Hezbollah Consolidates Its Stranglehold Over Lebanon

Saad Hariri resigned his post as Lebanon’s prime minister, citing an assassination plot brewing against him, presumably from his former government coalition partner Hezbollah. “Wherever Iran settles,” he said in a televised speech, “it sows discord, devastation and destruction, proven by its interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries.” Iran’s hands in the Middle East, he then said, “will be cut off.” He delivered that speech and resignation not from Beirut but from Saudi Arabia.

In a sinister statement worthy of Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad himself, Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun, a long-time tool of Damascus, says he won’t accept Hariri’s resignation unless he returns to Beirut and hands it over in person.

Nobody really knows what’s going on there right now. Lebanon is one of the hardest countries in the world to make sense of sometimes, even for experts, because there are easily ten different versions of every event, nearly everyone lies, and your average Lebanese media organ is a tribal sectarian fusion of Breitbart, Alex Jones and Pravda. For instance, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah says the Saudis forced Hariri to step down, and the hysterical pro-Hezbollah news rag al-Akhbar goes even further and says Hariri is under house arrest in Riyadh, a story proven instantly false by the fact that Hariri is now in Abu Dhabi.

The Lebanese Army says it isn’t aware of any assassination plots inside the country. Hardly a credible statement. Hezbollah effectively controls Lebanon’s army now, and in 2011, an independent United Nations tribunal fingered Hezbollah for the assassination of Hariri’s father on February 14, 2005, with a gigantic bomb in the city center. Not even a damn fool would expect the army to say, yes, our masters are planning to retire yet another prime minister.


http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/hezbollah-consolidates-its-stranglehold-over-lebanon