Let’s all give thanks to the Israel Defense Forces for the operations that have not only gutted Hezbollah, but at long last took out the thugs most responsible for the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that slaughtered 220 Marines and 21 other US service members.
Seven US presidents had failed to bring that basic justice.
Bigger picture: Israel’s steady flow of deftly targeted attacks has eviscerated Hezbollah’s leadership and its rocket stocks — and back-footed the civilized world’s ultimate enemy in this conflict, the cabal that controls Iran.
It’s also exposed the fatuousness of all the Western “friends” of Israel who still keep mewling that the only path to Mideast peace starts with the creation of a Palestinian state.
No: The barriers to Mideast peace are now: 1) The Tehran regime and its imperialist ambitions, and 2) the refusal to recognize that Israel can and will continue to exist, in roughly its current borders, as the world’s only Jewish state.
Israel’s Arab neighbors have slowly been coming to accept the latter truth, their attention focused by the growing Iranian threat, their public stance constrained by all the decades of anti-Israel propaganda they’ve pushed, before and after their military efforts failed.
The Palestinian people are the prime victims of that propaganda, weaponized and infantilized by it, deceived into thinking that Israel’s success is the cause of all their problems.
But their plight is only a sideshow, one that will only end as a consequence of a far larger regional settlement.
Indeed, “Mideast peace” progressed by leaps and bounds in the Trump years, as Washington finally quit chasing the “two-state solution” and instead brokered accords between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors.
Progress slowed to a crawl when the Biden team took over and re-embraced the two-state delusion, plus the even more fantastical Obama-ite obsession with reaching an entente with the “Death to America” Tehran regime.
The Israelis were horrifically shocked out of their own (much smaller) complacency last Oct. 7: They’d convinced themselves Hamas was fully contained.
As the IDF focused on destroying Hamas this last year, it held off from answering the thousands of missiles Hezbollah shot into Israel — even as the Jewish state’s diplomats warned that action would come if the terrorists remained on its northern border, in defiance of the 2006 UN resolution that supposedly guaranteed they’d be removed.
When Israel finally began to move against Hezbollah, Team Biden and its equally feckless allies rushed to call for a cease-fire — between Israel and Lebanon, not even daring to call out Hezbollah in much the same clueless way it had stood silent during the 11 months of rocket attacks, even as it had fundamentally abandoned the US citizens taken hostage on Oct. 7.
The IDF isn’t done with Hezbollah yet, nor should it be: Whether or not it takes a ground invasion, this threat must be eliminated now as surely as Hamas must be wiped out.
As for Iran: The regime’s leaders are huddled in hiding, unsure if the IDF has their numbers as it did those of Ibrahim Aqil, Hassan Nasrallah and all the rest of Hezbollah’s top ranks.
The tyrants in Tehran never intended a direct faceoff with the IDF; this war was supposed to see its proxies keep everyone busy while Iran went nuclear.
Instead, the war is steadily destroying those proxies, along with whatever credibility the Iranian regime had in Arab eyes.
Note that Nasrallah’s death brought widespread celebrations in Lebanon, Syria and even Iran.
The Lebanese are starting to imagine a future when Hezbollah doesn’t dominate their nation; the butcher who rules the remnants of Syria is refreshing his exit strategy while the Houthi terrorists who control most of Yemen are realizing that Tehran won’t protect them, either.
Exactly what’s next in the coming weeks and months is profoundly uncertain, but at least the nonsense that has animated Biden-Harris policy toward the Middle East stands exposed as the poppycock it’s always been.
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