As for Iran, Israel’s retaliatory strike in late October on key military facilities left it too weakened and exposed to save Assad. Tehran is now rapidly withdrawing its once-considerable military presence in Syria. Cut off from this military supply chain, Hezbollah has never been in a more precarious position, giving the Lebanese people their own rare opportunity to bring this terrorist militia to heel and restore their sovereignty after decades of de facto Syrian and Iranian occupation.
Victory, as the saying goes, has a thousand fathers. But credit for Syria’s liberation from Assad must also be given for Israel’s courageous decisions to ignore calls for cease-fire and pursue its enemies — whether in Gaza, Beirut, Hodeidah, Damascus, or Tehran. Each of these actions was denounced at the time for risking “escalation.” But victory over terrorists and tyrants has a way of paying dividends for the victorious and defeated alike.
Let’s hope the next leaders in Syria recognize the debt and finally seek peace, after 76 years of fruitless rejection, with their Jewish neighbor.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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