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September 2024

The Killing of Nasrallah—and the Virtue of Escalation The best way to end a regional war is to win it. Eli Lake

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-killing-of-nasrallahand-the-virtue?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

What Israel has managed to accomplish over the past two weeks will long be studied by military historians.

In a series of brilliant operations—beginning with the simultaneous explosion of encrypted pagers belonging to Hezbollah’s commanders, and culminating with the coup de grâce on Friday that eliminated the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and the rest of his high command—Israel managed to decapitate the entire leadership of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet. In so doing, it ignored the advice of its allies in the West, and radically disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East.

Hezbollah’s war is not just with Israel. It has American, Syrian, and Lebanese blood on its hands as well.

Recall that in 1983, the group killed 241 servicemen with a massive bomb at the Marines barracks in Beirut. The organization was also responsible for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 innocent people were murdered. In 2012, Hezbollah bombed a bus with young Israeli tourists at the port of Burgas, Bulgaria, that left five dead and 32 injured.

But Hezbollah’s bloodiest campaign was reserved for Syria, where it became the shock troops for the country’s tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, during his brutal suppression of a democratic uprising. Hezbollah’s forces led the ground operations in the siege of Aleppo, a vicious campaign in 2015 and 2016 that starved the ancient city and reduced most of it to rubble.

A day after Hamas launched its pogrom of October 7, Hezbollah began raining rockets and missiles into northern Israel, displacing up to 70,000 Israelis. Nearly a year later, those people have not been able to return to their homes.

With this kind of butcher’s bill, one might think the response from the civilized world upon learning of Nasrallah’s death would be jubilation. But Western leaders have responded with reticence. In this they have revealed their profound confusion about the enemy. It is not a nation-state, a terror group, or even an ideology. From Washington to Paris, they seem to believe the real enemy is escalation.

SURVEY: INDEPENDENT VOTERS MORE CONSERVATIVE

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/30/survey-says-independents-are-way-more-conservative-than-theyre-willing-to-admit/

If conservatives want to win elections, they don’t need to rile up the base, they need to convince independents to say in public what they believe in private – that they agree with conservatives on most issues and that Democrats are the wildly out-of-touch extremists.

That, at least, is one way to read a fascinating new survey from Populace, a non-partisan think tank in Massachusetts, which figured out a way to discern what 20,000 Americans think privately and compare that to what they are willing to say publicly.

It turns out that there are often wide gaps between the two, which Populace calls the “Social Pressure Index.” People tend to avoid stating their views if they think they’re in the minority.

But here’s the really interesting finding: On a host of bellwether issues, independents are, in private, far more conservative than they will admit to pollsters.

The survey asked questions about democracy, individual rights, the economy, culture, racism, etc.