[WeeklyStandard] Is Iran's Lebanese client losing its grip?
Last week Hezbollah buried one of its princes, Jihad Mughniyeh, the 22-year-old son of the late Imad Mughniyeh, a legendary Hezbollah commander implicated in such infamous operations as the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The liquidation of the elder Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008, typically attributed to Israel, is regarded as one of the organization's most traumatic blows. However,
there's more than one way to skin a cat...
some in the Shiite community here say that Israel's January 18 strike on a three-car convoy in the Golan Heights near the Syrian town of Quneitra--which killed the younger Mughniyeh and five other Hezbollah operatives, along with as many as six Iranians--is evidence of a dangerous crisis for Hezbollah.
The throngs attending the younger Mughniyeh's funeral on January 19 yelled "Death to America" only once. "I counted," says Lokman Slim, an anti-Hezbollah Shiite activist. "And they said 'Death to Israel' only a few times. Then they went to more religious slogans."
According to Slim, the scaled-down rhetoric and modest size of the funeral are evidence that Hezbollah is caught in a bind. "The [Lebanese Shiites] don't want another war with Israel," says Slim, "but they also want to know Hezbollah can protect them like it says." 
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