Thanks to Treacherous America, Hezbollah Runs the Show in Lebanon

Hezbollah holds talks with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Beirut. 

Just like Arafat's PLO did back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Iranian terrorist organization Hezbollah runs the country of Lebanon. As with Arafat back then, foreign dignitaries fly in and out of Beirut, visit Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah first, then may or may not hold talks with Lebanese State officials. That is what the Iranian foreign minister did a few days ago. 

Are the Lebanese to blame for this state of affairs? Consider that back in the 1970s, the crook Richard Nixon and war criminal Henry Kissinger made a deal with the butcher of Damascus, Hafez Assad, in which Assad was given free reign in Lebanon in exchange for surrendering the Golan Heights to Israel and keep a quiet border there. Assad, followed by his fetus Bashar, has strictly abided by that agreement. There never was a Syrian resistance against Israel on the not-only-occupied, but annexed, Golan Heights, while in Lebanon the Syrian and Iranian occupations have stoked the conflict with Israel for decades. 

Then there was the idiot Republican president Ronald Reagan who in 1982 dispatched his Marines to Beirut to escort Yasser Arafat's PLO out of an Israeli-besieged Beirut. One year later, the tandem Hezbollah-Syria-Iran blew up the Marines headquarters near Beirut Airport, killing 243 US servicemen, and the "Drakkar" French paratrooper compound a mile away, killing 58 French soldiers. What does Reagan do in the face of this tragedy? Did he fight back? No, he didn't because the oil-drenched Arab friends of his VP George HW Bush told him not to. Instead, he packs up his dead Marines and the few remaining living ones and flees like a coward, leaving Syria and Iran's Hezbollah in control of Lebanon. Here we are 40 years later, still confronting those same enemies and sending warships to the eastern mediterranean for fear of what they might do. US foreign policy is a pile of monumental disasters caused by US State Department bureaucrats who, despite their so-called "education" in American universities, are mired in their ignorance of the world. Believe me, I've dealt with so many of them and I was always shocked by their stupid simplification and reduction of complex world problems to binary issues only simpleton minds could comprehend. The US armed forces are also a disaster. They have yet to score a durable solution wherever they shove their nose (e.g. Bosnia, Kosovo...) and they have yet to score a military victory wherever they decide to fight (Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan...).

Lebanon is the victim of western treason and all these machinations, and today it remains a hostage in the hands of Iran, thanks to US treachery and backstabbing. Even Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush perpetuated this US deal with the Assad regime against the interests of Lebanon and American interests. Why? What status quo were the Americans so eager to maintain, when it was against the existence of a democratic liberal Lebanon and against the peace process? The answer is in the events unfolding today: A status quo of no war no peace, of intermittent violence, decade after decade, serves the interests of the violent regimes around Lebanon, Israel and Syria, both of whom do not want the peace process. It allows the permanent settlement of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, thus relieving Israel of their Right of Return. As we speak, Lebanon is also hosting 2.5 million Syrian refugees whom the EU and the US want to settle permanently in a Lebanon of 4 million people. Which means that Lebanon is the sacrificial lamb to protect the lovely barbaric couple of the Israeli and Syrian regimes.

Both of these regimes inititate violence, then claim deniability by blaming their victims, the Lebanese. That has been America, Syria and Israel's plan for Lebanon all along. If the Palestine conflict expands to south Lebanon, and Israel invades and holds ground there, the most likely scenario would be that Israel would keep - occupy? annex? - the territory of south Lebanon south of the Awwali River. Another land theft for the expansionist British-American colony of Israel. Assad, for his part, gets to keep his regime intact, one of a handful Stalinist regimes still in power around the world today, and may in fact reclaim what is left of Lebanon.

Perhaps a Lebanon built on accommodation and power-sharing between Muslims and Christians is not a model Syria and Israel would like to follow; they prefer Fascist ideas built on the superiority of one "race" over other races: Jewish in Israel, and Arab in Syria. That is why they have been so eager over the decades to demolish the multicultural model of Lebanon that stands as a thorn in their supremacist ideologies.

The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group held talks on Wednesday in Beirut with senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad figures in a key meeting of three top anti-Israel militant groups amid the war raging in Gaza.  Following the meeting, a brief statement said Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah agreed with Hamas' Saleh al-Arouri and Islamic Jihad's leader Ziad al-Nakhleh on the next steps that the three — along with other Iran-backed militants — should take at this “sensitive stage" in the Middle East. If logic is any guide, Israel should be smashing Beirut to the ground as it is doing in Gaza. 

Their goal, according to the statement carried on Hezbollah-run and Lebanese state media, was to achieve “a real victory for the resistance in Gaza and Palestine” and halt Israel's "treacherous and brutal aggression against our oppressed and steadfast people in Gaza and the West Bank”.

No other details were provided. As the Gaza death toll spirals, tensions have also been rising along the tense Lebanon-Israel border, where Hezbollah members have been exchanging fire with Israeli troops since the day after Hamas' rampage into Israel.

For now, those exchanges remain limited to a handful of border towns and Hezbollah and Israeli military positions on both sides. Lebanese army soldiers and United Nations peacekeeping forces have deployed in large, but useless, numbers.  Dozens of Hezbollah fighters have been killed in the clashes so far, the group says, while the Israeli military has also announced some deaths among its ranks.

Nasrallah has yet to publicly speak about the war in Gaza and clashes along the Lebanon-Israel border. However, other Hezbollah top officials have warned Israel against its planned ground invasion into the besieged territory. Israeli officials have said they would retaliate aggressively in case of a cross-border attack by Hezbollah from Lebanon. “We will cripple it with a force it cannot even imagine, and the consequences for it and the Lebanese state (will be) devastating," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said while visiting Israeli troops along the border with Lebanon on Sunday.

Lebanon's cash-strapped caretaker government, along regional and international figures, has been scrambling to keep the country out of the war. Hezbollah and Israel fought a monthlong war in 2006 that ended in a tense stalemate. Israel sees Iran-backed Hezbollah as its most serious threat, estimating it has some 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel. Yet, it continues to pummel women and children in Gaza, while engaging in "polite and civilized" exchanges of rockets and missiles with Lebanon. 

Why have the US and the West refused to help Lebanon out of this hellish equation for so long? A vast majority (75%) of Lebanese do not want war with Israel, but the US has encouraged the Syrian occupation of Lebanon between 1975 and 2005, during which Iran smuggled the 150,000 rockets to Hezbollah in Lebanon via its alliance with Syria. A cowardly West had 40 years to do something, but it didn't. Have the hens come back to roost? Is the US ready and willing, once again, to wage a war against the very same monsters it created, as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq?