In the two weeks since Hamas terrorists committed atrocities across southern Israel killing 1,400 civilian men, women and children, the Israeli military has engaged in collective punishment of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza. Intensive missile and bombing attacks have killed more than 5,000 Palestinian civilians, including more than 2,000 children.
UN Secretary General António Guterres, Pope Francis and heads of state around the world have condemned Hamas for its brutal terrorist attack, and expressed concern that Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza will kill many more innocent civilians and trigger a regional war.
With Israel’s planned ground assault on Gaza many observers share the concern that the conflict could soon expand into a broader Middle East war. As Israel exchanges fire with powerful Hezbollah forces across its northern border with Lebanon, the U.S. has sent two aircraft carriers to the region and accused Iran of “actively facilitating” rocket and drone attacks by its proxy groups on American bases in Iraq and Syria. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Mel Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and former CIA analyst, who assesses growing concern that the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza could soon spin out of control and ignite a dangerous wider Middle East conflict.
MEL GOODMAN: So it seems to me you have to consider the possibility of a wider engagement in that region. And if Hezbollah got into the war, they could do the kind of damage to Israel that Hamas is just not capable of doing. They have far more sophisticated rockets and even missiles with good guidance technology. They have tens of thousands of these things that have been smuggled into Lebanon through Syria, which is why Israel stepped up its bombing of Syrian airfields in the past two weeks, which is part of the widening engagement that no one is really talking about.
I think to date, Hezbollah has been very careful because I think all of the fighting that I’m aware of has been in this region called Shabba Farms, which is a disputed region on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Hezbollah knows darn well and Netanyahu has emphasized this many times, that if they get involved in this war, Beirut is going to be leveled. There’s going to be massive destruction. And we’ve seen that before. We saw that in 2006. And of course, it was an Israeli strategic blunder to go into Lebanon in the first place in 1982. And, we had to send Marines in to pull Israeli chestnuts out of the fire, which led to the attacks on our embassy and the Marine barracks in 1983.
These accusations with regard to Iran, I think are made without any evidence whatsoever. I think the Biden administration used intelligence transparency to great effect when Russia went into Ukraine in 2022. If they want to have some credibility among the American public and more importantly the international public where opinion is shifting in the direction of Hamas because of what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, they’re gonna have to be a little more transparent.
Just to say White House and State Department spokesmen have been saying that Iran is stepping up its engagement, we don’t know that. We do know that there are forces that have gotten support from Iran over the years, including Hamas and Hezbollah and some of the more fundamentalist groups in the Middle East.
But the problem with Iran is we need to be talking to Iran. You know, this was the blunder that Trump made when he pulled the United States out of the Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which covered the de-nuclearization in terms of weaponry in the Iran nuclear program. But, it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy the way we’re dealing with Iran and the fact that we’re sending two carrier task forces to the Mediterranean at the same time we’re saying we’re not gonna get involved militarily? I mean, that’s just bizarre to me. Obviously it’s there just an attempt to intimidate Hezbollah and Iran, but what if Iran decides to do some military engagement against Israeli positions or U.S. forces?
We still have 2,500 troops in Iraq. So the potential for a wider engagement, I think is a realistic scenario. I think it would be something no one really wants. I don’t think Iran really wants to challenge the United States. I don’t think the United States is looking for war. I don’t think Hezbollah really wants to see again, the suffering that will ensue from Israeli bombing raids over Lebanon.
But, you know, I think of World War I, that’s the war to me that no one really wanted, and it ended in the worst kind of war of attrition — trench warfare — that we’ve seen in modern times. So this should be part of the calculations.
SCOTT HARRIS: Mel, I did want to ask you about a ceasefire. There are growing demands around the world for a ceasefire and cessation of the bombing of Gaza to allow humanitarian aid to the people, the 2.3 million people living in Gaza who’ve had their water, food, and medical supplies cut off. What can President Biden do, if anything, to exert pressure on Israel to stall this impending, we’re told, ground invasion of Gaza that could set things off in a horrible way?
MEL GOODMAN: Well, we’ve been led to believe that he has made these points in private. He’s said very little in public, but I think that the one remark about “don’t be consumed by rage,” that was a direct allusion to our rage after 9/11 when we did much more damage to ourselves and to others by going into Iraq where we still are — or Afghanistan for 20 years.
So Biden knows what he’s talking about, but we know that Netanyahu will do anything to hold onto military power. He’s very Trumpian in that regard. That’s his battle with the Supreme Court of Israel and trying to weaken the authority of the Supreme Court that’s in part to keep himself out of jail because of the various federal charges that are being made against Netanyahu.
But in terms of the calls for ceasefire, it’s interesting that there’s demonstrations now in Israel. They want the hostages back. They’re willing to put off or maybe even abstain from an invasion to get the hostages back. And I think that’s what Hamas has maneuvered itself into in trying to capture the attention of the mainstream media around the world and social media by the release of what is now for hostages.
JENNIFER BENDERY: The thing to know about Mike Johnson is that he is a Louisiana Republican who, for eight years prior to Congress, worked as the senior attorney and the national spokesperson for a group called Alliance Defending Freedom, which is a Christian nationalist group that is essentially part of the religious right, that is very focused on rolling back abortion rights and LGBTQ rights.
If you dig into his past, you can find a number of lawsuits that Mike Johnson has helped to lead because he is a constitutional attorney by training. But he has used his legal background to try to essentially roll back LGBTQ rights and eliminate abortion rights. So there’s a whole bunch to dig into there. What I think is particularly fascinating, though, is the fact that most people in Congress don’t know much about him and this is his background.
So as a reporter, I can say that many people have been spending the last week or so truly digging into his background, but next to nobody knows much about. And the more that is revealed about him shows that he is in fact, particularly extreme even for this current Republican party when it comes to things like abortion rights and LGBTQ rights.
SCOTT HARRIS: There’s another aspect to Johnson’s background that we should discuss even briefly, and that is Mike Johnson was one of Donald Trump’s biggest allies in the House, and he had a central role in organizing support to overturn the 2020 presidential election, taking it away from Joe Biden the legitimate winner and giving it to Donald Trump. That’s pretty disturbing. We’re going to be talking about a lot of disturbing things about his background tonight.
But I wondered if you just touch on that because that that seems central in terms of U.S. politics today and the divide between the country where I think it’s safe to say a strong majority believes the 2020 presidential election wasn’t stolen, but was indeed the target of an attempted steal by coup plotters like Donald Trump and his inner circle, as well as it appears, Mike Johnson.
JENNIFER BENDERY: Yes. If we want to talk about the 2020 presidential election, it is absolutely crucial to understand that Mike Johnson, of everybody in Congress, he was the architect of House Republicans’ argument that Donald Trump won the election or that at least it should be evaluated, that the election was stolen from him. It is objectively fair to argue that Mike Johnson used his legal background as a way to justify his argument that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, which it was not.
He basically leaned on every aspect of the law he could to try to argue that widespread voter fraud should be examined. In fact, there’s no proof that there was any and every Republican that decided to vote to throw out the results of the 2020 presidential election looked to Mike Johnson to make their argument because, again, he is a constitutional attorney who leaned on his legal background to make this claim.
So that alone is incredibly problematic in understanding who the new House speaker is. Never mind his long history as an attorney associated with the religious right.
SCOTT HARRIS: Review for our audience some of the more disturbing lawsuits that Mike Johnson undertook when he was associated with the Alliance for Defending Freedom.
It is key to remember that Mike Johnson, who for eight years he was the senior attorney for a group called Alliance Defending Freedom — it’s fair to categorize as a Christian nationalist group. He defended a number of lawsuits on behalf of the religious right, specifically relating to LGBTQ rights and abortion rights. In 2004, he represented the organization in defending Louisiana’s constitutional amendment that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
He went to federal court on this one and successfully defended it again in 2004 before the Supreme Court declared marriage equality the law of the land. That is one case. The bottom line is that he has dedicated his professional life to convincing people that LGBTQ people don’t deserve any legal protections and that abortion itself should be entirely illegal.
Mike Johnson is a person who has dedicated his life as an attorney to eliminating abortion. This is someone who, even within the current Republican party, is actually more extreme than we’ve seen among Republicans who have supported rolling back some abortion rights or some LGBTQ rights. He is way out there on the extreme calling for eliminating all of it.
For more information, visit Mel Goodman’s website at melvingoodman.com and the Center for International Policy at internationalpolicy.org.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Melvin Goodman (22:15) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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