Israel’s Expanding War Against Lebanon
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Trita Parsi on the dangers of a lame-duck president with spiraling crisis.

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On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Trita Parsi on the dangers of a lame duck president with spiraling crisis.
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Lebanese army soldiers stand guard near a hospital in Beirut on September 17, 2024, after explosions hit locations in several Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon amid ongoing cross-border tensions between Israel and Hezbollah fighters.
(Anwar Amro / AFP via Getty Images)Joe Biden’s foreign policy team was hoping for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas before his term was over, perhaps as early as the end of September. This always seemed wishful thinking but now is almost impossible as Israel not only continues to fight in Gaza but has expanded its conflict with Palestinian forces to neighboring Lebanon. The expanding conflict once again raises the question of Biden’s bear-hug strategy, which the administration argues would help foster peace and restraint. This failure of this policy is likely to haunt whoever wins the White House in November.
To survey the dire scene and discuss the possibility of American involvement in yet another large Middle Eastern war, I talked to Trita Parsi, executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute.

Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
The US/Israel War against Iran is shaping out to be a much bigger mess than expected
even by critics. As it turns into a regional conflict that has embroiled more than a dozen
nations, are there any possible ways Donald Trump can be forced to pull back. I spoke
with international affairs scholar Emma Ashford of the Stimson Center about the war
and paths to peace.
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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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