Thomas Small

but Trump I don't think has disagreed with that policy.

And that's different from the politics of it.

Yes, he needs a quick win in order to win the midterms.

He cares about poll numbers.

He also cares about the stock market, which is a massive problem in this whole thing because people in his family and certainly in his coterie have got very rich on and off over the course of this very wild time.

So he cares about those things, but I also think he does know

that Hezbollah needs to be destroyed if there is going to be anything like a well-governed Middle East.

Yeah.

Public opinion in Lebanon is, is remarkable at the moment.

It has shifted in a way that I think a lot of people 20 years ago would never have believed that now more and more Lebanese are, are openly feel bold enough to say that, that Hezbollah is the proximate problem that must be dealt with and that actually

since that's the case and since their corrupt political leadership and weak political leadership and utterly implicated political leadership aren't able to do it, well, okay, Israel's gonna do it.

Now, obviously they also at the same time don't like it.

I mean, they can both understand that it's something that,

It makes sense that it's happening and also not like it.

They don't like having to evacuate from their homes.

They don't like the fact that the IDF tells the Christians of Tyre, the city on the coast, you've got to go.

They know what that means, especially as an increasingly aggressive Israel is

prosecuting this buffer zone security doctrine where they're they're perfectly happy to lay waste to huge tracts of territory on the other side of their borders both north and south uh in order to prevent anything like the 7th of october ever happening again so i don't you know by any stretch of the imagination i'm not saying that the lebanese are jingoistically supportive of

of Israel's moves there.

But there is a kind of exhausted realism now that they're that they just realized that the Hezbollah thing has been a problem, that Hezbollah has been a cancer in the body politic of Lebanon and that the ideology of resistance that has been sort of propagated by Iran