DNI: Bill Lind artfully notes the inversion of legitimacy in the Middle East:
A Hezbollah success against the hated Israelis will give governments throughout the Islamic world a stark choice. They can either snuggle up as close to Hezbollah and other Islamic 4GW entities as they can get, hoping to catch some reflected legitimacy, or they can become Vichy to their own peoples. Since the first rule of politics is to survive, I think we can look forward to a great deal of the former.Hezbollah's success demonstrates that legitimacy (which translates into funding, recruits, safe-havens, etc.) is increasingly gained through victory on the battlefield (and to a lesser extent, good works and stability). It will get worse. Here's why. If you look at this through the lens of global guerrillas, you will see Hezbollah's success serves as both a catalyst and validation for the emerging marketplace (bazaar) for violence and security. As we have seen in Iraq and other global locales, this marketplace has a long ("fat") tail of demand and supply. As global chaos heats up, the diversity and intensity of demand/supply will grow to challenge (in aggregate) that of provided by nation-states. Hezbollah, within this context, is an entrepreneurial success story. It is being paid in legitimacy.
NOTE: William Gibson (the futurist and writer) has a post on his blog that explains the conceptual barriers of paradigm shifts (and in particular, how they relate to 4GW).