Ultimate responsibility for the intense fighting between Israeli and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon can be directly traced to several American presidents, especially to one Democrat who has been busy building houses ever since he left the Big Bungalow on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Fearing an East-West clash of apocalyptic proportions, Lyndon Johnson thought it best to confront the powerful Soviet Union and China in an indirect manner. He would inflate John F. Kennedy’s mini-war against Soviet and Chinese-backed fighters in relatively insignificant Vietnam into a major conflict. His successor, Richard Nixon, further fanned the flames before finally agreeing to a cease-fire in January 1973. After the Communist north violated it, Nixon rushed to pull remaining war-weary U.S. forces out of the southern half of the divided Southeast Asian country, climaxing with a humiliating final retreat in April 1975. As expected, South Vietnam was then completely overrun by Communist fighters, who subsequently proved uninterested in conquering their neighbors as part of the dreaded “domino” disaster that had long been forecast if America did not decisively win the costly war.
Tired of overseas adventures, a majority of American voters were then ready to scale back their country’s international policeman role. This led to Jimmy Carter’s election as commander in chief in 1976 after running on a fairly pacifist platform.
During the latter years of his watch, a turban bound mullah named Ruhollah Khomeini took over a Middle East country called Iran. His January 1979 Shiite Islamic Revolution was met with shocked surprise in Washington, which was then obsessed with Soviet designs on nearby Afghanistan. After all, the radical Muslims were our allies against the red superpower giant that was preparing to end all life on planet Earth in some insane nuclear showdown – not!
The Muslim fundamentalist leader was fit as a fiddle to move to Tehran and take over the reigns of power. This was largely because Carter had naively allowed him to come to America the previous October to receive first-class medical attention.
After ousting the pro-West Shah, the Shiite ayatollah repaid Carter’s kindness by sanctioning the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran. Over 50 Americans, mostly government diplomats and employees, were taken captive in the November 1979 action, being held hostage for over one year. Operating in the still strong shadow of the Vietnam fiasco, Carter refused to see the seizure for what it was – a clear act of war – and ordered relatively feeble (and definitely ineffective) military measures to free the hostages, who were only released when Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president in January 1981.
Flagging American resolve to take on its declared enemies when actually necessary was thankfully reversed during the Reagan years. But the tall ex-actor also contributed to the current Mideast crisis. Fearing an atomic showdown with Moscow, he ordered Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to cancel his defense minister’s rational plan to fully oust Syrian occupation forces from all of Lebanon in 1982. Thus, Ariel Sharon’s prescient goal to free Lebanon from Syrian (and thus Iranian) domination was thwarted, which opened the door for Khomeini to establish an enduring alliance with Syria that rapidly led to the formation of the extremist Lebanese Hezbollah militia.
The Shiite force quickly proved to be a faithful Iranian-Syrian anti-American puppet when its operatives destroyed U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut in October 1983 – the deadliest terrorist atrocity against American servicemen to this day. But this clear act of war was also basically ignored by Soviet-obsessed White House personnel, who simply ordered a humiliating retreat from the battle zone. Hezbollah-Iran-Syria had won, and this fact would set the tone for their later “victory” over war-weary Israeli forces that were rushed from the Land of the Cedars in a virtual summer rerun of the U.S. flight from Saigon.
The May 2000 Israeli getaway left its faithful Maronite-run South Lebanese Army allies dazed and confused, and in instant mortal danger from advancing Hezbollah forces. This guaranteed that no Lebanese Christian groups would ever fully ally themselves again with the Jewish-run state.
Meanwhile, Iran had succeeded in crushing the U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian “land for peace” process. It began supplying weapons and training to Hamas and Islamic Jihad Palestinian terrorists – mainly via Hezbollah channels – soon after the 1993 Oslo peace accord was signed on the White House lawn by Yassar Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Emulating Hezbollah’s mushrooming suicide attacks against IDF soldiers in Lebanon, Hamas launched its first deadly bus bombing in April 1994, followed by a flood of such wicked assaults in early 1996. Two months later, Hezbollah let loose with a massive rocket blitz upon northern Israel, leading to the election of Binyamin Netanyahu in May and the total collapse of the peace process four years later.
And so we come to today. Israel has been forced to re-enter Lebanon and the Gaza Strip with its relatively big guns blazing, leading to inevitable Arab and international condemnation. Its unilateral pullouts from both places – demanded by Lebanese and Palestinian leaders – have been tragically reversed amid a flood of blood. All this as Iran’s outrageous “president,” under orders from chief dictator Ayatollah Khamenei, repeatedly vows to wipe Israel off of the Middle East map, probably with nuclear weapons.
Is the current White House occupant finally ready to admit that the insidious theocratic Iranian regime has long ago declared war to the death not only against its main Mideast ally Israel, but also against America? Stay tuned. I’m not overly optimistic that the gravity of Iran’s threat to Western interests is fully understood yet in Washington’s halls of power, given that so much time, money and military lives have been spent going after a regional mouse named Saddam, followed by hopeless attempts to bring enduring “democracy” (how about simple stability?) to his basket-case, internally divided country.
All of that has only served to divert vital attention from the far more dangerous regional rat lurking right next door – Iran – and its supplicant surrogates, Syria and Hezbollah.
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