Stop Denying That Hizballah Controls Lebanon

When Saudi Arabia attempted to pressure the Lebanese prime minister Saad Harari to resign in November, the U.S. State Department, France, and the International Crisis Group for Lebanon (a body whose members include the U.S., the EU, Russia, and China) all condemned Riyadh’s “destabilizing” actions and stressed the need to protect Lebanon from the chaos that has seized much of the Middle East. These statements, writes Evelyn Gordon, simply preserve the fiction that Lebanon is not entirely under the thumb of Hizballah—itself a proxy of Iran—and in its present form is a major engine of regional instability: