Hassan Nasrallah, the dreadful Shiite cleric who commands the Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement, couldn't get what he wanted.
He had plunged his militia into the war in Syria, he had helped turn the tide of war in favor of the Bashar Assad regime, and he had bragged about the prowess of his fighters. Yet he had asked that the fight for Syria be waged only on Syrian soil.
The two bombings that hit the Iranian embassy in a Hezbollah neighborhood of Beirut on Nov. 19 should have delivered to Nasrallah a truth known to all protagonists in this fight. There are no easy victories, no way that the fire could rage in Syria while life went on as usual in Beirut.