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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.