FPI / October 2, 2024

Geostrategy-Direct

In liquidating Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s 30-year reign of terror, Israel not only killed a primary enemy but launched into a strategic shift as it turned a deaf ear to the West’s foreign policy consensus that favors accommodating Iran, an analyst wrote.

The smoldering rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli air strike that killed Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sept. 27. / Ibrahim Amro / AFP via Getty Images

By ordering the strike on Nasrallah while he was attending the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “underscored the Jewish state’s independence from the global consensus that has resolved not to confront terrorists but rather to appease them, whether they’re plotting in the Middle East or living among the local populations of Western nations, including the United States,” Lee Smith wrote for Tablet Magazine on Sept. 27.

“At this stage, heeding Washington’s advice in war is like taking counsel from the angel of death,” Smith wrote. “Just as the U.S. is no longer willing or able to win the wars it commits Americans to fight, the Joe Biden administration won’t let U.S. allies win wars either.”

In paving its own route in the turbulent Middle East, Israel decided that occasional strikes that took out officers was not enough. The Israelis went for the knockout blow by targeting its enemies’ chain of command.

Hizbullah “is a function of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and if allowed to survive the Lebanese militia will be replenished and trained by the IRGC to replace the fallen,” Smith wrote. “Nasrallah issued from a different source. He was the protégé of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Their tenures — until now — were roughly coterminous: Khamenei replaced the founder of the Islamic Republic Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 and chose Nasrallah to lead Hizbullah in 1992.”

In 1989, Nasrallah left Lebanon for Iran, where the 29-year-old cleric was introduced to Khamenei. In the vacuum left by Khomeini’s death, Khamenei was working to consolidate his power, which included taking control of Hizbullah, Teheran’s most significant external asset.

Khamenei saw Israel’s 1992 assassination of then-Hizbullah chief Abbas al-Mussawi’s assassination “as an opening to put his own man in place, and with Hizbullah’s operations against Israeli forces in Lebanon, Nasrallah’s legend steadily grew,” Smith noted.

“Even Israeli officials credited Hizbullah for driving Israel out of the south in 2000, a singular triumph worthy of the name Nasrallah, a victory against the hated Zionists that no other Arab leader could claim.”

Smith continued: “But the myth of Nasrallah as Turban Napoleon was dispelled with the disastrous 2006 war which he stumbled into by kidnapping two Israel soldiers. Later he said that had he known Israel was going to respond so forcefully, he’d never have given the order. And yet despite the thousands killed in Lebanon, Hizbullahis and civilians, and the billions of dollars worth of damage, he claimed that Hizbullah won just because he survived.”

It was the U.S. which brought an end to the 2006 Israel-Hizbullah war with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which stipulated that there were to be no armed personnel or weapons south of the Litani, other than those of the Lebanese government and the UN peacekeeping force.

“The resolution was a farce, as Hizbullah’s presence and capabilities in south Lebanon have only grown in the two decades since it was passed,” Smith noted.

“Obviously, there is no chance the Lebanese government will ever take action against Hizbullah, which controls the government. Nor will the U.S., France, or any other power enforce UNSCR 1701—except to endorse the Lebanese demand for an end to Israeli overflights and indulge Beirut’s border claims.”

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  Analysis: Israel declares independence from a pro-Iran global consensus, WorldTribune.com