Charles Krauthammer has an interesting piece up in the Washington Post. It explores the "victory" that Hezbollah won in Lebanon. If Krauthammer is correct, the victory was a grim one. He starts off by noting the same, lame apology by Nasrallah about his misjudgment in starting the war. I said it was an admission that Hezbollah had been hurt a lot more than people realized. Krauthammer takes it further.
So much for the "strategic and historic victory" Nasrallah had claimed less than two weeks earlier. What real victor declares that, had he known, he would not have started the war that ended in triumph?
Nasrallah's admission, vastly underplayed in the West, makes clear what the Lebanese already knew. Hezbollah may have won the propaganda war, but on the ground it lost. Badly.
True, under the inept and indecisive leadership of Ehud Olmert, Israel did miss the opportunity to militarily destroy Hezbollah and make it a non-factor in Israel's security, Lebanon's politics and Iran's foreign policy. Nonetheless, Hezbollah was seriously hurt. It lost hundreds of its best fighters. A deeply entrenched infrastructure on Israel's border is in ruins. The great hero has had to go so deep into hiding that Nasrallah has been called "the underground mullah."
Most important, Hezbollah's political gains within Lebanon during the war have proved illusory. As the dust settles, the Lebanese are furious at Hezbollah for provoking a war that brought them nothing but devastation — and then crowing about victory amid the ruins.
The Western media were once again taken in by the mystique of the "Arab street." The mob came out to cheer Hezbollah for raining rockets on Israel — surprise! — and the Arab governments that had initially criticized Hezbollah went conveniently silent. Now that the mob has gone home, Hezbollah is under renewed attack — in newspapers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt, as well as by many Lebanese, including influential Shiite academics and clan leaders. The Arabs know where their interests lie. And they do not lie with a Shiite militia that fights for Iran.
Frankly, if the other Arab countries do not start acting against the Iranian puppets (and Iran itself), they will end up as vassal states to a new Persian Empire. If you do not think that is what Tehran is planning, you have a really big set of blinders on. Read the whole thing and see if you agree with Krauthammer. Basically, I suspect he may be right.
