Lebanon's Decline: Who's to Blame?

Iran will NOT wage war with Israel to save Hezbollah. Nor will Israel wage a land war against Hezbollah.

Iran fears the destruction by a far more superior Israeli airforce of its infrastructure. It keeps wavering between wanting "peace' and a "ceasefire" with Israel while at the same time issuing grandiose threats against the Jewish colonynin Palestine. Bottom line: Iran will not take any chance of an open war with Israel to save the skin of its idiots of Hezbollah who now feel abandoned to their fate.

Israel knows that the only war it can sort-of-win is the one it is conducting right now, with massive airstrikes against anything that moves on the ground and underground. But it will not send its terrorist settler soldiers on the ground because it knows they will be slaughtered. Israel's reputation as invincible was built on fighting conventional wars with poorly trained and equiped regular armies whose soldiers have low morale. But when it comes to guerilla warfare, the asymmetry between its massive war machine and a bunch of stealthy fighters hiding in every corner and behind every bush in the Lebanese maquis, Israel knows it will lose. 

Since neither Israel nor Iran want a broader war between each other, the current stalemate will continue as is. Decaptitating Hezbollah will not bring about a victory for Israel; it might scare off potential successors to the leadership but the terrorist organization, like many similar organizations, end up relying on lone wolf type of organization without a leader. And that was, in retrospect, Hezbollah's mistake: As it mutated from an undeground guerilla organization facing its enemy in the south of Lebanon to an army and a structured visible and broader political organization, it became more vulnerable. Therefore, to survive and to be effective, Hezbollah might return to its roots, but with the caveat that it no longer faces its enemy across a front line similar to when Israel occupied south Lebanon. Other than lobbing rockets and missiles into Israel, which would scare Israel but never defeat it (as Hezbollah still claims), there is very little it can do other than take blow after blow.

Not only is Iran abandoning Hezbollah to its fate, but so is Syria and its criminal regime in Damascus. After dying in huge numbers defending the Stalinist regime against its own people, Hezbollah has not heard one word from Bashar Assad who has been eerily silent. He and his vulgar Baath party are not even treating us to the standard Arab nationalist testicular bravadoes. This silence means that Assad is afraid that one of these 2,000-lb bombs comes down from the sky on his "palace" in Damascus. But Hezbollah too has been silent on Assad's cowardice and lack of defense of the ally that saved his skin during the Syrian civil war beginning in 2011. Alternatively, as many of us have long suspected, Assad is in cahoots with the Israelis and secretly wishes that Hezbollah be done with. He has reintegrated the Arab League and after all, he hasn't fired a single bullet from his own Golan Heights that have been occupied and annexed by Israel since 1974. Shouldn't there have been a "resistance" and a "Syrian Hezbollah" on the Syrian-Israeli border? Why is that, barely a couple of miles away, the Lebanese have been getting killed for the past 50 years so that every Arab and Iranian jackass could warmonger and claim to want to liberate Palestine, while the Syrian annexed Golan has been very quiet? 

Nothing has really changed. Lebanon continues to be the only open Arab-then-Persian war front against Israel, a situation imposed on it by every Arab country and by Iran, ever since the Arab League forced Lebanon to cede the south of the country to Yasser Arafat's PLO in 1969 (Cairo Accord), which was then recuperated by Iran that substituted the PLO with Hezbollah. Yet, not one of the Arab countries, and now we find Iran as well, are willing to die for Palestine. Only the Lebanese.

You want to know why? Because of Lebanon's Christians who are deemed disposable by the fucking Arab Muslims all around. On the scale of alterity (otherness) that Muslims have on their hatred roster, Jews occupy the top position. Next down the list are the Christians. Since Jews are inaccessible to them, while Lebanon's Christians have been forced to open their country to every Arab and Persian mongrel, then the Muslims vented their rage at the Christians of Lebanon who have become the proxy enemy that should be sacrificed and must die in lieu of the Jews.

That is in essence the real cause of Lebanon's decline since the early 1970s. After making Lebanon a jewel of a country between 1920 and 1970, the Christians who led the country, in total collaboration with the Muslims mind you, were attacked by Lebanon's Sunni Muslims as not "arab enough" and had to prove their arabity by sacrificing the beautiful country they had built. Between 1970 and 1990, it was the Lebanese Sunnis, backed by every Arab member of the Arab League, no exception, from mild and meek Jordan to mighty Egypt and every son-of-a-bitch Arab in between, who decimated the country militarily, using the Palestinians as their militia, to steal power from the Christian president and give it to the Sunni prime minister. Between 1990 and 2005, the Sunnis economically ran the country to the ground with corruption and subservience to the Syrian occupation and the Iranian Hezbollah terror organization that muzzled any residual Christian opposition. 

After the Shiites killed the Sunni prime minister Rafik Hariri, it was too late for the Sunnis to mount an opposition to Hezbollah which mutated from an underground militia into a political party that quickly seized power and ran the country to the present time. All of this heartache has been under the pretext of liberating Palestine, but only from Christian Lebanon. The stupidity of the Arabs and the Persians goes like this: by destroying the Christians of Lebanon (no. 2 on their hatred list), the Arabs and the Persians thought they could face off directly with the Jews of Israel. Somehow they saw the Christians of Lebanon as an obstacle, and perhaps even as a dry run to their supposed dream of eliminating Israel.

But given Iran's animosity to the Sunni Arabs, the latter jumped into the arms of Israel and the US, and are now the best friend of their Zionist enemy. They have embassies in Jerusalem and Israel has embassies in every other Arab capital, and they still talk about Israel being "the enemy", or the "Zionist entity", and about liberating Jerusalem and praying at Al-Aqsa Mosque. If the history of the barbarian English can be summarized by the "perfidious Albion", the Arabs should be in the Guiness Book of Records as the most perfidious of nations, way ahead of the English.

And so, Lebanon, the tiny, diverse and liberal country by the Mediterranean stood as a thorn in the side of both the Jewish extremists of Israel and the Muslim Arab extremists, and had to be disposed of as the ultimate sacrificial lamb in this whole affair.

The Christians today are again facing the same dilemma. By rejecting war against Israel they are accused of being traitors to the Arab cause, while the Arab custodians of that cause have given up on it. The Christians continue to walk the fine line of not provoking the Muslims while trying to preserve the only country where they can live free.