HEZBOLLAH TAKES OVER LEBANON:FRED GEDRICH
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.8686/pub_detail.asp
During the past several decades Lebanese people have endured wars, assassinations, sectarian violence, foreign military occupation, and political turmoil. They are now dealing with another crisis. The Hezbollah Shiite Muslim terrorist group has succeeded in getting its hand-picked candidate, billionaire businessman Najib Mikati, selected as the country’s new prime minister.
This comes in the aftermath of a Hezbollah-forced collapse of Lebanon’s government, in a thinly veiled attempt to scuttle a UN backed investigation into the 2005 assassination of the country’s prime minister, Rafik Hariri. It is widely believed that sealed indictments in that case will implicate some Hezbollah members in his murder, and some of their patrons in Iran and Syria.
Hezbollah’s government takeover will likely further destabilize the country along sectarian lines, cause another exodus of Christians from the country, cripple the Obama administration’s Middle East peace push, and place a dark stain on President Obama’s Muslim Outreach Program.
Controlling Lebanon is strategically important to Hezbollah and its Iranian and Syrian patrons. This prized Arab state borders Israel, Syria and the Mediterranean Sea.
Hezbollah formed in 1982 during Lebanon’s brutal 15-year civil war, drawing inspiration from Iran’s supreme Shiite leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and support (weapons, training and money), from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Quds Force. It subsequently grew into a potent political and military power that reaches outside of Lebanon. Its activities, and those of its chief sponsor Iran and the IRGC, have earned them an infamous place on various U.S. State Department and Treasury terror listings.
Hezbollah’s activities have also put them in violation of international law. During its 2006 war with Israel the terror group violated Geneva conventions and protocols with impunity for, among other things, disguising themselves as civilians, embedding in civilian populations, and using civilians as shields. It also stored weapons in, and fired weapons from, mosques, schools, hospitals and civilian residences, and attacked Israeli non-combatants innocently going about daily affairs. It has also bombed American embassies in violation of a millennium of diplomatic protocols and kidnapped and killed American citizens and captives. Hezbollah has also refused to disarm its militia as required by several UN Security Council resolutions. It’s quite ironic that Lebanon currently holds a prestigious UN Security Council seat.
According to Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, the group intends to transform the country into a religious Islamic state, similar to Iran’s. It also seeks to destroy Israel for what it believes is the illegal occupation of Muslim land in Palestine. The group also considers the United States an enemy primarily because it is the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s existence.
Hezbollah draws much of its manpower from dissatisfied Shiite Muslims and Palestinians. Lebanon currently has 4.1 million citizens, with about 60 percent Muslim and nearly 40 percent Christian, divided into 17 recognized religious sects. The Shiite Muslim religious sect located mostly in Southern Lebanon is the largest, comprising about 1.4 million (34 percent) of the overall population. Lebanon also has 400,000 non-citizen Sunni Muslim Palestinians scattered about the country in 12 UN refugee camps. The Shiite and Palestinian locations serve as terrorist breeding grounds and are places where most attacks against Israel and American interests are planned and launched.
Iran’s current religious dictator, Ayatollah Khamenei, is delighted with recent Lebanon developments. Iran’s theocratic leaders have long sought to establish a power base of like-minded regimes stretching across the upper tier (Lebanon, Syria and Iraq) of the predominantly Sunni Muslim Arab World. Syria and now Lebanon are in the alliance, and Iraq may soon follow. The Jaish al-Mahdi Army’s Moqtada al-Sadr recently returned to Iraq from Iran after a four-year exile, and it appears he is being groomed by the Iranians to follow Nasrallah’s political and military model in Lebanon. This power base will enable Iran to better challenge other Arab states for area riches, especially given the recent turmoil in several important Arab countries, including Egypt.
President Obama needs to recalibrate his policies to effectively deal with Hezbollah’s ascendency and regional threats posed by its chief sponsor, Iran. Accordingly, he should abandon his current Iranian ‘engagement’ and ‘economic sanctions’ regimen strategies which clearly haven’t succeeded in preventing the current Iranian rulers from interfering in the affairs of states like Lebanon, exporting terrorism to neighboring states, and pursuing their nuclear weapons development program.
A good start would be for President Obama to adopt policies that will encourage and support all Iranian resistance groups and ‘Green Revolution’ participants seeking to peaceably change Iran’s Islamic Republic into a secular, democratic, non-terrorist, and non-nuclear weapons state. Such a change would quickly destroy the IRGC and Quds Force and starve terror groups and proxies like Hezbollah of the vital support they need to survive. He should also consider authorizing overt and covert support for Lebanese freedom-fighters who do not want to see their beloved country turned into an Islamic state.
The time to act is now. Freedom-loving people in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East are desperately looking to the U.S. for leadership and help. Most importantly, U.S. national security depends on it.
Family Security Matters Contributor Fred Gedrich is a foreign policy and national security analyst and served in the U.S. Departments of State and Defense. He visited Lebanon on official assignment shortly after the end of the country’s civil war.
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