From Beirut to the Beltway

When the big bad wolf was banished to the lion’s old forgotten farm, the warring dogs of the newly liberated state found that the citizens of their shrunken conflict zone, a handful of sheep and cows that inhabit a grassy hill called Shebaa, had little appreciation for heroism and egotistical freedom-fighting. Their sacrifices, at one time hailed and worshipped by many, risked becoming dust-collecting trophies from a long gone era. Desperate for fresh bounty, the warring dogs turned to the lion in the jungle of failed causes and barked a long painful: now what?

The lion, decrepit and lazy, showed them juicier and nearer legs to bite: their own masters’. So the haplessly hungry dogs of war divided their time between biting legs they once protected from the wolf and chasing their own conspiracy-plated tails.

Hizbullah’s degeneration into a mere Syrian proxy will have some comparing them to their former enemies, the South Lebanon Army, an Israeli proxy militia that ran the security zone on behalf of the Israeli occupation. And while Hizbullah’s soldiers are not running concentration camps, they are holding an entire population hostage to their fallacies and running multiple de-facto security zones in the South, Beirut and the Bekaa. SLA’s torture electrodes are suddenly no different than Hizbullah’s political bullying and intimidation. Doing it from within the system or from outside does not matter anymore, for Hizbullah’s politicians have proven that they are in the cabinet only as guardians of another country’s short-sighted interests and not their own country's.

Take the latest fuel controversy. Has it escaped some that the Hizbullah energy minister is responsible for that file? Have we forgotten the infamous Mr. X conversation when Ghazali sought to “let Hariri be the laughing stock” by unleashing protests and demonstrations against his government? To understand this strategy, look no further than Syria’s Tishreen “newspaper”, which is now predicting a popular uprising in Lebanon that will topple the Siniora government. That paper makes Siniora’s government look like the Vichy government and is projecting a public dissatisfaction with that government that only exists in Bashar’s mind. And the stars of that paper are no other than warmongering Hizbullah and failed politicians such as Zaher al-Khatib and Omar Karame. To Tishreen, these are Lebanese “patriots” with Syria’s best interest in mind! It is ironic that the mouthpiece of a Nazi-like regime is using another country’s freedom of expression to defend the rights of the “deprived” of that country. Go figure!