On situation in the ME - someone else's expertise we thought we'd share with you:
Well, and some general thoughts on Lebanon.
1. Hezbollah and Iran certainly put themselves in serious trouble when Iran first raised the bar of expectations very high and then began to delay its response to the murder of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, while Hezbollah limited itself to an extremely modest response to the murder of its commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut.
In August, I wrote that something like this would hit the deterrence potential and provoke the Zionist enemy to even more daring actions. Iran's strategy in support of the Palestinians after October 7, 2023, to drag Israel into a swamp of conflicts on various fronts with a slow escalation boiling the frog was quite understandable and workable, but the fact that Israel would ultimately try to escalate sharply in order to get out of this swamp should also have been expected, and they had to be ready to raise the stakes as well.
Instead, the Iranian and Hezbollah leadership succumbed to the persuasions of Qatar, Turkey, etc., deciding that the US would be able to persuade Israel to agree to a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, etc., in the run-up to the US presidential elections to prevent the conflict from expanding.
As a result, the Resistance Axis completely lost the initiative in the last two months and Israel took it over.
2. I was somewhat surprised that the military and political leadership of Hezbollah turned out to be so concentrated in Beirut, where, in my opinion, all the known high-ranking commanders who died, including the Secretary General himself, died as a result of strikes on Hezbollah ground and underground facilities in the Dahiya area. At the same time, Hezbollah has a developed underground and other infrastructure in other parts of Lebanon. Again, it seems that the Hezbollah leadership and command believed in the previously existing "red lines" for too long and did not expect that Israel would dare to act in a mode of rapid increase in the escalation level
3. The armed wing of Hezbollah has received a number of very heavy blows, but still retains serious military potential and its units continue to shell northern Israel and elsewhere, and while they are able to do this, the Israeli leadership cannot achieve its stated goal, that is, to create conditions for the return of residents of the northern regions of Israel evacuated due to military action. In this regard, the likelihood of an Israeli ground operation in some limited area in southern Lebanon, in my opinion, is very high, and in the near future.
4. The main question is how flexible and adaptive is the Hezbollah command structure to cope with these challenges, although in terms of saturation with personnel and weapons, it can certainly count on the help of allies. Potentially, Hezbollah can be helped in this by both Iranian advisers and pro-Iranian Iraqi militia forces, who now regularly launch drones and cruise missiles at Israel in support of the Palestinians under the general name of "Islamic Resistance in Iraq."
Moreover, today's words of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that "all Muslims are obliged by Sharia to stand with the people of Lebanon and proud Hezbollah with their capabilities and help them in the fight against the aggressive and vile oppressor regime," looks like a clear instruction to Iranian allies to use all their capabilities to support Hezbollah. The capabilities for this are there, but they must be used wisely.
t.me/ImpNavigator/8651
Sep 28 at 22:45
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