The ink on the Iran deal is barely dry, and already the British mandarins are fretting over Lebanon. How quaint, how perfectly Victorian of them. They wring their hands over regional stability, as if the last two decades of Western intervention in the Middle East were a model of prudence.
One might laugh if the stakes were not so grim. The truth is that the Iran deal, for all its nuclear non-proliferation pretensions, has handed Tehran a blank cheque to meddle in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The British officials who now caution about the consequences remind me of the Edwardian diplomats who carved up the Ottoman Empire and then acted surprised when the borders they drew sparked a century of conflict.
They are playing the same game again, only the pieces have changed. They talk of ‘concerns’ and ‘questions’. But what is there to question?
Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, is already the de facto ruler of Lebanon. Its arsenal grows by the day. Its influence has spread from the Bekaa Valley to the halls of government.
And now, with the sanctions relief and the influx of cash, Iran will be able to funnel even more resources to its clients. The British, along with their American cousins, have effectively legitimised this arrangement. They have traded a nuclear threat for a conventional one, a trade that would have made Neville Chamberlain blush.
And what of the Lebanese people? They are the forgotten victims of this grand diplomatic theatre. They suffer under a sectarian system that Iran and its allies exploit.
They endure blackouts, inflation, and a government that cannot even collect garbage. The deal does nothing for them. It only empowers the militias that hold them hostage.
But the Foreign Office does not care about Lebanese rubbish. It cares about optics, about keeping the American alliance intact, about pretending that diplomacy works. So they issue cautionary statements, knowing full well that they have already lost Lebanon.
They might as well warn about the rain in Manchester. The Middle East shudders, but the mandarins sip their tea. They look at the map and see borders that no longer hold.
They talk of power vacuums, as if nature abhors a vacuum. But the vacuum is their own making. They emptied the bottle, and Iran is drinking.
The only question left is whether we shall repeat the history of the Sykes-Picot era, or whether we shall learn something from our folly. I suspect the former. We are, after all, creatures of habit.
