Looming Israeli Attack? What We Can Expect

The title of this post is the title of a video discussion between two military guys, Daniel Davis and Doug Macgregor. However, before getting to a partial transcript/summary I’ll take a brief—but related—detour.

Earlier today Glenn Diesen hosted an excellent discussion:

Wars in the West, development in the East - Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

I highly recommend the entire video, but I want to single out a remark that Jeffrey Sachs made that pertains to the Speakership impasse:

Maybe diplomacy would be helpful, rather than assertions of the US as the [26:04] indispensable nation and all these other cliches, but seemingly—at least in the political class in the United States—there is a such a collapse of understanding and knowledge that cliché seem to be the the last hold of the US political class in Washington right now. There's just no proper understanding of what's happening and maybe a not insignificant part of this is that the selling of arms has become the business of the United States. It's this role of the military contractors and their lobbyists that has also hijacking a lot of US foreign policy, so that's actually part of the story, as well. Lockheed and Northrup Grumman and Boeing and General Dynamics and Raytheon, getting hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts over the years and exercising extraordinary lobbying weight over US politics.

One of the remarkable things we've seen in this fight over the next Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives is that the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee [Mike Rogers, R-AL], who's basically the recipient of the largess of the military industrial complex, is negotiating that the incoming Speaker will support “proper funding” for Ukraine and, presumably, Israel. Meaning that you see the handiwork of the military industrial complex and the arms contractors and their lobbyists at work in the interstices of the day to day political machinations in Washington. That plays a big role, especially in an election year, and we're entering one right now. So all eyes are on campaign contributions. So this is another part of [28:33] the bizarre story right now.

Anyone who has listened to Doug Macgregor will recognize in Sachs’ remarks one of Macgregor’s regular themes—”foreign” military aid is actually aid to the MIC and, thus, to the political class on Capitol Hill.

So, let’s turn to Davis and Macgregor. The full video is here:

Looming Israeli Attack: Col Doug Macgregor Breaks Down What We Can Expect

I’ll be providing an edited transcrip/summary. Meaning, I’ve cleaned it up, excerpted what I thought was most interesting, but haven’t put words in their mouths.

The discussion begins with a reference to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. This tweet will give you the context:

DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant at the Israeli airforce command center:

"This needs to be the last [ground] maneuver in Gaza, for the simple reason that after it there will be no Hamas.

"It will take a month, two months, three, but in the end there will be no Hamas. Before the enemy meets the armored and infantry forces, it will meet the bombs of the Air Force."

"I am under the impression that you know how to do it in a lethal, precise, and very high-quality way, as it has been proven until now."

However, in the video that Davis plays Gallant also acknowledges that Israel will “pay a price.” That’s really what Davis and Macgregor focus on. “A month, two months, three” of intense urban combat against a highly motivated foe is likely to extract a very high price in casualties. Here we go:

The worst part, of course, is that the Israelis have demolished these areas. It would have been better if they had left these buildings intact. The Israelis have done these kinds of things before—in Lebanon, on the West Bank. I'm quite certain that this will be a nightmare, and I think the Israelis will pay a price. I'm sure that they will use firepower as much as possible to keep people alive. You can't just send infantry in with some engineers. You need tanks, ideally auto-cannon [?], though I don't think the Israelis have very many of those. Tank fire, of course, is very, very accurate—much more accurate than anything coming in from above—and I would also expect to see some attack helicopters, although perhaps not as many as we’ve seen in the past, because we're finding out more and more it's just very easy to eliminate helicopters from the battle space.

This is not something you rush into. If you rush into it you're going to lose a lot of people. You’re dealing with 70 square miles. That may not sound like a lot, but it really is when you're being asked to go in there and essentially neutralize it, cleanse it of any enemy. The enemy, on the other hand, has a free wheeling operation. I'm sure they'll use some of these underground tunnels we've heard about. I know in studying the Battle of Stalingrad, the Germans went in there and they just bombed all these houses and structures and turned it into rubble thinking that was going to help them, but then the Russians actually used a lot of that for defensive positions, actually making it difficult. The Israeli Force is going to have some similar problems with the many buildings they've already rubbled. That makes it easier on the defender, harder for the attacker. You can't plot your movement as effectively as you could if those things were intact. But there's no easy way around this.

Hezbollah has made it clear that in the event that the IDF goes into Gaza they will attack in Northern Israel. Hezbollah has about 100,000 Fighters. Estimates are 130-140,000 rockets and missiles, of which about 40,000 are very accurate, very deadly, very lethal. That's going to have a big impact.

The Israeli force is not really that large, and this is one of the reasons that I think the Israelis extracted from President Biden the solemn promise that if Hezbollah attacks we will launch air strikes in support of the Israelis into Southern Lebanon.

Now this this is another problem, because as soon as Hezbollah attacks I think the rest of the Muslim world around Israel will begin to organize to fight. I think it's only a matter of time until the entire region joins the fight against Israel.

This is the problem with going into Gaza. If that [Hezbollah joining the war] happens while they're fighting in Gaza how far are you going to get in Gaza? I mean, how many forces are you going to use? I think we're looking at 10,000 initially, but those are 10,000 combat troops. When we say there are almost 500,000 soldiers in the Israeli Army that's misleading, because you and I know that less than half of that consists of combat troops. How many combat troops can you commit on the two fronts simultaneously?

1973 was different because, although there were two fronts, the Israelis did not attempt to go on the offensive on two fronts simultaneously. They handled each front seriatim. They dealt with Syria first, then they turned her attention to Egypt.

Remember, Hezbollah is operating on its own turf. We don't know to what extent they have air defense technology that can neutralize or damage our aircraft--we just don't know. We do know that the Russians in Syria absolutely have air defense technology that can do serious damage to us. That's part of the operational picture. I don't think there's any question but that Hezbollah will enter, and I think the Israelis will be hardpressed to deal with them while simultaneously trying to clear things in the South.

Keep something else in mind. Remember that the Israelis themselves created this Hamas mess. They stood it up and they bolstered it over time on the assumption that they were splitting the Palestinian opposition in a way that served Israeli interests. Israel is not unique in this. All powers at one time or another have done these kinds of things, but now I think it's backfired very badly.

Hamas is no longer The Lone Ranger. I would expect a serious uprising on the West Bank against the Israeli presence there. If Hezbollah does come in and the Israeli Defense Forces have an actual two front war, then if this so-called axis of resistance actually stands up and it comes in from the West Bank as well, ...

Americans in Iraq and Syria are potentially coming under fire from a lot of these groups. I mean, this could get messy really fast.

The Egyptians have already committed three or four divisions from their army to the border with Gaza. I'm told that they're going to move as many as 300,000 troops to the border. Now that may not seem significant, but once they have all those forces there and large numbers of people who are Arabs inside Gaza are dying, how difficult will it be for General Sisi to stay out of this fight?

That's just the beginning. We haven't even talked about Jordan. I would be surprised if the King of Jordan can hold his kingdom together very easily, because more than half of his population is now Palestinian. So this thing just gets worse the more you look at it.

Then, of course, you have the Iranians in the distance, who I think will only operate through their militias. If the Israelis use a nuclear weapon against Iran I think they will be in serious trouble, because I think the whole world will desert them at that point.

The Turks are the open question right now. We know that they are preparing for the contingency of fighting against Israel and us. Yyou and I talked years ago about all of these films being marketed in Turkey that were breeding hatred for the United States that talked about Turkish forces resisting the US military in Iraq. This is fertile ground for serious trouble with the Turks. How do you keep the Turks out, especially when we shot down one of their drones recently? The Turks would like us out of Northern Syria. We've insisted on staying there. We have a thousand men up there. I would like to see them extricated as opposed to being sacrificed pointlessly.

Then we have to add in the Russian variable. The Russians are not going to sit there quietly if Iran is suddenly attacked. One of the most dangerous things that I've heard recently from the hill people is that now's the time to do in Iran. This is insane. We're not what we were in 1991 demographically. We're not the same nation and the potential for trouble inside our own country is enormous now.

I would urge the Israelis not to go into Gaza at this point. Blowing up people's houses, killing their families--you just breed more enemies.

Biden last night said Hamas and Putin represent different threats but they share this in common: they both want to completely annihilate neighboring democracies. That means we have to go after them until Ukraine wins, until the IDF has destroyed Hamas completely. This is a a replay of the George Bush speech on the Axis of Evil, where he effectively said you are either with us or you are against us. This is the dumbest thing that you can possibly say or do. I mean the most intelligent approach when you have to fight anybody is to practice economy of enemies. Find out who the people are that you really don't want to fight. Find out what their interests are and find a way to keep them out. If you go back through history and you look at all the statesmen that were successful, they did this. Even George Bush Senior understood this very well.

Biden's axis of Evil is Iran, Russia, and China. All of this fits in with this sort of neocon globalist approach that says if you don't look like us, if you if you don't live like us, if you don't have a government like us--you're the enemy. We have this passion for demonizing anybody who doesn't cooperate with us or won't agree with us--turning them into this sort of anti-democratic element that has to be expunged. The whole idea of alliances keeping us safe doesn't make sense because yesterday's friends are not all our friends anymore, and yesterday's enemies in some cases have become our friends. We live in a world of shifting interests. We should be looking at the rest of the world as what I would call limited liability partners. Sometimes it makes sense for them to cooperate with us and for us to cooperate with them, but we don't really need permanent enemies and only rarely do we have permanent friends. The Neocon version is the kindergarten school of statesmanship. Roll out the wornout tropes from 1941 42 43 repackage them and try to mobilize the country one more time do something utterly stupid and involve itself in a war that it doesn't need to fight.

I think Mr Netanyahu is doing something similar in Israel. He's essentially saying, 'It's my way way or the highway.' That kind of approach is going to be ruinous for Israel. Israel knows that it lives in an environment where it has very few friends--if any--and you want to avoid conflict as much as possible. What Netanyahu and others have tried to do is manipulate the opponent--build up Hamas in the hopes that you can split the Palestinians and even manipulate them into conflict with each other. Sounds great! Lots of powers have done it. It always fails, and has failed right here.

I think they need a fresh approach but, of course, if you regard any compromise whatsoever with your identified opponent as essentially unacceptable you're locked into perpetual conflict. I think that's where we're headed right now.

They [the Neocons] don't seem to care what the impact of these policies is here at home--this business of entangling alliances is a disaster for us. We no longer need it.

When the people overseas are not going to buy up your debt and finance you, so we've got serious problems economically. We've got serious problems financially. This is all going to come home to roost. It may be less than a perfect storm, obviously, but it'll be a storm. Committing us to an open-ended War at this stage--it would make more sense for the president to step up and say, this is not a good time, we are not as strong as we once wer,e we've sacrificed much of our strengt,h we have our own problems to deal with, you've got to back down and look for an alternative solution that doesn't involve a regional war. It's not an unreasonable request if you're the United States, but nobody's thinking like that now.

There's one other point I want to make. We have put naval power offshore. Naval power offshore in the final analysis has a marginal to no impact. Nobody in southern Lebanon, the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt, the Sinai, is quivering in their boots, worried about B-52s and others flying over. We struck the Serbs repeatedly, never hit a damn thing. We've been down this road before--it's not going to change anything. We don't have a ground ground force to send, that's the bottom line. Ground forces ultimately change the equation, and that's what the Israelis are probably going to need once this regional war really expands. You know how long it takes to build an army. We can't do it quickly enough to make any difference. We can't even get people to voluntarily enlist in the Army, and the people they're taking in are hardly the people that the American people would want in their military. It's a huge problem. You look at the people at the top of the military, you listen to their comments--I wouldn't want to join that organization if I had to listen to that nonsense from Austin and this new chairman. I didn't think much of what Milley had to say, so that's the other sort of ticking time bomb in this mix. We can't put the forces ashore to fundamentally change the geostrategic picture.

You know, Doug, this analogy you talk about--the outbreak of the First World War. What made the First World War a World War was Britain's decision to enter it. Had the British stayed out of it it would have been a regional war, and probably the British were in a position to intervene and help negotiate an end to it. Instead they joined it and, as a result, tens of millions of people died. The the War lasted almost five years and was catastrophe. I see us in a very similar position.