Benny Avni: America’s Lloyd Austin, Who Stared ‘Evil in the Eye’ While Commanding GIs Against ISIS, Emerges as a Powerful Ally of Israel in the War Against Hamas The defense secretary’s clarity could go a long way toward muzzling the growing international criticism of Israel as ground operations begin in Gaza.
When, even as Israeli special forces are entering Gaza in preparation for a massive invasion, a top official says that Hamas is worse than ISIS, what jumps out is the identity of the speaker: In this case it’s the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, who has devised much of America’s war on ISIS, and he knows the pitfalls of battling terrorism.
“In countering ISIS, I felt that we were staring evil in the eye. What we are seeing with Hamas is taking that evil to another level,” Mr. Austin said Friday during a Tel Aviv press conference alongside his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant.
The retired four-star general’s clarity could go a long way toward muzzling the growing international criticism of Israel, which on Thursday urged northern Gaza civilians to evacuate and move farther south. On the Strip’s roads, long lines of cars were seen traveling away from Gaza City, where Israel is expected to concentrate its complex operation to dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities.
On Friday afternoon, special IDF units entered northern Gaza as the air force constantly pummeled buildings at Shujaiyeh, Gaza City’s home to top Hamas leaders. The special forces reportedly discovered several bodies of abducted Israelis.
Self-described international human rights bodies are complaining that 1.1 million Gazans living in the city and north of it have no place to go. Some accuse Israel of committing a war crime. The United Nations “considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,” its spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said.
“All who can influence Israel must push for this madness to stop and the order to evacuate reversed,” a former UN official and current leader of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, wrote on X. Even as similar organizations have, at best, weakly condemned the Hamas atrocities that launched the war, they are now urging America to muzzle Israel.
General Austin doesn’t heed such calls. Echoing other administration officials, he does say that democracies, like America and Israel, act according to the laws of war. In the press conference he also called on Israel to operate with “resolve” rather than “revenge.” Yet he spoke after he and Mr. Gallant emerged from Israel’s equivalent of the Pentagon, the Kirya, after a long consultation over war plans.
Mr. Austin said that he trusts the IDF as a “professional force,” and that he shared his own experience in fighting terrorism while also learning from the Israelis. He knows from whence he speaks. As commander of the American forces in Iraq, and later as leader of the U.S. Central Command, he led much of the war that ended ISIS’s hold on territories in Iraq and Syria. Israel’s declared goal in the war is similarly to end Hamas’s control of Gaza.
Mr Austin “designed and executed the campaign that ultimately beat back ISIS,” President Biden said when he named the retired general as defense secretary in January 2021. The general led ferocious fights at Tel Afar, Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi, where ISIS was beaten down. While successful, these battles entailed large numbers of civilian casualties.
General Austin already had retired from the Pentagon when Raqqa, Syria, which ISIS had declared as the capital of its “caliphate,” was liberated in 2017. In that battle, Arab and Kurd forces mostly fought on the ground. America’s carpet bombing from the air, though, was a decisive factor in that victory.
The air attack has left a “wasteland of war-warped buildings and shattered concrete,” the New York Times reported. As Pentagon chief, Mr. Austin in 2021 ordered a review of the Raqqa battle after the Rand Corporation and other critics had accused the American military of failing to pay enough attention to civilian casualties.
Hamas’s strategy of targeting enemy civilians while using Gaza civilians as human shields was devised long before ISIS declared its Islamic caliphate — and before it made publicizing its atrocities central to its war plans.
ISIS took many pointers from Hamas, and like ISIS, Hamas this week distributed on the internet snuff-like horror videos, expecting supporters to cheer. Some did, but, apparently under orders from the organization’s leadership abroad, Hamas later ended the practice, instead using Al Jazeera to publish a fake video purporting to depict the freeing of an Israeli woman and child.
ISIS’s shocking videos a decade ago prompted the UN Security Council to declare it a terrorist organization. Hamas was never added to the terror list that authorizes UN members to use military force. Now, Washington is indicating that just as allies fought ISIS and won, the IDF too has the right to fight Hamas.
Hamas’s allies will push back. President Putin, whose Russian military has targeted Ukrainian urban centers for months, warned Friday that if the IDF invades Gaza, the number of “civilian casualties will be absolutely unacceptable.”
Like blame-America-firsters, critics are taking Israel to task. “It doesn’t matter what Israel or America do, they’ll always turn around and say this,” the editor of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Long War Journal, Bill Roggio, tells the Sun. Yet, Israelis increasingly take comfort in Mr. Austin’s moral clarity and his active participation in planning the war.
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