A small country like Lebanon cannot be solely responsible for the agony it has been going through for the past 50 years. Prior to 1970, it was a successful, prosperous and vibrant democracy. It could not by itself decide to self-implode as it has done since, unless others intervened.
The success of the country between 1920 and 1970 was essentially on account of its undeclared but subsumed neutrality, the decision of its constituent communities not to take sides in international and regional conflicts. Its constitution and its non-written National Pact stipulated that Lebanon is a bridge between East and West, between Christianity and Islam, between the Arab world and Europe, and that is what made it a successful democracy with fair elections, a representative assembly and peaceful transfers of power. It deliberately chose to have a "salon" type of army more for decorum than for waging wars.
When the Lebanese complain about outsiders beginning to intervene and challenge those tenets that made their country prosperous and stable, they are immediately shut down for not assuming their own share of the responsibility for the downfall of the country. They are accused by ignorant people of being an artificial country based on sectarian and religious chasms that can never be overcome. But the Lebanese proved for five decades that the country could function and succeed as a multicultural, multi-religious republic. The country had in fact been functioning successfully since 1860 when it obtained its autonomy from the occuying Turkish Ottoman empire, just like Greece and Egypt did at the time.
But the Turks re-invaded in 1914 and ravaged the country with famine (confiscating everything from the population), war (forced conscription) and repression (both Christian and Muslim leaders were hanged by the Turkish occupation in downtown Beirut). Was that the fault of the Lebanese?
After 1918, the country began rebuilding itself with new institutions under the guidance of the internationally-approved French Mandate. Unlike in Palestine where the crooks of the British mandate sold the country to the Zionists instead of helping the Palestinians build their own new institutions after the war, the French in Lebanon helped the Lebanese write a constitution that was based on power-sharing and accommodation between Christians and Muslims, rather than sowing bloody sectarian division as the British were doing in Palestine between imported Jews and indigenous Muslims and Christians.
And accommodation and power-sharing worked in Lebanon. The country became the envy of all the religious barbarians around it, be it the fanatic Jewish Zionists in Israel or the radical Muslim Arabs in every other Arab dictatorship and monarchy.
By the 1950s, Nasser of Egypt decided to wreck the Lebanese success story by trying to force it into a stupid short-lived union between Egypt and Syria.
By the early 1960s, the Syrians who had been ricocheting from annual one coup d'etat to another tried a failed coup in Lebanon.
By the mid-1960s, the Palestinian refugees whom Israel and Jordan had so gracefully displaced to Lebanon dealt another blow to Lebanon with their challenge to the state and its army.
By 1970, the barbarian Stalinist regime of the Assad dynasty took power in Damascus next door, followed by the war that Yasser Arafat and his PLO waged against the Lebanese state with the backing of the illustrous oil-drenched Muslim Saudis, Kuwaitis, Libyans and every other Arab asshole around. The jaundiced westerners, thirsty for oil, did not challenge the Arab assault on Lebanon.
The Eden that Lebanon once was was dragged into the living hell it became ever since.
Then the Jewish Zionist brutes decided to join the orgy and invaded the country (1978 then in 1982), and when they withdrew (2000) they, along with their American godfather, handed the country to Iran and its bastard child Hezbollah.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan had sent the Marines to Beirut to secure the withdrawl of Arafat and help the Lebanese government regain its sovereignty. But the newly born Iranian theobarbarity in Tehran decided it was its turn to join the slaughter: Its Hezbollah militia bombed the Marines and killed 241 of them. Instead of fighting back, Reagan fled like a coward because he was selling Israeli weapons to the Iranians in secret. Again in 1988, George H W Bush sold Lebanon to Syria in exchange for the hostages that Syria had ordered Hezbollah to kidnap.
How many times should we be telling this story to prove that Lebanon's ailments are not of its own doing? For 50 years, it had proven the success of its peaceful coexistence formula that the hatred of some (Arabs and Jews) or the indifference of others (Westerners) wanted destroyed.
Today in 2024, Lebanon continues to agonize because of Israel, Iran, Syria, the US and every other belligerent monster out there "with interests". Lebanon is a very small country made up of one long and high mountain chain. It is not made for wars, nor has it ever invaded other countries.
Yet, intellectual criminals or ignoramuses will continue to tell you that Lebanon's problems are of its own doing, despite the long list above of outside belligerent fanatic countries that participated in the slaughter with either their hatred or their indifference. Lebanon's diversity and small size make it vulnerable and weak, and only hostile countries "with interests" exploit this weakness. Are there any decent countries left out there with no interests that can help?
Haven't major countries formed coalitions and gone to war to help tiny Kuwait against Saddam Hussein, or help tiny Christian East Timor against huge Muslim Indonesia, or help tiny Muslim Bosnia and Kosovo against Christian Serbia?
Why is tiny Lebanon treated differently?
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