Donald Trump’s “art of the deal” in Lebanon is geared to give Netanyahu a life-saving escape. It involves pointing two guns, one to each side of the head of the heretofore impotent Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun. Impotent because the Christian-by-custom presidential post has been castrated by the 1989 Taif Agreement that the conservative dumb Texan president George Bush Sr. forced on Lebanon to appease the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister which, by proxy, was meant to massage the oily ego of the Sunni Saudis. In Texas, Bush Father and Bush Son, and their Holy Ghost James Baker the Turd were Christians, but in Lebanon they politically converted to Sunni Muslims.
One gun says, “Use the army and plunge the country into a civil war to disarm Hezbollah”. The second gun retorts, “If the first gun doesn’t fire, Israel will bomb Lebanon an umpteenth time to dislodge and disarm Hezbollah.” There is no doubt, even among the Party of God’s diehard brainwashed supporters, that while the country is sick and tired of Hezbollah, it doesn’t want a repeat of 1975 when the country tried to disarm the Palestinian guerillas of Yasser Arafat. Back then, everyone around the planet name-called the Lebanese as imperialists, isolationists, crusaders, etc. for beating up on the “poor Palestinian refugees”.
No one at the time minded the fact that the foreign colonial invasion of Palestine by the Zionist hordes forcibly “transferred” (by means of massacres, rapes, destruction, demolitions, and other refined western civilizing methods) hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians as refugees into Lebanon. To this day, Israel not only will not take these refugees back to their native land, as it should under international law, it is laying the ground as we write these lines to forcibly “relocate” many more millions. You see, for the oxymoronic “Democracy-Only-for-Jews” to work, there can be only one homogeneous people on the land. It cannot tolerate another people.
In 1975, a war between the Lebanese and Yasser Arafat’s PLO led to a breakdown of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) army along sectarian lines because Lebanon is basically not a nation. It is a federation of religious sects that has failed since 1920 to build a unified state, let alone a nation and a functioning country. Syria’s Stalinist Assad, whom George Bush Sr. admired as a “smart”, “cunning” man who “keeps his word”, was asked by the morally bankrupt American conservative regimes of Reagan and Bush Sr. to “pacify” those unruly Lebanese trying to salvage their country. It led to a brutal 30-year occupation by the last Stalinist regime on earth in Damascus which, truth be told, was the inaugural member of the US State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. For thirty long years, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and their envoys kept meeting Assad in Damascus and Geneva every year, lavishing praise on him. Ultimately, Syria did not finish off the PLO as the US-Israeli syndicate would have wanted. A similar gun is pointing today at Joseph Aoun’s left temporal lobe pressing him to finish off Hezbollah.
The other gun has always been at hand: Israel repeatedly invaded (1978, 1982, etc.) but it too failed to rid Lebanon of the PLO or its “resistance” heir, Hezbollah. After Israel’s test run of last fall in which Hezbollah’s capabilities were truncated, its Iranian sponsor debilitated, and its Syria’s Assad associate crushed, one wonders why is the US-Israel syndicate pushing the envelope in Lebanon?
How can an emasculated Hezbollah still pose a threat to a regional super-power whose prime minister continues to say that he can reach the far corners of the entire region? Don’t they know from experience that they can beat Hezbollah to a pulp but they can never defeat its ideology? Trump is telling Joseph Aoun: If you fail to respond to engage in a civil war against Hezbollah, we’ll activate a new Israeli war. By what measure of hubris can the Americans continue to engage in warmongering ad absurdum?
The very same day of Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023, a beaming Benjamin Netanyahu announced to the world that he will change the region’s borders. Hence, one is compelled to invoke the ulterior motive behind the two guns pointing at Joseph Aoun’s head: Land thieving.
Zionists love land. Stealing land is not an acquired characteristic of Zionism driven, as claimed, by security concerns or self-defense. It is an inborn genetic malfunction which they inherited from their Nazi progenitors, and they are addicted to augmenting their “lebensraum”. They already took the Golan Heights from Syria, they are stealing Gaza and the West Bank, and it makes sense that they want South Lebanon, from the Litani River and across the Upper Galilee. But to steal South Lebanon, they need a pretext, and the pretext is this fake self-defense against an emasculated isolated Hezbollah. Zionists have a knack at playing the victims of the very people they have been brutalizing for a century.
If President Aoun complies with Trump and attacks Hezbollah with his badly armed army, he is certain to plunge the country into a civil war. For decades, Israel pressured the US not to arm the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) on the pretext that should decent weapons be given to the LAF, those weapons will fall sooner or later into Hezbollah’s hands. This is the very same under-armed army that is now being cornered by the US and Israel is into fighting Hezbollah! As a result, Lebanon will again turn into a jungle like it did in the 1970s, the army will splinter along sectarian lines, and the ensuing chaos will necessitate the involvement of either Israel or Syria, or both. Right now, they both are America’s best friends. The new Syria of the former Sunni Muslim Al-Qaeda leader Al-Sharaa is now part of the US-Israel-Saudi conglomerate, and might be enticed into intervening in “unruly” Lebanon with promises of recovering Syrian lands attached to the 1920 Greater Lebanon construct. By the same token, the Israelis will not be too unhappy with occupying and annexing South Lebanon south of the Litani River.
If President Aoun resists Donald Trump’s first gun, a full-fledged war by Israel against Lebanon will be unleashed on the pretext of disrobing an already naked Hezbollah. Devastation, destruction, deaths by the tens of thousands, and the outcome is the same: Israel will occupy and annex South Lebanon south of the Litani, but will never completely eradicate Hezbollah.
The question then becomes: Why even force the Lebanese to commit suicide when the death-by-murder alternative is also available? The answer is that if President Aoun takes the civil war approach, Israel can claim deniability in the future by saying that it is those unruly Lebanese who are to blame. Moreover, Israel does not have to spend treasure and life if the Lebanese do the job. They’re taking the South anyway, so why bother and work hard at sowing chaos when the Lebanese can do it themselves?
This in fact explains why Hezbollah remained armed and threatening for four decades since 1982 and no one tried then to muzzle it, even when it bombed the US Marines Headquarters in Beirut and killed 243 US servicemen and kidnapped dozens of American and western hostages. In 1982, another Republican coward, Ronald Reagan, had his army on the ground in Beirut along with British, French and Italian contingents, the new government of Amin Gemayel was an ally of the US, Israel itself was on the ground, and none of these courageous mighty armies could decimate one-year old poorly developed and armed Hezbollah? Had Reagan not fled Lebanon the morning after his marines were murdered, had he stayed and fought Syria – Iran’s theocracy was still in its infancy, it posed no immediate threat – we would not be in the swamp we’re in today. It wasn’t even kicking the can down the road; in retrospect, it was a deliberate policy of maintaining a largely useless Lebanon in a state of chronic instability to guarantee themselves the freedom to intervene at will.
The question every day on Lebanese news is what is President Aoun going to do? As a divided people in a very small and dysfunctional country, the Lebanese have no compunction to play against the other teams around them. Over time, they have been so conditioned to refrain from taking any action unless and until someone else tells them what to do. And so, we wait.
The more likely scenario is that President Aoun will continue to reject Trump’s ultimatum, which would eventually unleash a new Israeli assault and invasion. President Aoun does not want to go down in history as the man who presided over a civil war. He’d rather see the Israelis do the dirty work for him, especially since the alternative might invite Al-Qaeda-ruled Syria into the country, with all the jeopardy to the country’s non-Sunni minorities. In the 1970s, Assad was a secular dictator and he brutalized Lebanon. Imagine what Al-Qaeda’s Al-Sharaa will do if Trump invites him into Lebanon to “pacify” the country.
