Who Blinks First?

On brinkmanship, détente and mutually assured destruction.


Hassan Nassrallah just made a speech in which he said:

If you bomb Beirut, we will bomb Tel Aviv and we’re capable of doing so. I would like to make it clear that bombing Israeli settlements and cities are a reaction, not an action. You are attacking our towns, our cities, our civilians, and our capital. This is why we react by bombing similar targets. The day you stop your attacks on our cities, towns, civilians and infrastructure, we will stop sending missiles to your cities, towns and settlements. We naturally prefer that our fighting remain in the battlefields.

I don’t know about you, but I sense a hint of contrition in Nassrallah’s speech. There’s perhaps some public opinion pressure concerning the random killing of Israeli civilians, and he’s trying to deflect it by saying that it’s Israel who started the random bombing. It’s actually the same tactic the Israeli used when they said that Hezbollah was behind the Qana Massacre.

I believe it’s morally wrong to target innocent civilians and terrorize them the way Hezbollah is doing. But I doubt it if Nassrallah shares my position. Nassrallah is rather trying to create an Israeli public opinion that pressures their government into keeping the fighting with Hezbollah in the field to spare the civilians on both sides the collateral damage. Nassrallah knows that they have an upper hand in the open Lebanese fields, and their objective is to restore the situation to what it used to be before July 12.

Israel apparently doesn’t want to play Hezbollah’s game, so it raised the stakes in its reaction to Nassrallah: If you Bomb Tel Aviv, we will destroy all of Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Nassrallah, will you raise or fold?

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