Beirut: On a day when parliament failed for the 21st time to secure a quorum and vote to elect a president of the republic, Foreign Minister Jibran Bassil declared on Thursday that Lebanon’s participation in a recently agreed to League of Arab States military force was “optional”. He emphasised that national unity overrode all other considerations, and was “much more important than Arab solidarity”. The minister added, however, that Beirut “may not have supported a position at the recent Arab League summit that targets a Lebanese faction — a reference to Hezbollah, but that does not mean that we advocate that faction’s stances”.
Although Arab participants attending the summit reached an agreement to form a unified military force to counter growing security threats throughout the region, the Sharm Al Shaikh resolution was chiefly meant as a response to Iranian advances in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and now in Yemen. According to Arab analysts, the main purpose of the force was to combat terrorist groups, which have also made inroads in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has criticised Prime Minister Tammam Salam for offering support to the creation of a joint Arab force in his League declaration, which threatened the fragile government after several ministers voiced strong objections, even if a crisis was averted after Salam refused to back down and, equally important, after Bassil played both sides of the fiddle to clarify Lebanon’s position.
“Lebanon has always backed such a force,” the minister told reporters, reminding everyone that the League had proposed the creation of such a force before the latest Yemeni conflict. Beirut, he added, “will support any position that enjoys consensus”, though he underlined the need to “remain neutral from crises”. Bassil stressed that it was “natural to dispatch an Arab force to fight terrorism”, though he added that participation was “optional”. Ironically, the Hezbollah deputy Nawaf Mousawi declared in April 2010 that if the party was made “to choose between domestic unity and the resistance, the priority [would] be for the latter”, which mooted the foreign minister’s 2015 lecture.
At the height of fresh regional crises, Lebanese politicians slammed each other, with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah launching a vitriolic attack on Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states. On Thursday, the Lebanese Force leader Samir Geagea declared that “Lebanon had no interest in verbally assaulting Saudi Arabia or the Arab coalition”, called on politicians to prioritise Lebanese interests, and drew clear parallels between the rebel takeovers in Sana’a and Hezbollah’s military deployments in Syria. Bassil spoke of national unity but chose not to identify what were Lebanon’s interests.
