Hezbollah leader & Gamal Abdel Nasser ... mullahs reap the benefits

Not that we did not warn in these pages before, but it now appears official. The recent turn in public and now official opinions in the Arab world concerning the upheaval in Lebanon, where now the Hezbollah leader's (Sheik Nasrallah) photo is shown in demonstrations with that of Nasser- the Egyptian leader whose pan-Arab stand made him a darling of the Arab world and eventually led to the 1967 Arab-Israel war, speaks volume to how the Iranian mullahs have engineered and managed this whole affair (New York Times, July 28, 2006, " Changing Reaction: Tide of Arab Opinion Turns to Support for Hezbollah.") No, we're not talking about the "vaunted" Arab street here. That's for the pundits to write worthlessly on.

We're referring to how the Iranian mullahs, faced with huge presssures from within and without, engineered a de-facto coup de'tat in Lebanon, paralyzed Israel and with it the US, made the inititally preceived "only a Shiite Lebanon" problem- in the form of Hezbollah-Israel fight- into a regional manifesto for hegemony. A look at the timeline reveals how carefully this fire has been set: On July 11, the Iranian nuclear negotiator, Larijani, who's also the spokesperson for the regime's National Security Council, told the EU representative, Mr. Solana, in Belgium that Iran did not have anything additional to say or give in return for the June 2006 offer of nuclear incentives- see previous posts. Larijani was accompanied by the head of intelligence of the regime's feared Revolutionary Guards. Immeadiately, the couple flew to Syria to discuss their next move with the Syrians and, of course, the Hezbollah. The next day, Hezbollah in a blitz military move, seized two Israeli soldiers and killed several more. The backdrop for all of these was the annual G8 meeting.

Now, the Iranian mullahs knew full well that the Russians were hosting this event and were confident of their resurgent role in the world's politics and they knew also that they had the US, via their proxies in Iraq, the Hakim-led Badr and Sadr shock troops, in a tumble. Little wonder, that Iraq prime minister, Nouri Maliki, who was groomed in Iran in the early 80's during the Iran-Iraq war and was later transferred to Syria to open the new front in the war with Iraq, would come to the US (July 25, 2006) and call for the condemnation of Israel and support for the Hezbollah. It is precisely here that those in the know, recognize the long-hand of the mullahs in orchestrating the affair.

The initial mostly Sunni Arab reactions, including their fearless leaders, were mixed to lukewarm, but as the conflict drags on, it's becoming more like the Arab-Israel conflict again, and those initial thinkings, albeit true, that the Shiite Iran was at fault, are now turning to the killing of Arabs in the hands of Israel. It is this effect, more than anything else, that the Iranian mullahs want. It occupies the world's attention on the petrol keg that is the Middle East, but away from their nuclear ambitions. Soon, the mullahs hope to have wished away the "Shiite crescent" motto that was beginning to evolve in the Middle East, so that they could continue their nuclear and hegemonic ambitions.

It is time for the US to unleash the Iranian opposition and allow them in turn to unleash the Iranian people's wrath on the murdering mullahs.