Jane Kinninmont on the Israel-Hizbollah-Iran war
And for paid subscribers: Jason's story of flying over Iraqi airspace late yesterday afternoon and receiving a surprising announcement from the flight deck
This is a guest post from Disorder regular and occasional co-host Jane Kinninmont:
Dear Mega-Orderers,
I’m jumping in for a guest post this week as Jason asked me and Arthur Snell to record an episode of the pod on the Israel-Hizbollah war which you can hear HERE…
They say a week is a long time in politics. This time last week, US officials were briefing with apparent confidence that there was international support for a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah. Remember that? It was supposed to start a diplomatic process to end rocket fire across the border and enable tens of thousands of people to go back to their homes, both in northern Israel and in southern Lebanon. This mass displacement started in October last year when Hizbollah started firing into Israel in a show of support for Hamas in Gaza – nearly a year ago.
I remember reading some wag on Twitter saying: “Biden says there’s about to be a ceasefire in Lebanon. Based on the guy’s track record, I reckon there will be a war.”
Fast forward to today: Hizbollah leader Nasrallah is dead, Israeli troops have gone into Lebanon, Iran attacked Israel with a barrage of missiles last night (no casualties) and the world is waiting to see how Israel will respond. Chances seem higher than ever that Israel could attack strategic sites in Iran directly.
How did we get here? On Friday – before the death of Nasrallah - Arthur and I recorded an episode talking about what Israel wanted, what Hizbollah wanted, why Iran might not want to get directly involved, and what the chances were for diplomacy.
Sure, we knew there could be some changes afoot. We were recording slightly before Netanyahu addressed the UN. We did assume that he wasn’t about to say that he accepted the ceasefire. But there seemed to be some room to explore diplomacy with the aim of returning displaced people to the north.
Overnight everything changed. A massive Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon, shortly after Netanyahu’s address, targeted the Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. After a night of confusion, competing claims, and near-silence from Hizbollah, it was confirmed that Nasrallah was dead, along with most of Hizbollah’s senior military leadership – some killed alongside him and some killed in previous days. The group was in shock and disarray.
As Arthur and I discuss in the intro to the pod, the dynamics of the northern front for Israel have now gone beyond an attempt to return residents to the north, or to restore deterrence with Hizbollah.
Israel may now see a rare opportunity to “break Hizbollah” or - perhaps more realistically –break the solidarity of the so-called “axis of resistance”, i.e. Iran, Hizbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the various Iraqi militias they work with.
Oh, and that “axis” is supposed to include the Syrian government, which is conspicuously absent from any efforts to support Hizbollah, despite Hizbollah’s track record in helping Assad to brutally suppress Syria’s popular uprising in the 2010s. Hassan Hassan in New Lines Magazine is brilliant on this and his piece with Kareem Shaheen on Nasrallah is also a must-read.
If the axis of the resistance is shown to be just a one-way deal – the axis provides deterrence for Iran, but Iran does very little in return – then it’s not just facing a military threat, but a deep political threat.
That is one reason Iran chose to respond with its missile attack on Israel last night, although it is the militarily weaker party and Israel is backed by the world’s superpower. Another reason is that Iran has probably been calculating that if it did nothing, Israel could seize the opportunity to attack it directly and create new “facts on the ground” while Hizbollah is missing in action. With Israel having the upper hand militarily, Iran seems to have concluded that it was better off carrying out a face-saving attack, to which Israel will doubtless respond, than doing nothing, and perhaps being attacked anyway. We will never know the counterfactual, but it may have been a big miscalculation.
But as we discuss on the pod, domestic politics always have a big role to play. Iran is no exception. Right now, also, Iran has a president who is prioritising outreach to the West. As Meir Javedanfar writes, Israelis don’t put much stock in President Pezishkian actually changing much about Iran’s foreign policy. But Pres Pez has been hoping to engage the US and explore whether some form of agreement over Iran’s nuclear programme could be revived in exchange for sanctions relief. In recent days he’s been taking flak from the harder-line hardliners in Iran who have been calling him and his confidante Zarif (a key JCPOA architect) little more than a bunch of woke softies. These loud voices are also saying that they really should get a nuclear bomb if they can’t count on Hizbollah to keep them safe any more.
It's really too early to say what will happen to Hizbollah though there are plenty of predictions that it will definitely bounce back or else that it will never recover. Take your pick! In the episode we discuss the domestic issues facing the group in a country that was already in a protracted economic and political crisis. What can be done to build up the strength of the Lebanese state and strengthen the capacity of the Lebanese Army (not to mention the UNIFIL peacekeepers) to deploy in southern Lebanon and provide real security?
Is Israel now going to carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, energy infrastructure and military bases? Where is US credibility now when it calls for diplomacy and what does that mean for its ability to bring more order to the region? How will the latest violence – and a new wave of displaced people – play into European politics where the far-right continue to make gains on the back of anti-migrants and anti-Muslim sentiment?
I talked to Bloomberg News and BBC on Monday (You can watch Jane’s segment at 29:00):
Let us know your feedback and questions and we’ll continue to discuss all this, bringing in Jason and some well placed experts… So please write us at Disordershow@Gmail.com with any questions, critiques, ideas, criticisms you might have.
For More background on the week’s events:
Listen to Arthur Snell’s podcast Behind The Lines: https://shows.acast.com/65196b0b1488340011cf14a1
Read Tom Fletcher’s (a former guest from Episode Ep10. How international actors can stabilize the ongoing Israel-Hamas War and prevent a regional escalation - https://pod.link/1706818264/episode/cd7401e8093b8bb8f10c639a30db226c) piece on what’s next for the region: https://www.ft.com/content/f78a4277-8f94-40c4-a4d4-6c0bde361ecb
Read Michael Young’s Twitter Thread on the latest: https://x.com/beirutcalling/status/1840008152336527715?s=46
More on the moving situation in Reuters https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/apartment-building-beirut-hit-israel-widens-air-campaign-2024-09-29/
Read this really insightful bio of Hassan Nasrallah by Hassan Hassan (from Syria) and Karim Shaheen in New Lines magazine - https://newlinesmag.com/argument/end-of-an-era-what-hassan-nasrallahs-assassination-spells-for-the-middle-east/
Read this article by Michael Young (@beirutcalling) which covers both the regional risks and the domestic political implications - https://carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/diwan/2024/09/israel-has-assassinated-the-secretary-general-of-hezbollah-hassan-nasrallah?lang=en¢er=middle-east
Some phrases you never want to hear uttered:
We all know there are some locutions that you truly never want to hear, like when a doctor says, ‘Before we discuss your test results, I think you’re gonna wanna sit down’, well now I know that one think you never want to hear a pilot announce on the loudspeaker is: ‘We are just receiving reports that Jordanian airspace is closed.’
So with that dramatic lead in here is the promised extra content about my flight back from Dubai to London yesterday afternoon (EK005 taking off at 345pm local time). You might not believe it but I was the only person on the plane who flipped out when an hour after take off as we are going north west in the Saudi desert and the captain comes on and says ‘ we have just received a notification that Jordanian airspace is being closed. We will instead be taking the northern route’. As soon as I heard this, I started flipping out. Like fuck me, so we are over southern Iraq heading north west and because of an Iranian missile attack causing the Jordanians to engaging their interceptors, now we are gonna have to head straight north. As the words missile and Iran were not used in the announcement No one else got worried. Morons. I instantly understood that ‘Jordan has closed its airspace’ is euphemism for there must be Iranian missiles crossing Westward over Iraq and into Jordan on their way to Israel. As you can see at 6pm local time by taking the Northern route, we were perpendicular to the missiles trajectory at exactly the time they were launched.. Normally the route hugs the iraqi saudi border heading mostly west towards jordan, then aqaba and over Sinai.
Well the most interesting bits are what this episode reveals about how information is withheld and shared and how that affects how people feel about it or not… For paid subscribers listen below to my experience and musing on this:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Ordering the Disorder to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.