War Nerd on Hezbollah

War Nerd calls the recent conflict entirely for Hezbollah:

The funniest bit is the way desperate suckers are trying to spin total defeat of the IDF into some kind of victory. What's impressed me is that no Israelis are saying that. All the Israeli commentators I've read have faced up to the fact that they got hosed. It's the Americans, totally out of touch with reality and desperate to stay that way, who are finding lame excuses for the IDF, like "Hezbollah didn't really WIN, since they didn't wipe out Israel."

The best answer to that comes from an Israeli columnist I read, who said, "If a lightweight boxer fights a heavyweight and gets a draw, the lightweight won." Except I'm not sure it was even a draw. I think Hezbollah flat-out won, not just in PR/Propaganda terms but by anybody's standards. They're in total control of the field of battle, Southern Lebanon -- I hope none of you are dumb enough to think that this "International Peacekeeping Force" is going to actually try to disarm Hezbollah after the Israelis couldn't do it by force of arms.

As always, it's sad when parody personalities have greater insight than official pundits. I'm not sure I agree that it's been entirely a positive for Hezbollah though. Here's Totten quoting Michael Young from Reason:

Hezbollah's victory is no different than most other Arab victories in recent decades: the "victory" of October 1973, where Egypt and Syria managed to cross into Israeli-held land, their land, only to be later saved from a thrashing by timely United Nations intervention; the "victory" of 1982, where Palestinian groups were ultimately expelled from West Beirut, but were proud to have stayed in the fight for three months; the Iraqi "victory" of 1991, where Saddam Hussein brought disaster on his country but still held on to power. Now we have the Hezbollah "victory" of 2006: the Israelis bumbled and blundered, but still managed to create a million refugees, to kill over 1,000 people, and to kick Lebanon's economy back several years. One dreads to imagine what Hezbollah would recognize as a military loss.

Now that the fighting has stopped, we'll have to see how many Lebanese think Hezbollah are heroes, and how many Lebanese think Hezbollah are an annoying bunch of foreign-backed troublemakers that provoked Israel into devastating their country. Naturally the Bush administration will say that the latter reaction is stronger than the former, but anyone who listens to them when it comes to judging the Middle East should have their heads examined for large holes out which their brain has fallen. I don't know much about the various factions in Lebanese politics. I suspect that many Lebanese will be vehemently pro or anti Hezbollah depending on their ethnic or religious affiliation. Right now most of what I've read seems to indicate the Hezbollah's prestige has shot up dramatically in the larger Arab and Muslim worlds. But those larger worlds didn't get their infrastructure bombed and civilians killed. As always, I welcome expert opinion (or more likely, given the prominence of my blog, informed amateur opinion) on this matter.

UPDATE: Totten just put up this post quoting Hezbollah's leader Nasrallah saying he really didn't know what he was starting:

“[W]e did not believe, even by one percent, that the captive operation would result in such a wide-scale war, as such a war did not take place in the history of wars. Had we known that the captive operation would result in such a war we would not have carried it out at all.”