This April will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of Lebanon’s civil war. Palestinians, Israel, Syria, and postrevolutionary Iran played out their own regional Great Game in what was once a placid and cosmopolitan country. Beirut transformed from the Paris of the Middle East to its Mogadishu. The shaky peace of the 1990s allowed a slight recovery, but the threat of violence was never far away.
The main culprit in recent years is Hezbollah. The Iranian proxy group embraced the rhetoric of democracy and Lebanese nationalism, but its actions suggested a darker agenda. Hezbollah’s weapons, first and foremost, served to suppress other Lebanese and to signal that the group would achieve through the barrel of a gun whatever it could not in the ballot box. The talk of Lebanese nationalism was also empty. Not only did Hezbollah continue its anti-Israel terrorism after the United…
