Trita Parsi

But it was not at a level that justified an escalation from the Israeli side to strike at Beirut itself, particularly after what happened about 10 or so days ago, in which they did strike Beirut, knowing very well that there had been a warning both from Trump and by the Iranians.

And this time around, the Iranians did strike back at the Israelis, which is a very important development because for the first time, the Iranians were striking

at Israel for Israel striking Lebanon, not because Israel had struck Tehran, which was an attempt by the Iranians to essentially, after having established their own deterrence or reestablished their own deterrence, they were now going to extend that deterrence to Lebanon.

They do so for a variety of reasons.

One of them is, of course, that if the Israelis are allowed to just continue to bomb Lebanon and Gaza, et cetera, that war, that fighting will spill over into an Israeli-Iranian war at some point, and that will likely drag the US into it again.

That's exactly what already has happened twice since October 7th.

So if you want to have a deal with the US,

and US wants to have a deal with Iran that ends this war in a durable fashion, then you cannot allow the Israelis to continue to be able to restart that war.

So on the one hand, the Iranians wanted to establish that deterrence in order to make sure that the Israelis didn't do this.

On the other hand, it is also a longer guarantee for the Iranians, what they call their forward defense, meaning that they want to have this presence or the support in Lebanon as a deterrent against the Israelis attacking Iran, period.

Because this is what they had before Assad fell, before Hezbollah was really weakened by the Pajar attacks.

Let me give you a quick story.

In 2006, as you recall, you were there when Israel and Hezbollah went at each other.

In the midst of that, I ran into Efraim Sneh, who was at the time Deputy Defense Minister of Israel.

I had interviewed him several occasions before.

And he told me very explicitly that Lebanon and Hezbollah is just a pit stop.

The war with Iran is inevitable, but they have to essentially finish off Hezbollah first before they take the war to Iran.

But precisely because the Israelis never managed to defeat Hezbollah, in fact, the Israelis were defeated in that war, the war with Iran didn't start in 2006.

This was a manifestation of the efficiency of Iran's forward defense.

By being able to have Hezbollah there, they stopped the Israelis from taking the war to Iranian territory.