What Hezbollah and the Americans want in Lebanon

The following are excerpts from a speech delivered yesterday by Hashem Safieddine that reveal Hezbollah’s thinking about Lebanon. I have always believed that Hezbollah would never relinquish its weapons and its will to dominate Lebanon, unlike others who naively believed that it will give up its "resistance" once Israel withdrew from the south in 2000. They were wrong, for Hezbollah invented new pretexts to retain its weapons. 

At its founding, Hezbollah clearly stated that it wanted to transform Lebanon into a new Iranian-style theocracy (ولاية الفقيه or The Rule of the Religious), and despite its talk about the plurality and diversity of Lebanese society with which it implies that won't control a multi-diverse Lebanon, we should remember that Iran is also a very diverse and multicultural country, yet is dominated by the fundamentalist Shiite bosses of Hezbollah. 

Unfortunately, I happen to also believe that the West, led by the Americans, has allowed Lebanon to fester for decades as a cesspool of violence dominated by America's enemies like Syria's Assad and Iran's Hezbollah, when the US had ample opportunities to prevent the decline and fall of a country that was once a major ally of the US in the region. One wonders why, and whether there is a priority in deliberately keeping Lebanon as an unstable crucible of containable violence where Syria, Israel and others can wage their wars without spilling too much over into their neighbors. One wonders why the Americans, who have defeated and/or helped topple many Arab dictators, have done everything they could to maintain the inimical, terrorist-supporting, human rights-violator Assad regime in power since 1969.  When Israel strikes Syria these days, or when Israel annexes the Syrian Golan Heights, the Syrians never react and somehow have the luxury to ignore these blatant attacks against their sovereignty. In contrast, Syria's allies like Hezbollah have been causing mayhem, war and instability (including the murder of hundreds of Americans) in Lebanon for decades if one Israeli jet flies overhead in the skies of Lebanon. 

 Here are a few salient points of the Hezbollah's mullah's speech:

- The Americans will learn soon enough …. that Hezbollah will take certain undefined actions to implement Hezbollah’s design for a new Lebanon.

- Hezbollah wants to “Sweep” the Americans and their cronies out of Lebanon. (Implying: Hezbollah will do what it did in the 1980s when it resorted to extreme violence to dislodge Ronald Reagan’s Marines and every other Westerner from Lebanon)

- Hezbollah will build a new Lebanon upon new “priorities” that will erase the past 70-80 years of Lebanon’s history. (Implying: the 1943 National Pact and Lebanese constitution will no longer be the basis for Lebanon’s current formula of governance).

- Only the “Resistance” will be the absolute master of the new Lebanon. (i.e. just as the Khomeini revolution of 1979 did with the Iranian nation).

Below are the excerpts from Safieddine’s speech:

Hashem Safieddine: We need to choose self-reliance to build our nation, and then “sweep up” the Americans and their cronies from Lebanon

Sunday, 20-February-2022

The head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council, Hashem Safieddine, said during a meeting of educational institutions in southern Lebanon, “All the Lebanese should know, and all the Americans should know, and they will find out soon enough, that if these pressures persist and if this meanness and hatred to the Lebanese continue in their livelihood and their money, we won’t have but one option, namely to rely on ourselves and to build our country as nations and countries should be built. We have the brains, capabilities and capacities that enable us, God willing, with all the sincere and honorable people, to rebuild a new, strong, resilient, resistant, fortified and independent Lebanon that can preserve its maritime and terrestrial sovereignty, its oil and its maritime resources, and its present and future for generations to come.”

Safieddine further said that “If the American wants to put us under maximum pressure, I think we should move to the maximum option of relying on ourselves to build our nation, then we shall sweep up the Americans and their cronies in Lebanon … From these pressures, we shall perform the miracle of building the new Lebanon on new priorities, and on a genuine and inclusive culture for all religions, denominations and regions detached from the bosses, the authoritarians and the feudal lords who have dominated the country over more than seventy or eighty years up to this day.”

Safieddine concluded, “We have the Cause of the Resistance, the vertebral column of all this strength and power without which there is no way of building neither a new Lebanon nor an economy,” adding “Whosever is preventing the Lebanese from building a real economy is the United States of America that does not want a solution in Lebanon in order to secure political gains that serve Israel.”