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.
But in Lebanon, the crime was met with silence; it was justified, sanctified, and rebranded as “resistance,” when in truth it is a full-fledged Iranian hegemony project.
The time has come to expel the Iranian ambassador from Lebanon—not as an impulsive step, but as a self-evident act of sovereignty. An ambassador of a state that interferes in the formation of governments, obstructs the presidency, steers defense policies, and controls war and peace has no place in a capital that claims to be the capital of an independent state.
It is also time to fundamentally reconsider bilateral relations with Iran. Relations between states are based on parity and mutual respect, not ideological tutelage or the export of revolutions. We do not oppose a people; we confront an expansionist extremist regime—a system of Wilayat al-Faqih that does not believe in states, borders, or free societies. A regime that lives on chaos, invests in division, feeds on destruction, and excels at using sectarianism as a weapon, religion as a tool of mobilization, and disorder as a means of influence.
The entire world today stands against political Islam, whether Sunni or Shiite, having belatedly realized that it is a cancer on modern states; these ideologies do not build states—they destroy societies and turn peoples into fuel for transnational projects. Lebanon, with its pluralism, history, and culture, cannot live inside the cage of Wilayat al-Faqih, nor be reduced to a militant identity alien to its traditions. If it is to survive, it must stand with states—not in the trenches of militias.
Sovereignty is not divisible.
Neutrality is not treason…..And peace with oneself begins by liberating the national decision from any foreign influence, whatever its source.
Lebanon is not a subordinate, not an arena, and not a bargaining chip.
Lebanon is our state… or it will not be.