Dexter Filkins, who covered wars in the Middle East for decades, weighs in on Hezbollah, Iran, and what America should do about the brewing conflicts in the region.
Great to see Dexter Filkins in the FP ! For those who don't take seriously or read the New Yorker or NYT anymore, he is missed. Thanks and more please :)
The only reason that there is a danger of full-scale war breaking out between Hezbollah and Israel is Hezbollah's continuing rockets, mortars, snipers, drone attacks against Israel. "They started it" might sound like a childish claim to someone sitting in comfort and peace, but let's see how long the complacency would last if over 11 months thousands upon thousands of hostile armament was shot at you? Let's see what would happen if tens of communities were evacuated while the buildings themselves were being systematically destroyed. Most importantly, and this even this honored publication doesn't emphasize, the Hezbollah had no reason to begin hostilities, NONE! Media stars and intellectuals can portray what is happening as some sort of adolescent hissy fit between two entities that "just have to sit down and talk about it", but it is a war of survival, Israeli's.
This article seems extremely one sided. If Israel is interested in negotiating, then how do you justify the pager attacks. Or the assassinations of leaders? Who then is left to negotiate?More evident is Israel's policy of expansion of the settlements in the West bank and likely movement into portions of Gaza which have been bombed and bulldozed to become uninhabitable. You talk of Palestinians being indoctrinated, while evidence accumulates of indoctrination of settler children, as evidenced by the actions of israeli soldiers. Palestinians have valid grievances, and as the extreme ruling coalition in israel continues to deny these, the hatred will only grow.
We justify the attacks by making it clear that in a war one kills the enemy. What exactly is there to "negotiate" with the Hezbollah? A Lebanese Shiite militia thinks it has a right to destroy the Jewish nation so that is something we should negotiate? After the 2006 war against Hamas the UN authorized a border commission to define and delineate once and for all the international border between Lebanon and Israel. Israel accepted, totally and without qualification the findings of that commission. Yet the Hezbollah, which is NOT the government of Lebanon, doesn't. What is there to negotiate? Furthermore I think your claim that Israel should avoid killing the Hezbollah leaders disingenuous at best, out of courtesy I don't use a stronger word. In what world do you not attack and if possible kill the commanders of an entity making war on you? Regarding Gaza, I certainly wish that Hamas had not turned Gaza into an fortified city making the Maginot Line look amateurish, but they did. Moreover, if the Hamas had not brutally attacked Israel, destroyed entire communities, murdered over a thousand citizens (incl. 400 at a music festival), kidnapped over 250 people of which over 100 are still hostages, Israel wouldn't be bombing and bulldozing ANYTHING in Gaza. Finally, you parallel of Jewish settler children being indoctrinated just like Hezbollah children is absurd, mendacious, and fantastical.
Israeli is our canary in the cage, when it comes to maintaining our own freedom. The axis of evil can not be allowed to keep expanding. Europe which folded like dominoes less then 100 years ago shows sign of rot again. You merely need to look at voting records in the UN to see the true state of the world... and it isn't favorable to us. President Trump right now is a person that, given the presidency, can make a dent in this dangerous dystopian clown show we are currently in.
I think that Americans are sick of sending our children and our money to fight these foreign wars. This has been our foreign policy for years and has accomplished nothing. We have to fight these battles economically, as was described in the article above. Unfortunately, the DC elite can't or won't change the strategy. The welcoming of the Neocons into the Democratic Party scares the heck out of me, seems that Eisenhower was right.
The US is still a dominant economic power but the growth of China is threatening it. We need a total rethinking of foreign policy and I'm not sure we have the leadership to do it.
Hezbollah tunnels. What a scary geometry on Hamas. Quatar, you could find yourself hoisted on your own Frankensteinian monster! Interesting that finally there is an Iranian toadie admitting that "Iran controls every bullet". If, as we in the West, are led to believe, the Iranian people do not support this, then when are they supposed to do something about their own regime? In Lebanon, why are the Lebanese Christians hiding, and waiting for someone else, the Israelis/US/anyone else, to do something in their own backyard? If your don't like your regime, and you don't have full and fair elections, then grow a pair and do something before they destroy you because of your own cowardice. Silence and inaction is complicity.
We, unfortunately, do not have the luxury of ignoring or avoiding or isolating or disengagin with the MIddle East. We are, like it or not, a superpower and that comes with obligations and responsibilities. Appeasement and isolationism have never worked in the past, so there is no rational reason to think it will work now. We need to work with our allies, to have allies, to cultivate allies, to support allies. We live in a dangerous, and very small, world.
Used to be that government officials could only use approved phones, the Blackberry comes to mind if I recall. Now, everyone uses what they want. Just imagine if there was ONE explosion inside the Capital or the White House. Just one... This is a wake-up call.
I wonder if anyone caught the Head of the Secret Service disclose during her grilling that she uses SIGNAL and other messaging apps on her personal phone to do business. Big deal people. These phones are coming back to bite us or kill us if we don't wake up.....
As I see all these deep dives into how Israel got the pagers and walkie-talkies (can we just call them boom boxes?) into hezbollah, it reminds me of just how little actual journalism takes place in places like Lebanon.
Good for Filkins to be one of the very few to go there, and do these sorts of deeper dives. It doesn't surprise me to hear hezbollah has 12 year old recruits or that the younger fighters want to go right into Israel or that hezbollah was making large investments in tunnels 20 years ago (and likely still today). But just try to get the nytimes or wapo or any other major news group to dig for that story. They'll spend huge resources on the boom box story -- and just nothing on what's really going on in Lebanon.
It's hard to take Obama's account of his Iran policy at face value. "Pivot to Asia, create a balance of forces in the Middle East..." The JCPOA was cover to realign US foreign policy with the Ayatollahs and to elevate Iran and its "equities" to become the regional power. Hostility to US allies and interests from the Obama and Biden administrations was too open for their talking points to be credible. This was ideology dressed up as pragmatism.
Remember when Biden trotted out the Kashoggi affair to antagonize Saudi Arabia as soon as he took office? What was the point of that again?
Why was his administration so reluctant to even mention the Abraham Accords by name?
Why did Biden waived sanctions on Iran that were keeping the region calm, which was good for the US?
Why did Biden remove the Houthis designation as a terrorist organization?
I want us to build and stockpile more weapons and grow our military AND stay out of world affairs. We should make it very clear though, that an attack on this country means we will wipe out anyone who dares to do it.
I don't think most readers interested in the coverage of the Middle East go to the New Yorker for that coverage, and those who seek objective coverage of the Middle East certainly don't read The New York Times. I follow the news from that region and the name Dexter Filkins never comes up. Now that I have heard him on this podcast, I can say confidently I learn nothing new except that Mr. Filkins attends a lot of dinners and parties with Hezbollah and talks about it in a very sophomoric way...like like like...immature way? Like, yeah.
"We don’t have American soldiers on the ground there" yes we do, both in Syria and Iraq helping the Kurds against ISIS.
Didn't learn much from this article. Israel will win this war and it will do it much, much quicker if President Trump returns to office. Trump knows how to deal with Iran... with a big fist and starving it. If Harris is installed like Biden we're all in a heap of trouble.
"There’s an increasing trend in both parties to just wash our hands, not just the Middle East, but the whole world. [...] We have tried for years to get out of the Middle East, and we have found ourselves incapable of doing it. It’s hard for me to look at the region right now. It’s imploding. I think it absolutely can get worse, and it will get worse if we walk away from it. That’s just a fact of life that we have to live with."
The dichotomy set-up here is a false one, and betrays a misunderstanding of the nuance that "realist" positions can hold.
The excuse will always be, for a certain type of foreign policy thinker, that if the US doesn't take an active and unipolar role in governing the international sphere, not only will the US suffer but the planet as well. So we just have to keep doing what we're doing, and maybe even MORE, and everything will turn out correctly in the end. The problem is that we lack the moral fortitude to make the sacrifices necessary to do so. And so on.
I disagree with this. You don't have to be an "isolationist" (is anybody actually this?) to question the PRUDENCE with which US foreign policy has been pursued since WWII, especially after the fall of the USSR. Are we not over-extended in our commitments at this point? How did we get here? Why are such commitments simply unquestionable? Why can't they be renegotiated? And all of this especially when these very commitments are (1) dubiously founded and (2) creating more problems than they solve.
Example: We have strategic interests in the Middle East because of oil access. Ok, what's the solution to this? Constantly interfere in the Middle East? Or genuinely seek a sufficient "energy independence," even if it ends up hurting us somewhat materially in the short-term? But in long-term, consider all the benefits, politically and economically, but also morally, culturally, and environmentally. And then maybe we can take a more objective role in the Middle East, once we are less codependently bound with it.
Example: The State of Israel is our "ally" (in what, I don't know, but fine). Ok, but do we have to enable Israel's intransigence by subsidizing its security directly and indirectly as if we have some messianic mission to be its perpetual protector from everyone else in the world who understands that their behavior is ALSO part of the problem of the instability of that region through its own abuses? In turn, does everyone else in the world resent our one-sided support for Israel, impacting their trust in us and disposing them to work against us? I suppose it's just because they're evil antisemites... sort of like DEI critics are all just fragile whites.
Tell me that these scenarios and others like them are not direct contributors to the constantly escalating realignment of the globe against US interests. I maintain that you are thinking too simplistically about these matters. But if it helps you to sleep at night to write off various people as "the evil ones who just need to be defeated" while ignoring the decades of cumulative imprudent foreign policy choices that have gotten us to this point, that's your business. God forbid other nations have their own national interests to pursue: if you're not with (i.e. under) the US, you're not respecting the "rules-based international order."
Whatever "increasing trend" the interviewee is seeing in both Parties, he should make sure that said trend is not simply people realizing we can't keep doing business as usual. Perhaps the American people are finally admitting that for decades their country has been marshalled in pursuit of the global hegemonic dreams of our elite classes while they've been bought-off by being fed with the bread-and-circus of our unrealistic and unsustainable material lifestyle? Maybe the elite classes are realizing that this dream isn't possible any longer, and they either change course or risk falling from power?
Reality will set in eventually. Something's got to give, and as the US is sapped of its material and moral strength internally and externally, there are only two choices: (1) renegotiate things to give ourselves a softer landing, or (2) have everything crumble in our hands because we refuse to let go of the status quo. The fatalism evidenced in this interview is in keeping with option (2). (1) seems much more reasonable to me, and apparently to a growing number of Americans.
I quote you: "The State of Israel is our "ally" (in what, I don't know, but fine)"
It seems to me that in order to work for the salvation of Mankind, one would need Friends. Not everyone WANTS the salvation of Mankind; in fact, some people, even whole GROUPS of them, want what could be construed to be the opposite -- the destruction of Mankind, or at least a portion of it, which could really be seen as the whole, couldn't it?
Hamas, and an integral part of the Islamic world, wants Israel, and Jews, DEAD. I would put to you that the US and Israel are "allies" in preventing the sworn mission of Hamas & Friends, and in trying to 'negotiate'.
You say "something's got to give." Well, something HAS given, and has been giving way for decades, if not millenia. "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away," yes? The readiness is all.
P.S. Snark does not enlighten your otherwise earnest, half-right and sophistically-reasoned message. But thank you for your passion.
Great to see Dexter Filkins in the FP ! For those who don't take seriously or read the New Yorker or NYT anymore, he is missed. Thanks and more please :)
The only reason that there is a danger of full-scale war breaking out between Hezbollah and Israel is Hezbollah's continuing rockets, mortars, snipers, drone attacks against Israel. "They started it" might sound like a childish claim to someone sitting in comfort and peace, but let's see how long the complacency would last if over 11 months thousands upon thousands of hostile armament was shot at you? Let's see what would happen if tens of communities were evacuated while the buildings themselves were being systematically destroyed. Most importantly, and this even this honored publication doesn't emphasize, the Hezbollah had no reason to begin hostilities, NONE! Media stars and intellectuals can portray what is happening as some sort of adolescent hissy fit between two entities that "just have to sit down and talk about it", but it is a war of survival, Israeli's.
This article seems extremely one sided. If Israel is interested in negotiating, then how do you justify the pager attacks. Or the assassinations of leaders? Who then is left to negotiate?More evident is Israel's policy of expansion of the settlements in the West bank and likely movement into portions of Gaza which have been bombed and bulldozed to become uninhabitable. You talk of Palestinians being indoctrinated, while evidence accumulates of indoctrination of settler children, as evidenced by the actions of israeli soldiers. Palestinians have valid grievances, and as the extreme ruling coalition in israel continues to deny these, the hatred will only grow.
Yeah, negotiate with the Palestinians over their grievances - that should work.
https://i.redd.it/budt05qtdhac1.jpeg
We justify the attacks by making it clear that in a war one kills the enemy. What exactly is there to "negotiate" with the Hezbollah? A Lebanese Shiite militia thinks it has a right to destroy the Jewish nation so that is something we should negotiate? After the 2006 war against Hamas the UN authorized a border commission to define and delineate once and for all the international border between Lebanon and Israel. Israel accepted, totally and without qualification the findings of that commission. Yet the Hezbollah, which is NOT the government of Lebanon, doesn't. What is there to negotiate? Furthermore I think your claim that Israel should avoid killing the Hezbollah leaders disingenuous at best, out of courtesy I don't use a stronger word. In what world do you not attack and if possible kill the commanders of an entity making war on you? Regarding Gaza, I certainly wish that Hamas had not turned Gaza into an fortified city making the Maginot Line look amateurish, but they did. Moreover, if the Hamas had not brutally attacked Israel, destroyed entire communities, murdered over a thousand citizens (incl. 400 at a music festival), kidnapped over 250 people of which over 100 are still hostages, Israel wouldn't be bombing and bulldozing ANYTHING in Gaza. Finally, you parallel of Jewish settler children being indoctrinated just like Hezbollah children is absurd, mendacious, and fantastical.
Israeli is our canary in the cage, when it comes to maintaining our own freedom. The axis of evil can not be allowed to keep expanding. Europe which folded like dominoes less then 100 years ago shows sign of rot again. You merely need to look at voting records in the UN to see the true state of the world... and it isn't favorable to us. President Trump right now is a person that, given the presidency, can make a dent in this dangerous dystopian clown show we are currently in.
I think that Americans are sick of sending our children and our money to fight these foreign wars. This has been our foreign policy for years and has accomplished nothing. We have to fight these battles economically, as was described in the article above. Unfortunately, the DC elite can't or won't change the strategy. The welcoming of the Neocons into the Democratic Party scares the heck out of me, seems that Eisenhower was right.
The US is still a dominant economic power but the growth of China is threatening it. We need a total rethinking of foreign policy and I'm not sure we have the leadership to do it.
Moynihan's interview with Dexter Filkins is stunning in its analysis. encourage everyone to hear the whole thing on podcast.
Hezbollah tunnels. What a scary geometry on Hamas. Quatar, you could find yourself hoisted on your own Frankensteinian monster! Interesting that finally there is an Iranian toadie admitting that "Iran controls every bullet". If, as we in the West, are led to believe, the Iranian people do not support this, then when are they supposed to do something about their own regime? In Lebanon, why are the Lebanese Christians hiding, and waiting for someone else, the Israelis/US/anyone else, to do something in their own backyard? If your don't like your regime, and you don't have full and fair elections, then grow a pair and do something before they destroy you because of your own cowardice. Silence and inaction is complicity.
We, unfortunately, do not have the luxury of ignoring or avoiding or isolating or disengagin with the MIddle East. We are, like it or not, a superpower and that comes with obligations and responsibilities. Appeasement and isolationism have never worked in the past, so there is no rational reason to think it will work now. We need to work with our allies, to have allies, to cultivate allies, to support allies. We live in a dangerous, and very small, world.
Used to be that government officials could only use approved phones, the Blackberry comes to mind if I recall. Now, everyone uses what they want. Just imagine if there was ONE explosion inside the Capital or the White House. Just one... This is a wake-up call.
I wonder if anyone caught the Head of the Secret Service disclose during her grilling that she uses SIGNAL and other messaging apps on her personal phone to do business. Big deal people. These phones are coming back to bite us or kill us if we don't wake up.....
As I see all these deep dives into how Israel got the pagers and walkie-talkies (can we just call them boom boxes?) into hezbollah, it reminds me of just how little actual journalism takes place in places like Lebanon.
Good for Filkins to be one of the very few to go there, and do these sorts of deeper dives. It doesn't surprise me to hear hezbollah has 12 year old recruits or that the younger fighters want to go right into Israel or that hezbollah was making large investments in tunnels 20 years ago (and likely still today). But just try to get the nytimes or wapo or any other major news group to dig for that story. They'll spend huge resources on the boom box story -- and just nothing on what's really going on in Lebanon.
It's hard to take Obama's account of his Iran policy at face value. "Pivot to Asia, create a balance of forces in the Middle East..." The JCPOA was cover to realign US foreign policy with the Ayatollahs and to elevate Iran and its "equities" to become the regional power. Hostility to US allies and interests from the Obama and Biden administrations was too open for their talking points to be credible. This was ideology dressed up as pragmatism.
Remember when Biden trotted out the Kashoggi affair to antagonize Saudi Arabia as soon as he took office? What was the point of that again?
Why was his administration so reluctant to even mention the Abraham Accords by name?
Why did Biden waived sanctions on Iran that were keeping the region calm, which was good for the US?
Why did Biden remove the Houthis designation as a terrorist organization?
I want us to build and stockpile more weapons and grow our military AND stay out of world affairs. We should make it very clear though, that an attack on this country means we will wipe out anyone who dares to do it.
I don't think most readers interested in the coverage of the Middle East go to the New Yorker for that coverage, and those who seek objective coverage of the Middle East certainly don't read The New York Times. I follow the news from that region and the name Dexter Filkins never comes up. Now that I have heard him on this podcast, I can say confidently I learn nothing new except that Mr. Filkins attends a lot of dinners and parties with Hezbollah and talks about it in a very sophomoric way...like like like...immature way? Like, yeah.
"We don’t have American soldiers on the ground there" yes we do, both in Syria and Iraq helping the Kurds against ISIS.
Didn't learn much from this article. Israel will win this war and it will do it much, much quicker if President Trump returns to office. Trump knows how to deal with Iran... with a big fist and starving it. If Harris is installed like Biden we're all in a heap of trouble.
This supports my decision as a one issue voter. Avoiding WW 3 Trumps every other issue. Pun intended.
escalate, escalate,
dance to the music... dum dee dum...
.
"There’s an increasing trend in both parties to just wash our hands, not just the Middle East, but the whole world. [...] We have tried for years to get out of the Middle East, and we have found ourselves incapable of doing it. It’s hard for me to look at the region right now. It’s imploding. I think it absolutely can get worse, and it will get worse if we walk away from it. That’s just a fact of life that we have to live with."
The dichotomy set-up here is a false one, and betrays a misunderstanding of the nuance that "realist" positions can hold.
The excuse will always be, for a certain type of foreign policy thinker, that if the US doesn't take an active and unipolar role in governing the international sphere, not only will the US suffer but the planet as well. So we just have to keep doing what we're doing, and maybe even MORE, and everything will turn out correctly in the end. The problem is that we lack the moral fortitude to make the sacrifices necessary to do so. And so on.
I disagree with this. You don't have to be an "isolationist" (is anybody actually this?) to question the PRUDENCE with which US foreign policy has been pursued since WWII, especially after the fall of the USSR. Are we not over-extended in our commitments at this point? How did we get here? Why are such commitments simply unquestionable? Why can't they be renegotiated? And all of this especially when these very commitments are (1) dubiously founded and (2) creating more problems than they solve.
Example: We have strategic interests in the Middle East because of oil access. Ok, what's the solution to this? Constantly interfere in the Middle East? Or genuinely seek a sufficient "energy independence," even if it ends up hurting us somewhat materially in the short-term? But in long-term, consider all the benefits, politically and economically, but also morally, culturally, and environmentally. And then maybe we can take a more objective role in the Middle East, once we are less codependently bound with it.
Example: The State of Israel is our "ally" (in what, I don't know, but fine). Ok, but do we have to enable Israel's intransigence by subsidizing its security directly and indirectly as if we have some messianic mission to be its perpetual protector from everyone else in the world who understands that their behavior is ALSO part of the problem of the instability of that region through its own abuses? In turn, does everyone else in the world resent our one-sided support for Israel, impacting their trust in us and disposing them to work against us? I suppose it's just because they're evil antisemites... sort of like DEI critics are all just fragile whites.
Tell me that these scenarios and others like them are not direct contributors to the constantly escalating realignment of the globe against US interests. I maintain that you are thinking too simplistically about these matters. But if it helps you to sleep at night to write off various people as "the evil ones who just need to be defeated" while ignoring the decades of cumulative imprudent foreign policy choices that have gotten us to this point, that's your business. God forbid other nations have their own national interests to pursue: if you're not with (i.e. under) the US, you're not respecting the "rules-based international order."
Whatever "increasing trend" the interviewee is seeing in both Parties, he should make sure that said trend is not simply people realizing we can't keep doing business as usual. Perhaps the American people are finally admitting that for decades their country has been marshalled in pursuit of the global hegemonic dreams of our elite classes while they've been bought-off by being fed with the bread-and-circus of our unrealistic and unsustainable material lifestyle? Maybe the elite classes are realizing that this dream isn't possible any longer, and they either change course or risk falling from power?
Reality will set in eventually. Something's got to give, and as the US is sapped of its material and moral strength internally and externally, there are only two choices: (1) renegotiate things to give ourselves a softer landing, or (2) have everything crumble in our hands because we refuse to let go of the status quo. The fatalism evidenced in this interview is in keeping with option (2). (1) seems much more reasonable to me, and apparently to a growing number of Americans.
Father Bri,
I quote you: "The State of Israel is our "ally" (in what, I don't know, but fine)"
It seems to me that in order to work for the salvation of Mankind, one would need Friends. Not everyone WANTS the salvation of Mankind; in fact, some people, even whole GROUPS of them, want what could be construed to be the opposite -- the destruction of Mankind, or at least a portion of it, which could really be seen as the whole, couldn't it?
Hamas, and an integral part of the Islamic world, wants Israel, and Jews, DEAD. I would put to you that the US and Israel are "allies" in preventing the sworn mission of Hamas & Friends, and in trying to 'negotiate'.
You say "something's got to give." Well, something HAS given, and has been giving way for decades, if not millenia. "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away," yes? The readiness is all.
P.S. Snark does not enlighten your otherwise earnest, half-right and sophistically-reasoned message. But thank you for your passion.