The lamentable Shiite traitors of Lebanon continue to heed Iran's instructions to obstruct any effort at normalizing Lebanon after 50 years of torment, first by the Palestinians of Yasser Arafat, then by the criminals of Iran's Hezbollah.
Hezbollah knows it can't do anything against Israel, and in fact suffered a pathetic loss in last Fall's bout of violence between the Jewish Zionist extremists of Israel and the Muslim Shiite extremists of Iran in Lebanon. Yet, the leaders of the criminal organization continue to holler from their ratholes deep under the ground about "resistance".
The entire country is beseeching Hezbollah to drop its weapons, admit defeat in dignity and allow the Lebanese State to assume exclusive monopoly over all military functions in the country. But civility and patience may not last forever. Now isolated more than ever with the loss of Syria's Assad as a bridge between Iran and Lebanon, and given that Iran didn't move a finger to help Hezbollah as it was decimated last Fall, Hezbollah has really two options.
One is to surrender its weapons and cease its separatist operations as a mini-state inside the country - Hezbollah has its own banks, its own hospitals, its own army of course, and runs a pleitropy of illicit operations including drug manufacturing and smuggling, all of which are increasingly restricted. Smuggling across the Syrian border - of weapons, drugs, mercenaries - has dropped precipitously. Smuggling through the Beirut Airport has also nearly ceased as Lebanese airspace is now closed to Iranian planes.
As its capabilities have become severely truncated, one wonders why is Hezbollah still rattling the sabers? The answer has long been known: Iran doesn't genuinely care for the Shiites of Lebanon as it claims some sort of religious brotherhood between the two sides. However, Iran uses the Shiites of Lebanon as a Trojan horse, as a beachhead on the Mediterrean, as a warfront with Israel, and most importantly as a bargaining chip in its endless negotiations with the US.
Let no one forget in passing that the Lebanese Sunni Muslims - who are today champions of the sovereignty of the Lebanese State against Shiite Hezbollah - were themselves traitors to that State. Back in the 1960s-1980s, they led a sedition against the Lebanese State using the Palestinian organizations as their militias and Sunni Saudi Arabia as their sponsor furnishing them with weapons and money. But after Israel wiped out Yasser Arafat's occupation of Lebanon in 1982, the Saudis submitted themselves to American hegemony, secured some political gains for their Sunni herd in Lebanon (an amendment of the Lebanese constitution giving the Sunni Prime Minister a more prominent position than the Christian President, an arrangement known as the 1989 Taef Agreement), and along with their Gulf Emirates backyard, are just about to conclude the final sale of Palestine to the Zionists.
Two, Hezbollah's second option is the default option if the above fails, and is itself made up of a decision fork. If Hezbollah refuses to lay down its weapons and reintegrate the State,
1- The US is prodding the non-Shiite communities of Lebanon (Christians, Sunni Muslims, Druze and others) to wage a civil war against the Shiites. Now, as was the case in 1975, it is the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) that will begin the charge. It already is confiscating weapons from Hezbollah's caches (two days ago, 6 Lebanese soldiers were killed trying to defuse a Hezbollah weapons cache in the south), and tensions are rising. The problem with the LAF is that its soldiers hail from the same spectrum of mutually-hostile sectarian camps. So, unless a genetic metamorphosis has radically altered the backward mindests, all it takes for Naim Qassem, the current troglodyte cave-dwelling leader of Hezbollah, is to call up all Shiite soldiers in the LAF to abandon their posts and join Hezbollah, with their weapons of course.
The Lebanese Sunnis did it back in the 1970s. Backed by the Lebanese Sunni leadership, by the Syrians of Hafez Assad, by the Druze chameleons of the Jumblatt feudal dynasty, by Yasser Arafat's Palestinians, and by many others, a Sunni Muslim LAF lieutenant - Ahmad Khatib - led an "Arab Army of Lebanon" sedition against his own army, attacked its barracks across the country and thus completely paralyzed the LAF's capabilities at crushing Arafat and his PLO and precipitated the collapse of the Lebanese state and the rise of sectarian militias.
Broadly speaking, therefore, any move by the LAF and the Lebanese State to disarm Hezbollah by force will inevitably lead to a civil war and the collapse of the State. Again, as in the 1970s, such a collapse might invite both Israelis and Syrians to venture inside Lebanon with attacks, invasions and other destabilization actions which, in my mind, might logically lead to military occupations and annexations of Lebanese territory. To push this argument further into "conspiracy" territory, such a scenario is consistent with the theorized conspiracy of breaking down near eastern states like Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq into smaller statelets - a Kurdish one in northeastern Syria, a Turkish one in northwestern Syria, an alawite one along Syria's mediterranean seacoast, a Druze one in the currently destabilized Sweida region of Syria which abuts the Druze areas of Lebanon and Israel, a Christian one in the central Lebanese mountains (the "Smaller Lebanon" of pre-1918), and of course the Jewish one in Palestine.
2- If the Lebanese government, led by Christians and Sunnis, refuses to confront Hezbollah militarily, then it will incur the wrath of the Americans and invite a direct Israeli war that will by far be more devastating than last Fall's. Ironically, this scenario will lead to the same consequences as the first option: a direct Israeli occupation and annexation of territory, a possible mass relocation of the Lebanese Shiite population from the south up the corridor of the Bekaa Valley, and also a Syrian military (now all Sunnis) intervention against Hezbollah inside Lebanon.
Naturally, a third option is also possible with both scenarios above unfolding simultaneously. The LAF could begin the charge but is then "assisted" by Israel and Syria to deal a definitive death blow to Hezbollah and Iran's presence.
For my part, I believe that the Lebanese government of Christian Joseph Aoun and Sunni Nawwaf Salam will NOT confront Hezbollah militarily for one simple reason: The precedent of the 1970s hasn't yet vanished from the minds, and neither wants to go down in history as having initiated a second civil war in the country. They'd rather let Israel do their dirty work for them, knowing that they will still not emerge unscathed from either scenario.
Finally, there is one option that can avoid all these terrifying scenarios, one that western nations have used elsewhere but have always been reluctant to use in Lebanon: Mount a multinational expeditionary force that will land along Lebanon's coast and join the Lebanese Armed Forces in crushing Hezbollah, premepting a Syrian or Israeli intervention.
In 1958, President John Kennedy dispatched 10,000 US Marines to protect Lebanon from the Egyptian dictator Nasser's ambitions to annex Lebanon. It worked.
Unfortunately, the MutliNational Force (MNF: US, France, Britain, Italy) that was dispatched to Beirut in 1982 to oversee Arafat's departure from the country AND to assist President Amin Gemayel's government in restoring order and ending the civil war failed in its mission. As soon as Hezbollah (only two years old at the time) blew up the US Marines Headquarters in Beirut (243 US servicemen killed) and the French Paratrooper Compound (58 French commandos killed) in coordinated truck bomb attacks, the imbecile and Arab asskisser coward republican president Ronald Reagan packed his body bags and shamefully fled the battleground. Had he (and the French, British, and Italians) stayed, supported by the Lebanese Army, the Israeli invading army and the Christian militias, they could have easily defeated two-year old Hezbollah and this whole 30-year-long episode of wars and terrorism would not have occurred. But the Americans have always had bigger interests with the oil-drenched Sunni Arab Muslims than with tiny useless Lebanon. The Sunni Arabs at the time were still trying to Islamize the West with mosques and madrassas, funding all kinds of anti-western terrorism, and were naturally sympathetic to the Iranian Islamic Revolution. So as not to offend the Saudis, the Americans and the West abandoned Lebanon to Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. And Lebanon is still reeling from those same failures in US foreign policy.
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Hezbollah warns Lebanon 'will have no life' if state moves against it
Maya Gebeily and Jana Choukeir
Updated Fri, August 15, 2025
Lebanon’s Hezbollah Chief Naim Qassem gives a televised speech [All warmongers wag their index fingers because they know their audiences are wagging their middle fingers at them]
By Maya Gebeily and Jana Choukeir
BEIRUT (Reuters) -Hezbollah raised the spectre of civil war on Friday with a warning there would be "no life" in Lebanon if the government sought to confront or eliminate the Iran-backed group.
The government wants to control arms in line with a U.S.-backed plan following Israel's military campaign against Hezbollah which was founded four decades ago with the backing of Tehran's Revolutionary Guards.
But the group is resisting pressure to disarm, saying that cannot happen until Israel ends its strikes and occupation of a southern strip of Lebanon that had been a Hezbollah stronghold.
"This is our nation together. We live in dignity together, and we build its sovereignty together - or Lebanon will have no life if you stand on the other side and try to confront us and eliminate us," its leader Naim Qassem said in a televised speech.
Israel has dealt Hezbollah heavy blows in the last two years, killing many of its top brass including former leader Hassan Nasrallah and 5,000 of its fighters, and destroying much of its arsenal.
The Lebanese cabinet last week tasked the army with confining weapons only to state security forces, a move that has outraged Hezbollah.
Qassem accused the government of implementing an "American-Israeli order to eliminate the resistance, even if that leads to civil war and internal strife."
DIALOGUE POSSIBLE
However, he said Hezbollah and the Amal movement, its Shi'ite Muslim ally, had decided to delay any street protests while there was still scope for talks.
"There is still room for discussion, for adjustments, and for a political resolution before the situation escalates to a confrontation no one wants," Qassem said.
"But if it is imposed on us, we are ready, and we have no other choice ... At that point, there will be a protest in the street, all across Lebanon, that will reach the American embassy."
The conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, which left parts of Lebanon in ruins, erupted in October 2023 when the group opened fire at Israeli positions along the southern border in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas at the start of the Gaza war.
Hezbollah and Amal still retain influence politically, appointing Shi'ite ministers to cabinet and holding the Shi'ite seats in parliament. But for the first time in years, they do not hold a "blocking third" of cabinet, enabling them to veto government decisions in the past.
Hezbollah retains strong support among the Shi'ite community in Lebanon, but calls for its disarmament across the rest of society have grown.
(Reporting by Maya Gebeily and Jana Choukeir; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Andrew Cawthorne)
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