Hizbullah Has Achieved What Arab States Only Dreamed of

I don't pretend to be a middle east expert, but it seems like Israel and the U.S. are losing bigtime.

Hizbullah Has Achieved What Arab States Only Dreamed of:

The sixth Arab-Israeli war, as some have called it, has ended in the first real setback for Israel's deterrent power

by David Hirst

There was nothing new about the broad objective behind Israel's war on Lebanon: through the destruction of Hizbullah it was to wreak fundamental change in a strategic, political and military environment that it had come to regard as menacing to its future. Nothing new about its methods either: the use of massive violence not merely against its military adversary but against the civilians and the infrastructure of the country in which it operates. Or about its official justification: seizing upon one single act of 'terrorist' violence from the other side as the opportunity to strike at the whole 'terrorist' organisation that was responsible for it. Or about the international support, even outright collaboration, it enjoyed, although in the case of the US and Britain this support was unprecedented in its partisan degree and in the perception of the vast dimensions, nature and menace of the 'enemy' against which Israel was waging war. For Condoleezza Rice the 'root causes' of the Lebanese crisis lay not on the Israeli side but in the wider Arab and Muslim world: Hizbullah was but the cutting edge of 'global terror', of the Islamic fanaticism that nurtured it, and of those states, Iran and Syria, that succour these forces for their own purposes, whether inspired by ideology or realpolitik.