Lebanon Falls, the World Yawns
If weather is the subject everyone talks about but nobody does anything about, then Iran is very much like the weather.
This past week, Iran put a choke hold on Lebanon in order to preserve its position on Israel’s northern frontier. This act of war sounds a death knell for Lebanese democracy, strengthens Iran’s grip on the Middle East, and dramatically increases the threat to Israel and beyond.
Amazingly, the United States and the international community will do nothing.
The Lebanese feel abandoned. The Tehran-headquartered axis of Islamist terror feels vindicated and empowered.
The Lebanese government had just taken steps to restrict communication and travel between Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Iran—dismissing the security chief at a major airport facilitating Iranian arms shipments to Hezbollah, and launching an investigation into an Iran-built telecommunications network maintained by Hezbollah. Iran treated these moves as a declaration of war.
Within hours, Hezbollah gunmen in a massive show of strength, rapidly overwhelmed the streets of West Beirut. They blockaded the airport, shut down pro-government news outlets, and besieged the headquarters of Lebanese leaders Fouad Siniora and Saad Hariri—all within one day.
Then, they turned their new gains back over to the Lebanese Army. The message: Iran will not tolerate attacks on Hezbollah’s power and military infrastructure in Lebanon—yet it is not interested in taking over formal governance of the nation. All it needs is a weapon to unleash against Israel at some point yet future. Hezbollah already proved its value to that end in the summer war of 2006.
“Hezbollah’s victory in taking over western and central Beirut … has had the effect of adding another link to the pro-Iranian chain encircling Israel,” reporteddebkafile. “In many ways it is a more damaging setback for Israel’s national security than the Palestinian Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip” (May 15). In fact, one Hamas activitist told the Washington Times that it was the second stage of a plan to tighten the noose around Israel—a plan that started with the Gaza coup last year and will spread to Jordan and Egypt.
No doubt about it: Iran is the problem. Everyone knows it. Everyone is talking about it. But here is yet another instance in a string of them where no one will do anything about Iran.
Washington’s response to the crisis has been anemic. It sprung to action by—watch out, Iran!—trying to drum up international support for the Lebanese government. Condoleezza Rice busied herself with visits to the United Nations secretary general and the foreign ministers of France and Saudi Arabia. Washington called on the Arab League to “show its displeasure with Hezbollah and its sponsors,” the Washington Postreported.
Plainly, phone calls and meetings will change precisely nothing. For the past 19 months, the United Nations has stationed 15,000 troops in Lebanon, ostensibly to contain Hezbollah, and that has changed nothing. What possible good will expressions of “displeasure” do?
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called on “those who have influence over Syria and Iran to encourage those countries to use their influence with Hezbollah.” It is hard to imagine a more ignorant statement. Syria and Iran are already using their influence with Hezbollah—to control Lebanon.
As Barry Rubin wrote, “Iran and Syria back their friends with weapons and help; the West responds with words backed by nothing. Who can blame Hezbollah and Damascus and Tehran for laughing in contempt?”
The fact that the U.S. is abandoning Lebanon to Iran is a truly remarkable sign of just how powerless it has become.
Lebanon is clearly a project the U.S. is heavily invested in. Washington trumpeted the Cedar Revolution of 2005 as being a symbol of the Middle East’s future, of freedom and democracy sweeping the region toward peace and security. It has funneled $1.3 billion into the Siniora government over the past two years.
Those big ideas have been trampled—but you can’t exactly say all the money went to waste: $400 million of it went toward strengthening the Lebanese Army, and Hezbollah should be able to put those resources to good use after having co-opted that force. “The Lebanese Army is by now more an operational arm of Hezbollah than an armed force that serves the government,” debkafile reports.
The reason America’s efforts in Lebanon have failed could not be more clear. It is because Iran, via Hezbollah, has the Lebanese government under siege. Yet still, the U.S. simply will not go after Iran.
Do you know why? If you have been reading the Trumpet for any length of time, you know that biblical prophecy reveals precisely the reason. It’s because God has broken America’s will.
Read the prophecy in Leviticus 26. God says that if we do not obey His laws, He will curse us. One of the curses God warns us about is this: “I will break the pride of your power … And your strength shall be spent in vain ….” (verses 19-20). Yes, America has power—yes, it has strength. But the pride in that power is broken, and the strength is being spent in vain.
President Bush has pursued three priorities in the Middle East: Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and Lebanon. Despite massive expenditures, he finds himself unable to lock down even one of these situations.
Here is the plain truth: Iran is the problem behind all three.
The U.S. will never resolve Iraq without confronting Iran. The U.S. and Israel will never put down the Palestinian terrorist groups without confronting Iran. Lebanon will never be secured unless Iran is put down. All efforts to put these issues to rest—while ignoring the Iran connection—are exercises in futility.
The fact that the U.S. simply will not confront Iran is the single greatest proof that God has broken the pride of our power.
The U.S. is truly spending its strength in vain in Lebanon, in Israel and in Iraq. The single greatest reason is Iran. The Islamic Republic is bloodying us in all three theaters. And still, Washington acts as though France or the Arab League can solve the problem.
The Iraq War alone is costing the United States $341 million per day. It has killed well over 3,000 of our soldiers and cost half a trillion dollars. And the truly remarkable thing about it is where it is all leading: In the end, the U.S. is going to pull out, and Iran is going to take over.
The U.S. went into Iraq not only to put down Saddam Hussein, but also to use that area as a staging ground for dealing with the second member of the “axis of evil”—Iran. But in the end, all the strength we’re spending there is achieving exactly the opposite of what we wanted. We are preparing to hand control of Iraq—and subsequently the Middle East—to Iran.
Many people are criticizing the Bush administration harshly for its decisions. They fail to see the bigger picture. This problem is not merely the result of a sequence of bad decisions by one administration: It is the result of curses from God that have descended on the United States for our disobedience to His laws.
It wasn’t our president who broke the pride of our power—it was God. He is trying to teach our nation the problems that result from forgetting Him.
Gerald Flurry has been warning for 15 years that Iran would take over Iraq en route to its becoming the “king of the south.” Its role in biblical prophecy is clear, and we are watching events leading to its fulfillment in a truly remarkable way.
