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16/02/2008 | The Mughniyah Assassination Guessing Game

Stratfor Staff

Imad Mughniyah, a Hezbollah leader who is believed to have planned the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, and a series of other attacks around the world, was killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday.

 

No one took credit for the killing, but the general consensus has been that it was carried out by the Israelis. The U.S. State Department said that “the world is a better place without this man,” showing that the United States wanted him dead as well. A lot of people wanted Mughniyah dead, including some intelligence services in the Muslim world that regard Hezbollah as a threat.

If we had to guess, it was the Israelis — but that’s a guess. We do know that the consensus that emerged quickly after the attack, shared by Hezbollah as well as some of the Israeli media, was that it was the Israelis. Therefore the question is what is going to happen, given the consensus that Israel was behind the killing?

First, there is the question of how Hezbollah will respond. Any response is possible. In the past, Hezbollah has taken its time planning its responses and has struck in unexpected places. For example, in 1992 they attacked the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Hezbollah is in many ways a global organization as well as a Lebanese faction. It has capable assets in a lot of places and it will, therefore, strike where security is the weakest.

One thing Hezbollah is unlikely to do is give Israel an excuse to attack it in Lebanon. The Israelis would like another shot at Hezbollah after their failures in the 2006 Lebanese conflict. An internal Israeli review of that conflict, the Winograd Report, excoriated the performance of the Israeli military and also criticized Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Israel has been working intensely to rebuild its capabilities and it would not be averse to having a second shot at Hezbollah. Hezbollah emerged from that conflict as a hero in the Islamic world and a major power in Lebanese politics. It has nothing to gain from a war with Israel. At most, it can retain its position. At worst, it could be decimated. Launching a barrage of missiles at Israel would justify an Israeli attack on Hezbollah and is therefore not the most likely event. An attack against Israeli or Jewish assets elsewhere in the world, with sufficient deniability to keep the Israelis from a military confrontation, is the most likely. However, given the fact that Israel fears Hezbollah and wants an opportunity to crush it militarily, this may simply be the first of a series of attacks designed to force Hezbollah into exposing itself to attack.

The second question is how the Iranians will react. Iran is a patron of Hezbollah, and it likely will view the attack as an attack against Iranian interests. In the Iranian view, an attack by Israel could not take place without American approval. So accepting the first premise — that Israel was behind it — and a second premise — that Israel does not act without American approval — the Iranians could blame the United States. Indeed, given the State Department’s approval of the killing, that’s not an unreasonable assumption.

As we have been discussing, the Iranians seemed to be in the process of opening a new round of public diplomacy with the Americans. If the Iranians choose to, they can read this as a deliberate American provocation designed to derail the talks. So far, they have condemned the Israelis and have kept the United States out of it, indicating that they don’t want to create an issue.

And that’s the interesting point of all of this. A man was killed and a lot of people wanted him dead. Now, the world deals in guesses — some intelligent, some just guesses. More than that, various players decide what guess to make based on the consequences of the guess. So the guess, not unreasonable, is that the Israelis did it. Given that guess, Hezbollah must react against Israel. The Iranians now get to decide if they want to accuse the Americans of complicity. If they do, then sitting down and talking will be difficult. If they don’t hold the Americans complicit, they can talk. In all this, the facts become secondary to the consequences of the facts.

We’d guess it was the Israelis and that the United States was informed that it was coming. But we don’t know. What we do know is that those who talk don’t know and those who know don’t talk. In any case, the game will play out based on the assumption that the Israelis did it, and the rest will follow.

Stratfor (Estados Unidos)

 



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