Taking on Hezbollah
Regional war chatter fills the air and oil markets are roiling. The strategic implications of what's happening on the Israel-Lebanon border are wide reaching. Some of the most incisive analysis of the crisis is being produced by Austin Bay:
"The Middle East — the entire world — has changed since 1982. There is no Cold War, there is no Saddam. Lebanon has also changed. Many Lebanese are ready for Hezbollah to enter history's dustbin. The Lebanese have also experienced twenty years of Syrian occupation and thuggery. Hezbollah remains a creature of Syria — a Syrian tool bought and paid for by Iran."
As Bay and others have pointed out, Hezbollah is a financial dependency and an armed proxy of Tehran and because Iran is making a mockery of the West's attempts to halt its nuclear program, condemnation of Israel is not as vociferous as it might have been. Sure, the French and the Finns engaged in some mild bleating yesterday, but nobody took it seriously. The US endorses Israel's right to defend itself against terrorist attacks and it's Washington's word that counts. Which lead us to Austin Bay's most intriguing hypothesis. Might it be, he posits, that following the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers, the Egyptian and the Saudi governments have given Tel Aviv an implicit green light to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah so that the regional chess table can be reset and the road map rolled out once more.
WEEKEND READING: Jeffrey Goldberg called Hezbollah "the most successful terrorist organization in modern history." In 2002, Goldberg wrote a brilliant two-part article for the New Yorker examining Hezbollah. Here's part one, and here's part two. After reading Goldberg and after assessing this week's events so far, one is entitled to ask: Is the Lebanon crisis a preview of a terrifying future? Obviously, Iran and its allies are pushing for war. On Tuesday, the Iranians rejected a Western offer of talks on their nuclear program; on Wednesday their proxy committed an act of war. A logical conclusion is that Israel and America are being dragged deeper into the Mid-East killing fields by radicals who are convinced that they have the staying power to prevail.
