All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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Hey guys on the line, I've got Danny Scherz and sorry I'm running so late, it'll be a short one.
But Danny, he was a major in the army.
He was in Iraq War Two in Afghanistan.
He wrote Ghost Riders of Baghdad and 10 million articles for the entire internet, including especially antiwar.com, where his last two are about Lebanon, top 10 myths about the country and its conflicts.
Welcome back to the show, Danny.
How are you doing?
Oh, I'm great.
Thanks for having me on.
Man, I am so sorry that we're only going to be able to do the 20 minute version of this because I've learned so much stuff in these great articles that you wrote about Lebanon and I guess spurred originally by that giant apparently accidental explosion at the port of Beirut there.
So it's not really at all what the what the article is about, but that's, I guess, what brought up Lebanon.
Also, they've had, of course, major economic problems and riots and all kinds of I guess it's the the aftermath of the explosion, right, is really what you're writing about there, the fall of the government and all of these things, the confessional system and Hezbollah and the Christians and everything.
And so go ahead, man, and tell us what we need to know here, would you please?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that I've been sort of a Lebanon geek for, you know, coming up on about 15 years now.
So this was a little opportunist of me, you know, that it gets in the headlines with the explosion and the fall of government.
I was, you know, just kind of pouncing, you know, great stuff, man.
Some of the best stuff I've read by you in a long time.
And that's really saying something, because I love all your stuff.
Yeah, well, I appreciate that.
It's it's one of my side interests.
I first read about, you know, Lebanese history, especially the civil war there from seventy five to ninety when I was in Iraq, you know, and it was it was really interesting, I think, because I'm reading like, you know, Robert Fisk stuff, you know, some of Robin Wright's more mainstream stuff, anything on Lebanon I could find.
For some reason, it just jumped at me because I was working in Shia Baghdad.
I understood Maqtada al-Sadr and his family, uncles and father and grandfather being important.
And then, of course, the connection to Lebanon.
And I think one of the first times that I started to think, oh, maybe there's something to this whole, you know, Lebanese Iraqi connection and how America's misreading of Lebanon in 1982, 83 kind of set some of the stage for our messes in the Middle East was when I was at a market in East Baghdad, which would later be blown to pieces by a suicide bomber killing dozens.
And there was a poster on the wall, like a propaganda poster.
It was really well done.
I have a picture of it.
And it's, you know, it's Sadr, Maqtada al-Sadr.
And he's walking on the American flag right proudly.
And next to him is like his grandfather, I believe, walking on the British flag, right, having, you know, kind of fought them or, you know, kind of pushed them out in or tried to in the Shia rebellion around 1920.
And then there's, you know, Musa Sadr, right, his sort of distant cousin in Lebanon, walking on, you know, an Israeli flag and the idea being this like mass Shia sort of resistance to imperialism.
And of course, there's a lot of holes in the entire concept from the Shia perspective.
But, you know, right there in that moment, that's where they're at in 2006 and 2007.
So it got me thinking about Lebanon.
I start reading about it.
And of course, I've done The Ten Myths.
I could probably do 20.
But the biggest thing is that from the start, and the start is 1958, when Eisenhower, you know, sends in the first American military intervention since the Barbary Wars in the Middle East, at least in a direct sense.
And it's in Lebanon.
And he says at the time, I realized he says to the British Prime Minister, Harold McMillan on the phone, he says, I realize I'm opening a Pandora's box here, you know, in terms of interventionism in the Middle East.
And, you know, ever since then, Lebanon has been more central to American policy or more instructive about it than it often gets credit for.
So I think that's what got me interested.
And well, 12,000 words later, right, I've got the first 10 minutes.
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All right, so obviously the biggest deal of all here is Hezbollah, the party of God and sort of, kind of founded by the Iranians there.
And some say it's pretty much Iran's 51st state.
And of course, based on always just the slogan and no details, because of course they don't add up at all, Hezbollah's very existence is the basis for the accusation that Iran is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.
And then if you say, well, what do you mean?
They don't back Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda kills around guys, you know, they say, oh yeah, no, because they back Hezbollah.
Right.
And that's the big lie, right?
The big lie is that, you know, Iran runs Lebanon.
Iran is the greatest state sponsor because of Lebanon.
And therefore we should be at war with them forever.
Of course, the smaller lie that bolsters the big lie is that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization.
Okay.
Hezbollah has, you know, first of all, they didn't do half as many suicide bombings in their resistance to the Israelis as folks think.
If you actually look at the numbers, it's not that high.
And the vast, vast majority of Hezbollah's targets in that 18-year resistance to the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon from 1982 to 2000, the vast majority of their targets are military.
In that sense, Hezbollah has more in common with the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, and their targeting than they do with, say, ISIS or Al-Qaeda, of course.
After 2000, you know, with a few exceptions, the very notion that they're a transnational terrorist organization is sort of ludicrous.
They show restraint more often than not.
This is a true resistance organization, and it doesn't really matter what we think.
That's the thing.
It's not about us when it comes to Lebanon, even though we try to make everything about us.
The Shia people, they see Hezbollah as a resistance organization as well as, and here's the complicated part, social services, political party.
And we are totally misreading Lebanon.
So the small lie of misreading what Hezbollah is and its place leads to the big lie of, well, therefore Iran's hand is everywhere and basically up for rever war, right, hot and cold alternating, has to continue between us.
If we don't deflate the myth of Hezbollah, we can't deflate the myth of Lebanon.
And if we don't deflate both of those, we will never get to the bottom of why this Iran story for 40 years is one of the greatest lies in American foreign policy.
Right.
Okay.
Now, I got to just mention this real quick, and I won't expect you to go down this rabbit trail unless you feel like it or whatever, but people need to know that Gareth Porter has done all the great work showing that the Argentina bombing in 1994 of the Jewish community center there was done by right wing Nazis in the local police department, not by Hezbollah.
They spun it and they use that and they use it to this day.
It's like they go back to 1983 to cite the Beirut bombing of the Marines by the Amal militia to say, aha, see bombings overseas based from Iran.
But in the case of the Argentina thing, it's just completely bogus.
Instead, the reality is just what you said.
They're a militia, basically.
They fight in their own territory for their own territory.
And that's it.
Although, I guess you could say they went and helped Assad defend himself when the CIA under Obama started backing Al Qaeda in the war there, but you can hardly blame them for that.
Well, yeah.
Why wouldn't they?
I mean, for ISIS isn't, you know, ISIS rises.
But even before that, you know, you have this very quickly, the rebels are, are Islamist, right?
They either, many of them are from the start and it goes in that direction much faster than most people in the West want to believe with these myths of the moderate rebels.
This is like an existential threat, not only to the Assad regime, but to, to Hezbollah.
So the, I think the lie there is that Hezbollah goes just because Syria controls them through Iran, probably through Russia, right?
These are the lies.
The reality is Hezbollah, you know, has a degree of autonomy, a significant degree of autonomy in Lebanon, and they also are rational actors.
And they're Lebanese.
Let's all remember this.
They are Lebanese.
The, the leadership and the rank and file are Lebanese, but the threat from the Islamism, the extremism that grows, especially once ISIS pops up in Syria is massive to Lebanon and to Hezbollah and the Shia community, because the spillover war that's very rarely reported on of ISIS and Nusra Front into Lebanon, they, they, they took and held territory there on the border, you know, in the border, the Eastern border parts of Lebanon.
And oh, by the way, they did several, if not scores of bombings within, within Lebanon, ISIS did, which targeted specifically like Hezbollah organizations, Shia people who are presumed to support Hezbollah.
So they were really under attack.
So yes, Hezbollah went and, and backed up Assad.
But here's the thing, in a sense, we're, we are on the same side, or we should have been, because in reality, this whole CIA drummed up regime change was putting us on the same side as the ISIS crowd for a long time.
But really, in many cases, the United States is tacitly or should be tacitly allied with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah when it comes to fighting Sunni Islamism, which is by the way, a far more transnational threat to the American homeland to the extent that one exists.
Right.
And, of course, sorry, I can't help myself, because Bush gave the Shia Baghdad.
So then, geez, consolation prize, let's see if we can take Damascus away from them.
And that was because they regretted what they'd done in Iraq war two, was why they had a CIA support al Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, in the Syrian war, which led to the rise of the Islamic State.
And then Iraq war three, where they guess what, just like you just said, they're essentially embedded with and fighting on the same side of the same Shia that they wish they hadn't fought Iraq war two for.
Oh, yeah, it's it's twisted.
It's as twisted in Byzantine as the entire confessional system of 18 religions that run Lebanon's government.
Explain that, man.
I don't think people know what the hell is a confessional system.
Yeah.
So it's fascinating.
So Lebanon is created in 1920 out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
The French take their cut as part of the whole deal with the British.
They take what's kind of, you know, greater Syria.
Most Lebanese, as we know them today, would have been kind of considered, like, a Syrian or just a citizen of the Levant under the Ottoman Empire.
There was no Lebanon as a country.
There was a mountain, Mount Lebanon, right, and, like, it's Enverans, which were mostly Maronite Christian, right.
And so France takes its cut from the Ottoman Empire and says, what we're going to do is we're going to have Syria, we're going to create a Syria, but we're going to lop off this mountain with the Christians.
We're going to add a bunch of Shia and Sunnis and these Druze kind of secretive sects.
We're going to add them to it to make it a viable state.
You know, that's 1920 gets independence in 43.
The whole reason they do that is to create like a Christian state.
They carve it out because they figure that'll be closer to the West.
And since 1860 it had been, because the French had been intervening in the Ottoman Empire to protect the Christians, partly out of religious loyalty, but mainly out of, you know, just a way to get into the Ottoman sphere.
So what happens is this is such a tenuous thing, because you've got basically four main groups, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Christians, Maronites are the main one, and then these Druze, which are sort of like a, you know, splinter of the Shia sort of maybe the Muslims don't think they're Muslim.
They don't, you know.
But I have a friend, I have a friend that's a Lebanese Druze.
And here's what he tells me.
He says they're part Muslim, part Christian, part Greek mythology.
That's a pretty good.
That sounds pretty good.
Yeah.
Everything I've read is definitely a syncretic nature to these folks.
Well, anyway, there's there's 14 different types of Christians.
So when people say there's 18, the recognized confessional groups, most of them are Christian.
There's just a ton of different like Greek Orthodox and Protestants and all this.
But basically, here's the deal.
The French leave.
They want the Maronite Christians, the strongest Christian group in charge.
They create a system based on the 1932 census where everyone gets a certain number of slots in parliament and jobs in government based on their confession.
So this is like talk about identity politics run wild, right?
This is quotas like if you're against affirmative action, you hate the Lebanese system, OK?
I mean, it's incredible, but it's all based on that 32 census.
When the Christians were ostensibly the majority, just barely.
The dirty secret that everyone in Lebanon is known for almost 100 years is the Christians are not even close to the majority anymore.
But the system has kind of maintained itself.
And so what has happened is that each of those sects, right, the four main sects has a patron, has a rabbi, right, a foreign one, you know, whether it's the West or the Gulf, the Sunnis have the Gulf states, the Shia have tended to have, you know, Syria and Iran and the Druze.
Well, they'll they go back and forth.
They'll usually whoever the Arab nationalist socialist brand is at the time, if one exists, they go there.
And then the Maronites first went to France and then then America, then the Israelis, when the Israelis invaded and now kind of back to the West.
But not really, because half of them are supporting Hezbollah.
So it's a real mess.
But what it means is that there's corruption endemic to the system more than even most systems because people only serve like their community.
So the leaders are more like mob bosses, which is kind of a follow on column that I'm kind of playing with.
But there's essentially six families that run Lebanon.
So it's like New York's five main Italian families, plus, you know, say the, you know, the Florida family or whatever that gets thrown on there.
So it's basically six families that run it.
But this creates a lot of the division within Lebanon.
So since they each have a patron and they become the proxies for them, this does become the battleground of, you know, sort of the Middle East.
That's why I call it, you know, a battleground past, you know, bastard child of the Middle East because and bellwether because as Lebanon goes, a lot of those same trends tend to blow out into the Middle East.
So, yeah, it's wild, man.
You can talk about it for four hours.
Yeah, I know it, man.
And we only got six minutes left.
So let's talk about the coalition between Hezbollah and the Christians that is in charge now, Michael Aoun and all that.
And we're skipping so much.
There's so much.
We need to I need to reread these articles.
We need to do a whole other interview about this maybe next week or whatever it is, Danny.
There's a whole civil war and all of these things.
But back to what you were saying about Hezbollah, you know, like you can even hear it's like you're defending someone accused of sexual assault or something like you can't.
It might look bad for you if you say that Hezbollah is anything but the devil.
And you're saying, look, it's like the IRA and Sinn Féin, like, yeah, they have their armed militia, which sometimes commits crimes, but they also have a political faction and it is what it is.
And in this case, they happen to be allies with America's friends there.
And so combined in this coalition government, right, the ruling party, the the least the winner for the least known but most important singular fact about Lebanon is that the Christians have always and still do work with variety of Muslim factions.
And today, that means that the ruling Christian president and and his half of the Christians, slightly more than half, is in alliance with Hezbollah and has been since about 2006.
That's the thing that is least known, but needs to be known.
There is no Christian Lebanon.
There is no unified Christians that love the West.
That is not how this works.
It is way more complex.
The president, Michael Aoun, who runs the country and is kind of critical of America and who works with Hezbollah.
He has a backstory that matters.
So what I'm saying is we don't have a lot of time, but when he was first prime minister and he tried to get the Syrians out in the War of Liberation of 1989 to 90, which was the bloodiest part of the entire civil war, and that's the very end.
He was abandoned by Washington, who had always been anti-Syrian.
And why was that?
Because this is right around the time of the Gulf War kicking off.
So at the end of this War of Liberation, you know, there's a shift towards being positive with Syria because we want them in our coalition.
We abandon him.
We let the Syrians have a freer hand.
They wipe out his army.
They kind of, you know, get him trapped in his palace.
He goes into 15 years of exile in Paris.
Now when he comes back, wouldn't you know, he's not all that positive towards the West in America.
So he deflates this whole idea of the positive Christians.
But like we did that in part.
I mean, it's not just us, but, you know, 40 years ago he said, quote, the United States does not care about Lebanon.
It has sold Lebanon.
It says it is moved by our tragedies.
It is lying.
He's part of the problem of corruption, but he ain't wrong about that.
And that should be the story of Lebanon post-bombing.
Yeah.
And, man, can we talk about the war of 2006 real quick here?
It started as just, you know, small tit for tat type skirmishes, kidnapping across the border.
First was the Gaza Beach Party massacre and then followed by the kidnapping of a couple of IDF soldiers.
And then Israel attacked and they fought for about six weeks in the summer of 06.
And what difference did that really make, Danny?
You know, I actually what I think it did is it it punctured the myth again of Israeli, you know, military supremacy and the idea that force can be used to achieve all its goals.
I mean, Israel is born, you know, of sort of force and by the sword and thus it has to live by the sword.
And it may die by the sword, but it will probably be by its own hands, if at all.
But the thing is, the first time Israel is truly bloodied and just kind of dragged out in the guerrilla wars in Lebanon, Ariel Sharon, he he he collapses.
He falls out of government as secretary of defense because of the war crimes and the Lebanon war and his own failures.
And then it's this 2006 war that where Lebanon comes back to fight them.
Israel was looking for an excuse to go into southern Lebanon.
They've been kicked out by Hezbollah or agreed to withdraw because they were taking casualties, really significant ones for a small country.
And yeah, so they they invade.
But the thing is, tactically, you see the things you can't really say that they tactically won.
You know, Hezbollah didn't beat them in a pure sense, but Hezbollah put up a good fight.
Israel gets its nose bloody.
It's really only like one brigade of about 3000 guys of Hezbollah that like holds up the Israelis.
And in the process, as always, Israel like bombs Beirut and kills mostly Lebanese who aren't in Hezbollah in the process, sullies their name in the Arab world, makes Hassan Nasrallah the secretary general of Hezbollah, the most popular world leader in the entire Arab world, which is mostly Sunni, even though he is Shia.
And so it's a moral victory for Hezbollah in a lot of ways.
And Israel will never learn that its fantasies of having control through Christian proxies in Lebanon is it is a mirage and it has been there undoing and collapsed governments two times at least.
And we're talking about 1982 and then again in 2006.
And that's where it stands today.
It's like a stalemate.
And, you know, I'm sorry, because we're skipping around so much on the part about Hezbollah, you know, rising up to resist Israel after the invasion of 1982.
You have this great quote I'd never read before of Ehud Barak saying it, the former defense minister and prime minister, saying it in as clear language as any accuser could have ever said that the Shia, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 82, the Shia welcomed them to get rid of the PLO, who they hated and wanted rid of.
And then the Israelis, you know, wore out their welcome and treated all the local Shia like garbage.
And the party of God was born in response to that.
And there's Ehud Barak himself right out of the horse's mouth going, yep, this is how we screwed it up.
All right, Shia who welcome us with flowers and invasion sounds familiar, doesn't it?
I mean, really?
Well, I'm being sarcastic about Iraq, but I mean, the reality here is that there was a lot of lessons we should have learned from the IDF in Lebanon that we chose not to.
But that is correct.
Israel, look, people say, oh, Iran created Hezbollah.
I'm going to be provocative.
Israel created Hezbollah.
There would be no Hezbollah if it wasn't for Israeli aggression, continued military occupation, and massive disproportionate civilian casualties that usually fall on the Lebanese Shia, not even the PLO, who they were ostensibly fighting.
Israel created the situation that birthed Hezbollah.
They are one of the most counterproductive, self-sabotaging nations in history, befitting their big brother, the United States.
Absolutely.
All right.
I'm so sorry that we got to cut it here, but everybody, please go and read Danny Sherrison.
You should always be reading every single thing this guy writes.
At antiwar.com, it's, I guess so far, two parts.
Three parts, yeah.
About two parts for the bits, and right before that, kind of the intro.
Maybe some more coming.
We'll see.
Who knows?
Yeah, so it really is a three-part essay so far on Lebanon there.
So keep up, everybody.
You'll learn a ton.
It's really great.
Lebanon, bellwether, battleground, and bastard child of the Middle East, followed by the Top Ten Myths, part one and two.
There.
Thanks again, Danny.
Appreciate it.
The Scott Horton Show on Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
