Hezbollah Will Only Grow Stronger

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is an old proverb that still rings very true today. There are a lot of people in Beirut and throughout Lebanon that hate Hezbollah. They would like nothing more to see Hezbollah out of Lebanon and democracy take hold. However, when your enemy is fighting the country that is bombing you back to the stone age, you begin to think that maybe they're not all that bad. Such is the mindset of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens today.

There is a reason that Hezbollah is 30,000 strong. Every time Israel drops a bomb in the middle of a crowded neighborhood and kills dozens of civilians, including women and children, a new Hezbollah recruit is born. People that wouldn't even think of joining the radical group may now reconsider. They'll take up their differences with Hezbollah at a later time because right now they must focus on the enemy that is causing the most immediate danger . In this case, to the people of Lebanon, that enemy is now Israel.

The non-Hezbollah people of Lebanon may not have been friends with Israel a week ago, but they were not enemies either. Now the situation is different. Israel has killed over 200 civilians and very few Hezbollah militants. They have eliminated electricity and water supplies. They have bombed airports, bridges, roads, and have cut off millions of people from the outside world. Citizens have been forced to leave their homes and their country. If they weren't able to leave, they now live in constant fear of death.

Israel has created over a million enemies in less than one week. If only a small fraction of those people decide to pick up a gun and join Hezbollah, Israel will have lost.

Israel makes the argument that Hezbollah offices are purposely placed around residential areas, so when they bomb, civilians will inevitably be killed. It is a reckless and sloppy argument. I don't dispute Israel's claim that these targets are in civilian areas. I question the way they destroy the target and the recklessness involved. If you know full well that civilians are in a location, you do not, I repeat, do not fire missiles into that area. If you must destroy a target, you go in with special forces to take it out.

Somewhere along the way, powerful nations decided to trade off civilian deaths in order to preserve their military personnel. They conduct air strikes from thousands of feet above ground and hope to "minimize civilian casualties." The problem is that it never minimizes civilian casualties. Civilians get killed constantly because these nations don't want to get their hands dirty. That is why the enemy grows and gets stronger. For every woman or child that is killed, there is a brother or son or father or uncle or nephew that is now your enemy.

That is why Hezbollah will get stronger. In the short-term, they will be weakened, but they will regroup and they will have a great number of new recruits to help them.

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