Former Maj. Harrison Mann, who resigned on Nov. 1 from the Defense Intelligence Agency, in protest over U.S. policy in Gaza, is now sounding the alarm of the dangers of expanding the war into Lebanon. Mann gave an interview on June 13 in New York’s Intelligencer site, in which he implies that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to risk an expanded war as a desperate move to stay in power and to avoid facing corruption charges. But, what is at stake is mass civilian deaths in Israel and Lebanon, and Mann predicts that the U.S. would be further dragged into the regional conflict. Just like the fighting in Gaza, it is a miscalculation to think that this war would make Israel safer.
Mann warns that even the Israeli military knows that there will be no quick, decisive blow that will lead to an easy victory. Hezbollah is much bigger than Hamas, much better equipped, and dug into well-fortified positions in the mountainous terrain of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has a vast arsenal of rockets, missiles, and heavy artillery. As the IDF is discovering in Gaza, even a seeming victory of a ground battle in one location merely leads to fighting in another location.
According to Mann, the IDF will utilize its unwritten military tactic known as the “Dahiya Doctrine” (named after the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut which Israel targeted in the fighting in 2006). Today this tactic would mean killing the key leadership of Hezbollah and then bombing civilian Shi’a neighborhoods, which might have more sympathy to Hezbollah, in order to demoralize the organization’s base of support. Mann explained: “Bombing civilian centers as a way to compel the enemy is clearly an accepted and shared belief in the IDF and Israeli leadership. We’ve just seen them do it in Gaza for the past nine months.” He said that the plan would “backfire” and not make Israel safer.
If Hezbollah felt an existential threat, it would unleash a massive rocket and missile attack on civilians in Israel. “They probably have the ability to at least partially overwhelm Israel’s air defenses, strike civilian infrastructure around the country, and inflict a level of destruction on Israel that I’m not sure Israel has really ever experienced in its history—certainly not in its recent history,” Mann said. Mann expects Israel to then start a ground assault on Lebanon with terrible casualties on both sides, and meanwhile, Hezbollah would continue heavy artillery attacks on Israeli civilian targets. During the U.S. elections, if Israel were to be under this type of attack, the White House would give total support to Israel’s defense, Mann argued. The U.S. would be encouraged to conduct air assaults on the supply lines and communications-support networks in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. Iranian and other nationals might become casualties in this air campaign and thus expand the war even further.
Mann was the highest-ranking U.S. military officer to resign over the U.S. role in Gaza. He wrote to his former DIA colleagues that as a descendant of European Jews, “I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing.” When he resigned on Nov. 1, 2023 from the DIA, he wrote: “A lot of people I worked with reached out to me, a lot of people I didn’t work with as well, and expressed that they felt the same way. It’s not just a generational thing. There’s quite senior people who feel the same way.”
