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Hizbullah Isn't Getting the Message
(Wall Street Journal) Editorial - While Americans see the war in the Middle East winding down, Israelis worry it is only beginning. Hizbullah has been escalating its strikes on Israel, and the Iranian proxy militia could provoke a larger war unless the U.S. gives it a good reason not to. Washington is too fixated on restraining Israel to notice. The latest misfire is Sunday's comments by Gen. C.Q. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said the U.S. won't likely be able to help Israel defend itself against a broader Hizbullah war as well as it helped Israel fight off an Iranian barrage of missiles and drones in April. He warned Israel that the Iranians could join the fray directly and give greater support to their proxy, "particularly if they felt that Hizbullah was being significantly threatened." That's a calculated red light to Israel - don't count on U.S. help. But what message is the general sending to Hizbullah? To its leader Hassan Nasrallah, it probably sounds like: "Go ahead. You can get away with more." The other half of this administration policy is the withholding of armaments, slowing their flow to Israel over the past four months with bureaucratic delays. This gives the President plausible deniability, even though the delays and extended reviews were absent when the Administration wanted them to be. The White House goal is to discourage a larger war, but a policy of weakening Israel has the opposite effect. It emboldens Hizbullah to keep shooting and extend its range. Unprovoked, Hizbullah has already fired nearly 5,000 rockets, missiles and mortars at northern Israel since Oct. 7, depopulating the region. Hizbullah has no reason to quiet its rocket fire and remove its fighters from the buffer zone in southern Lebanon if it thinks it can keep firing away and be protected from the consequences.