LONDON: Israel has miscalculated the costs of a potential new war with Hezbollah, a former US military intelligence analyst warned on Tuesday, stressing that it could cause massive civilian casualties in both Lebanon and Israel.
Harrison Mann, a Defense Intelligence Agency major and the highest-ranking US military officer to resign over the Gaza conflict, expressed his concerns in an interview with The Guardian.
Mann stressed the high risk of Israel engaging in a war on its northern border for internal political reasons, primarily driven by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s seizure of power and his insulation from corruption charges are seen as dependent on maintaining a state of war.
“I don’t know how realistic their assessments are of the destruction Israel would suffer, and I’m pretty sure they don’t have a realistic idea of how successful they would be against Hezbollah,” said the former army officer and intelligence analyst.
He said the Israeli military was aware that it could not strike decisively at Hezbollah’s large arsenal, entrenched in the Lebanese mountains.
Mann instead suggested that the IDF target Hezbollah leaders and Shiite residential areas to demoralize the group’s supporter base, a tactic known as the Dahiya doctrine, after the Beirut district was heavily bombed during the 2006 war.
“It’s not like a written doctrine, but I think we can be very comfortable in assessing that bombing civilian centers as a way to coerce the enemy is clearly an accepted and shared belief in the IDF and the Israeli leadership. We’ve just seen them do it in Gaza in the last nine months,” Mann said, but said such a plan would backfire.
Mann told the Guardian that he expected Hezbollah to respond to any existential threat with a massive missile strike.
“They probably have the capability to at least partially overwhelm Israel’s air defenses, hit civilian infrastructure across the country, and inflict on Israel a level of destruction that I’m not sure Israel has ever experienced in its history, and certainly not in its recent history,” Mann said.
Since Hezbollah’s arsenal appeared beyond the reach of air strikes, Mann suggested that the IDF launch a ground offensive into southern Lebanon, which would come at a high cost in terms of Israeli casualties.
He warned that the prolonged bombing of Israeli cities could force US President Joe Biden’s administration, especially during the election season, to accede to Netanyahu’s demands for greater US involvement.
“Our least escalating involvement will probably be hitting supply lines or associated targets in Iraq and Syria to help cut off lines of communication and weapons flowing to Hezbollah,” Mann said. “But that in itself is risky, because if we start doing that, some of the people we hit could be Hezbollah, but they could also be IRGC (Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).”
Mann believes the Biden administration will aim to avoid direct conflict with Iran, but acknowledged that the risk of such an escalation remains.
“We know specifically that the Israeli prime minister has to continue to be a wartime leader if he wants to prolong his political career and stay out of court, so that motivation is there,” Mann said, adding that any Israeli government would also be under pressure to displace tens of thousands of Israelis due to Hezbollah attacks.
Mann also stressed the Israeli military’s belief that it is necessary to counter Iran-backed Hezbollah as it continues to grow in strength.
Mann’s resignation, submitted in November and effective June, was accompanied by a public letter on LinkedIn in May. In the letter, he condemned U.S. support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, saying it had “allowed and authorized the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.”
As a descendant of European Jews, Mann wrote, “I grew up in a particularly ruthless moral environment when it came to taking responsibility for ethnic cleansing.”
He said his resignation had been largely welcomed by former colleagues, many of whom expressed similar sentiments.
“A lot of people I’ve worked with have reached out to me, as well as a lot of people I haven’t worked with, and they’ve expressed that they feel the same way,” he said. “It’s not just a generational thing. There are some pretty older people who feel the same way.”