Who Won? Who Lost? We Don't Know Anymore!

In the aftermath of the disastrous June 1967 war—the so-called Six-Day War—the Arab countries were forced to confront a bitter reality: Egypt had lost the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula; the Hashemite Kingdom had been stripped of Jerusalem and the West Bank; while Syria had ignominiously withdrawn from the Golan Heights.

Yet the Baath regime in Damascus, refusing to assume responsibility for a historic defeat, suggested that Israel had not truly won as long as it had failed to overthrow the Syrian regime. As long as the regime remained standing, Tel Aviv could not claim victory.

This attitude of denial would set a precedent whenever the Arabs suffered a Waterloo. And so, true to form, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General, raising his voice despite the retreat, proclaimed on the eve of Ashura commemorations the victory of the Party of God “against the conspiracy woven by the alliance of the United States and Israel, under the cover provided by the Lebanese state.”

It takes no small amount of audacity to claim the laurels of victory at the very moment when the Israeli army is steadily encroaching upon southern Lebanon and emptying it of its inhabitants.

Saving Face

And what about Donald Trump? Why does he appear so triumphant?

According to Nicolas Baverez in Le Figaro, the protocol signed at Versailles by the American president shares many characteristics with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War and established “a false peace and merely a suspension of hostilities.”

From this premise, the columnist drew a sweeping conclusion and delivered the following verdict: “The Versailles Protocol thus records the strategic debacle that concludes the Iran war for the United States, Israel, the Gulf monarchies, Europe, and America’s Asian allies.”

That said, one should be wary of the reflexive anti-Americanism found in certain segments of the French press and instead pay close attention to Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, a newspaper that is hardly indulgent toward the current U.S. administration.

Friedman observes that the leaders of Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the United States have one thing in common: none of them would welcome the establishment of a commission of inquiry to examine their conduct and performance during the latest Middle Eastern conflict.

So who won and who lost?

But is it not still too early to ask—or answer—that question?

The Axis of Evil—or the Axis of Good, depending on one’s perspective—may not have won a battle, but neither has it necessarily lost the war. Conflicts are not judged by their opening rounds but by their final outcome. The simmering confrontation will continue in one form or another, under one pretext or another, with Lebanon serving as a testing ground and an arena for settling scores.

Dissociating Lebanon from Iran at All Costs

Our Lebanon, more than ever the punching bag of the belligerents, has been ravaged since early March by a new war between Israel and Hezbollah. The country has suffered damages estimated at more than one billion dollars, with 11,000 buildings completely destroyed in the South. This is without mentioning the thousands killed, wounded, and displaced.

Yet what is even more serious—and what Naim Qassem openly advocates—is maintaining a link between the ceasefire established in Lebanon and the one reached between Iran and the United States.

Making the two fronts inseparable would mean sacrificing the Lebanese cause on the altar of Iranian interests during the negotiations taking place in Bürgenstock, Switzerland. For Lebanon to extricate itself from its predicament, it must remain an autonomous theater of operations, governed by its own circumstances and conditions.

If the cessation of hostilities in the South were to depend on an understanding between Tehran and Washington, Lebanese sovereignty would effectively be lost. Such an arrangement would establish a Persian tutelage over the Lebanese state—more insidious than the Syrian tutelage exercised under the Assad dynasty.

Naim Qassem is waiting precisely for such a development so that he may proclaim victory. Yet this would be a victory for Iran, not for Lebanon.