Was just looking at the close-up, on site pics of the buildings destroyed by Israel of the Hezbollah headquarters area and you could just about run what’s left through a flour sifter. Israel says Hezbollah’s top commander, Hassan Nasrallah, was present when they bombed the area into oblivion, and there’s no sign of life now in the pile of sand and dust that remains.
The word is that he was there with a lot of other terrorist schemers when the bombs hit and there is now nothing whatever coming out from anyone in Hezbollah, no orders, no comments, nothing.
The jokers in Iran are claiming that he survived and is alive, but denial is their stock in trade and I doubt anyone is buying a word of it. With the pager and walkie-talkie explosions, all the dead and sorely damaged users of them, all the hits on all the rocket launchers, all the destruction of all the rockets stored away, Hezbollah has been hugely degraded over this past week and I now expect Israel to move in with a ground campaign with air support to force either the surrender of Hezbollah or the actual government of Lebanon to take back their country, or preferably both.
France is having fits over this, Lebanon used to be basically a French colony, and they still have big investments there they don’t want getting bombed, so they’re screaming for a cease-fire. The problem is that Hezbollah, just like Hamas, moved munitions and operations into a lot of public buildings, homes and apartment buildings, and Israel is destroying them. It’s a little late for the French to complain, they should have stopped that, themselves, instead of letting the terrorism against Israel build and grow.
Right now I think Israel is definitely going to do a ground invasion to push Hezbollah back behind the Litani River, which is the boundary they’d agreed to stay behind in a peace accord that they then ignored. Only this time, Lebanon is going to lose more territory because Israel will push them further back than before and make it permanent this time.
The government of Iran is a pack of cowards, they’re riding a dying horse because the people have realized how much better off they were with Shah Reza Pahlavi than the religious fanatics they traded him for, who keep committing mass executions of dissidents. But being fanatics, they may just try to attack Israel full on, once they see their surrogates of Hamas and Hezbollah rendered impotent that they poured many billions of dollars into.
Remember that Iran is an enemy of most of the Mid-Eastern states and ultimately the US will have to take a side against them because we’re allied with Saudi Arabia and friendly, if not allied, with the OPEC states. This would happen if war breaks out between Iran and Israel, because the Saudis would seize the opportunity to help smash their worst enemy if their chances of winning looked good enough, and the US would support them against Iran.
Everyone knows that sooner or later, Iran has to be stopped from becoming the nuclear armed bully they want to be, and I see that day coming the more Israel hammers Iran’s proxies into the dirt.