The Ontological Decompensation of Hezbollah

Every twenty years,

a gambler arrives,

who stakes the country,

its people, its inheritance,

sunrises and sunsets,

boys and girls,

waves and sea

on a poker table.

Nizar Qabbani

Thus, Naïm Qassem seeks to sacrifice Lebanon for Iran.

After sending his followers to die for Assad’s Syria, after allowing the inhabitants of his revolutionary home to be atomized for Hamas, he now seeks to conclude in style, through a collective suicide, at a moment when the Iranian mother-house itself is under threat, facing the supposedly invincible armada deployed by Donald Trump in the waters of the Middle East.

The latest statements by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General might almost pass for the bravado of a hardened strongman—and perhaps they still do for part of his flock, weaned on the myth of the Aryan Übermensch manufactured by Iranian clerics. Yet this so-called “bravery”—once acknowledged in the late 1990s by the vast majority of Lebanese when it came to defending Lebanese territory against Israeli occupation—has since degenerated into strategic suicide, even if the word “strategic” itself now sounds grotesque in this context.

Planes dive over our heads.

War

is not won with dissertations,

nor with metaphors,

nor with adjectives.

How many times have we paid,

at a very high price,

the tax of empty talk.

The problem with Naïm Qassem’s rhetoric is that it is simply stupid. Where his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, was particularly skilled—wrapping his speeches in a political virtù acquired over decades, to the point of becoming a true mass hypnotist—the doctrinal guardian who was catapulted by default to replace him after the serial liquidations carried out by Tel Aviv among militia leaders possesses the charisma of a depressed crocodile. Nasrallah sought to justify his blind loyalty to Tehran, and its natural consequence—the conquest of power in Lebanon—through a blend of supposedly rational argumentation, political bluster, and formulas that oscillated between the ideological and the populist. He did so with the mastery of a historic leader. Qassem, for his part, is trying to sweep up the broken pieces—and he does so with the clumsy, caricatural ineptitude of those who fall victim to the Peter Principle.

In other words, Nasrallah was a virtuoso of verbal sleight of hand. Even when he admitted, in moments of calculated lucidity, to being a soldier in the army of the velayat-e faqih, he did so from a position of strength, inscribing himself within an Iranian imperial logic sweeping across the region without any real counterweight—often even with Western complicity in practice. With Qassem, and his latest speech provides the clearest proof, discourse either descends into the delirium of a sect that has nothing left to lose, or into the crude display of muscle of a steroid-pumped wrestler destined for a certain knockout. This is no longer honest lucidity. It is homicidal irresponsibility. Homicidal recklessness.

By asserting that any threat against Iran, and even more so against the Supreme Leader, constitutes a direct threat requiring Hezbollah’s intervention, the party’s Secretary-General is no longer merely raising his voice in a rhetorical escalation that has become familiar. He is openly designating the true locus of the sovereignty to which he submits. And that locus is not Lebanon. True, this comes as no surprise. The party-militia’s allegiance to the Persian revolutionary Internationale is an open secret. The problem lies in the persistence of blindness, to the point of forgetting that Hezbollah’s most recent adventure, in the service of Hamas, turned into a tragedy—not only for the party itself, but for the inhabitants of southern Lebanon and Beirut, for the Shiite community as a whole, and above all for Lebanon.

Every twenty years,

a complicated man arrives,

his pockets full

of detonators.

Naïm Qassem once again formalizes the explicit subordination of Lebanon’s destiny to an external, confessional, transnational architecture of power, transforming the country yet again into a mere surface of exposure, a dispensable space, a sacrificial satrapy for a confrontation that transcends it. What this speech ultimately consecrates is the pure and simple abolition of collective decision-making. War and peace, life and death, future and ruin no longer stem from a national debate, shared institutions, or a political contract—however fragile it may be. They become the mechanical extension of an axis-based logic, of an ideological loyalty that recognizes no legitimacy other than that of the center it serves. In this vision, Lebanon is neither a state, nor a society, nor even a people in the full sense of the word. It is merely a relay. A pawn. Nothing more than a vulgar front among others, with little tin soldiers and an abundance of cannon fodder—one of the last still in service to the Iranian despot, along with Iraq.

Every twenty years,

a ruler arrives by decree,

who leads the sun

to the execution post.

The image Hezbollah has assigned to Lebanon is inevitably that of a corridor-state, a frontline-state, a permanently martyred state, doomed to pay the price for the confrontations of others. A logic that has already destroyed the state, hollowed out institutions, fractured society, and turned sovereignty into an empty slogan. The paradox is cruel, almost obscene: Hezbollah today invokes sovereignty at the very moment it proclaims its negation; it presents itself as a shield while acting as a vector of maximal exposure; it accuses the state of weakness after having methodically stripped it of its fundamental attributes. This duplicity is not merely tactical. It is ontological. It stems from a profound inability to accept historical time, with its limits, its defeats, and its responsibilities. It is another name for delirium.

Lebanon is not a myth to be nurtured nor a sacrificial stage to be exploited. It is a real, inhabited, fragile, plural country that can no longer survive a permanent economy of proxy war. Naïm Qassem’s discourse does not merely threaten external adversaries. It threatens the very idea that Lebanon might still exist as an autonomous political space—that is, as a place where collective decision prevails over imposed faith, and where the lives of citizens are not subordinated to an armed eschatology.

Every twenty years,

a man comes

to slit unity in its bed

and abort dreams.

Once again, Hezbollah denies the country’s constitutive plurality. It erases all those who refuse to accept that a para-state power—which has lost all legitimacy even within its own camp, to the point of being gradually abandoned by its closest allies; which has lost its strategic depth with the fall of Assad; which is confronted with a Lebanese will to restore sovereignty and the monopoly of legitimate violence across the national territory; and which, above all, is so exhausted by successive catastrophes that it can no longer bear the physical, material, and moral cost of yet another disaster—should continue to preside over the country’s destiny. Moreover, this is a militia power whose misdeeds, ranging from criminal violence to obstruction of justice and all manner of mafia activity, are innumerable.

But worse still, Hezbollah now locks the Shiite community itself into a violent identity assignment, reducing it to a supposedly homogeneous bloc, ready to sacrifice itself unconditionally for a cause that, in its real diversity, does not command consensus. Lebanon’s Shiites have suffered persecution and political, social, and economic marginalization since the Ottoman era. Yes, it took Moussa Sadr, and then the Iranian Islamic Revolution, to change that context. Yes, Hezbollah, after Sadr’s disappearance, restored a sense of pride and dignity to the Shiite community. But it also enslaved it to its law, founded on brute force. It Basij-ized the community, “purified” it by liquidating intellectual elites who did not share its doctrine or its geopolitical and military alignment with Iran, and extended its political control, through the terror of arms, over the entire community—mortgaging it in the process. In a perverse and insidious way, it galvanized the community in the name of a hollow and illusory glory, assigning it a function of territorial resistance while simultaneously developing a social, political, and mafioso infrastructure network tied to Iran. Under the guise of resistance, it de-Lebanonized the Shiites in the service of Tehran.

Every twenty years,

a narcissist in love with himself arrives,

claiming to be the Messiah, the Savior,

the One, the Eternal,

the Wise, the Omniscient, the Holy,

the Imam.

What Naïm Qassem’s discourse ultimately reveals is the ideological heart of the system: the sacralization of command, which renders any contestation illegitimate, any dissent suspect, and any criticism assimilable to treason. In this millenarian and totalitarian mental universe, the leader is not a political actor accountable to reality, but a figure invested with a transcendent mission. Such a construction is by nature incompatible with the state, which presupposes finitude, responsibility, the possibility of failure, and accountability.

This is where Hezbollah’s current fragility lies, desperately masked by martial rhetoric. Behind the posture of firmness looms a profound anxiety: that of loss. The party has entered a phase of vulnerability it has never experienced to this degree. Totemic figures have been struck down. The regional axis is cracking. The imperial space that once gave coherence and depth to its power is contracting. And with it, Hezbollah’s very identity wavers. What is Hezbollah without its fallacious preaching of territorial resistance? What remains without its weapons? And above all, what future would it have if its directorate in Tehran, the IRGC (Pasdaran), and its ultimate referent, the velayat-e faqih, were to collapse? It is its very existence—indeed its essence—that is at stake.

And faced with this erosion, the reflex is old, almost mechanical. Hezbollah does not know how to lose. It cannot conceive of itself in defeat, because accepting defeat would mean renouncing its status of exception, its symbolic monopoly, its founding narrative. So it shifts the stage of conflict. It expands the theater of operations. It turns local fragility into a cosmic issue. It attempts to reconstruct through words a centrality that reality is stripping away. It implodes into spectacular sacrifice, like a sect refusing to confront bitter reality after a messianic delirium of superiority and invincibility. After all, are not angels, prophets, and Hussein himself fighting at its side? To accept defeat would be to validate the failure of the doctrine. And for a theocratic party, the collapse of doctrine amounts to decompensation, derealization, a total dissociation from reality.

Naïm Qassem’s objective, and that of his circle, is not merely to defend Tehran against the “Great Imperialist Satan”, its Israeli satellite, and its flotilla. It is to survive the absurd, the void—even if that must paradoxically be achieved through death.

Lebanon, in this framework, no longer counts. It does not belong to the calculations or the mental space of a sect whose gurus and disciples have sunk into unreason.

Naïm Qassem is, in fact, nothing more than another Jim Jones or David Koresh.

Cornered, he will not hesitate to throw himself into the abyss, taking the Shiite community and the entirety of Lebanon hostage if necessary.

It is not so much for his masters in Tehran that he would do this, but to prove that he was right.

Every twenty years, writes Nizar Qabbani.

Far less, tragically.

But Lebanon’s time can no longer be that of sacrificial cycles. It is now the time of an unavoidable choice: to become a country again, with all that entails—limits, responsibilities, renunciations, neutrality vis-à-vis regional axes—or to disappear definitively as a political subject, dissolved in the convulsions of a disintegrating empire.

And this time, no decree, no slogan, no empty talk will be able to delay the reckoning.

This time, someone must stand in the way of Qassem and his kind, whoever they may be—not through their logic of violence and madness, but through the rule of law and through firm, clear-eyed dialogue, if some within Hezbollah can still hear reason and wish to avert collective catastrophe.

And that someone cannot be the United States, and even less Israel. The cruel irony is that a new confrontation with the Hebrew state would only strengthen its influence, or even entrench its occupation in Lebanon. Better, then, not to provoke the beast—especially since it lies in wait, eager to be handed the scythe.

In principle, it is the role of the Lebanese state to actively deter the pro-Iranian party. And if there still exists a Lebanese popular and political will concerned with acting in Lebanon’s own interest, it is time for it to express itself without reserve, sovereignly, through all democratic means, loudly and clearly against war—so as to prove that it still wants to live, far from the eternal return of madness-violence and all its demons.