The Islamic Republic says one thing and its opposite when it comes to Lebanon. Before Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, arrived in Beirut, Iranian officials—including Larijani himself—dismissed outright the Lebanese government’s stance on Hezbollah’s weapons. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi even proclaimed that the Lebanese government would “fail” in any attempt to disarm the party.
Yet as Larijani’s visit approached, the rhetoric shifted. Suddenly, Iranian officials were speaking of “Iran’s support for the Lebanese people,” not merely for Hezbollah. This change in tone appears to have been one of the conditions set by the Lebanese side to grant Larijani meetings with President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who insisted during a cabinet session on fixing a deadline—by year’s end—for dismantling Hezbollah’s arsenal. The president raised no objection, underscoring that the Lebanese authorities have but one option: to adopt a definitive position on the illegal weapons of a party that is Lebanese in name only.
The difference between mounting a hostile campaign against the Lebanese government and claiming to “support the Lebanese people” is stark. Those who defend Hezbollah’s arms are, in truth, standing against the Lebanese themselves, given the devastation those weapons—extensions of Iran’s arsenal—have inflicted on the nation, including on its Shiite citizens. Hezbollah’s weapons have never been intended to safeguard Lebanon; their purpose has always been to transform it into a state orbiting within Tehran’s sphere of influence.
Larijani could not maintain even a veneer of moderation. At a press conference following his meeting with Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, he reverted to reiterating Iran’s opposition to any timetable for Hezbollah’s disarmament—in essence, resisting the dismantling of the Islamic Republic’s weapons stationed throughout Lebanon. He urged the Lebanese to “preserve the resistance,” ignoring that the primary cause of Lebanon’s misery is precisely this so-called resistance, which has impoverished the south and dragged the entire country into becoming little more than a battleground for Iran’s messages to Israel, and previously for the exchanges between the Assad regimes in Syria and Israel.
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There is a reality in Lebanon that Iranian officials like Larijani refuse to acknowledge: The “resistance” was never more than an Iranian instrument, advancing Tehran’s agenda under the guise of Lebanese struggle. Iran seized on the US-led war in Iraq in 2003 to push its expansionist project further across the region. What, after all, explains the assassination of Rafic Hariri and his companions, and the long chain of killings that followed—including the assassination of Lokman Slim—if not Iran’s determination to dominate Lebanon and suffocate any effort to revive its national life, especially in Beirut?
Who can forget Hezbollah’s paralyzing sit-in in downtown Beirut, or the bloody events of May 7, 2008? Nor is there any need to revisit in detail the 2006 summer war, which preceded Hezbollah’s incursion into Beirut and Mount Lebanon. That conflict, with its devastating aftermath, exposed the depth of collusion between Iran and Israel, culminating years later in the election of Michel Aoun as president in 2016 and, before the close of his term, in the maritime border demarcation agreement with Israel that served Israeli interests.
Iran acts solely for its own benefit. Every Lebanese child knows this. Every Lebanese child understands that the Islamic Republic has done nothing but dismantle Lebanon and displace its people. Iran has no allies in Lebanon—only tools it wields in the hope of striking a grand bargain with its so-called “Great Satan,” the United States, to cement its regional dominance.
Larijani came to Beirut after first stopping in Baghdad, where he signed a security pact with Iraq aimed at salvaging what remains of Iran’s expansionist vision. At this moment, the Islamic Republic seeks nothing more than to prove it still has leverage in the region, Lebanon included. To that end, Larijani falls back on tired, hollow language that glorifies the “resistance” while deliberately ignoring the calamities it has unleashed, including the so-called “Gaza Support War.”
That war devastated Lebanese villages, most of them Shiite, and drove their people into displacement. It effectively reimposed the Israeli occupation, and Hezbollah’s insistence on clinging to its weapons now stands as the surest guarantee of its indefinite continuation.
Larijani has no shortage of rhetoric and “advice” for the Lebanese, but he offers no answers to the obvious questions: Why did Hezbollah open a front in southern Lebanon? Who will bear the cost of the party’s crushing defeat? Who will rebuild the villages of the South? Who will return the displaced to their homes? Who will remove the Israeli occupation—an occupation Iran itself, through its proxy, has all but restored?
Finally, the Iranian envoy, who claims to know the region well, seems to have forgotten Iran’s own most painful wound: the loss of Syria. Syria matters to Tehran as the indispensable corridor to Lebanon, and thus to Hezbollah. Until Iranian officials confront this new reality—that their wars can no longer be waged by proxy militias in Arab lands but must be faced within Iran itself—they will continue to repeat the same hollow script, even as the region around them moves on.
Kheirallah Kheirallah (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)