Neutralize Lebanon د.هشام حمدان: ضرورة تحييد لبنان Dr. Hicham Hamdan/Toronto/Published on October 16, 2019
I spent many years trying to convince Western democratic leaders that they had made a serious mistake when they sacrificed the only democratic Arab state in the East and almost destroyed its unique model of coexistence among civilizations and its role as a cultural bridge between the Christian West and the Muslim East.
Today, I am very pleased to hear Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker stating officially, in a live television interview, that his country “will not repeat what happened in 1991 when it miscalculated with Lebanon and was handed over to Syria”.
I hope that the United State Administration will bring forward the declaration made by US President George W. Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Washington 2007 that Lebanon should be saved.
I also hope that the United States will, in practice, and seriously translate its support for Security Council resolution which endorsed the 2012 Baabda Declaration on Neutralizing Lebanon.
I also hope that the Americans will listen to President Bill Clinton’s advice when he told a leadership conference in Dallas in 2015, that a successful leadership in America includes helping restores stability in Lebanon.
Republicans and Democrats agree then that Lebanon should be saved.
We also hope that the United States will not repeat its miscalculations with Lebanon; a distinctive democratic homeland in the East and the country whose name has been mentioned 75 times in the Bible, and allow Lebanon to become again an open territory for a bloody solution to another Israeli problem in the region.
Lebanon must not be an Iranian-Israeli war arena. The US allowed in 1969, converting Lebanon to be a bloody arena, to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The United States could have then prevented the fateful Cairo agreement of that year, which gave the Palestinians, under Arab pressure and international silence, an unlawful right, to use southern Lebanon as a passage in their little warfare and military struggle against Israel, while the rest of the Arab fronts shut them down. Thus, Turning Lebanon into an Arab, Israeli and international arena to tackle the Palestinian cause and its legitimate demands, which was publicly confrontational, and has accordingly, shifted the burden of carrying the results of these confrontational policies, to Lebanon and thus facilitated transforming Lebanon into a battle field.
Yes, our people in Lebanon have sinned and are still wrong, because some believe that they can “verbally and emotionally sway” the world.
We paid the heavy price, of converting others battles in Lebanon to an existential crisis that quickly erupted into a devastating civil war.
Lebanon needs a US-European pressure movement in cooperation with the Russian Federation and China to turn Lebanon into a neutral country. Austria was neutralized in 1945 based on an agreement between the United States and its allies on the one hand and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other hand.
We call on the US Government to work together with the Russian Federation to bring forward the Security Council resolution and neutralize Lebanon.
Such agreement would put pressure on regional powers, especially Iran and Syria and thus facilitate the elaboration of this resolution, which is overwhelmingly supported even implicitly by the Lebanese.
*- Hicham Hamdan (PH.D)/Founder and President of the Executive Council at Lebanese Center for the Service of the Arab-LatinAmerican relationship. *Ambassador (R) *Visiting Scholar at UT Austin
