'Paging' Hezbollah: Beirut, we have a problem!
BONUS: WSJ debunks Vance's slimy cat myth
There is military prowess and then there is pure genius. Israel exhibited both this week, as it found new and creative ways to beat back the enemies surrounding the Jewish state.
I’m not usually one to salute the discovery of new ways to kill people and blow things up. I leave that to my son, a former Marine Corps officer who understands the dangers of this world far better than I do.
But purely as a matter of military tactics and strategy, you have to admire Israel’s latest strike against the forces that seek to destroy it. On Tuesday, Hezbollah, Israel’s longtime nemesis and a terrorist group that routinely lobs missiles at the Jewish state, suffered an unknown number of casualties as thousands of phone pagers the group had ordered blew up nearly simultaneously, killing at least 12 people in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based, and injuring thousands of others. The following day, a second wave of attacks was launched, “killing 14, injuring 450 others and igniting blazes across the country,” as reported by NBC News.
It was a masterful scheme. From the looks of it, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were able to infiltrate the manufacturer — or perhaps obtain its cooperation — and plant explosives in the pager order bound for Hezbollah. Then the devices were detonated remotely after they had been distributed to individual Hezbollah agents.
The headline in this morning’s New York Times proclaims: “Hezbollah Leader Vows ‘Retribution Will Come’.” I’m sure they will try to get even but at this point, it’s hard to see how that could be accomplished. Hezbollah’s human infrastructure has been decimated.
Here is a good summation on X by Malcolm Nance, an intelligence and foreign policy analyst. Nance is something of a hothead, but he generally knows that he’s talking about when it comes to this stuff (he also has some other theories about how the Israelis were able to implant explosives into the devices):
My question is how long will it take for Hezbollah to respond to this attack? Think about it: thousands of its senior command and foot soldiers have been injured. And that’s just the short-term tactical effect. The strategic outcome could be even worse.
Hezbollah is always looking for new recruits. Now they must find hundreds more to replace the dead and injured. What will be weighing on the minds of potential recruits? They will have to wonder if Hezbollah actually knows what it’s doing — and if the terrorist organization could be so easily fooled, it’s logical to conclude that an attack like this one could happen again.
One of the reasons Hezbollah obtained the phone pagers is its leaders were concerned that conventional smart phones could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. Now their communications and command-and-control infrastructure is in shambles. Even if you hate Israel and want badly to avenge these attacks, would you want to join an organization like Hezbollah? In a word, a terror group has been throughly humiliated and its reputation severely tarnished.
I’m sure that in the coming days we will hear about the innocent lives that were lost as well. The pager attack is a tragic event. But all things considered, this was a much more targeted attack than Israeli operations in Gaza over the last 11 months in which tens of thousands of innocent civilians were killed or are still missing. If there is one thing that never changes, it’s that people die in wars.
‘Cats and dogs’: lying politicians won’t stop until they pay a price
A remarkable development has occurred in the story about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio. The now-debunked story was invoked by Donald Trump in his debate earlier this month with Vice President Kamala Harris, and has been raised repeatedly by Trump’s toxic running-mate, Sen. J.D. Vance.
The mainstream journalistic community has treated the story with a great deal of skepticism. The fallout from the fake story was substantial: the day after the debate, bomb threats forced the evacuation of some schools, City Hall and the state motor vehicle offices. The city even canceled its two-day CultureFest celebrating diversity, arts and culture, out of concerns about threats and safety.
When confronted with statements that the story has no merit from the mayor of Springfield and the Republican governor of Ohio, Vance essentially said his constituents have told him of the problem and he is merely passing along their concerns. Vance acknowledged he had not visited Springfield recently and suggested the “liberal media” should just get off their lazy asses and investigate the matter.
So guess what? The Wall Street Journal did exactly that. The Journal sent a team of reporters to Springfield. They reported a story headlined, How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants — After Being Told They Weren’t True (free link).
In advance of the story, the Vance campaign provided journalists with a police report indicating a Springfield woman had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. The woman subsequently found the cat in her basement. To her credit, she later apologized to her Haitian neighbors.
Now if only the two members of the GOP national ticket would be so gracious.
Why do politicians of all stripes lie so often? The WSJ interviewed Bill Adair, founder of the fact-checking website PolitiFact and a professor at Duke University:
It is depressing as a fact checker. We like to think that fact-checks will stop elected officials and candidates from repeating false claims or at least persuade people that these false claims have no truth to them.
But here’s the money quote:
Lying is really an economy. Politicians lie because they think it pays off.
The pager attack will go down in the annals of military history as a great accomplishment. What could the IDF come up with that will top it?