Retired British commander says the Iran backed group’s missile arsenal was built to strike Israel during a regional war involving Iran and its allies
As Israel deepens its ground operation in Lebanon following renewed Hezbollah missile attacks, retired British Army Col. Richard Kemp says the campaign is not a limited border action but a decisive effort to break Hezbollah’s remaining ability to threaten Israel during a wider confrontation with Iran.
Hezbollah, of course, exists for this very moment
In an interview with The Media Line, Kemp said Hezbollah was built for exactly this moment. “Hezbollah, of course, exists for this very moment,” he said, arguing that the group’s missile arsenal was always intended for use in a conflict tied to Israeli or US operations against Iran. As long as Hezbollah retains meaningful capability, he said, Israel has to assume it will use it. “One has to assume that while they have any capability, they will use it,” he said, warning that Israeli civilians remain at risk as long as the group can still fire.
You need to get rid of both the weapons of war and the people who are using them
Kemp said Israel’s objective in Lebanon is likely twofold: eliminate the leadership of Hezbollah and other armed groups operating there, and destroy the military infrastructure that allows them to keep attacking. “The goal is probably twofold. First of all, to eliminate the leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad, if necessary,” he said. But he argued that decapitating leadership is not enough. “When you eliminate the leadership, inevitably someone else steps up to take over,” he said. That, in his view, is why Israel must also keep targeting missile launchers, stockpiles, and lower-level operatives. “You need to get rid of both the weapons of war and the people who are using them.”
Kemp, a former British Army officer who commanded forces in Afghanistan and later led the international terrorism team at Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, said the Lebanon front cannot be separated from the wider campaign against Iran.
He said Tehran has been trying to widen the war across the region, including by threatening or attacking Arab states, in hopes of pressuring Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and others to push Washington to halt the offensive. “I do believe that their objective in that is to apply sufficient pressure on Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE in order to get them, in turn, to pressure the US to call off the operation,” he said.
Kemp believes that strategy is backfiring. “I think it’s going to have the reverse effect,” he said, arguing that countries once reluctant to confront Iran are now moving closer to what he called “an ad hoc coalition against Iran led by the United States.” He added that Tehran’s retaliation reflects not just strategy but humiliation. Iran, he said, is trying to restore its appearance of strength through force, driven by what he called “the sense of honor that prevails across the Middle East.” Yet he said that instinct has worked against the regime. Despite volleys of missiles and drones, “it’s had relatively limited effect comparative to the volume of missiles that they’ve fired,” he said, crediting Israeli, American, British, and Arab interception efforts.
Asked whether strikes involving Azerbaijan and Turkey could pull more regional powers into the conflict, Kemp said Iran may be trying to widen the map of confrontation but is running up against its own weakening capabilities. He pointed to what he described as a drop in Iranian missile fire toward Israel, from large salvos to “single shots,” which he said suggests Iran’s offensive capacity is being “badly degraded.”
He dismissed the idea that attacks affecting Turkey or the British sovereign base area in Cyprus would trigger formal NATO involvement. “That’s not going to happen,” he said, arguing that the alliance’s main fighting power in this theater is already engaged through the United States and that other NATO countries are unlikely to enter the war directly.
Kemp was far more scathing about Britain’s response to the attack on its base in Cyprus. He said London had failed even to defend its own territory. “The United Kingdom, which has, shamefully, in my view, has stood on the sidelines wringing its hands,” he said. “That’s British Sovereign Territory, let’s not forget. It’s the first time that British Sovereign Territory has been attacked since 1982, the Falklands War.” Britain’s response, he said, has been “absolutely zero so far.”
On Iran’s military condition after nearly a week of US-Israeli strikes, Kemp’s assessment was blunt: “They were hit very, very badly on day one.” He said the opening wave exceeded even the 2003 “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq and that the damage has continued to build. In his account, the campaign has targeted the regime’s leadership, the machinery of internal repression, and the full range of Iran’s offensive capabilities, especially ballistic missiles and drones. Launch sites, storage facilities, and production centers are all under attack, he said.
Kemp also argued that Iran’s conventional forces have been devastated. “Don’t forget also that the US has sunk almost the entirety, if not the entirety of the Iranian Navy,” he said, adding that Washington has also destroyed nearly all of the Iranian Air Force. His bottom line: “I think this campaign proceeds really, until Iran’s military capability, offensive capability is reduced to pretty much zero.”
That leads to the question of what comes next inside Iran. Kemp said there remains a possibility that sustained military pressure could bring about regime change, though he stopped far short of predicting a smooth transition. “There is the possibility, which I think we would hope for, of regime change in Iran as a result of this military campaign,” he said. But whether that happens depends “to a large extent on what the Iranian oppositionists on the ground are prepared to do and able to do.”
He sees two plausible endgames. One is a messy transition driven by pressure from opposition forces and growing splits within the regime. “We’re going to probably see more infighting within the regime,” he said, and that could “lead ultimately to a transition to a different regime,” though “it might not be neat and tidy, it might not happen overnight.”
The other possibility is a much darker one: prolonged instability with no side able to take full control. “The other alternative, I think, which is potentially likely as well, is we see an extended period of chaos and violence in Iran, with no side dominating,” he said. Under that scenario, regime elements could continue to repress the population while opponents struggle to organize an uprising.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to see a tidy end to this
Kemp did not pretend to certainty. “It’s very hard to predict exactly what will happen,” he said. But his conclusion was clear: “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to see a tidy end to this.”
Kemp sees the Lebanon and Iran fronts as part of the same war. In his reading, Israel is trying to break Hezbollah because Hezbollah was built for this moment, while the campaign against Tehran is moving beyond attrition toward a possible political rupture. The immediate goal is to strip away the remaining offensive power of both Hezbollah and Iran. The harder question is what rises from the wreckage after that.
