David Ignatius, the CIA's and administration's spokesperson at the Washington Post, is peddling one of these day's most stupid ideas:
The U.S. has an opportunity to help rebuild Lebanese sovereignty – (archived)
Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah has created a security vacuum.
The Biden administration’s diplomacy has failed to restrain Israel and de-escalate the Middle East conflict over the past year. But the administration has a new opportunity for constructive engagement: helping the Lebanese Armed Forces fill the void left by a collapsing Hezbollah and reestablish the Lebanese government’s sovereignty.
To start a column with a lies shows the way it will go. The Biden administration has not 'failed to restrain' Israel but has urged it to peruse its attacks on Hizbullah:
Presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah in order to convince the group to engage in diplomatic talks to end the conflict, the officials told POLITICO.
The Lebanese Armed Forces, which Ignatius wants to promote, have a nominal strength of some 80,000 men. But, thanks to U.S. influence over it, they is only lightly armed, little trained and of no use against any serious enemy. The LAF's fighting value in quantity and quality is well below that of Hizbullah's cadres.
Ignatius is dreaming:
Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah — culminating in the killing of Hasan Nasrallah last week — has created a security vacuum in Lebanon. The shellshocked lower ranks of Hezbollah undoubtedly hope to fill the void. But for the first time in a generation, there’s a real chance that the LAF takes control of the nation’s security and its borders, with proper assistance.
'A collapsing Hizbullah' is a wet dream of imperialist and Zionist but has nothing to do with reality. Just ask the Israeli forces which, in recent days, tried to infiltrate into southern Lebanon. The alleged 'security vacuum' hit them with all its might:
Israeli forces were struck with rockets on the outskirts of the Lebanese town of Odaisseh on Thursday afternoon, one of the towns where troops fell into a bloody ambush just a day earlier.
A Hezbollah guided-missile attack also hit a Merkava tank in the Natoa settlement not long before.
“When an Israeli enemy infantry force attempted to infiltrate towards the cemetery of the town of Yaroun, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance detonated a Sejil explosive device at the advancing force at 12:00 noon on Thursday 10-3-2024, killing and wounding them,” Hezbollah said earlier, marking its 21st statement on 3 October.
Hezbollah announced shortly before that its fighters “detonated an explosive device at 12:00 noon on Thursday 10-3-2024 with a force from the Golani Brigade in the Tartira area in the town of Maroun al-Ras, which was trying to bypass the western side of the town.”
The members of the Golani Brigade force were killed or wounded, the Hezbollah statement added.
Over the last days the 'security vacuum' also managed to fire hundreds of missiles onto the Zionist colony:
Sirens sounded in Israel's Haifa, Carmel foot hills and the Hadera region, including – for the first time since the war began, in Caesarea, An affluent seaside community where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu owns a private residence.
…
Hezbollah attacked northern Israel including the cities of Haifa and Acre repeatedly since the early morning hours. Rockets also landed in the Upper Galilee causing damage but no injuries.
The White House thinking, it seems, is not impeded by any reality:
The Biden administration sees a “massive opportunity” in Lebanon, a senior official told me this week. But to help Lebanon regain sovereignty, the Biden administration will have to move quickly and decisively while Hezbollah is still in disarray.
The Pentagon has been rehearsing for this role for several decades through its support program for the LAF. Less than four months ago, the Pentagon hosted the LAF’s commander, Gen. Joseph Aoun, in Washington and at Centcom headquarters in Florida.
“Biden administration officials want the LAF to prepare a force that could potentially deploy near the border to monitor a future buffer zone negotiated between Israel and Hezbollah,” Al-Monitor news organization reported at the time of Aoun’s visit in mid-June.
The LAF forces are already deployed near the border. They are not very friendly with Israeli forces which routinely kills them:
Two Lebanese army soldiers were killed in separate Israeli strikes on south Lebanon on Thursday, the military said as Hezbollah said it repelled Israeli troops trying to cross the border.
The army said in a statement that a soldier was killed in an Israeli strike on a military post in the Bint Jbeil area, adding that soldiers fired back at the source of the fire.
A military official told AFP that this was the first response to Israeli fire since last October because the post had been “directly” hit.
It was the second Lebanese soldier to be killed by Israeli strikes on Thursday.
The army had announced earlier in the day that a soldier “was killed and another was wounded as a result of an aggression by the Israeli enemy during an evacuation and rescue operation with the Lebanese Red Cross in Taybeh village.”
To support his dream Ignatius cites a long discredited Lebanese neo-conservative:
Michael Young, a veteran Lebanese journalist, explained the dynamics after Nasrallah’s death in a post Sunday for the Carnegie Endowment’s Diwan website. He juxtaposed Hezbollah’s “logic of resistance” with “the logic of the state” and said the latter “imposes itself on a country that has been carried into a catastrophe by an armed group that has disregarded the Lebanese state.”
Young wrote that in the view of many Lebanese, “the single national institution that retains credibility and widespread popular endorsement is the Lebanese army.”
Unlike Ignatius, Young himself sees no plausible way to put the Lebanese army on top of the state. The most influential politician in Lebanon is the current speaker of the parliament, Nabih Berri. His Amal party is allied with Hizbullah and depends on its votes. Without Berri's support, Young writes, any change in the distribution of power in Lebanon is inconceivable.
But Ignatius insists that the impossible is doable or at least worth a try:
[R]ebuilding the Lebanese state behind a strong army — supported by a population that is sick of Hezbollah’s violent fantasy of resistance — is an achievable goal. It will require disciplined American effort and political will. But it’s a worthy task for Joe Biden’s final months in office and for his successor.
So let's send the Marines to prop up the LAF and let's manipulated the country's policies through bribes from the U.S. embassy.
Some thirty years ago the U.S. attempted to do such stupid things. In consequence its embassy got blown up as were the Marine's barracks.
Why someone believes that it is smart to now follow a similar strategy, and to thereby likely provoke a similar outcome, is well beyond me.
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Added: Ignatius' column is, apparently, not a fluke. Axios just posted this:
Scoop: U.S. wants to use Hezbollah's weakness to elect new Lebanese president
The stupidity – it hurts.