By Kelly Sloan | Contributing Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Say what you will about the Israelis, no one can accuse them of lacking a degree of chutzpah when they put their minds to dealing with terrorism.
Last week’s pager and walkie-talkie detonations in the hands and waistbands of thousands of Hezbollah operatives, and the subsequent massive airstrike against the organization (timed perfectly, by the way, to take place in the middle of Hezbollah’s press conference howling about the outrage of the operation – nice touch) read like something out of James Bond or a Tom Clancy novel.
It was brilliant too: the psychological impact was almost as valuable as the crippling of their communications, and denying an enemy the ability to coordinate movements, relay information, and report to command is priceless in warfare.
Of course, the Israelis have something of a storied history of no-nonsense on the matter of defeating terrorism, and of applying creative solutions to the problem, both overt and clandestine. The legendary Entebbe raid of 1976, which rescued the passengers of an Air France plane that was hijacked and taken to Uganda, is the most ostentatious historical example. It may be worth remembering that the current Israeli Prime Minister’s brother, Lt. Jonathan Netanyahu, was killed executing that raid.
Israeli security services were stung very badly by the brutal attacks on their country on Oct. 7, and they are making up for it now. Before this week’s redefinition of electronic warfare, Israel’s fist, guided by her intelligence arm, struck down Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the middle of Tehran, and in July eliminated a top Hezbollah leader in Beirut. They take this stuff seriously, as they must.
The thought occurs watching all of this; could the United States pull this off? Putting the legal question aside – this operation may have, arguably, violated a few U.S. statutes, but then again, U.S. laws have not been written under the existential threat of annihilation – would the U.S. have the ability to carry out an operation of that magnitude, with that level of success, if placed in a situation where we had to? Well, certainly the technical capability is there. But what about the less tangible elements?
America’s intelligence community is professional, capable and formidable. Its political direction has always been rather more shaky; and, quite frankly, the CIA has never quite maintained the same level of awed respect that, say, Mossad has acquired over the years, going back at least to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. William F. Buckley, who himself served in the CIA briefly in Mexico, famously quipped after a failed assassination attempt on President Sukarno of Indonesia, that “The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno.”
The organs of national security are the most important components of the national government, and yet have been treated as little more than afterthoughts in the current administration. President Biden’s 2025 budget request for defense was a paltry 1% increase over 2024 – an actual reduction after inflation. In fact, all four of Biden’s defense budget requests have been reductions, despite the multi-polar threats accumulating around the globe. The Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength rates the U.S. military overall as weak, especially in terms of naval and air power, and the report doubts America’s ability to handle even a single major regional conflict, let alone the two major conflicts and separate brushfire the military at one time was supposed to be able to manage. Intelligence budgets are, necessarily and appropriately, much harder to ascertain, but given the official neglect granted to the military, can one expect that much devotion has been afforded our intelligence services?
This decline and neglect is an extension of foreign policy, which is a reflection of political will. The country has been operating without a decipherable foreign policy for quite some time, and where we have expressed our national interest globally under this administration, it has been either insufficient or a debacle. The consequences of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan are still wreaking havoc around the globe, and served as a sort of permission slip for Putin to export violence in Eastern Europe. Our Ukraine policy has been aimless and ineffectual, featuring repeated delays in delivering the Ukrainians promised weapon systems, and then attaching ludicrous conditions – like forbidding their use to strike Russian targets in Russia, the kind of thing that would allow Ukraine to actually win the war.
And even that is not as schizophrenic as our alleged “support” for Israel in its defensive struggle against Iran and its proxies, which seems to consist mainly of scolding them for fighting back too effectively. And how strong is our commitment to Taiwan’s defence (and by extension our own) if we do not have a Navy sufficiently strong to deter, much less defeat, Communist China’s?
These are the challenges of our era, if we can meet them. Perhaps, when push comes to shove, and if we start being a little nicer to them, the Israelis may come to our rescue.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.