Birds, Stones

Imad Mughniyeh is dead (See Fausta’s overview of the avowed terrorist).

Here are a few realities:

If the Israel’s Mossad got him, they killed a number of birds with one stone.

They sent a message to Nasrallah and Fadlallah, reminding them that they too can be fertilize, be they in Lebanon or Syria.

There is another message sent to Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and every other two bit corrupt terrorist who mourned the death of their beastly comrade- ‘you are in no position to threaten us with rockets or the killing of Gilad Shalit. We can get you, your little dog Toto and everyone around you.’

There is yet another message to Damascus: ‘We can come and go as we please and we will come and go as we please and there is nothing you can do to change that. If you want to play with Tehran, you will pay the price. Imad Mughniyeh was killed in your back yard and on your watch, on the anniversary of Hariri’s assassination in Beirut.

Tehran too is put on notice yet again- it may not take a bombing run to effect some kind of change in that nation. A few well placed assassinations might do the trick, or at least shake up the game board. Glenn Reynolds was prescient when he said

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don’t understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs’ expat business interests out of business, etc. Basically, stepping on the Iranians’ toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003. But as far as I can tell, we’ve done nothing along these lines.

The Israelis may have sent a clarion message to the Iranians on our behalf.

We noted in Foresight that a former Mossad chief championed the idea of assassinating Ahmadenijad:

Western countries must unite in an effort to assassinate Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former head of Mossad Meir Amit said on Wednesday night.

“Even though in the past I have been opposed to assassinating Arab leaders, this case is different because it alone is the center of the nuclear issue,” Amit told the weekly Kfar Chabad magazine set be published on Thursday.

Amit said he did not perceive an existential danger to Israel following Iran’s nuclear development – “but that is only on condition that we do something about it.”

It just might be the Israelis are starting to “do something about it.”

The assassination of Imad Mughniyeh serves as a reminder to the dysfunctional and failed leaders of the region that sooner or later we and the Israelis will respond to their ever escalating threats and bellowing.

Beirut’s broken infrastructure and the south of Lebanon turned into cement dust ought to remind the Arab world that the Israelis will happily ‘lose’ another war with the similar results throughout the region.