Declan Hayes
Although Iran's Armed Forces will no doubt rise to the multiple challenges which await it from Beirut to Tehran, Iran must also somehow galvanise countries like Egypt.
Benjamin Netanyahu must feel he is on a roll. Hassan Nasrallah, with many of his comrades, is gone, assassinated by American war ordnance in an act widely described as just another run of the mill Israeli war crime. Israel's air force continues to bomb Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and wherever else takes their fancy. Israel's ground forces commit countless more war crimes, primarily against defenceless Palestinians, and all of NATO actions show the West fully supports all those crimes, both big and "small".
Because all of the indignities Israel's troops inflict on defenceless Arabs have NATO's imprimatur, reports that tossing dead Palestinians off roof tops goes against Israeli Army family values must be treated as the sort of sick joke we have not seen since Hitler's Wehrmacht were amusing themselves at the expense of Belarusian nuns they stuck up against firing squad walls all those years ago.
Although NATO were quick to tell us what an awful man Nasrallah was, I hold a contrary opinion of him and the group he led, most particularly because of their heroic stand in Syria, where they inflicted the first important strategic defeat on NATO's Muslim Brotherhood proxies in the Qalamoun Hills, just north of Damascus, and where they then went on to help the heroic Syrian Army liberate the fabled Christian of Maaloula and thereby turn the course of NATO's war against the secular Syrian republic.
Not only were those string of Hezbollah victories strategically important but the crimes Netanyahu's "freedom fighters" committed against Orthodox Christian girls there are so horrific that, even now, over ten years later, they are too demonic to recall but not to avenge, as Hezbollah heroically did, and may God bless every last one of them for that.
The fact of the matter is Christianity would have ceased to exist in its historic Syrian cradle without the sacrifices of the martyrs of Hezbollah and, to repeat, may God and all people of good will bless them now and forever for that. The fact that Netanyahu, whose army regularly slaughters Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese Christians, argues the contrary just goes to further show what a morally decrepit monster he and his NATO cronies are at heart.
Still! Give the devil his due. Taking out Nasrallah and getting those pagers and walkie talkies to explode will make for great Hollywood blockbusters, and Nasrallah and his mates can always be painted out as monsters, the sort who throw dead bodies (and homosexuals) off buildings, and who don't believe in little league baseball and apple pie. Oscar winning dross, for sure.
Hezbollah and Iran, meanwhile, will have some serious soul-searching to do, as to how their security was so heavily breached, most particularly in the case of the pagers. As regards Nasrallah's assassination, that was only a matter of when not if. Hezbollah's south Beirut stronghold is relatively small and NATO's armies of informers and agents would, over the years, have garnered important granules of information that would have allowed NATO to zoom in on Hezbollah's primary bolt holes. Add in more electronic spying than we can even begin to imagine and Nasrallah had to be, at day's end, a sitting duck.
I extrapolate to that from the IRA's South Armagh sniper, who was eventually caught by a more primitive version of such means and by the 1973 arrest of Belfast's IRA leaders. Although the Viet Minh's Hanoi HQ (in an ice cream shop) and the Viet Cong's Saigon HQ (in a noodle shop that served excellent noodles) were never discovered, the Vietnamese never had to contend with the huge array of electronic firepower NATO has at its disposal.
The exploding pagers are a different matter, as they show that the supply chains of Hezbollah and, perhaps Iran as well, were compromised almost at their core. Although former Iranian President Ahedinejad has pointed to the hand of Mossad, which has spewed out all kinds of James Bond blarney to further beguile and bewilder Israel's many enemies, all of that is by the way.
We have, in essence, two sides going to war here and one side, NATO, knows what it is doing and the other, the so-called Axis of Resistance, is still very rough around the edges on both the hard and soft parts of this decades-long war.
NATO, using Israel as the tip of its spear, has total air superiority and, when not itself directly bombing Syrian Army positions in Deir ez-Zor, can summon its Israeli attack dog to ethnically cleanse Palestine, as well as large as swathes of Lebanon and Syria and all, without as much as a whimper or complaint from the great and the good of the Western world.
Instead, all we get are flaccid marches in London, New York and Berlin (dangerous one that) imploring someone or other to stop the carnage. But none of those marches and none of those UN resolutions will change a thing because, as often as not, they are designed not to change a thing.
Though Nasrallah, for all his faults, (he had a slight speech impediment), set out to change things, most notably by his critical intervention to thwart NATO's Syrian campaign, the game has moved on and different players must bring different tools and tricks to the table now that NATO has what it has always wanted: a direct confrontation with Iran and the opportunity to obliterate south Lebanon with heavy ordinance.
Although Iran's Armed Forces will no doubt rise to the multiple challenges which await it from Beirut to Tehran, Iran must also somehow galvanise countries like Egypt, which famously led axes of resistance in days gone by, to act in both the hard and soft war arenas.
Although that is a huge call for Iran and her allies, there are even bigger plates she must step up to. With NATO's road to Tehran now prised open, NATO now sees another means of thwarting whatever plans Russia and China may be hatching regarding their forthcoming BRICS summit in Kazan, where cold feet may very well be the order of the day.
Still, After all... tomorrow is another day , we can think of all that tomorrow. For now, we salute Nasrallah and all Hezbollah's fallen who, like the great Syrian apostle St Paul before them, fought the good fight and kept and spread the faith.