Aside from the tagging, I do actually think you’re right in this comment at least. I like to think I’m fairly consistent - anybody who’s seen the pro-Resistance side on media has seen how they went on and on about how all the news that Nasrallah was assassinated was actually a massive psyop to get Nasrallah to reveal his location and that he was definitely still alive. I was willing to humor it, but did not believe it.

One should be able to bring up how they were simply incorrect, no ifs, ands, or buts - Nasrallah was in fact killed in the attack. Going “Now’s not the time, look at what just happened!” is understandable, especially for people here with strong ties to Lebanon or the Resistance - mourning is perfectly allowed here, communists are not emotionless Vulcans that only spit out logical analysis - but if they talking about how it was just a big psyop, then it’s not honest. This doesn’t apply to users like LargePenis obviously, who said as it was happening that things were looking bleak based on their sources. If the “bloomer” side fails to produce good predictions here and there, then we/they have no place to lecture the “doomer” side just because they also have had bad predictions here and there.

I am anti-defeatist, but I am far from delusional. It is true that Hezbollah has a strong organizational structure that prevents assassinations from crippling it. It is also true that there’s been some extremely visible fuckups in Hezbollah that cannot just be dismissed as a mere unfortunate cosmic accident. What the hell was Nasrallah and a high-up Iranian official doing near a residential building in Beirut on the eve of war? Similar cases for the other martyred Hezbollah officials lately. If it was entirely out of nowhere in a world where October 7th didn’t happen and there was no war, then a lapse in guard is understandable, but good leadership is valuable and should be protected to the greatest degree reasonable even if it is ultimately replaceable; and Israel was already bombing Lebanese cities, Israel had found a big way into the supply chain and any device could be an informant, so you have to be VERY careful! It’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you!

I am absolutely willing to see reality. There’s a very big reason why I refused to believe the rumors, even from officials, that he was alive, and maintained neutrality on it! We all saw this before, with Raisi!

The point being made is that “the rest of the entire Hezbollah leadership” has not been wiped out, and Hezbollah’s structure has been developed to specifically mitigate a strategy of assassination. Every person who gets killed has a competent replacement before the day is out.

But to answer your question: I would not be surprised if Israel has gone harder than the Resistance expected. Perhaps they imagined that Israel’s reluctance to meaningfully attack Lebanon after so many months meant that they were too afraid to make big moves out of fear of reprisal. Therefore, the sudden severity of the attacks may have caught them off-guard. If that is the case, then over the coming days and weeks, we will hopefully see a course correction by Hezbollah and friends towards more daring moves - it is hard to boil a frog if it’s hopping around and splashing that boiling water over you as well.

I don’t think recent events have substantially shifted the conflict, we’re still mostly in the same lane towards the destruction of Israel albeit with some significant speedbumps.

I’m not gonna lie, following this whole conflict is like if you were following an upcoming match between two boxers, the first of which is a favourite to win but you’ve read that the second has some awesome techniques up their sleeves specifically to counter their style, and he’s given interviews to that effect. And then the match comes after the first boxer has spent the previous match fighting to a draw, bruised and bloody, but they still have to fight the next guy. And you watch as the first boxer just starts tearing into the second boxer, like, you’re watching them do shit that you thought they would only threaten to do but no, they’re actually doing it. And the second boxer is also giving out some punches, but weaker than the first guy. And it seems very unequal at the start, but the second boxer has a knowing smile on their face as if this is actually all part of the plan, and you’re thinking “Aha, very clever, he’s trying to exhaust the guy so that knockout punches later are easier to do.” But it just keeps going, and you begin to question if the second boxer’s smile is actually knowing at all or if somebody wiped their memory of how to box well before the fight started and they just have a dumb, blank smile on their face. And you know that they have prepared for this fight, you’ve literally seen them practice the techniques and shit, but they aren’t using them yet for some unknowable reason.

so that’s all to say that I don’t know and have no way of knowing but I do know that the second boxer’s coach/hypeman in the back is just saying nonsense half the time even if he does actually do a lot of physical work to help him out, so he’s not useless or anything but you shouldn’t really listen to him.

Like, okay, there’s no conceivable way that the thought process over the last couple decades has been:

Hez: “Okay, Israel is beaten back to the border! Let’s acquire a shitload of missiles so that we can destroy Israel in mutually assured destruction if they do drastic shit.”
Everybody: “What is the definition of ‘drastic shit’ in this particular case?”
Hez: “Aha, that’s a secret that only our commanders know, but trust us.”

fast forward 18 years

Hez: “You are weaker than a spider’s web, betcha won’t invade us! It would be SUCH a shame if you did that!”
Israel: “Uh, okay. We will bomb the shit out of you.”
Hez: “Oh yeah? How about we fire missiles at these military bases a bunch of times? What if we try and force you to evacuate Haifa?”
Israel: “Uh, okay. We will bomb the shit out of you and assassinate your leader of three decades.”
Hez: “Oh yeah? How about we fire missiles at Tel Aviv and take out civilian infrastructure with the hundreds of thousands of missiles that we’ve stockpiled for this exact situation?”
Israel: “Uh, well, we’d probably like, nuke you, or just continue bombing the shit out of you conventionally.”
Hez: “…damn, they got us. Fuck. Shit. Why didn’t we think of that? Nuclear blackmail! What the hell are we gonna do now?”
Everybody: “Hey, what does ‘drastic shit’ mean again? Does it mean the bombing of several residential blocks throughout the country, or the assassination of top officials, or anything else?”

Like, all that would be stupid if they didn’t plan for Israel to like, bomb the shit out of them - they literally did that in 2006, and tried to assassinate Nasrallah then too! - and I’m waiting to see what Hezbollah actually does to meaningfully respond to all this, but every day that goes by, I’m getting… not demoralized, I still 100% believe that Israel is in its terminal crisis, but I am getting confused about what precisely the plan is here.

All of this is why I think being like “Oh, you’ve gone WAY too far now, Israel! Hezbollah’s gonna pummel you! You Zionists better stop celebrating and making memes when Hezbollah blows up your cities!” on social media is cringe and unhelpful and embarrassing because people inevitably look like morons when there actually isn’t the level of reprisal that was expected. All I’ve done over the past year is point out that Hezbollah does in fact possess like 100,000 soldiers and hundreds of thousands of missiles, but if and when they actually use the goddamn things has been a critical question over the last year and the answer hasn’t seemed to be elucidated lately despite my expectations. What if Israel just… doesn’t invade? They probably have enough bombs to reduce every major city in Lebanon to a state of unlivableness. What is the internal death count, or number of buildings toppled, or weeks since the bombings started, or whatever combination of metrics that Hezbollah uses, where they’re like “Okay, time to use our arsenal to also take out Israeli infrastructure like they’re doing to us!” in the event that the invasion doesn’t happen, or it’s staggered/slow enough that Hezbollah can’t do enough damage to the army within, say, 6 months to force a surrender? I’m not saying that Hezbollah doesn’t have contigencies and plans, but the breakpoints clearly aren’t where I thought they would be. Perhaps I didn’t learn as much as I thought I did from Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, where the red lines are actually red carpets.

And that means those Israeli air strikes probably have been hitting weapons stockpiles.

I hate it when I construct underground facilities in southern Lebanon to launch missiles and then place those missiles above ground a hundred miles away in Beirut when my enemy has total air superiority and can destroy my stockpiles at any time instead of placing my stockpiles underground and not in northern urban centers, where they are safe and near the launchers. Somebody really needs to organize my military better. I also shouldn’t have put all these rakes in the hallway to my office so that I step on them and the handle hits me on the head a dozen times every time I go there to do paperwork

???

I’m not gonna lie and say that some Hezbollah commanders haven’t been making some questionable decisions about where they meet foreign nationals (a better place might be where you have a hundred feet of solid rock above you) but no amount of Israeli infiltration can magically generate poor decision-making about meeting places. Hopefully the next leader keeps his head below ground most of the time from now on. However, the organization did also defeat Israel when Hezbollah was ten times weaker than they currently are, so these may as well be speedbumps rather than a “very bad situation”. The actual physical capabilities of Hezbollah are approximately the same as they were a month ago.

We lost an anti-colonial champion in 1924 in Lenin, the architect of the first communist revolution, and a tragic loss for the world, taken at least a decade or two before he should have gone. And then we got Stalin out of it, who did yet greater things, defeating fascism and supporting movements the world over.

A hundred years later, we lose Nasrallah. And the person, or people, who come after may well be the ones who lead us to the defeat of Zionist fascism and the end of Israel.

It is, as it means that some people will want to listen to Western media and the accompanying propaganda to get the facts faster, which doesn’t exactly help the West’s media domination. But ultimately there’s a hard decision to be made either way: tell everybody in Lebanon that the Resistance leader that they’ve known for most of their lives and saved them from Israel is now dead during one of the worst bombing campaigns yet, or keep it hidden for a day and suffer the aforementioned consequences but in a more controlled and calm environment

On the one hand, assassinating enemy leaders or very high-ranking officials is usually a pretty big no-no in wars as it leads to very bitter and dangerous escalations; there’s a reason why Hezbollah only strikes bases after Israeli leaders leave them, to show that they could have killed them but decided not to; so that, combined with the widespread bombing of Lebanon yesterday, would indicate that a significant escalation is now necessary

On the other hand, the Resistance has always been known to take things slow and steady

Yeah, this is why his death remained a very distinct possibility even after all the officials claiming he was alive and well, we’ve seen this song and dance before. Iran is perfectly willing to lie in order to manage (a more hostile word might be “manipulate”) reactions to bad events. To be clear, this makes them no different to any other country, there has never been a government that has (consistently) immediately revealed the truth about events that are negative to them and most of them invent lies to cushion the blow.

All it means is that you have to base your analysis on state actions and precedents rather than fancy speeches or soothing words, which we are very familiar with as communists

I am very much a subscriber to the thesis of strategic planning and attrition and waiting for the right moment to strike even if it takes weeks or months, but I do hope that Iran has some more public show of support planned in the coming days or weeks. They don’t have to flatten cities or anything like that, but y’know, Yemen of all countries, emerging from a genocide not unlike the one seen in Gaza, has risked its ass more than Iran has in the last couple months. They have similar PR/propaganda issues that Russia has where their weekly proclamations about how Israel/Ukraine is doomed and should surrender, but those statements just make them look kinda silly when it’s just the same attrition of a dozen villages named variants of Vohreshitfuckizye that we’ve seen for months on end. I guess for Putin himself it’s always been an issue, saying that THIS is DEFINITELY the last and final straw for REALSIES this time each time an eastern European country joined NATO.

I do wonder if the Resistance had something planned for October 7th this year but didn’t expect Israel to actually start shit to this extent this soon. It would be a convenient (if rather obvious) date to co-ordinate a Grand Response™ for the entire Resistance Axis, and a two-month wait for an operation, from early August to early October, is fairly short in retrospect compared to operations in other wars, historical and recent. Like, nobody reads like “It took two months for X country to plan and proceed with Operation Y against Z country…” in a book on a war and goes “Two months! What an agonizingly long period of time!” it just feels like an eternity living through it today, where every hour that goes by, another residential building full of civilians is hit by a bomb equivalent in size to the Beirut Port explosion. That’s just a total guess from me though.

It’s still entirely possible that Nasrallah is dead, but the IDF also claimed this in 2006, there was total darkness, and then he emerged a few days later totally fine. So if he is alive, what’s going on is not unprecedented.

The trouble is that ongoing events and the information blackout both correspond fairly well to “Nasrallah is dead but Hezbollah is not revealing it so as to buy time to create a remoralizing response to the assassination of their leader,” and to “Nasrallah is alive but they don’t wish to confirm or deny anything so that Israel does not gain intel on what is happening inside Hezbollah such as the positions of their commanders; the IDF currently has no idea what Hezbollah is planning so this is an opportunity to make them squirm,” so both sides can debate each other endlessly and not reach any result because it’s just what situation you, personally, vibe more with.

Finkelstein had said in his recent interview that Iran knows if Hezbullah falls they will fall. To be frank, his saying is not far from the truth.

I don’t think this is totally true, but it makes things much more difficult; either they’d have to rebuild Hezbollah inside Lebanon covertly or they’d have to create a whole new organization over several years to fulfil its role in Iraq or something. A rising China and Russia allied to Iran is the wildcard that will make the coming decades a whole different ballgame than the previous decades.

perhaps a similar situation with what happened with Hersh’s account of the conflict where claims he made stopped making sense due to poisoned intel?

at the absolute minimum, they’re claiming that Nasrallah is alive a lot longer than they claimed that Raisi was alive, which is interesting

for those who can’t be bothered to go look, the top ten subreddit overlaps are:

• Israel (at a score of 43, AKA /r/lebanon users are 43 times more likely (than the average user presumably) to comment/post there
• 2middleeast4you
• exmuslim
• islam
• enoughcommiespam
• steamgiveaway
• randomactsofgaming
• redlettermedia
• eminem
• witcher3

honorable mention to r/anime_titties at 19th place, r/chile at 21th place, r/geopolitics at 24th place and r/genzedong at 30th place, and r/washingtondc at 43rd place

most babies achieve object permanence before their first birthday, so it’s surprising that this interviewee hasn’t managed it yet, as they believe that damage does not exist if it is hidden

All r/[country/city] subreddits are guaranteed to be some of the worst places on reddit in terms of banal evil and propaganda, and their only benefit is seeing what the petty bourgeoisie think and/or what various intelligence agencies want the petty bourgeoisie to think. If you see a country/city subreddit for a country which doesn’t have many english speakers that nonetheless has mostly english-language posts then you know there’s some astroturfing going on, it’s like when there’s protests in Mexico or Cuba or something and all the signs are in english, so either the alphabet boys fucked up again or they don’t even care that they fucked up because they know it’s entirely for Western consumption

I know there’s nothing I can say to improve your situation and I’d be a wreck if I was in the same place, but I really hope that everybody in your family comes out the other side of this unscathed. I hope you know that everybody in the megathread values your presence and insight, whether it’s making rankings of Russian politicians, or talking about the histories of various Middle Eastern countries, or even the low-effort stuff.

perhaps, but they’d have to pack quite a punch to fundamentally threaten the integrity of the structures (and they didn’t seem to; there’s a reason why most people were injured albeit quite badly in some cases, rather than killed), and the assassinations were happening before the pager attack

The best two answers I can come up with right now are 1) complacency (as you suggested), because, I mean, every Hezbollah commander reached the current moment that they did without being bombed to death, so there’s no immediate suspicion that tomorrow they will be killed, in the same way that going out driving is statistically kinda dangerous but you don’t expect to get hit by a car and killed on your daily commute after thousands of days of doing so without being killed, and 2) the knowledge that they have constructed an organization where assassinations aren’t terribly meaningful and that martyrdom is another way of serving the movement, so they don’t fear death in the exact same way that us Westerners might. Apologies if that second point is a little callous or badly worded, I’ve seen similar sentiments about martyrdom spread on Resistance media and I don’t have the religious knowledge to articulate it properly.

edit: I suppose there’s also that classic thing throughout warfare where the leaders should be seen taking similar risks as the soldiers so as to encourage them and promote unity in the army, which seems pretty reasonable too.

Not to be like “If I was in the Resistance I would simply X” but I admit that I’ve never 100% understood why Hezbollah commanders and leaders get caught in these big bombings relatively often. Like, everybody knows the following is true:

a) Israel will assassinate anybody in Hezbollah regardless of potential civilian casualties; they would kill a thousand civilians to catch a single commander in the blast. Assassination has been a key tool in their toolkit for decades; it is not a new strategy.
b) Israel generally possesses good surveillance capabilities; these have substantially decreased due to Hezbollah destruction of border infrastructure but even Nasrallah has freely said in speeches that they are perfectly aware that every single cell phone in Lebanon is an informant, which must be countered with leaving them in places where they cannot track or hear you (in a fairly soundproof box at home at all times, for example). There’s a famous interview with Assange where Nasrallah says that they don’t rely on digital encryption for orders, they rely on local sayings “the chicken is near the well” etc to encode commands that are very difficult for Israeli operators to interpret.
c) Therefore, being above-ground is putting yourself at severe risk, no matter your location (in the heart of the densest part of a city, or out in the middle of nowhere)
d) Hezbollah nonetheless possesses underground metropolises that might as well be impregnable to Israeli bombs; during the 2006 war they repeatedly tried to destroy known underground facilities with bunker busters and found no success, and since then Hezbollah must have constructed even better facilities

All those facts combine to suggest to me that you’d want to just stay underground most of the time, especially when doing important work or having important meetings, and take foreign nationals underground with you to protect them rather than meeting them above ground. So I’m always a little confused when Israel bombs a residential building and it turns out that (aside from the heinous murder of hundreds of civilians) there actually was a commander there. Why aren’t they underground instead?

Again, not saying that I’m some supergenius that has outsmarted Hezbollah or anything, there’s obviously reasons why they do what they do, I’m just having trouble rationalizing it because I’m not an expert in warfare or anything.

He might be alive, he might be dead. I’ve seen rumors for both scenarios. I am firmly anti-defeatist and anti-doomer but once bitten, twice shy - I remember how the situation around Raisi’s helicopter crash went, with rumors from “official” sources about how he was alive that then turned out to be incorrect, which confused the entire situation to a massive degree. While we waited for official news, different factions vied over creating narratives from very few facts, as we see in the media right now. But with how Israel loves to assassinate people, I have basically pre-emptively accepted and internalized the potential deaths of most Resistance leaders and figures so as to get the mourning process over with sooner and recognize that those who replace them shall continue the job with great vigor.

But this isn’t Lord of the Rings where defeating the leader of the army causes all their empire and soldiers to crash into nothing. This goes both ways - killing Israeli commanders and leaders will not cause the IDF to evaporate either. Assuming he is dead, just as with the pager terrorist attack, Westerners (and some people in this thread) will go “It’s over, the walls are closing in, Hezbollah has been defeated,” and then Hezbollah will continue functioning without significant interruption, and they’ll go “Ah, well, nevertheless…” and wait until the next major strike. It is clearly a durable organization that has survived decades and many assassinations by Israel. Hezbollah will survive and thrive regardless of who sits at its helm, and it is the combined product of every leader and commander; in that sense, they never truly die.

Nonetheless, I do sincerely hope that Sinwar and Nasrallah live to see a free Palestine. They deserve nothing less, and infinitely more.