Two weeks after the funeral of Hizbullah's senior military leader, pundits are still debating Imad Mughniyah's mission and the circumstances surroundings his assassination, Rasha Saad writes Pundits have been engaged in pinpointing the perpetrators of the assassination of Hizbullah's influential chief of staff Imad Mughniyah and the implications of the act. While no party has declared responsibility for the assassination, most writers believe it was Israel. Patrick Seale said, "there seems little doubt that Israeli agents were responsible for the car-bomb assassination in Damascus." Seale explained that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office issued a lame denial, "but the applause from Israeli ministers, the popping of champagne corks, and the jubilant reports in the Israeli press tell a different story." Seale added that Israel's YNetnews website said that "the score has been settled," which is, according to Seale, "a clear suggestion that the killing was a response to the humiliation Hizbullah inflicted on the Israeli army in the 2006 Lebanon war." In his article entitled "Israel's targeted assassinations" published in the London-based daily Al-Hayat, Seale accused Israel of making something of a specialty of targeted assassinations, "that is to say sending hit teams to kill its enemies abroad in the evident belief that the best way to deal with Arab resistance movements is to physically eliminate their leaders. Over the past several decades, scores of Arab activists, intellectuals and scientists have perished in this way," Seale wrote. Seale pondered the possible reasons behind assassinating Mughniyah besides being a reaction to the 2006 war. Among the explanations, wrote Seale, is that Israel was keen to demonstrate to its regional opponents -- not just Hizbullah and Hamas, but Syria and Iran as well -- that its "long arm" can reach deep into their home territory. No doubt, Seale continues, such spectacular feats were also intended to remind Washington -- especially its intelligence community -- that in spite of the fiasco of the Lebanese war, Israel remains a valuable strategic asset in America's global war on terror. Seale believes that although such killings ran the risk of provoking revenge attacks, the Israeli calculation may be that such a risk is worth taking compared to the inevitable losses which would be incurred by a major military operation, not to speak of the missile threat to the civilian population of northern Israel. If this analysis is correct, the assassination of Mughniyah, Seale maintains, should be seen as an alternative to a large-scale war and not a prelude to one, as many Arabs fear. "Israel is seeking to deter Hizbullah, not to provoke it into another conflict on the scale of the ill- fated 2006 war." Also in Al-Hayat, Hassan Haydar wrote, "Whoever assassinated Imad Mughniyah and the suspicion is basically pointing to Israel and its security agencies until the promised Syrian investigation confirms this" has given Hizbullah the opportunity to declare that the war of July 2006 is still continuing and hence far from over." Mughniyah's assassination also brought to the surface the controversy surrounding his person. While for many he is the ultimate resistant fighter and martyr, for others he is simply a terrorist. On its website, the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir dedicated a series of stories posted on its home page to the assassinated leader entitled " Imad Mughniyah -- a resistance fighter." The folder included photos of the funeral attended by tens of thousands in the southern suburbs of Beirut and also included dozens of articles written in Mughniyah's commemoration. In "Imad Mughniyah the martyr: the fox that occupied the minds of the world for a quarter of a century" Wasef Awada paid tribute to the Hizbullah leader. In As-Safir, Awada wrote that much has been written and said about Mughniyah but very few really knew the man. Mughniyah was known for his ability to hide his identity, for being discreet and not talking much. "Only the leadership of Hizbullah knows the full history of the man who occupied the minds of Americans and Israelis for a whole two decades. Only the leadership of Hizbullah knows the huge loss caused by the assassination of its most significant resistance leader, engineer and plotter for a quarter of a century," wrote Awada. Describing his huge funeral, Jihad Bezzi wrote in As- Safir, "the man who is portrayed in Western and Israeli media as a fugitive terrorist, an evil man who is devoid of human qualities before and after his assassination had, at his funeral, a proud parting." It was not only the Western and Israeli media who portrayed Mughniyah a terrorist. In most articles of the Saudi-based Asharq Al-Awsat pundits referred to Mughniyah's controversial nature. They referred to Mughniyah's alleged role in the Khobar Towers explosions in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and the hijacking of the Kuwaiti Jabriya jet in 1988, among others. According to Meshari Al-Zaydi in Asharq Al-Awsat, one of the most compelling things about Mughniyah's assassination "was the nature of the description and image that various parties use to depict him. For Hizbullah, Iran, Syria and their supporters in Lebanon, Mughniyah was a resistance hero and a symbol of martyrdom and jihad. However for others, especially in the Gulf and among some Lebanese, he was a master of hijackings, explosives and terrorism." According to Al-Zaydi, Hajj Radwan, Mughniyah's nomme de guerre, or the Shia fox or the Shia Bin Laden, are all names that connote conflict, not union. "This is why it only seems natural that his assassination would continue such conflict and disunity since he dedicated his life to serve a vision and a project that constitute a point of contention and conflict in the Arab region," Al-Zaydi wrote. For Al-Zaydi, this division in describing Mughniyah means that the Arab world is divided between some parties who seek to transform it into a land of strife, war, martyrdom and "another Karbala" and those who want to lead it to another direction towards progress, developing the economy and catching up with the contemporary world. "Such a contradiction may be summarised as the two cultures [trends] of life and death: the first propagates stability, calm and peace and the other backs revolutionary trends, suicide missions and weapons," Al-Zaydi concluded.
