From Jeff Childers War Analysis…no one does it better

There was rare good news from the Middle East War yesterday in the form of the big Hezbollah announcement’s abject failure. I’d previously reported that, all week long, the bigger and meaner Hezbollah terrorist group had advertised a “major announcement,” including releasing a theatrical trailer that showed someone pushing a “launch” button (labeled in English). I’m not making that up.

The speech failed to launch. I guess they couldn’t find the button again.

My conclusion was the heavily-marketed speech was a kind of inflection point, signaling either regional military escalation or that cooler heads were in control. The doombloggers all predicted escalation.

But nope. It was a long, rambling, boring speech in Farsi or Lebanese or something. In summary, Hezbollah said Israel is the worst, et cetera, and Hamas’ October 7th massacre was totally justified.

Hezbollah did not declare war or even anything like war.

Instead, buried plumb spang in the middle of Hezbollah’s “major announcement” was an express denial that either Hezbollah or Iran were involved on October 7th. The denial was so jarring and out of place, so different from the rest of the angry rhetoric, it jumped out like it was the speech’s real purpose: to deny any involvement. Kind of like the rest of the rambling, meaningless rhetoric was just violent window dressing for the Arab street to make that one express denial go down easier.

Here’s how Hezbollah’s grand poobah (or whatever) Somethingsomething Nazrallah put it:

“The operation was 100 percent Palestinian in terms of both decision and execution. That element of secrecy was the linchpin to this emphatic success of the operation, it came as a surprise, shocking surprise, unlike what’s assumed by many.
Since the Iranian revolution … (Iran has) always been openly adopting and supporting resistance factions in Lebanon, Palestine and in the region. However, they do not exercise any form of authority or control over these factions or in their leadership. And what happened … proves this fact.”
In other words, we had nothing to do with it and neither did Iran. We didn’t even know it was coming. So don’t blame US.

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Remember that old saw, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan? Hezbollah clearly just distanced itself from the October 7th Massacre. It’s clearly not being seen as a winning event by the muslims.

To me, the denial sounded like something Hezbollah was forced to say against its will. Probably by the Iranians. To call the speech ‘anticlimactic’ seriously understates the case. The denial of involvement was so direct and so unexpected it made me suspect the Iranians are fretting the October 7th attacks will become a pretext to take them off the board for good.

Bottom line: this was an embarrassing, if not humiliating concession by Hezbollah, and it also strongly signals Iran is backing down. While Israel can surely expect more face-saving attacks along its Northern border, for now, the risk of a wider regional conflict appears to have been drastically reduced.

That’s great news for everybody.

………..

WW3 Cancelled again …sheesh