In a rare and commendable stance, Lebanon’s Minister of Foreign Affairs breaks with the logic of chronic submission and refuses the Iranian Foreign Minister’s invitation to hold talks in Tehran, insisting instead that any talks take place in a neutral country. This decision—however self-evident it may seem in any normal state—constitutes in Lebanon an exceptional act of sovereignty after years of political prostration before a regime that treats Lebanon as a security appendage rather than an independent state.
Enough submission to Iran. Enough surrender of the national decision to a radical theocratic regime that has not merely interfered in our affairs but has effectively confiscated our sovereignty by arming a terrorist party outside the framework of legitimacy and imposing it as a fait accompli above the state, the army, and the constitution.
The mullahs’ Iran has never dealt with Lebanon as a sovereign state, but as an arena.
An arena of rockets, an arena of messages, an arena where negotiations are conducted with Lebanese blood. Its intervention was not merely political; it was structural, deep, and organized: arming the Hezbollah militia, financing it, training it, and wrapping its military project in religious indoctrination based on the brainwashing of the young—through institutions such as the al-Mahdi Schools—implanting a culture of death and futile martyrdom, and despising the very concept of the state in favor of the “Supreme Leader.”
Any respectable state would have taken Iran to international forums years ago:
• for arming an armed group outside legitimacy (Hezbollah);
• for its direct interference in security and political decision-making.
• for turning Lebanon into a platform for regional conflict.
• and for its blatant violation of the principle of state sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs.