Last week I argued that the blows Israel inflicted on Iran and its most important proxy, Hezbollah, would have vast consequences for the military balance in the region. It has only taken a few days for those consequences to start showing up. Donald Trump reportedly wants the region’s conflicts quieted down by the time he comes to office. Hey — good luck with that.
For starters, with Iran and Hezbollah weakened by Israel, the leader they were protecting most, the beleaguered Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, took a body blow in the last few days when anti-government rebels in Syria swept in from their countryside redoubts and swept out Assad’s army from virtually all of Aleppo, the second largest city in Syria. Alas, though, many of these Syrian rebels are not boy scouts — the group leading the charge, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is a former Al Qaeda affiliate — and if Assad were toppled from power in Damascus, Syria, it could draw Israel in and destabilize the whole Levant.
Interestingly, Turkey, which backs some of these rebel groups and had been restraining them, may have given the green light for the attack. Turkey has long been Iran’s archrival for regional domination.
At the same time, a Western intelligence source tells me, a rancorous debate is afoot within Iran’s leadership over who is responsible for letting Hezbollah drag both Iran and Hezbollah into a devastating war with Israel — on behalf of Hamas — when Israel had not even attacked Hezbollah. As a result, Hezbollah’s rocket forces, meant to deter Israel from ever bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, have now been shattered.
Inside Lebanon, Hezbollah, which had become the army of the Shiites of Lebanon and imposed itself as the sacred third part of the country’s trinity — “the army, the people and the resistance” — to which every Lebanese leader had to pay homage, has dramatically lost support.
Israel was so surgical in its bombing inside Lebanon, trying to hit only Hezbollah targets and pro-Hezbollah neighborhoods, that it sent the message: “If you live in places that are loyal to the Lebanese state, you are safe, but if you stay in places Hezbollah controls, you are not safe,” explained Hanin Ghaddar, an expert on Hezbollah at The Washington Institute.
The message to Lebanese Shiites: Move away from Hezbollah and sign up for the new trinity: the people, the army and the state.
I would not count Hezbollah out, but it is going to be hard-pressed to come up with the money from Iran to pay for the reconstruction of all the neighborhoods and villages it controlled that have been devastated. And without that money and a resupply of arms from Iran, the other Lebanese political parties will surely try to remove Hezbollah’s veto power in the cabinet over who can be Lebanon’s next president and prime minister.
A senior U.S. official remarked to me, though, that precisely because Iran is so wounded now, it may feel that the only way to protect itself is by making a mad dash for a nuclear bomb. The Middle East will be anything but “over” when Trump arrives.
