In the summer of 2006, I participated in the evacuation of American citizens from Lebanon. Israel had invaded after Hezbollah abducted two of its soldiers in a cross-border raid. I was a Marine Corps officer, and our platoon was embarked on the USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious ship, for a routine deployment in the Mediterranean. My unit, the First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment—“1/8,” for short—had history in Lebanon. It was known as the “Beirut Battalion,” because on the morning of October 23, 1983, Hezbollah detonated a truck bomb that killed 238 Marines and sailors from 1/8. In 2006, when we were unexpectedly sent to Lebanon, it was the first time Marines had returned since 1983. That it was our battalion was purely a coincidence.
It was a strange deployment for us. We had just returned from Iraq, where the entire Marine Corps had its focus, and my next deployment would be to Afghanistan. Those were our major wars. After a day of evacuation operations during our interlude in Lebanon, I would climb onto the deck of the USS Iwo Jima and watch the fighting around Beirut. I would struggle to make sense of the conflict. At the time, the first of Iran’s explosively formed penetrators—a kind of armor-piercing improvised explosive device—were only just appearing in Iraq. When I arrived in Afghanistan in 2008, I would be fighting members of the Taliban who were supported by Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force. I didn’t understand it then, but in retrospect, it’s obvious that Iran wasn’t only at war with Israel; Iran was at war with the United States. Today, this remains true.
No one wants war. However, in recent years, in the name of “ending America’s forever wars,” our leaders have proved reluctant to call enemies “enemies” and friends “friends.” If America wishes to remain at peace, or at least not find itself in an active war, we must speak clearly in defense of our friends. This remains uniquely true in the case of Israel.
In response to Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah yesterday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has called on Lebanon to “make the aggressor and evil dark enemies regret their actions.” Who are those aggressors? They include a wider array of antagonists than ever before. Certainly included is the United States. But the list of “evil dark enemies” also surely includes Ukraine. Iran has been supplying Russian forces with advanced weaponry, including Shahed drones. And although the Iranians aren’t in a military alliance with China, they are in an economic one, and would be China’s ready allies in any conflict with the West.
Israel has recently dealt Hezbollah a series of crippling blows, beginning with exploding pagers and radios that sabotaged Hezbollah’s command and control and degraded its leadership. This has culminated with the strike against Nasrallah. Hezbollah has been forced onto its back foot, as has the Iranian regime. This creates an opening, one that Israel will likely exploit and that the United States, Israel’s ally, must support, lest we squander a precious opportunity in this broader war.
In the early days of Ukraine’s war with Russia, Ukraine put the Russians on their back foot, expelling them from the outskirts of Kyiv when the world had assumed that a Ukrainian defeat was inevitable. At that moment, the United States could have reinforced Ukraine’s victory, delivering the military aid Ukraine was clamoring for, and without delay. Instead, we equivocated, sending military aid in drips while trying to appease the Russians, heeding every red line in the name of “regional stability”—a foolhardy objective in a region consumed by war. This strategy has only perpetuated the conflict, raising Ukraine’s cost of victory to staggering heights.
The United States can’t afford to make the same mistake with Israel. Now is the time to stand decisively behind our ally and against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, China, and the axis of authoritarian nations that continue to menace the liberal world.
This has proved challenging. Sadly, threats facing the United States have increasingly been viewed using the simplistic partisan prism through which we filter every issue now. We seem incapable of looking at the proliferation of conflicts in the world as a single challenge that confronts and threatens all Americans. Support for Ukraine is coded as an issue of the left, and support for Israel is coded as an issue of the right. While the ayatollahs applaud student encampments on American campuses, Vladimir Putin is delighted to see President Volodymyr Zelensky’s trip to an arms-manufacturing plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, provoke partisan outrage, threatening future aid.
Divide and conquer: It’s one of the oldest military strategies. Our adversaries know it well.
We and our allies face a global axis of authoritarian nations. They are bent on the physical destruction of democratic nations such as Ukraine and Israel. Our shores might be beyond their reach now, but they want nothing less than the destruction of the liberal world order. A broader swath of America must wake up to this threat.
Marine units continue to patrol the Mediterranean. After hearing the news of Nasrallah’s death, I couldn’t help but wonder which one was currently on station. As luck would have it, I discovered that it was my old unit, 1/8, the Beirut Battalion. Right now, they’re sitting off the coast. I can almost imagine some young officer staring at the shore in the evening, as I once did, watching the fighting and trying to make sense of what it’s all about.
This is a long war, and one that Americans have been fighting for decades. Victory is impossible unless we call things what they are.