School of War - Ep 93: Michael Doran on the War in Israel & Ghosts of 1973

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

Michael Doran, senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, joins the show to talk about Iran-backed Hamas’ savage attack on Israel, how we can expect Israel to act in Gaza, prospects for escalation, and the echoes of 1973. ▪️ Times      •    02:33 Introduction      •    03:16 10/7     •    08:51 Potential Israeli objectives in Gaza     •    20:18 A regional war?     •   27:20 Iranian objectives     •    34:28 Intelligence failures, operational catastrophes     •    42:11 Redeployments      •    44:45 Parallels with the Yom Kippur War     •   51:07 America and Israel today To read the article discussed today click here  Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

On Saturday, the 50th anniversary plus one day of the surprise attack on Israel that launched the Yom Kippur or 1973 war, the Iran-backed terror organization Hamas launched a savage assault on southern Israel, which at the time of recording this episode threatens to escalate into a broader regional war. We've got one of the smartest analysts of the strategic logic of the Middle East, Mike Duran, to join the show today to talk about what happened, about what went wrong. and about what the history of Israel's wars can teach us about what's likely to happen next. Let's go. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay on it. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We'll fight on the beaches. We'll fight on the landing grounds. and shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images,

follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to be welcomed today by Mike Duran, who is a senior fellow

and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at Hudson Institute. Great job on peace in the Middle East, by the way, Mike. We're really crushing it these days. He's the author of, I'm going to say this about you, Mike.

There are a lot of smart people in Washington, D.C., a lot of smart people who I respect and write smart and interesting things. It's pretty rare that an author produces something that when you read it, it fundamentally changes how you understand an issue at a deep level. You know, in your adult life, I guess it happens a lot when you're a kid. But once you kind of arrived at your views, that's not a regular occurrence. And I think you've written, for me, speaking for me personally, you've written numerous pieces like that that have affected me that way.

It fundamentally changed the way. I think about things. I think about your writing about Obama's Iran policy back around the time of the deal in that category. You've written a new piece for Mosaic, eerily timed, obviously for the 50th anniversary of the war and also eerily timed for a new war, launched against Israel by its enemies. I don't know if you in Hamas were in coordination on the dual rollout there. But it's also a brilliant piece. And I want to talk about today. And I of course want to talk about the war, about which you're a source of, I think, really interesting commentary and analysis over the last couple days. So thank you. Thank you for joining. Thank you for coming on to share your thoughts.

Great to be here. I wonder if we could extend that introduction a little longer because I don't think anyone has ever said brilliant, you know, mind opening. I was really enjoying it. That was the fun part. I didn't want it to end. So you and I have obviously been following what's going on in Israel. you know, kind of obsessively of the last couple days. But for the benefit of those who have sort of seen the headlines and kind of know the main strokes, but have not been following it as closely as you have, you know, just quickly like, what has happened? And I should say, we're recording this at 1 o'clock in the afternoon on Monday. This is going to go up on Tuesday morning.

So obviously a lot could happen between now and then. But as of 1 o'clock Monday afternoon, where do things stand? So on Saturday, just in case someone who's listening wasn't really paying attention on Saturday, Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel. Miraculously or amazingly managed to blind Israel, to deceive Israel about the preparations and then to blind it from an intelligence point of view, breached the fence between Israel and Gaza and about 20 different places. A thousand or more fighters from Gaza, terrorists, as well as just the thugs from Gaza, went to the communities surrounding Gaza in Israel,

and they were divided into two kinds of teams, murdering teams, murderous teams, just terrorists who went and just slaughtered people and hostage takers. They were tasked with going in and taking hostages. They killed in one place. They killed nearly 300 young people at a all-night rave, a dance.

party that was just coming to an end, and they killed about 300. They grabbed girls and raped them next to the bodies of their dead friends. They took over communities around Israel. This is the first time since 1973 that an enemy of Israel has actually taken territory from Israel. They only took it briefly, but they were in control of the city of the town of Steyroth next to Gaza. They went house to house and they grabbed people out of their houses, shot parents in front of their children, shot children in front of their parents, took some of them back to Gaza, killed whole families wholesale. And this went on, again, amazingly, for about eight hours before there was a serious response by the Israeli military. And there's going to be commissions of inquiry and debates about how this could have ever happened. But the images that come out of this of parents and children sheltering quietly inside

their house in their attics in their shelters, listening to terrorists outside, trying not to get caught. You know, they had in one case a Holocaust surviving woman of 85 years old has been taken hostage and taken to Gaza. These images, images that come back from Jewish history in the diaspora, the worst images of Jewish history and the diaspora, like the pogroms, the Kishnyev progrom in Ukraine or from the Holocaust. And this has really shaken Israelis to their core. The president, the prime minister, Netanyahu, has given the order to the IDF to strip Hamas of all military capability. Now, exactly

how they're going to define this militarily is unclear, but it probably means we're going to have a very serious ground incursion by the Israelis into Gaza. The United States policy is, on the one hand, there are statements of support for Israel, right to defend itself, et cetera. On the other hand, Secretary Blinken, one of his first statements was that he had talked to the foreign minister, Hakkan Fidon, of Turkey, to try to get his help in getting a ceasefire. So for Israelis, we have to understand, Aaron, that this for Israelis is an absolutely unprecedented moment. All the rules, all the norms and rules and kind of rules of the road by which Israel's been behaving with Gaza over the last 20 years are out the window. This is a whole new game.

And I've gone on along here and the answer, let me just give you one, throw one more thing on the table here. And that's that I think for us in the United States, the most important thing to understand is that this is really this is an action by Hamas, but it was empowered by Iran. And Iran is pulling the strings ultimately behind the scenes. And Iran has scored a major victory here. The goal of this was to scuttle Israeli Saudi rapprochement or normalization, but also to deflect the international agenda. from the Iranian nuclear program to the Palestine question and to deter Israel from doing anything about its nuclear program. Yeah, and the Biden administration really doesn't want to hear about these Iran links. When you question about them, I'm like listening to Blinkenfield

questions about Iran's links to Hamas sort of reminds me, this is going to date me, but there's an old Chappelle show sketch, a brilliant sketch where Dave Chappelle is playing a potential juror and jury selection for the R. Kelly trial. And he's demanding like increasingly preposterous, like levels of evidence before, you know, like he'll need to be staining in the room while the crime is occurring. Like that's kind of the vibe. That's like a 10-year-old joke. But that's the vibe I get from the Obama administration on Iran.

Okay. So I never saw that, but the just being like, is this pornography? I'm not sure if this is it a little bit more. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, there's a lot to unpack in everything you just laid out. Let me start with this, you know, ground incursion into Gaza that we are all, you know, anticipating the Israelis are going to do in some fashion. What are the range of possible goals the Israelis might have as they launch such an incursion?

And how do you rate their, you know, their feasibility? Well, that's a really great question. And I note that I've been reading Israeli statements very carefully to look at what the stated goal is. Because I know from my own experience, well, I worked in the Bush White House, and of course, the stated goal of Iraq war was WMD and Iraqi WMD. And I saw how that came to haunt the president. And I also when I was in the White House in 2006, the Israelis had the second. Lebanon war, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmer made some early statements of goals in that war that were unachievable, and that haunted him as well.

And I also remember I wrote a book about Eisenhower, and I don't know where I read this, but somebody came in, you know, Eisenhower was preparing to intervene in Lebanon, which is which the Lebanon intervention in 1958 is remembered as the least costly American intervention ever. I think two soldiers died. One was by an accident and another was by hostile fire or something, but really very, very, very low cost in terms of American soldiers. But going into it, Eisenhower said it was the hardest decision he had to make other than the D-Day invasion. Because he expected the worst. He was really worried about it. And he had a lot of nightmare scenarios about what might happen. None of them came to pass.

but he worried about a lot ahead of time. And somebody walked in on him when he was preparing the speech to announce it. And being a very experienced guy and having run the country, run the war in World War II in Europe, he said, he was explaining, I'm working very hard to get the statement of goals right

because everything is going to hinge on this. So he knew this. And Netanyahu, Netanyahu has defined the goals and this, like I suggested, in this rather flexible manner, or an objective to strip Hamas of its war-fighting capability, that is sufficiently vague, I think, to allow, to give the Israelis flexibility in terms of their operations, and they can call it off whenever they want and say, we achieved our goal. I think that that's probably rather smart, but in terms of us who are

trying to analyze what they're doing, it does make us wonder what exactly are they going to do. Are they going to try to kill every fighter? Are they going to destroy all of the rockets and all of the rocket making capabilities? Exactly what that means? I don't know. The problem they're going to have as time goes on is that they're going to be fighting in Gaza in the streets. They're going to be killing a lot of civilians as they do, or a lot of civilians are going to die. That's all going to be broadcast around the world. We've already got demonstrations in European capitals against what the Israelis are doing. That's going to increase. And the Hamas took well over 100, and we don't know the final number of hostages. It could, when all of said and done,

it may be in the hundreds of hostages. some of whom are American, I think 40-some-odd are American, I may have the number wrong. They're going to use these hostages as human shields. They're going to put them on every building of use to Hamas. But they're also going to use them as bargaining chits to put pressure on the Americans, to put pressure on the Americans and others. They're not, they have some European hostages as well, to bring international pressure on Israel to limit its operations, its operations on the ground.

So there's going to be a very complex operation for the Israelis. On the one hand, they have what I described at the beginning, this unprecedented public demand that this enemy be eliminated. And at the same time, they have this sense, I think there's no way that the top leadership doesn't understand, that if they're not seen to really deliver a grievous, very grievous blow to Hamas or really wipe it out or bring close to wipe it out, They're going to be inviting more such actions from Hezbollah and from Iran.

There's Israeli credibility here in terms of the contest with Iran is at stake. And so that's the impulse to really go in and really clean out Hamas root and branch. On the other hand, there's going to be just the difficulty of urban warfare, the political pressure that's going to come on Israel, the internal divisions in Israel, and the pressure from the United States in particular. So how that's going to play out exactly, I don't know. Yeah. And when you say clean out Hamas, root and branch, I mean, one, virtually impossible to do that,

I think, without losing a lot of the hostages. It's just hard. It's hard to conceive of how you would, you know, essentially take Gaza from Hamas without losing a lot of those hostages. And two, and I'm curious to know where you come down on this, like, you could, you could, you could pull them out root and branch as a kind of maximalist version of mowing the grass, knowing you're going to leave again. and knowing that they're going to come back.

There will not be regime change without occupation. Or you could, in part or whole, reoccupy Gaza, which I don't know. You know, it seems like so much has changed since Saturday in terms of the logic of the region and the logic of Israeli policy, but I don't know who's going to want to sign up for that. Yeah, right.

You think? Well, I mean, there's two million people you're going to have to rule over and they're going to be carrying out terrorist attacks against you all the time. I wouldn't entirely rule it out, but I think it's unlikely that they're going to want to do that. The other possibility is you go in, you root out Hamas, and then you hand it over to the UN. Again, not an optimal option. But the other possibility is that you just put it under this terrible siege and put pressure on it and pressure on it and pressure on it until Hamas agrees to some kind of ceasefire,

that you can present as a victory, but that's also not optimal, and it puts, it gives leverage in the hands of the, if you're Israel, you've lost, the Israelis have lost escalation dominance, and they want to reestablish it, I mean, to put it in geek, in, in, in defense geek terms, they want to reestablish it, but because of all the factors we're talking about, it's extremely difficult. And so I, there's no, there's no good solution here whatsoever. Let me just make one more point on this, that I don't know how to exactly say it, but there's, because of the

Holocaust, there's a very special Israeli sentiment here about the hostages. And I'm not talking about the American hostages. I mean, these are American Israelis anyway. They're going to be fellow Jews. But there's this sense that there's a

strong sense among Israelis that no Jewish life is is, you know, is let, no Jew is left behind. And no, and no civilian, no Israeli civilian, is going to be left behind. And as you say, there's no way you can carry out. You cannot, and you cannot say that the goal of, I'm saying the prime minister practically cannot say the goal of this operation is to rescue the hostages, because I just don't think it's feasible. And the use of special forces to go into each place where hostages

is being held means you're going to lose more special forces. forces that then you're going to then hostages that are going to be saved. So in terms of just a raw numbers calculus it's impossible. And so the prime minister

is going to have to make this incredibly difficult decision which actually any commander in war has to make. But basically to say we're going to let those lives go

in order for the greater good, we have to say goodbye to those lives. This is incredibly difficult for any commander to make under any circumstances. You know, there's a scene from the finest hour, was it, where, where I don't know if it actually took place in history. I actually meant to check, you might know, where Churchill gives the order, gives commander, was they moving to evacuate everyone from Dunkirk? there's one there's one division or brigade that's that's surrounded and holding out and and they give the word that they that they don't have the the strength to hold on and and Churchill orders

them to fight to the debt so that that's a very hard command to give I think the but especially because of this Holocaust sensibility to say that to say to the Israeli public we're not not going to prioritize the hostages. Even to imply it is extremely difficult. You have, if you're reading the Israeli media today, the Israeli media is full of stories,

of interviews with parents who are talking about, my daughters are in Gaza, they're being raped, how are we going to get them back? And so, and for the prime minister to say, we're not going to. It goes against

the whole ethos of the country. And that's one of the reasons why I think the Israelis, aside from all the other reasons, they're really traumatized at this moment. But I don't see from a real cold, just, you know, military calculus, I don't see how they can possibly prioritize those hostile. I want to get in a minute to what went wrong and from there get back to the Yom Kippur War, to which there are, as you point out, some startling parallels. But before that, let's actually zoom out for a second. and talk about the possibility of escalation beyond Gaza, either because I just saw reports in the last few hours

that Iran is encouraging Hezbollah to get in the fight in Israel's north, which is, of course, one possibility that Iranian proxies launch a war in the north or start a cycle of escalation that leads to a war in the north. There's another option, you know, which I have friends who think this is the right move for Israel, and I'm sympathetic to this view, which is, sure, you know, there are protests in European capitals and we'll probably see opposition to Israeli policy build in the days to come. Nevertheless, sitting here on Monday, it's hard to think of a window where public attitudes

towards Israel are going to be more sympathetic than they are right at this moment, given the nature of the attack. Maybe now is the time to actually take a swing at Iran and the nuclear program and go at the heart of the adversary network that is facing Israel. You know, how feasible that is, you know, is another question. But like, what are the different ways in which this could become a regional war, I guess, is the question that is on my mind. And how do you separate them and think about their likelihood?

If you don't mind, I'll answer that question. But let me, can I come out from a different angle? Of course. And just talk about what I think the American role should be. Because, and the reason I want to do that is because I think that the United States is absolutely crucial to preventing this war from spiraling out of control. The way I think we should be conceiving of this here in the United States. I think Israelis should be conceiving out of this way, too, but of course they have their own, you know, immediate pressing three-meter problems.

This is a, this conflict is a dialogue between the United States and Tehran. From the point of Tehran. That's what this is. This is not a, this is not, this is not primarily, you know, you can see it legitimately as this is an Iranian answer to some of the things that the Israelis have done to Iran in recent memory, like for example capturing the nuclear archive from Tehran. The Israelis have managed, and the Israelis apparently, we assume, have carried out a lot of covert operations in Iran. This is an Iranian answer. I mean, there's a covert Israeli-Iranian war that's been going on for some time,

and this is a major move in that war. But it's also much more than that. This is an effort of Iran to shape the regional environment and to shape the international agenda and the international diplomacy in a way that favors Iran's strategic interests. And unfortunately, the United States, the Biden administration, is playing into Iran's hands. I think partially unwittingly, partially unwittingly, but they don't see, they're not, the administration doesn't read, doesn't read the Middle East map correctly. And reading the Middle East map correctly is they should see Iran as a primary adversary of the United States.

And it should see the United States as the leader of a coalition designed to do two things, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and to contain Iran's growing conventional military power, especially its disruptive military capabilities, drones, missiles, ballistic missiles, drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. The administration has a different concept. It wants to engage Iran, an American official, presumably Brett McGirt, who runs Middle East policy in the White House, said that the message to Iran about the war in Israel is that Iran should watch its moves or it will jeopardize further initiatives with the United

States, which tells you that they are, which tells you that they are envisioning further initiatives with the United States. I have to say, I just stole this line from Tony Badron, my good friend at FDDD. I was just on a podcast with him a few minutes ago, and he said this. And I thought, oh, that's really good. So before, just if anyone's listening to both of these, I don't want them to say, hey, Duran, you stole Badron's line. But I did.

I stole Badron's line. But that's it. They're always dreaming of this engagement with Iran. And this conflict hasn't ended that. Tony Blanken, as you mentioned, he said that, you know, there's no sign Iran's hands are on this conflict. If we see the signs and the signs are overwhelming, if we see them, then we have to do something about it.

We don't want to do something about it because we want to engage Iran and use Iran to de-escalate. That's the whole thing. That's the whole thing. These things are sending the wrong message because they're allowing His Bala to threaten the two front war which is a way

this is a way of putting pressure on Israel there's a genuine threat of the threat of a two front war is real but it's also a way of activating the Americans to get in and mediate because then the Americans say oh we don't want a two front war we don't want a true front war so we better get in and start mediating And what mediation means is demanding that Israel pare down its war aims and bring the war to a quick end,

which is going to weaken Israel. It's going to leave Israel in a weakened state. It's going to leave Hezbollah and Iran in an emboldened position. And they are going to use that emboldened position to further undermine the American order in the region. So American policy here is, I think, pathological. And everything you just said, I mean, And it's pathological for sure, but in the minds of its practitioners, it's not, it's not purely perverse. And this is something that you taught me a decade ago and you're writing about the Obama administration.

I don't know if you'll endorse everything in my formulation here, but, you know, beginning in the Obama administration, there is a impulse to elevate Iran as a means to extricate the United States from the Middle East, that we are going to help the evolution of a new regional balance of. power buttressed by Iran on the one side and anti-Iranian states, say Israel, some Arab states, on the other. And this balance of power will then, with us, as offshore, you know, limited participants, will tick along at much less cost to the United States, militarily, and so forth. The problem with this, among the problems with this, it seems to me standing here in 23, looking at what's happening, is you're looking at creating a kind of metternichian, you know, balance of power with a group of, you know, relatively normal, sort of self-interested in the normal way states on the one hand and a revolutionary, self-professed revolutionary regime on the other

that derives a chunk of its legitimacy through its opposition to the very idea of, of the other half or a major part of the other half of the balance. So how that's meant to lead to stability as opposed to instability has always been unclear to me. But anyway, you said that extremely well.

Well, thank you. Thank you. We got to find a way to create, this is too much praise going in both directions. We got to talk about turkey in a few minutes and we can disagree with each other. But, you know, it's like, it's pathological for sure, but in their minds,

you know, people like, people like me, have always overstated, you know, the toxicity of the Iranian regime and underestimated the way in which they're just rational folks. And this, sorry, that's a long speech, which leads to a question, which is what are fundamental, you kind of laid out the way in which this is, you know, an Iranian dialogue with, you know, Jerusalem and also Washington. Fine. What specifically are they hoping to achieve with this Hamas attack? Like, is this, it's going to end normalization? Like, what do they serve of benefits here? I think three major benefits, maybe four. I'll start ticking them off and then we can decide.

One is they do want to end the normalization with Saudi Arabia. That's a threat to them, a genuine threat to them. And that's something the Biden administration was doing and something that was good, you know, or let's say not bad. The problem with the Biden administration's concern, I'll come back to this. I'm not just a small tangent. The problem with the Biden administration's understanding of Saudi Israeli normalization is that it was meant.

to put Saudi Arabia and Israel, get them, put them together, and then sit them down in the corner so the United States can negotiate with Iran over their heads. As the Trump administration had understood the Abraham Accords and the normalization with Arab countries, it was to build a coalition to contain Iran on the ground and to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. The Biden administration does not have that concept. Okay. So number one, but nonetheless, normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia is a threat to the regime in Tehran. So they want to end that. They want to weaken the Abraham Accords in general.

So they generally, they just want to drive a wedge between Israel and all Arabs and all Muslims. Secondly, they want to elevate Hamas and Palestinian Islamic jihad in internal Palestinian politics. Abu Mazen, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, he is from Fataq, and he's in his 80s. He's not going to be with this, you know, for actuarial reasons that much longer. There's a vacuum of power around him. The Palestinian Authority is in a very, very advanced state of decay. Hamas wants to take it over, and it wants to take over the PLO and become the sole rep, the sole reprimed, representative of the Palestinian people. And Iran very much wants to help Hamas achieve that.

Next, I can't remember what number of things were on. It wants to put the Palestine question with Hamas at the forefront of it at the top of the regional international agenda. As I mentioned before, that's both because it achieves all those other goals of driving wedges between the West and the and the Muslim world, the Arab world and the Muslim world. But it also deflects from the Iranian nuclear program. You know, if you were Benjamin Netanyahu last week on Wednesday or Thursday, Friday, and you got your intel brief, the number one thing you were getting briefed about was the Iranian nuclear program.

On Saturday, Sunday, and today, that's not what you're getting briefed about. And so just, you know, just in terms of the amount of man hours in Israel that's being devoted to the Iranian nuclear program, that just got reduced. But that's true, not just of Netanyahu, but of the whole world. The whole world is now focused on Gaza, not on Iran. And secondly, this is costing Israel greatly. I'm costing Israel in terms of expenditure, but also in terms of diplomatic credit and so on. So you've done a great job from Iran's point of view of freeing up the nuclear program. And all this talk of a second front with Hezbollah and so forth, it's going to make it very hard for Israel to pose a credible threat.

I understand what you were saying before about, you know, wouldn't this be a great opportunity for Israel to do something out of the box against Iran? I don't think, I think their plate is, you know, their agenda is very full. I can imagine they might want to do something to the Iranians to deter them, you know, to send a message that don't think that, you know, don't think that we don't have capabilities to deal with you too. Just to just to kind of focus the Iranian mind a little bit on that, that they're in a position to to extract costs from Iran. But they are really, really tied up. And in that sense, Iran has already achieved a major, major strategic victory. It doesn't have to do anything else now. But it wants to prevent Israel from wiping Hamas out. And that's its goal right now. Just make sure Hamas remains on the playing field. That's a victory then. Yeah.

That all sounds extremely sensible to me. The only thing I would add, and you kind of point to it a little bit here and there is, I don't know, maybe you think this is over the top. But I do think that on some level dead Jews is just always a good outcome for, Iranian policymaking. I went, you know, I went to Vancey House for the first time last year. Have you ever been near Berlin? No. Were the final solution? There was like a, no, no, no. I'm not familiar with it at all. So after Pearl Harbor, the final solution is, you know, coming together and getting into the

serious planning stages for the Nazis, and they do basically a kind of corporate offsite major players in the Nazi party and German government hierarchy get together at a place called Vonsi House and have a conference. This is later made into a very good movie, actually, by Kenneth Brenna, who stars and directs. And you can go to the house where the conference was held. And they have the minutes sort of translate

into various languages of the meeting. You know, it was like a couple hours and they just, they talk through logistics, you know, the train networks, which department's responsible for which,

et cetera. And what's striking about it, if you read through the minutes, aside from the kind of cold-blooded banality, you know, to borrow Hannah-Orenz phrase of it, you know, these little bureaucratic disputes

that are playing out in the minutes and sort of bureaucratic jealousies and so forth. is the way in which the destruction of European jury is clearly a war aim, right? It's not like a fringe benefit. It's not like, oh, and thank goodness, now we can get to this like 18th on our list, you know, objective.

It's an objective and an important one in it of its own right that's going to take major resources. And I just, you know, maybe it doesn't belong near the top of the list for Iran, but anything that moves the Israeli state closer to its destruction and that results in a bunch of dead Jews, seems to me to be, in general, something that the Iranians would favor. I don't know if I'm letting my own politics and ideology kind of, you know, make me emotional about this, but it does. No, no, I think that's absolutely right. I agree 100%.

Yeah, that should have been my first statement, actually. And then if I move out and kind of concentric circles from that. Let me ask, so you talked about intelligence briefings, and this will start to move us in the direction of your fantastic piece on the Yom Kippur War, but a lot had to go wrong here in the Israeli intelligence services, both in the intelligence front and then on the operational front for the military and police. I mean, Mike, what went wrong? What went wrong here? I don't know the full answer. I can give you part of the answer. I'm particularly perplexed by the operational values. I mean, these people were in their basements, they don't have basements, but shelters and addicts hiding for eight hours, all day with their terrified kids.

In Israel, I mean, you expect the IDF can get within minutes to any place. So this is another reason why I think we see the fingerprints of Iran here, because this is a Hezbollah-style operation. You know, Hezbollah keeps telling us how it's going to breach the fence in the north. And this is exactly the way the way Hamas did it. The first thing they did is they took out the electronic sensors, the kind of first line of sight by which the Israelis see what's happening. And they did that with drones. And that blinded the kind of frontline visual awareness.

And then they overwhelmed the sensors by doing a number of different, by breaching the fence in a variety of ways. simultaneously, each of which suggested a different kind of attack. And from your military background, I think you'll understand how this can discombobulate the leadership. Because they sent an unprecedentedly large rocket, a number of rocket barrages. They flew over the fence with paragliders. They breached the fence in 20 different places. When they breached it, they sent people through on foot.

in vehicles and on motorcycles. And they sent out two different kinds of teams. They sent out teams to just murder people, but also teams to take hostages. And this is what they were tasked with doing this. They also apparently launched something from the sea as well. And as a result, they blinded the Israelis at the beginning.

And then they had these multiple different kinds of breaches, which confused the Israelis. about what they were dealing with. Oh, oh, and they also had people just, you know, just run-of-the-mill young men from Hamas just went through the, or not from Gaza, not necessarily from Hamas, just went in and ran riot inside Israel, not necessarily with weapons. So it confused the Israelis about what they were seeing. They managed to take over military bases, including the division headquarters in the south.

And that blinded the local command about what was happening. This is a tremendously sophisticated attack. And it shows that it really understood the kind of high-tech military that Israel is, how its decision-making, you know, how the info flows are the nature of the info flows by which the Israeli command makes decision, and it disrupted them. It disrupted them, it overwhelmed them, it confused them. And so it used the startup nation, you know, the 8200 super high-tech concepts of defense that the Israelis have, and to which they're very proud.

It used them against the Israelis. It also deceived them. I think I may have mentioned this actually at the beginning. it convinced the Israelis Hamas through its pre-war diplomacy that it had changed course, that it was interested in economic relations with Israel, that it wanted, you know, they had just made this deal to allow Gazans to come work in Israel. There were these deals to get money from Qatar. So the impression that the Hamas leadership was giving to the Israelis

was that they had been basically defeated, subdued by the last round of violence They were not interested in carrying out mass casualty attacks against the Israelis. They wanted a quiet life in order to develop the economy of Gaza. This is a play that all of the rogues in the world use against the West over and over again. China used it against us. Russia used it against us, you know, with Nord Stream 2 at the beginning of the before the Ukraine war. The Iran nuclear deal is based on the idea that we're going to integrate Iran into the international. international system and that's going to wash away all of their, all of their rough edges.

So they use that against the Israelis. I can't, I'm shocked the extent to which they fell for it. I strongly suspect we'll have to wait and see, but that American diplomacy played a major role in helping because the Americans have been believed, the Biden administration believes that it's in Iran engagement has made the world a safer place. I just would refer you to the recent, was it the, I don't know if it was the ideas. Fassment Ideas Festival or something with the Atlantic, I just saw Jeffrey Goldberg interviewing Jake Sullivan, and Jake Sullivan says, yeah, it's the quietest Middle East we've had in 17 years, and thanks to all our integration, de-escalation.

They have a whole set of catch phrases, diplomacy, dialogue, de-escalation, integration, all of this, which all basically means appeasement of Iran. We've made the world a much safer and better place, and these challenges like, how Hamas and Hezbollah, they get a lot easier to deal with because we, the United States, are here, Israel to help you negotiate with them as an intermediary. What I don't understand, so that's, I think, I think kind of explains some of the intelligence failure. Of course, there's a lot that needs yet to be explained. I can't explain to you and begin to explain to you why the operational failures afterwards. That's just a mystery to me. Yeah. Yeah. To me as well, I mean,

if I'm speculating, I would speculate that it has to do with your discussion of the way in which this frontier is so high tech and a kind of unearned confidence that the situational awareness that the technology provides means that you don't need the amount of just forward-staged mass, you know, staged in a way that is ready, right? Quick reaction forces, ready to deploy to breaches, ready to deploy to crises, that because you'll have so much warning, right? Because, you know, nothing can so much as twitch, and you can't see it twitch, you know, kilometers away from the frontier on the Gaza side. Then you can kind of, you know, you don't have to walk around every day worrying like the world's about to drop on you from a great height.

Like you'll have warning. Yeah, the Israelis were living in a world of Star Wars. And the Ghazans, the Hamas, they're living in a world of Mad Max. Yeah. And it's it's Mad Max that the Mad Max. is closer to the world we actually live in. You can have Star Wars here and there, but ultimately, you have to have your Mad Max capabilities to win. So this failure is happening on the 50th anniversary of another famous initial failure of Israeli intelligence in arms, the Umquipur War of 1973,

which of course becomes in many respects a great Israeli success. You've written this piece for Mosaic that sort of unpacks the nuances and complexities of the sort of, you know, bumper sticker summary I just presented of everything. What are the parallels that you see and what are the differences that you see? I hate to interrupt you here or to deflect since we got to my article. But as you were talking, I just remember one more thing related to the previous question. and about the operational failures. Apparently, what they're saying in the Israeli press

is that the IDF had completely denuded the Southern Command and had taken all of the units and deployed them to the West Bank. And after the recent tensions in Janine and elsewhere. And this has a huge, if you're reading about, this and you're not digging deep into the Israeli sources, this has huge political significance. Because with respect to the, this is where the analysis of what just went wrong intersects with the political divisions that we've seen in Israel over the last year, over the proposed judicial reform. The argument coming from Netanyahu's

critics is that they were, the troops are all in the West Bank because they're protecting the settlers who are carrying out the West Bank expansion agenda of Smutrich and Ben Gvier, the extreme right members of the coalition. So the argument becomes whether, I think it's probably true that they did denude, I don't know what the right word is. What's the right military term? Re-deploy. Redoploy.

They left the vacuum in the south. What exactly the reasons for that were? I don't know. Part of it was, of course, they were lulled to sleep. But anyway, I wanted to point that out, both because it explains some of the operational failure a little bit of it. But also it shows you how this intersects with the politics. Yeah.

Well, and I mean, it can take us back to you, of course, as well, because of course, famously one of the outcomes of 1973 is, you know, the major shaking of labor rule in, in, or government in Israel. It's hard to see Netanyahu coming out of all of this, anything other than much weaker. But back to my, not to hit you with kind of this huge 30,000 foot question, but, you know, feel free to take it in any direction you want. Go ahead. Yeah, the parallels are amazing. They're really shocking. I think this attack was timed the 50th anniversary was on the 6th of October. This took place on the 7th.

I think they timed it to coincide with the 73 war. The 73 war being the greatest defeat that the IDS or the greatest setback that the IDF has ever suffered prior to this day here. And more people died on October 7, 2023. than have ever died in the single day in the history of Israel's wars, I think, certainly, certainly not since 1947, 48 have so many people died. I don't know if there. The statistic I heard, I have not checked this, but I've heard this tossed around. It's more, more dead Jews on any single day since the Holocaust.

Since the Holocaust. That's probably true, although I can't tell you. I know how many died on the 300-some-odd people died on the worst day of the Ompupur War. I'm not, so that's going to be the one that's worse than 47 or 48. But anyway, horrible day. In 1973, the Egyptians and the Syrians overran the Israelis after deceiving them, just as Hamas deceived them, took territory. In the case of the Syrians, they didn't really manage to hold it.

In the case of the Egyptians, they managed to hold some of the territory. This was in, they crossed the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal and grabbed territory in Sinai and held on to it until the end. Not a lot of territory, but enough to help them in the diplomacy afterwards. The Israelis, in the end, it was a 19-day war. In the end, the Israelis routed both the Syrians and the Egyptians, and they were poised to completely destroy the Egyptian military. military, but the superpowers stepped in and stopped it so that it ended in a kind of a stalemate. The Israelis don't remember it.

They don't remember it as a victory or as a defeat, but they remember it as a colossal screw-up, especially because of the intelligence failure at the beginning. They had total penetration of the Egyptians military, and yet they never saw it coming, partially because the Egyptians hit it in plain sight all the time, carrying out. almost a major, you know, a major military exercise a month so that the Israelis got used to the Egyptians holding major military exercises just across the canal from them. But there are lots of other elements of the deception. And I think that Hamas carried it out. One of the remarkable things about 73 is that Sadat fought that war, not in order to win it, but in order to

hit Israel really hard, shake it up severely to its core, but also to shake up the international system in order to improve Egypt's position in the post-war diplomacy. I think that Hamas has pretty much the same goal, except unlike Sadat, Sadat wanted to come to some kind of an accommodation with Israel. I think he probably wanted one on different terms than he got, but that's what he wanted. I don't think Hamas is doing this to get a better deal with Israel. It really wants to destroy Israel. Yeah. Something that your piece really brought out for me was just the skill and talent of Sadat and the way in which that was a factor, both at the, you know, the grand strategic diplomatic level and the way that he sort of, he hears Nixon and Kissinger saying, hey, you know,

you can make war with the Soviets, but if you want, if you want peace and you want prestige, you've got to come with the Americans, he hears that. And then he decides to reposition accordingly before hostilities to get himself spaced for when the hostilities start. And then you have this great description of an analysis of his sort of innovations in the use of anti-air weapons to do, you know, early, you claim the first area, anti-access area denial. I always, I always, nobody, nobody has, I keep waiting to see somebody on Twitter saying, you're some defense geek come and say, you're You're wrong. I don't know.

I don't know if it's right. It's it is quite literally a bold claim. I'm not sure if it's right or wrong. I can't think of it. I can't think of a counter example. Okay. All right. So far, so good.

I mean, if we really like expand out the definition, we could probably come up with earlier examples. But if you're talking about using anti-air weapons to do that, it is a clever point at a minimum. The use of these weapons in Vietnam against us was pretty prevalent. but I don't think they clustered them all together in the same way. But I don't know, I don't have such a knowledge of the Vietnam War to be able to really talk. To create what you, your claim is to create space for a major ground maneuver.

Like keep the other guy, keep the Israelis away so we can achieve things on the ground in a coordinated way using massed anti-air assets. I mean, it's interesting. It's really interesting. And as is your, I mean, I didn't know this.

I'm just, I'm not a scholar of the period like you are. but, you know, that Siddot is integrally involved in that kind of planning at that level. So that was one thing I really took away was Siddot's skill. And then the other thing, which you just kind of pointed to in which, frankly, is I'm probably going to be, I'm going to predict the most depressing parallel or actually absence of a parallel with the present day, which is the way in which the 73 war ends with American power and American statesmanship, guiding the region to a seven-three war ends with American. Guiding the region to a fundamentally better position where Israel's security is better, is more, Israel is more secure. And the American interest is advanced.

The American interest vis-a-vis the Soviet Union is advanced. That's how the 73 war. Those are ultimately the consequences of the 73 war to, as you argued, Nixon and Kissinger's great credit. I don't know. I'm not as optimistic sitting here about this round, but curious your thoughts. No, I'm not either. I mean, one of the reasons that I wrote the article or one of the goals I had in the article was that I think Kissinger, especially, but also Nixon.

Although Kissinger is more of an academic, so he actually wants to spell everything out very carefully. I think Nixon got in his gut, didn't necessarily have to write the memo that Kissinger wanted to. But Kissinger spelled out very clearly what the roles and missions are. of the United States and Israel, of the alliance. And he saw, unlike all of his predecessors, he saw Israel unambiguously as an asset of the United States and an asset in the great power competition, in the superpower competition,

and in shaping an regional order that worked to the advantage of the United States. And I don't think, I think the ideas of the Biden administration, compared to the concepts that Nixon and Kissinger had are, it's like they were written in crayon. You know, they're just, they're so, they're so crude and they are based on fundamentally flawed assumptions. And we, we've already, you and I have already talked about what those, you know, those assumptions are. But they, we call, I called them pathological before because as, as you mentioned, they, they, they have a set of beliefs, you know, that they, they, they think that they're, you know, they're, building a better order by carrying out these things, but they're actually incentivizing violence on the part of Iran and Hamas and Hisbalah as well, incentivizing and rewarding,

although they don't think of themselves that way. I don't want to say that this is their actual goal, but that's what they, but that's what they're doing. So one of the things that I hope people would get out of this article is a little bit more deep thought about how we divide up the. roles and missions between us and Israel so that we shape the international environment in a way that works the advantage of both of us. Mike Duran, you're in demand today.

You're very busy for obvious reasons, and I'm very grateful that you were so generous with your time with us. Thank you so much for joining the show. Oh, thank you. I mean, if I'm going to get this many compliments, I haven't got this many compliments in one hour in a very long time. I'll come back anytime, anytime. This is a nebulous media production.

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