Interview With Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA) About Israel-Hamas War
Interview
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Well, look, they've obviously made the decision to go ahead with the ground invasion, something that we've been expecting for a long time. But first of all, militarily this is going to be extremely difficult. Compared to our fighting in Iraq, the buildings in Gaza are five times as tall, they have an extensive tunnel network. Fighting house to house, building to building in Gaza is going to be extraordinarily difficult for the Israelis.
And what they're trying to do, of course, is take out the Hamas terrorists. The Israelis have a right to do that. They have a military necessity to take out the terrorists who attacked them. That's Israel's right to keep its citizens safe. But if they kill innocent Palestinians in the process, they run the risk of recruiting more Hamas terrorists than they kill. And striking that balance in such a difficult military operation is going to be very hard.
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I don't think so. I mean, bluntly, I think that's extraordinarily optimistic. I think the hostages from all we know are being hidden in the tunnel network behind lots of Hamas terrorists. Realistically, the only way they're going to get these hostages out is through negotiations. Now that's tough, that's painful. It's extraordinarily difficult to negotiate with a terrorist organization like Hamas.
But I just don't see a sort of special forces raid kind of operation that a lot of people would like to imagine that's going to bring these hostages home. This is going to be brutal fighting for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
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Jim, I think the risk of a wider regional war is much greater than many people think. Hezbollah's activity on the northern border of Israel has taken a marked rise. And we're not paying much attention to that with everything going on down in Gaza. But if Hezbollah does actually intend to attack from the north, they're obviously -- you know, if they've got half a brain they're going to wait until Israel gets bogged down in Gaza in the south.
So there is a real risk here. And what the U.S. is trying to do and the administration has been very proactive about this is to deter a wider regional conflict. That's why they've sent troops and ships into the region. It's tough, though. You know, you've got Iranian-backed attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. At the sort of operational level, we're trying to deter that from happening again.
But to deter it in a way that doesn't actually spark a wider regional conflict at the strategic level, it's a really tough job for the U.S. right now because nobody wants a wider Middle East war.
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Well, look, I've made the argument very clearly that Israel has a moral necessity not to kill innocent civilians, but they have a military necessity for that, too. General Stanley McChrystal talks a lot about insurgent math where for every innocent civilian that you kill it serves to recruit more terrorists. He thinks that for every one innocent civilian you kill you recruit about 10 terrorists.
So of course there's a moral obligation to keep civilians safe, and that applies whether they're being used as human shield or anything else. But there's a real military necessity for Israel to do that, too. If they kill a Hamas operative but just kill one innocent civilian in the process, they could end up with 10 new recruits.
And in the long run, they're not going to win a war like that. So they've got to be able to make the case to innocent civilians that life is going to be better if you work with the Israelis, if you stand for peace, than if you stand for Hamas. But when they're short on food, short on water, that's not a good environment to make that case.
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I don't honestly think that Mike Johnson believes that Israelis are more deserving of peace and freedom and security than Ukrainians, but that's certainly what it sounds like. So he's going to have to make that case to all of us in Congress. I don't see it happening. I know that supporting Ukraine in their fight against Russia and supporting Israel, our staunchest ally in the Middle East, are both important to our national security, to our future national security, because it sends a message to terrorists, to aggressive dictators like Putin, that you're not going to get away with this.
That you don't test the United States or our allies. And that's an important message to send not just to the terrorists of today, and I put Putin in that category, a real -- I mean, he's a national terrorist. But it's also important to people like Xi Jinping in China who are looking at how we respond to these conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and making a decision about whether he's going to invade Taiwan which could literally start World War III in the Pacific.
The bottom line is the United States is fighting in the name of peace and security here, and it's a war of deterrence. We are supporting our allies, not just so that they win but so that they deter future conflict. And it's a tall order.
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I think, Jim, it would be hypocritical of me to just say that we shouldn't primary people because I primaried a 20-year incumbent.
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And that's how I got here into Congress. It's a free country, it's part of the democratic process. But I think that Joe Biden's leadership in Ukraine, in Israel, I mean, he's acting like a commander in chief right now. And that's who I'm supporting for president.
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OK, thank you, Jim.
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