Yet all this really just confirms what my comrade said. If Hezbollah and its echo chambers need to warn even their allies to stay on board politically; if the party is furious with the double language of the Lebanese political class, whose members will readily spill the beans even to the Americans, then that does not say much about Hezbollah’s capacity to unite Lebanon behind its resistance. In fact, it tends to confirm something that we always suspected: the party has managed to enforce a consensus solely through intimidation.
This poses potential problems for Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general. His implicit contract with Iran is that his party be prepared to protect and advance Tehran’s interests in the Levant, to the extent that Hezbollah would retaliate against Israel if the Israelis were to bombard Iranian nuclear facilities. But for such a project to be effective, for Hezbollah to go to war with confidence that its countrymen are not working behind its back against its interests, the party would have to enjoy widespread Lebanese backing.
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