They keep coming: EU, US, French and German ministers, envoys, ambassadors instructing the Lebanese on how to avoid a blowup in the war between the terrorists of Israel and Hezbollah. They meet with Lebanese ministers, clergymen of all colors and shades, leaders of political parties… but not with Hezbollah. They proffer advice and issue warnings, knowing all too well that the decision-making belongs strictly in Iran and in Hezbollah’s hands. The Lebanese state has all but collapsed because Hezbollah has dismantled the political and economic structures of the country: It continues to block the election of a president, the government in place is a powerless caretaker government, and the state is practically non-existent. You can’t even get a driver’s license in this country these days.
So, what do the French, the Americans and the westerners expect from a non-existent Lebanese state whose army is more of a glorified police force than an army? The army has no control over the borders of the country: in the east and north, Syria runs a freewheeling smuggling empire (drugs, goods, terrorists….), and in the south Iran’s Hezbollah controls the area and keeps the army out and is the decision-maker in matters of war and peace.
The West, particularly the US, is worried that a confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel is likely to see another indirect victory by Hezbollah, like the one in 2006. In that war, Israel was unable to “eliminate” Hezbollah, and a repeat of that experience now has a high likelihood of a land incursion by a much more powerful Hezbollah into the Galilee not unlike that of Hamas on October 7, and a land invasion by Israel of the Lebanese south. Not to mention the massive damage to both Lebanon and Israel. Indeed, a destruction of Lebanese infrastructure is likely to be much worse this time than in 2006 – back then Hezbollah was not in the government, today Hezbollah IS the Lebanese government – which, when added to the virtually collapsed Lebanese state, might lead to unimaginable consequences on the very existence of Lebanon.
For decades Westerners either nurtured Hezbollah or ignored it, not out of fear but out of a seemingly deliberate policy to keep Lebanon an unstable arena for their Israeli and Arab friends to use as a convenient pretext to avoid making peace. This is the same policy that Netanyahu adopted on Hamas which he nurtured in Gaza just to keep the Palestinians divided and undermine the Palestinian Authority as the primary representative of the Palestinian people and the custodian of a Palestinian state that Israel does not want to see materialize.
The British crooks who are responsible for the Palestine mess once imagined a “political” wing to Hezbollah with whom they wanted to talk. They eventually gave up. Their ambassador, Frances Guy, was the first European to publicly advocate the permanent settlement of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
The Americans lost 241 US Marines and servicemen in Beirut in 1983 to a Hezbollah truck bomb. These marines, along with French, Italian and British troops, were sent in 1982 as a peacekeeping force to supervise the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation organization (PLO) from Beirut. Instead of holding his ground and fighting the Iranian-Syrian takeover of Lebanon, Ronald Reagan packed up his remaining marines and fled like a coward, abandoning Lebanon to America’s own enemies. Hezbollah in 1983 was still in its infancy, having been created by the Iranians in 1982, and eliminating it would have been an easier task. Today it is a major threat, so they say, to their little Israeli colony in Palestine. In 1985, Hezbollah hijacked flight TWA 847 to Beirut airport and killed Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem. It held dozens of western hostages in dingy basements for years, releasing them one by one with every concession the West made to Syria and Iran.
Successive US administrations (Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.) seemed hell-bent on keeping Lebanon a voodoo doll in the hands of the Syrians and their allies. They endorsed a 30-year-long Syrian occupation of Lebanon as a “factor of stability”. Instead of fostering democratic practices and allowing the Lebanese to freely elect their leaders and extricate themselves out of regional conflicts and wars, the Americans always sided with the Assad regime in imposing puppet presidents whom the Syrians could manipulate at will. And when they couldn’t manipulate the Lebanese leaders, the Syrians would kill them: Kamal Jumblatt (1977), Bashir Gemayel (1982), René Moawad (1989), Rafik Hariri (2005) and many many others.
Ali Hamadeh, the leader of the 1985 TWA Flight 847 hijacking to Beirut airport was sentenced by a German court to life imprisonment in 1987. The German government released him in 2005 in exchange for German archaeologist Susanne Osthoff who had been taken hostage in Iraq by pro-Iranian militias.
The West even established a Special Tribunal for Lebanon in 2007 to investigate Hezbollah’s 2005 assassination of prime minister Rafik Hariri. After some 15 years and billions of dollars, the Tribunal found three Hezbollah operatives (Salim Ayyash, Hassan Merhi and Hussein Oneissi) responsible for the killing but avoided directly naming Hezbollah or Syria as the masterminds behind the scheme. The three wanted men live in Lebanon under the protection of Hezbollah, while the Lebanese government is bound by treaty to hand them over to the Special Tribunal. One example of the infirmity of the Lebanese state and its army and security forces in enforcing the law.
The Israelis themselves, when they withdrew from South Lebanon in 2000, refused to coordinate their withdrawal with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the Lebanese Army. Instead, they handed the Lebanese south to their own enemy Hezbollah on a silver platter, as if they wanted the war with Hezbollah to continue. Furthermore, they purposely did not withdraw to the internationally recognized border set in the 1949 armistice agreement; they kept some tiny useless pockets of land, again giving Hezbollah the pretext of an incomplete Israeli withdrawal and the justification to continue its so-called “resistance” against Israel.
It seems that the West has for far too long sought to undermine the stability of Lebanon and keep it as a festering wound with many opportunities for others to intervene. Lebanon is a tiny country whose problems are in large part due to foreign interference – Syria, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others. The West marshalled armies to liberate Bosnia from Serbia, liberate East Timor from Indonesian occupation, and liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi invasion. Why has Lebanon remained impervious to similar therapies?
There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and close to 2.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Their presence is a fertile incubator for all kinds of subversive outlaw activities. To pacify Lebanon, the West must embarrass Israel with the inconvenient “Right of Return” of Palestinians to the towns and villages the Zionists expelled them from in 1948 and 1967. To pacify Lebanon, the Syrian butcher Assad must take his people back, but the West and its Arab allies refuse to compel him to do that. It doesn’t cost much to let a tiny, once peaceful and prosperous country like Lebanon with no resources to vie for, remain a cesspool of violence where all peace opportunities have come to die for decades. And the Americans and Europeans have the gall to lecture the Lebanese on how to avoid war.
