Israel’s war against Hezbollah is the West’s fight against Iran

OPINION:

Before the Trump administration’s rejection of Iran’s latest peace plan response, the joint U.S.-Israeli war against the regime in Tehran had begun to recede from public memory.

So had Israel’s ongoing fight against Iran’s terrorist proxy in Lebanon.

Yet we allow these conflicts to fade from the collective consciousness at our peril, because the fight in Lebanon is the fight against Iran — and the fight against Iran is a battle for the very soul of the West.

Although a shaky monthlong “ceasefire” between Iran and the U.S. is holding (for now), Washington appears to be on the verge of issuing another ultimatum to the Islamic republic, which reportedly refused to discuss its nuclear program in its latest response to the U.S.

Meanwhile, in southern Lebanon, Israel wages a defensive war against Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim terrorist group formed in 1982 with Iranian cash.

Despite a U.S.-brokered ceasefire last month, Hezbollah has continued its attacks on Israeli forces. (Terrorists do not respect or abide by diplomatic agreements. Why this continues to come as a surprise to the West is one of the world’s mysteries.)

Since its inception, Hezbollah has killed hundreds of Americans. The Lebanese government’s attempts to disarm the organization have been unmitigated failures. For decades, Lebanon has allowed the terrorist group to fester and embed itself into Lebanese politics and society.

Still, Israel has been making steady and impressive progress in rooting out the cancer that is Hezbollah.

Since March, when Hezbollah began firing thousands of rockets toward Israel as retribution for the killing of Iranian megaterrorist Ali Khamenei, Israel has eliminated several thousand Hezbollah operatives and created a 6-mile buffer zone in southern Lebanon to protect its citizens.

This weekend alone, the Israel Defense Forces hit more than 85 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, including an underground weapons production site in the Bekaa Valley and a drone launch position, and killed more than 100 Hezbollah terrorists.

With legacy media outlets focused on the hantavirus, tariffs and the price of gas, the West seems to be forgetting that just months ago in the Middle East, America and Israel pulled off one of the most successful military operations in recent history. Together, the allies eliminated an evil tyrant with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands.

Israel’s effort to do what the Lebanese government either could not or would not do has been pushed to even more remote recesses of the West’s mind.

Make no mistake: The war in Iran and the Jewish state’s sustained efforts in Lebanon are part and parcel of the same critical campaign. It is a struggle for the continuation of the American way of life, one that is so very nearly replicated in tiny Israel and nowhere else in the vast Middle East.

It is no coincidence that Iran’s (and by extension, Hezbollah’s) “Big Satan” and “Little Satan” are the same nations that now fight for the freedom of the Iranian people and remain firmly in the crosshairs of the ayatollahs’ deadly, Dark Ages government.

We cannot afford to allow the valiant efforts of either country to fall to the back sections of newspapers, to the bottoms of homepages. Whether Iran agrees to the terms of the latest U.S. offering is irrelevant. No overture from the regime is worth the paper it is printed on.

The fight with Iran has come to a head, and it may well be the fight of our lives.

• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor for The Washington Times.