Michael Doran appears on Potomac Watch to review the fallout of the October 7 attack on Israel by an Iranian proxy.
Podcast Transcript
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Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is All Things with Kim Strassel, a Potomac Watch podcast.
Kim Strassel: Welcome to All Things with Kim Strassel. Monday marked one year since Hamas enacted its horrific massacre of innocent Israelis on October 7th, and here to talk to me this week about how the world has changed since that day for Israel, for the region, for the US, is Michael Doran, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the 91ÆÞÓÑ Institute and an expert in that region. Mike, thanks so much for joining us this week. By the way, I love your tagline on Twitter or X or whatever we call it these days, which explains that your job is to sit in a tank and think, so we definitely want to know what you've been thinking. Obviously, the world looks very different from a year ago, including I think the way we should look at October 7th, the common way that people have described it in the media, the press as an attack by Hamas and Israel. But I've been thinking about this in light of everything else that was going on even before that horrific day, and since, it strikes me this looks now much more like Iran launching a multi-front war against Israel. How would you, if you just backed up right now, describe the situation in the region in terms of the contours of the actual conflict, the big picture?
Michael Doran: Oh, first of all, let me say thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Kim Strassel: Sure.
Michael Doran: Yes, I think that's it, exactly. Properly understood, this is an Iranian-led war against Israel. I'd even go a step further and say it's an Iranian-led war against the American security system, an asymmetric war. The Iranians are not going directly after the Americans, but their goal is to kick the United States out of the Middle East and they want to do that. Step one is to weaken the most powerful partner of the United States and the one that poses the greatest threat to the Iranian resistance axis, as they call it, and that's Israel.
Kim Strassel: And how would you say that that conflict is going? Who's winning, as it were? When I look at it, Israel's had some stunning victories in Gaza, taking out Hamas, but also in the north they've eliminated Hassan Nasrallah, a number of other operations commanders, commanders of the Radwan force that had planned to invade the Galilee. They've degraded Hezbollah's missiles and rocket capacities. I actually heard an IDF spokesman say that since the beginning of ground maneuvers in southern Lebanon, Israel had killed more than 400 Hezbollah fighters, including several dozen commanders. At the same time, I see a lot of liberal commentators insisting that Hezbollah is about to deliver some devastating blow to Israel, that Israel is really weak in this conflict. Set us straight. What do you see happening on the ground?
Michael Doran: I think Israel's winning. I want to say Israel is winning big, but I hesitate to say that because Iran and its proxies do have some very serious weapons that they're using, and American policy is not as supportive of Israel as I would like it to be, so I don't want to get cocky and I don't want to minimize the threats out there, but there's no doubt in my mind that in the last couple of months, Israel has really made a comeback and it's turned the tables on the Iranians. After October 7th, everyone was stunned by how weak Israel appeared, how unprepared Israel was for the war in Gaza, and the war in Gaza dragged on for so long, and it was so difficult for Israel to get a complete grip on the Gaza Strip, that I started to think of it as a much more generally a diminished power, much less influential than I thought it was, but then came the war in the north here, and this is the war that Israel was actually prepared for. And what Israel's managed to do, decapitate Hezbollah and basically render all of its ballistic missiles ineffective, as you mentioned, destroy the leadership of the Radwan forces. This was all unimaginable just a couple of months ago and it's left Iran naked.
Kim Strassel: Does it seem notable to you, it does to me, that in reality the major response to Israel for its Lebanon operations have come from Iran, not from Hezbollah? Is that something that, to your point, that they have done such an adequate good job of degrading Hezbollah that Iran is not necessarily able to lean on those proxies?
Michael Doran: Absolutely. The thing about Hezbollah is that it was, until recently, the most potent threat to Israel, much more significant than Iran itself because it had 150,000 rockets and missiles of which some significant proportion were precision-guided, and when we imagined what a conflict between Israel and Iran was going to be like, we imagined Iran and Hezbollah attacking simultaneously and Hezbollah being so much more dangerous because of the proximity so that its missiles and rockets and drones would overwhelm Israeli sensors and interceptors and they would hit every major city in Israel. And nothing like that has happened, nothing at all. That's all due to the effectiveness of the IDF.
Kim Strassel: I want to talk to you a little bit about Israel and its mindset at the moment, as it were. You mentioned that it did look like it was utterly... I mean, we know it was utterly unprepared for October 7th. Nonetheless, we see now from its actions in the north that it did have a broader plan for a moment like this and Iran utilizing those proxies. If you're an American, you get a lot of headlines right now about supposedly the Israeli people being disgruntled with the actions that Netanyahu has taken. Not a lot of support for him, a divided country. Then again, it sounds to me, and reading you that sometimes it sounds like maybe a lot of that is emanating from the Israeli elite, which have their own sort of Bibi Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome to a certain extent. In your mind though, what did October 7th mean to the Israeli mentality, their view of their own security, their place in the world, the threat from outsiders? Was it a wake-up call again? I saw Netanyahu recently vowing that he was going to change the balance of power in the region. Is that something, a sentiment you think that is a mainstream mentality of Israelis? Where are they right now a year after this?
Michael Doran: That is increasingly a mainstream mentality. The Israeli elite remains divided, as divided as it was before October 7th, I think. There is this huge rift in Israeli society between right and left, between religious and secular. And the media in Israel, which is like the media in our own country, is overwhelmingly liberal in orientation, and as you mentioned, it all suffers from Bibi Derangement Syndrome, and it perceived an opportunity after October 7th to actually take down Netanyahu. As I believe also, I believe that the Biden administration saw an opportunity as well and was trying to stoke those anti Netanyahu fires. There's no doubt that everyone who was in power on October 7th, including Netanyahu, was irreparably harmed. Their reputations were irreparably harmed by the disaster, and there's no doubt that Netanyahu bears some responsibility for the mistakes that were made on October 7th. Not all of them, but some degree of responsibility for sure. He is the most influential politician leader in Israel the last 20 years. The strategy that they followed toward the Hamas was flawed. He deserved some responsibility for that, but the average person on the right and on the left felt after October 7th, "We have to go to war with the government that we have and we have to destroy Hamas", and everyone felt that. If you're trying to understand Israeli society by reading the mainstream media, you just don't get the unity behind that purpose. Netanyahu, he developed this line, which was total victory. We're going to stay the course until we get total victory. The press ridiculed him for this. They said it was just a crass effort to hold onto his seat, didn't reflect anything other than his careerist, megalomaniacal goals, but it actually reflected public opinion, and now we're really seeing that because since the attacks on Hezbollah by Israel, since Israel has turned its attentions northward, he has gone way up in the polls. He is more secure in his seat today than at any time since October 7th, and it looks likely that he'll see out the whole... You never know in Israeli politics, they're a little bit like Italian politics. They're-
Kim Strassel: Crazy.
Michael Doran: Yeah, they're crazy. So he could fall, but he is very secure at the moment.
Kim Strassel: Yeah, that's all fascinating because that is just not something you hear if you are reading legacy media here in the United States. We're going to take a break. When we get back more on Israel and October 7th. Welcome back. I am here with Mike Doran, a senior fellow at the 91ÆÞÓÑ Institute. Let's talk about the US a little bit because you've mentioned it a couple of times now, despite Joe Biden, Kamala Harris constantly saying they're allied with Israel, and yes, providing some of what Israel has needed, I have been mortified numerous occasions by their response, whether it be withholding of certain arms to try to restrain Israeli actions, the constant push for ceasefires or fewer actions rather than letting Israel make the decisions it needs to take and then backing them, the double-sided statements all the time. "We support Israel, but we support the Palestinian cause." What grade do you give them A through F, and what specifically do you think has been the biggest mistakes they've made here?
Michael Doran: Let's decide together on the letter grade.
Kim Strassel: Letter grade?
Michael Doran: Yeah, but I'll tell you what's wrong with what they're doing. What's wrong with what they're doing is their concept of regional order that they went into the war with. You remember that Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, published an article in Foreign Affairs, the hard copy of the article was reaching the mailboxes of Foreign Affairs subscribers just as October 7th happened. And in that article, he claimed that the policy of the Biden administration had brought the Middle East to a period of greater stability than it had known at any time in the last couple of decades, and then this hit.
Kim Strassel: Whoops.
Michael Doran: But why did he think that? Because they believe that their policy of engaging Iran had stabilized the Middle East and Kim, they still believe this. This is the amazing thing. They still believe it. They see themselves as mediators between the American Alliance system, particularly between the Israelis and the Saudis on the one hand and Iran and its proxies on the other. They don't see Iran as a potential friend, but they see the possibility for a strategic accommodation with Iran and they just feel in general, it's better for the United States to have distance between Saudi Arabia and Israel because they think that traditionally, historically, the Israeli agenda, anti-Iranian agenda, and the Saudi anti-Iranian agenda have forced the United States into conflicts with Iran that were unnecessary. And so their posture of putting themselves halfway between Israel and Iran is a posture that leads to greater stability and opens up avenues for diplomacy that don't exist otherwise. What's wrong with this is that they then see a conflict like Gaza, the attack by Hamas as a Palestinian-Israeli conflict rather than what it is you and I started with in this discussion, an Iranian-Israeli conflict. The more we restrain Israel, the more we embolden Iran. They are incapable of understanding this. Every assumption they have about the Middle East militates against that very simple understanding, and that's how we got to this point where we are where there's a continuous pressure by all of Iran's proxies, including the Houthis, including the militias in Iraq and Syria, including Hezbollah to attack Israel. And the United States has no answer to the Israelis about how to stop that other than to force them into a ceasefire in Gaza.
Kim Strassel: Yeah, you are right. It is a very simple formulation, but one that absolutely puts a lot of things in context and makes sense. I think it's a perfect example or description of what we have happening here. And it leads me to my next question because it's a bit demoralizing, that being said. It's concerning because as you say, that does not seem to be something that has altered or will alter, and that raises this issue of the presidential election we have coming up, and Kamala Harris did an interview with 60 Minutes. She was asked about Netanyahu as an ally. She declined to claim that Netanyahu was a good ally. She sidestepped that question by saying, "Israelis were good allies." There's a lot of talk here in the US about how quiet her campaign has been about her agenda in general, but the part that's the most scary to me is what her judgment would be as commander in chief, because obviously those are some of the president's greatest powers. They require the most judgment and instinct, and yet I think we've had little to no public discourse about her thinking on many of these things. When you look at her, do you think that she also holds that mindset of that way of looking at the Middle East? Would you expect her to do anything differently?
Michael Doran: There's no reason to believe that she would come up with any different ideas. All of her advisors think this way. Barack Obama thinks this way. This is his policy. He's the one who took us down this path of turning the United States into a mediator with Iran. She came of age in San Francisco and California politics surrounded by people who think this way. So what in her surroundings or her experience would lead her to any other conclusion other than that the key problem in the Middle East is Benjamin Netanyahu rather than Iran?
Kim Strassel: Well, what about Donald Trump? Obviously, he was much stronger when he was in office, recognizing Iran as a threat. You can certainly suggest he was a stronger ally to Israel, but we're also seeing a slightly different Donald Trump this time around. There is a faction of the Republican Party that has grown even more wary about international engagement. That hasn't been as visible when it comes to Israel, far more prominent when it comes to support, for instance, for Ukraine. What would you gather his policy might look like were he elected?
Michael Doran: The two key issues with regard to the war are the attitude toward Israel and the attitude toward Iran. And I think on a gut level, Trump is going to be better than Kamala Harris on both of those. And we've already seen the Trump show before. So we have a sense of what that's going to be like. Where I feel like Trump has, let's call it room to grow, is that he had the opportunity when he was president to set up the military system in the Middle East that would provide constant deterrence of Iran. It needs to be a system. The greatest thing that he did in my eyes was killing Qasem Soleimani. That's the head of the Quds force, which is the external terrorist arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. I was in the White House in the George W. Bush administration, and I saw it in two different times where I saw it with my own eyes. We had Qasem Soleimani in our crosshairs literally, and we decided not to take the shot. And I have heard of two other times in which we had the opportunity and we didn't do it. And I thought both times that I was aware of, I thought we should have. So I was just delighted when I saw that Trump did this. Qasem Soleimani has a blood of Americans on his arms, had blood of Americans on his arms up to his elbows, so he had it coming. But what this needed to be was a system that provided certainty to the Iranians that when they carry on acts of aggression against us or our allies, they're going to be forced to pay a price that's heavier than they want to pay. And Trump avoided, or I don't even know if they were put to him, but the Trump administration, let's say, avoided making the decisions that would pose a credible military threat to Iran at all times. And that's what we need. We need to put Iran in a box and keep it there, and that requires a credible military threat.
Kim Strassel: We're going to take one more break. When we get back, more with Mike Doran.
Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is All Things with Kim Strassel, a Potomac Watch podcast.
Kim Strassel: Welcome back. I am here with Mike Doran, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the 91ÆÞÓÑ Institute. If you step back and you look at the last three presidents we've had in a row now, to one extent or another, they have wanted in ways to pull back the US presence in the Middle East. Obviously, the current presidency, we saw the horrific exit from Afghanistan. There have been talks for... But that by the way though, that was something that Donald Trump had been putting into motion too. We've been talking about exits from Iraq, the conversations about forces in Syria. I mean, the justification is that we need to focus more of our efforts on China. But it strikes me that the lesson for all three of these presidents is that the more that they have tried to pull back, the more they are getting sucked back in because of the whirlwind of what happens when Iran is not contained. I mean, do you agree with that assessment? Is there a lesson here for American presidents?
Michael Doran: I agree a hundred percent. I couldn't have said it any better. The Biden administration had this notion, it said it explicitly, Joe Biden said it in an op-ed during the election in 2020 that there's a smarter way to get tough with Iran, and the smarter way is to pull all of our troops out of the Middle East and negotiate with it. And so what the Iranians see is a void that they can fill with terrorist action by their proxies. And the result of that is that at some point we have to end up taking very large numbers of troops from East Asia and bring them to the Middle East. And believe me, Beijing is watching this basically with the attacks by the Houthis since October 7th, which have all but shut down commercial shipping through the Suez Canal. The Iranians have hung out their shingle to Beijing and said, "If you want to divert lots of American military resources from East Asia just back us, and at the right moment, we'll launch one of these little wars that will force the Americans to throw all of their plans to the wind and bring everything to the Middle East."
Kim Strassel: I think we do need a much larger strategic vision. Last question here just about the state of American politics in general when it comes to Israel. I have been utterly disturbed over the past year in particular since October 7th, some divisions and cracks we are seeing mostly within the Democratic Party, somewhat less in the Republican Party, an anti-Israel feeling that has been growing. Obviously, on the Democratic side, it's been there for a while, but as a progressive wing has really gained a voice, Democratic leaders have seemed to feel necessary to cater to it. So I mean, you end up with the sight of Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish politician in the country, essentially openly feuding with Bibi Netanyahu, Kamala Harris refusing to attend Netanyahu's address to Congress, statements that throw shade on him. A little bit on the Republican side, too much less so. But how concerned are you by this fall off? I mean, this was always sort of something that Americans in both parties agreed on. That's certainly shifted. How worried are you about that and what do we do to fix it?
Michael Doran: I'm really worried about it, but I worry about it not just because of my concerns about the Middle East. This is a progressive foreign policy. This is progressivism. They've been teaching this in the universities for three or four decades, and this is just standard. All of the Hamas raping and killing is just a legitimate resistance of occupation and resistance of settler colonialism and so on and so forth. That's what every undergraduate gets in American universities at the Ivy League level. And so the hatred of Israel is really a hatred of the American system itself. It's the same thing, and we're kidding ourselves. There's something pathological about a society that teaches its elite to hate itself. That's what we're witnessing here. It's just that Israel right now is the licit target of this self-loathing that we are inculcating in our own elite.
Kim Strassel: Yeah, it's a great point. We have much broader, deeper problems we need to tackle, and hopefully if we were to do that, a greater appreciation and understanding as Israel as an ally would come out of that. Thanks, Mike. Thank you so much for spending your time and sharing your wisdom with us, and we hope to talk to you soon.
Michael Doran: Thank you.
Kim Strassel: Thanks to Michael Doran. Thank you to our listeners. We are here every week. We hope you tune in. If you like the show, please hit the subscribe button and you can write to us at pwpodcast@wsj.com.
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