in acquiring. In effect, it was Israel, the strongest military force in the Middle East, that was badly defeated, failing to achieve any of the goals it had set itself.

On July 20, 2006, the Israelis tried to take Lakkis out with a rocket fired from an F-16 fighter at his apartment in Beirut, but he wasn’t ho

me and his son was killed.

The 2006 war (known as the "Second Lebanon War" in Israel, to distinguish it from the war Israel waged against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982) was the high point of the Radical Front and the coordination between the coalition’s top members. Since then, the wheel has turned a full cycle. Mughniyeh was killed by a bomb in his car in Damascus in February 2008; Suleiman wasshot dead by a sniper on a beach in Syria in August of the same year; Mabhouh was strangled and poisoned in a Dubai hotel room in January 2010; Moghaddam was blown sky high along with 16 of his personnel in an explosion at a missile depot near Tehran on Nov. 12, 2011. And on Tuesday night, two unidentified masked men cut Lakkis down in the parking garage of his apartment building in a suburb of Beirut.

Hezbollah was quick to point the finger at Israel; Israel was quick to deny the attack. If indeed the assassins belong to some elite intelligence organization, by now they are most likely to be out of Lebanon, away from Hezbollah’s grasp. But this tactical success — if you can call it that