This is Hezbollah's Playbook, not Israel's

How the superior strategic thinking of Iran's Axis of Resistance directs Israel into overplaying its hand, confusion and exhaustion

Nasrallah with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Teheran, 2019 Image source

Meaningless slogans and catchphrases were a staple of Obama’s traumatic two terms as president, during which the full-blown ‘war on terror‘ that he so enthusiastically advanced saw its heyday. You may remember ‘shovel-ready jobs‘ (to describe work creation after the great recession), and you’ll definitely remember ‘yes we can‘, yelled mindlessly by who know how many supporters in that embarrassing moment in American history. One of those meaningless catchphrases I remember (it just stuck to a neuron and wouldn’t let go) is ‘leading from behind‘ (made famous by a New Yorker article in 2011). Remember that?

In essence, this fake strategy (as all things political are always fake in colonizer cultures) purported to push an image of a US that was not using open force to dominate, but a rather stealth, fake sense of international cooperation, combined with the world-famous ‘hey, I’m only backing democratically elected local actors’.

Since those days (which is to say, forever) the US hasn't spent a single day not at open war with someone somewhere around the world, or, preferably, in many places at once. The military-industrial complex needs to be fed, and America must be kept paranoid and insane lest its people start demanding weird stuff like healthcare and infrastructure - all is plenty known and profusely researched, documented, and commented on.

But now, with the current phase in the Israel-Hezbollah war, (

really the Iranian-Native-West-Asinan-European-Colonialist war), that old slogan came to mind, as this is precisely what Hezbollah and Iran are doing to Israel and the US: they are letting Israel believe it is leading and dictating, while it actually operates according to the Hezbollah playbook.

Let me explain.