With the killing of Nasrallah announced earlier today, and all the events of the last year in that region of the world, here are some musings.

Of course, Israelis detested Nasrallah. But I wonder how many Arabs felt the same way and are happy that Israel managed to take him out. He was an agent of Iran, which after all isn’t part of the Arab world, and had been responsible for the death of many Arabs, too. And although the vast majority of the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank (or Judah and Sumeria) are highly invested in the perpetual war to destroy Israel, I wonder how many others in the region would just like the Palestinians and Iranians to cease and desist. For example, the Lebanese might recall the days when their country was a very pleasant place in which to live, and might want some of that back again. The Palestinians have stirred up trouble and bloodshed wherever they’ve gone. And the same for the Iranian mullahtocracy.

But even if it’s correct that many Arabs would like the wars to stop and could live with the existence of the state of Israel, will it matter? Because the billion dollar question is: what will Iran do?

One of the brilliant things Netanyahu has done is to make the message very clear: we can find you and kill you wherever you are. And although the higher-ups speak of the glory of martyrdom, I doubt they’re extremely eager for it themselves. It’s hard to know how well such deterrence would work for people who believe that martyrdom is the best way to paradise, but these people also seem to crave and enjoy having power on earth.

Speaking of Iran, one of the men taken out in that Beirut strike was Abbas Nilforoushan, Iran’s big man in Lebanon:

Nilforoushan, Hezbollah’s key Iranian advisor, was behind the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran. He appears to be second-in-command when it comes to military operations. In a 2020 article, the Israeli news website YNET identified him as the Islamic “Guard’s deputy commander for operations.”

Israel’s latest operations against Hezbollah have had an extraordinary boldness and must strike at least some fear into the hearts of Iran’s proxies and the Iranians themselves. I don’t think they saw anything like this coming and to me it seems to represent a sea change. First the utter shock and science-fiction quality of the exploding pagers, then the walkie-talkies, and then a whole series of targeted killings on the mid-level leaders. Then the higher-ups were obliterated while in a bunker-like headquarters where they were conferring, and my strong suspicious is that it was highly fortified. And yet they’re gone, killed in a place where they probably felt the safest, assembling in person because their other communications were either dismantled or seemed too dangerous to use.

Apparently, Khamenei has now been moved to a “secure” location. But is any location secure?

And to top it all off, the big blast occurred when Netanyahu was addressing the General Assembly of the UN and giving that body a piece of his mind.

NOTE: Joe Biden has come through with a pretty decent statement on the killing of Nasrallah. Then again, it’s being reported that Biden is none too pleased at having been kept out of the information loop and that his ceasefire plans didn’t work out. Harris’ statement starts out fine and then pivots to the usual blah-blah about the need for diplomacy. I think diplomacy has been tried for a long long time in the region, and has utterly failed when dealing with terrorists.