Lebanon mulls Iran’s military aid offer

… from Press TV,  Tehran

[ Editor’s Note: Saudi Arabia continues to play its “Bull in a China closet” routine in the Mid East, with its foreign policy that is based on buying the Arab League’s support in a coalition against a new threat from Iran. The KSA is trying to manufacture the Iranian threat to replace the recently crashed-and-burned one.

What the Saudis fear is the long term decline of their country, due to its power being purely financed from its oil wealth. If the Saudis disappeared from the face of the earth because the ETs discovered that they taste better than the rest of us, the world would never miss them. They make no measurable contribution due to their abhorrence of work and wanting everyone around them to be a slave.

The Saudis pumped money into Lebanon, as it does the other Arab states as part of its “Cashocracy”. Iran had supported Hezbollah, which was the front line defending Lebanon against Israeli domination. It poured a lot of money into Lebanon to help rebuild after the Zionist attack on the country’s infrastructure during the war, after Israel was stymied in their land assault.

The Zios did their collective punishment routine by bombing all over the country with the hope that Hezbollah would be blamed for causing the destruction — but the Lebanese were not born yesterday. They know what Israel is, what it has done, and why.

Lebanon has a vibrant people. With long term non-exploitive allies, plus the end of wars, money from Iran and others could flow into desperately needed development to improve Lebanese living conditions.

What the Israelis fear most is their surrounding countries improving their economies, since Israel is a bankrupt socialist state supported by the US taxpayers and an active international criminal network operating with immunity out of Israel doing every kind of white collar scam imaginable.

I would not be surprised to see Russia team up with Iran to help Lebanon out. Russia has maintained reasonable relations with Israel.

There is nothing that Israel has that Russia would want, and together with Iran, the Russians could dampen Israel’s history of destabilizing aggression and exploiting the resulting turmoil to keep its own people living in fear for purposes of state control.

The Israelis and Saudis have been natural partners, as their modus operandi are exploitation and compromising those around them. For the Zios it a superiority complex issue, while for the Saudis an inferiority complex.

But that makes them both dangerous when they have a lot of weapons or cash, which together they do, with Turkey and the other Gulf States added to the list. We are just one step away from the Arab world and the whole world figuring out who the real security threat to the region has been all along. I will be one of the first to donate a mirror… Jim W. Dean ]

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– First published  …  March 03,  2016 –

The Lebanese defense minister says he will ask the government to take Iran’s past offers of military support seriously after Saudi Arabia’s recent decision to retract $4 billion in military aid.

Defense Minister Samir Moqbel said Lebanon had informed Iran of the decision which was to be studied at a cabinet meeting on Thursday.

“The Iranian side was informed that when sanctions were lifted on Iran, we would study the Iranian support for the army at the cabinet,” The Daily Star quoted him as saying.

Last month, Saudi Arabia said it had suspended USD 3 billion in military aid to the Lebanese army and another USD 1 billion to the country’s internal security forces. The aid was cut after Lebanon refrained from endorsing Saudi-crafted statements against Iran at separate meetings held in Cairo and Jeddah.

The Saudi decision also came in the wake of recent victories by the Syrian army, which is backed by Lebanon’s Hezbollah in its battle against Takfiri militants fighting to topple the government in Damascus.

Last month, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari said Beirut had made no official request for financial aid from Tehran, but said the offer still held.

According to The Daily Star, Moqbel expressed his desire for Lebanon to consider Iran’s aid package the same day Saudi Arabia announced its decision to halt assistance.

Members of the Saudi-backed March 14 coalition in Lebanon pressured the government not to accept the Iranian aid, arguing at the time that it would violate sanctions against Iran. Sanctions were lifted on Iran in January in a historic deal between the Islamic Republic and the West and other parties over Tehran’s nuclear program.

The aid is vital as the Lebanese army is fighting Takfiri militants from the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and Daesh near the country’s northeastern border with Syria. After halting the aid, Saudi Arabia banned its citizens from traveling to Lebanon and imposed sanctions on the country, leading to new divisions among Lebanese political groups.

The decisions have led to heated arguments over whether Lebanon should have gone along with its Arab identity to back recent measures by Saudi Arabia and its allies against Hezbollah.

In January, Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil refused to support an Arab League statement listing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri on Wednesday called for the removal of Arabism from political debates.

“We should remove the term Arabism from political debates given that this issue is already stipulated in the introduction of the Lebanese Constitution. It’s a given and the debate about it is misplaced,” Berri said.

His remarks came as the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which comprises Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, designated Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

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Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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