Ben Hubbard

There's a weird story in this morning's The New York Times, by-lined by Ben Hubbard, datelined BEIRUT, Lebanon, filed August 27, 2017, "Hezbollah: Iran's Middle East Agent, Emissary and Hammer", that contains this sentence: "But as the Middle East has changed, with conflicts often having nothing to do with Israel flaring up around the region, Hezbollah has changed, too."

If the story's weird, and it is, bringing to mind Judith Miller's reporting for TNYT on Weapons of Mass Destruction in the salad days of the Bush/Cheney administration's invasion of Iraq, (not that Ben Hubbard's in her league; she's gone on to Fox News) it's made even weirder by the inclusion of a photo of a ruined Israeli Merkova tank, bombed by Hezbollah and now displayed at a war museum in a village in southern Lebanon that's operated by the military group.

The juxtaposition of the words--"conflicts often having nothing to do with Israel"--and the photographic image of the Israeli tank presumably destroyed by Hezbollah, are somewhat dissonant to a reader who presumes that virtually all the tension in the Mideast involves Israel in one way or another.