The picture you see above is a screenshot of the headlines that blared across Israeli media in 1992, following the assassination of one Abbas al-Musawi, then the Secretary-General of the Shi’ite Lebanese militia, Hezbollah.

The Israelis killed al-Musawi, along with his wife and five-year-old son, and four others, using helicopter gunships firing air-to-ground missiles. The headlines that followed in Israel declared that “the era of conflict with Hezbollah is over”.

How did that work out, exactly?

Keep in mind, that was over 32 years ago. And this subject is rather germane, given what we learned yesterday about the death of one Hassan Nasrallah, who succeeded al-Musawi as the Secretary-General of Hezbollah.

The two assassination attempts have a great deal in common. Both were the products of meticulous and careful planning. Both were approved at the highest levels of the Israeli government. And both were, objectively speaking, exceptional tactical victories in the long war between Israel and the Shi’ite militias.

Indeed, given the successes Israel has had recently, it is obvious that their intelligence services have penetrated very deeply into Hezbollah’s infrastructure and communications networks – in a way they have NOT managed to do, for whatever reason, within Hamas. Hezbollah is clearly reeling from the attacks, and is struggling to reorganise in the wake of multiple decapitation strikes that were, when analysed dispassionately, very well planned and executed.

However, that is where the plaudits for the Israelis must end.

The first, and most glaringly obvious, problem with what the Israelis have done, is the number of civilian casualties involved. No one in his right mind can possibly argue that the Israelis are “the most moral army in the world”, when you run a simple calculation on the number of civilians killed in these strikes.

Consider: if you take the lowest end of the estimates of the number of civilians killed in Gaza, in almost a year of military operations there, the Israelis have killed something like 110 civilians every single day that they have waged their ethnic cleansing there. And that does not count the over 500 civilians killed in the air strike against Nasrallah yesterday, nor the thousands of maimed and wounded civilians from the pager attack a few days ago.

By contrast, in two and a half years of war against the Banderites in Ukraine, the Russians have killed something on the order of 12,000 civilians – mostly as collateral damage to their air strikes against civilian infrastructure that the Ukrainians routinely use to house military equipment, in flagrant violation of the Laws of War. That comes to about 13 civilians a day, since Feb 24, 2022.

The scale of the violence against civilians is simply not comparable. The Israelis are killing 10 times as many civilians, per day, as the Russians are, but with ten times less justification.

And, again, that is before we get to the nature of the pager attacks – plural – a few days ago.

That attack was terrorism, pure and simple. If a Muslim fundamentalist organisation had committed something like that against a Western target, every nation in the WORLD (except, probably, most of the Muslim ones) would have risen up and called it terrorism. That attack was indiscriminate and designed to sow injury and pain, rather than necessarily kill outright.

The second, even more fundamental, problem is with the reasoning behind the attack.

The Israelis, like most Western military and political thinkers, seem to believe that the way to defeat an existential enemy, is to lop off its head. This is a category error of Western thought – along with the equally mistaken (nowadays) desire to seek out the single climactic and decisive battle that will determine the course of a war.

Neither approach works in real, serious warfare, and especially not in long wars of attrition. And that is precisely what Israel is fighting against both Hamas and Hezbollah. It is the kind of war that Israel is NOT designed to fight – therefore, it will lose.

All you have to do to understand this, is to look at what happened after al-Musawi was killed. Hezbollah did NOT go away. It became stronger, not weaker – to the point where it did, in fact, defeat the IDF during the 2006 war in Lebanon. Even the IDF itself now admits – many years later – that the war in Lebanon was a failure on their part.

Back then, the Israelis claimed they won a considerable tactical victory when they destroyed a substantial portion of Hezbollah’s long-range rockets. Precisely how much of that capability they actually destroyed, is a subject of considerable debate. But it is clear that, at the time, the IDF did destroy a significant number of long-range rockets.

Did that stop Hezbollah?

To ask the question is to answer it. Look at where Hezbollah is some 18 years later – they WON the war of attrition, and Israel LOST.

In the same way, the Israelis seem to think that taking out the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, along with most of the top command structure, is the best way to win their war. But this is entirely false. The problem is that they are trying to kill the proponents of an idea – not the idea itself. To kill an idea, you need to address the root causes of that idea and destroy those. That is the exact opposite of what the Israelis are doing.

Instead, what they are doing – by indiscriminately bombing civilians, and by resorting to a vastly disproportionate use of force in the Gazacaust – is feeding that very ideology.

The whole of the Muzzlim world is absolutely enraged with Israel now. All the goodwill and effort that the God-Emperor spent in crafting the Abraham Accords, which would have resulted in some sort of recognition of the Israeli state by Saudi Arabia – the single most important source of power in the entire Sunni Izzlamic world – is now gone.

The people of the region now actively seek the total destruction of Israel – and that possibility is well within reach.

Iran has enough weapons, all on its own, to wipe Israel off the map. Never mind that doing so would condemn the entire region to burn in nuclear fire – the FACT is, the Persians can rain enough missiles down upon Israel to turn the entire country into a parking lot. They do NOT do so through what I can only call superhuman restraint, despite colossal Israeli provocations against them.

The peoples of the region – note, the peoples, NOT the leaders – are furious at what is happening. Their leaders do not represent them, and that is a situation that cannot last forever. Erdogan in Turkey is a two-faced blowhard who seeks maximum benefit for himself and his country by playing both sides against each other – that is why he happily condemns Israel on the world stage, while continuing to do business with the Israelis behind the scenes. But the people of Turkey want to see an end to the Gazacaust, and that kind of pressure cannot be resisted for long.

The same is true in Jordan, where King Abdullah II must constantly worry about the fact that one third of his people are basically Palestinians – indeed, I would argue the “Palestinian” people, are actually Jordanians anyway, and belong in Jordan.

And the same is again true in Egypt, where President Sisi sits atop a very volatile and economically fragile situation, that will not require very much to detonate the entire powder keg.

Simply put, the Israelis are inflaming an already extremely tense situation, in the hopes that by triggering a regional war, they will be able to pull the FUSA into the war with them against Iran. And this will then result in the destruction of the Shi’ite centre of power in the Middle East, thereby securing Israel’s ability to contain the Palestinians and destroy them outright.

All of this illustrates the fundamental weakness of Western and Israeli military and political thinking. This all helps us see and understand why the West – and, by extension, Israel – keeps losing all of its wars.

The key element missing in the thought process sketched out above, is the moral level of war. The greatest military theorists and practitioners in history, from Caesar to Napoleon to Col. John Boyd, have all noted the importance of the moral level of war, relative to the physical.

What Israel accomplished yesterday was a master-stroke at the physical level. But it was a gross miscalculation on the moral level. It has simply strengthened the Izzlamick world’s resolve to see Israel destroyed – because they do not regard Nasrallah as a terrorist or a failed leader, but now as a martyr.

Further, the assassination will likely force Iran to bow to the pressures of its friends in the region – Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others – to escalate. There are rumours flying around that, during a recent summit of those parties in Iran, the regional allies got extremely angry with the Iranians for continuing to advocate for restraint. Those allies are out for blood, and now they will demand Iranian help to get it.

And if the Iranians respond, the Americans will have to choose sides. All past evidence shows the American foreign policy and military establishment will back Israel to any end, no matter how bad it looks, no matter how much it costs.

None of this should be taken as a defence of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinians, or the Izzlamists. I am on record for many years that I regard the Palestinians as treacherous in the extreme and totally incapable of keeping any sort of peace agreement. My views on Izzlam are quite well known – I regard it as an abominable and blasphemous Monophysite heresy of the True Faith, and I have no respect for its teachings whatsoever.

But it is essential in these situations to separate the -ism from the -ist, as it were, and understand that Israel’s policy – whether stated explicitly or not – of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, is killing innocent people by the tens of thousands. It is also resulting in the mass slaughter of Palestinian Christians, and the destruction of Christian sites of worship. It is worsening the existing trend of anti-Christian persecution in Israel. And it is causing the entire Global South to turn against Israel.

The importance of that last point cannot be overstated. Russia and China are the core of the Eurasian bloc – the Russians are its military and resource base, and the Chinese are its economic engine. These powers, NOT the FUSA, represent the future.

The USSA is in steep and terminal late-stage imperial decline. Israel knows this, and is getting increasingly desperate to involve it in the war against Iran, while there is still time.

But… what happens when the FUSA collapses, as it is all but certain to do within less than a decade? What then?

At that point, Israel will have burned all of its bridges with the rest of the world. It has already comprehensively lost the moral level of war, which means it is losing – and, by many accounts, has already lost – the physical level, certainly in Gaza.

What happens when the Arab world finally realises the Americans are a paper tiger and can do nothing to stop them from wiping Israel off the map?

The answer does not bear thinking about.