Forty years ago this coming October 23, 2023, Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist arm of the barbarian theocracy of Iran, blew up the US Marines compound near Beirut airport and the French Drakkar Paratrooper compound a couple of miles away on a Sunday morning as the soldiers were still sleeping.
Iran and Syria were behind a plan to void Lebanon of all Western presence in the early-mid 1980s: Kidnapping and killing of western hostages (clergymen, educators, journalists...), hijacking of TWA flight 847 and the murder of navy diver Dean Stethem, the twice bombing of the US embassy, the bombing of the French embassy, and the first ever twin truck bombings of the US Marines barracks and the French Paratrooper compound in Beirut, among other assassinations and acts of violence.
The Iranian reach into Lebanon could not have been possible, as it persists today, without the cooperation and collusion of the Assad regime in Syria which served, and continues to serve, as a bridge between Tehran and Beirut. Thanks to its Damascus airport from which smuggled arms and terrorist could sneak into the lawless border with Lebanon, and to the occupation by the Syrian army of parts of Lebanon, the road was open for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to establish Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The immediate reaction of Western nations was to run away like filthy cowards and hand over Lebanon to two of the most barbaric regimes on earth. The Marines and the Paratroopers were part of a peacekeeping Multi-National Force (MNF) - French, American, British and Italian - that was dispatched to Beirut to supervise the evacuation of Yasser Arafat's PLO that had plundered Lebanon since 1970 and dismantled the Lebanese state with the help of Syria and its local traitors - the Lebanese Sunnis and Druze - and international terrorist groups like the German Baader-Meinhof, the Japanese Nihon Sekigun or Red Army, and the Italian Brigate Rosse, all funded and armed by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,Egypt and Libya. Somehow, groups as disparate as dumb American imperialists, fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, European anarchists, Syrian Baathists, Palestinian "revolutionaries", Druze neanderthals, Iranian barbaric ayatollahs, and Israeli Jewish Zionists, found common ground against a tiny, liberal, multicultural, and diverse Lebanon.
Ronald Reagan, the spineless US Republican president at the time, packed his 241 body bags and remaining Marines and fled like a coward. The very next day, on October 24, 1983, he invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada to deflect attention away from his debacle in Beirut. The British and Italians quickly fled as well, followed by France whose force stayed a few months longer than the other cowards.
Before Reagan, Richard Nixon had his war criminal State Department Secretary Henry Kisssinger sign a deal in 1974 with Assad of Syria in which Syria would not bother Israel on the Golan (it hasn't) in exchange for Syria's takeover of Lebanon (it did). After Reagan, Bush Sr. handed over more of Lebanon to the Syrian butcher in exchange for Assad's joining the anti-Saddam coalition.
Had the West stood its ground at the time and defended tiny, tormented, abused Lebanon by all these rogue states, terror organizations,
Islamic theocracies and Baathist brutes, the region would be a very
different place today.
The West thus handed Lebanon over to Iran and Syria, a crime of monumental proportion because to this day both Syria and Iran continue to wreak havoc around the world and the region.
To deflect the shame of their cowardice, some, like the British crooks, tried for a while to soothe their guilt by pretending that there were separate "political" and "military" wings of Hezbollah to justify continued negotiations with the terrorist organization while pretending to fight it. France to this day, through its envoy Yves Le Drian, continues to pretend to be a mediator in the Hezbollah-manufactured presidential stalemate in Lebanon, acting effectively in the capacity of Iran's ambassador: First he supported the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah appointed candidate Sleiman Frangiyeh, then faced with opposition by much of the Lebanese political establishment, Le Drian called for "dialogue" between the Lebanese parties, which is Hezbollah's demand.
For decades, "dialogue" has been a Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah code word for circumventing the constitution in the disfigured Lebanese democracy that Hezbollah calls "consensual democracy": People vote in legislative elections for MP candidates appointed by the religious and political Mafia bosses, then the bosses meet behind closed doors and make decisions based on deals involving bribes, favors, paybacks and other corrupt practices, regardless of what the electorate might have wanted. Decisions are then given to the appointed MPs who vote in a charade ballot in Parliament. That is the essence of the fake "democracy" of Lebanon, a veneer of modernity over a putrid feudal-religious-tribal substance.
At this time, and for the past year, Hezbollah MPs walk out of parliament after a first round of voting in which their candidate doesn't win, break the quorum and void parliament of its constitutionally mandated obligation of electing a president in a continuous session. Hezbollah and its backers know that if a president is elected who will oppose Iran and Syria's diktat, he will be a threat to their terror grip on Lebanon.
France, one of those western "beacons" of democracy and human rights "values", is bending over backwards to give Hezbollah the benefit of the doubt. But which doubt? It's been 40 years of mayhem, killings, terrorism, assassinations of prime ministers, MPs, journalists, wars with Israel.... And a cowardly West continues to succumb to blackmail and the threat of violence. The US just exchanged five illegally detained Americans by Iran for billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets. The West is behaving the same way in Armenia, where it allowed the ethnic cleansing by the Muslim autocracy in Azerbaijan of a historic 120,000-strong Christian Armenian presence in Nagorno-Karabakh in exchange for gas and oil.
For decades, the answer to this duplicity was, "we're not sure if Hezbollah is behind those 1980s attacks". They should know, though, that dictatorships like Syria and Iran often create fake organizations with a multitude of names to confuse a supposedly rational West. "The Movement of the Oppressed of the Earth", or "The Youth of Ali", were some of the names Hezbollah used to claim with deniability its responsibility for their terrorist acts.
If there is still any doubt, here is the representative of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Lebanon, Sayyed Issa Tabatabai, admitting for the first time the Iranian regime’s role in the mass murder of American, French and other western military and diplomatic personnel in the early 1980s in Beirut.
In an interview with the Iranian News Agency INRA, Tabatabai said, "I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to carry out martyrdom operations in the place where the Americans and Israelis were." He added, "The efforts to establish Hezbollah started in Lebanon's Baalbek area, where members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) arrived. I had no part in establishing the political party Hezbollah, but God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the Islamic Revolution's victory."
According to reputed sources, the part of the interview in which Tabatabai acknowledged receiving Khomeini's fatwa ordering attacks on American and Israeli targets in Lebanon was immediately removed from IRNA's website shortly after publication. This is because no official representative of Khomeini or Khamenei had ever said that Iran had any involvement in ordering, planning and carrying out the massive bombings in Lebanon against U.S.
Tabatabai also said during the interview, "With the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran [in 1979], Hezbollah was established in the summer of 1982 [to replace the Palestinian PLO]. For two years, Hezbollah's military base was located in my home. The group signed a contract declaring their willingness to become martyrs. Perhaps more than 70 of them signed this contract in my home."
Michael Rubin, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said "Americans have astonished both Iranians and the victims of Iranian terrorism with the diplomatic contortions undertaken to avoid holding Iran to account. Now that the supreme leader's representative has confessed, the questions are:
(1) Will Americans who still carry water for Iranian terrorism apologize?
(2) Will Iran pay compensation to the victims of their terror? If President Biden prices five Americans at $6 billion, the U.S. should demand no less than $289.2 billion from Iran today."
The U.S. State Department has classified Iran’s regime as the worst international state sponsor of terrorism. Iran has always vehemently denied any role in the bombings. It submitted no defense in response to the 2001 U.S. lawsuits filed against it by families of the hundreds of Americans killed or wounded in the barracks bombings.
Baathist Syria of the Assad regime, for its part, was the inaugural member of the State Department's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, yet State Department kept telling the Lebanese who were reeling under occupation by one of the few remaining Stalinist regimes, that "Syria was a factor of stability" and its army was a "presence" not an occupation. For decades, the Arabist crooks of State Department worked hand in hand with the Syrians (Edward Djeredjian, James Baker, Richard Murphy...) to prevent the emergence of a free Lebanese government.
Lebanon today is in free fall, thanks to this US-driven policy that the French and others follow like poodles. One wonders if the US doesn't deliberately want Lebanon to disappear, so as to give the Palestinian refugees, and now Syrian refugees, a substitute homeland and relieve Israel and Syria of the Right of Return of their expat refugees. Alternatively, Lebanon is perhaps so complex for these dumb US bureaucrats with their pathetic diplomas from American higher education - I've been there, I know it firsthand - that they prefer to reduce the world to a simple binary equation: Muslim Arab and Jewish Israeli. It's easier to comprehend. Arabs hold the US by the balls with their oil; and Israelis impale the US with the guilt-inflicting Holocaust shaft. Everybody else in the region who is not pure Jewish or pure Arab ruins the simplicity of the equation for these idiots.
Acording to Banafsheh Zand, an Iranian-American expert on the Iranian regime, "Issa Tabatabai's admission is a sign of serious divisions among the regime's top brass. No one within the ranks of either the clergy or the Revolutionary Guards would confess to such an action unless the infighting among the leadership of the Shia Mafia was escalating. For Tabatabai to acknowledge and take responsibility for that hideous act of terror, he must be sure that his superiors would not or could not punish him, otherwise he would have self-censored and skipped over major details."
Potkin Azarmehr, a British-Iranian expert on Iran, says, "It seems no matter how many times Western leaders see the consequences of their appeasement with terrorists they are still resigned to continue the same doomed path they have in the last four decades."
Meanwhile, Lebanon continues to pay the price of western appeasement to Fascist, rogue and terrorist states.
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