Politics
How exploding pagers in Lebanon boost the risk of Israel fighting two full wars
To say that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanonhas gone through a rough couple of days would be a massive understatement. The group — which runs Southern Lebanon as its own personal fiefdom, boasts tens of thousands of hardened fighters and possesses as many as 150,000 rockets in its inventory — is confronting a degree of internal chaos that its leadership isn’t habituated to experiencing.
By Hezbollah’s own admission, the presumed Israeli operation was the ‘biggest security breach’ the group has ever witnessed.
On Sept. 17, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah members across Lebanon exploded simultaneously in what is very likely an operation conducted by the MossadIsrael’s foreign intelligence agency. More than 2,700 people were injured, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, and at least 12 people were killed in the explosions. The next day, a second wave of attacks occurredthis time targeting the handheld radios Hezbollah uses in the field. The attacks caused panic in Lebanon; the country’s Ministry of Public Health told hospitals to remain on maximum alert status to cope with the injuries. U.N. personnel in Lebanon were advised to remove the batteries from their phones as a precautionary measure.
By Hezbollah’s own admission, the presumed Israeli operation was the “biggest security breach” the group has ever witnessed.
While information is still fluid, reports suggest Israeli intelligence agents intercepted a shipment of pagers to Hezbollah and tinkered with the devices(possibly by hiding explosive material into the pagers’ batteries) before allowing the shipment to continue on to Lebanon. When the pagers received a messagedisguised as coming from Hezbollah’s leadership, the phones exploded. It’s the kind of well-planned, highly orchestrated, technologically sophisticated covert action for which the Mossad is well known. And if anybody has any doubts, just ask the Iranians, who in 2020 watched as one of their top nuclear scientists, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinatedby a remote-controlled machine gunas he was traveling down a highway. The entire thing feels like an old episode of”24,”the action-packed show starring Kiefer Sutherland from the early “war on terror” of the 2000s.
There’s little doubt that Israel has scored a big tactical success. Hezbollah, one of Israel’s fiercest adversaries since the group was established in the early 1980s, will spend the next days, weeks and even months cracking down within its ranks, preoccupied with internal security and investigating how two similar, devastating strikes could happen within 24 hours of each other.
But as fascinating as the nuts-and-bolts of the operation are, there are deeper and more consequential questions at stake.
First, how will Hezbollah react?
The fact that Israel hasn’t officially claimed credit for the explosions doesn’t mean Hezbollah will hold off on attribution. Indeed, the group already blames Israel and is vowing to exact a price.
Presumably, Hezbollah means what it says; as one of the Middle East’s most powerful anti-Israel resistance movements, it can’t afford not to respond in some way, shape or form, even if it’s only through some kind of symbolic strike on Israeli military infrastructure near the Israel-Lebanon border.
Despite what some foreign policy heavyweights assert, tactical success doesn’t automatically equate to a strategic accomplishment.
Recall that last month, after Israel conducted preemptive airstrikes against thousands of Hezbollah rocket launchers, Hezbollah retaliated by sending its biggest fusilladeof rockets and missiles against targets in northern and central Israel — 320, to be exact. Fortunately, both sides chose to de-escalate after the daylong exchange of fire and return to the pre-August status quo, in which tit-for-tat fighting was largely confined to the Israeli-Lebanese border area. The latest Israeli attacks, however, risk unraveling that arrangement.
At the same time, Hezbollah isn’t a rash, illogical actor. Although Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah won’t admit it openly, he understands that Israel has escalation dominance in this nearly yearlong struggle and could bring Lebanon into the Stone Age if it so desires. Hezbollah is therefore in a very tricky position — refusing to retaliate makes the organization look weak, impotent and compromised, encouraging even more daring Israeli attacks; but going too far on retaliation is liable to give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the excuse he needs to conduct the full-scale military operation that many within his government are clamoring for.
This is the last thing Hezbollah wants, if only because such a war — which would likely include an Israeli ground invasion to carve out a buffer zone in Southern Lebanon — would produce an economic and humanitarian catastrophe that would make the monthlong Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006 look like child’s play. Another war doesn’t serve Hezbollah’s interests.
Second, what is Israel trying to accomplish with these operations, exactly? It’s difficult to know. Some accounts suggestthat the altered pagers and radios were meant to be used during a war with Hezbollah, but that the trigger had to be pulled early because Hezbollah became suspicious that something was wrong with the devices. Viewed in this way, the Israelis decided to speed up the plot’s execution, lest all the time and planning they put into the operation proved to be wasted.
Regardless of the explanation, one wonders what Israel’s end-goal is with these operations.
Despite what some foreign policy heavyweights asserttactical success doesn’t automatically equate to a strategic accomplishment. Hezbollah, for instance, will evolve its own tactics, policies and procedures by battening down the hatches and ensuring its communications infrastructure — or what’s left of it — is better prepared to withstand similar technological feats. As a consequence of being utterly embarrassed on the international stage, Hezbollah will now be far more careful with how it communicates and enforce more discipline within its ranks, limiting the amount of information that Israel’s intelligence services will pick up.
Finally, what does this entire episode tell us about the U.S.-Israel relationship today?
Bluntly put, this week’s covert action underscores that Israel is going to do what it’s going to do, notwithstanding U.S. reservations about a particular course of action or whether it undermines U.S. diplomatic initiatives in the process.
This is particularly the case if Washington continues to refuse any conditionality on the relationship. One day before pagers exploded in Beirut, U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein was in Israel, trying to maintain some degree of calm between Israel and Hezbollah and trying to convince Netanyahu’s government that a wider war in Lebanon — particularly when Israeli troops are still fighting in Gaza — wasn’t in anybody’s interest. Despite the low odds, Washington hopes to strike a diplomatic arrangement that would avert conflict and allow hundreds of thousands of people in both Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon to return to their homes. Needless to say, that already difficult job has gotten a lot more difficult this week. Netanyahu knows this but doesn’t care — ultimately, he has concluded that the U.S. will offer unconditional support regardless of what he does.
Which leads to one more question that should at the very least be debated: Is it time for the U.S. to disabuse Netanyahu of that notion?
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
Brazil has won a record five World Cups, but the most important match it has ever played may have been an exhibition match against Haiti that was meaningless in sporting terms but has had a long influence on each country’s politics.
On Aug. 18, 2004, Brazil’s players drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince in armored personnel carriers, World Cup champions greeted like liberators. Two months earlier, Brazil’s military had arrived to lead a multinational peacekeeping force established by the United Nations following a bloody coup d’état.
“We’ve only seen such joy in the eyes, the exuberance of the eyes, when we paraded in Brazil after winning the World Cup,” coach Carlos Alberto Parreira said afterwards. “I will never forget this moment.”
The team was accompanied to the U.N.-hosted friendly match that followed — “They play, peace wins,” went the slogan — by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then in his first term as Brazil’s president. More than two decades later, Lula is back in office, now cemented as the most accomplished leader the world’s left has seen in the 21st century. His approach to foreign policy, say observers, was shaped partially on the soccer pitch that day in Port-au-Prince.
“It showed he was trying something different as a diplomatic tool,” said Mauricio Savarese, an Associated press political reporter in São Paulo who has researched the legacy of the 2004 game. “That match at the time was a symbol of Brazil’s soft power. You really showed how Brazil could win hearts and minds with a policy that was not exactly bowing to the United States or to the China or to Russia, but independent.”
The match, designed to build goodwill between a shell-shocked population and its benevolent occupiers, began after players from the two national teams unfurled a pre-match banner that read “Social Justice is the True Name of Peace.” The peacekeeping mission represented an early commitment to “continental solidarity,” as Lula defined it in a speech the following year to up-and-coming diplomats where he cited the Haiti mission as an example of “non-indifference.”
Lula was feeling his way toward a foreign policy centered around South-South Cooperation and the BRICS alliance of emerging markets. Lula has used that role as de-facto leader of the democratic developing world to, with mixed results, position Brazil as a leader on climate change — it hosted last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém — and a mediator when thorny international conflicts arise. It has a position of official neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war, so as to serve a potential role as mediator, as it did when partnering with Turkey in 2010 to broker a nuclear-fuel swap with Iran.
That same year, an earthquake hit Haiti, killing over 100,000 people while injuring and displacing millions more. It also destroyed the headquarters of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, even as Brazil led a post-disaster humanitarian relief effort. The experience further deepened ties between the two countries, as Brazil introduced a humanitarian-visa program for the first time to welcome Haitians fleeing the devastation; it has since been extended to Syrian war refugees, as well. One historically Italian neighborhood in São Paulo is now known as Little Haiti.
The broader peacekeeping mission began to resemble a military quagmire in humanitarian garb: Brazilian troops were blamed for human-rights violations and a cholera epidemic, while doing little to improve the overall security situation. For Lula and his protegée Dilma Rousseff, the Haiti project became a political liability, in both Haiti and Brazil.
As the two nations prepare to face off against one another in Philadelphia on Friday, Lula is not expected to be in attendance. Instead his travel schedule this week was built around the G7 summit in France, in which Brazil participated as one of five “partner countries” — a reflection of its increased global standing over the past few decades. If Lula shows up at one of Brazil’s matches later in the World Cup, it will likely be with a domestic audience in mind rather than a foreign one: he is in the midst of a reelection campaign for his fourth term, against a son of his longtime antagonist Jair Bolsonaro.
“I doubt that anyone is going to vote for him just because he’s recognized abroad as a key leader,” said Savarese, Brazilian political journalist who wrote the book “Dilma’s Downfall.” “But of course that helps with some moderates, which are a very thin part of Brazil’s electorate, and they’re going to be decisive in October’s election, that is also one of the things that tips the balance in his favor, as is being seen as this pragmatic leader who can also be respected even when he’s speaking about issues that clearly don’t affect as much in Brazil’s daily life.”
That day in Haiti, not yet a global figure, Lula confronted one limit on his power. He reportedly asked his team not to score too many goals, in the interests of goodwill. The players did not oblige, winning 6-0, including an astonishing solo effort from Ronaldinho.
Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.
In today’s item, we look at whether GDP per capita has any connection to soccer performance. As you can see, the chart does show some positive correlation — note, for example, wealthy tournament contenders such as France, the Netherlands and Germany all in the upper right corner.
But it’s not a perfect indicator. By this metric, Qatar is the wealthiest country in the tournament — and it lost 6-0 to Canada on Thursday …
CANBERRA — It was disappointment from start to finish around the USA vs. Australia match in the Bush Capital, won comfortably by the American side.
Neither of Canberra’s Socceroos made the starting lineup and the local government failed to provide an outdoor watch site for the match, despite a heavy social media campaign from locals. With federal politicians out of town and back in their districts this week, the campaign lacked star power and fell on deaf ears.
That left thousands to fill inner city pubs and the University of Canberra, which were allowed special trading hours for the match, from 4.30 a.m.
Australia’s politicians — vocal in their support in the lead-up to the match — went silent quickly, after Australia’s own goal 11 minutes minutes into the game.
If the Aussies’ lackluster performance left the crowd subdued, they found energy to boo Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a notably unpopular figure in Australia, which embraced harsh Covid lockdowns and vaccines — when he appeared on the match broadcast.
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