By Michael F. Duggan
Who would have thought that Hezbollah would the voice of reason in the Middle East? For while Hassan Nasrallah threw out a lot of predictable red meat to the crowd today, he did not call for a wider war.
Beyond the bluster, and reading between the lines, Nasrallah is giving Israel, the United States, and the world a chance to pull back from the brink. It was a warning, but it is also a window, an expression of restraint that should be met with an equal measure of sanity and realism. It is a signal from the other side, like Khrushchev’s message of October 26, 1962 to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. By not calling for an expanded war against Israel, a war that would set the Middle East and the rest of the world on fire, Nasrallah has provided an opportunity for deescalation.
I suspect that nobody in the Israeli government reads this blog. But if they did, I would advise them to look at the bigger picture, the long game, and to stop taking the bait. There is no plausible military solution to this crisis, and the killing of civilians in Gaza and sending IDF troops into this Stalingrad on the Mediterranean is exactly what Hamas wants Israel to do.