Ground assault: Israeli forces invade Lebanon

The Economist.

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Japan's new prime minister loves trains, Planes and ramen. Unfortunately, he doesn't love many of his fellow party members. Or rather, they don't love him. Our correspondent weighs his prospects. And our work columnist laments one of the worst inventions of modern office life: when your manager invites the team to a sandwich lunch. But first, in the past 2 weeks, one question has come up again and again: will the conflict on Israel's northern border escalate into an invasion? Today, we have an answer.

It appears to have officially started in a moment unlike anything we've seen in decades.

This moment, Israel launching a ground operation in Lebanon.

Tonight, American officials worry that over time, the mission could expand.

Israel says its ground operation is limited, localized, and targeted. Meanwhile, airstrikes continued overnight in Beirut's southern suburbs. Thousands of people have already been displaced. And Israeli missiles have also hit Syria's capital, Damascus. The international community is now clamoring for calm, but for the moment, that is not on the Israeli government's agenda.

Late on Monday night, the Israeli army announced that its troops had invaded Lebanon.

Greg Carlstrom is our Middle East correspondent.

They are describing it so far as a small ground offensive involving a limited number of commandos, but also promising that the offensive will expand on Tuesday, something that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

And as you say, they're saying it's a small ground offensive. What's the actual stated purpose of it?

The stated purpose of it is to destroy Hezbollah's military infrastructure along the border with Israel, bunkers and tunnels and other things that Hezbollah has built there over the course of decades. And for residents of northern Israel, for the 60,000 people who have been displaced by rocket fire over over the past year. They say getting rid of that military infrastructure is a prerequisite for them feeling safe enough to go home. They're worried about the prospect of attack from across the border. I think the question and the concern for many people in Lebanon, many people around the world, is whether this supposedly limited invasion is going to remain a limited invasion and whether the Israeli government has any exit strategy in mind or any plan for getting out of it.

And how is Hezbollah responding so far?

It's not clear how they are responding so far, and it hasn't been clear for the past 2 weeks how they are responding to anything that Israel has been doing, to the attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies 2 weeks ago, to the campaign of airstrikes across Lebanon, and of course, to the assassination of top commanders and of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. All of that has happened in the course of 2 weeks, and I think it has left the militia reeling. It's struggling with command and control. Its commanders have been killed. Its communications network has been disrupted. And it's not entirely certain yet how it wants to respond. And so we've seen in terms of the rocket fire aimed at Israel, it has kept up rocket fire on northern Israel. It says it is now targeting the area around Metula, which is a town in northern Israel where many of these troops have been staging, the Israeli troops who are going into or preparing to go into Lebanon. But we haven't seen much beyond that. It hasn't unleashed as many Israelis feared that it would. It hasn't unleashed hundreds or thousands of longer-range missiles aimed at Tel Aviv. It hasn't significantly escalated its barrages. I think it will also be preparing defenses on the ground, and that is an area where it might have an advantage. It doesn't have any response to Israeli airstrikes, to Israeli bombardment, but Israeli troops going into very difficult terrain in South Lebanon, terrain that Hezbollah has been preparing for many, many years to fight on is something that is likely to be much tougher for the Israeli army.

We've also heard about airstrikes on Damascus overnight. What do we know about those?

Not much at this point. The only person to have been confirmed killed in these Israeli airstrikes at the moment is a presenter on Syrian state television. And it's very hard to imagine that she would have been the main target of a strike. So we don't know what they were aimed at, but they fit into, of course, what has been a very lengthy campaign of Israeli strikes, not just in Lebanon, but in Syria, across Syria, aimed at Hezbollah fighters and commanders who were there, aimed at Iranian commanders who were there, aimed at military equipment, rockets, missiles, other things that Iran might be trying to send to Lebanon via Syria. Syria has been in Israel's crosshairs for the past year and actually for years before that throughout the Syrian Civil War as well.

And how have the US and its allies responded to this escalation?

America is simultaneously calling for a ceasefire and supporting a ground invasion, which might seem contradictory. If you think back just 6 days ago, the Biden administration insisted that it was close to brokering a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, and that would create more space for diplomacy about a permanent arrangement. That was last Wednesday. Two days after that, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, and no one is talking about a ceasefire anymore. The administration for weeks had insisted that a ground invasion of Lebanon was a red line. It was something they wouldn't support. Now that Israel has gone ahead with that ground invasion, the message from Washington is that we support it as long as it stays limited. We don't want to see it become an all-out ground invasion, a much larger one where the Israelis decide to stay. The Biden administration has not just with Lebanon, but throughout this past year, set red lines, told the Israelis not to do things. And then once the Israelis do those things, the administration has turned around and said, well, actually, we support it, but don't do this next thing. And that has been the pattern throughout the entire year. It's a pattern that I think has done tremendous damage to America's reputation across the Middle East, not just from people who think that it's a moral outrage, but also just on pragmatic grounds. America now seems like a superpower that is being led by the nose by a client state, then that does not make it look like a superpower in the eyes of many people in this region.

And Greg, as you say, no one wants this to become a large-scale invasion, but we have no idea if Israel has an exit plan. How likely is it to become a war with Lebanon?

That's always the risk with invasions. That's always been the risk in the history of Israeli invasions of Lebanon. It's a real concern if you take the Israeli army at its word that it is invading to destroy Hezbollah's military infrastructure along the border. Imagine it does that, it withdraws its troops. There's nothing at that point to prevent Hezbollah from trying to come back. And so the Israeli army might be tempted to occupy some bits of territory in South Lebanon. Its outposts there would then become targets for Hezbollah, and it might have to send more troops to reinforce the ones who are already there. And the logic of any invasion always tends to be expansionary. And I think it's a particular concern With this Israeli government, Prime Minister Netanyahu has spent a year refusing to even talk about Israel's exit strategy from Gaza, pursuing a war there that even many Israeli generals will say has turned into a forever war that doesn't seem to have any clear goals or any clear way out. And there is a lot of concern, not just in Lebanon and other Arab countries, but also within Israel, that the government is embarking on a similar sort of operation in Lebanon.

Greg, thank you so much for talking to me.

My pleasure.

Today, Ishiba Shigeru was sworn in as Japan's prime minister. It was his fifth bid to lead Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party in an unusually competitive contest. This time around, 9 candidates fought for the top spot, the highest number in 50 years. And Ishiba's victory was unexpected. Though he's promised to be a leader who speaks truthed with courage and sincerity, he has few solid allies within the party. In recent years, many of Japan's prime ministers have lasted only a short time in office. So how will Ishiba Shigeru do?

The Liberal Democratic Party, the LDP, has been in charge in Japan for most of the period since World War II. They've only lost power briefly twice.

Noah Snyder is our East Asia bureau chief.

But they're in a bit of a crisis now. There was a financial scandal that broke late last year, and it really dragged the party's ratings down, and it proved a death blow for Kishida Fumio, the outgoing prime minister, who announced in August that he would not be running for reelection. And this scandal also created some chaos within the party itself. It weakened the hold of the factions inside the LDP and made for a much more chaotic leadership election than we've seen in recent years, a field of 9 candidates with a pretty unpredictable outcome.

So what can we expect from Ishiba?

Well, this is his 5th attempt at party leadership, so he's clearly got a lot of perseverance. But there's also a reason why he didn't win any of his previous attempts. He comes from a lineage in the LDP that runs back to a postwar leader named Tanaka Kakuei, a regional focused infrastructure, shoe leather campaigning style of politics. He's from Tottori, which is in fact Japan's least populous region. It's on the northern coast of Japan's main island. It's sand dune-filled rural prefecture. His father was also a politician from the region, and so he's kind of a, in some ways, an outsider in the modern LDP. He left the party in the 1990s briefly, which made many of the older generation of LDP figures see him as a traitor. He was kind of a gadfly when he returned. He liked to criticize Abe Shinzo, the late former prime minister. And he's known for being a bit of an otaku, a nerd, a geek, an obsessive, a wonk. He likes to collect model planes and warships. When you go into his Diet office, as I have, the first thing that sort of stands out is these shelves full of these model trains, model planes, model warships. So he's a real detail-oriented, obsessive type, but he also has a bit of a populist flair of a particularly Japanese variety. He's a train enthusiast, he's a ramen enthusiast. Those are big national pastimes here. So he's quite popular amongst the broader public. In fact, he's consistently the most popular politician amongst LDP leaders.

And what about within the LDP? Where are the fault lines in Japanese politics? What are the stakes here of his leadership?

It's a great question. I think one of the fault lines is one we saw play out in the second round of this election between a harder-edged version, a harder-edged vision of Japanese nationalism and Japanese foreign which Takaichi Sanaya represented, and what Ishiba has called for, which is a more measured approach. He also, I think, on the economic side of things, tends to be focused more on forgotten prefectures, on regional revitalization, on helping the parts of Japan that are most affected by its aging demographics and by the concentration of wealth and power in urban centers like Tokyo. He has a bit of a liberal streak on social issues. For example, he's supports the right of married couples in Japan to have separate surnames, which has become a litmus test for issues of sexism and family policy in Japan. So he calls himself sometimes a conservative liberal, which might sound like a bit of a paradox, but I think it hints at how he contains both strains, a more liberal strain within the LDP, but also a fundamentally conservative nature.

Now, what does all that translate into in terms of his priorities as a leader?

So he's said a number of things during the campaign that have folks in Japan and abroad a little worried about his priorities. I mean, he's made some contrarian, almost intentionally provocative comments about, for example, the necessity to create a broader collective security system in the region, something akin to an Asian NATO, as he's called it. He's talked about revising the Status of Forces Agreement, which is the legal basis for the relationship, the alliance with America. And what actually lies behind this is a sense that Japan needs to do to make the final push to revise its own postwar identity, to take on more of the burden in security for itself and for the region.

And what does that mean in practical terms?

In practical terms, these are ideas that are very hard, if not impossible, to implement. And I think that Kishida himself knows this. So having spoken in recent days with several people who are going to be entering his administration, the message I'm hearing is continuity, that they are going to be inheriting the policies of the outgoing Kishida administration, that they aren't going to be swerving wildly off course, that there are ideas, of course, that the candidate put into the air during the campaign, but these are just ideas, not necessarily a roadmap for their governance. So I think we can expect a measure of policy continuity, broadly speaking, but not necessarily stability, because the nature of Yeshiba's victory— someone who is deeply disliked by his fellow party members, doesn't have a lot of close allies, is dependent on support from several former prime ministers to win this runoff. It makes for a very unstable administration. And so the question folks are asking here in Japan is just how long is he really going to last?

Noah, thank you so much. Great to talk to you.

Thank you for having me.

There's nothing wrong with a sandwich, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with lunch, but put them together and you get one of the worst two-word combinations in the English language.

Andrew Palmer writes Bartleby, our weekly column on work, and hosted Boss Class, our series on management.

Competition is tough. Surprise party, cruise holiday, rice pudding, keen golfer. But sandwich lunch spells unmitigated disaster. Whatever plans you had for lunch are ruined by an email from your boss telling you your break will be spent in a meeting room with several of your colleagues. 'Sandwiches will be provided,' it says. You have no say in the food on offer, and the choices appear to have been made by a 6-year-old. Sandwiches cut into triangles, paper plates. You half expect party hats to be handed out. The fillings are unidentifiable. Is that cheese or polyurethane? Taking a bite plate offers no further clue. Not that you actually do much eating. Etiquette dictates that you take less than you actually want. Your plate makes for depressing viewing: 2 sandwich triangles, 4 crisps, a soggy salad leaf, and 1 cherry tomato. It's about as appetizing as a cup of sand. Trying to eat any of it is a lesson in the perils of eating and working. Crisps are never noisier than when eaten at a sandwich lunch. Every crunch thunders through the room. Attempts to spear a tomato with a plastic fork see it fly across the table and into your manager's lap. Unchewable bits of meat hang from a colleague's mouth as they realize, too late, that there is no way to bite through it. And people's opinion seems only to be sought once they've taken a bite of something. Cue rapid chewing and a poorly suppressed belch. Their answer may be a good one, but everyone is far more interested in the spinach stuck between their teeth. Efforts to eat anything else are soon abandoned. The remaining sandwiches start to curl and yellow. There is still a full plate of delicious-looking brownies in the middle of the table. Here, the 6-year-old has chosen well. But now that no one else is eating, there is an unspoken agreement that they should be left untouched. Someone else will get to scoff them later. And so when the meeting ends, you head outside so you can finally get some food.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. And don't forget, if you're a subscriber, you can listen to The Intelligence and all our shows ad-free on The Economist app. Do let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch at podcasts@economist.com. We'll see you back here tomorrow.