WINNERS?
It is interesting to see how suggestible world opinion can be. Hassan Nasrallah says that Hezbollah "won" the one-month war it started with Israel and the world affects to believe it. Even the Lebanese pretend to believe it, though their economy was wrecked in the process.
What interests me a little more is the absence of any sense of cause and effect among the Lebanese leaders. They allow Hezbollah to operate as a surrogate military within their state, and then they complain when Hezbollah's military transgressions are answered by an Israeli military response against the host state. And now the Lebanese have to pretend to celebrate Hezbollah's victory -- while tourists quietly decide to go anywhere in the Mediterranean except Beirut.
Another body of opinion, exemplified by George Friedman at Stratfors, says that by failing to eliminate Hezbollah's hardened positions in south Lebanon, Israel has lost its aura of military invincibility -- the invisible shield that for thirty-odd years made the leaders of Muslim states think twice before starting a rumble. This might be true for the moment. But it doesn't include the additional reality that sometimes failure is a salutary prompt to rethink one's tactics and strategy. The likelihood now is that Israel will find ways around Hezbollah's (and Iran's) tactic of conducting rocket war from fortified bunkers and Israel will not advertise it when they do.
Israel's current Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert may be viewed as a loser by Israel's Knesset or parliament, and they may replace him with Bibi Netanyahu, who was PM in the 1990s and went through his own years of loserdom, and now might return to power with a more refined tragic sense of politics and circumstance, as Churchill did in England in 1939.
World opinion seems to regard Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the current "winner" in the region. He says he aims to kick Israel's ass and sends his goons to show the world how it's done. They're like little kids who go to a neighbor's house, set a paper bag full of dog shit on fire on the door step, ring the doorbell, and hide in the bushes to watch the response. Eventually the police show up.
What interests me a little more is the absence of any sense of cause and effect among the Lebanese leaders. They allow Hezbollah to operate as a surrogate military within their state, and then they complain when Hezbollah's military transgressions are answered by an Israeli military response against the host state. And now the Lebanese have to pretend to celebrate Hezbollah's victory -- while tourists quietly decide to go anywhere in the Mediterranean except Beirut.
Another body of opinion, exemplified by George Friedman at Stratfors, says that by failing to eliminate Hezbollah's hardened positions in south Lebanon, Israel has lost its aura of military invincibility -- the invisible shield that for thirty-odd years made the leaders of Muslim states think twice before starting a rumble. This might be true for the moment. But it doesn't include the additional reality that sometimes failure is a salutary prompt to rethink one's tactics and strategy. The likelihood now is that Israel will find ways around Hezbollah's (and Iran's) tactic of conducting rocket war from fortified bunkers and Israel will not advertise it when they do.
Israel's current Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert may be viewed as a loser by Israel's Knesset or parliament, and they may replace him with Bibi Netanyahu, who was PM in the 1990s and went through his own years of loserdom, and now might return to power with a more refined tragic sense of politics and circumstance, as Churchill did in England in 1939.
World opinion seems to regard Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the current "winner" in the region. He says he aims to kick Israel's ass and sends his goons to show the world how it's done. They're like little kids who go to a neighbor's house, set a paper bag full of dog shit on fire on the door step, ring the doorbell, and hide in the bushes to watch the response. Eventually the police show up.
posted by Padrino at 8:24 AM
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