Biden-Harris ‘Jekyll-Hyde’ Israel Policy — with Rich Goldberg

In recent days, the Biden-Harris administration has announced it would deploy the THAAD system to Israel — THAAD is an advanced missile defense system that can thwart short-, medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, as well as the U.S. military personnel to operate it. 

At the same time, the Biden-Harris administration has issued a blistering letter to Israel’s government threatening to withhold military resources at the time that Israel is planning its response to the October 1st Iranian attack (here’s a copy of the letter:  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25212303-bqshvt-hmmshl-hamryqny-bhqshrym-hvmnytrym ).

To help us understand what is going on with U.S. policy, Rich Goldberg returns to the podcast. Rich is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. From 2019-2020, he served as a Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction for the White House National Security Council. He previously served as a national security staffer in the US Senate and US House. Rich is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve with military experience on the Joint Staff and in Afghanistan. 

Recent pieces by Rich:

“Israel’s Victory Will Be a Success for American Grand Strategy”: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/op_eds/2024/10/04/israels-victory-will-be-a-success-for-american-grand-strategy/

“Turn-Key Alternatives to Replace UNRWA Immediately”: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/05/06/turn-key-alternatives-to-replace-unrwa-immediately/

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Full Transcript

DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.

RG: There's no more time to play around. There's no more time to just be a turtle under your shell playing defense and rely on missile defense. You have to have an offense. You have to have something that imposes true costs, defangs the threat long term, and, by the way, the conversation we're having of the possibility of Israel launching some kind of offensive, doing something like this to respond, is made possible by the incredible change in the dynamic out of Northern Front with the decimation of the leadership and capabilities of Hezbollah.

DS: It's 10:00 AM on Wednesday, October 16th here in New York City. It is 5:00 PM on Wednesday, October 16th in Israel as Israelis wind down their day and get ready to enter another chag, a holiday, Sukkot. And many of you may be wondering why we are dropping an episode during the day. We typically drop an episode at midnight Wednesday night going into Thursday. But the reason we're dropping this one early is not because it's an emergency episode, although there is a lot of news. But as we learned a couple of weeks ago, a number of our listeners felt very strongly that we not release an episode on Shabbat. It was a debate whether not to release an episode during Shabbat, which we chose not to do. And we are in the height of the holiday season, as they say on the Hebrew calendar in the Jewish world. And for those observant Jewish listeners of ours, we wanted to be very respectful of them. And many of them are going offline for the holiday. And those at least that are not in Israel won't be back online until Saturday night. So we want to get something out before then. And so that is what we are doing. And there is real news that we wanted to get to. And for that, we are joined by my longtime friend and third time returnee, I was reminded, I thought it was second time, third time returnee to the Call Me Back podcast Rich Goldberg, who is a senior advisor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a prominent Washington think tank on all things related to foreign policy, but especially the Middle East, and a prolific writer. We will post a few of his pieces in the show notes, and former director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction at the National Security Council in the Trump administration. And before that, a longtime national security advisor in Congress, both in the House and the Senate, and was a real architect in those roles in the House and Senate of a number of the most important sanctions that were ultimately imposed on Iran over the years. And so for that and his analysis and thinking on a series of very confusing developments in recent days, I'm pleased to welcome Rich Goldberg to the podcast. Welcome back, Rich. 

RG: Thanks. Great to be back.

DS: All right, number three, three's a charm.

RG: Three. Now I get…

DS: You get the swag. 

RG: I get swag. I get swag. 

DS: That's when we give out the Call Me Back mugs. You may even get a baseball cap. Once you cross the threshold of three, it's a whole new world. 

RG: I will wear it. I will. 

DS: I know you will. 

RG: Kids drop off wearing this stuff. It'll be…

DS: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. No more of that… none of that Chicago Cubs, Chicago Bears merch. We're going to load you up with Call Me Back… Yeah. Okay. So Rich, I reached out to you because I'm confused. I'm generally confused, but I'm particularly confused right now because it's a little bit, as you and I were talking about offline, it's a little bit of a Jekyll and Hyde situation with regard to US policy in the Middle East and towards Israel that we have seen since October 1st. So since the Iranian attack against Israel and then all the speculation about how and when Israel is going to respond. And the reason it's a Jekyll and Hyde situation is there seem to be two very different policies coming from the administration and it is difficult to reconcile them. That's among the things I want you to help us resolve. So what I want to do is take each of these two policies that seem to be in conflict and explain them and evaluate each one on the merits as though it's a standalone policy and then we'll get to how they fit together. Before we do that though, I do want you to spend a moment on what we, the US and Israel and Iran learned from the October 1st attack against Israel because it seemed that based on Israelis I've spoken to it is clear that the Iranian attack against Israel on October 1st, while it was not destabilizing in any way, it was definitely more effective than the Iranian attack against Israel on April 13th, which again, the folks I'm speaking to in the Israeli system say Iran is definitely learning. With each of these attacks, they're getting a little better. So can you just describe what we, the collective we, have learned from the October 1st attack against Israel?

RG: Yeah, I think that they're learning, but they're also changing tactics to see what is more effective. I mean, you go back to the April 13th attack, you had a mixture of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones. The US Navy, along with the UK, some of the Arab partners, were able to deal with most of the non-ballistic missile threats, the cruise missiles and the drones. You know, obviously it took a lot of effort and you had to own the skies and race around and use various systems, airborne systems, sea-based systems, taking things out of the sky one by one. But you could really thin out that threat and it was very effective, the defenses there. And we've seen, by the way, our US Navy destroyers in the Red Sea, very effective against cruise missiles that are being launched potentially by the Houthis every now and again, and obviously against their drones as well. However, I think they saw a couple of ballistic missiles get through that time and they looked at sort of what the Israeli tactics were in response, what the doctrines were. And they said, okay, if we're gonna do this again, it's gonna be all ballistic missiles. 

DS: There were two theories about the April 13th attack. I was more sympathetic, in more agreement with one of the theories, but there were two theories. One theory was, it was for show. Iran never intended to do real damage. They never intended to penetrate. knew there would be this elaborate, multi-leveled, multi-layered, multinational defense system that their projectiles would have a hard time penetrating, but they needed to show that they were trying. So Israel should not respond in kind because it wasn't intended to do real damage. My theory, or not just mine, but the other theory is, are you kidding me? You launch 300 projectiles at a country as small as Israel, one hundredth of one percent of the landmass of the entire globe and hope that nothing's gonna break through? Nonsense. If even 5%, 10% had broken through, it would be devastating. So the idea that Iran didn't intend to actually land some of these projectiles in a very damaging way and potentially fatal way for Israelis was ludicrous. I'm just curious where you are on that. 

RG: Well, I think it's obvious that if you launch 120 ballistic missiles at certain targets, even if they are military targets, you are trying to do significant damage to the targets. Now, you also have the advantage of just seeing sort of how do people respond and what do the defenses look like and how successful are we and what are the tactics to learn from, but you're not launching 120, that is a massive number of ballistic missiles, just to have a symbolic play. You are hoping to do some damage.

DS: Plus the drones. 

RG: Plus everything. Yeah, you're trying to disorient, distract, see what works, see what gets through. Yes, absolutely. But it also is a ridiculous comment because you hear it back in the latest attack. I don't care if they're targeting a military base versus targeting a city. First of all, the accuracy is not reliable. You're going to hit a civilian population center potentially. This is a country the size of New Jersey and you're launching in this last round 181 ballistic missiles at this country and you don't know if it's gonna be precise where these things land if they get through? I mean, we would never allow this in the United States. I mean, we would just sit back and allow a country to throw ballistic missiles at our military bases without a massive response. Never happened. Never would've happened. Say, well, they didn't target Chicago downtown. They didn't target Washington, DC. 

DS: Right, they just hit a bunch of farmland in Nebraska. 

RG: Yeah, it's like, no, it's crazy. This is a strategic level attack on a country the size of New Jersey. You have to respond. And the fact that there was no response back in April, whether that was necessary for Israel's strategic posture at the time…

DS: Well, there was a response. It just wasn't overwhelming. 

RG: Well, it was, let's call it, a symbolic response. 

DS: Okay. So now back to the most recent attack, the October 1st attack. What has Iran learned? What have we learned from their attack? What can you tell us? 

RG: So what has Iran learned? Iran definitely saw, we have seen some open source reporting, I think around 32 missiles get through. Now, we don't have confirmation specifically. I think we have a good idea that I think a lot of these things did just get through, but it's also possible in certain cases the system declined to engage because it sort of could see the trajectory. The Israeli system did not want to engage. American systems can decline to engage if you can predict the trajectory of the missile, sort of similar to Iron Dome. Everybody is sort of familiar with that idea of like, if it’s going to go into an empty field, don’t waste the Tamir interceptor on this field, save your shot.

DS: Because everytime Israel uses the Iron Dome or any of these defense capabilities, there’s not an endless supply. It costs money. You’re firing a bullet that you may not have in the future unless you're resupplied.

RG: In the Arrow situation, you’re talking about cost and supply. In Iron Dome, it’s costly, but the proportions on cost per Arrow are much, much higher for every Arrow interceptor you’re using. And then, if you’re going to be facing 200 ballistic missiles every salvo, yeah, you’re going to be firing off a lot of interceptors, and so how long can you sustain that for? Now, the Israelis have said, you know we’ve heard from IAI, Israel Aerospace Industries, that they are just cranking 24/7 on their production lines and they’re going to meet the obligations, whatever the need is. You would imagine… You saw a Financial Times story leaked out by somebody who, assuming the Americans but perhaps to constrain the Israelis a little more on a counter strike, that they think that they are facing some limits on their interceptors. So you do have to be very disciplined and you have to decide, am I going to take out 181 missiles or can I save 20, 25, 30 interceptors? Now that’s sort of wishful thinking that that’s maybe what happened, but it’s also possible and likely that there is a miss. And you know it’s not a foolproof system. I think the Israelis like to say they have a 90% solution. But by the way, when you have a nuclear tipped missile, or biological or chemical tipped missile, a 90% solution is very nice. The 10% is game over. And so, this has got to be the takeaway, is that imagine if this was a nuclear tipped missile attack, not a conventional attack. Everybody’s celebrating, oh, nobody died except for that poor Palestinian from Gaza who had something land on his head, which was just crazy. Reminder of how this regime in Iran doesn’t care about the Palestinians one iota. The one death of this attack is a Palestinian. But, had these 32 missiles been carrying an unconventional payload, we’d be having a very different conversation. There wouldn’t be time, there wouldn't be thinking. So, if you’re Israel from a strategic perspective, you have to internalize that. You have to say, okay, we can’t just keep firing off a limited supply of Arrow interceptors forever, we can’t endure a situation where Iran has now achieved a new strategic paradigm in the region, where they have crossed the rubicon in April and they have now doubled down on that and believe that they can get away with massive strategic ballistic missile attacks on Israel. They still have a nuclear program that is racing forward and one day you may in fact face that Shahab missile coming from Iran with a nuclear warhead on it. That is the ultimate objective there, which means that there is no more time to play around. There's no more time to just be a turtle under your shell playing defense and rely on missile defense. You have to have an offense. You have to have something that imposes true costs, defangs the threat long term, and, by the way, the conversation we're having of the possibility of Israel launching some kind of offensive, doing something like this to respond, is made possible by the incredible change in the dynamic out of Northern Front with the decimation of the leadership and capabilities of Hezbollah.

DS: Okay, without getting too technical, but a little more technical than one would read in the popular press, can you just briefly explain these different defense capabilities? What is the difference between Iron Dome and Arrow? And then I want to get to THAAD because that gets to that first big policy change that I want us to explore. But can you just explain the different defense capabilities that Israel has at its disposal and what they’re used for?

RG: Yeah, so the best way to think about it is your responding to a threat. As threats evolve, as the threats get larger and more dangerous, your defenses are evolving and becoming more sophisticated. So you have a homemade rocket threat from Gaza, right? That's really what the Hamas threat originated at. And you didn't have a solution to that because you had been working on much, much bigger threats for many years, potentially coming from Iran, from Syria in ballistic missiles. You know, coming out of the Gulf War, the Scud missile attacks.

DS: The First Gulf War in 1991.

RG: First Gulf War. The Scud missiles launched by Saddam Hussein where, you know, the Americans sort of rolled out a Patriot battery that wasn't meant for ballistic missile defense and said, hey, we're here to help. And it was very political, symbolic. And but for the grace of God, those missiles could have been carrying something else and could have done a lot more damage. And both the United States and Israel said, okay, well, we need a solution to this problem. And that's when the Arrow missile defense program was born. And here we are some 30 years later, and you have two, three iterations of Arrow. You've had the basic design of Arrow as the Iranian ballistic missile threat became more sophisticated, as their missiles grew and advanced, you came out with a new system to engage larger medium range ballistic missiles in the Arrow 2 program. And then as these missiles from Iran became even more threatening, you needed to find an interceptor to intercept even higher in the atmosphere, exo-atmosphere, and try to take out these massive medium range ballistic missiles coming from Iran. And so you have the Arrow 3 program, which is sort of a high upper tier intercept capability. So you hear Arrow 2, Arrow 3. They're meant for different kinds of ballistic missiles that are coming at you. They might be used all at the same time based on what's coming in from Iran. But the Arrow is going to be focused on these larger medium range ballistic missile threats, typically that we're seeing obviously out of Iran, out of the Houthis, and perhaps even out of Iraq. You have sort of this middle ground. So Iron Dome is developed to hit those homemade rockets, these very short range rocket threats coming out of Gaza. You have Arrow, Arrow 2, Arrow 3, looking at these massive strategic ballistic missile attack threats. And so what about this middle ground of short range ballistic missiles, long range rockets, cruise missiles? And so there is this middle system that's created for a catch-all of other threats, I would say. And you think about it, long range rockets that Hezbollah has that don't quite make the Arrow system, are too big for Iron Dome to handle. So that's where the David Sling system comes out of. So you have Iron Dome, you know, these rockets now for drones as well, because you're starting to see drone swarms and drones continuing to come in and the Iron Dome has been able to usually pick up most of those drones and be able to intercept. You have these longer range rocket threats in the David Sling. You have cruise missiles, David Sling. You have ballistic missiles, medium range ballistic missiles, Arrow 2, Arrow 3 system. That's the layered missile defense. And of course you have the actual aircraft in the air and they're flying around doing just air patrol of Israel's airspace, they can monitor if a radar picks up an incoming threat that's a drone and there's an aircraft up, they can go get it too. If there's a night when Iran sends 30 cruise missiles and 150 drones or whatever it was, you could have aircraft in the air to help alongside the missile defense assets that you have as well. 

DS: Okay. We're going to get to that in a minute, but before we do, of these defense capabilities that you just ran through, which is very useful, just generally, how much of it is based on Israeli R&D, Israeli tech, Israeli genius, yet limited by Israel's ability to manufacture at scale? So Israel can design these capabilities, but they can't produce them at the scale they now need it in this seven front war Israel finds itself in because these projectiles are coming from all over the place. They're coming from Gaza, they're less so, but it's just still coming from southern Lebanon, they're coming from Iran, they're coming from the Houthis in Yemen, they're coming at times from Iraq and Syria. So Israel just has a volume issue. It just needs a lot of this now, a lot of this stuff. And only the US, even though Israel can design a lot of it, the US has to build it. Where is the fault line there? Like what's the tension? 

RG: So it's interesting. The Israelis are credited for a lot of the R&D, certainly for Iron Dome. This is an Israeli project genius that later the United States comes in to fund to help move to scale for the Israelis to counter the Hamas rocket threat. And then over time, US dollars then say, we want some ROI as well. We want some co-production of this. We want to get the system for the United States Army and potential export involvement. Many, many years until we started thinking, hey, we should have some sort of dual production line capacity redundancy where things are being made in Israel, but things should also be made in the United States. This has actually been a change in a lot of the push from Congress over the years because of what's happened over the last few months and obviously is something that's relevant in the news. The Israelis do most of the production and for many years, a lot of us have thought, okay, well that seems like a single point of failure. If Iran or Hezbollah takes out your production facilities, you need some sort of a dual train going in the United States. You need production lines in the US. First of all, it'll lock in domestic support for the program. These are jobs. The whole idea of the defense industry, this is to bring us together more. Somewhere in Alabama or Mississippi or wherever it is, there's going to be people who are building the interceptors to help defend Israel. And in a time of crisis, we can search production in the United States and help provide you as well. Well, the Israelis looked at that dynamic and said, well, we don't want to be dependent on the US for resupply because what if we're in a scenario where that gets withheld and then we're… then we're in crisis. And so we don't want to be reliant there. So they've always wanted to have production lines and scale them in Israel. And so there is a tension there and now we're seeing that play out. There's a need for more production. There's a need for greater capacity. If we had the ability to surge production lines here in the United States to support all the various interceptors Israel might need, you would hope we would do that. At the same time, the other side of the coin we are seeing for the first time, at least that I can remember in a long time, the United States using military assistance as a tool of leverage and actually threatening to withhold it or at times withholding it to gain political concessions from the Israelis. And so you would hope that would never happen with truly purely defensive systems and interceptors, but it is part of this dynamic. Now for us to just wake up today and say, hey, we need more factories. We need to build more stuff. We need to have more production lines for Arrow, for Iron Dome. It's sort of too late. You need to be working on this for years now. And so, I don't want to speak to what we don't fully know. And certainly, you don't want to project to Iran a signal of Israeli weakness. You know, a leak in the Financial Times that Israel might be running short on interceptors is potentially fatal to Israel. I mean, that's a terrible message to send to the Iranians, whether it's true or not, because that will embolden the Iranians. You want to at least project that Israel has the capacity to continue to produce and meet its need of interceptors. But here is the bottom line. If you are running shorter on interceptors, if you do have supply shortages and production shortages, and now there's this leak telling the Iranians that might be true as well, from my strategic perspective, that reinforces the need for overwhelming offensive operations to ensure you don't start receiving more incoming. 

DS: Okay, we're gonna get to that. Before we do, then there was this extraordinary development of October 13th, the United States announcing that it is deploying the THAAD defense capability to Israel, along with approximately 100 US military personnel to operate the THAAD in Israel. What is THAAD? What does the acronym stand for? What does it do? 

RG: THAAD, let's think of this in the most simplistic terms, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense Ballistic Missile Defense System. This is sort of our Arrow, let's say. It's mobile, roll-on, roll-off capability. You put it on a plane. A battery comes with six launchers, eight interceptors per launcher, so 48 interceptors that are available to go up and hit ballistic missiles. These are short-range ballistic missiles, medium-range ballistic missiles, and what we call intermediate-range ballistic missiles, so a larger, farther-range missile than that, capable of dealing with all the Iranian threats. And this is augmenting Arrow essentially in adding 48 interceptors at a time, you would hope that the US would be providing additional interceptors along with the personnel and the logistics to operate this battery in Israel. But it's a big deal in that number one, you are giving Israel additional shots at whatever is going to come again from Iran in the future, potential retaliation after whatever Israel might do next. But also a show of not just political commitment, but military commitment by putting more US troops there in Israel to support a defensive mission, very important to distinguish that, and to be there in Israel on the ground working alongside, literally shoulder-to-shoulder, in some of these battle management control systems. You're going to have American soldiers sitting next to Israeli soldiers looking at the threats, operating their systems. It's an incredible thing if you think about 30 years of US-Israel missile defense cooperation coming into true side-by-side missile defense coordination cooperation and operational activity. Now, I will say a couple things. When we talked about the layered defense of Israel, particularly in the last year or so with all the threats that Israel has faced, we touched on it when we talked about the April 13th attack from Iran. But we should talk about the fact that part of today's layered defense that Israel has also comes from the US Navy. But the idea of this US-Israel bilateral exercise, originally European command where Israel used to be part of the US European Command, shifted…

DS: For our listeners to understand. So the US military organizes its cooperation in military theaters around the world regionally, right? So there's a US European Command. There's a European Southern Command There's a European Central Command which basically covers most of the Middle East and other neighboring regions and unlike any other command, US Central Command has been the only command that has focused on one region, but excluded one country from that region. So historically Israel has not been included in US Central Command because the other Arab countries that are all in Central Command do not want to be working with, cooperating, being co-located, or having some other personnel co-located with the Israeli military. I was always struck by that when I spent some time at Central Command both in MacDill Air Force Base at its headquarters and then also its forward operating base in Qatar. You would have all these Arab officials, they're all talking about the Middle East and war in the Middle East, and Israel is just not part of the conversation. That changed early ‘21, where Israel was invited to join Central Command, left European Command, it made no sense that it was in European Command, and now I was with senior US CENTCOM officials two weeks ago, and they talk about how you now have at CENTCOM Israeli military personnel sitting around the table with military personnel from all these Arab countries, and they're all working together like they're all brothers. He was describing it as like, it's the most natural thing in the world now.

RG: Yeah, I mean, it's a game changer strategically. And obviously, if we can get back to Abraham Accords expansion and counter-Iran campaign and how do you build this Arab-Israeli military alliance, so to speak, some sort of Middle East NATO long term, the fact that Israel is now part of Central Command is a big part of that going forward. But we are where we are today. And so just to go back to your geography and sort of the breakup into these combatant commands. European Command which had Israel for many many years was in charge of the US-Israel bilateral military relationship and put together this series of exercises on missile defense. And you know you're doing missile defense exercise with Israel. What do you think you're preparing for? You’re preparing for the contingency of an Iranian ballistic missile attack the likes that we have now seen this year. But this was you know something that we just never thought was really gonna happen. It's like maybe one day it could happen. This is the potential threat. We're exercising on it because it’s the worst-case scenario. The point is that this continued to build out and test the interoperability of the American systems and the Israeli systems. Back in 2008, my old boss, Senator Mark Kirk, at the time he was a House member, we led this big initiative to put an X-band radar, at the time the most powerful missile defense radar the United States had actually developed and is the radar that goes with the THAAD system to pick up ballistic missile threats that are coming from, you know, thousands of miles away and start looking at it like the size of a baseball, thousand miles away and what does the missile look like? How's the design? Let's start targeting it. You know, where are we going to have the intercept from? Let's have a firing solution to help with the interceptor. Put that into the Negev Desert at the end of the Bush administration, hooked it into the rest of Israel's independent missile defense capabilities. The United States back in 2001 had already provided Israel access to our satellite real-time early warning system, what we call eyes in the sky, so the minute there's a launch from Iran, we detect it in the Pentagon. But now Israel knows about it too. It used to be, before Israel had access to those satellites, you'd get a call from the US embassy saying there's a missile attack on the way, get ready. You’d have to wait for your own radars to pick it up. And remember, the distance, the timeline is, let's say, 11, 12 minutes of flight time of a ballistic missile from Iran to Israel. 

DS: So like the difference between the phone being allowed to ring four times versus one ring is like the difference between…

RG: Oh it was crazy. You talked to the lieutenant at the Arrow Command Center at Palm Mountain Air Base, you 24, 25 years ago. He said, well, how would you know? if you want to get a cup of coffee, like Israel's gone, that, like it's crazy. So we, know, Don Rumsfeld, God bless him, you know, signed off on this idea, again, it's a Mark Kirk initiative. Let's give Israel access to eyes in the sky. A few years later, let's put X-band into the Negev and hook our systems in together and make them more interoperable. EUCOM starts exercising this, European command starts exercising this for years, our interoperability and working together on missile defense threats. In 2019, under the Trump administration, they actually did a real live test of what you are seeing right now. A very short notice, hey guys, there's a crisis going, Iran's gonna attack Israel, deploy the THAAD system to Israel, get a bunch of guys on a 48 hour, 96 hour, we call it tether, of like, you gotta be ready to go if your beeper goes off, these are very different beepers than the ones you saw in Lebanon. Get ready to go deploy with THAAD, be in Israel, know what to do when you get there, take your seat next to your Israeli counterpart, plug in the system, and now the X-band radar's talking to THAAD X-band. And the green pine and super green pine radars that Israel already has plugged into their Arrow systems are all talking together. Everything's getting information from the satellites coming down. Everything's looking at the threat, discerning it, trying to figure it out, all talking to each other. And now with THAAD, you have 48 more interceptors about to go up with whatever the Israelis have from Arrow as well. So it's a big deal. It's a big deal.

DS: Right. And so just so we're clear, credit to the Biden administration for deploying THAAD to Israel. And not only at a technical level why it's important, but the message it sends to the region that yes, there are all these fronts opening up against Israel and there's this ring of fire and Israel is fighting for its life. And with deployment of THAAD, plus everything that led to it, the US has Israel's back, defensively to your point. The US is standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel on its defense and in its defense. So that is an important strategic message to Israel's enemies. Right?

RG: It is an absolutely important strategic message to Israel's enemies. Now I will say there's controversy potentially in some camps of, do you want US soldiers deploying with that and on the ground in Israel? Are they now a target? Are they participating in a war somehow? Well, again, this is defensive in nature. So it's purely for the defense of Israel. It's not for offensive operations against Iran. Nobody can make that argument. And by the way, the Iranians need to think about the fact that there's American soldiers now in Israel operating these batteries of THAAD. Because if their missile hits an American, I mean, I'm a critic many times of the Biden administration and our lack of action in the face of threats against the United States by Iran's proxies. But if an Iranian ballistic missile hits an American soldier, kills American soldiers, you know, just manning a missile defense battery in Israel, my God, that's going to take a massive retaliation from the United States inside of Iran. The Iranians should know that. I hope that would be true. That should be true. And the Iranians need to calculate on that as well, which is another added bonus of making the deployment happen.

DS: Okay. So now I want to fast forward to the other major policy development, which was a letter drafted on October 13th by Secretary State Blinken, Secretary of Defense Austin, sent to Defense Minister Yoav Galant and Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer in the Israeli government, expressing great frustration, this letter is now public, it lays out in great detail the administration's criticism of Israel and concern about what it regards as a considerable drop-off in humanitarian aid heading into Gaza and some other policy concerns around Gaza and we'll post the letter so our listeners can read it. I don't want to go through the whole letter but I do want to, the sort of the nut graph, like the key paragraph in the letter if you will and I'll just read it here: “To reverse the downward humanitarian trajectory and consistent with its assurances to us, Israel must, starting now and within 30 days, act on the following concrete measures.” And then it lays out what Israel must do to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza. And then this paragraph goes on to say: “Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for US policy under NSM 20 and relevant US law.” So before we get to NSM 20, I mean, I was fixated on this line, this very explicit, very public message to Israel and I think to a lot of other actors, both in the region and around the world and potentially here in the US, we are perfectly prepared to cut off Israel unless Israel does X, Y, and Z. Can you briefly describe what the administration is saying they want Israel to do? Then we'll get into NSM 20 and cutting off assistance to Israel. But before we do that, just explain what is expressed in this letter that the administration wants Israel to do or wants Israel to address. 

RG: So there's a lot in this letter. I encourage people to take a look at your show notes, bring it up if you haven't seen it. It's lengthy and it's pretty specific in many places. Now, from what I understand, some of them are logistical problems that might have some merit. There's customs issues, there's tax authority issues. A lot of this is not the Israelis' fault. The Americans have switched how they want aid to go from month to month. They had a pier that was going on and they had a process for pier deliveries and then that didn't work because the pier floated away and kept getting destroyed and we wasted $320 million. They said, okay, now we want things out of the North here. The Jordanians have their own platform for aid deliveries and they were going to be relying on the pier. So everything had shifted the bureaucracy to approve things for the pier. Then the pier got destroyed, so now we have to approve the Jordanian supply lines out of this gate here into Gaza and the bureaucracy is trying to figure it out. So there may be bureaucratic problems that are not Israel's fault per se, but that need to get worked out if you are trying to get humanitarian aid into certain areas. And some of those issues are there. There's winter coming. There is winterization type prevention advising things that are in there of what are we going to assert, moving people away from colder areas that are in the humanitarian area, go inland from the sea? There are interesting and important humanitarian questions that are baked into this letter in certain places. And then there's things that are just like, whoa, where is this going? There are apparently some just quite obvious due diligence requirements that the Israelis have on aid going into areas where Hamas is still there and where they are trying to regain their control, especially in northern Gaza. And so they're asking aid organizations to simply certify certain things like, you're not working with Hamas, you're not going to allow, you're going to take responsibility if your aid goes and gets taken over by Hamas, if you're part of the distribution process. And we've understood some organizations have stepped back and said, no, I'm not going to sign off. I'm not going to assume the liability for that. And the Americans are looking at this saying, well, we want all the aid in no matter what, no matter if Hamas takes over, no matter if they take it. And by the way, the Americans, my understanding from sources inside the Israeli side, is the Americans have now reduced dramatically their own supplies and deliveries of aid into parts of Gaza, especially northern Gaza, because they are being hijacked at a 50% rate. That's something I just heard from a very well-placed source. 50% of the aid in certain areas of Gaza the US is providing is being taken by looting gangs, by Hamas itself, the private sector companies that the Israelis thought that they were going to be the solution to a non-Hamas aid distribution scheme. They’ve decided to, they got hit up like the mafia from Hamas saying, you think you're going to be in charge of distribution? Well, we still got the guns, so you're going to pay us or you're going to give us part of the aid shipments that you're in charge of. So it turns out these private sector firms are in bed with Hamas now, whether it's under duress or not. And so they can't, they've got to switch back from the private sector to humanitarian aid organizations. But UNRWA still is being used every single day. You hear a report of UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency, its operations in Gaza, its offices, its headquarters, its clinics, its schools, all being used for command and control of Hamas. And as Hamas tries to take control back in parts of northern Gaza, you're using UNRWA infrastructure for it. So nobody trusts UNRWA. Seems like just an arm of Hamas at this point in Gaza. So these are real challenges that the Israelis face when you are also, by the way, needing to go after Hamas itself, a terror organization holding 101 hostages. We probably should have led with that. Don't see that in the letter, but by the way, that's still happening. And these bad guys, these folks that committed October 7th that are holding 101 hostages, are trying to retake area in northern Gaza. The IDF is going back in to try to go after these cells and these guerrilla factions that are popping up. I don't want to assign a military type label to them, you know, brigades or units or whatever, but these guerrilla forces of Hamas that are reappearing and trying to take hold, they're using the distribution and control of aid as their anchor strategy to retake control of Gaza. So we do need to have some sort of a real policy discussion between the American and the Israelis. Where are we going in Gaza here? Like, are we actually working towards the defeat of Hamas, the removal of Hamas, a non-Hamas aid distribution network, municipalities that are run by non-Hamas people actually moving towards a day after if you can in Gaza at some point here, really undermining Sinwar, putting more pressure by doing that to potentially get some sort of a deal on the hostages or collapse further around him until you get him, others find more hostages if you can? Or are we just gonna live in this fantasy world where you just pump as much aid as you can into areas controlled by Hamas, know that Hamas is taking like 50% of the aid, whether it's to resell on the black market, control the distribution, and you're just never gonna get your hostages back. You're never gonna defeat Hamas that way. So one other thing I'll say in the letter, you keep going beyond these humanitarian requests that are being made of, you know, you need to facilitate the Jordanians doing this, you need to prepare for winter here, you need to stop your onerous requirements for shipments going in from humanitarian organizations, which are anti-terror requirements. Then gets into larger policy demands. You need to stop the campaign against UNRWA. Right now, the Israeli Knesset is moving forward with legislation to basically designate UNRWA as a terrorist organization, which I personally agree with. I think we have ample evidence for our own sanctions to be used on UNRWA at this point to cut off the rest of their donors around the world. The Israelis say, we're not working with these guys. This is Hamas. We can't work with UNRWA. They're trying to take over their facilities in Jerusalem and say, okay, we're kicking you out of Israel proper. UNRWA no longer has diplomatic immunity here in Israel. You're a terrorist group. Get out of here. We're going to take your buildings. So the Americans are going apoplectic over that. They're defending UNRWA. It's in the letter, back off on this legislation. Then the part of the letter that really I think annoyed me most because there's no mention of the 101 hostages. There's no mention of the strategic failure of the humanitarian aid link to Hamas remaining in power and keeping hostages and how that has to be addressed. It says that there is major concern that the Israelis are not allowing the Red Cross to visit Hamas terrorist detainees from the battlefield. No mention of the Red Cross never visiting a single hostage. So, this letter was not put together in the best way in my view, and yet it's leaked out…

DS: Well, hold on, we're not done. We could do a whole episode on just the letter. I will say the other criticism, concern expressed in the letter about the possibility that Israel must create, not do anything to relocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from northern Gaza who had homes in northern Gaza to another part of Gaza, meaning there's this plan kicking around in Israel, what they call the General's Plan, which is this idea to create some kind of buffer in northern Gaza so that you never have a situation again where Hamas can reorganize in civilian residential areas right up like a kilometer, a couple kilometers from Israeli communities in southern Israel, in these kibbutzim, like kibbutz Nahal Oz. So the General’s Plan is we're gonna have a little bit of a buffer here. And the letter comes out against that too.

RG: Correct. And basically anything else that the Israelis are trying to do to facilitate a military operation against Hamas resurgence, the code of what being requested here is to make that military operation more difficult.

DS: Okay. So there's the letter. We can critique a lot of the items in the letter. You and I are in agreement on that. It would be one thing if the administration communicated these issues to the Israeli security leadership, to the Israeli political leadership in a discrete bilateral way, which they often do. But this was clearly designed to, I mean, a letter reported exclusively by Barak Ravid from Axios, I mean, within hours of it being sent to Israel, this was a public relations document. 

RG: It would certainly appear that way, yes. 

DS: Okay. 

RG: Because you don't even need a letter, to your point. You can just call. You can fly over and get in somebody's face.

DS: Okay, so before we get to the motive of the letter and the public communication of it or the nature of the public communication of it, just briefly, and this will be brief because we can get really technical, this paragraph about withholding assistance, NSM 20. So just can you briefly explain what that was referring to and its significance?

RG: So there's two main parts of law that have been invoked by Israel's detractors to try to cut off US military assistance to Israel. One of them is what's called the Leahy Laws. This deals with human rights violations actually conducted by a unit of a military organization. 

DS: Drafted by Senator Pat Leahy, and it's focused on countries of military organizations doing what you're describing who receive military assistance from the US. 

RG: Correct. And so usually you think of in terms of like some really egregious regime that we, for some reason, you go back to Cold War-type politics, some more recent examples where you would have an ally and you believe from a US strategic perspective, this government needs to be strong and needs to be able to take out its threats, can't be taken out by our enemies, but it's a human rights abuser. And it's possible that the provision that we provide that government could be used on their own people and that's not okay for our values. And so, we have a provision of law saying that we can impose sanctions, essentially we can cut off the assistance, prohibit our assistance from going to units that have been identified as being involved in human rights abuses that may be attached to our aid. So there have been people making allegations for the last year. This has picked up some steam in some parts of the far left in the House and Senate, putting pressure on the administration. We saw actually the State Department during some of the worst parts of the tension between Israel and the United States over the Gaza campaign earlier this year around primary season time actually talk about threatening that there might be use of this law against certain units of the Israeli military that has since deescalated. But that's one tool here. We're not actually talking about this tool here. We're talking about a different body of law, Section 620i of the Foreign Assistance Act, goes back to the 1990s, has completely different reasons for why Congress adopted it. It had to do with Turkey putting an embargo and stopping the flow of humanitarian assistance into Armenia, which obviously has long been a flashpoint in the Congress. And what we say in that law is you can't get military assistance from the United States, you can't get military sales if you are blocking the United States' own humanitarian assistance from going to where it's supposed to go. So we're funding aid into Gaza at this point and the allegation from some of Israel's detractors based on UN Hamas disinformation is Israel is blocking the aid from going in. They're trying to starve the Palestinians or creating a famine. You've heard all the allegations. Therefore, Israel is in violation of this statute and we should be cutting off any future arms transfers to Israel. There was a senator, Senator Chris Van Hollen, who put together a letter, put a big campaign, tried to do an amendment in the foreign assistance bill. 

DS: Democrat from Maryland, prominent senator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

RG: Yep, replaced a far more prominent senator before him, Barbara Mikulski, who was actually the chair of the Appropriations Committee, pro-Israel stalwart of many years. Kind of a real wake up call to listeners in Maryland who know far more about this problem than the overlay. But you have Chris Van Hollen, who's been making these threats, trying to get this to be US administration policy to cut off Israel. And in response to this pressure coming out of Senate Democrats led by Van Hollen, this is all in the Michigan primary timeframe where you started seeing a lot of the consternation start between Washington and Jerusalem, you saw the president say, okay, stand down on your amendment, stand down on your campaign for us to have to adopt strict measures and reporting to you on whether Israel's in violation of this law. We're going to put out a new national security memorandum, which is not exactly an executive order, but it's an administrative order throughout the government. The president writes something and he directs the agencies to do something. So in this case, they call it a National Security Memorandum, NSM, the acronym. In this case, it's his 20th one of his presidency, NSM 20. And he's directing essentially the State Department to have to put together a whole process to have new and even beyond the law assurances, investigations of whether or not allegations against a country are true, that it might be blocking humanitarian aid, and then have a reporting structure to the Congress to keep Congress up to date on what's going on. This was some compromise they worked out with Van Hollen. They issued this, they start sending reports to the Congress about what Israel's doing. They put pressure on the Israelis to make more concessions on UN demands and Hamas demands on humanitarian assistance flows. The Israelis knuckle under the pressure and say, of course, we'll do whatever you want. You see the surge in humanitarian aid. They go back to Van Hollen and say, look, it worked. We got the Israelis to surge humanitarian aid and we don't have to cut off assistance. So now they're going back to this national security memorandum that they created, which is over and above current law anyways, and they're basically threatening the Israelis saying, hey, it worked out in your favor last time, but maybe it won't next time unless you do the following dozens of things that we demand and you have 30 days to comply. Otherwise, we're going to enforce our rules and our law and cut you off of military assistance.

DS: Okay. So if I go back to the deployment of THAAD, I say the best of US policy, US policy at its best. Again, not only for the technical capabilities it's providing to Israel, but the strategic message it's providing to Israel's enemies, which is, we are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel. Israel's fight is our fight. If I had to just summarize it in a bumper sticker, okay? And that has a deterrent effect. I remind listeners, if you go back, as I've said many times in this podcast, February, March, April 2023 was a very dark period in the US-Israel relationship and in Israel's war against Hamas because that was the period, combination of the US administration refusing to veto, basically greenlit, a very bad resolution at the UN Security Council as it relates to Israel. A number of statements that the president himself and vice president had made about what Israel was doing in Gaza. Senator Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, going to the Senate floor and basically calling for the downfall of the Israeli government was so crazy. All of that, combined with all the campuses on fire and a general sense of the world, all the mob, the jackals, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it, the jackals of the UN, them all ganging up on Israel. All the pressure was on Israel. The pressure was mounting on Israel. So Sinwar was sitting there saying, why do I need to make any concessions? Why do I need to negotiate? Why do I need to do anything but keep doing exactly what I'm doing because all the pressure is mounting on Israel, not on Hamas. The deployment of THAAD, again for simplicity's sake, is the opposite of that. It says, no, no, no, we're standing with Israel. We're not letting the pressure mount on Israel. What I can't make sense of, Rich, is that at the exact time that you have this extraordinarily positive policy with deployment of THAAD, you also have this very public blasting of Israel and sending a message that not only do we the US have such a problem with US policy, but we're willing to withhold from Israel its capacity to fight this fight that we say is our fight too, or we signal is our fight too. And that then takes us back, in my view, to spring of 2023, where there's distance between the US and Israel. So in the brief couple minutes we have left, I'm just asking you, how do I reconcile those two things? Literally, within the same, possibly the same day, the announcement of THAAD and the release of this letter about possibly withholding military assistance to Israel, how do you reconcile those two policies? Because they seem to be in total open conflict with one another.

RG: Well, they are. They are. If you're the Iranians, by the way, like you, Dan Senor, you're confused by this mixed messaging, what do you think the Iranians are thinking? What's Hezbollah's remnants thinking? What are the IRGC thinking? And of course, what is Sinwar thinking looking at this? Here's the bottom line. It's all American politics, right? It's all in the context of an election that is now less than three weeks away. And that has to be something that we take into consideration here. It doesn't justify anybody's actions. It doesn't make this okay. It is clearly to me the reason why all of this exists. You know that you have to come to Israel's defense after a massive missile strike, but at the same time, you can't afford Israel hitting oil infrastructure or the nuclear infrastructure that might somehow require US involvement on follow-on strikes or you don't know what's going to happen there, it's less predictable. Attacks could come against US forces, and now we're responding. We want this to happen November 6th, not November 5th. What could happen to the oil market? What could happen to US involvement in war? And so even with respect to how you're seeing all these leaks on the US trying to constrain Israel on its response to Iran, that is part of the election. This appears to be right. That gets announced. In the broader context, even though we strategically see a lot of management of Israel in terms of its response to Iran, if you're a detractor of Israel, you're seeing the Americans knuckle under and going from some crazy 21 day ceasefire proposal with Hezbollah, Lebanon and being wonderstruck by Israel's success in Lebanon and say, well, okay, I guess we should let the Israelis sort of run with this. It's working. You see the Iranians now with a massive ballistic missile strike. And you know that the Israelis have to respond because it was now a strategic mistake, you understand, to constrain Israel back in April because Iran learned it's okay to launch 200 ballistic missiles and do it again and again and it has to stop. And now if you're a detractor of Israel saying, why are you all with the warmongers? Why are you backing Israel? You got to do something. And so this letter was drafted October 13th, according to the letterhead. That's a Sunday, right? Now I know for the Israeli listeners, you're working on Sunday, maybe. We don't work on Sunday. Yeah, there's a crisis in the US government we're in on Sunday, but it's got to be a real crisis. If it's a letter that can kind of wait till Monday, the bureaucrat who asked to actually draft it is going to draft it on Monday. The fact that this was drafted and ready to go, sent alongside the THAAD announcement, is sort of like we have something ready in case we get blowback for supporting Israel and then we'll leak it. And it's sort of to me what happened. And it doesn't make it less disgusting. It just is what it is. But I will say one other thing. It's really, really, really, really, really unfortunate and sad for the hostages. It is really, really, really undermining of Israel in its campaign against Hamas and of course against the larger ring of fire. And here's why. There are multiple ways to conduct a war. There's a lot of tools of warfare that are being used by Iran, by its proxies, by Hamas. Hamas is failing on almost every single one of those tools of war. They have failed. They have lost. They're being destroyed. There is only one tool of warfare that they succeed on almost every time, and it's information warfare. And if you view the UN organs as an extension of Hamas's information warfare, as a tool of their information warfare, and you see the cause and effect, if Hamas starts saying that there is a humanitarian crisis, if you get the UN agencies to report a humanitarian crisis on the rise, you can then get the American media to report a humanitarian crisis on the rise, you can then get the detractors of Israel, who are like an Achilles heel for the Democratic Party at this point, to be screaming in their ear there is a humanitarian crisis on the rise, you have to do something, and you can then get American government pressure on Israel to change a policy, change a course, and relieve whatever pressure is building on Hamas itself. That is not to minimize humanitarian concerns in Gaza, but from a warfare perspective, you almost see this every time. When I see the UN starting to up its decibel level, start screaming, when I see the media coverage start increasing, when I see the screams from Israel's detractors in America increasing, it is absolutely an indicator that Sinwar is feeling more pressure. And yet our response continues to be answering and rewarding that information warfare and saying, yes, we do have an Achilles heel. We do have a strategic vulnerability. It is this information warfare and we decrease the pressure on Sinwar. That along with a whole bunch of other policies that we've never considered against a whole bunch of other Hamas sponsors is part of the problem of not getting a ceasefire, not getting a deal to get the hostages back in Gaza. 

DS: All right. Rich, we will leave it there. You've been very generous with your time. I know for many of our listeners, and I say this, Rich, this is a badge of honor. It was on the nerdier end of our conversations, meaning you provided a lot of technical detail, but I wanted to provide a lot of technical detail because I think these terms, Arrow, Iron Dome, David Sling, THAAD, like these terms get thrown around for many of our listeners, and I've heard from some of them that they don't really understand the difference between one from the other and why one matters more than the other and which ones are the most important ones in this new environment we're in. And for years, they just heard Iron Dome, Iron Dome, Iron Dome, Iron Dome, and actually it's much more complex and there's much greater range of capabilities that matter. And I just think folks would benefit from understanding what these terms actually mean because they're going to matter a lot. So thank you for that. And then also helping us make sense of the, as I said at the beginning, this Jekyll and Hyde policy, because on the one hand, it's very encouraging, THAAD, and very unnerving, this public statement threatening Israel with withholding assistance. And I'll leave it to our listeners to figure out what you do with that in terms of your own civic and political activities. But there's a real contradiction that we need to better understand. And I thank you, Rich, for helping us do that today. And I wish you a Chag sameach. I hope our listeners will be able to hear this before Sukkot being offline for our more observant listeners in compliance with the holiday is only one day in Israel. So they can come back online tomorrow night and listen to this podcast. But for those who are offline for the next Wednesday night, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we hope folks will be able to listen to it before they go offline. And Rich, I know you crammed this in before you go offline for four days. So thank you. 

RG: Chag sameach to everyone. And hopefully this Sukkot ends in a very different way than last Sukkot and we see Israeli victory at the end of it.

DS: Absolutely. All right, Rich. Talk soon.