Hezbollah is Nearing its Apogee

So Hezbollah got its way and replaced Prime Minister Saad Hariri with Najib Mikati. Lebanon’s president, prime minister, and speaker of parliament are now all, to one extent or another, aligned with the Syrian-Iranian Resistance Bloc even though that coalition lost the election.

Lee Smith’s analysis is spot-on:

In Lebanon, every time a confessional sect tries to overextend its prerogatives at the expense of its neighbors, it pays the price. It happened to the Christians as well as the Sunnis and it will probably happen with the Shia as well. It is impossible not to fear for the fate of Lebanon’s large Shia community, which tied its fate to Hezbollah, and thus the Islamic Republic of Iran, an obscurantist clerical regime that imagined it could overturn 1400 years of Middle East history and triumph at last over the Sunnis. It is a story full of pathos, for in the end all Tehran had at its disposal was terror and a nuclear weapons program that could be derailed with a computer worm. What will happen to the Shia and who will protect them when Hezbollah is finished?

After all, the reason that Hezbollah fears the tribunal is because they understand that having been named guilty in the murder of a Sunni leader, they will have shown that they are not the Islamic resistance fighting the Zionist entity, but a sectarian project directed against the Sunnis. Their war against Israel was meant to earn them prestige in the great Sunni sea that has engulfed the Shia for more than a millennium. Now they have forfeited all that.

In the meantime, Lebanon is governed by a terrorist organization, which means that unlike Hezbollah’s patrons in Iran and Syria, the country is not merely a state sponsor of terror, but is an actual terrorist state…

Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Barry Rubin is also correct:

Of course, Hizballah is not going to convert Lebanon into an Islamist republic. Why start a civil war with the Christians and Sunni Muslims. Just leave them alone in their territorial enclaves. But the Islamists and their partners will control the apparatus of state, foreign policy, and all the key decisions.