How many of us can remember the names of the Presidents of Italy or Germany? This is because in these republics, it is the prime minister who wields the real power, with the President largely playing a symbolic role as a grey-haired sage who views the proceedings at a great distance.

This is how many Lebanese would like to think of their own aging President Michel Aoun, who in his mid-eighties (it’s unclear exactly how old he is) is holding Lebanon to ransom over a new cabinet of ministers. Aoun, a Hezbollah servant who once fled Lebanon at the end of the civil war when Syrian troops approached Beirut, has taken the terms of his office too literally in believing that the President has the overall say who makes up the cabinet.

It is for this reason why we will see Lebanon fall into an abyss of rampant crime and poverty not seen since the civil war, following the recent resignation of Saad Hariri, who stepped in as Prime Minister nine months ago, following the Beirut bomb and the appointment of a stooge Sunni PM whose name has been changed to sound like “diabolical” by most Lebanese, such was the magnitude of his uselessness.

But even in Lebanon, being useless can be quite useful.

Hariri, hardly a dynamic player himselft, was Saudi Arabia’s last hope in playing a role in somehow compromising some of Iran’s power it wields through keeping Aoun and his son-in-law, Bassil, a hapless buffoon who never had a real job until he was given the post of foreign minister on a plate without even holding a parliamentary seat, in office. Their plan is probably to present Bassil as a presidential candidate in next year’s elections which will be a major juncture for Lebanon and the country’s future. Some even go as far as to argue that the present set up of a Christian Maronite President, a Sunni PM and a Shia parliamentary speaker could even be scrapped.

For Aoun to refuse to accept that it is for Hariri as PM to choose the lion’s share of cabinet ministers was a move, which might prove to have cataclysmic consequences. For Hariri to not accept the stand-off and resign was predictable, given that he will no doubt be having his own ideas about how to derail even the process of being replaced. It is the oldest after dinner joke in Beirut shared by almost everyone that Hariri believes he is indispensable. A lot of that collateral stemmed from the special relationship his father had with the older generation of Saudi royals who treated the Lebanese firebrand leader as one of their own.

But with now King Salman’s health a question in Saudi Arabia, with many speculating that he may well step down to give the throne to Mohamed bin Salman (MbS), how long can this old record keep getting played?

Lebanon needs fresh flows of outside money to pull itself out of the cesspit which the country has become through decades of being looted by the same cronies who are in office today. The only way that money can come in is with cast iron guarantees signed by a credible new government which is not being hijacked by Iran, so as to let Hezbollah keep hundreds of thousands of sophisticated rockets buried in secret bunkers all over the country, facing Israel, naturally. This old set up of “corruption sharing” which now even the most naive Lebanese citizen knows was all about a farce of scaring people into supporting their militia leaders to apparently keep the peace has also had its day.

Hariri’s resignation should neither shock us or worry us. It is simply another move in the same game which has been played out since the early 90s. Sabotage. The difference today is that Lebanon is reported to be literally a matter of days away from hospital generators being shut down as the government neither has the will, nor the ability, to pay for fuel via the central bank – whose chief is so mired in corruption and embezzlement scandals that no one on the country can tell you if the central bank has anything left of the 40bn dollars it was once believed to have before the entire crisis imploded in 2019. Today, Lebanon’s currency in practical terms is worth not even ten percent of its original value as the country is gripped by new fuel shortages and the relentless hyperinflation on essentials, foods and drugs.

Soon, when the old and weak are dying in hospitals which don’t even have electric light and crime levels sore, those who are linked to Hariri will note that in fact, in the shorter term, it was Aoun and his son-in-law who came out of this recent spat as victors – given that Hariri’s ace card (he can talk to Hezbollah) was played but came to nothing. Even the Lebanese Shiite militia, which acts often as a state within a state inside Lebanon, didn’t want to face a stand-off with a President who is so old and showing signs of senility, over his role. Here we see for the first time real power of this duo which explains why they behave sometimes like they are untouchable. Is Hezbollah looking to Aoun to ‘hand down’ the presidency to Bassil, who is hardly on good terms with the Lebanese group? If this is the case, then the Saudis have got their work cut out if they are relying on the often repeated Hariri ruse of resigning just to create a political vacuum. Surely the capricious young Saudi Prince, who once had Hariri beaten up during a kidnapping ordeal which made international headlines in 2017, must have reached the end of his patience?

Israel is convinced that, for the first time, that the ‘next war’ will not be limited to Lebanese territory; that its own borders will be violated; and that offensive combat forces will enter settlements and homes and clash with Israeli troops.

This is giant ‘chess’ – where a combination of armed drones, suicide drones and ‘smart’ missiles likely will predominate (rather than tanks, as in the 2006 war). In its evolving thesis of a new war with Hizbullah, Israel believes that all its airfields will be bombed with precision missiles. (And is therefore trying to get from the U.S., a few squadrons of the new generation F-35B jets that do not need long runways, so as to try to secure its air superiority in the face of a possible swarm drone or missile attack on its air defences).

This represents just one component to Iran’s transmutation of any Israeli or American ‘military’ option against Iran into a suicide ‘Red Pill’ for whomsoever might launch it. Quietly, while all the world was focussed on the ‘Big One’ (putative nuclear weapons), over the last four years, Iran has built a conventional ‘swarm’ and ‘smart’ (and virtually undetectable by radar) ‘ant’s hive’ of ‘micro’ weapons circling across the region – from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq to Yemen.

Although it is still to sink-in to European and American thinking (obsessed with the possibly now passé framework of the ‘Big One’ – the JCPOA), Iran quietly has inverted the calculus. It possesses the leverage now. And it has other trade options (through looking East) opening to it. Israel and its Gulf State ‘allies’, by contrast are on the defensive.

So what is next? An Iranian law has come into force setting a 60-day deadline for the U.S. to lift sanctions. If the U.S. doesn’t do so, the law states that Iran must raise uranium enrichment levels to 20% and limit UN inspectors’ access to its nuclear sites. The bottom line for Israel is that this new paradigm demands swift, confidential talks with America.

Some in Israel clearly ‘get it’: In one of the split-screen realities, it is all about nukes (on which U.S. politics is focused), but featuring on another screen is Iran’s Red Pill deterrence against the U.S. putting the military option back on the table.

However, as Professor Michael Brenner has observed, “foreign policy has got short shrift over the last two years” in the U.S. (Iran and the JCPOA being the one exception): “Even on that [latter] issue, there is scant dissent from the twin propositions that Iran is a hostile state that threatens our vital interests and that the Islamic state’s disappearance would remove a serious anathema. So pervasive is this consensus that the foreign affairs community has developed something that approximates herd immunity to critical thinking. Political élites, think tankers, and consultancy gurus all sing in chorus from the same hymnal. Such differences as exist are barely noticeable variations on the fundamentally same threat assessments or on tactics for countering those alleged threats. Strategy is nowhere to be seen”.

Today, we are all too highly susceptible, to “techno-chauvinist” perspectives. Because we are incessantly told technology – whether military, or via algorithmic control – is the irresistible driver of change. Consequently, we now simply cannot imagine a future in which the solution to our problems is not more and more technology (or more and better weapons). Clearly, step-evolutions in weaponry can become a strategic game-changer (it just has); yet the best lesson history can offer is that the future is determined by cultural and social dynamics, as much as it is shaped by technology alone

And just as America experiences its cultural Blue versus Red ‘war’, so the Middle East has its’ own cultural wars, which are being exacerbated and made more intractable by that Washington ‘tin ear’ to critical thought, and which insists to define the world around it as a Manichean struggle between the forces of light and of darkness; of freedom versus despotism; of justice versus oppression and cruelty.

Washington truly stares at its own image in the mirror, and throws this wide shawl across the rest of the world. Its’ own Presidential election is no longer purely political, but it too now is configured more as a ‘crusade’ against cosmic evil – a devil, or demiurge (Trump). The salience of this for the Middle East is that, what America defines as ‘evil and malign’, may be no more other societies’ cultural wars (little different to America’s own), playing out.

Here is the point: technology – whether military or financial – is often not the determinant. The Iranian nation has been placed under huge stresses, yet it has found the inner resources to build a solution (its smart weapon deterrence). It has demonstrated societal and cultural energy. This matters.

Jacques Barzun, the philosopher of history, asks the question: “What makes a nation?” He answers his own question. “A large part of the answer to that question is: common historical memories. When the nation’s history is poorly taught in schools; ignored by the young, and proudly rejected by qualified elders, awareness of tradition consists only in wanting to destroy it”.

The December issue of The Atlantic magazine has an interview with Professor Peter Turchin, who is actually a zoologist. He spent his early career analyzing population dynamics. Why does a particular species of beetle inhabit a certain forest, or why does it disappear from that same forest? He developed some general principles for such things, and wondered if they apply to humans, too.

One recurring pattern, Turchin noticed is something he calls ‘élite overproduction’. This happens when a society’s ruling class grows faster than the number of rulers it needs. (For Turchin, “élite” seems to mean not just political leaders, but all those managing companies, universities, and other large social institutions, as well as those at the top of the economic food chain.) As The Atlantic describes it:

“One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, élites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do …”.

The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The élites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

Turchin’s article was intended – and did – resonate as a description of the U.S. in its current state. Yet it describes much of the Middle East to a ‘T’ – particularly in the context of weak oil prices. The region is an economic disaster. And no, Turchin’s observations apply not just to the region’s autocrats, but in certain important respects – i.e. in social poverty and inequality – they apply to Israel, as much as to anyone else.

Cultural ‘war’ is as much about whether a civilisational ‘life’ is ebbing, or is both vital and fertile.

In the wake of the Iranian Revolution; 9/11, and the ‘Arab Spring’, Robert Worth notes in a long essay in the NYT Magazine, key Gulf leaders such as Mohammad bin Zayed (MbZ), shifted from an initial openness to political Islam, to a recognition that the path of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that of his own path to feudal power, simply “were incompatible”.

MbZ incrementally turned implacably hostile to the MB, to Iran, and was wary, even, of the Wahhabi establishment in Saudi Arabia. By 2013, MbZ was deeply worried about the future. The Arab Spring uprisings had toppled several autocrats, and political Islamists were rising to fill the vacuum. Worth expands:

“It was a recipe for apocalyptic violence; and regional powers were doing little to stop it. Turkey was vehemently cheering its own favoured Islamists on and backing some of them with weapons. So was Qatar, the U.A.E.’s oil-rich neighbour in the Persian Gulf. The Saudis were ambivalent, hampered by an elderly and ailing monarch.”

“He would soon enlist as an ally Mohammed bin Salman, the young Saudi crown prince known as MbS, who in many ways is MbZ’s protégé. Together, they helped the Egyptian military depose that country’s elected Islamist president in 2013. In Libya in 2015, MbZ stepped into the civil war, defying a United Nations embargo and American diplomats. He fought the Shabab militia in Somalia, leveraging his country’s commercial ports to become a power broker in the Horn of Africa. He joined the Saudi war in Yemen to battle the Iran-backed Houthi militia. In 2017, he broke an old tradition by orchestrating an aggressive embargo against his Persian Gulf neighbour Qatar. All of this was aimed at thwarting what he saw as a looming Islamist menace.”

Of course, all this, and the Sandhurst-trained monarch’s model ‘Spartan’ army, made him a star in Washington (although he subsequently fell-out with Obama, over the latter’s support for Morsi – and later, over Obama’s JCPOA, which MbZ opposed).

What then was the Gulf and Sunni riposte to this impending cultural war catastrophe? MbZ actualised an ambitious dream: that of “building a state that would show up the entire Islamist movement by succeeding where it had failed. Instead of an illiberal democracy — like Turkey’s — he would build its opposite, a socially liberal autocracy, much as Lee Kuan Yew did in Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s.” The future was a binary choice: repression or catastrophe. He chose repression: “It is ‘culture war’” he said.

This was a coherent, if tiny, civilisation disintegrating. A Gulf cultural tradition was being eviscerated in order to shield it against the Islamist and Iranian ‘virus’’. Even Worth, who visited the region often, described the inhabitants as ‘rootless individuals’, wandering the caverns beneath the hyper-capitalist, glass towers. Energy fades, civilisation gently dies.

But for the Israeli commentator, Zvi Barel, MbZ’s normalisation with Israel is simply the inevitable continuation – a further weave into the fabric of MbZ’s worldview: “His hatred for the Muslim Brotherhood equals only to his fear of Iran, in which he sees a clear and immediate threat to the Emirates in particular – and to Sunni Islam in general”.

In the Middle East, the Shi’a – widely – are enjoying a renaissance, just at the moment when the Sunni ‘old’ establishment is convulsed with fear at being overwhelmed by the region’s Shi’a. Cultural virility can trump repression, as Iran is showing. And the correct response to a cultural resurgence is almost never a ‘military option’. Iran’s readiness to face-off over the JCPOA makes a western course-correction urgent. Will that happen? In Washington, almost certainly not: We shall just have to shuffle unsteadily and nervously along the cliff edge of Israeli and U.S. demands for ‘forever-containment’ – awaiting events.

The British press seem to be doing a rancorous business of late of fabricating stories about Iran, Hezbollah and China. It’s almost as though these subjects are fair game for the old newsroom saying, once repeated often by hacks at the Daily Express in the 80s “make it sing, make it dance, but above all, make it up”.

But the culprits are not red top tabloids who one naturally assumes have an estranged relationship with facts at the best of times. But the Times and the Telegraph, stalwart champions of journalism and pillars of British society no less.

Somebody has really let the dogs out on Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based Shiite group which acts as a proxy to Iran in the Middle East. Hezbollah plays a very good game of smoke and mirrors itself with the media and in particular doesn’t let its top people speak freely with journalists, which could explain in part why hacks tend to get carried away when writing about the organisation. But that’s hardly a justification for making up stories flat out.

Take for example the Sunday Times whose Irish correspondent and expert on the IRA recently penned a piece which was an agonising triumph of futility if not a record breaking example of what can be done with almost no evidence, a dodgy source with an axe to grind and the effortless efficacy of the conditional tense.

“New IRA forges links with Hezbollah” the Times headline rages.

And yet, within seconds the caveats start stacking up and leave you giggling at the pure piece of fiction which masquerades as journalism. (My bold).

“The New IRA, the largest dissident Irish republican group, is thought to have forged alliances with Hezbollah and radical organisations in the Middle East, who may be providing it with weapons and finances”.

The IRA is thought to have forged alliances with Hezbollah?

Incredible. So, who is doing the thinking then to make this article stand up? A retired undercover cop who had his cover blown who thinks that IRA folk travelled to Lebanon in 2018 and visited the Iranian embassy there with the sole purposes of possessing arms, er from, Hezbollah.

Amazing. Given that Hezbollah doesn’t make arms and certainly doesn’t trade them with like-minded groups around the world, this is a pretty breathtaking conclusion to come to, based merely on a visit.

But wait. Give it just a few days for the army of shoddy Middle East copy/paste journalists and the ludicrous story can gain some momentum. Step forward The National, the UAE’s fake news rag which started off so well in its early days with a former Telegraph editor at the helm, but is now so bad that many of its British journalists there tell me that traffic on the website has fallen down to almost nothing. And who can blame readers when some of the articles are such baloney that no one wants to put their name on them?

Dog didn’t bite man

The Hezbollah piece from the Sunday Times was replicated and done so well that you couldn’t see the seams. It went further with this cracking theme of IRA buying arms off Hezbollah and actually interviewed a number of experts. But this only served the purpose to shoot the wild notion down in flames as the article quoted UK police sources which said that it was old news as moves for the New IRA to make contacts with Hezbollah had been made possibly years earlier and that it was more about the new Irish group’s public image than acquiring weapons.

“It appears that they were forging the links between the New IRA, Iran and Hezbollah,” said an intelligence source. “No weapons from Hezbollah had been received although they were on the verge of concluding some form of agreement, but now the whole thing has been shattered.”

So, a story about a dog which didn’t bite a man. No wonder powerful Royals in Abu Dhabi have given up on The National being a credible newspaper one day and are looking at setting up a new international news outlet in London, according to my own sources. (In the Middle East you don’t pull the plug on an under-performing news organisation, but simply start a new one with the intention that the former dies of natural causes).

But don’t let that stop the Saudi cat litter tray daily “Arab News” taking up the theme – a newspaper which has no shame whatsoever publishing fake news articles from computer-generated identities who don’t exist and who were probably created by the UAE (who wrote their articles), following an investigation which caught them red-handed.

Just like the UAE’s The National’s article (which also had no byline) the Arab News knocks out the same garbage, with such vociferous disregard of facts it makes you wonder why the CIA even bothered to investigate its editor in 2015, after he presented himself and his fortuitous, if not amorous online activities as a prime candidate for a Kurdish honey trap in Oslo.

One story on Hezbollah in a British newspaper generates a huge amount of download the brown load Middle East journalism. Some newspapers in the Middle East, like Annahar in Lebanon, for example, only know this copy/paste model.

But wait. The Daily Telegraph isn’t going to be left standing out in the rain when the gangbang is inside in the warmth. It also claimed in a piece, strongly denied by those who know Hezbollah in Lebanon, that the Shiite group was smuggling ammonium nitrate to Europe, according to a U.S. counter intelligence official. I have no doubt that the official said that but why do people buy newspapers? For journalists to guide us through the maize of inference and disinformation, of course. Not just to parrot a narrative in Washington which fits nicely into how western readers like to read about “terrorist” organisations. The Telegraph, the year before, had a big piece on a shipment of ammonium nitrate confiscated by UK security forces just outside London, kept by terrorists who had “links” to Hezbollah. But what does that mean? If these terrorists looked at an article online from a Lebanese website which was believe to be linked to the group, is that enough for mainstream media outlets to join up the dots? If only British journalists would report correctly terrorist activities carried out by Hezbollah or Iran when the latter really is the culprit – like Lockerbie for example which was blamed on Libya’s leader for well over a decade – people might have confidence once again in mainstream media. Currently all that the Times and the Telegraph appear to be doing in the UK is supporting a ruse by Trump to, at some point, go to war with Iran, supposedly as an act of “defence” with these sexed up stories.

It’s a similar story on China. Recently it was reported that a UK official working in Brussels for a lobby group was passing information about the EU to China. Great story. If only it were true. Fraser Cameron’s tale has all the makings of a good spy story. He himself was an MI6 agent until 1991 but there is very little if any evidence to support allegations against him that he was deliberately leaking sensitive information from the EU to China although he admits that some of his China contacts may well be conduits for Beijing. The idea that Cameron would have any sensitive information from the bowels of the European Commission is also laughable. James Bond in Brussels. You couldn’t make it up.

New journalists, lower standards

Sexing up stories on Hezbollah, Iran and China, unfortunately, is an inevitable derivative of a new generation of journalists and editors in the newsroom, which has lost its sense of purpose and no longer follows the dictum ‘The Story Is King’. These days these subjects are a fodder for journalists to go wild on story-telling to keep themselves in the spotlight among their contemporaries with no fear of any accountability, in what has become an entirely corrupted profession – while keeping the security services happy. A double tap. The problem, which editors at the Times and Telegraph, should be aware of is when hacks peddle such bullshit, it has a an uncanny habit of accumulating and gaining its own momentum. This is again down to really atrocious levels of professionalism and pressure on the same journalists to produce more. We saw this previously with a number of journalists who got pulled into the “Assad uses chemical weapons” line and couldn’t get out of it, when irrefutable evidence piled out showing that the entire basis for this notion lacked any solid evidence whatsoever.

But how do you build on foundation of lies? Only with more lies. Expect stories soon of “Revealed: Hezbollah in the UK” or “Iran agents’ network in south of England” with lots of references to “security sources” but not one single shred of evidence to make them stand up.

While I have no great novel contribution to offer in that growing array of hypotheses (which are slowly turning into noise), I would like to share an insight which addresses a too-often-overlooked aspect of the role of Lebanon in the Great Game. Before proceeding, it is useful to hold in the mind several points of certainty:

1) The official narrative of a chance mishap of Turkish fireworks instigating the detonation of the 2700 tons of ammonium nitrate which had been sitting at the Port of Beirut for six years is entirely unbelievable.

2) This event should not considered in any way separated from the anomalously large pattern of explosions and arson which have spread across the Arab and African worlds in recent weeks.

3) This pattern of chaos must itself be seen in the context of the clash between two systems: The collapsing NATO unipolar alliance on the one side and the New Silk Road-led multipolar alliance on the other.

The Matter of Causality

The Middle East has been labelled the “geopolitical pivot” of the world island by devout adherents to the Hobbesian worldview of Halford Mackinder such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Bernard Lewis. Today it is understood that whomever can either stabilize or destabilize this region can control the levers for the “world island” (Africa, Europe, and Eurasia)… and as Mackinder once said “who controls the world island, controls the world.”

In the case of Lebanon, the role that this region plays as “Pearl on the New Silk Road”, and intersection of all major civilizations of the globe, has shaped global policy considerations in Washington, London and Israel for the past several years. The destructive events underway Lebanon cannot be separated from the breathtaking spread of Belt and Road projects across Iraq, Iran, Syria and other Arab nations.

More than Coincidence

In the weeks surrounding the Lebanon disaster, Iran found herself the target of a vicious sequence of attacks as arson and explosions were unleashed beginning with the June 26 explosion at the Khojir Missile production complex, the June 30 explosion at a medical clinic killing 19, a July 2 explosion at the Natanz nuclear facility which set Iran’s centrifuge production schedule back by months and the July 15 fires at the Bushehr Aluminum plant. Additionally, and the UAE experienced its own anomalous fires which ravaged one of the most important markets in Dubai (luckily empty due to Covid-19) on August 5.

If any of these anomalies were taken individually, “chance” could always be blamed as culprit. However when one takes them all together and recognizes the revolutionary BRI-connected agreements currently being finalized between both China and Russia with Iran does one get a solid idea of the deeper causality underlying these apparently separate situations of chaos.

Iran and the New Silk Road

The fact is that the long awaited $400 billion China-Iran economic and security pact which is in its final stages of negotiation includes not only important oil for infrastructure agreements which will extend advanced rail and new energy grids to Iran. This program also includes an important military/security partnership which will dramatically transform the “rules of the game” in the middle east for generations. Elements of this pact include not only defense and intelligence sharing infrastructure, but also also bolster China’s new digital currency the e-RMB which will circumvent western controls on trade.

Meanwhile Russia’s announced extension of the 20 year security/economic partnership agreement first signed in 2001 by Presidents Rouhani and Putin will certainly be finalized in the coming months. Iran has also made it’s interests in acquiring Russia’s S400 system well known and all geopoliticians understand well that this system which is spreading fast across all of Eurasia from Turkey to South Korea renders America’s F-35s and THAAD missile systems impotent and obsolete.

If the China-Russia-Iran triangle can be firmly established, then not only does America’s sanctions regime policy disintegrate, but a vital platform of Middle Eastern development will be established to better spearhead the growth of transport and advanced development corridors from China to the east (and Africa) along the New Silk Road. Since November 2018 an Iran-Iraq-Syria railway has taken great strides towards implementation as part of middle east reconstruction funded by Iran and ultimately connecting to Syria’s Lattakia Port as a hub to the Mediterranean and a 32km Shalamcheh-Bashra railway is in an advanced phase of development with Iran’s Minister of Roads and Urban Development Abbas Ahmad stating:

“Iran’s railway system is linked to railways of central Asia, China and Russia and if the 32 km Shalamcheh-Basra railway will be constructed, Iraq can transfer goods and passengers to Russia and China and vice versa.”

While the 32 km rail line would be phase one, the 2^nd phase is scheduled to be a 1545 km rail and highway to the Syrian Port.

The Iran-Iraq-Syria regional participation in the broader New Silk Road is incredibly important, especially since Iraq signed a September 2019 Memorandum of Understanding to join the BRI under a new infrastructure-for-oil program. This plan involves China’s reconstruction of the war-torn region under a multiphase program of hard infrastructure (rail, roads, energy and water projects), and soft infrastructure (hospitals, schools and cultural centers).

Similarly, China has made it intention to bring real reconstruction programs to Syria are also well known and President Bashar Al Assad’s long overdue Four Seas Strategy first announced in 2004 (and sabotaged with the Arab Spring) is finally coming back on line. President Assad had won 7 countries over to sign onto it’s construction by 2010 and entailed connecting all four major water systems (Mediterranean, Caspian, Black Sea, and Persian Gulf) together via rail and infrastructure corridors as a driver for win-win cooperation and regional modernization. Assad had said of the project in 2009 “once we link these four seas, we become the unavoidable intersection of the whole world in investment, transport and more.”

A fuller video of this important project can be viewed here:

Lebanon: Pearl of the New Silk Road

Lebanon’s participation in this long-awaited process should be obvious to all, sharing as it does a major border with Syria, hosts 1.5 million Syrian refugees and also a vital port to the Mediterranean making it a keystone of east-west development. Connecting this emerging zone of development to Africa where the Belt and Road has emerged as a leading force of change and hope in recent years, Lebanon finds itself among the most strategic keystones.

Designs for rail connecting Lebanon’s Port of Tripoli through Jordan and thence through Egypt would be create a new positive field of prosperity which could dramatically change the rules of the Middle East and Africa forever.

On June 17, 2020 the Chinese Embassy publicized an offer to extend BRI projects to Lebanon featuring a modern railway connecting coastal cities in the north with Tripoli through Beirut to Naquora in the south. China’s National Machinery IMP/EXP Corporation also offered the construction of three new power plants of 700 MW each, a new national energy grid and port modernization. The Embassy’s press release stated: “The Chinese side is ready to carry out practical cooperation actively with the Lebanese side on the basis of equality and mutual benefit in the framework of joint work to build the Belt and Road… China is committed to cooperation with other nations mainly through the role of its companies, the leading role of the market, and the catalytic role of government and commercial operation. Chinees companies continue to follow with interest the opportunities of cooperation in infrastructure and other fields in Lebanon.”

These offers were applauded by Hassan Nasrallah (leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and partner in the coalition government) who had been an outspoken advocate of Lebanon’s participation in the BRI for years. Nasrallah has also advocated liberating Lebanon from the IMF whose structural adjustments and conditionality-laden investments have resulted in the small country’s debt exploding to over 170% of its GDP with nothing to show for it.

It is noteworthy that the same day China made its offers known publicly, Washington imposed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act to punish all who wish to trade with Syria which itself has not only further crushed Syria’s cries for economic reconstruction, but had taken direct aim at Lebanon which sees 90% of Syrian goods flow through its borders to the Mediterranean.

When Chinese delegations first made their vision for the BRI’s extension to Lebanon known in March 2019 where the Arab Highway from Beirut to Damascus and rail to China was floated, western stooge Saad Al Hariri said no, preferring instead to sign onto a $10 billion IMF plan. Over a year later, not one iota of infrastructure was built. Secretary of State Pompeo played a major role at keeping Lebanon from “going east” as Nasrallah and even President Aoun had desired when he stated in a March 2019 press conference “Lebanon and the Lebanese people face a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future.”

Pompeo’s obsessive drive to eliminate Hezbollah and especially the influence of Nasrallah in Lebanon has less to do with any perceived threat Israel claims to its existence and everything with Hezbollah and Iran’s embrace of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

When Chinese offers were renewed in June 2020, Pompeo’s stooge David Schenker (Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs) gave a June 23 interview stating that Hezbollah “is not an organization that seeks reform, but rather one that lives on corruption”. Schenker warned Lebanon from falling into the “China Trap” and said that Nasrallah’s demands that Lebanon “look east” was “shocking”.

Without going into a lengthy refutation of the “China debt trap” argument (which is really just the effect of western imperialists projecting their own dirty practices onto China’s BRI), it is sufficient to say that it is a 100% myth. A summary overview of Chinese investments in Africa which are numerically similar to American investments demonstrates that the difference is found entirely in QUALITY as China uniquely invests in real construction, manufacturing and even African banking which are verboten by all imperialists who only wish to use Africa as a looting ground for cheap resources and cheaper labor.

Speaking to this issue, and the hope for Lebanon more broadly the BRIX Sweden’s Hussein Askary stated:

“It is becoming obvious that a tiny country like Lebanon, but fully sovereign and independent can break the back of a global empire by opting to follow the path of progress, national sovereignty and international cooperation according to the win-win model offered by China. This does not mean cutting all bridges to the west. It is necessary to keep those that are in the true interest of Lebanon and its people. If the U.S. and Europe wish to change their policies and join China in offering Lebanon power, transport, water and agro-industrial investments, the Lebanese people and leadership would take them with open arms”.

The author gave a recent interview on this topic and can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

The main stream media is in a hurry to ‘shape’ its story of the explosion in advance of the Special Tribunal verdict on the death of Rafic Hariri (now due on 18 August), and which is expected to indict Hizbullah members. Yet there are still many unanswered questions. It will be a further few days until these forensics become available from the site. They will of course be contested, and may resolve very little.

Against this silence, awaiting word from key players, the western and Israeli media headlines are churning out ‘everything you need to know’, and their ‘wrap-ups’ from Beirut. It is however, far from wrapped-up. More questions arise as the days pass. And the region has a collective memory of such geo-political inflection points.

The ‘popular’ 1953 uprising against PM Mossadegh, which transpired to be an MI6/CIA coup, and which – subsequently – was to usher in the game-changing Iranian Revolution; the 2005 assassination of Rafic Hariri, which led to Syria’s exit from Lebanon – and on flimsy computer patterning of calls (of unknown content) on ‘families’ of cell phones – was institutionalised into shaping the culpability of Hizbullah, and concomitantly, the movement’s widespread terrorist designation. (Hizbullah has, from the outset, disputed the western/international narrative on the Hariri assassination).

Yet the truth is, that what happened to Rafic Hariri remains still obscured in the fog of partisan war (as maybe will be the fate of this week’s Beirut devastation). In Syria, the Chemical Weapons story for Douma became another ‘turning point’, amidst the roar of U.S. Tomahawk missiles (as Assad became a Chemical Weapons pariah). Yet, documents from the OPCW in last days show the chemical weapons claim was a fabrication.

Yes, the region has good cause to pause. On the one hand, we have not had the forensics on the Port explosion, and on the other, we have Trump’s assertion – later reiterated by him – that he was told by his military generals that what happened in Beirut was “an attack” (a bomb). The President did not “speculate” that it was an attack. He said plainly that his generals had told him so.

This statement cannot entirely be air-brushed out of the calculus. And nor can the exact mirroring of the strangely unified ‘shape’ and mushroom effect of the Beirut main explosion with a similar ‘unexplained explosion’ some months ago in Syria – be discounted. And finally, there is the question: Were there three explosions?

So, we await what is likely to be a perfectly binary outcome. Either the devastation resulted from culpable negligence by the port security authorities, or was a bold attempt to audaciously ‘explode’ the current regional dynamics; to re-shape narratives and radically to re-cast geopolitics. Both are possible.

What then? The Israeli narrative is that the destruction in Beirut will cause the Lebanese population to rise up against Hizballah, and will demand that its munitions be removed away from population centres. (Israel of course would welcome the visibility into Hizbullah’s arsenals that this would entail). The scheduling of an emergency UNSC meeting for Monday, and calls to place Lebanon under international supervision, suggest that western states will be seeking to use the crisis further to weaken and constrain Hizbullah.

March 14th will seek to capitalise on what has happened to mobilise the Lebanese against Hizballah, but it is unlikely to get the domestic resonance that others may anticipate. The port of Beirut historically has been a Sunni patrimony. It has no single security structure, and these latter are no friend to Hizbullah. The port is also open to inspection by UNIFIL. If the management of the facility were to be characterised, it would be said to be one of decay and rampant venality. It is possible that this – culpable negligence leading to accident – was responsible fully or partially, for what happened.

If so, it would seem that public anger may focus more on the corrupt Za’im (the ‘capos’ of the system that have been ravaging the economic structure for their own enrichment for decades), than necessarily be directed at Hizbullah. Indeed, the present government may have a tough time to survive – even though it was not in office at the time any negligence may have occurred. That responsibility belongs to the Old Guard.

Were it to transpire that Trump was broadly correct, and that what occurred was an attack of some sort, it would not be hard to answer to the question cui bono? Israeli journalists are already preening themselves over the ‘event’s auspicious timing: That “Lebanon [now] is bound to implode”, and that the explosion’s ‘shockwaves’ will discomfort Hizbullah for a long time to come, but more especially in advance of the Special Tribunal report.

One Israeli journalist added that the explosion “at Lebanon’s main port sends a warning message to Iran, too, who only about a month ago said it would deploy ships and oil tankers to Lebanon. There were even talks of a vessel that would host a power station, which would give Beirut electricity … Israel and the United States in particular, fear these ships, if they do make it to Lebanon, would start a regular supply line not only of oil, flour and medicine, but also of weapons, ammunitions and missile parts”.

Much then, hangs on the forensics: Was this a bold ‘false flag’ initiative to upturn the strategic status quo (of the kind on which Israel once prided itself), hiding beneath, and making use of a publicly known vulnerability at the Beirut port – the storage of 2,700 kg of ammonium nitrate – in order to destroy Hizbullah’s strategic place in the region, and to shift politics in an unexpected new direction (favourable to Israel)?

Or, a further example of Lebanese élite lassitude and venality, caring only for themselves and nothing for the well-being of its people?

If the former, and events presage a renewed attempt to crush Hizbullah, the new regional paradigm indeed may be explosive.

Kelley Vlahos comments on the recent U.S. airstrikes against Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia that is supported by the Iranian government:

The Pentagon claimed Sunday that the Iraqi Shia group Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed paramilitary organization that swears loyalty to supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and Iran, launched “more than 30 rockets against the base” during the Saturday attack. Furthermore, according to The New York Times, U.S. officials say this is indicative of the “growing risk of attacks by Iranian proxy forces on American interests and forces in the region,” and one of the “one of the two largest over the last two months.”

The airstrikes over the weekend serve as a reminder that tensions between the U.S. and Iran remain high and the crisis created by the administration’s Iran policy has not ended. U.S. forces in Iraq are at greater risk today than they were before the U.S. reneged on the JCPOA and began waging economic war on Iran. It is also a reminder that the ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq is quite unpopular and will only become more unpopular when it is used to carry the feud with Iran onto Iraqi territory. The U.S. is still far too involved militarily in both Iraq and Syria, and these strikes threaten to pull the U.S. in deeper by feeding a cycle of tit-for-tat attacks in a country where the U.S. has few interests at stake. Our military presence in these countries has become self-justifying: we maintain a military presence and increase it in order to defend it from attacks that wouldn’t happen if our forces withdrew. That puts U.S. military personnel at risk for no good reason. The latest airstrikes can’t be separated from the context of complete policy failure that has led to them.

The airstrikes conducted inside Iraq prompted condemnation from the Iraqi government, which understandably protested against the use of force in their territory as a violation of their sovereignty:

Abdul-Mahdi had made no public comment on Friday’s militia attack but condemned the U.S. retaliatory strike on Sunday. He called it a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and a “dangerous escalation that threatens the security of Iraq and the region.”

U.S. Iran policy has put Iraq’s government in an increasingly difficult position. Iraq has permitted 5,000 U.S. troops to remain in the country, but that does not give them license to carry out military operations against Iraqi militias. Contrary to the mindless rhetoric about “restoring deterrence” that we will keep hearing, the strikes against this militia have likely put these troops in much greater danger. The administration has escalated a fight that it is ill-prepared to continue:

Kataib Hezbollah warned of retaliation following the strikes, and other Iran-backed groups joined it in calling for U.S. troops to be expelled from Iraq.

“We have no choice but confrontation,” Kataib Hezbollah said. “Trump should know that he will pay a heavy price in Iraq and the countries where his criminal forces are present.”

This threat suggests that U.S. forces in both Iraq and Syria could face additional attacks in the near future, and that has the potential to spin out of control into a larger conflict that the U.S. doesn’t need and the region can’t afford. Why should the U.S. be fighting against another Iraqi insurgency? What possible American security interest does that serve?

The U.S. barely gave the Iraqi government advance notice of the airstrikes, and ignored their requests to call off the attack:

In a statement, Abdul-Mahdi said Defense Secretary Mark Esper had called him about a half-hour before the U.S. strikes to tell him of U.S. intentions to hit bases of the militia suspected of being behind Friday’s rocket attack. Abdul-Mahdi said in the statement he asked Esper to call off U.S. retaliation plans.

The statement said Iraqi President Barham Salih also received advance notice from a U.S. diplomat, and also asked unsuccessfully for Americans to call off it off.

The Iraqi government has no interest in being caught in the middle of our government’s Iran obsession.

Defense Priorities issued a statement in response to news of the airstrikes:

The U.S. has no good reason to remain militarily involved in a region of diminishing strategic importance. Keeping large numbers of U.S. forces in the Middle East leaves them vulnerable to attacks from countries and groups who could not otherwise threaten them. There is no justifying rationale for such a risk.

It is hard to see what interest the U.S. has in fighting Iranian-backed militias in Iraq almost seventeen years after the initial invasion. One reason that the U.S. is endlessly at war in that part of the world is that our government keeps looking for excuses to have U.S. forces where they are not needed or wanted.

theamericanconservative.com

Mousa made some unexpected points, beyond warning of major change ahead (“the thing now is that the simple Arab man follows everything” – all the events). And in reference to the protests in Iraq, Moussa says that Iraq is in “a preparatory stage for them to choose their way as Iraqis — emphasizing that “the discord between Sunni and Shia is about to fade away.”

The present regional turbulence, he suggests, is [essentially] a reaction to the US playing the sectarian card – manipulating “the issues of sect and religion, et cetera, was not only a dangerous, but a sinister kind of policy”. He added however, “I don’t say that it will happen tomorrow, but [the discord between Sunnis and the Shi’a fading away], will certainly happen in the foreseeable future, which will reflect on Lebanon too.”

What we are witnessing in Iraq and Lebanon, he adds, “are these things correcting themselves. It will take time, but they will correct themselves. Iraq is a big country in the region, no less than Iran, no less than Turkey. Iraq is a country to reckon with. I don’t know whether this was the reason why it had to be destroyed. Could be. But there are forces in Iraq that are being rebuilt … Iraq will come back. And this phase – what we see today, perhaps this is the — what can I say? A preparatory stage?”

Of course, these comments – coming from a leading Establishment Sunni figure – will appear stunningly counter-intuitive to those living outside the region, where the MSM narrative – from Colombia to Gulf States – is that the current protests are sectarian, and directed predominantly at Hizbullah and Iran. Certainly there is a thread of iconoclasm to this global ‘Age of Anger’, targeting all leaderships, everywhere. In these tempestuous times, of course, the world reads into events what it hopes and expects to see. Moussa calls such sectarian ‘framing’ both dangerous and “sinister”.

But look rather, at the core issue on which practically all Lebanese demonstrators concur: It is that the cast-iron sectarian ‘cage’ (decreed initially by France, and subsequently ‘corrected’ by Saudi Arabia at Taif, to shift economic power into the hands of the Sunnis), is the root cause to the institutionalised, semi-hereditary corruption and mal-governance that has infected Lebanon.

Is this not precisely articulated in the demand for a ‘technocratic government’ – that is to say in the demand for the ousting of all these hereditary sectarian Zaim in a non-sectarian articulation of national interests. Of course, being Lebanon, one tribe will always be keener for one, rather than another, sectarian leader to be cast as villain to the piece. The reality is, however, that technocratic government exactly is a break from Taif – even if the next PM is nominally Sunni (but yet not partisan Sunni)?

And just for clarity’s sake: An end to the compartmentalised sectarian constitution is in Hizbullah’s interest. The Shi’i – the largest minority in Lebanon – were always given the smallest slice of the national cake, under the sectarian divide.

What is driving this sudden focus on ‘the flawed system’ in Lebanon – more plausibly – is simply, hard reality. Most Lebanese understand that they no longer possess a functional economy. Its erstwhile ‘business model’ is bust.

Lebanon used to have real exports – agricultural produce exported to Syria and Iraq, but that avenue was closed by the war in Syria. Lebanon’s (legal) exports today effectively are ‘zilch’, but it imports hugely (thanks to having an artificially high Lebanese pound). All this – i.e. the resulting trade, and government budget deficit – used to be balanced out by the large inward flow of dollars.

Inward remittances from the 8 – 9 million Lebanese living overseas was one key part – and dollar deposits arriving in Lebanon’s once ‘safe-haven’ banking system was the other. But that ‘business model’ effectively is bust. The remittances have been fading for years, and the Banking system has the US Treasury crawling all over it (looking for sanctionable Hizbullah accounts).

Which brings us back to that other key point made by Moussa, namely, that the Iraqi disturbances are, in his view, “a preparatory stage for them to choose their way as Iraqis … and that will reflect on Lebanon too”.

If the ‘model’ – either economically or politically – is systemically bust, then tinkering will not do. A new direction is required.

Look at it this way: Sayyed Nasrallah has noted in recent days that other alternatives for Lebanon to a US alignment are possible, but have not yet consolidated into a definitive alternative. That option, in essence, is to ‘look East’: to Russia and China.

It makes sense: At one level, an arrangement with Moscow might untie a number of ‘knots’: It could lead to a re-opening of trade, through Syria, into Iraq for Lebanon’s agricultural produce; it could lead to a return of Syrian refugees out from Lebanon, back to their homes; China could shoulder the Economic Development plan, at a fraction of its projected $20 billion cost – and, above all it could avoid the ‘poison pill’ of a wholesale privatisation of Lebanese state assets on which the French are insisting. In the longer term, Lebanon could participate in the trade and ‘energy corridor’ plans that Russia and China have in mind for the norther tier of the Middle East and Turkey. At least, this alternative seems to offer a real ‘vision’ for the future. Of course, America is threatening Lebanon with horrible consequences – for even thinking of ‘looking East’.

On the other hand, at a donors’ conference at Paris in April, donors pledged to give Lebanon $11bn in loans and grants – but only if it implements certain ‘reforms’. The conditions include a commitment to direct $7 bn towards privatising government assets and state property – as well as austerity measures such as raising taxes, cutting public sector wages and reducing social services.

Great! But how will this correct Lebanon’s broken ‘business model’? Answer: It would not. Devaluation of the Lebanese pound (almost inevitable, and implying big price rises) and further austerity will not either make Lebanon again a financial safe-haven, nor boost income from remittances. It is the classic misery recipe, and one which leaves Lebanon in the hands of external creditors.

Paris has taken on the role of advancing this austerity agenda by emphasising that only a cabinet acceptable to the creditors will do, to release crucial funds. It seems that France believes that it is sufficient to introduce reforms, impose the rule of law and build the institutions – in order to Gulliverise Hizbullah. This premise of US or Israeli acquiescence to this Gulliverisation plan – seems questionable.

The issue for Aoun must be the potential costs that the US might impose – extending even to the possible exclusion Lebanese banks from the dollar clearing system (i.e. the infamous US Treasury neutron bomb). Washington is intent more on pushing Lebanon to the financial brink, as hostage to its (i.e. Israel’s) demand that Hizbullah be disarmed, and its missiles destroyed. It might misjudge, however, and send Lebanon over the brink into the abyss.

But President Aoun, or any new government, cannot disarm Hizbullah. But Israel’s newly ambiguous strategic situation (post – Abqaiq), will likely hike the pressures on Lebanon to act against Hizbullah, through one means or another. Were Aoun or his government to try to mitigate the US pressures through acquiescence to the ‘reform’ package, would that be the end to it? Where would it all end, for Lebanon?

And it is a similar conundrum in Iraq: The economic situation though, is quite different. Iraq has one-fifth of the population of neighbouring Iran, but five times the daily oil sales. Yet the infrastructure of its cities, following the two wars, is still a picture of ruination and poverty. The wealth of Iraq is stolen, and sits in bank accounts abroad. In Iraq, it is primarily the political model that is bust, and needs to be re-cast.

Is this Moussa’s point – that Iraq presently is in the preparatory stage of choosing a new path ahead? He describes it as a self-correcting process leading out from the fissures of sectarianism. Conventional Washington thinking however, is that Iran seeks only a Shi’i hegemony for Iraq. But that is a misreading: Iran’s policy is much more nuanced. It is not some sectarian hegemony that is its objective, but the more limited aim to have the strategic edge across the region – in an amorphous, ambiguous, and not easily defined way – so that a fully sovereign Iraq becomes able to push-back against Israel and the US – deniably, and well short of all-out war.

This is the point: the end to sectarianism is an Iranian interest, and not sectarian hegemony.

Into its third week and the stand-off between protestors and the elite in Lebanon is still holding strong as thousands of Lebanese are calling for a radical overhaul of a system which collapsed under its own weight of corrupt warlords who have looted the state coffers for decades

But do they know what they want? And how relevant is Hariri’s resignation?

Hariri resigning could mean a new anti-corruption agenda installing itself within the political institutions – whether he comes back as PM with his own cabinet hand-picked, or is dispatched to the darkness of opposition.

Or it could mean just a rearrangement of the window dressing to keep the old guard in place.

The call from protestors to install a new government cabinet of technocrats who are not part of the political elite will have to be heeded; the question is whether it will be done properly or disingenuously. Your technocrats or mine?

But his resignation was fundamentally based on a clash of personalities. And its personalities which play a huge role in Lebanon, which operated under a sectarian power sharing system for decades – one which many Lebanese claim they are tired of, but which they are still very much attached to, despite the protests, the chanting and even the partying.

The problem Lebanon has is that while many want change, few, if any, are able to provide any lucid vision of what that might entail.

Consequently, this places even more emphasis on political figures. It’s unlikely that a new European style of democratic apparatus will permeate the Lebanese government. What is more likely is that the old system will stay in place, but a genuine crackdown on corruption – which is seen to work – will be forced to take root.

The fundamental difference of opinion is thus. Hariri plus two other groups (socialist Druze and ultra Christian conservative ‘Lebanese Forces’) all believe this should be done through installing an entirely new cabinet of technocrats, based on their individual merit. The opposition to that plan, from Aoun and Hezbollah, is that this can be done from within the existing political framework, with less fuss.

Hezbollah is keen not to let the country descend into chaos but also invested heavily in the Aoun-Hariri power sharing model which kicked off on October 31^st 2016. In short, it fears that the Hariri plan would ultimately lead to an entirely new breed of MPs which would erode its support base.

Indeed, the baying crowds need to see an entirely new approach to governance and responsibility of office. For the moment, this has put a spotlight on key figures as their resignation is seen to be a swift and clean antidote to decades of embezzlement and greed. The house speaker, for example, Nabih Berri, has been in the job since 1992 and so entire generations of Lebanese know no other. But even his own supporters are tired of his rapacious embezzlement of state funds and running the south of Lebanon almost like a mafia chief, according to a leaked US cable. Aoun himself, also profited from the ‘wasta’ (kinship)corruption system, and is from a different age which no Lebanese understands or align themselves to. His background is military and he is hated for running the country along the same lines as any clueless dictator, taking his lead from Hezbollah and showing a vociferous disdain for anything whiffing of democratic reform.

And how can you trust a man who lies about his age, to have the best interests of the country at heart, let alone the economy?

Hariri’s original proposals, which were accepted, fall short of the mark on saving the economy also. One has to question how serious he was about banking transparency of the elite or a new anti corruption agency, when, in fact, he agreed at least to close down the previous one – a farcical set up of a minister and a fax machine in downtown Beirut run by an Aoun supporting minister who is considered part of the elite.

What Hariri does see though is the removal from office of key figures which are universally loathed for their personal aggrandizement – both financially and politically – and his resignation was based on this. It is said in Beirut that he visited Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah, on the day of his resignation where he demanded that the president’s son in law, Gebran Bassil, be removed from his post as foreign minister.

Bassil is despised by protestors and is seen as a epitome of greed and graft  – who was actually made a minister by his father in law, President Michel Aoun – through the corrupt political system, based on tribalism and kinship.  But worse, the odious Bassil – recently reported in Lebanon for taking boxes of cash from Iran, disguised as Red Cross aid parcels – is being groomed by Hezbollah to inherit the presidency from Aoun.

He’s actually seen as Assad’s man in Beirut.

For many Lebanese, even those not interested in confessional politics, this is what is at stake. Aoun’s presidency, tainted by journalists and protestors being beaten up and jailed and corruption reaching new levels, has made Lebanon more or less a tin pot African dictatorship, complete with succession of heirs, no power nor water, a garbage crisis, a local currency under threat of being devalued and a new level of lawlessness taking root.

Even Aoun’s own daughters are enraged by Bassil becoming President and want him kicked out, believing their father’s legacy had been stained. And Bassil also became the focal point of particularly vitriolic chants from the protestors.

And so, for Hariri, it was clear that a quick and decisive way to quell the protestors’ anger, would be to do some culling. The removal of Bassil is key, he believes, to moving forward.

Hezbollah has resisted this though as indeed has Aoun as Bassil represented a new, younger face to represent Iran’s interests in a country where there aren’t too many candidates for such a job.

And getting Berri to step down as House Speaker will also be difficult. The sheer pusillanimity of these characters is what is fundamentally wrecking the Lebanese economy as is their idea that it is the poor who should pay for their call-centre governance with a whatsap tax, which is what ignited the protests on October 17.

A caretaker government with Hariri still acting as PM is the most likely of scenarios in the short term, while Hezbollah, Aoun, Berri and Bassil all try and manipulate MPs to vote for the status quo with a new Sunni PM, possibly Raya al-Hassan, the current minister of interior who is from Tripoli and has no stained record of graft. If they however go for a Hariri come back, then this will be seen as a survival ticket for themselves – as it will mean Bassil leaving the cabinet and the protestors’ fevered demands for early parliamentary elections possibly cooling. To re-elect Hariri, which is not at all a far-fetched scenario – will almost be the starter’s pistol on a revolution, one which will be keenly watched both by wobbly Gulf Arab rulers in the region and even as far as Algeria and Morocco. The problem is there is not the time for such previous stand offs which have left Lebanon without a government. There simply isn’t time left to experiment further with the Hezbollah-Aoun ruse.

alsiasi.com

President Donald Trump, who canceled a missile strike on Iran, after the shoot-down of a U.S. Predator drone, to avoid killing Iranians, may not want a U.S. war with Iran. But the same cannot be said of Bibi Netanyahu.

Saturday, Israel launched a night attack on a village south of Damascus to abort what Israel claims was a plot by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force to fly “killer drones” into Israel, an act of war.

Sunday, two Israeli drones crashed outside the media offices of Hezbollah in Beirut. Israel then attacked a base camp of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in north Lebanon.

Monday, Israel admitted to a strike on Iranian-backed militias of the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. And Israel does not deny responsibility for last month’s attacks on munitions dumps and bases of pro-Iran militias in Iraq.

Israel has also confirmed that, during Syria’s civil war, it conducted hundreds of strikes against pro-Iranian militias and ammunition depots to prevent the transfer of missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Understandably, Israel’s weekend actions have brought threats of retaliation. Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has warned of vengeance for the death of his people in the Syria strike.

Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani reportedly tweeted from Tehran, “These insane operations will be the last struggles of the Zionist regime.” Lebanese President Michel Aoun called the alleged Israeli drone attack on Beirut a “declaration of war.”

Last Friday, in the 71st week of the “Great March of Return” protests on Gaza’s border, 50 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli live fire. In 16 months, 200 have died from gunshots, with thousands wounded.

America’s reaction to Israel’s weekend attacks? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Netanyahu to assure him of U.S. support of Israel’s actions. Some Iraqi leaders are now calling for the expulsion of Americans.

Why is Netanyahu now admitting to Israel’s role in the strikes in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq? Why has he begun threatening Iran itself and even the Houthi rebels in Yemen?

Because this longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, having surpassed David Ben-Gurion, is in the battle of his life, with elections just three weeks off. And if Netanyahu falls short — or fails to put together a coalition after winning, as he failed earlier this year — his career would be over, and he could be facing prosecution for corruption.

Netanyahu has a compelling motive for widening the war against Israel’s main enemy, its allies and its proxies and taking credit for military strikes.

But America has a stake in what Israel is doing as well.

We are not simply observers. For if Hezbollah retaliates against Israel or Iranian-backed militias in Syria retaliate against Israel — or against us for enabling Israel — a new war could erupt, and there would be a clamor for deeper American intervention.

Yet, Americans have no desire for a new war, which could cost Trump the presidency, as the war in Iraq cost the Republican Party the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008.

The United States has taken pains to avoid a military clash with Iran for compelling reasons. With only 5,000 troops left in Iraq, U.S. forces are massively outmanned by an estimated 150,000 fighters of the pro-Iran Popular Mobilization Forces, which played a critical role in preventing ISIS from reaching Baghdad during the days of the caliphate.

And, for good reason, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, with its crew of 5,600, which Trump sent to deter Iran, has yet to enter the Strait of Hormuz or the Persian Gulf but remains in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Oman, and, at times, some 600 nautical miles away from Iran.

Why is this mighty warship keeping its distance?

We don’t want a confrontation in the Gulf, and, as ex-Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, says:

“Anytime a carrier moves close to shore, and especially into confined waters, the danger to the ship goes up significantly. … It becomes vulnerable to diesel submarines, shore-launched cruise missiles and swarming attacks by small boats armed with missiles.”

Which is a pretty good description of the coastal defenses and naval forces of Iran.

Netanyahu’s widening of Israel’s war with Iran and its proxies into Lebanon and Iraq — and perhaps beyond — and his acknowledgement of that wider war raise questions for both of us.

Israel today has on and near her borders hostile populations in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq. Tens of millions of Muslims see her as an enemy to be expelled from the region.

While there is a cold peace with Egypt and Jordan, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs are temporary allies as long as the foe is Iran.

Is this pervasive enmity sustainable?

As for America, have we ceded to Netanyahu something no nation should ever cede to another, even an ally: the right to take our country into a war of their choosing but not of ours?

lewrockwell.com