Santa Barbara, California: Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah militia leader, emphasised the necessity for dialogue among rival Lebanese politicians during his latest television appearance to mark the end of the annual Ashura commemorations.

Inciting emotionally-laden crowds who repented their forefathers’ alleged failures to assist Hussain Bin Ali at the battle of Karbala in 680, Nasrallah fell back on irony to criticise Lebanese elites. “They have waited for the Iranian nuclear agreement to be finalised thinking that Iran would abandon us, and it did not,” he hammered. “They have waited for the fall of Syria, but Syria will not fall,” he said. “They shall not benefit from this opportunity,” he drove the point home, declaring: “In Lebanon we are the masters of our decisions.”

Nasrallah further pledged that his party and its allies would emerge victorious from the ongoing civil and regional wars in Syria, and accused the United States of being the “leader” of what he described the “rival front” in the region. “We will not back down in this battle if anyone is betting on this. This is a battle that we believe in and we will win it,” he told frenzied supporters in a rare public appearance in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The irony of the bombastic speech was not lost on most since restating that Hezbollah was “standing in the face of Israel and its threats and wars and in the face of the takfiris”, belied his presence in Aleppo and other points north — at some distance from Israel. In fact, Hezbollah deployed thousands of its militiamen across the border with Syria to bolster President Bashar Al Assad’s regime, not to apparently defeat the Jewish “enemy”. Undeterred by his own imaginative rhetoric, Nasrallah renewed support for the Palestinian people in their fight against Zionism, at a time when Palestinians clashed with Jewish colonists and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu without as much as a peep from the Party of God.

In a moment of hubris, Nasrallah stated that he intended to confront the American projects, and promised to defeat Washington, “just like we defeated Israel”.

Seldom short of explanations, he noted that “the rival front is not led by [Al Nusra Front chief Abu Mohammad] Al Julani, [Al Qaida boss Ayman] Al Zawahiri or [the self-appointed Islamic State Caliph Abu Bakr] Al Baghdadi, but rather by the United States.”

“The ongoing war is not for the sake of reforms, democracy, human rights, poverty or countering ignorance but it is rather aimed at subjugating those who rejected the US scheme and punishing those who defeated the New Middle East scheme in 2006,” added Nasrallah, referring to the 2006 war between his militia and Israel.

It was particularly interesting to note in this latest presentation how Nasrallah added colour when he affirmed that the takfiris, jihadists and other extremists fighting to topple the Syrian regime were in fact doing nothing more that serving American interests “because the biggest dictatorships in the region are sponsored by the US.” Buoyed by his own comments, he predicted that Israel would “lose its ability to survive in our region” if “America weakens”, which explained his anti-American position.

What stood out in the full frontal attack against Washington was the dearth of an explanation regarding the Iranian nuclear agreement with the US. Despite the Iranian Supreme leader’s oft-repeated chastisement, Tehran bowed to American will in the region, at least for the next decade, since the deal denied Tehran the long coveted nuclear parity with India and Pakistan on the one hand, and the application of hegemony over Arab Gulf monarchies on the other.

He said nothing about Iranian military deployments in Syria but attacked Islamists fighting against the regime. Such fighters served US interests, he claimed, though it did not occur to him that his own fighters were doing the same thing — presumably also serving US interests.

In the end, Nasrallah blamed his local and regional opponents for many ills and labelled then Zionists, enemies, takfiris, and assorted other names before he re-emphasized the need for dialogue. Of course, Hezbollah’s foes accused the party of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, among other ills, before agreeing to serve in a national unity government with them, which led one to ask whether Lebanese politicians suffered from schizophrenia.

Still, it behoved Hezbollah leaders to recall that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini chose to drink from the poisoned chalice in 1988 when he decided to sign a ceasefire accord with Saddam Hussain after he concluded that the US sided with Iraq against Iran. Khomeini understood US power and chances were good that his successors did too even if they did not share that knowledge with their Lebanese acolytes.