mouin Rabanni break down Israel's strike on Lebanon which Israel claims has killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man.

We met them at their homes. We met them at the recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to it. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Michael Kasson, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on good company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi. We dive into the competitive world of streaming. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. There are so many stories out there. And if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content, the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, I'm joined here by Moeen Roubini, a Mideast analyst, to talk about Israel's devastating strike on the Israeli suburbs,

which they are claiming, or we'll talk about this in a moment, to have taken out Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. We'll also talk about the threat that the IDF has been making to the Daya suburbs, ordering a massive evacuation of civilians, presaging what could be a Gaza-like assault on southern Lebanon. So, Moeen, first of all, thank you for joining me today. Good to be with you. this works on YouTube and wherever else people are watching this is that many of you, by the time you're watching this, may know a little bit more about the precise outcome of this attack than we do as we're speaking now at 5.06 p.m. Eastern on Friday. Let's have the first part of this conversation on the assumption that the Israeli confidence that

Nasrallah has been killed is accurate. Now, we don't know if that's true, but that is what the claims are. So we'll have a conversation based on that possibility, allowing for the other possibility that he survived this attack. And we'll know more in the coming days, hours, and even minutes. This is a developing story. So, Moeen, what do we know so far? My understanding is that this was a block-wide, most of the block is Hezbollah headquarters, and that some of the Hezbollah operations were in bunkers underneath it.

Israel is saying that Nasrallah was in, they had evidence that he was inside the building. What do we know so far? And also, what do we know about the destruction? Because what we're looking at is unlike anything we've even seen in Gaza from a single strike, it appears. Well, this was an unprecedentedly intense air raid, even by Israeli standards. And it hit an area at least as large as a city block in the very densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut. Israel's claim is that it was targeting Hezbollah's central command headquarters, which it insists was located beneath one General Secretary of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, along with a number of other senior leaders of the movement were there at the time and is expressing high confidence that they were killed. As of now, we have no verification from Israel that this was indeed a successful attack. At the same time, Hezbollah and its media have maintained strict radio silence. There could be various explanations

for that. It could mean that the strike was indeed successful and that they won't be making any statement until they actually find his remains. It could mean that the strike was a failure and they're not making any statements to keep Israel off balance, perhaps to spirit him to safety. We just don't know. So I think there are two issues here. One concerns Hezbollah as a movement

and the other concerns the broader strategic picture. Regarding Hezbollah as a movement, it has suffered a series of assassinations over the past two weeks of some very senior commanders. Its general secretary, who was an iconic, charismatic figure, was indeed assassinated today. And even more so, along with other senior figures, it's tantamount to a decapitation strike, which will obviously, at least in the short term, severely undermine the movement and its ability to act and its organizational integrity and throw it into chaos and so on. But having said that, I also would not jump to any conclusions about Hezbollah's future as a movement by losing these cadres and commanders. I mean, Nasrallah's two predecessors, Abbas Musawi and Raghad Harb, if I'm not mistaken, were also assassinated. And it's true that Nasrallah has been a particularly effective, iconic, charismatic figure within the movement. But Hezbollah also has what's called a very deep bench. It's a very deeply entrenched, very sophisticated

organization, even though I should add that these latest assassinations do speak to complacency, to infiltration, and so on. So as far as Hezbollah is concerned, it would be a very severe blow. In terms of the wider strategic picture is concerned, it almost doesn't matter whether this attack was successful or not, because what Israel has now done, it has launched arguably the most intensive air raid in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict at a very densely populated suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut. And since then, it has given additional evacuation orders to hundreds of thousands of residents in the same neighborhood. And I think quite clearly, Israel is dead set on regional escalation. It sought to provoke a very widespread response by Hezbollah, which in turn will be used as a pretext to essentially flatten large parts of the Lebanese capital and perhaps other parts of Lebanon. And I think it's quite clearly trying to draw Iran directly into this conflict in the remaining months of the Biden administration.

In my view, Israel sees a unique opportunity to engineer a direct military confrontation between the United States and Iran. And it has determined that the road to Tehran leads through the southern suburbs of Beirut. Yeah, there was an Israeli official who was quoted, I think today saying, in response to the 21 day ceasefire that the United States had proposed. We can't stop now. We've been waiting years for this, which goes to your point. And I wanted to pick up on something that you alluded to there about the Daya doctrine. Can you talk a little

bit about what that doctrine is and the irony that it appears to be that they're about to apply it to this area that it is named after? It seems like this that that we're talking about now maybe just the beginning of a massive assault that's coming yeah well the dahiya doctrine so named by um former senior uh israeli military officer gadi eisenkot who was also a member of israel's war cabinet after October 7th until he resigned a few months ago. The Dahya Doctrine is an Israeli military doctrine whereby Israel, in its armed confrontations with its enemies, deliberately and disproportionately targets civilians and civilian infrastructure with the aim of creating pressure on its military adversaries from their constituencies. Eisenkot first enunciated this in 2008, but it in fact goes back decades. I mean, if you think about the late 1960s, when various PLO guerrilla movements were ensconced in Jordan, in the Jordan Valley,

Israel essentially depopulated the Jordan Valley and destroyed irrigation works in the Jordan Valley, southern Lebanon, from the late 1960s onwards. Israel has always, in fact, had this approach that when faced with a military adversary, you not only seek to attack that adversary directly and seek to defeat it militarily, but at the same time, you try to extract an intolerable price from its civilian support base, from its constituency, and from the infrastructure of the territory or state concerned in order to generate political pressure upon that military adversary. And that's essentially what we've been seeing in the Gaza Strip for the past year and what we're now increasingly seeing in Lebanon. You also mentioned the infiltration that Hezbollah has suffered at the hands of Israeli intelligence. And I've seen some speculation that Syria may be the weak link here in the chain, in the axis between Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas split for a while over Hezbollah's support for Syria's dictator, Bashar al-Assad, who I would argue has no ideology whatsoever.

His goal is to remain in power and he's going operation might be the most susceptible to Israeli infiltration. If if he believes that that's his path forward. What is your sense of why Hamas has been able to resist that type of infiltrate intelligence? You mean Hezbollah? I think Hamas has been able to resist it, but Hezbollah has not. I'm curious why you think that is. Well, there are several issues here. First of all, regarding Hezbollah and Lebanon,

it remains unclear whether Israel's ability to target Hezbollah cadres and commanders is a result of signals intelligence or human intelligence, in other words, actual penetration of spies and collaborators, or perhaps a combination of the two. Regarding the Syrian government, I don't think the Syrian government as such would be playing a role in this for the simple reason that it sees both Iran and Hezbollah as bulwarks that it believes are necessary for its defense and survival. So it's very unlikely that the Syrian government would be shooting itself in the foot this way. But I think what you can say is, you know, Syria has been at war for over a decade, has witnessed a profound economic collapse. The same can be said about

Lebanon, obviously, in recent years. And Hezbollah does have enemies in both Syria and Lebanon and elsewhere. And under such circumstances, it's entirely plausible that Israel and or the United States, particularly with the U.S. now maintaining also a direct military presence in Syria, would have been able to identify and recruit a number of agents and collaborators. So I certainly wouldn't exclude that. But again, we don't really know to what extent this is Israel, I presume with the support of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and perhaps others, being able to successfully tap into Hezbollah's

communication networks and to what extent it is a result of individuals penetrating the organization. I think Hamas is a somewhat different kettle of fish. The reason being that since Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, there has been increasingly restricted passage of individuals into and out of the Gaza Strip, primarily because of Israel's blockade. And this has really reduced the opportunities for Israel to recruit Palestinian collaborators. Secondly, Hamas, like Hezbollah, placed a lot of emphasis on counterintelligence and was screening and monitoring individuals who, for whatever reason, did have contact with the Israeli and, for that matter, Egyptian authorities quite closely. And although Hamas obviously also has opponents and enemies within the Gaza Strip,

it's a much smaller territory. It's a much smaller society where essentially everyone knows everyone else. That's not too much of an exaggeration. And so it was easier for Hamas to keep tabs on Palestinian society in Gaza, than it would have been for Hezbollah to do the same in Lebanon. I want to play quickly for you the response of the Pentagon to the strike and get your reaction to that. Let me figure out how to do this.

There we go. I'm a novice at this. Okay. I just called on both sides to not escalate the situation. Is this an escalation? Yeah. Again, that remains to be seen. We're still assessing. Six apartment buildings in the southern suburbs of Baywood have been leveled. That's not, you have to assess whether that's an escalation? You're telling me that. I do not know that to be true. So again, we are still assessing the situation. We are going to continue to have our calls with our, you know, the Israelis to get more details. I appreciate the question. I hope you would also appreciate that this just happened a few hours ago. So yes, we are still doing an assessment for you. So you can have an escalation and obviously leveling an entire city block and killing hundreds upon hundreds of people is an

escalation. But can you have an escalation if the other side just refuses to escalate with you? Where do you see this going? Well, you know, if Hezbollah would have so much as thrown a pebble across the Israeli-Lebanese border, this spokesperson, along with all their colleagues, would have wasted about a millisecond to decry Hezbollah's unconscionable escalation and illegitimate warfare against Israel. But in this case, if 10 years from now, Israel has yet to confirm that it escalated today, the official U.S. position will be, we're still looking into it, we're consulting with our Israeli partners, and so on. I mean, you know, the same government, the United States, which spent months warning the world about the Russian invasion of Ukraine,

supposedly has absolutely no idea what Israel, a very close ally with whom it has extremely close intelligence links. In this case, it supposedly has no idea what's going on, has absolutely no involvement in anything, only learned about it, not through its own sources, but when the Israelis decided to inform them during or after the fact. So I think Washington is playing this double game of being very deeply involved in Israel's activities.

And I would suspect helping to plan them with provision of superior intelligence capabilities, of course, all the arms and weapons that were used to carry out this attack, and not least providing diplomatic and PR cover, but at the same time feigning ignorance, seeking to distance itself from these things. As far as escalation is concerned, I mean, a number of people have pointed out that, in fact, Hezbollah has been behaving with relative restraint in the past two or three months, where its responses to Israel's clear steps up the escalation ladder to the extent that it has simply incinerated the ladder, you know, it hasn't yet responded with, let's say, full-scale attacks on Israeli civilian infrastructure, it's been quite measured in seeking to limit its targeting to Israeli military and intelligence facilities.

I suspect that's no longer going to be the case, and it's now going to engage in more widespread and more comprehensive attacks on Israel. Israel's strategic goal is to push the region towards a full-scale armed conflagration with the intent of producing a direct U.S.-Iranian confrontation in the few months that Biden is still in office. whom has proven time and again that he will stop at absolutely nothing to support Israel, even where it contradicts the U.S.'s own stated preferences, and will ensure that Israel is immune from any consequences for its actions, irrespective of what it does. I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I've muted myself. Moeen Rabbini, thank you so much for joining me today. People can find you on twitter.com slash Moeen Rabbini, excellent person to follow. And where else can they catch you? I publish most of my material on Jadalia, a website where I'm co-editor, and that's www.jadaliyya.com. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you.

I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.

Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to it. It makes it real. It their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to it. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you

get your podcast. I'm Michael Kassin, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on good company. The podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi. We dive into the competitive world of streaming. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. There are so many stories out there, and if you can find a way to curate and help the right person discover the right content,

the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.