The Journal. - The Risk of an All-Out War in the Middle East

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Israel is now fighting on multiple fronts, after clashing with Hezbollah in Lebanon and sustaining Iranian strikes yesterday. WSJ’s Michael Amon explains the growing risk of an all-out regional war.   Further Reading: - Israel Clashes With Hezbollah in Lebanon  - Israeli Response to Iran’s Attack to Set Course of Widening War  - Israeli Review Shows Minor Damage From Iran’s Missile Barrage  Further Listening: - Exploding Pagers and the Risk of a Spreading War  - The Brutal Calculation of Hamas’s Leader  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Tuesday afternoon, Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles into Israel. Iranian state TV starts showing missiles flying over Tehran, flying over other cities, flying over the skies. That's our colleague Michael Amon. You see video popping up on social media from Iraq, from Syria, you know, of these missiles going over. What you are seeing, what we are all seeing with our own eyes, is a major attack from Iran.

And then what, air raid sirens go off? Air raid sirens go off across the entire country. Millions of people rush to shelters before explosions that lit up the skies above Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And I started getting text messages very quickly from colleagues saying, explosions all over the sky. This was the biggest Iranian missile attack on Israel in history. It came after months of deadly Israeli strikes on Iranian allies throughout the region.

Israel and its allies, including the U.S., were able to fend off the attack with minimal damage. One fatality was reported. Israel vowed to retaliate. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Iran had made a big mistake and that, quote, Israel has the greatest opportunity in 50 years to change the face of the Middle East.

Nearly a year after Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1200 people, and after Israel invaded Gaza, killing tens of thousands, Iran's attack and Israel's potential retaliation risk a major escalation in the Middle East. We are on the brink of a regional war. The only thing that's missing is a declaration of war. Without a declaration of war, is it still war? It depends on who you ask, but it has all the makings of a war. It looks like a war, it sounds like a war.

It's a war in all but name only. or it's a war in all but name only. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leimbach. It's Wednesday, October 2nd. Coming up on the show, the escalating violence in the Middle East and the risk of all-out war. How do airplanes fly? What's in this box? What does this thing do?

Kids are curious about everything including guns. Learn how to store your gun securely and make your home safer at nfamilyfire.org. Brought to you by N Family Fire, Brady and the Ad Council. Iran and Israel have been sworn enemies for decades, but much of their conflict has played out through Iran's proxies. Iran has been supporting militant groups around the region, and these groups are united in their opposition to Israel's existence. The U.S. has designated some of them, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, as terrorist organizations.

Iran is the architect of a loose coalition of militias that's often called the Axis of Resistance. They are in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, really just across the Middle East. And Iran funds Hezbollah, Hamas, other militants. It trains them. It provides the sort of ideological underpinning of the movement, provides advice and counsel, and coordinates all these militias.

After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, Israel started fighting Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah, to the north of Israel's border in Lebanon, joined the fight. On October 8th, Hezbollah starts firing rockets into Israeli positions in the north. Dozens of rockets coming in. Israel responded in kind, and a tit for tat battle began

that basically was raged every day for the entire conflict. This conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and the tensions at the Lebanese border go back decades. Israel has a tortured history on the ground in Lebanon. They fought several wars there. None of them have ended in a clear-cut victory. It's a place where Israelis who are adults today remember body bags coming home from. And Lebanon is often described as Israel's Vietnam.

After the last major war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, a UN resolution established that there would be no armed presence over a large swath of Southern Lebanon. But Hezbollah has been building up a military presence there. Having them on the border was always the threat to Israel. To be fair, having Israeli soldiers on the border of Lebanon has always been seen as a threat.

But Israel had been saying that in the last few years, the Hezbollah infrastructure along the border had gotten more obvious. They were able to actually see Hezbollah operatives setting up tents and encampments. And sometimes they would even kind of wave at Israeli soldiers mockingly and sort of daring them to do something. Over the past year, Hezbollah and Israel have been in this tit-for-tat conflict with airstrikes

and rockets. In response to all that rocket fire, Israel evacuated about 50 or 60,000 people from the north of Israel. They are now living all over the country with families. Some were kept in hotels for some time. They've left behind businesses. They're essentially ghost towns along the border. And what does the border look like on the Lebanese side?

It's similarly evacuated. The Lebanese have fled to Beirut, some of the coastal cities. It's exactly the same situation, if not worse, for them in that they've been hit by Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling. And then, two weeks ago, there was an inflection point. Israel carried out a covert operation in Lebanon. I think when it really dawned on everybody that we've entered a new phase of the war was when thousands of pagers started blowing up in the pockets and belts and hands of Hezbollah operatives. Multiple reports say that Israel's Mossad spy agency placed explosives in thousands

of Hezbollah pages before they detonated across Lebanon on Tuesday. Then the next day there were explosives in walkie talkies and walkie talkies from Hezbollah started blowing up and at the end of the, you know, those two-day attacks, you had, I think, almost three dozen dead in Lebanon and thousands injured. And it was a shocking blow. Then, after that, we have Israel stepping up airstrikes, going further into Lebanon, hitting Beirut, the capital,

and then killing the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Breaking overnight, the Israeli military has eliminated its most powerful target yet. Israel says long time Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an airstrike in Beirut. It's hard to overstate the importance in the Arab world. He was a charismatic figure, very religious, very close to Iran, and was seen as a real strategic thinker who maybe is the only opponent of Israel who had kind of outfoxed it over the years. And after taking out Nasrallah, did Israel back off?

No, Israel did not back off. Quite the opposite. Israel has gone harder and harder with each day. Israeli troops have crossed the border into Lebanon after two weeks of heavy bombing, targeting Hezbollah's leadership. Why is Israel moving into Lebanon? To push Hezbollah off the border and keep them off. Their goal is to get to a point where they feel safe enough that Hezbollah doesn't pose

a threat to people who will be coming back. The idea was, you know, they don't want to have another October 7th-style attack. What does Hezbollah say about all of this? Hezbollah says that they are for Lebanon and that they believe that they are defending Lebanon from Israel. That it is not Hezbollah who poses a threat to Israel, but Israel is the one who has invaded Lebanon several times over the past four or five decades. And so they are there holding the line against Israel

in their view. Israel says its airstrikes in Lebanon over the last two weeks were aimed at Hezbollah and Hamas targets. Many senior Hezbollah commanders have been killed, but more than a thousand Lebanese people have been killed, according to the health ministry. And at least a million more people have been displaced from their homes.

Meanwhile, Israel has been bombing other Iran-backed militants. And on Sunday, Israel also struck the Houthis in Yemen? That's right. And there were additional strikes in Syria? There were. Why? The Houthis had fired a ballistic missile towards central Israel.

In Syria, Israel has been carrying out air strikes over Syria on Iranian targets for more than a decade. The Israelis believe that Iran uses Syria as a way station for weapons that go to Hezbollah and also to Hamas and the West Bank. What's Israel's end goal? Israel's end goal is the security of its borders. And there's been, I think, a strategic shift in the Israeli security mindset.

For the last two decades, Israel was content to have periods of calm, during which neither side would fire on each other. But now they feel like that was a mistake. That what those periods of calm really did was allow their foes on the other side of the border to build up large arsenals and time and space to plot new attacks. And the October 7th attack was the cardinal moment in the shift in that thinking. And now Israel is looking at a future of preemptive wars, preemptively hitting back before a big attack happens. Coming up, how Israel could respond to Iran's attack. With Israel launching airstrikes in Lebanon, in Yemen, and in Syria, the question was, how would Iran respond?

And for a long time, it looked like they wouldn't respond. Was that surprising? It was surprising. This axis of resistance looks to Iran for leadership and looks to Iran, in some cases, for protection and for their strongest proxies, like Hamas and Hezbollah, to really be crippled and have no response. It's embarrassing for Iran.

These are allies. And Iran tells itself, tells its people that it's a strong country, it stands up to the United States. So it is surprising that there wouldn't be an immediate response. But that changed on Tuesday. That changed on Tuesday. On Tuesday morning, the United States said it had indications that an imminent Iranian attack was coming,

a ballistic missile attack. I wasn't sure when it would happen, but it looked like Iran was telegraphing what it was going to do and how it was going to do it. Iran said it was retaliating for Israel's killing of the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas. What was Iran's goal with this attack? Iran had to save face here.

And their gamble is that Israel won't respond so forcefully that it forces them to respond in the same way and basically starting all that war. And now we have, in Israel, a lot of momentum behind their back. They've just taken down systematically their biggest foe in Hezbollah and now Iran just attacked them. You could imagine that the rules of the game have changed and they may want to strike back even harder. Does Israel have support for doing that?

Israel has support from the United States in that the Biden administration believe in Israel's right to defend itself. And Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor to President Biden said today that the repercussions for this attack will be very severe. So I think they have the United States' support. The United States' interests diverge from Israel's in this, though. The United States doesn't want a regional war. The United States doesn't want oil facilities hit in such a way that it causes oil prices to rise a month before an election. They're looking to contain this problem as much as

they can in Washington. The Israelis are in a different position. The Israelis see they have the wind at their back, and the conversation in Israel is about how far they can push the envelope on that right now. Is there a risk that Israel could push it too far? Yes. These escalations work until they don't, until one side miscalculates, until one side hits just hard enough that the other side has to hit back even harder, and then there are no

rules anymore. And that's when you're at, that's when you have war. Are we there? We're not there yet, but we're moving into another level of the conflict. Instead of getting closer to an end, we're getting farther away from an end. There are more players in the conflict now than there were

even just after October 7th. What have we learned over the last two weeks? We've learned that Israel can go from being very much on the defensive to being on the offense at lightning speed. And that it can't be underestimated. That's what we've learned about Israel. What we've learned about Iran and its axis of resistance is that it wasn't as strong as we thought it was.

And the people who pay the price along the way? Our average people in Lebanon, civilians in Gaza, you know, and Israelis who are displaced from the north. So regular people pay the price for that. Today, President Biden said he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites. Also today, Hezbollah said it was fighting Israeli forces inside Lebanon. Israel said eight soldiers died in combat, and it plans to send in more troops. Iran said it closed its airspace in anticipation of Israeli strikes.

That's all for today, Wednesday, October 2nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Rory Jones, Stephen Kalin, Dov Lieber, and Yaroslav Trofimov. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.