The provocation of Israel staged by the Lebanese army earlier this week is an augury of a large Middle Eastern war that President Obama’s strategy of appeasement has made all but inevitable.

Tweet

Email

Print

That it was a deliberate incident is evidenced by the presence of news and even camera crews that had been brought along on the Lebanese side while Lebanese military snipers killed an Israeli officer standing hundreds of yards inside Israeli territory and wounded another.

For generations, the Lebanese army has been among the world’s most timid. It went through the motions of fighting Israel briefly in 1948 and took no part in subsequent Arab-Israel wars. It has consistently been a non-factor, or rather non-actor, in Lebanon’s civil wars these past 35 years, bringing to mind the old quip about the Soviet satellite states: that they were so neutral they did not even intervene in their own internal affairs.

Why the sudden daring?

Because Hezbollah now largely controls Lebanon, and Iran owns Hezbollah, and both are feeling their oats. Initiating the skirmish with Israel was of a piece with the boast by Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff just three days earlier that Iran could build a nuclear bomb. According to a semiofficial Iranian news agency, the chief of staff elaborated: “Today . . . we are presented with an opportunity to alter world management.” In this usage, “world management” means the same thing that the Soviets used to call the “correlation of forces.” In the face of such an opportunity, he continued, “confining ourselves to small steps, while less costly, is not right.” And as Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the estimable Iran expert who brought these comments to light, explains, the chief of staff’s “reported remarks were full of comments about how this moment is a turning point in world history — one in which international arrogance can be replaced by a new global management, if only Iran makes the necessary effort.”

Some reports say Iran wants to avoid a new war between Hezbollah and Israel for now, preferring to keep the vast arsenal it has placed on Israel’s borders at the ready for retaliation against any strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. This makes sense, and if it is true, it makes this week’s events all the more ominous.

Reportedly, the commander of the unit that attacked the Israelis is a Shiite — sympathetic to Hezbollah. Conceivably, the Lebanese deliberately staged the incident to heat up the border in order to deflect the UN investigation of the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which reportedly is leading directly to the doorsteps of the Syrian government and Hezbollah. Or possibly, it was an act of pure bravado.

But either way, this aggression and the Iranian aide’s speech both indicate that the region’s radical, anti-American forces are growing bolder. This is an inevitable result of America’s projection of weakness and uncertainty, the essence of Obama’s foreign policy, expecially toward our Middle Eastern enemies.

Democracies don’t ever go to war with one another, but they often have gotten into wars with dictatorial regimes, and often those wars have been provoked by the democracies’ natural tendency toward pacificism, which leads ambitious authoritarians to overreach. Thus, Germany counted on England’s aversion to war in 1914; Hitler dismissed the democracies as soft in the 1930s; Dean Acheson declared South Korea outside of America’s “defense perimeter”; and April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein that America does not intervene in intra-Arab conflicts. In the end, democracies do fight, as they did in those instances, but often they might not have needed to had they not tempted the aggressors by a display of weakness.

Obama’s softness toward Iran has emboldened Ahmadinejad; and his similar stance toward Syria had led to the collapse of Lebanese independence that had nearly been restored in 2005. In the end, the US is likely to fight, and Israel certainly will. The steady growth of the radicals’ self-assuredness, stoked by Obama’s appeasement, will end in a big blow-up.

_