Hassan Nasrallah’s schadenfreude – opinion

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah may be evil, but he’s not stupid. This was evident in his televised speech on Tuesday night, delivered in the wake of US President Joe Biden’s hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

His oratory appropriately coincided with the ninth day of the “Mourning of Muharram,” observed by Muslims to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Karbala, when the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, was killed by the forces of Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad.

What a perfect opportunity to assert Islamic victory over the West.

Gloating over the Taliban takeover, the Lebanon-based, Iran-backed terror-master compared the scene on Monday, when US personnel absconded from Kabul, to the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“The United States is still ignorant,” he said, “and is repeating the same mistakes.”

It’s not that his heart was bleeding for the terrified Afghans desperate to escape their fate and attempting to board the US jets taking off from Hamid Karzai International Airport. Nor was his analogy meant to express sympathy for the South Vietnamese who faced the same predicament 46 years ago.

No, he couldn’t care less about the torture and killing of innocent people, certainly those who aren’t Shi’ites – especially not ones who spent two decades collaborating with Uncle Sam.

But he definitely loves witnessing Washington’s weakness on display for all the world to see and ridicule. It’s a sight that gives credence to all his hopes, dreams and predictions about the decay and eventual death of “America, the Great.” 

The “Great Satan,” that is.

“Biden wanted a civil war in Afghanistan through a fight between the Taliban and Afghan forces,” Nasrallah continued. “[And] the Americans… came out as humiliated, losers and defeated.”

Indeed, he added, not only did the US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan “fail miserably,” but Biden’s behavior showed that Washington couldn’t be counted on to “fight on behalf of its allies.”

Biden couldn’t have said it better himself. In fact, it’s pretty much what he did say during his press conference on Monday. 

Naturally, Nasrallah was happy to highlight that bit, stressing that the president’s words should be a message to anyone relying on America these days. “Those watching most closely and drawing conclusions from this are the Israelis,” he stated, with customary complacency and no small amount of schadenfreude.

I HATE to agree with a mass murderer and all, but Nasrallah got it right about Kabul and Saigon. Interesting that he failed to mention Israel’s similarly disgraceful exit from Lebanon in 2000, spearheaded by then-prime minister Ehud Barak, who deserted allies to their fate at the hands of Hezbollah. He also ignored the late Ariel Sharon’s unilateral pullout from Gaza – a move that basically handed the territory to Hamas on a silver platter.

Still, he was on the mark in his criticism of Biden, though his hatred for the US causes him to pooh-pooh distinctions between one president and another. Through his radical Islamist lens, they all look alike to him.

This isn’t to say that he or his patron mullahs in Tehran didn’t anxiously await Biden’s entrance after four years of Donald Trump calling the shots in the White House and beyond. On the contrary, they knew full well that their leverage over the West was being restored, and began using it as soon as the architects of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) were back in business on Pennsylvania Avenue. 

But the loathing of liberal democracies is so strong among radical Islamists that nothing America does will change their attitude or aims. For them, watching US soldiers and diplomats hightail it out of Afghanistan was a victory, and not solely for the Taliban.

Under other circumstances, Nasrallah, a Shi’ite, might celebrate the defeat of the Sunni Taliban. But at the moment, the sight of Biden turning his back on his friends with his tail between his legs is sufficient reason for a joint celebration.

WHICH BRINGS us to the taunt that Nasrallah directed at Israel, whose leadership, like that of the US, recently underwent an overhaul. Just as the Hezbollah honcho’s hostility to America remains intact no matter who’s at the helm in DC, so is his desire to see the Jewish state wiped off the map, regardless of the makeup of the government in Jerusalem.

He does, however, use the information in both cases to calculate his steps. His optimism about the Afghanistan debacle, for instance, was compounded by his assessment that if Biden could pull such a stunt in that country, he might well decide to let an already unstable Lebanon disintegrate beyond recognition without a second thought.

It’s a dream scenario for Hezbollah, of course, which not only wields legitimate political power as a member of the Lebanese government, but has a strong military presence that terrorizes the populace. And, like Hamas in Gaza, it uses civilian infrastructure as human shields for its operatives and missile-making activities.

As primitive a trick as this is, it works like a charm on the international community, no matter how often it’s exposed. It’s particularly effective when used against Israel, whose rules of engagement are so self-imperiling that they wouldn’t be fit for a computer game, let alone an actual battle.

Nobody knows this better than Nasrallah.

That’s not all he understands about the “Zionist entity.” In addition, he has come to discern when and to what extent to take Israeli politicians’ threats seriously.

It’s a game of chicken he’s had years to master, mainly at the expense of the Lebanese people. He remembers and is proud of the havoc he wrought on northern Israel during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, despite the decimation of Hezbollah arsenals by the IDF.

Once UNIFIL forces were stationed in a “buffer zone” along the border – as part of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 – he was able to relax. Those UN “monitors” were no more than props for photo shoots and fodder for Hezbollah.

Since that war, and subsequent sporadic mini-conflicts that ensued, Hezbollah managed to amass an estimated 150,000 missiles. It even succeeded in constructing a network of terror tunnels leading from Lebanon into Israel. 

Meanwhile, Nasrallah – keeping his whereabouts on the down-low to avoid assassination – never ceased issuing threats. Some of these were empty. Others, in retrospect, sound eerily prescient.

Take his pronouncement on al-Quds Day in 2017, for instance. In a televised address, he declared: “The Israeli enemy should know that if it launches an attack on Syria or Lebanon… it would open the door for hundreds of thousands of fighters from all around the Arab and Islamic world – from Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan – to participate.”

AT THE time of this statement, Trump was in the Oval Office and Benjamin Netanyahu was occupying the Prime Minister’s Residence on Balfour Street. A mere few months later, the Mossad performed the astounding feat of stealing a massive trove of nuclear documents from a warehouse in Tehran. Faced with hard evidence of Iranian violations of the JCPOA, Trump withdrew from the deal and increased sanctions on the Ayatollah-led regime.

Israel, with US approval, proceeded to conduct a combination of overt and covert operations against Iranian targets, both in Syria and in the Islamic Republic itself. No match for the might of this US-Israel constellation, and genuine friendship, Nasrallah and his patrons were not pleased.

Today, they are heaving a collective sigh of relief.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett needs to keep this in mind during his meeting with Biden in Washington later this month. A worrisome indication that he won’t is the vow he made in June to “challenge any attempt to make America a partisan political issue in Israel, and Israel a partisan political issue in the United States.”

What he ought to have gleaned by now is that “partisanship” exists between ideologically similar groups in both countries. The only possible way to bridge the gaps that members of his government keep yammering about is for one side to capitulate to the policies of the other. 

Woe to Israel and its newfound allies in the Middle East if Bennett is persuaded by coalition partners at home or by Biden’s team abroad to cross the so-called “aisle.” 

Nasrallah, for one, is praying to Allah for such a scenario.