1.
We often hear that violence breeds violence, that if states use it against their enemies then they only succeed in radicalizing those enemies and storing up trouble for the future. This view is usually held to be self-evidently correct and not to require either supporting argumentation or consideration of alternative analyses. It is a thesis frequently resorted to by those commenting on the use of force by Israel.
2.
Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah is not generally thought of as having been a great success but a lot of people in Lebanon ended up dead and a lot of infrastructure in the country got pretty badly smashed up.
3.
I don’t know much about politics in Lebanon so am not well placed to offer an analysis of the results of the recent general election there. However, even with all the appropriate caveats in place, the modest reverse suffered by the party responsible for starting and prosecuting the 2006 war against Israel would not appear to offer much immediate support for the thesis briefly sketched in 1.
A majority of Lebanese have also realized that, simply put, they do not want to live under the yoke of Hizbullah and allow their country to become an Iranian proxy.
Lebanese politics are famously labyrinthian, shaped as they are by all sorts of complex ethno-sectarian dynamics. But, at its best, Lebanon is a vibrant democracy. And this despite the myriad ways Iran and Syria attempt to interfere in her affairs via Hizbullah. Yet it’s clear that for the majority of the people and in spite of Iran’s machinations, Hizbullah’s vision for the country is unacceptable.
And Eamonn, you are correct: the results are, indeed, a direct rebuttal to all those observers who claimed that 2006 bolstered Hizbullah’s credibility and allowed it to consolidate its power base in Lebanon. BUT, I would still hesitate to say that, mutatis mutandis, the same outcome would necessarily result were Israel to preemptively attack Iran. Iran is not Lebanon. Sure, the educated and urban segments of Iranian society may, in the event of a strike, reason that the IRI, not Israel, is ultimately to blame (for nuclear brinksmanship, for belligerent rhetoric, etc. etc.).
Of course, this is all speculative and I may yet turn out to be wrong. Anyway, even if I were right, the benefits associated with a preemptive strike may far outweigh such costs from an ‘existential security’ perspective.