Iran and Lebanon: The Fake Diplomacy of the US Losers and the Israeli Butchers

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Reality means nothing to either the US or Israel, who launched an illegal and unprovoked war on Iran on February 28, and were then humiliated when Iran delivered devastating blows to the US’s outposts throughout the Gulf, pierced Israel’s defense systems, causing extensive damage that the Israeli authorities have desperately tried to hide, and dealt a massive blow to the world’s energy supplies by cutting off the transit of tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.

For the US, which had fallen for Israeli lies that the war would be swift, and that decapitating Iran’s leadership would lead to a popular uprising and the collapse of the government, this was a rude awakening, and after Donald Trump had spent days on his social media account posting increasingly unhinged threats against Iran, he suddenly backed down last Tuesday and announced a two-week ceasefire.

This was a tacit acknowledgement of defeat, but when a US delegation, led by Vice President JD Vance, headed to Pakistan for peace talks with their Iranian counterparts, they refused to leave their baggage of belligerent arrogance at home, and turned up with a delusional swagger, reflecting the depths of their leader’s derangement, and the extent to which their alleged “America First” policies has been entirely usurped by the tired old ghosts of the discredited neocon movement.

Back in 2004, the journalist and author Ron Suskind reported that a senior figure in the Bush administration had rebuked him for being in “what we call the reality-based community”, which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”

As the senior official proceeded to explain, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The neocons, of course, finally crashed and burned after their ruinous, ruinously expensive and fundamentally counter-productive escapades in Afghanistan in Iraq, but monstrous genocidal fossils like Sen. Lindsey Graham, a devoted slave of Israel, have recently caught the ear of Donald Trump, and have been evidently whispering to him, with regard to Iran, that reality will be whatever he wishes it to be — a dangerous position for a full-blown narcissistic fantasist like Trump to be put in.

Israeli influence on the US

Also apparent, during the negotiations, was the extent to which the delegation was taking orders directly from Tel Aviv, the other loser in the six-week war, but a delusional entity that wields such disproportionate influence over the US that, according to an unverified claim by Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, Netanyahu rang Vance during the negotiations, and derailed the talks, as his call “shifted the focus from US-Iran negotiations to Israel’s interests.”

Netanyahu refuted the claim, but completely failed to challenge the perception of Israel’s role when he told an Israeli Cabinet meeting, “I spoke yesterday with Vice President JD Vance. He called me from his plane on his way back from Islamabad. He reported to me in detail, as this administration does every day, about the development of the negotiations.”

On X, Mark Pocan, a Democratic Congressman from Wisconsin, responded by stating, “The Trump administration daily reports to Netanyahu on the Iranian war, but not Congress or the American people. Let that sink in.”

Also on X, Joe Kent, the former US National Counterterrorism Center Director, who resigned over the Iran war, warned that negotiations would fail if the Trump administration didn’t stop “giving them [the Israelis] access to our decision making.”

Kent also addressed one of the major stumbling blocks in the negotiations, Iran’s uranium enrichment program, suggesting that the shift in the US’s position to demanding zero enrichment, rather than the amount needed for generating nuclear power but not making weapons, came from Israel. As he put it, “The Israelis push for zero uranium enrichment because they know it’s a poison pill for Iran and will result in the war continuing.”

As Abbas Araghchi stated, when asked about the enrichment program at a press conference, “Why have we insisted — and continue to insist — so much on enrichment? Why are we unwilling to give it up, even if war is imposed upon us? Because no one has the right to tell us what we should or should not possess. This is based on the principle of rejecting domination.”

He added, “Enrichment is my right under the law, and whether I exercise that right or not concerns only me. The narrative that’s been told to us for years and still continues — ‘You have no right to enrich; enrichment must be zero’ — Why? ‘Because we’re concerned’, they say. If you’re concerned, we’re ready to address those concerns. Is there a question? We’ll answer it. Is trust lacking? We’ll build trust. But no one has the right to say to us, ‘You can’t have this because I don’t want you to.’”

On another issue of contention, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the US seemed completely unable to understand that the Strait had been open until they launched their illegal war, and that they had only themselves to blame for its closure, and for not foreseeing that this would be Iran’s response to unjustifiable aggression.

From Israel’s point of view, meanwhile, all of the above was merely a diversion from its sole concern — preventing the negotiations in Pakistan from including a ceasefire in Lebanon, which, since the war on Iran began, Israel had been subjecting to increasingly savage attacks, and threats of invasion and occupation. This was explicitly included in the initial announcement of the ceasefire deal, but, according to a report by CBS News, Trump backed down on it after a call from Netanyahu.

For Israel, while reluctantly accepting a halt in attacks on Iran, Netanyahu and his government were — and still are — unwilling to recognize that any restraints can be placed on their pursuit of all that Israel has lived for over the last 30 months — to inflict as much death and destruction as possible on the civilian populations and civilian infrastructure of every country that contains any armed resistance whatsoever, while, simultaneously, lying relentlessly that all they are targeting, in their wild and indiscriminate attacks on hospitals, ambulances, schools and civilians’ homes, are “terrorists.”

On the day after the ceasefire was announced, in the grisliest demonstration imaginable of its refusal to be curbed in any manner, Israel launched ‘Operation Enduring Darkness’, described by the Guardian as “one of the worst mass-killings in Lebanon since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990.”

357 people were killed, in nearly 100 attacks that took place in the space of just ten minutes, followed by dozens more attacks in the next hour, and, despite Israeli claims that it had targeted Hezbollah command centres and military sites, no evidence has emerged to indicate that any of the victims were anything other than civilians.

Where to now, as Israel and Lebanon prepare for negotiations?

As the impasse between the US and Iran continues, with Trump — in between lauding himself as Jesus, and launching bitter attacks on the Pope — deciding that blockading the blockaded Strait of Hormuz, which was open before his latest bout of idiocy began, is a sensible way forward, Israel has evidently been prevailed upon to undertake a dismal facsimile of peace negotiations with the Lebanese government. This mirrors the US’s groundlessly arrogant approach to the Iranians, but with one noticeable difference — the Lebanese government is already so rattled that it is approaching these negotiations from a position of cowed deference.

Whether or not this is because of those officials’ historic differences of opinion with Hezbollah, or a genuine fear that, otherwise, they will be assassinated by Israel, is unclear, but as reports today have revealed, Israel is bringing to the negotiations, taking place in Washington, D.C., nothing less than a proposal for Lebanon’s total submission.

With instructions not to accept a ceasefire, Israel’s delegation has been instructed to push for nothing less than the division of Lebanon into three areas — a permanent, uninhabited buffer zone in the south, reaching a distance of 8km from the Israeli border; an Israeli-controlled military operations area, of unlimited duration, reaching all the way up to the Litani River; and an unfulfillable requirement for the Lebanese government to disarm and dismantle Hezbollah in the north of Lebanon.

As for Hezbollah, Al Jazeera reported today that they have “fiercely condemned the negotiations, with Secretary-General Naim Qassem calling them a ‘free concession’ to Israel and the US.”

As Al Jazeera added, “Hezbollah views negotiating while Lebanon is being bombarded as akin to signing a document of surrender”, citing Ali al-Miqdad, a Hezbollah member of the Lebanese parliament, who told them, “You cannot conduct negotiations to stop the fighting if you are under fire and under pressure.”

Naim Qassem also warned that there was, as Al Jazeera described it, a “lack of national consensus”, accusing the government of “acting without the backing of the majority of the population.”

Hezbollah also insists — in an echo of the response by Hamas and other factions in Gaza regarding disarmament — that “its weapons are a ‘Lebanese internal matter’ that can only be discussed by Lebanese factions after a complete Israeli withdrawal.”

Mahmoud Qamati, the deputy head of Hezbollah’s political council, told Al Jazeera, “As long as there is occupation, there is a legitimate right to resistance, and no one can impose anything on us.”

Hezbollah officials have also accused the Lebanese government of “backstabbing” the resistance by declaring its military activities illegal at the start of the war on March 2.

Given all of the above, it seems unlikely that peace is coming any time soon to Lebanon, unless negotiations between the US and Iran resume, as is being mooted, and curbing Israel’s endless aggression is put back on the agenda, which it must be if the entire region is to have any opportunity for any kind of peace.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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