The World from The Hill: Lawmakers fear Hezbollah upper hand in Lebanon

Lawmakers are
sounding alarms about the potential takeover of Lebanon by
Hezbollah, and are urging the White House to take steps to try to prevent such a scenario from becoming a reality.

One Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Eliot Engel
(D-N.Y.), said he is “very frightened” about the possibility of war
breaking out in the Middle East as allies of Iran circle Israel in this
latest development.

{mosads}”Make no doubt about it — it’s a very, very dangerous situation,” Engel told The Hill.

Prime
Minister Saad Hariri was visiting President Obama in Washington last
week when word came that Hezbollah, listed as a terrorist group by the U.S., had pulled out of the unity
government in protest of a forthcoming United Nations tribunal report
that reportedly implicates senior members of the group, which has
gained considerable traction in the Beirut government in recent years,
in the 2005 assassination of Saad’s father, former premier Rafik Hariri.

A Saturday report by Newsmax claimed that the report will show
assassination links all the way back to the direct orders of Iranian
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and a joint attack by Iran’s Quds
force and Hezbollah. Damascus is reportedly not off the hook either,
with alleged cooperation with the government and its intelligence
agency in the killing.

The U.N. tribunal is expected to release its findings Monday.
Various reports indicate that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was
racing to try to form a ruling coalition to declare the tribunal
illegitimate.

“We will not allow our reputation and our dignity to be tarnished, nor will we allow anyone to conspire against us or to unjustly drench us in Hariri’s blood,” Nasrallah vowed Sunday in a televised speech.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the grandson
of Lebanese immigrants, called Hezbollah “a cancer on Lebanon.”

“It’s
deeply concerning that forces who oppose a U.N.-led effort to expose the
truth about the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri
would risk the welfare of the entire country by forcing the collapse of
the Lebanese government,” Issa said in a statement.

With a caretaker government in place as Hariri scrambles to cobble
together his own coalition, many on Capitol Hill fear an emboldened
Iran as its Hezbollah allies might keep the upper hand and install a
puppet government. This means finding a Sunni prime minister who would
be closely aligned with the Hezbollah-allied Shiite Parliament leader.

According to a Lebanese news report on Saturday, Hariri told the
Lebanese Druze leader that the Hezbollah-led opposition wants him to
“surrender and present concession after concession. … To top it all
off, they have a gun pointed to my head.”

Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said in a
statement this week that the U.S. must “strongly and consistently
support” pro-West forces in the Lebanese government struggle.

“The
Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis is working to put an end to any hope for
sovereignty, democracy, and freedom for Lebanon and the Lebanese
people,” she said. “The United States and other responsible nations
must not repeat past mistakes where we failed to stand up to those who
threaten Lebanon and all free nations.”

The panel’s ranking member, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), echoed that call in a statement.

“I
stand firmly behind Prime Minister Hariri’s decision not to cave in to
Hezbollah’s blackmail,” Berman said. “This is a critical time for
Lebanon to find a peaceful way forward, and I urge all Lebanese to
reject violence in resolving this matter.”

But a key fear is that civil war will break out as Hezbollah eyes a full takeover.

Former
U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who served under the administration of President George W. Bush
and has been talking up his own possible presidential bid, told The
Hill that the situation “reflects the reality that Hezbollah has held
the shadow authority in Lebanon for some time.”

However, he said the White House has “subordinated” Lebanon to
the Israel-Palestinian issue, and now “all of that has come home to
roost.”

“You find very little from Obama except trying to find someone in Iran to shake hands with,” Bolton said.

Eliot expressed frustration in the limits as to what the U.S. can
presently do, but stressed that Washington needs to be prepared to make
difficult choices and not allow a Hezbollah takeover.

“We have
to make an assessment if war broke out if we could effectively arm the
Lebanese militia, if they’re capable at all of standing up to
Hezbollah,” Engel said. “It will take a lot of our diplomacy and maybe
more than diplomacy to prevent them from taking over Lebanon.

“For all intents and purposes it would be a rogue state just like
Iran,” he warned. “We need to do whatever we can to make sure that
doesn’t happen.”

The government collapse comes shortly after one
lawmaker, appropriator Steve Rothman (D-N.J.), fired off a letter to
French President Nicolas Sarkozy asking that the European ally back off
its plans to sell 100 anti-tank missile systems to the Lebanese army
out of fear they could fall into Hezbollah hands.

“As you know, Lebanon is in a precarious situation whereby
Hezbollah is in a powerful position to usurp the Lebanese Armed Forces
(LAF),” Rothman wrote. “If this were to occur, Israel would be in grave
danger of having your anti-tank missiles used against her.”

On Thursday, Rothman told The Hill the week’s events
“only magnify my concerns that these anti-tank weapons don’t fall into
the hands of Hezbollah.”

“Prudence dictates that we continue to
pay extremely close attention to every new development and possibility,
but that we not overreact by withdrawing any assistance to the Lebanese
government or to the Lebanese Armed Forces,” Rothman said.

Bolton said that the “high risk of internal conflict” in Lebanon
put the region “very close” to hostilities similar to 2006, when
another Iran ally, Hamas, launched attacks against Israel from Gaza,
while Hezbollah fired its own rockets from Lebanon.

“Who knows what Iran would do on the broader front,” Bolton warned,
noting suspicions that Iran may want Hezbollah to provoke strife to
keep Israel off balance and distract from goings-on in Tehran as it
drives forward with its nuclear ambitions.

“I think it’s even more dangerous than 2006,” Engel said, citing
reports that Hezbollah has not only rearmed in violation of the
Security Council resolution that halted the earlier conflict but now
has an even greater stockpile of weapons with longer reach — “Tel Aviv
and maybe even farther.”

This heightens the temptation for Israel to strike, and brings about
“a hundred different scenarios, none of which are good,” he said.

“We
need to get our allies to support lots of coordination and discussion
with Israel,” Engel said. “The larger thing that we need to deal with
is the whole Iranian nuclear catastrophe in the making.”

How to deal with it, he said, involves confronting the country to
which Obama just sent an ambassador for the first time in six years,
bypassing Senate approval and infuriating many lawmakers.

“Hezbollah
and Syria, they’re all Iranian proxies,” Engel said, slamming the
appointment of U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford. “There’s no way
that we should reward [President Bashar] Assad for walking hand in
glove with terrorists and Iran.”

Both the conservative Bolton and the liberal Engel, in their
separate interviews with The Hill, called Obama’s appointment a show of “weakness.”

Now the White House has to get serious about the fresh potential for violence in the region, Bolton said.

“Based on their record in every other diplomatic arena we’ve seen,
they’ll ask for negotiations between Hezbollah and Hariri and what’s
left of his coalition,” he predicted. “But as long as Hezbollah remains
an armed terrorist group, you’re not going to have a functioning
democracy in Lebanon.”

Engel said the Obama administration needs to reach out to its
strongest ally in the region, particularly as Arab countries can
exploit feuds between the U.S. and Israel.

“It’s very important that the U.S. not nitpick Israel to death with
settlements and other things we seem to find to put pressure on
Israel,” Engel said. “I don’t hear the same kind of criticism of the
Palestinians.”

Congress needs to show support for Israel right now and press the White House to “take a strong hand with Israel,” he added.

And
while lawmakers have been chiding each other to watch their rhetoric on
Capitol Hill, Engel cautioned the administration to watch its own
rhetoric in dealing with the Lebanon crisis and Israel.

“The president and the secretary of State, they have to be very careful in what they say and convey,” he said.