Temporary Reduction of Hezbollah Enrichment

Somewhere deep in the bowels of Dahieh, a Hezbollah communications task force is working hard to solve a prickly problem: Where should the party of God officially place blame for the assassination of Hassane Laqees, a man whose profile in the party is so high that the news of his death took the first spot on the BBC’s international news website?

For starters, Hezbollah must point a finger. It doesn’t do the whole ‘we will wait for our official investigations to end before blaming anyone’ line. Theirs is traditionally a choice between a whipping boy and complete silence. But today their options look particularly bad; the death of Hassane Laqees has already done irreversible harm to the party.

The Usual suspects

Blaming Israel or Saudi Arabia, a few weeks after the dual explosions in Dahieh that targeted the Iranian embassy and killed scores of innocent people, would be a morale-sapping admission of failure by the party which until recently derived a good deal of its power from its reputation of infallibility and its ability to protect its own. Two hits in a row awkwardly change the conversation from “bad luck” to “dangerous incompetence.”

Another snag is defining the nature of the enemy. Are we talking about crazy bearded Sunni ideologues who blow up themselves indiscriminately, whose very irrationality is cause for rallying the Shiaas around Hezbollah? Or are we talking about a precise, professional opponent who can carry out sophisticated assassinations of senior operatives in their strongholds?

The Not-So-Usual suspect

What we won’t be hearing for sure however is the possibility that Hassane Laqees’s head was a token of goodwill from the Iranians to the Americans as part of their latest deal. The secret talks are still ongoing after all. Killing such a high official in Hezbollah’s military arm could have been the Hezbollah equivalent of reducing Uranium enrichment to 5%.

Through this assassinations the Iranians would have dangled to the Americans the tantalizing prospect of Sayyed Nasrallah’s head as part of a future final deal, giving even more strength to the Iranian negotiating hand and giving more reasons for the Americans to concede regional influence and respect to the Persian behemoth..

The spinners have their work cut out for them..