Opinion | Hezbollah Is Everyones Problem

In 2006 Hezbollah launched a guerrilla raid into Israel.It led to a 34-day war that devastated Lebanon, traumatized Israel, and concluded with a U.N.

resolution that was supposed to disarm the terrorist militia and keep its forces far from the border.The resolution did neither.Instead, a combination of international wishful thinking and the willfulness of Hezbollah’s patrons in Tehran have brought us to where we are now — the cusp of a conflict that could dwarf the scale of fighting in Gaza.Can a full-blown war be avoided? Hard to say.

Can the lessons of 2006 lead to a better outcome this time? That’s the important question.First lesson: Tactical brilliance is not a substitute for sound strategy.In 2006, the Israeli Air Force, operating on excellent intelligence, was able to knock out many of Hezbollah’s longer-range rockets — often hidden in homes — by the second night of the war.

The strike surely helped spare scores, if not hundreds, of Israeli lives.But Israel had little idea of how to fight the war after that, other than through a bombing campaign whose ferocity generated acute diplomatic pressure for the war to end, along with a belated Israeli ground incursion that got badly mauled by Hezbollah.Does Israel have a better plan today?Second lesson: Hezbollah is not Israel’s main enemy.

Iran is.Or, to borrow a metaphor from the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, Tehran is the head of the octopus and Hezbollah — like Hamas in Gaza or the Houthis in Yemen — is merely one of its tentacles.

By going to war with Hezbollah, Israel risks exhausting itself in a secondary fight.That doesn’t mean that Israel can afford to ignore Hezbollah; its arsenal of 120,000 to 200,000 missiles and rockets poses a dire and direct threat to the Israeli home front.But the only way in which Israel restores its deterrence is by imposing costs directly on Hezbollah’s masters.

Tehran, not Beirut, is the real center of gravity in this fight.We are havin...