Michael Moynihan: Given Israel’s targeted attacks on Hezbollah over the past few days, are we looking at what’s going to become a hot war like we saw in 2006 or in the early ’80s?
Dexter Filkins: I don’t think either side wants a war. They’ve been very clear about that. Israelis don’t want it, and Hezbollah doesn’t want it. Hezbollah knows Lebanon would be destroyed in any kind of war like this. So they don’t want a war, but here we are. In that way, it feels like 1914. Nobody wants to go to war, but everybody’s getting closer and closer to the edge. As one side or the other ticks up the intensity of the firing, we just get closer to a full-on shooting match, which would be, I think it’s fair to say, apocalyptic for both countries.
MM: This is effectively a proxy war with Iran like the war in Gaza is, but it has a lot of local elements too. Hezbollah is essentially a creation of Iran, isn’t it?
DF: It really is. I think the best way to imagine Hezbollah is that it’s an Iranian aircraft carrier sitting off the coast of Israel. It’s created by Iran in the 1980s, paid for, trained, armed, equipped, directed, everything. When I was in Lebanon and I spent some time with guys in Hezbollah, they were completely clear about that. One of them, a senior commander in the field, said to me, “Iran controls every bullet we have.” He’d been to Iran several times. So that’s the best way to look at it, but you can see that when you look at it that way, it makes things much more complicated and much more dangerous.
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