The "Resistance"’s Copium of Denial

In April 2003, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf gave the world one of the greatest political performances in the art of denial.

On April 7, American tanks had entered the heart of Baghdad, their images broadcast across television screens worldwide. Yet Saddam Hussein’s information minister stood before reporters and declared—with the confidence of a man who possessed information unavailable to the human eye—that there were no Americans in Baghdad and that the invading forces were being crushed and annihilated.

Two days later, on April 9, Baghdad fell.

Al-Sahhaf was not merely lying. He was providing a psychological service to an audience no longer capable of confronting the truth. That is precisely what makes him so contemporary in Lebanon.

Were he among us today, al-Sahhaf would probably find excellent employment with the mouthpieces of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah in their tabloid press. He might even discover that his imagination was rather limited compared with the extraordinary progress the Axis of Resistance has made in the manufacture of victory.

The Israelis enter a position? They did not enter all of it.They seize the entrance to a tunnel? The tunnel has other entrances.They reach one facility? There are other facilities.

They occupy a hill? The hill is not the entire mountain.

And if they occupy the mountain, do not worry: Lebanon is a mountainous country.

This is not military analysis. It is a dose of copium.

“Copium,” in the language of the internet, combines cope and opium: a psychological narcotic consumed to dull the pain of a defeat one refuses to acknowledge. It does not recover territory or win battles. Its function is much simpler: to make you feel victorious while you explain why your defeat was not really a defeat.

But Lebanon’s problem today extends beyond Hezbollah itself. Treating Hezbollah as merely a Lebanese organization that made a series of strategic mistakes misses the essence of the matter.

There is an owner of the project, and there is a Lebanese franchise attached to it.

The owner is Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Lebanese franchise is Hezbollah.

This is not a description invented by Hezbollah’s Lebanese opponents. In March, Reuters reported that the IRGC had played a direct role in rebuilding Hezbollah’s military leadership after the blows it suffered during the 2024 war. Around one hundred Iranian officers were reportedly sent to Lebanon to participate in training, restructuring, and rearmament. More importantly, the result was described plainly: Hezbollah had been prepared to enter the 2026 war alongside Tehran.

Iran does not merely “support” Hezbollah, as diplomatic statements so politely put it.

Iran built it, trained it, armed it, and rebuilt its military structure. Then came the moment to collect on its investment.

But who paid the price?

Certainly not only the IRGC officers sitting safely in Tehran.

The largest share of the Lebanese bill has been paid by the people of the south, the Bekaa, and Beirut’s southern suburbs—above all, by hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shiites whom Hezbollah claims it exists to protect.

Here lies the bitterest irony of the so-called resistance.

The IRGC wants leverage on the Mediterranean, so Lebanese Shiites pay with their sons, their homes, and their villages.

Tehran wants to remind Washington and Tel Aviv that it commands multiple fronts, so Nabatieh, Bint Jbeil, the southern suburbs, and the Bekaa are transformed into mailboxes for other people’s missiles.

Iran’s leadership is fighting a regional struggle for influence. But on the Lebanese front, most of the blood is not Iranian. The destroyed villages are not in Isfahan. The displaced families are not searching for shelter in Tehran’s schools.

Since March 2026, more than 4,300 people have been killed in Lebanon, according to Lebanese government figures cited by Reuters. By early September, more than 340,000 people remained displaced in the south. More than 250 children had been killed and over a thousand wounded.

And yet the Lebanese are still expected to celebrate because the Israelis may not have reached the final metre of a tunnel beneath Ali al-Tahir.

This is the genius of it.

The house is gone, but the tunnel is long.

The village is empty, but the “equation” survives.

The land is being swallowed, but the resistance is doing well.

Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the enemy has not discovered where passageway number three ends.

And if anyone dares ask what purpose this enormous military apparatus serves when the very people it supposedly protects are sleeping in schools on foam mattresses, the yellow press has its answer ready: You do not understand the nature of war.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps the Lebanese are beginning to understand it all too well.

Perhaps they now understand that the celebrated “unity of fronts” means something painfully simple: Iran chooses the front, and the Lebanese pay the price.

More damning still, the bill is imposed, time after time, on Lebanon’s Shiite community itself.

For decades, this community has offered its sons under the banner of liberating the land and defending Lebanon. But the question that now grows more urgent is this: When did sacrifice for Lebanon become the sacrifice of Lebanon for the interests of the IRGC?

There is nothing anti-Shiite about asking this question. Quite the opposite.

The most dangerous thing Hezbollah has done is to claim an exclusive right to represent Lebanon’s Shiites, then bind their security, their homes, and their children’s future to the strategy of another state. As though the Lebanese Shiite has no right to demand a state that protects him, rather than being treated as ammunition in an Iranian strategic arsenal.

Then comes the machinery of denial to add insult to loss.

It is not enough for people to surrender their blood, homes, and livelihoods. They must also call the result a victory.

And so Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf returns. In April 2003, he looked at the tanks with his own eyes and declared that they did not exist.

His Lebanese successors are more sophisticated. They acknowledge that the tank exists, but explain that its presence is proof of its defeat.

They admit that the position has fallen, but insist that its fall is part of steadfastness.

They concede that hundreds of thousands have been displaced, but demand that the displaced take pride because “the project” has survived.

What project? And whose project?

Why must the Lebanese Shiite die so that the IRGC can improve its negotiating position?

These are the questions copium cannot answer.

The opium of denial may dull the pain of defeat for a while, but it cannot alter its outcome.

In the end, as al-Sahhaf discovered in April 2003, there comes a moment when words can no longer conceal the tank.

Especially when that tank is standing on your land.