Michael Totten (who has been living in and blogging from Lebanon) thinks that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, failed to convince a majority of the educated and independent-thinking Lebanese population that Hezbollah really "won" the recent war with Israel. So to save face, Nasrallah recently declared:
“[W]e did not believe, even by one percent, that the captive operation would result in such a wide-scale war, as such a war did not take place in the history of wars. Had we known that the captive operation would result in such a war we would not have carried it out at all.”
Interesting. That doesn't sound at all like the rhetoric of a victorious leader doing the will of God.
And RedBlueChristian has much more regarding the pyrrhic victory of Hezbollah:
Mona Fayed, a prominent Shiite academic in Beirut, wrote an article also published by An-Nahar last week. She asks: Who is a Shiite in Lebanon today? She provides a sarcastic answer: A Shiite is he who takes his instructions from Iran, terrorizes fellow believers into silence, and leads the nation into catastrophe without consulting anyone.
Ouch.
While the radical Shi'aa Islam preached by Iranian leaders certainly has a stranglehold on southern Lebanon, it is comforting to know that fundamentalism and extremism is abhorrent to many others in the rest of the nation, and that Hezbollah's $100 bill handouts are seen as an insult rather than as the blessings of Allah.
This is the only way that war in the Middle East can be peaceably averted.
ADDED: don't miss this stunning American Thinker article by Dan Gordon: Prelude to Apocalypse. A sample:
Much has been made in the Western press of Hezb’allah’s benign social services function in Lebanon, of the hospitals and schools it has built. Almost no notice, however, has been paid to the large numbers of these hospitals and schools which were built over its military bunkers and rocket launching sites. This was perhaps both the most cynical and barbaric disregard for innocent civilian lives of all of Hezb’allah’s and Iran’s strategic choices. It was also the most successful.
The decision was predicated not on its knowledge of its enemy (Israel) but its true genius lay in its knowledge of the press. The calculus was simple: launch a rocket from within a civilian population; if you kill Jews that’s a victory. If the Jews hit back and in so doing kill Lebanese civilians, that’s a victory. If they don’t hit back because they’re afraid to hit civilians, that’s a victory. Now repeat the process until you kill so many Jews they have to hit back and in so doing kill more Lebanese civilians. That’s the ultimate victory, because they know that in striking just those chords exactly what music the press will play.
Gordon concludes that the only battle won by Hezbollah was the media battle. Otherwise, their combat strategies were ineffective against Israel, and nearly all of their fortified bunkers, missile launchers, and anti-tank weapons were either captured or destroyed by Israel. However, the complicity of the press all but guarantees that this war will be but round one of a larger and much more deadly conflict.
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