A Lebanese Image Encapsulating Iranian Impudence

Against a backdrop of more than a million displaced persons and the rubble of over fifty-five Lebanese villages and towns in the South, the "Islamic Republic" held a commemoration in Beirut — Lebanon's capital — to mark the fortieth day of mourning for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, assassinated by America and Israel on 28 February last.

The spectacle of this commemoration betrays an impudence with few equivalents, not least because the Iranian ambassador Mohammad Reza Shibani — declared persona non grata by the Lebanese government — occupied the front row, though he has never once presented his credentials. His continued presence in Beirut is nothing but further proof of the contempt with which Iran regards Lebanon and the Lebanese, a contempt that is, at its root, of Persian character, grounded in a sense of superiority towards everything Arab in the region.

The image of those seated in the front row — among them the Minister of Health, one of Hezbollah's representatives in the government — encapsulates, on its own, the Iranian impudence in Lebanon. It illustrates in concrete terms the wager that the "Islamic Republic" continues to place: holding Lebanon in its grip and turning it into one of its bargaining cards.

This wager on the Lebanese card dates back to that ill-omened day in the summer of 1982 when the vanguards of the Revolutionary Guards entered the city of Baalbek. It was no coincidence that those Guards — who had crossed Syrian territory on the pretext of confronting Israel — chose to install themselves in a Lebanese army barracks named the Sheikh Abdullah barracks. Striking a blow at the Lebanese army was one of the foremost objectives of the "Islamic Republic," as embodied by its Revolutionary Guards.

The image of the Khamenei fortieth-day commemoration thus appears more than meaningful. It reveals, first of all, the refusal of the "Islamic Republic" to accept that Lebanon has now dissociated its path from Iran's own. Tehran cannot bring itself to acknowledge that Lebanon is striving to exist outside direct Iranian control. This blindness stems from an inability to come to terms with the regional and international realities that eventually brought the war inside Iran itself, after long years of unparalleled success in deploying its instruments — most notably the Lebanese Hezbollah — to extort the world and the Arabs alike.

What began with the Guards' entry into Baalbek and their occupation of a Lebanese army barracks, in open defiance of all international laws and conventions, continued with an Iranian campaign targeting the American University of Beirut. In the summer of 1982, the Iranians abducted university president David Dodge from Beirut through their Lebanese proxies and transferred him to Tehran. The Iranian authorities subsequently released Dodge following efforts made by Rifaat al-Assad, who was then seeking to ingratiate himself with the Americans and to present himself, in due course, as a potential successor to his brother Hafez.

Iran succeeded in driving the United States out of Lebanon. It prevailed, effectively, over American presence in the country — particularly following the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and of the Marines' headquarters near Beirut airport in October of the same year, an attack that inflicted on the American military its heaviest losses since the Vietnam War. Two hundred and forty-five American servicemen were killed.

The Iranian campaign against the American presence in Lebanon never ceased. There is no need to revisit the kidnappings of Americans in Beirut, nor the assassination of Malcolm Kerr, the American University's president, in 1984, all the way through to the day Rafic Hariri was assassinated on 14 February 2005, an event that opened the path to the imposition of total Iranian guardianship over the country in the wake of the Syrian military and security withdrawal.

There is a fundamental Iranian incapacity to accept that Lebanon has changed and that the region has changed with it. The fortieth-day commemoration for the "Supreme Leader" confirms this incapacity, now transformed into outright impudence. What remains of the Iranian leadership cannot conceive of the "Islamic Republic" without Lebanon in the position of a vassal state. There is a refusal of a reality that is nonetheless pressing: Lebanon is capable of recovering its status as an independent and sovereign state while simultaneously freeing itself from the Iranian stranglehold that drove it to the present catastrophe — a catastrophe that struck the Shia community first and foremost, before any other, and devastated the land of the South, its villages, its towns and its people.

The "Islamic Republic" will not be able to flee from international and regional reality indefinitely. It is plain that the impudence to which it has resorted in Lebanon is but one facet of this Iranian flight, with its multiple dimensions — among them the response to the United States and Israel through acts of aggression against the Arab Gulf states.

No country in the world can continue its flight from reality without end. The reality is that the "Islamic Republic" has lost every war it waged on the margins of the Gaza war — whether in Lebanon, in Syria, or in Gaza itself, which Israel has obliterated from existence just as it simultaneously obliterated the leadership of Hezbollah. The loss of Syria remains Iran's most significant loss, as Syria was the bridge to Lebanon. The "Shia Crescent" that once extended from Tehran to Beirut and stretched toward southern Lebanon no longer exists.

In brief: impudence cannot conceal impotence. Only the admission can cover that impotence — the admission that Lebanon is no longer an Iranian protectorate, as Syria was in the days of Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad, when the "Shia Crescent" was still alive and thriving.