Bill Roggio has a very good piece over at the Counterterrorism Blog, entitled “After Action Report: Winners and Losers in the Hezbollah-Israel War.”  Regarding Iran, he says:

The 24 year old Iranian project of funding, training and arming Hezbollah in Lebanon has netted a large return. While the Israeli withdrawal form southern Lebanon in 2000 was certainly a victory for Hezbollah and their Iranian backers, the current Hezbollah victory is far more significant. Hezbollah gave the appearance of directly defeating the Israelis and forcing them to the negotiating table within one month of the onset of fighting.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and the elite Qods Force have created a powerful military and political force capable of spreading the radical Khomenist agenda. The Hezbollah model is a tried and proven method of the subversive Iranian foreign policy, and will be applied elsewhere. The IRGC and Qods will study the Hezbollah-Israel war and apply the lessons learned to improve this model, as well as to incorporate the military and political lessons into their own doctrine. The IDF fights as most Western armies do, and the Israeli political vulnerabilities are also shared throughout the West.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s gambit has paid dividends, and he has successfully distracted efforts to cease the refinement of uranium and the further development of its nuclear program. “Today, we are fully mastering the nuclear fuel cycle for our peaceful atomic activities. It is a native technology… No one can take it away from us,” said Ahmadinejad, who has been emboldened by Hezbollah’s victory against Israel. The Western world has signaled it is fearful of confronting Ahmadinejad or his terrorist proxy Hezbollah head on. Ahmadinejad ‘s stature is the Islamic world will only grow over time as he demonstrates the ability to stand up to the West. 

Continuing the discussion, Iran has won in even more ways that Bill ennumerated here.  The IDF failed to drive Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, and more specifically, Hezbollah still has thousands of rockets to fire at Israel.  Given the ability to hide and discretely fire Katyusha rockets, no one but the dilusional would believe that any amount of so-called “peace-keeping” troops will be able to keep Iran from re-supplying Hezbollah to replenish their stockpile of terror weapons.

So the surrogate military force that Iran has in southern Lebanon has not been disarmed, will not be disarmed, and has now achieved rock-star popularity in the Muslim world due to the failure of the IDF to decisively defeat them.

In a recent post I cited an editorial from one of Iran’s hard line newspapers, where they seemed to parrot the hard line from the Muslim leadership:

“The American defeat and withdrawal from Iraq will forever bury the Neoconservative current in the U.S.,…while the formation of an Islamist state in Iraq, which will be a natural ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran and will form a contiguous link between Iran and Palestine through Syria and Lebanon, will bring about a sea change in the geo-strategic balance in the region in favour of Iran and to America’s detriment. This new alliance with its huge size will directly influence all developments in the Arab and Muslim Middle East