They keep coming: ministers, envoys, ambassadors, telling the Lebanese to avoid a blowup in the war between the terrorists of Hezbollah and the terrorist Zionists. They meet with ministers, clergymen of all colors and shades, leaders of political parties... except with Hezbollah. They proffer advice and warnings, knowing that the decision-making is strictly in Hezbollah's hands which 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 or register a new home.
So what do the French, the Americans and the westerners expect from a non-existent Lebanese state whose army is more like a domestic police force than an army? The army has no control over the borders of the country: in the east and north, Syria runs a smuggling empire (drugs, goods, terrorists....) without any impediments, 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 stop the barrages of missiles over its cities ans towns, and this time around there is a high likelihood of a land incursion by Hezbollah into the Galilee similar to Hamas's incursion on October 7, or 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, which when added to the virtually collapsed Lebanese state might lead to unimaginable consequences.
For decades Westerners either nurtured Hezbollah or ignored it, not out of fear but out of deliberate policy to keep Lebanon an unstable arena for their Israeli and Arab friends to use as a pretext to avoid making peace. This is the same policy that Netanyahu adopted on Hamas by nurturing it in Gaza just to undermine the Palestinian Authority as the primary representative of the Palestinian people and the likely custodian of a Palestinian state that Israel does not want to see materializing.
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.
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 as a peacekeeping force to supervise the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation organization (PLO) from Beirut. Instead of holding ground and fighting the Iranian-Syrian takeover of the country of Lebanon, Ronald Reagan packed 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. 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 by the dropper only when the West made concessions 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 the 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.
The Germans released one Hezbollah terrorist, Ali Hamadeh, the lead hijacker in the TWA Flight 847 in 1985 after a German court sentenced him to life imprisonment in 1987. He was released 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 (STL) in 2007 to look into Hezbollah's assassination of prime minister Rafik Hariri two years earlier. After some 15 years, the Tribunal found three Hezbollah operatives responsible for the killing but avoided directly naming Hezbollah or Syria as behind the scheme. The three wanted men live in Lebanon under the protection of Hezbollah, while the Lebanese government is bound by the STL treaty to hand them over. One example of the infirmity of the Lebanese 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 for decades has sought to undermine the stability of Lebanon and keep it as a festering wound with many opportunities for Israel, Iran and Syria to intervene. Lebanon is a tiny country whose problems are in large part due to foreign inteference - Syria, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others. The West marshalled armies to solve the Bosnia-Serbia, to liberate East Timor from Indonesian occupation, and to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi invasion. Why did it refuse to do the same for Lebanon?
Take a guess: There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. There are close to 2.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. To pacify Lebanon, the Israelis must recognize their "Right of Return" to the towns and villages the Zionists expelled them from in 1948 and 1967, and the Western protectors of Israel do not want to embarass Israel. To pacify Lebanon, the Syrian butcher Assad must take his people back, but the West refuses to compel him to do that. It is more convenient to destroy a tiny, once peaceful and prosperous country like Lebanon and keep it as a cesspool of violence where all peace initiatives have come to die for decades.
And the hypocrite Americans and Europeans have the gall to lecture the Lebanese on racism and avoiding war.
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