Lebanon Once Again Ignites While on America’s Back-Burner

Photo: Associated Press

Beirut is once again in flames as Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias and Lebanese government forces clash in the worst outbreak of violence there since the end of the fifteen year civil war in 1990. The underlying political stalemate between the government and Hezbollah-led opposition parties, which has left the country without a president for nearly a year-and-a-half, is still unresolved. And, once again, America stands idly by and watches.

Lebanon: Overlooked Centerfold of Neoconservative Wet Dreams

At the end of May, I posed this question: why would the neoconservative narcissists choose Iraq as domino-one in their design to remake the Islamic world, when Afghanistan was so much easier, available, appropriate, and economical a target?

A year before I posed the question about Afghanistan, in June of 2005, I commented on the astonishing non-response of the Bush Administration to the political assassinations that were decimating Lebanon’s fledgling democratic government. Syrian operatives had murdered both Prime Minister Rafique Hariri and influential anti-Syrian politician George Hawi, as well as a prominent anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir. Despite the administrations macho rhetoric toward Syria in those few heady days of the illusory “mission accomplished”, it seemed that they were missing an opportunity to control a situation that had spun well out of control. One of my points at the time was that Condoleza Rice — who must surely be the worst Secretary of State in the history of the institution — not only fucked up by pursuing policies that were wrong-headed; she also fucked up by failing to pursue the few administration policies that made good sense.

Allow me to tie these two threads together and suggest that Lebanon offered another perfect fixation for neoconservative wet dreams of secular – pluralistic, even! – democratization of the Islamic world.