Lost in the haze of the never-ending news cycle is the newly restarted violence in Lebanon. Like most people, I’ve been hearing about it in passing, not giving it much thought. Haven’t they ALWAYS been fighting there?
If you care to find out a little more about what exactly IS going on there, I would recommend reading Michael J. Totten’s excellent piece over at the Contentions Blog, "Lebanon’s Third Civil War".
With Iranian money and weapons, Hezbollah has built its own state-within-a-state in South Lebanon and South Beirut which is used as a base to wage war against Israel. Hezbollah also wishes to violently yank Lebanon from its current pro-Western alignment into the Syrian-Iranian axis. Roughly one-fourth of the population supports this agenda. No country on earth can withstand that kind of geopolitical tectonic pressure. For more than a year members of Hezbollah have tried unsuccessfully to topple the elected government with a minimal use of force, but their patience is at an end and they have turned to war.
Totten paints a bleak picture for the near, and maybe long term for that battered country. And what will it mean for Israel and beyond? I still stand by my long-held contention that we are witnessing the ongoing fall of dominoes in a new world war…