Israel continues targetting Hezbollah senior figures: is this strategy effective?

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00:00Now, our international affairs commentator, Douglas Herbert, is with me in the studio.

00:04Hi.

00:05To give all this into context, now, Doug, Israel obviously doesn't appear to be letting

00:11up in its airstrikes against Hezbollah targets, continuing to go after the group's senior

00:16leaders, as we've just heard from Robert.

00:20Is this strategy effective, and has it been effective in the past?

00:23Yeah, it's a very relevant, timely question.

00:26Does the strategy of picking off your adversaries, in this case the terrorist group's leaders,

00:30one by one, taking aim at their munition stocks, their arms stocks, is it effective in the

00:37short, medium, and long term?

00:40Perhaps not, history would suggest.

00:42Look, the reality is that it is undeniable that Hezbollah has taken perhaps one of the

00:47most crushing blows ever in its 40-year history.

00:52But that said, it still retains a lot of people who are able to command and call the

00:57shots and steer its military wing.

01:01It still has a lot of precision-guided missiles, potentially very lethal, if they are used

01:08in the right manner.

01:09It has a lot of long-range missiles.

01:11Its arsenal is still very much there, even as Israel takes aim at them.

01:16So the question really is, you know, Israel has been applying a philosophy, it's really

01:20a doctrine.

01:21We've been talking about it in recent days, the Dahiya doctrine, really named after this

01:26neighborhood.

01:27It's the sense of this doctrine, use overwhelming, often disproportionate force to wipe out and

01:33to overwhelm your enemy, even if that means many collateral, quote, civilian casualties.

01:39That is, civilians living in these densely packed urban neighborhoods at times that also

01:43die as a result.

01:45Striking a village where some rockets are fired from, razing essentially, or knocking

01:48out the entire village with many civilian casualties, because that is justified in Israel's

01:53military doctrine, because you are taking out terrorist targets.

01:57Look, in the past, we have had Hamas's leader way back in 2004 killed in – one of Hamas's

02:05founders, Yassin, killed in an Israeli airstrike.

02:08We had a top Hezbollah military leader knocked out in an airstrike going back to 2008.

02:13I'm using examples way in the past to show that this is an ongoing, over-a-decade-long

02:17strategy.

02:18Even the United States knocked out a big al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq

02:24back in 2006.

02:25We're going back almost 20 years, right?

02:27You'd say, oh, al-Qaeda gone from Iraq.

02:29They decapitated its leadership.

02:31Not really.

02:32We know what happened.

02:33Seven, eight years later, al-Qaeda all of a sudden, poof, transformed.

02:37It was ISIS.

02:38ISIS took over much of Iraq.

02:40There was devastating wars.

02:42Yes, U.S.-backed wars to then wipe them out over multi-year war.

02:46But they built a capital around Mosul in Iraq.

02:48We all remember the devastation, the tragedy.

02:50So it is an outstanding question.

02:53Is this an effective strategy?

02:54You will have the military people, a lot of them hawks, some even not so hawkish, saying

02:58disproportionate force, overwhelming strategy.

03:01This is the only way to do it.

03:02Others say you are actually shooting yourself in the foot in the long term because these

03:06groups are savvy enough and wily enough to appoint new leaders and to reconstitute themselves

03:11with redoubled determination against their adversary, in this case, Israel.

03:15So it very much remains a big question there.

03:17Absolutely.

03:18Now, all this intense military campaign, of course, is instilling fear in the civilian

03:24population in Lebanon, and Lebanon, which is already reeling from an economic and political

03:29crisis with a weak government.

03:32Its society is divided along sectarian lines.

03:36Could this conflict bring the nation, the fragile nation, together?

03:40Could it?

03:41Yes, it could.

03:42That is the hopes across a lot of the Lebanese political spectrum right now.

03:48But the odds are maybe against it right now because, as you said, reeling might even be

03:51putting it mildly.

03:53Lebanon has just been taking one hit after another.

03:55Its economy has been in free fall.

03:57It's still suffering the aftereffects of that massive port explosion in 2020 attributed

04:01to government mismanagement.

04:05And now it has Hezbollah, the assassination of a giant paramilitary leader, the leader

04:11of the largest military force, larger than the Lebanese army, in southern Lebanon with

04:16its strongholds knocked out, basically, a group that didn't just have military power

04:21in Lebanon, but also political influence, since it has seats in parliament.

04:25It's a country right now without a president, Lebanon, because the president, who's supposed

04:29to be a Maronite Christian, according to the sectarian division attribution allocation

04:33of posts in government, has not been able to be – they haven't been able to find

04:36anyone in the past two years right now.

04:39So it's a partially decapitated government.

04:42You have had some signs that the Lebanese are hoping, hoping to see some form of victory

04:49from what seems a massive defeat for the nation, in the sense of the Lebanese army is very

04:54much right now calling on the Lebanese people to preserve national unity.

04:59Remember, the Lebanese army, a far less militarily powerful force until now than Hezbollah.

05:05And also trying to urge citizens to not let them further divide themselves.

05:11The head of the Christian community, also in Lebanon, making a similar call on a Lebanese

05:18to sort of stand together, condemning the assassination of Nasrallah, saying that it

05:22has opened a wound in the heart of the Lebanese.

05:26So you do have this recognition in Lebanon that this is a tragic, tragic event for the

05:30nation in terms of the potential ramifications and the fallout, and they want to see if they

05:35could use this moment to try to rally Lebanese and to try to bring them together across their

05:39sectarian divides, their ideological divides, their political divides.

05:43Unfortunately, that as well remains a question mark.

05:46Well, Doug, thank you for that.

05:48That was Douglas Herbert, our international affairs commentator.

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