Reporter Seth Colter Walls has filed this analysis of recent military maneuvers:  

The wires are hot today with news of Hezbollah's weekend maneuvers along the border with Israel, as reported by Lebanese outlets. Pretty much everything about the revelation is newsworthy – in particular that Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was supervising the exercises in person, and that anyone was ever told about them at all.

Historically, Hezbollah has been vague yet boastful about its military training. After the summer of 2006, when Israel simultaneously miscalculated Hezbollah's strength and yet still managed to administer a pounding Lebanon has yet to recover from, Hezbollah now appears willing to deter any future Israeli campaigns through greater military transparency.

As much as Hezbollah's leak to Lebanese media was obviously directed at Israel's military planners – and pegged as a response to recent Israeli war games on the other side of the border – it also has to be looked at in the context of Lebanon's presidential crisis, which comes to a head this month.

I wrote in greater detail about Lebanon's complicated presidential politics recently, but here's a summary: Lebanon's next president has basically two options with regard to the Shiite militia and political party. First, he (sorry, no women are in this presidential race) could stand deliberately astride of any effort to get Hezbollah to disarm, like leaders installed by Syria after Lebanon's civil war – including the current occupant of the presidential palace, Emile Lahoud, whose term expires Nov. 24. Alternatively, the next president could team up with the Western-friendly parliamentary majority in attempting to usher in a stronger Lebanese state – thereby giving Hezbollah less of an excuse to operate as a military organization.

Lebanon being Lebanon, most politicians' attitudes on such matters are not a secret, thus the impasse. While many Lebanese are nervous about international reproach over Hezbollah, some of those same citizens look to Hezbollah as their most stalwart protector against Israeli attack. Nasrallah himself has made a lot of hay out of the fact that calls for Hezbollah to abandon its weapons amount to an effective unilateral disarmament for all of Lebanon – a weak state with a weaker military. When your country has spent two-thirds of the last 25 years either occupied or cleaning up from the wreckage of war, having a strong fighting force is something you might value, no matter who in the world objects.

So, less than a month before a fateful changeover at the presidential palace, Hezbollah's military exercises - impressive as they indeed sound – pose a rhetorical question to Lebanon's war-weary populace: Do you really want a president who would negotiate this kind of military strength away?