Israel Matzav

The end of Lebanon

Caroline Glick's column on Tuesday describes the fate of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, but it is really a description of the end of an independent Lebanon. Lebanon is being forced to be the front of Iran's alliance with Syria, Hezbullah and Hamas, and Hariri is being forced to be the face of that submission.

ON MONDAY, Yediot Aharonot reported that Iranian and Syrian intelligence agencies are applying massive pressure on Hariri to openly join the Iranian axis. Today that axis includes the Syrian regime, Hizbullah and Hamas. If and when Hariri openly joins, Lebanon will become its first non-voluntary member.

Chances are good that Hariri will succumb to their pressure. Yediot reported that the Iranians and Syrians made him an offer he can't refuse: "If you don't join us, you will share your father's fate."

His father, of course, was former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in Beirut by Syrian and Hizbullah agents on February 14, 2005. A month later, on March 14, Saad led more than a million Lebanese in a protest in Beirut. Their demand was for Lebanon to be free of Syrian rule.

Everyone knew the March 14 movement had no chance of militarily defeating either Syria or its Hizbullah ally. But the US and France both lined up behind the young Hariri and his followers. The unlikely alliance of the Bush administration and the Chirac government just two years after Franco-American ties were seemingly irreparably frayed in the lead up to the US-led invasion of Iraq was enough to intimidate Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

After 29 years of Syrian occupation, he ordered his forces to withdraw from Lebanon.

As the head of the March 14 movement, Saad Hariri was flying high. No one could have imagined that within five short years he would become a slave of his father's murderers. No one, that is, aside from his father's murderers.

...

Iran saw an opportunity in its enemies' combined strategic dementia. And so in June 2006, it went to war. First it attacked Israel from Gaza. A cross-border attack left three soldiers dead and Gilad Schalit was taken hostage.

Two weeks later, as Israel stammered out incoherencies about Gaza and Olmert barred the IDF from taking measures that might have freed Schalit lest his hopes for further withdrawals be exposed as strategic absurdities, Hizbullah struck. What became known as the Second Lebanon War began.

The only ones who openly acknowledged the stakes were the leaders of the March 14 movement. Druse leader Walid Jumblatt repeatedly warned that if Hizbullah was not completely defeated, Lebanon would become an Iranian colony.

But the withdrawal-crazed Olmert government wouldn't listen. It couldn't listen.

SO TOO, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice ignored the March 14 movement leaders' entreaties. A full Israeli victory would require full US backing. And full US backing would require an admission on her part that Iran was engaged in a direct war and a proxy war against the US and that the war against Israel and the war against the US were two fronts in the same war.

These were realities that Rice would never accept.

And so together with her fantasy-driven Israeli counterparts, Rice sued for a cease-fire that left Hizbullah in charge.

The rest was preordained history. In 2007 first Hizbullah and then Hamas staged putsches in Lebanon and Gaza and wrested control over their respective governments from their Western-backed rivals in the March 14 movement and Fatah.

The US responded by massively increasing its military assistance to the Lebanese armed forces and Fatah. Continued Fatah terrorist attacks against Israelis in Judea and Samaria and last month's lethal ambush of IDF forces along the border by the Lebanese army exposed the strategic insanity of that policy. And yet it continues. The US remains unwilling to acknowledge that Iran's persuasive power is greater than theirs --given the price of non-cooperation with the mullahs.

Read the whole thing. It is amazing how badly policy has been bungled in this region since 2006. Note Ahmadinejad's schedule on October 13. Will there be a sniper there? On which side of the border? Hmmm.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:28 PM