Politics & Power Quote by Hassan Nasrallah

Nasrallah is doing two jobs at once: pre-bunking an Israeli strike and pre-authorizing his own escalation. The sentence is built like a warning label. By framing an attack as something "being talked about now", he positions himself as the reader of regional tea leaves, not the instigator. The real punch lands in the causal chain he constructs: Sharon will "use" the American war against Iraq. That verb matters. It casts Israel as opportunistic and Washington as the enabling environment, folding two adversaries into one narrative of coordinated aggression without needing to prove coordination.

The context is early-2000s Middle East geopolitics: post-9/11 U.S. militarism, the looming Iraq invasion, and Israel under Ariel Sharon, with Hezbollah entrenched in southern Lebanon after Israel's 2000 withdrawal. In that climate, everyone is gaming out what a U.S. war might unlock elsewhere. Nasrallah speaks into that anxiety and tries to own it.

The subtext is deterrence marketed as inevitability. "Eliminate the resistance" is presented as Israel's goal, but it also flatters Hezbollah's self-image: not a militia or proxy, but "the resistance" as a legitimate national force. Then comes the conditional vow - "of course... we will certainly fight" - a calibrated mix of fatalism and resolve. He isn't asking for war; he is declaring that if war is imposed, the only politically survivable response is total confrontation. It's a message aimed outward at Israel and inward at his base: brace, unify, and treat the coming storm as proof of your importance.