Even if the conniving Nasrallah, with Iran’s support, holds on as head of his extremist Shiite organization for a long time to come, his principal goal — to become a pan-Arab and Lebanese leader — is now unattainable. The man who for some time was seen as Israel’s main strategic enemy has, with his own hands, buried his accomplishments.
Bergman, Ronen. “The Fall of Hezbollah’s Leader.” Bloomberg, June 24, 2013.
“But regional experts say no one in the struggle has had a greater impact in recent weeks than Iranian-backed Hezbollah. The Lebanese group’s appearance in force on the battlefield has prompted a new direction in a war that had ebbed and flowed and until this spring appeared to be slipping away from the Syrian government.”
Detmer, Jamie. “Hezbollah Has Edge on Syrian Battlefield.” Voice of America, June 25, 2013.
“For Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, there is “some good news for his involvement in Syria,” observed Yoram Schweitzer, director the Terrorism and Low Intensity Warfare Project at the Institute for National Security in Tel Aviv.
“Hezbollah is gaining battle experience, but this is smaller in significance than the price Nasrallah’s paying, politically and operationally. There’s an erosion of Hezbollah’s fighting forces and its resources.”
RT, perhaps reverting to old habits, is getting hard to read as it or its contributors (what follows appears to be an op-ed) picks up on an anti-American screed in thick paragraphs. Nonetheless, as long as the world is reading the about itself in English, it’s outlook is as much a part of the global information environment as, say, Voice of America’s.
“Undoubtedly Hezbollah did discuss its intentions to enter the Syrian conflict with its patrons in Tehran and coordinated with Iran and then, to a lesser extent, with Russia through Iranian officials and through consultations with Aleksandr Zasypkin, Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon, and then Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov during his April 2013 visit to Beirut. The involvement of Hezbollah in Syria, however, is purely defensive. Moreover, Hezbollah is one of the last external players to be involved in Syria.”
As mentioned a few times on this blog, Syria is the Black Hole and Dark Star of the Islamic Small Wars: it has been drawing energy and matter, one might say, into itself and burning, and the longer it burns, the more it draws, and that includes some of the energies of two superpowers distinctly not invested in Islamic sectarian concerns except as a part of their distinct security structures.
In the early post-Soviet years, Russia appears to have neglected or sustained (both) arrangements with Syria as they were during the Cold War. There seems perhaps to have been no basis for complaint on the part of those with power: the Assad regime improved its financial standing, the Russians maintained lucrative contracts, and the military had a decent buffer and the core of a useful naval facility (Tartus).
The “Arab Spring” that seems to be giving way to a Burning Islamic Sectarian Summer has played hard on the secular dictatorships in the region and led the theocratic states into a so-far proxy conflict in which Hezbollah today has been spilling blood while spending itself — its intellectual and logistical energies, manpower, and focus.
On the Sunni side, which may be hemmed in or contained by Russian regional interest and military backbone, the fight is as slow as experienced by the Shiite, but its financial and social impacts may be comparatively less devastating.
The absurd ends — my analogy has been “two mad wasps fighting inside a bell jar” — make this form in conflict akin to an unmanageable natural disaster that casualty and displaced person figures underscore (more than 92,000 dead with about four million persons displaced).
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