This Green and Pleasant Land. And so we wake this morning to read that... (Hrâjel, Mont-Liban, Lebanon)
This Green and Pleasant Land. And so we wake this morning to read that Donald Trump has done what Obama would not and has fired missiles at Syrian airforce bases. Putin is upset, which threatens their cosy love-in. Iran isn’t very happy either, so presumably, neither is Hezbollah. You might think that would be bad enough but then into the maelstrom jump the Israelis. Now that their aerial defences are up and running, they’re eager to get stuck into another war and so once again, we have had to listen to a succession of threats from Tel Aviv that it will ‘bomb Lebanon back into the Stone Ages’. Hezbollah has replied that if Israel thinks it can destroy Lebanon with impunity, it should be aware that they will retaliate and that they are better armed than ever before. As for Lebanon, well it isn’t issuing threats. It can’t, really. It doesn’t have an airforce, let alone an aerial defence system. Nor does it really have a navy and as for the army, well that last fought Israel in 1948, despite the fact that Israel has invaded Lebanon five times since then and occupied parts of the country twice. Asymmetric doesn’t quite describe the situation. So Lebanon contents itself with worrying about what could happen if we do go through another 2006 war, or worse, only this time with 1.5 million Syrian refugees in the country and with nowhere safe for anyone here to go. Now we have heard these threats before, many, many times before. Usually they’re trotted out just as Lebanon is beginning to prosper. They could be empty, they could be genuine. It will be difficult to know until the bombs start to drop.
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