Bulletins and News Discussion from July 29th to August 4th, 2024 - Haters Stay Mad(uro) - COTW: Venezuela

This is the critical part of the interview IMO:

Jeremy Scahill: If Israel does commit and they do want war with Hezbollah, what does that look like from the Lebanese side, based on the history of these conflicts and wars and Hezbollah's response to Israel? If Israel does send in ground forces or engages in a very heavy, wider bombing campaign, what could we expect Hezbollah's response to look like?

Amal Saad: Well, I think the Israeli intelligence is quite aware because I've read a lot of these analyses in Israeli and U.S. intelligence reports and others, which is that Hezbollah—first of all, I don't think we would see what we saw in 2006. I don't think Israel would even get to invade Lebanon in the same way. I don't think it would be able to stage a ground incursion, definitely not of that magnitude. And Israel would not be in a purely offensive position. Israel would be also in a defensive position because Hezbollah would also infiltrate and make incursions into Israel proper. So, it's going to look very different, just in terms of the overall strategy of the war, that it will be an offensive defense on Hezbollah's part. It won't just be defense.

Secondly, the fact that Hezbollah has now fully conventionalized, it's no longer even a hybrid force. I've spoken to military experts here, and I've been curious myself to see what they think. Where is [Hezbollah] on the spectrum of guerrilla to conventional army? Is it sort of in the middle, like in 2006? They've said, “No, it's actually a fully fledged conventional force now. But obviously it has these sort of capabilities of an irregular armed force. It still retains them and has that experience.” So we're talking here about a much more sophisticated military organization with well over 100,000 fighters, well over that number, over 150,000 missiles and rockets. You know, back in 2006, Hezbollah had just a few thousand fighters, far fewer rockets, much less sophisticated missiles and rockets. Basically everything that Iran has, all the weapons Iran has, you can be certain Hezbollah has them, too. That's what we know. And that's aside from the things that Hezbollah is manufacturing domestically, like it's drone technology—it's manufacturing its own drones now. So, we're talking here about a vastly different military creature than 2006.

And, again, the tactics will not just be purely defensive. They will be offensive. And that's not even factoring in other actors in the resistance axis who are itching to join the fight and have declared their intent to send hundreds of thousands of fighters, such as the Houthis [from Yemen], to Lebanon.

From all the information I've been gathering, it would actually lead to the unraveling of the Israeli state. We're not talking here about just a defeat for Israel like in 2006. It would be the sort of defeat that would actually lead to its demise. This is why, when we talk about “the great war,” which is not a matter of if, it's when, when that war happens, which is an inevitability, [Hezbollah] have always said that that is going to be the war that will change the face of the region. So, we are talking here about a scenario which would definitely lead to the destruction of a lot of Lebanon — no one is discounting that or belittling that. But at the same time, it would lead to the destruction of Israel and while it would lead to the destruction of Lebanon in material terms, that destruction would not lead to the unraveling of the Lebanese state in the same way that it would lead to the unraveling of the Israeli or Zionist regime. I think that's one way of looking at it.

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