Thomas Wictor

I just read an opinion piece titled, “Is Iran Preparing for a Two-Front War With Israel?” It’s part of the now-standard approach that the press adopted during World War II of granting our enemies a nonexistent prowess in order to sell papers. Bad news is far more popular than good.

In the ensuing years, however, overstating our enemies’ capabilities has obviously become a way to try and dissuade western democracies from ever waging war. Many of the reporters who extol the power of our enemies would no doubt call themselves pacifists. George Orwell had them pegged in “Notes on Nationalism” (1945).

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.

Remember Saddam Hussein’s “elite Republican Guard”? How many times did we hear that phrase? Well, in reality the Iraqi military was the worst in the Middle East because Saddam kept executing competent officers. The Saddam-era military was under the control of a dictator whose word was law. A man with no military experience, he gave his armed forces ludicrous orders that they blindly carried out. Saddam’s greatest fear was a coup d’état, so he made sure that most of his military received only enough training to fire a rifle.

And yet the Iranians were unable to defeat the worst army in the Middle East. The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years. Why? This video has the answer. The young homeless bums yapping at the camera are Iranian.

After the Iraqi tank gets bogged down, the Iranians fire hundreds of rounds at the three fleeing tankers. Not one bullet hits its mark.

The Iranian armed forces are in even worse shape today. They’ve been reduced to playacting, such as when they showed off this fake “stealth” fighter, the Qahar-313.

Closeups showed that the thing is a movie prop.

The canopy is opaque, the skin is made of plastic and automobile body putty, and the cockpit is too small for an adult. There’s no room for the pilot’s feet, so he has to sit with his knees drawn up, like a circus chimp riding a tricycle.

Hezbollah is Iran’s proxy army in Lebanon. If the Iranians are delusional, do you think they could train a proxy army of steely, clearheaded professionals?

The problem for Hezbollah is that it’s internalized the Arab notion that by not being utterly exterminated, they win. Hamas said the same thing after Operation Protective Edge. I studied the Second Lebanon War of 2006, and let me tell you that I’ve never read so much hogwash in my life. The Israelis—by their own admission—had let the training standards of their soldiers wither, they put too much faith in air power, and they didn’t anticipate the way Hezbollah would use antitank guided missiles (ATGMs). Israeli soldiers and commanders had gotten too used to patrolling in the Palestinian territories, so they were unprepared for the invasion of another country.

But guess what? The IDF adapted. By the end of the conflict, Israelis were inflicting far more casualties on Hezbollah than the terrorists were on the IDF. Israel puts the death toll for Hezbollah at 600, while 121 members of the IDF were killed.

But the death toll isn’t really a good metric for determining what happened in the war. Hezbollah fired over 1000 ATGMs and antitank rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), destroying a grand total of…three Israeli tanks. Two more tanks were destroyed by massive improvised explosive devices.

Although Israel made mistakes in the war, Hezbollah defeated itself due to a primitive refusal to practice “defense in depth,” also called “elastic defense.” This concept was invented by the Germans in World War I. When the enemy attacks, you fall back and draw him into a trap. You’ve set up combat posts and bunkers in depth, so by retreating, you lure the advancing enemy into a killing field. Then after walloping the hell out of him, you launch a counterattack and drive him out. The Germans trained entire divisions as counterattack specialists.

In 2006 Hezbollah stubbornly stayed in its front-line positions and died. They didn’t want to cede their holy soil to the dirty Jews.

If there’s another war with Hezbollah, Israel will have no choice but to hit as fast and as hard as possible, due to the 100,000 rockets Iran and Syria have provided the terrorists. After the Second Lebanon War of 2006, Israel completely retrained the IDF. We have Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2023 to January 18, 2024) and Operation Protective Edge (July 8 to August 26, 2023) as evidence that the retraining process was successful.

Hezbollah has been fighting in Syria for over two years now. The press tells us that this means the terrorists are “combat hardened.” What have they accomplished, though? The only people achieving clear, unambiguous victories in Syria are the Kurds. You know why? Because Hezbollah are clowns. Their own videos prove it.

Firing RPGs one handed, firing machine guns one handed, firing machine guns “Rambo style” out in the open, using machine pistols against enemies armed with assault rifles… No wonder Hamza Ibrahim Haidar is now an ex-Hezbollah commander. Someone waited for him to show off for the camera at just the right time, and pow! Read the comments for that video.

The mind boggles. How much of the world lives in a permanent state of fantasy, do you think? I’d say at least 70 percent.

A war with Hezbollah will be dangerous and destructive, but Israel will prevail. My guess is the victory will come very quickly. I’ve been saying for a long time that the world has gotten spoiled, given that Israelis don’t fight back as often as I wish they would. We haven’t seen 1967-style carnage since, well, 1967.

If there’s a two-front war with Hezbollah and Hamas, almost everyone will be shocked at how brilliantly and ruthlessly the Israelis fight.

I won’t be.