Two years on: Hezbollah and Lebanon's Shi'ites are the biggest losers of Israel's war - opinion

In fact, as Israel’s longest war enters its third year, Nasrallah and his cause appear to be its most decisive losers. Where did he go wrong?

HEZBOLLAH’S defeat is on every possible level: strategically, militarily, politically, economically, and psychologically.

The Mossad’s operation was but another proof that Israel arrived for this part of the war well-prepared. The gradual decimation of Hezbollah’s commanders in multiple locations, and the systematic destruction of its long-range missiles, came coupled with a home-front policy that was controversial while executed, but ultimately proved effective.

The evacuation of 250,000 Israelis from 45 towns was costly both socially and fiscally. However, the de facto invitation of missile attacks on empty houses wasted Hezbollah’s ammunition, and at the same time caused a similar evacuation on the Lebanese side of the border.

On the face of it, in this part of the war, the sides were even. However, it is now clear that in this civilian respect, too, Hezbollah was outmaneuvered, twice:

Physically, Hezbollah’s villages were leveled, and their reconstruction seems nowhere in sight. Socially, Israel’s evacuees were taken care of; Hezbollah’s were not. The Israelis were sent to hotels throughout the country, where they were fully accommodated by the taxpayer. Nasrallah prepared no such cushion for his flock, who ended up homeless in their own land.

It was, and remains, the grim aftermath of Nasrallah’s military adventurism, political megalomania, and strategic folly.

FOUNDED IN 1982 with Iranian inspiration, funding, and management, Hezbollah’s undeclared, but very clear mission was twofold: to impose the Shi’ites on Lebanon, and Iran on the Middle East. For a good 40 years, this grand strategy seemed increasingly successful.

Within Lebanon, the Shi’ites’ previous political inferiority was gradually reversed, until Beirut’s parliament and government could do nothing without Nasrallah’s nod. Outside Lebanon, Hezbollah became a centerpiece of an Iranian network of proxies that stretched from Iraq through Syria to Yemen. The plot was much more ambitious than many people realize, underscored by an effort to redesign Syria demographically.

The Syrian civil war’s estimated 6.5 million refugees were predominantly Sunnis. They were president Bashar Assad’s main enemy, and targets. Assad, an Alawite, and his Iranian masters thus began settling Shi’ites, mostly from Iraq, in the abandoned homes of Syria’s Sunni refugees.

It was in this setting that Hezbollah believed, with good reason, that it was part of a historic effort to create a Shi’ite-dominated Middle East. That belief is what had previously led Nasrallah to his most daring – and reckless – decision: to join Assad’s war on his people.

Numbering hardly 2 million people, Lebanon’s Shi’ites assumed a task the price of which they could not afford. Yes, as their leader saw things, it was a goal worth the sacrifice. He saw a continuum of Lebanese, Iraqi, Yemeni, and Iranian Shi’ites, reinforced by Syrian Alawites, and thus totaling more than 100 million Persians and Arabs.

Within this configuration, the Lebanese Shi’ites would loom prominent, as would their leader, because they will be recalled as those who spearheaded the creation of a Shi’ite Middle East.

That was the dream. Reality was that Lebanon’s Shi’ites became Assad’s cannon fodder. Hezbollah is believed to have lost in Syria more than 2,000 quality fighters. Combined with its wounded, the militia lost in Syria more than one-tenth of its effective fighting force, all for naught. Syria was its Vietnam. A more prudent leadership would have appreciated this risk in advance and avoided other people’s wars.

That, for instance, is what Generalissimo Francisco Franco did during World War II, when he refused to join Hitler’s war, even though they were fellow fascists, and despite Germany’s crucial assistance to him during the Spanish Civil War. But Franco, though also a tyrant and a religious reactionary, was no Nasrallah. He knew his size, and its limits. Nasrallah didn’t know his size.

Nasrallah thought his minority, hardly one third of Lebanon’s population, could impose itself on that country’s Sunnis, Christians, and Druze. Moreover, he thought a country as small, poor, and fractured as Lebanon could lead the Islamist assault on the Jewish state. And he thought 100 million Shi’ites could impose themselves on 400 million Sunni Arabs. And most spectacularly, he thought 85 million Iranians could dominate the Middle East’s 500 million inhabitants.

In the past two years, this entire structure unraveled.

The Alawite-led Syria, for which Nasrallah sent his people to die, is gone. The imperialist Iran he served is crippled militarily and marginalized strategically, having lost its Syrian bastion and Lebanese arm.

Worse, the Lebanon that Nasrallah hijacked is reasserting itself, and no longer heeds its Shi’ites’ commands. And worst of all, the militia that was Nasrallah’s lifetime achievement is dismembered: its men fill hospitals and graveyards, its outposts are razed, its arms are busted, its coffers are empty, and its Iranian sponsors are gone.

That is why the biggest losers of the war that began two years ago next Tuesday are Lebanon’s Shi’ites, their brash leader, and the militia that was his pride, and his country’s bane.