‘Dark, terrifying, claustrophobic.’ What it’s like inside Hamas’ tunnels, CNN.com

Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
The tunnels built by Hamas in Gaza are likely to be a key target of the Israeli offensive sparked by the October 7 terror attack on southern Israel. Hamas is believed to be housing underground a considerable number of fighters and weapons, along with an unspecified number of the estimated 239 hostages that the Israeli government says that Hamas has taken.

One expert on the tunnels is Dr. Daphné Richemond Barak, who wrote “Underground Warfare,” a book, that until three weeks ago, was of interest largely to students of military history.

A professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, she founded the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare.

During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong used tunnels extensively to hide in and to fight US troops, while during World War I, the British launched large-scale attacks from tunnels against the Germans, such as one at the Battle of Messines in Belgium in 1917 that killed some 10,00 German soldiers.

Richemond Barak began writing her book in 2013 when a sophisticated cross-border tunnel about a mile long and at a depth of up to 60 feet was dug by Hamas from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory, where it was subsequently discovered.

In the decade since, she has done extensive research into Hamas’ tunnel system as well as the underground network built by Hezbollah.

The latter will be important to understand should the regular exchanges of fire this month between the Iran-backed militant group and Israel intensify into a full-blown war on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.

Peter Bergen: What’s it like inside a Hamas tunnel? What does it feel like? What does it smell like?

Daphné Richemond Barak: You find yourself in this moist, dark, terrifying, claustrophobic environment where you never know what’s around the corner, literally.

Also, it can get very cold at night, and it’s suffocating. There’s not a lot of air. If you’re going to be there for a long time, you need oxygen, especially if you’re a soldier. And in some of the tunnels, you need to bend down because they’re not very high.

When you enter one of these tunnels very quickly, you lose your sense of direction completely — where you came from, where you’re going. It’s easy to get completely disoriented and confused quickly, and some people have major trouble with that.

In addition to the claustrophobia, you lose your sense of time, so you might feel like you’ve been there for two hours, but it’s only really been 20 minutes.

Bergen: How is Hamas communicating inside these tunnels? Because presumably, radio communication and that kind of thing doesn’t work.

Richemond Barak: So, cell phones, of course, are out of the question. It has implications for Hamas, which, to exploit this network of tunnels needs to figure out a way to be able to communicate among themselves, but it also has implications for the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). If they go down inside the tunnels, how do they maintain communication between the units underground but also with the forces above ground?

Bergen: The tunnel training facility that the Israelis have — tell us the history of that and how it works.

Richemond Barak: After the wake-up call of 2014 Operation Protective Edge in Gaza (Israel’s campaign against Hamas involving both airstrikes and ground raids that took 50 days), Israel started looking at the underground tunnel issue as a strategic issue.

Israeli soldiers went into Hamas’ tunnels during Operation Protective Edge, and they were not trained and not equipped, and there was combat in the tunnels.

As a result of Operation Protective Edge, Israel took a lot of measures not only for the detection techniques of tunnels but also to train in this subterranean environment.

They created elite units that are very well-versed in all aspects of underground warfare.

In addition, they started basic training in underground warfare for soldiers so they would know how to bypass a tunnel or neutralize a tunnel and then what equipment would be needed if they had to go down there. You need to be prepared for a different kind of environment but also a different kind of fight.

IDF also used simulators where you put these virtual reality goggles on, which would then take you inside the virtual tunnel. But it’s not the same as being in a tunnel. To experience it, you need to be inside an actual tunnel, and then one of the challenges you face there is decision-making: What do you do if you find a door? Do you breach the door? How do you breach the door?

Bergen: Why tunnels?

Richemond Barak: Why tunnels? The digging of tunnels is a very time-consuming and resource-intensive kind of work. It takes a long time to dig. You need to keep the location of the tunnels secret. So the point is, there’s a huge investment there. When you go inside the tunnel, this investment hits you in such a powerful way, especially in the Hezbollah tunnels, because they are near Israel’s northern border, where it’s hard rock that you must tunnel through — or more accurately in this case — excavate.

Tunnels neutralize the military capability of a more sophisticated enemy. It serves as a great equalizer between the two sides.

Bergen: Regarding Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was held hostage by Hamas between 2006 and 2011. Reading your book, I realize tunnels played an important role when he was taken. Can you explain how that happened?

Richemond Barak: What Hamas did was they used smuggling tunnels to bring Shalit into captivity, and it was a surprise because this was not what these tunnels had been used for until then. And Israel was surprised and suddenly realized, wait a second, maybe we should pay more attention to these tunnels because the kidnapping of an IDF soldier is considered a major strategic event. After all, Israel had to release some 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to get Shalit back.

Bergen: For the Israelis, one of their significant concerns now must surely be that these tunnels could be used to take additional soldiers as hostages.

Richemond Barak: Absolutely. Kidnappings of soldiers are always perceived in Israel as a strategic kind of event. So, additional kidnappings would be devastating at this stage.

Bergen: How big a role will the tunnels play in this war?

Richemond Barak: Israel understands that to eliminate or destroy Hamas’ military capabilities, this subterranean network of tunnels, where Hamas has its arsenal and command and control, needs to be eliminated. I won’t say entirely eliminated because I believe it’s impossible. But it needs to be a significant blow to this capability, much more severe than what was done during Operation Protective Edge.

It’s terrain that Hamas knows so well, in which it maneuvers with ease, and they don’t get lost inside their tunnels. It’s not that different from what ISIS did in Mosul, Iraq, or Raqqa in Syria; this was ISIS’ last-resort measure when it came to fighting the coalition fighting against ISIS. The fight moved to the underground.

But to achieve the strategic aim, which is to eliminate Hamas’ underground military infrastructure, the way to do that is not via an above-ground incursion.

Bergen: Is a dog force used by Israel inside tunnels?

Richemond Barak: Yes, dogs are trained to go into this environment.

Bergen: What about robots?

Richemond Barak: What you need for such a robot is the ability to walk in wet terrain because there’s water usually at the bottom of a tunnel. It’s moist. You need them to be able to go up ladders or staircases.

Bergen: What else might work?

Richemond Barak: High-pressure water would cause a collapse of the structures of the tunnels. It attacks the tunnel structure in a much more significant way than just flooding it with regular water. Remember that the ground can absorb some of the water.

Now, there could be civilians in the tunnels, and most likely, there could be hostages; you need to clear the tunnels first. If they’re inside the tunnel, then it’s obviously more difficult. And I wouldn’t use the high-pressure water.

Bergen: What about Hezbollah’s tunnels should the war widen?

Richemond Barak: To illustrate how difficult it is to detect tunnels, refer to Operation Northern Shield. This is the operation that Israel launched in 2018 to expose the cross-border tunnels that Hezbollah had dug.

This is after Israel had dramatically improved its detection techniques, but this is in a different kind of terrain because Hezbollah must tunnel through hard rock, whereas in Gaza, it is soft soil.

It took Israel — even though there were no hostilities — six weeks to detect six tunnels.

Even if you have intelligence, even if you’ve narrowed down the area where you suspect tunnels are located, even if you have the most sophisticated and available means of detecting tunnels, it will still take you a considerable amount of time to find the tunnels.

Gen. David Petraeus and historian Andrew Roberts: The huge challenge facing Israel, CNN.com

By Peter Bergen, CNN
18 minute read
Updated 7:37 AM EDT, Mon October 23, 2023

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
Two leading experts on warfare say the Gaza war may be more challenging than any of the conflicts they have examined since 1945. General David Petraeus, one of the most prominent practitioners of warfare, and Lord Andrew Roberts, an eminent historian of war, have written a new book, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.”

It’s an insightful and thorough examination of key military conflicts over the past seven and a half decades. The book was published as the conflict between Hamas and Israel entered its second week.

Petraeus and Roberts provided a sobering assessment of the challenge facing the Israeli military in trying to eliminate Hamas after its October 7 terrorist attack on southern Israel killed more than 1,400 people.

They emphasized that policymakers who do not have a good plan for the “day after” the fighting stops are simply seeding the ground for the next conflict, which in the case of Gaza necessitates some kind of positive vision for what the Palestinians can expect when the guns fall silent.

I interviewed Petraeus and Roberts for the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen.” Our discussion was edited for length and clarity.

PETER BERGEN: How might this war unfold?

DAVID PETRAEUS: Israel’s big idea right now is to destroy Hamas, which means rendering the enemy incapable of accomplishing its mission without reconstitution. As a military commander, that means not just a lot of as-precise-as-possible airstrikes, but at some point, you have to go in on the ground, clear every building, every floor, every room, every basement, every tunnel — part of a very extensive tunnel system — against terrorists who know this place better than the backs of their hands, have demonstrated significant tactical creativity, and have shown a willingness to blow themselves up to take Israeli soldiers with them.

We can’t envision a more challenging context for a military commander and soldiers than this one.

David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts

And by the way, you not only have to clear every building like that, but you also must then retain each building by leaving a substantial force behind, one that’s large enough that it can’t be swarmed by the enemy who can then add captured soldiers as hostages to the over 200 hostages that have already been taken. And, of course, this will all be done in a densely populated area with substantial numbers of civilians — even with hundreds of thousands of people — leaving Gaza City and northern Gaza.

Andrew and I have gone back through all these conflicts that we recount from 1945 until now, and we can’t envision a more challenging context for a military commander and soldiers than this one.

The big idea in the past was described as “mowing the grass.” Hamas would do something particularly egregious. Israel would make a limited incursion — use a lot of air power, drone strikes and so forth to “mow the grass” to damage Hamas, its organization, and its infrastructure. And then Israelis would enjoy a few years of relative peace.

Clearly, that approach has been invalidated. But if you go in and say you mow the grass all the way down to the dirt — you can even pull the grass out — if you don’t have an answer to the question of “then what” that is reasonable and that can keep Hamas and Islamic Jihad from coming back, you’ll have mowed the grass, and perhaps it doesn’t grow back for a few years but eventually, it will, and the Israelis are going to be back in the situation that they were in before that horrific attack two weeks ago.

BERGEN: Some of the other obstacles that the Israelis will likely encounter in Gaza: Hostages, human shields, suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices, booby traps, snipers and fighters not in uniform. And Hamas has had years to prepare.

PETRAEUS: Also, a lot of civilians, in addition to hostages. It’s hard to imagine anything more challenging than this, and that’s especially true if there is a push to do this rapidly.

BERGEN: The fight against ISIS in Mosul that began in late 2016, the second largest city in Iraq, seems like an interesting analogue to what may unfold in Gaza: Mosul was a city of two million people that ISIS took over and had plenty of time to dig in, its foot soldiers were willing to fight to the death.

How long did it take the Iraqi military assisted by American advisers and US airpower to remove ISIS from Mosul?

PETRAEUS: Over nine months. Longer if you just take the period of planning, the positioning of forces, and the setting of conditions for the attack, and that was with considerable American support — what we call “advise, assist, and enable,” the enabling including lots of drones and precision munitions. And also, a lot of situational awareness from American intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance platforms that we could put over the fighting.

We had an American officer in Iraqi command posts with Iraqi commanders, literally watching the same screen, watching our drone “feed,” so that they could make decisions together. They could call on American air power, precision surface-to-surface munitions, and so forth.

BERGEN: It still took nine months.

PETRAEUS: Exactly right. And by the way, Mosul’s population wasn’t two million at that time. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had left. It was certainly roughly the same size of Gaza, but not with the same number of high-rises that you find in Gaza. .

BERGEN: Two of the Israeli goals seem incompatible — destroy Hamas completely and try and rescue the 200-plus hostages.

PETRAEUS: It will be very challenging to accomplish both those objectives. And then beyond that, how to administer Gaza after the conflict is over? Not just handing out humanitarian assistance and rebuilding and reestablishing markets and schools and so forth, but also conducting a counterinsurgency campaign to ensure that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad can’t come back. And of course, a vision for the Palestinian people of what life can be like when Hamas is dismantled has to be part of this effort as well.

A Regional Conflict?

ANDREW ROBERTS: It’s also worth pointing out, of course, that you’ve got to do all of this in a situation where you don’t know what Iran will do next. You don’t know what Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is going to do next. The West Bank front could open up at any moment. A large number of Israeli reservists, 360,000, has been called up but if you’re suddenly fighting on multiple fronts, that force gets dissipated.

BERGEN: General Petraeus, you were CENTCOM commander. Your area of operation included all the countries around Israel with some kind of alignment with Iran, the Houthis in Yemen who are backed by Iran, Iranian-backed militias have a presence in Iraq, Syria is strongly backed by Iran, Hezbollah is effectively an arm of the Iranian government in Lebanon and Hamas itself has Iranian support. So, when you look at all that, what do you think?

PETRAEUS: I think it is enormously challenging, and it could get worse. There could be regionalization of the war in a way that would be very, very serious. You can assess that Hezbollah doesn’t want to revisit the war it fought with Israel in 2006 and the damage and destruction inflicted on Hezbollah in the wake of their incursion into Israel. But Iran may push them that way, and so could public sentiment in the Shia areas in the south of Lebanon.

Hezbollah has 150,000 rockets, so they are not a little militia force. That number of rockets could overwhelm Israel’s air defense system. But then, Israel would be compelled to respond with devastating strikes. And Hezbollah knows that. Hopefully, that knowledge will dissuade them from conducting substantial attacks on Israel.

BERGEN: If this invasion happens, the pictures of destruction will just go on and on and on. The images are going to inflame the Arab world.

PETRAEUS: The amount of battlefield imagery is a much more prominent element in conflict now than it was even 10, 15 years ago when I was privileged to command in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is, of course, because of the widespread present proliferation of social media sites, some of which are really siloes for one view or another, the proliferation of smart phones, access to the internet, and social media onto which individuals can upload videos, but that are not always obviously reporting truthfully. It is also because of the greater presence of commercial imagery and other forms of open-source intelligence.

BERGEN: Would pressure on Hezbollah to mount a large-scale attack increase as weeks go on and more pictures of destruction come out of Gaza?

PETRAEUS: It certainly could. So, the periods after Friday prayers will become more challenging in Muslim countries in the region, and also in Israel. This was often a challenge in Iraq when I was in command there: If there was some issue that arose that aroused the people, then tragically, it would often be amplified by the mullahs of different mosques in their Friday sermons and the resulting demonstrations could be very problematic.

Surprise attacks

BERGEN: There are a couple of big themes in your book that I want to draw out. Robert Gates, the former US Secretary of Defense, kept a maxim in his office which said, “The easiest way to achieve complete strategic surprise is to commit an act that makes no sense or is even self-destructive.” Yet you say, “surprise attacks are surprisingly common.” I found it fascinating that you found that dictatorships and terrorist groups are much more likely to launch surprise attacks because democracies must build consensus, which can take time. They can’t just launch a war without the political support of their people.

ROBERTS: It tends to be authoritarian or totalitarian powers that launch these surprise attacks. What we discovered, again and again, is that — and which I think, by the way, will also be the case here with the Gazan situation — is the response of the country that’s been attacked is all the more outraged for having been the victim of a surprise attack. Look at America after Pearl Harbor. There was a sort of righteous fury that grabbed the nation and held it for four years until the US defeated Japan.

The country that’s been attacked is all the more outraged for having been the victim of a surprise attack.

Andrew Roberts

PETRAEUS: Same after 9/11, of course. Now, interestingly, President Joe Biden, in addition to expressing America’s big idea, which is to have Israel’s back absolutely, also offered a caution to the Israelis about what followed 9/11, acknowledging that we didn’t get everything right, that the quest for vengeance can lead you to take actions that, in some respects, you might look back and say we’d like to have a redo of this or that.

ROBERTS: Well, partly, I think that’s because, especially in response to surprise attacks, it’s very difficult to promote a compromise solution if you’ve just been attacked, let alone attacked in this medieval and sadistic way that Hamas has attacked in southern Israel. So, to get into the sort of frame of mind where you are offering something to the enemy requires an extraordinary degree of statesmanship that is often not present when you’re the victim of a surprise attack.

BERGEN: The 1973 Yom Kippur War, you cover in some detail in the book. What are the parallels with this war that Hamas has unleashed?

ROBERTS: The Yom Kippur War started with an Arab surprise attack and ended with a catastrophe for the Arab armies, so hopefully, there are some direct parallels with history in this latest Hamas attack. The Israeli army was within sight of Damascus and was only a few days away from Cairo when peace broke out in 1973. So, there is a tremendous capacity in the IDF for taking the punches and returning them with vigor, which I’m assuming will be the case when it comes to Hamas.

Securing Gaza

BERGEN: In 2005, the Israelis pulled out of Gaza, and elections were held which Hamas then won, and there have been no elections since. Israel doesn’t seem to want to own the Gaza problem.

PETRAEUS: They do not want to, and also they can’t bring in the Palestinian Authority (the overarching Palestinian entity based in Israel’s West Bank) on the backs of Israeli tanks.

BERGEN: In your book, you say that to secure any kind of area, as a rule of thumb, you need one security person per 50 inhabitants. There are some two million inhabitants of Gaza, which would suggest you need around 40,000 security personnel to secure Gaza. And if the Israelis aren’t going to secure it, who is?

PETRAEUS: You’ve raised a very good point; whatever interim international authority might be established in Gaza will not just have to distribute humanitarian assistance, restore basic services, repair damaged infrastructure, reopen markets, schools, clinics and hospitals, and restore all the social services that Hamas’ political wing have overseen. The interim authority is also going to have to conduct a counterinsurgency operation with a hard edge, with very good intelligence capabilities, because there will be remnants of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and they will try to reestablish control in Gaza. That has to be prevented.

I don’t know that 40,000 security personnel will be necessary in this particular case, but certainly, it will be a substantial force – and I would err on the side of larger rather than smaller.

BERGEN: Another one of the big themes that I took away from the book is, again and again, policymakers often have no real plan for the “day after” the fighting stops.

PETRAEUS: There was an episode when I was a two-star general and commander of the great 101st Airborne Division in the early days of the fight to Baghdad, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where we were ordered to take the city of Najaf, a city of about 400,000-500,000 people then, and the holiest city in Shia Islam.

After several days of fighting, the enemy collapsed and melted away. We took control of the city, and I go on the radio. I called my boss and said, “Hey, boss, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that we own Najaf.”

He asked, “What’s the bad news?”

I replied, “We own Najaf. What do you want us to do with it?”

And so, I hope that some weeks, months down the road, there’s not a call that’s made, “Hey, boss, I got good news and bad news. We own Gaza City or all of Gaza. What do you want us to do with it?”

There has to be a viable plan for the day after.

ROBERTS: The Malayan Emergency of 1952 to ’60 is a very good example of where the big idea was got right, not just “clear and hold,” but also the fact that the commander there, Sir Gerald Templer, offered the Malaysian people their independence pretty much from the beginning as they fought a communist insurgency.

And so that helped capture their “hearts and minds.” That was where the original phrase came from; winning the “hearts and minds” of the local population was essential in putting down the local communist insurgency. So, they got the population on side, which was essential, defeated the communists and independence was given in 1957.

I don’t know how that would translate into the present Gazan situation, but there has to be something that the people on the ground can really look forward to, something positive.

A positive vison for the Palestinians

PETRAEUS: There has to be a positive vision for the Palestinian people that life will be much better if Hamas is eliminated and out of their lives and that the international community will support them.

BERGEN: But the Israeli government has little to no credibility with the Palestinians in Gaza. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have much credibility either because they’re in the West Bank, and they’re seen as almost collaborators with Israel by the folks in Gaza.

PETRAEUS: And by the folks in the West Bank, in many cases, too.

It couldn’t be more difficult. Andrew uses the phrase “fiendishly difficult,” and that is correct.

You can’t just say that you’re going to destroy Hamas. You also must lay out the vision for the Palestinian people and the future of Gaza.

David Petraeus

BERGEN: So, if you were advising Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today from a military point of view, general, what would you advise, and Andrew, from a political point of view, what would you advise?

PETRAEUS: Well, what’s interesting is I think you must combine the two. You can’t just say that you’re going to destroy Hamas. You also must lay out the vision for the Palestinian people and the future of Gaza. And this will be challenging because there will be a vision announced, I hope, but there’s also going to be a substantial loss of innocent civilian life and very substantial damage and destruction of civilian infrastructure and civilian dwellings.

Israel’s advantages

ROBERTS: The last chapter of our book is “The Future of War,” and we look at cyber and sensors and space, AI, robotics, and also, of course, drones. And this is one area where the Israelis will have an advantage.

BERGEN: Well, let’s talk about some Israeli potential advantages. You mentioned robots. Also infrared and acoustic tools that might be able to look down into tunnels and armored bulldozers. What about morale? Morale is a major theme of your book. Whether it’s the Ukrainians fighting the Russians or Israelis volunteering to fight today. It’s a nebulous concept on some levels, but how important is it?

ROBERTS: Morale is absolutely central to warfare. We came across this again and again in the course of writing this book. It’s a very interesting thing when demoralization can take place and how it can take place. But if you’ve got morale, it is “worth several divisions,” as Napoleon always used to say.

PETRAEUS: You’ve had a barbaric, horrific, unspeakable set of actions that killed some 1,400 Israelis, and to put that in perspective, from a US point of view, that’s the equivalent of more than 50,000 Americans having been killed on 9/11, as opposed to the 3,000 terrible losses that we sustained. And the over 200 hostages are the equivalent of well over 6,000 Americans being taken hostage on that day. And I think we are not fully appreciating the impact of all this on the Israeli people and government.

The Israelis have enormous morale. When they were called up, members of the reserves literally drove their own vehicles down to southern Israel. And they just parked their cars on the side of the road and reported for duty.

But that also does raise yet one more challenge. The bulk of this force is reservists. They’re not serving professionals or on active duty. Some will have done recent active duty or perhaps a lot of reserve duty but by no means all, and I’m sure that there are those in the ranks who are a bit more advanced in age than the typical 19-year-old infantry soldier.

So, they’ve got to be brought back in, reequipped, introduced to the more cutting-edge technology, say, night vision goggles and close combat optics on weapons that are very, very important so that you can have a precise fire, not just “spray and pray.” So, all of this has to be done as well. You have to reorganize, re-equip and retrain to some degree. At the very least, they’ve got to get whatever weapon systems they have now and get reacquainted with that and do drills with their fellow soldiers as units.

BERGEN: And, of course, reservists are people who’ve got day jobs in the Israeli economy. If this continues for a long time, you have social, political, and economic effects inside Israel.

PETRAEUS: In this case, there are multiple clocks running, but one of those is the domestic economy clock, that if you call up 360,000 out of a population that’s around 10 million, obviously there’s an enormous impact on the economy.

Beyond that, the policy makers have essentially taken the slack out of the trigger, and there will be pressure to squeeze, perhaps sooner rather than later, because of the imperative of getting on with this. But that should be tempered with a recognition that urban operations need to be pursued in a deliberate, methodical, careful manner.

BERGEN: General Petraeus you famously said close to the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, “Tell me how this ends.” How does this Gaza war end?

PETRAEUS: It depends on the conduct of the campaign. Can they fully clear, hold and then start the rebuilding? Are they able to identify, in particular, a true vision for the Palestinian people that is inspiring to them? “Inspiring” might be a bit of a high bar, but let’s use this moment as a catalyst — this horrible, despicable, unspeakable set of barbaric murders — to try to communicate a vision for the future that can reduce grievances in the future, noting that nothing can conceivably justify the atrocities committed by Hamas.

ROBERTS: One thing that we can be certain of, though, in all this uncertainty is that if Israel doesn’t destroy Hamas, or if it fails to, then we know how this ends, because it ends with an organization which, in the next generation, will do exactly the same thing to Israelis, will continue to kill Jews.

BERGEN: General Petraeus, you’re a former director of the CIA. After October 7th, we’ve heard a lot about intelligence failures. The question is, when we get further away from this, do you suspect that it will be seen as mostly a policy failure, misunderstanding Hamas’ aims, having kind of a too-rosy view of Hamas and so ignoring intelligence that might have been germane?

PETRAEUS: I think this was a real intelligence failure, and I think it was also a military readiness failure. My speculation is that Hamas dramatically improved its operational security and prevented Israel from developing the understanding of the extremists’ intentions well before they materialized as terrorist operations.

I think this was a real intelligence failure, and I think it was also a military readiness failure.

David Petraeus

I think we’ll come to understand better how creative Hamas was in using all kinds of ways to get into Israel — paragliders as well as bulldozers and golf carts. But in advance of that, they blinded the surveillance systems along the wall by taking out the communication nodes that connect those observation systems to command posts that are monitoring those systems, and so there was an overreliance on technology. And that technology was blinded at a critical moment.

BERGEN: What about the US “pivot to Asia?” Is that sort of dead now?

PETRAEUS: No. The primary focus of the US overall, especially the military of the US, is rightly the Indo-Pacific region, and the situation in the Mideast doesn’t detract from that. I have long felt that the term “pivot” was not very helpful—because it implies that you’re pivoting away from something, and the more accurate term — and the one that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used to use — was the “rebalance” to Asia, and that’s what we should have been saying that we were doing.

I always also thought that it was unwise to try to leave the Middle East to the extent that we have tried, and I think we should retain a substantial force there.

BERGEN: It turns out that getting out of the Middle East is something almost every recent American president wants to do, but it never really happens.

Palestinian analyst: Hamas had ‘no clear-cut political goal, CNN.com

GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie discusses the 2024 race. Watch CNN
Palestinian analyst: Hamas had ‘no clear-cut political goal’
Peter Bergen
Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN
7 minute read
Updated 12:53 PM EDT, Thu October 19, 2023

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen,” also on Appleand Spotify. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
Khaled Hroub, a Palestinian academic and the author of “Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide,” says he believes that Hamas did not expect that the October 7 attack on Israel would be the scale that it became, and the group didn’t have a plan for what came afterward. Speaking to me on Sunday, Hroub also said that Israel’s expected ground invasion of Gaza doesn’t seem to incorporate any planning for the “day after” the war is over.

Hroub was born in Bethlehem in the West Bank in a refugee camp, and his family moved to Jordan and then to the UK, where he completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge. He is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, Qatar.

Hroub told me he believes that Hezbollah in Lebanon on Israel’s northern border will not get involved in the war in a large-scale way unless the Gaza conflict drags on for many weeks. If it does, he said, the pressure on Hezbollah to fight Israel will increase.

Our interview was edited for length and clarity.

Peter Bergen: What do you think about the scale and timing of the Hamas attack in Israel?

Khaled Hroub: My analysis is Hamas did not plan this attack to be as large as it was. I think they planned something limited; they wanted to do something short, swift and effective.

They had been planning for this for a long time, but once they penetrated Israel, they were surprised by the ease of the operation. The operation spread in different directions without prior planning.

Once the operation became larger than planned, it appeared that there was no clear second phase to this Hamas operation. There was no clear-cut political goal or demand behind it. So, it looked like an ad hoc expansion of what had started to be the kidnapping of some Israeli soldiers and then swapping them for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. They were surprised by their own success.

Bergen: So, who’s in charge of Hamas’ operations? Is it Mohammed Deif, an elusive Hamas military commander?

Hroub: It is hard to tell because the media focuses on Mohammed Deif, but Hamas has a collective leadership at the end of the day.

Israeli policy seems to target these Hamas leaders, thinking they are solely responsible. So, if we assassinate this guy or that guy, things will be dramatically different. Over the years, this theory has been proven wrong. So, the more the Israelis assassinate Hamas leaders, the more a new generation comes in, even younger and maybe even more radical.

Bergen: You said in the past that when Israel undertook previous large-scale military operations in Gaza, it backfired because it strengthened Hamas. Do you think that situation is going to be different this time?

Hroub: I think neither Israel nor Hamas had a very clear plan for what happens down the road. Even if the Israeli military succeeded in destroying Hamas, the question facing everyone is, what’s next?

So instead of having one single address now in Gaza that you can deter — Hamas does have institutions — you will end up with a bunch of splinter groups, certainly more radical than Hamas, and without any method of deterring them. So, this is why I think Israel doesn’t have a clear plan for the second phase of whatever invasion they might do.

Bergen: The 2006 Palestinian elections were won by Hamas. The George W. Bush administration had encouraged that election but was surprised by Hamas’ success. What was the impact of that election?

Hroub: I think it led to the situation that we are facing at this very moment. Why is this? If you go back to the context, the regional and global atmosphere back then was dominated by the so-called war on terror, led by George Bush. This war was fought in countries and against groups, including Hamas.

The other campaign of George Bush’s administration was the region’s democratization. So, these two efforts were going hand in hand for the Bush administration: One was the democratization of the Middle East, and the other was the campaign against terrorism.

So, Hamas used the Bush democratization campaign to protect itself from the heat of the war on terror, and they won the 2006 elections and came into power in Gaza.

Bergen: Why did Hamas win the elections in 2006?

Hroub: Hamas’ victory in 2006 was not only the appeal of Hamas; it was the failure of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority in delivering their promises of having a Palestinian state.

Israel also did not fulfill its promises to the Palestinians, and there was no hope. Even Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the 1993 Oslo peace accords moving forward the peace process, was assassinated by an Israeli. And since then, you have right-wing politics dominating the Israeli scene. So that was another kind of failure.

A third party that failed was the US. The US did not care about the perspective of the Palestinians. These multiple failures fed into the popularity of Hamas.

Palestinian voters also hated the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and its failure in bringing about a Palestinian state, and they wanted an alternative: Hamas, which was seen as not corrupt and also adhering to resistance against Israel.

Now the image is different, of course, because Hamas has been in power for 16 years, and people have mixed views about Hamas’ performance.

Bergen: What is the role of religion in Hamas?

Hroub: Very central, the mother organization of Hamas is the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Jerusalem in 1945. During the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and most of the 1980s, they did the business of any other traditional branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, meaning working in charities, mosques, student unions and professional associations.

But they never adopted a resistance strategy against Israel, which meant that during this period, they had a dubious reputation among the Palestinians because they were not resisting Israel.

What changed was the gradual Islamization of Palestinian society, and in 1987, when the first Palestinian uprising happened, they changed their strategy and adopted resistance.

Since then, we have had these two tendencies within Hamas. One is nationalist; the other is religious. In times of crisis and war, the religious component comes to the forefront at the expense of the political and nationalist components.

Bergen: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the Qatari capital, Doha, last week. The Qatari government has a relationship with Hamas and has also had success in brokering deals to get hostages and prisoners released; for instance, five Americans held by Iran were released last month. Do you think there’s some possibility there, or is the war too advanced for that discussion to happen in a meaningful way?

Hroub: I think it’s still kind of very early to talk seriously about this issue. Hamas will be very stubborn because the only concrete outcome that could come from this confrontation is to free Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. And this doesn’t fit with the mood nowadays dominating Israel. So, I think it’s a bit too early.

Bergen: Do you think Hezbollah stays on the sidelines mostly during the war against Hamas, or that can change?

Hroub: Hezbollah may get involved the longer the war goes on. If it goes on for three, four weeks, things might change.

Bergen: Is peace at all possible here in the longer term?

Hroub: Since the killing of Rabin, the idea of a two-state solution on the Israeli side has been continuously going down the drain.

Bergen: What happens to those living in Gaza?

Hroub: There are many kinds of local voices calling upon the Palestinians not to leave Gaza, telling them, “If you leave, you will never come back.” The Arab countries are extremely sensitive to taking more Palestinians into their territories, whether in Egypt or Jordan.

Bergen: Do you think this Hamas attack on Israel was an intelligence failure or a policy failure by the Israelis, or both?

Hroub: I think both.

It was a policy failure because you have had Palestinians caged in Gaza since 2007, without any hope, and in that long period of 16 years, you have conditions in the Gaza Strip (going) from bad to worse by the day; they blame, of course, Israel’s blockade of Gaza, but there’s also a fair share of the blame on Hamas, which failed to provide employment and other services.

Youth unemployment in Gaza is 60%, the highest in the world. There is no hope whatsoever. So, Hamas wanted to do something to break this deadlock, even if it was very dramatic. If they freed their prisoners from Israel, they could at least bring in something not only for Gaza but also the Palestinians.

Israel ground attack on Gaza would be a long, deadly ordeal, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
It will be long, bloody, and complicated. That’s the way two leading experts on urban warfare described the prospect of a ground attack by Israel on Hamas’ base in the streets and tunnels of Gaza.

Colonel (Ret.) Liam Collins and US Maj. (Ret.) John Spencer co-authored the book “Understanding Urban Warfare.”

Collins is the executive director of the Madison Policy Forum, a senior fellow with New America and a US Army Special Forces officer. He served for 27 years with multiple deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies with the Modern War Institute at the US Military Academy at West Point. He served 25 years as an infantry soldier, including two combat tours in Iraq.

They provided a sobering assessment of Israel’s capabilities, saying they don’t think the Israeli military is prepared for the large-scale urban combat they will likely encounter in Gaza. This type of operation can take many months because an advanced military like the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) loses many of its advantages when fighting in a city.

The experts said Israel does retain some advantages, such as specially developed armored bulldozers that can be used in urban combat and the ability to fight at night, but that must be weighed against their lack of experience and training in urban combat. At the same time, Hamas has more than 200 hostages, human shields, suicide bombers, tunnels, booby traps, many civilians that remain trapped and has had years to dig in.

If the Israeli invasion goes ahead, they estimate that the IDF will destroy “80 to 90” percent of Gaza’s urban areas and the operation “will change the landscape of this area for decades.”

PETER BERGEN: What is the IDF’s record on urban warfare of this type?

JOHN SPENCER: Not much.

The biggest gap in the IDF is not their training areas or their tanks. It’s in a body of knowledge on how to do this big of an urban operation as fast and effectively as possible. To be clear, all militaries, to include the United States, are not trained, manned or equipped for this type of urban battle.

LIAM COLLINS: I don’t think their military is prepared to conduct large-scale urban operations. When you go to Israel and try to find their large urban training center, like many other militaries, they have something, but it’s not what you need to train for something like Gaza.

Israel has been extremely effective at antiterrorism operations in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the country, but that doesn’t translate to large-scale military operations in an urban environment.

SPENCER: There are a lot of unknowns that will be encountered, both on Hamas capabilities — everything from surface-to-air missiles to what don’t we know about that Hamas has in preparation for a likely retaliation by Israel.

BERGEN: Let’s talk specifically about the obstacles the Israelis face in Gaza: Hostages, human shields, suicide bombers, tunnels, cross-border tunnels, improvised explosive devices and booby traps, and many civilians. There is also no element of surprise here.

For political reasons, given international pressures, the Israelis also may want to make this operation in Gaza as short as possible. On the other hand, for military purposes, this could go on for months, right?

SPENCER: I say it would take months to do the mission in Gaza.

BERGEN: What advantages does an advanced military like the IDF lose in a well-populated, dense urban space?

SPENCER: They lose the ability to use advanced technologies to strike the enemy before you get close to them, which is what all militaries want to do. That’s why urban warfare is the most difficult, because all those superior advantages that a big military has are reduced and, in some respects, eliminated.

They lose the ability to do “combined arms maneuver.” The whole concept of combined arms maneuver from World War II to today is about having mobile forces that can maneuver around the enemy and envelop them. You’re not going to do that in an urban area. No military wants to funnel its forces into a single street or multiple single streets.

COLLINS: To provide some tactical-level examples, there are so many opportunities for the enemy to hide and move without being observed by the intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, or drones up in the sky. They can’t see the enemy because they’re moving through tunnels. The enemy can move between buildings by blowing walls from one building to another. And then, in terms of the firepower, even if you see them, you can’t always shoot because there might be another building in the way, and then all the while, you have to be concerned about civilians in that area.

There are so many opportunities for the enemy to hide and move without being observed by the intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, or drones up in the sky.

SPENCER: The other thing they lose is the effects of their weapons. In the concrete jungle of urban warfare, most of your weapons may not even penetrate the building the enemy is in. Yes, there are many that do, but most of the standard-issue weapons don’t.

BERGEN: Because?

COLLINS I’ll give an example. Back in 2002, we dropped two 500-pound bombs on a small compound in rural area of Afghanistan, and somehow this Taliban fighter lived through that and threw a grenade at us. These structures provide inherent defenses for the defender. You look at the destruction of a building and think no one could have survived that, but people routinely do.

Hamas wants to buy as much time as possible. The longer the urban fighting lasts, the more that political pressure will build for Israel to stop the attack due to the collateral damage and civilian casualties that are an inherent part of urban war. Their goal isn’t to destroy the IDF. They can’t. It’s to buy time.

BERGEN: The Israelis presumably retain some advantages?

SPENCER: D9 Bulldozers. Two-story remote-controlled bulldozers that can go forward and take the enemy’s advantage away. The advantage Hamas has is that it’s hidden in concrete buildings. Still, if you lead with an armored bulldozer that can take the first strike of anything — for instance, RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades) — that gives you the advantage to take away the concrete building protection that the enemy relies on. So that’s one of the low-tech solutions that the IDF built, a capability the US military doesn’t really have.

COLLINS: The Israelis also retain night-fighting capability; doing the attacking at night is to their advantage because that does favor them more than the enemy.

BERGEN: How do you suss out what the tunnels look like if you don’t have overhead imagery?

SPENCER: The overhead imagery won’t help you at the depth that some of these tunnels are at. You have to have specific underground mapping technologies.

BERGEN: What about using robots, and what about using tear gas in tunnels?

SPENCER: Tear gas is an effective way to clear a building of enemy personnel, without destroying it. It is unlikely Israel will use it because of the political aspect of it; what does it look like when Israel is using gas?

BERGEN: You quote the Australian strategist David Kilcullen in your book: “Cities are sponges for troops.” Why?

SPENCER: Because of that force power that you need to clear even a street. You’re not going to bomb your way to that. An urban defender of a much smaller size can soak up your entire military, but that isn’t to say that it’s not a mission that can be accomplished. It just requires a lot of force and power, including a lot of soldiers.

COLLINS: And the other challenge with the urban environment, too is you could clear an area, but as soon as you leave that building, you can no longer assume it’s cleared because the enemy may circle back on you using tunnels or through the walls of other buildings. They may get behind you and then reoccupy a building or an area as soon as you leave it.

BERGEN: Snipers are a tough problem. Presumably, Hamas has snipers who are going to be entrenched, and they know the terrain very well.

SPENCER: There are a lot of lessons learned from the last 20 years of urban battles, to include acoustic sensors that can tell you where a sniper is.

Also, if you’ve ever seen an IDF soldier, they have a very large bag that goes to the top of their head. It’s a special type of camouflage. The IDF wears on their heads these bags that cover their helmets to fool snipers

BERGEN: What about robots on the Israeli side?

COLLINS: They will, without a doubt, employ them, but they probably don’t have as many as they would like, and they’re slow.

BERGEN: Hamas provides garbage removal. It provides some social services. It was elected a government in 2006. There’s been no election since. But it functions on multiple levels. It has a terrorist component. Does that complicate things?

COLLINS: You have this hybrid organization that’s a terrorist organization and a paramilitary organization that provides government services.

So, Israel is not — despite stating that the goal is to “destroy” Hamas — they know that’s unrealistic. That’s just a political statement they have to say. Their goal is to degrade them and prevent a future attack. So, really, what they’re going after is the leadership, the terrorist wing, the fighting wing of Hamas.

So, they will call the end to the operation when they feel that they have culminated in terms of the diminishing point of returns on degrading additional capability versus the political cost of continuing that operation to degrade additional capability.

BERGEN: What does the day after the fighting stops look like in Gaza?

COLLINS: It’s people moving back to their houses. You’re removing rubble. You’re trying to get services back up and running. Nongovernment organizations are coming in and trying to restore some semblance of normal life to the Palestinians.

BERGEN: The Israelis already pulled out of Gaza back in 2005 because it was too big of a headache, and the Israelis that I’ve spoken say, “We’re not going to hold Gaza,” but, if that’s the case, then who is?

SPENCER: Militaries have an abysmal record at building states or nations or building cities in general. Who will govern Gaza? Who is going to provide services and security and reconstruction? That’s a massive question.

BERGEN: Let’s go to Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq that was taken by ISIS in 2014. In your book, you write about one hundred billion dollars’ worth of damage to the city during the fight to clear ISIS out of Mosul from late 2016 into 2017.

SPENCER: ISIS had two years of defensive planning and building a defense in depth with massive obstacle belts in Mosul, and that is why it took nine months for a hundred thousand security Iraqi forces — albeit nothing like the IDF — backed by the US with the world’s best air power to discriminately, building by building, destroy most of Mosul.

That’s a telling sign of what it would look like to accomplish the current mission we think the IDF will get. It will destroy 80 to 90% of the infrastructure and buildings in Gaza’s urban areas. This will change the landscape of this area for a generation.

COLLINS: People should know that even under the most stringent laws of war, cities are destroyed in order to accomplish this type of mission.

BERGEN: Israel seems like a tank-based army. Walk me through what tanks in an urban environment can do and the advantages and disadvantages they have.

COLLINS: Tanks have a huge advantage in the open desert. But many of their advantages get neutralized or lessened when you enter the urban environment. Their ability to range targets from a distance is greatly reduced and they can’t elevate their main gun to engage targets in tall buildings. So, you need a tank as part of your combined arms team in urban combat, but it’s much more vulnerable there than it is elsewhere.

Tanks have a huge advantage in the open desert. But many of their advantages get neutralized or lessened when you enter the urban environment.

Liam Collins

SPENCER: Of all the challenges inherent to this type of urban combat, the tank is extremely vulnerable.

But there is no other tool that is as vital as the tank when you fight in a city, because it can go down a street and take the punch of the defender. It has a firepower unique to ground forces that it can punch through concrete, and it has the mobility to move around.

The disadvantage, of course, is that it can’t see everything. It is vulnerable. It is slow. You can see it coming. So, it has to be protected with infantry.

BERGEN: So, you’ve got to have substantial amounts of infantry protecting the tank?

SPENCER: Right. That’s the lesson of the Ukraine war; Russia is an artillery tank-based army, so when it entered Ukraine in early 2022 they had reduced numbers of infantry and they lost an ungodly number of tanks.

COLLINS: You need the infantry to protect the tank, but you need the tank to protect the infantry.

BERGEN: Doesn’t this have some implications for the “mass” involved when you launch a military operation in Gaza? Defending is easier than attacking?

SPENCER: We usually say this is the “combat power.” In an open terrain, you need three combat powers — some people just say troops — to one defender. In urban terrain, historically, you need fifteen or ten to one combat power because you can’t mass in urban areas.

One street can suck up an entire battalion just to try to move down that street.

BERGEN: And a battalion would be 800 troops?

SPENCER: Up to 900.

BERGEN: Let’s just do some math here, what does it look like in terms of the size of the force that would need to be sent into Gaza?

SPENCER: There’s a lot of variables there, but it’s about power, not numbers. This isn’t the Battle of Berlin in 1945 where the Soviets put a battalion down every street. This is why urban battles also happen repeatedly, because nobody has a million-man army anymore. They have smaller armies, where a small opposing force can gain power in the urban environment, and you have to throw a lot of combat power — usually that’s artillery — to get them out.

BERGEN: Let me ask you, Liam, about the hostages because you come from the US special operations community.

COLLINS: I’m pretty confident that they don’t have the intelligence of where the hostages are located. They are most likely hiding them underground. And you absolutely need that kind of intelligence to conduct an operation, and then even if you have the intelligence, do you have the means to get there safely and get them out with a reasonable chance of success without losing the hostage and losing a significant portion of your force?

So, I think nations are probably staging their forces so that if they do get the intelligence, they can then decide if they’re going to try to rescue their citizens. But I think we’re most likely to see results through diplomatic means as was the case when Hamas released the American mother and her daughter last week.

Now, the Israeli hostages. I think those are the ones Hamas is going to hold on to the longest.

SPENCER: To have this many hostages from this many countries intermixed with the enemy and the Israelis about to execute this operation is an unprecedented situation in my mind.

To have this many hostages from this many countries intermixed with the enemy and the Israelis about to execute this operation is an unprecedented situation.

John Spencer

BERGEN: Why did you write a book on urban warfare?

COLLINS: Battles are increasingly being fought in urban areas, and militaries worldwide, including our military in the US, are underprepared or unprepared to do it. I constantly challenge people to name a significant battle in Ukraine that’s not in one of the cities.

SPENCER: Militaries are inherently resistant to urban warfare. It is a place where they don’t want to go. So, they don’t prepare for it, and that’s why the enemy continues to resort to it.

COLLINS: But you can’t help but be pulled into urban warfare because humans fight wars, and humans live in cities.

How the public can play a role in stopping the next mass shooter, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. Laura Tillman is a producer of the podcast. The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
After every large-scale mass shooting in the United States — including the one in Maine on Wednesday that left 18 victims dead and 13 others injured — there are the familiar and justified calls to limit or ban the sale of semi-automatic weapons or to pass more “red flag” laws in certain states so that guns don’t end up in the hands of those who may pose a threat to themselves or other people.

But as we have seen time and again, not much ends up happening when it comes to passing comprehensive gun control laws in the US. And that can lead to a feeling of powerlessness.

There are, however, promising efforts by US law enforcement and psychologists to better understand how a mass shooter goes down the “pathway to violence,” and how he — nearly all mass shooters are male — might be dissuaded or diverted from carrying out a violent act. Officials say the public can also play a critical role in this effort.

A perverse byproduct of the rise in mass shootings is that it’s given investigators more and more useful information with which to draw a portrait of the typical killer. This emerging field is known as “threat management.”

Ground zero for that effort is the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia, which we visited earlier this year for the Audible podcast, “In the Room with Peter Bergen.”

The Behavioral Analysis Unit’s files are full of cases, both of shootings that have already taken place and of potential shooters that the FBI has its eyes on.

We met with Karie Gibson, the chief of the unit and an FBI special agent who is also a psychologist. Gibson firmly believes some mass shootings can be prevented because mass shooters often follow a predictable pattern.

Gibson says the would-be-mass-killer often starts off with a “a specific grievance, along the lines of a slight or humiliation that has happened to them. And they can’t move past it, and it becomes very personal. These individuals start to think about how to resolve that grievance through violence.”

The next step on the pathway to violence is when would-be shooters start researching what weapons or tactics might be used for an attack, or gleaning techniques while researching what previous mass shooters have done.

Gibson explains, “And then it progresses to preparation.” The would-be shooter then carries out “a dry run or security probe to make sure they’re going to be successful.” And finally, the attack itself occurs.

So, how do you get someone off this “pathway to violence” before they attack?

The Behavioral Analysis Unit has analysts in all 56 of the FBI’s field offices in the US who work with local law enforcement officials. While these local officials often deal with criminals in the area, they are not always familiar with would-be shooters, many of whom do not have a documented history of violence.

Gibson says when she started at the Behavioral Analysis Unit eight years ago, they were getting about 150 referrals from local officials a year, while today they have more than 350 a year. In many of those cases, interventions by the FBI, working with local law enforcement or others in the community, have prevented potential acts of violence.

Understanding that the FBI’s work is confidential in such cases, we asked Gibson for an example of how the Behavioral Analysis Unit goes about getting someone off the pathway to violence.

Gibson told us about a case where a young man struggling with depression was also suicidal. His parents were working hard to keep a roof over the family’s head, and they weren’t in tune with their son’s emotional struggles.

The son began to fixate on school shooters and obsessively memorized the details of different shootings. The family was then in contact with the local sheriff, who began to mentor the young man and take him to mental health appointments. In the end, the young man was able to move on from his fixation and go to college, unaware that the FBI played any role in guiding him away from violence.

While most mass shooters do not suffer from serious psychiatric illness, they can be troubled or distressed in some way. Many are depressed and some have suffered a painful loss — of a loved one, a steady job, or a partner, which can leave potential shooters adrift without people around them to notice concerning behavior.

The FBI also researches the role of people close to potential shooters — those the Bureau calls “bystanders.” These are the peers or family members who are most likely to see worrisome social media posts or hear alarming comments from someone who is going down the pathway to violence.

Those bystanders are the ones who can provide the best early warnings. Gibson acknowledges that bystanders might not always get a straight answer when they check in — if the person is truly planning an attack, he or she might deflect the questions or lie. But it is important to alert the authorities anyway.

When a bystander becomes aware of key information about a potential shooter and does nothing, that individual is 16 times more likely to go on and commit an act of violence, according to a US government assessment. This is because a potential shooter might perceive that silence as permission, the assessment finds.

Gibson says people planning attacks are often crying out for attention. “In the conversations we’ve had with offenders, they felt like nobody was really paying attention to them,” she explained.

The most important piece of advice Gibson says she can offer to bystanders is to speak up and tell someone they trust about their concerns.

A former FBI special agent, Mary O’Toole, a pioneer in the field of threat management, urged family members who might have concerns about a loved one to do their best to limit his or her access to weapons.

Ultimately, what makes the US so exceptional when it comes to mass shootings is how pervasive guns are. There are more guns in the US than people. While stricter gun laws might not completely eradicate shootings, and other forms of violence may still persist, these laws could go a long way in saving lives.

Given the political reality in the United States that makes passing stricter gun laws extremely difficult, the next best thing might be to recognize who is on the pathway to violence — and figure how to effectively intervene before that person carries out the next mass shooting.

The Future of War

The Future of War

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Oct 10 2023
Length: 39 mins

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face,” Mike Tyson famously once said. Vladimir Putin thought he could defeat Ukraine in three days. How did he get it so wrong? And what can we learn from his mistake? Throughout history, according to one of the world’s leading experts, wars have almost never played out as predicted. But if that’s the case, how are we supposed to prepare for future wars — like a potential one with China?

Analyst: Israel’s costly misunderstanding of Hamas’ true aims, CNN.com

Analyst: Israel’s costly misunderstanding of Hamas’ true aims

Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
Kobi Michael, a leading Israeli expert on Palestinian issues, says his country’s policymakers have misunderstood the aims of Hamas for the past several years. Michael also predicted that Israel’s military operations in Gaza might take months and that Hezbollah in Lebanon will probably avoid a full-scale war with Israel.

Peter Bergen
Peter Bergen
CNN
A senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, Michael has worked as an Israeli intelligence officer, government official and academic focused on Palestinian issues for around three decades.

Michael was an Arabic-speaking intelligence officer when he was appointed in 1994 as the first commander of the Israeli-Palestinian Security Coordination Apparatus in the Gaza Strip. Michael then served on Israel’s National Security Council as the head of the Palestinian Division and in a similar position as the deputy director-general in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs at the prime minister’s office between 2009 and 2013.

In a conversation Friday with Peter Bergen, he explained the likely goal of the Hamas attack and talked of how peace could ultimately be made between Israelis and Palestinians. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Peter Bergen: Who oversees Hamas’ military operations, and what is the role of Mohammed Deif?

Kobi Michael: Mohammed Deif is the commander of the Qassam Brigades.

Bergen: Was he in charge of this operation in Israel last weekend?

Michael: He certainly is deeply involved. He’s one of the planners, together with Marwan Issa. There is no doubt because both are senior commanders of the military establishment of Hamas.

Bergen: Can you tell us who Mohammed Deif is? What is his background?

Michael: Mohammed Deif, he’s a cat, not with seven lives but with nine lives. He’s a terrorist from the first days of al Qassam Brigades in the Gaza Strip. Israel tried to target him several times, and he was injured. He lost a hand, an eye and other organs, but he’s still alive.

He’s very wise, very determined and very charismatic. And he’s totally dedicated and determined about his mission on earth. He’s willing to die.

Deif has almost no connections with the outside world. He’s the most influential figure in Hamas from the military point of view, and he’s also influential with the political leadership of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

An Israeli soldier walks by a house destroyed by Hamas militants in Kibbutz Be’eri on Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023. The kibbutz was overrun by Hamas militants from Neraby Gaza Strip Saturday when they killed and captured many Israelis. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
Opinion: What the war is revealing
But we have to understand that such an operation cannot be realized without two crucial abilities that Hamas is not capable of producing. The first is the intelligence factor, and the second ability is the technological factor. Only specific states can provide such abilities, and the only state that is capable and is willing to provide such capabilities to Hamas is Iran. And this is the reason that I do believe that Iran is deeply involved in this operation. (Iran’s government has praised the Hamas attack but denied that it was involved in it.)

The general strategy of Hamas — which is very similar to the broad strategy of Iran — is to launch a multifront war against Israel. And Hamas has worked in the last few years to realize this strategy — on the one hand, they kept things calm in the Gaza Strip, getting economic benefits from Israel, Qatar and Egypt to enable prosperity and the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip — but all of these were an umbrella for rebuilding their military capacities and preparing themselves for the big day, which was last Saturday (October 7), unfortunately.

Bergen: Why did Hamas launch this attack now?

Michael: What was the strategic aim of such an operation, considering that they knew for sure that the price tag would be very high and they were endangering their very existence? I’m sure that Hamas was sure that the shock and horror of this operation and the casualties that they would cause would be interpreted by all the Palestinians, that this was a sign from God that this was the time to open all the battlefronts and to fight Israel and this will be the end of the state of Israel. They were sure about it.

I believe this was the rationale behind this operation because we have to understand this operation was conducted by more than 2,000 terrorists from the special unit of Hamas, the Nukhba.

Do you know how long it takes to train and to prepare such a force? Now, all the Nukhba manpower is something around 3,000 to 4,000 people. (By comparison, the Israeli military, including reservists, is more than 600,000.)

This attack last weekend was not intended to release Hamas prisoners held in Israeli jails. The objective was much bigger, and I think this was to encourage the Palestinians in the West Bank and all over Israel to open other battlefronts against Israeli targets.

Hamas succeeded much more than they believed they would succeed because this was a huge catastrophe. We lost so many people. Hamas, with their brutality, became what we saw as an upgraded ISIS.

Bergen: You’re a former intelligence officer. Many people are saying this is an intelligence failure. Often policymakers say it’s an intelligence failure when it’s a policy failure because it’s hard for the intelligence agencies to publicly defend themselves. They work for the policymakers, and they deal in the classified realm. Was this an intelligence failure, a policy failure, or both?

Michael: This is a failure of the political echelon and the decision-makers because the decision-makers accepted the intelligence assessments about Hamas. They are responsible. They didn’t ask the right questions.

But the problem is not only intelligence. The problem is also policy. I was very critical of the Israeli policy in the last three years because I thought that we were providing Hamas with a comfortable zone and with too many degrees of freedom of action that enabled them to fortify themselves, to strengthen themselves militarily and at the same time to fuel Hamas’ terror campaign in the West Bank.

And we enabled them to continue doing that by providing Gaza with economic benefits that would supposedly make Hamas more moderate or more pragmatic, and they would lose their motivation to attack Israel; this was a mistake. I warned about this publicly in my writing in recent years.

We have to understand that Hamas are very religious people. They are very determined, radical and extreme, and therefore, it is very hard for Western people to understand that they believe that they will be able to collapse the state of Israel. But this is what they believe.

Bergen: How does their religious view affect how they see the world?

Michael: Hamas was established as a religious and social movement and is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which originated in Egypt. This is the basic essence of Hamas. The religious ideology is the most important component of their ideology, belief and existence.

Bergen: How does Hamas impact the more secular Palestinian Authority, which controlled Gaza until 2007 before Hamas violently pushed them aside?

Michael: We have to go back to 2007 to understand that Hamas came to be the essential challenge to the Palestinian Authority because Hamas’ endgame is to control the entire Palestinian system, which means the Palestinian Authority and the PLO. Hamas perceives the Palestinian Authority as a collaborator with Israel and wants to undermine it. They want to collapse the Palestinian Authority, and therefore, Hamas is the most severe threat to the survival of the Palestinian Authority.

Bergen: Palestinian Islamic Jihad is reportedly part of this attack on Israel, yet we don’t hear much about them. Were they part of this, and who are they?

Michael: Palestinian Islamic Jihad was established in 1982, whereas Hamas was established in 1987. But the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a pure terror organization. All the raison d’etre of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is to slaughter as many Jews as possible, and they don’t have any political aspirations.

Rockets are fired toward Israel from the Gaza Strip, Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. The rockets were fired as Hamas announced a new operation against Israel.
Opinion: Did Hamas attacks have a hidden target?
They are much smaller than Hamas. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad participated in this operation, and they still have an arsenal of rockets, some thousands of rockets, and they still have some thousands of terrorists that are active in the Gaza Strip. But this is a much smaller and less sophisticated organization. They don’t have any other aims like Hamas because Hamas is a religious, social, political movement and terror organization at the same time. And they are the rulers of the Gaza Strip.

Bergen: You mentioned the social services Hamas provides. What are they?

Michael: Everything. They are a semi-state entity from education to garbage, energy, infrastructure, health, tax collection, industry, agriculture, everything. They have run the Gaza Strip since 2007, and they went through an institutionalization process because they knew that if they wanted to effectively rule the population, they had to use some practices of a state. They had to collect taxes. They had to provide people with education and health services.

Bergen: Hamas in Gaza now: They are well-armed. They are hiding in tunnels. They have hostages. They have human shields. They’ve had years to plan. Urban warfare is very difficult. Do you anticipate Israeli intelligence really understands Gaza well enough to conduct a successful operation?

Michael: Yes. This is a huge frustration. We have such intelligence control over the entire Gaza Strip, and how come we failed to get an early warning of the attack last weekend? We have very accurate intelligence. We know exactly where the tunnels are and where any Hamas facility is located. In a building of 15 stories, we know in each story where Hamas is sitting; there is no intelligence problem in this regard.

The problem is that to accomplish the mission of annihilating Hamas and denying all of its military capacities, we will need to have not only an air force war, but also a ground force operation, and we have to prepare it very well because Hamas is waiting for us, and they prepared traps, and they have more than a general idea of how the (Israel Defense Forces) is going to operate there. We have no illusion that the cost isn’t going to be high. And we are going to have casualties, but this is the price that we have to pay if we want to remain living here in this neighborhood.

Israel follows the laws of war and international law and is trying to evacuate all the northern parts of the Gaza Strip and mainly the area of Gaza City, because this is the most crucial center of gravity of Hamas. Most of their assets are located there, and Israel doesn’t intend to harm innocent people, and we don’t want to have collateral damage. And therefore, we are trying to convince the population to leave because the area is saturated with Hamas assets.

The reason that Israel must bomb and demolish so many buildings is because Hamas is everywhere where their basic organizing rationale is to use their people as human shields. They do it in the most cynical and brutal manner, and they wish to have many casualties to use the international media and international tribunals in order to demonize Israel and gain empathy and support. It is the ultimate absurdity when those barbarians who do not respect any international law or norms are using these platforms to make their case. We have to clear the area and prepare the best conditions for the ground forces to enter to accomplish the mission to deal with all the underground infrastructure and to finish the job.

Bergen: How long will that take?

Michael: It’ll take months.

Bergen: Do you think Hezbollah in Lebanon will stay on the sidelines during this war?

Michael: It looks like now they have an interest in staying out of a full-scale war, because Israel is on full alert in the north. And now Israel is a wounded lion. They know that the Israeli retaliation will be very aggressive if it comes to a full-scale war. I don’t think that they are interested now in a full-scale war.

Bergen: So, the day after the war is over in Gaza, what does that look like for Israel? In the past, Israel has chosen to withdraw from Gaza. Do you anticipate a permanent occupation of Gaza?

Michael: No. Israel does not intend to remain in Gaza and to rule the population there. It might begin with an international mission force or an Arab mission force, and it will end with the return of the Palestinian Authority to the Gaza Strip. I think the Palestinian Authority cannot return immediately to the Gaza Strip. Otherwise, it will be perceived by the Palestinian constituency as a traitor, as someone who collaborated with Israel to topple Hamas. But I think that after a while and with the right preparations, it might be a reasonable model that the Palestinian Authority will return to rule the Gaza Strip.

But I think that we have to be very sober and to understand that even if the Palestinian Authority will return to the Gaza Strip, it doesn’t mean that we will reach a final status agreement with the Palestinians. This is not the situation.

Bergen: Why would the Palestinians make a final deal with Israel without getting something in return, when the settlements are expanding on the West Bank?

Michael: The settlements were never the issue. Israel dismantled all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and North Samaria (in 2005).

Yasser Arafat’s response to the Camp David offer (brokered by US President Bill Clinton in 2000) was the Second Intifada.

Israel demonstrated twice that it is able and willing to evacuate settlements for peace. The Palestinians need to cross the Rubicon and to understand that the only way to live peacefully here in this region is to find a way to do it together with Israel and as part of the new regional architecture that will be based on the normalization process between Israel and the Arab countries with American support. And this new architecture will be able to defeat any efforts of the Iranians to be more influential or to reach hegemony in the broader Middle East.

There is a clash between the Iranian radical extreme resistance axis, which is led by Iran and is composed of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and all the other Iranian proxies all over the Middle East, and the Arab Sunni pragmatic axis, which is led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The Palestinian Authority in Israel should be part of this camp, which is supported by the United States of America. If the Palestinians will be part of this camp, then we will be able to talk about peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Correction: An earlier version incorrectly said that the Palestinian Authority had not recognized Israel’s right to exist. The Palestinian leadership did recognize Israel’s right to exist as part of the 1993 Oslo accords.

The best way to resolve the Hamas hostage crisis, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. He is on the advisory council of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for US hostages. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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Up to 150 hostages are being held in Gaza, according to Israeli officials. Meanwhile, 17 Americans are missing, and Hamas may be holding an unknown number of them, according to the White House.

Hamas has threatened to execute hostages and broadcast video of the execution if Israel strikes targets in Gaza without warning.

The approach with the likely lowest risk to the hostages is a negotiated release. Few governments have much leverage with Hamas, but Qatar does, as it has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to poor Gazan families in recent years.

Qatar also has a track record of brokering such releases; for instance, last month, Qatari officials helped to secure the release of five American prisoners held by Iran, which included $6 billion of Iranian oil revenues being unfrozen and sent to a Qatari bank to be used for humanitarian purposes in Iran.

Already, Qatari officials are in communication with Hamas about what deal could be made to release the hostages they are holding.

If there were to be some prisoner exchange, Hamas in the past has driven a hard bargain, exchanging Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011 for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

There are options other than negotiated releases. There are rescue operations, typically by special operations forces. But those are predicated on knowing exactly where the hostages are located. US special operations forces are offering their expertise and support to Israel, but are not part of a ground mission to rescue hostages.

So far, there is no indication about where the hostages are being held, and Gaza is laced with underground tunnels that Hamas controls, making it hard to locate hostages should they be secreted in these tunnels.

When ISIS kidnapped American journalists and aid workers beginning in 2012, the US launched a rescue operation in 2014 based on indications that they were being held in a particular location in Syria, but the hostages had been moved by the time the operation happened. ISIS subsequently murdered the Americans.

Rescues can also be dangerous for the hostages, even when the most skilled special operations forces are deployed. In 2010, the Taliban kidnapped British aid worker Linda Norgrove, and US Navy SEAL Team Six launched a rescue operation. Subsequent investigations revealed that Norgrove was killed by a fragmentation grenade thrown by a SEAL team member during the operation.

Hostage-takers can also kill their prisoner during rescue operations. In 2014, during a SEAL Team Six rescue operation in Yemen, American journalist Luke Somers was killed by his al Qaeda captors.

A 2017 study that I co-authored for New America, a research institution, found that in the previous decade and a half, in 42 cases of Western hostages being taken by terrorist groups in which a rescue attempt operation was made, it was fatal to the hostages 20% of the time.

In short, a negotiated release of the hostages, mediated perhaps by the Qataris, is the lowest-risk approach to freeing them. If Hamas could release the children and elderly hostages the group appears to be holding, that would be a good start.

What my conversation with RFK Jr. showed about the kind of president he’d be, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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On Monday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was running as a third-party candidate to be president of the United States. Kennedy holds a mix of Republican and Democratic policy views which could make him attractive to the large numbers of American voters who are unhappy about a Biden-Trump rematch.

This may pose some real dangers for both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, who are the frontrunners in their respective parties, since in closely-contested US presidential elections, a small percentage of voters in relatively few swing states can have a disproportionately large effect on the outcome.

Third-party candidates — like the Green Party’s Ralph Nader in the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and Jill Stein in the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Trump — have had an outsize effect on the outcome of close US presidential elections despite their relatively small numbers at the polls.

It’s quite possible that Kennedy could do more damage to Biden as a third-party candidate than by running against Biden in the Democratic primaries, where Biden has a large lead over Kennedy. In a CNN New Hampshire poll last month, Biden had the support of 78% of likely Democratic primary voters in this early primary state, with only 9% for Kennedy.

Opinion: You’ll never believe why RFK Jr. thinks he’s qualified to be commander in chief
By contrast, running as an independent candidate, about one in seven American voters would vote for Kennedy, according to an Ipsos/Rutters poll released on Thursday. That number could put a serious dent into Biden’s support in a general election — as well as Trump’s, since Kennedy draws support from both sides of the aisle.

So it is worth considering what — beyond his storied family political name and the dissatisfaction that many voters have with both Biden and Trump — the appeal of Kennedy might be.

RFK Jr.’s predilection for fringe positions is well known, particularly his long-debunked view that vaccines cause autism. But what makes him an attractive candidate for some Americans is that he is not easily pigeonholed as either a typical Democrat or a conventional Republican, since his policy positions straddle the left and the right.

His blistering critiques of the Biden administration on everything from how it has handled the Covid-19 pandemic to its support of the war in Ukraine have earned him praise from Republicans.

At the same time, he describes himself as “a traditional Kennedy Democrat. I’m a leading environmentalist, arguably, in the country. I’m for medical autonomy, for women’s right to choose. I’m anti-war. I’m pro-free speech.”

Kennedy told me this at the end of August for the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen.” Beyond querying him about his controversial views on the pandemic — in which he debated with me about whether Covid vaccines had actually saved many lives — I was also interested in exploring his positions on the kinds of issues many American voters care most about, such as the economy, the border, affirmative action, gun control, climate change, abortion and the war in Ukraine.

Helping Trump?

I asked Kennedy if he was worried that running against the president would only serve to hurt Biden’s chances of beating Trump, the leading Republican nominee, in what will likely be yet another close general election.

He replied, “First of all, I get as many votes from Republicans as I do from Democrats. So, I don’t think that there’s that problem.” Kennedy went on to say, “President Biden has wounded himself. You know, he’s telling the country that he’s brought prosperity in the country. And 57% of people in this country cannot put their hands on $1,000 if they have an emergency. For those people, the engine light comes on in their car, and it’s the end of the world.”

Asked how he would fix this situation, Kennedy explained, “I will wind down the empire abroad, and I’ll start bringing that money home and investing in schools, public health, eliminating the chronic disease epidemic, and getting Americans healthy again. Our biggest cost, even bigger than the military, is health care.”

robert kennedy jr candidato democrata elecciones eeuu dusa_00022716.png
Opinion: RFK Jr.’s latest conspiracy theory is the last straw
I asked if he thought a second Biden term or a second Trump term would be worse, and he surprised me by saying, “I don’t think either of them are good, but you know, I’m worried about Biden because I think he will — is more likely to get us in a nuclear war.”

Kennedy also seems to firmly believe that the war in Ukraine is as much the Biden administration’s fault as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s. And he believes that, if the Russian leader’s back were up against a wall, Putin wouldn’t hesitate to use atomic weapons, telling me, “He’s already said that if it’s existential, he’s going to use a nuclear weapon.”

Kennedy’s big idea in foreign policy is “neo-isolationism,” i.e., pulling back from what some term “American Empire.” His position is one that is embraced by many on the left flank of the Democratic Party as well as many Republicans, a large majority of whom think the US should stop funding the Ukraine war. A CNN poll published in August found 71% of Republicans think the US should not authorize additional funding to support Ukraine.

The Supreme Court

In light of the Supreme Court’s decision last year that overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion, I asked Kennedy how the Catholic faith he had grown up with might have informed his views about abortion. He told me, “I’ve seen late-term abortion pictures and they’re horrifying. So, I understand the people who want them banned, but I also am too skeptical of government to believe that it should be the one that should be dictating bodily decisions.”

Kennedy is also opposed to the Supreme Court’s decision in June to end affirmative action for minority Americans going to college, a case in which Harvard, his alma mater, was one of the defendants. At the same time, he says “legacy admissions,” which give the children of alumni preferential treatment when applying to attend many elite colleges, should end. He described the practice as “affirmative action for White people only.”

Even though the Supreme Court has produced two key recent decisions that he disagreed with, Kennedy would not — as some Democrats have advocated — add more liberal judges to the Supreme Court, saying, “I just think it’s a terrible precedent. I’m very much aware of the attempts by FDR to do that and how that was viewed by the American public as cheating on the rules.”

Climate change

Much of Kennedy’s professional career was spent as an environmental lawyer, most notably helping to clean up the Hudson River in New York. Since this year is on track to be the hottest on record, I asked him what the US should do about this.

He said he opposed “carbon capture,” a technique in which carbon is pumped under the ground in deep wells to be stored there. He describes this as a “boondoggle” for the carbon-producing industries. Instead, he advocates for “habitat” and “environmental” protection since “destroying the natural systems destroys the resilience of the planet to climate changes.”

The border

I also asked Kennedy how he’d approach another important issue for voters: America’s southern border.

Much of Kennedy’s take on border security sounds more in line with Republicans than Democrats. He said Trump had gotten “the wall” mostly right but that “you don’t need a wall all the way 2,200 miles from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego. But you do need a physical barrier. You do need a wall in the heavily populated areas.” Kennedy also said many more asylum judges are needed to process the hundreds of thousands of asylum claimants who are now crossing the US-Mexico border.

The Second Amendment

Kennedy says he is not a gun owner himself, but he is not for “taking people’s guns away,” and he would include in that category semi-automatic weapons like AR-15s that have often been used in mass shootings in the US. He said, however, if he were to become president and the US Senate and the House both had passed measures banning AR-15s, he would go along with that decision.

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But in discussing America’s “gun culture” and the view by some that “their AR-15s are protecting them from government overreach” — he said it was a position he felt some sympathy with, given what he considered to be the massive US government overreach during the Covid pandemic.

On the Ukraine war, pandemic measures, US border policies, and the Second Amendment, RFK Jr. could easily be mistaken for a Republican, while on abortion, affirmative action and climate change, he sounds very much like a Democrat. All of this makes Kennedy a wild card who may scramble the presidential election and damage both Biden and Trump in unexpected ways.

The 9/11 attack wasn’t an intelligence failure. The Hamas attack may be, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room With Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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Comparisons are being made between 9/11 and Hamas’ attacks in Israel, and there are certainly parallels. In both cases, terrorist organizations killed large numbers of civilians in attacks that seemed to come out of the blue, shocking the two nations.

Hamas’s attacks are also being ascribed to an intelligence failure, just as 9/11 was.

But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the 9/11 attacks, which were not so much an intelligence failure as a policy failure.

First, let’s stipulate that intelligence agencies don’t make policy; they provide information — often imperfect and incomplete — so that policymakers can make better-informed decisions about what to do.

Police officers evacuate a woman and a child from a site hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, southern Israel, Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. The rockets were fired as Hamas announced a new operation against Israel.

In the spring and summer of 2001, the CIA provided a slew of warnings that al-Qaeda was planning something big. Intelligence distributed to officials in the George W. Bush administration included warnings entitled, “Bin Ladin Planning High Profile Attacks,” “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent,” and “Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delay.” (“Bin Ladin” was the spelling used by the US government at the time.)

The most well-known of these warnings was briefed to Bush at his ranch in Texas on August 6, 2001, and was titled, “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in United States.” The Bush administration didn’t do much of anything in the summer of 2001 in response to those warnings.

The reason we now know this, is because of the excellent work of the 9/11 Commission; the Bush administration only reluctantly acceded to an investigative commission more than a year after the attacks, following intense public pressure from the 9/11 victims’ families.

Certainly, the Hamas attacks in Israel were a surprise, just as 9/11 was, but it is premature to label it an intelligence failure. We don’t know yet what Israel’s intelligence agencies such as Shin Bet were saying about Hamas to Israeli policymakers, just as Americans had no idea what the CIA was saying to the Bush administration about al Qaeda’s intentions until at least a year after the 9/11 attacks had happened.

Blaming a lack of intelligence for policy failures is an easy dodge for government officials because, typically, the spy agencies can’t publicly defend themselves on the facts, which are often classified, and, in any event, they work for the policymakers.

After 9/11, Bush, who had anemic poll numbers before 9/11, suddenly had the highest polling numbers of any president in many decades, with a 90% favorable rating, benefiting from a “rally around the flag” effect in the wake of such a large-scale tragedy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will likely also benefit from this effect, at least in the short term.

But as the initial shock of the Hamas attacks wears off, presumably, the Israeli public will demand an accounting of what went wrong. Right now, we have no idea if there were signals amid the “noise” coming into Israeli intelligence about a likely Hamas attack. In hindsight, such signals often look much clearer than they do in the present.

In her 1962 study, “Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,” Roberta Wohlstetter showed how when it came to the Japanese surprise attack on the US naval base on December 7, 1941, separating the “signals” from the “noise” was a lot easier after the fact, writing that, “After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has now occurred. But before the event, it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings. It comes to the observer embedded in an atmosphere of ‘noise’, i.e., in all sorts of information that is useless and irrelevant for predicting the disaster.”

Indeed, a good example of this is the Yom Kippur War, which took place almost precisely half a century ago. It was also a surprise attack against Israel, in this case by the armies of Egypt and Syria and it was also described at the time as an intelligence failure because Egyptian and Syrian troop movements were interpreted by Israeli policymakers to be exercises rather than preparations for war.

In addition, as the veteran former CIA official Bruce Riedel has written, Israeli officials couldn’t believe that Egypt and Syria would start a war they were likely to lose.

That presumption was of course, wrong, and a declassified US government postmortem of the Yom Kippur War found that intelligence that the Egyptians and Syrians were likely planning an attack had, in fact, been “plentiful, ominous, and often accurate.”

The mistake the Israelis made 50 years ago, and the Bush administration made before 9/11, despite intelligence warnings, was to underestimate the capabilities of their nations’ enemies. We don’t know yet what the Netanyahu government was told, if anything, about a possible attack from Gaza, but given the large-scale nature of the attacks, it seems conceivable that there were some indications that an attack was coming.

Israelis will likely only find out if there is a real demand for timely accountability and if the Netanyahu government agrees to provide it.

For now, understandably, the Israelis are focused on the ongoing conflict. “We were surprised this morning,” Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, the international spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces, told CNN Saturday. “About failures, I prefer not to talk at this point right now. We’re in war. We’re fighting. I’m sure this will be a big question once this event is over.”

“I assume the intelligence question will be talked about down the road and we’ll learn what happened there.”

In so many “surprise” attacks, from Pearl Harbor to the Yom Kippur War to 9/11, it turns out that relevant intelligence generated by spy agencies was disseminated to policymakers, but it wasn’t heeded as it didn’t fit with the assumptions they had about the actual nature and scale of the threat.