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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 17-Jul-06
Mideast war now centers around Hizbollah's Hassan Nasrallah

Web Log - July, 2006

Mideast war now centers around Hizbollah's Hassan Nasrallah

Nasrallah splits the Arab world and draws international support for Israel

Hizbollah chief Sheik Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, gloating about missile strikes on Israeli civilians. <font size=-2>(Source: al-Jazeera via youtube.com)</font>

Hizbollah chief Sheik Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, gloating about missile strikes on Israeli civilians. (Source: al-Jazeera via youtube.com)

Hizbollah has launched over 1000 missiles on northern Israeli cities, but it was the sight of Hizbollah chief Sheik Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on tv with a shit-eating smile, gloating about missile strikes on Israeli civilians and promising more of them, that seems to have done the impossible -- made almost everyone agree that Israel is the victim.

"We are at the beginning of the confrontation with Israel", Nasrallah said, adding, "the Islamic world has the opportunity to be victorious against the Israeli enemy." Hizbollah is known to have thousands of missiles, supplied by Syria and Iran, pointed at northern Israel, but observers have been surprised that some of these missiles have been capable of reaching as much as 40 to 50 miles into Israel. "The enemy doesn't know our capabilities or what we have," said Nasrallah.

France, which had formerly been condemning Israel, agreed that "Israel has a right to defend itself."

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan made a middle of the road statement by saying, "I appeal to all parties to spare civilian life and civilian infrastructure," referring to Hizbollah's missiles and Israel's strikes at Lebanon's roads and bridges.

This followed a bitterly confrontational emergency summit meeting of the Arab League in Cairo on Saturday. The emergency meeting had been called to deal with the situation in Lebanon, but failed to produce any consensus.

The underlying issue was differences between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims. (These are the same two branches of Islam that have opposed each other in Iraq.)

More and more, Nasrallah's adventure is being seen as a means for Iran to use Shia Islam to penetrate the mostly Sunni Arab world.

Hizbollah is considered to be a creation of Iran with support from Syria, and receives $100 million funding per year from Iran. Hizbollah's weapons are clearly from Iran, and Hizbollah shares with Iran the goal of wiping Israel off the map.

Thus, Sunni Arab countries, including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, are not willing to give carte blanche to Shia Hizbollah, supported by Shia countries Syria and Iran. The centuries-old violence between Shia and Sunni Islam is just as great as the centuries-old violence between Islam and Christianity.

So we have a war between Israel and Hizbollah. Where is it going?

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, what I'm watching for in this situation is what I'm always watching for -- changes in attitude in large masses of the public.

While the mainstream media always focus on what the politicians do, what's really always important to Generational Dynamics is how the masses of people react. Mainstream journalists and politicians and pundits really have very little understanding of how little influence politicians have on world events. It's the shifts in public opinion that tell what's really coming, since politicians are always forced to follow public opinion.

In this case, the Hizbollah missiles have unified the Israeli public in support of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), for the first time in a long time.

This isn't so significant, however, since the public is unified against the politician Nasrallah and his band of men launching missiles from people's homes in southern Lebanon.

What's still missing, and what I still haven't seen, is any massive shift in the level of animosity between Israelis and Palestinians. That shift has been taking place gradually, to be sure, over a period of months, but the point is that the current war does not appear to have made a difference in that picture.

So as I wrote a couple of days ago, this situation does not appear to be heading for a major regional war. The problem is that there's no clear way for the current war to reach a ceasefire, since neither Hizbollah nor Israel appears willing to back down.

The United Nations is putting together a peace force, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to the region to broker a ceasefire, but whether that will be achieved in hours, days or weeks is unknown.

With so many missiles flying around, the possibility for miscalculation is enormous, and some event, possibly even some "little" event, a chaotic event with big consequences, could change public opinion very quickly. We saw something like this a few months ago when massive Muslim rioting occurred over the Danish cartoon controversy. The region is ripe for exactly that kind of trigger to occur. From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, a massive regional war between Jews and Arabs is 100% certain, but what will trigger that war, and when it will occur, cannot yet be predicted. (17-Jul-06) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 17-Jul-06 Mideast war now centers around Hizbollah's Hassan Nasrallah

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 17-Jul-06
Mideast war now centers around Hizbollah's Hassan Nasrallah