{"id":1154,"date":"2006-07-21T17:48:29","date_gmt":"2006-07-21T17:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:49","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:49","slug":"what_ifisrael_a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1154","title":{"rendered":"What If&#8230;Israel Actually Wins??"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the always-interesting site &#8216;democracyarsenal&#8217; (not known for its generous helpings of Bush-love), an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.democracyarsenal.org\/2006\/07\/why_did_hezboll.html\" target=\"browser\">interesting post<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.democracyarsenal.org\/hamidbio.html\" target=\"browser\">Shadi Hamid<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Hezbollah knew that any attack on Israel would elicit a forceful response, particularly in light of Israel\u2019s sustained efforts to recover abducted soldier Gilad Shalit the previous week. Any intelligent person could have predicted that Israel would do everything in its power to destroy Hezbullah infrastructure if provoked along the border. Sure, there are short-term strategic gains which may yet accrue to Hezbollah, but in the long run, the group\u2019s organizational capacity has been severely hit and, now, its continued existence as the second strongest political force in Lebanon (along with coalition partners Amal) is a big question-mark. If Hezbollah&#8217;s goal was, in fact, to force Israel into a prisoner exhange, then killing eight soldiers makes absolutely no sense. Nasrallah might very well be a raging megalomaniac but I&#8217;m not sure that, by itself, explains Hezbollah&#8217;s strategic self-immolation.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A strategic setback for Hizbollah sounds like a victory for Israel, no? How else can it be interpreted?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Some Egyptians I have spoken to here, in between tiresome praises of Nasrallah, claim to understand it quite well \u2013 that Hezbollah did this for karamah, to reclaim Arab world\u2019s dignity (the destruction of one\u2019s country would seem a rather exorbitant price to pay for regaining one&#8217;s \u201cdignity\u201d).  Or, as someone else suggested \u2013 it&#8217;s every militant Islamist group&#8217;s dream to drag the world into some kind or regional conflagration, where Arabs will be forced to get up or sit down (although the vast majority of Arabs have been sitting down rather consistently for the last five decades). Read Michael Doran\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.org\/20020101faessay6555\/michael-scott-doran\/somebody-else-s-civil-war.html\" target=\"browser\">Somebody Else\u2019s Civil War<\/a>\u201d for a sense of how this set-up might work. (Interestingly, Doran is now the point-person for the Middle East on the National Security Council).<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Interesting to see the man who ran Muslims for Kerry making an approving comment about Bush&#8217;s NSC staff choices, too&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>An interesting piece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A liberal American Muslim a) suggests that Israel could win this confrontation; and b) that Bush may have made some good staffing decisions in the NSC. Snowballs will be handed out in Baker, CA&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}