Blogging on Meds

“Gunboat diplomacy” has got to be my favorite way of flexing military muscle. Forget the sanctions, forget the covert ops, forget doing somersaults with AK-47s on your enemy’s border — just park out front and sit there. It’s so 19th-century Pax Britannia.

But yes, we still do it. Normally US warship stationing is rarely reported on, unless we’re conjuring up stories about the menace of Iranian speedboats, and it serves the purpose of portraying an always benevolent US empire under threat from an increasingly hostile Middle East.

The re-positioning of US warships off the coast of Lebanon showed up on the radar this week therefore not as an arrogant intimidation tactic (thank you, Al Jazeera, for reporting it as such), but on account of Hezbollah’s apparently fiery comments that the gunboats were a threat and they would not be cowed.

The US has sent three warships, including the USS Cole, to take up positions off the coast of Lebanon in a show of force over the ongoing political deadlock in the country. A senior US official said Washington was ‘very concerned’ about the situation in Lebanon and called the move ’support for regional stability.’

Hassan Fadlallah, a Lebanese MP from Hezbollah, called the US decision to position the warships off the coast ‘an attempt to spark tension’. “We don’t succumb to threats and military intimidation practised by the United States to implement its hegemony over Lebanon.”

Of course they’re a threat. How is that provocative? But drawing up a defiant Hezbollah, ready to throw its rhetoric at the mighty US, sure does make it easy to set the stage for another proxy war in Lebanon, with US-backed Israel and the Nasrallah-led Shiites duking it out in the south. The move is an obvious attempt to keep our Maronite mercenaries in power to the chagrin of the Syrian mukhabarat.

It should be noted the last time the Americans stationed their assault ships off Lebanon in the midst of the country’s 15-year civil war in 1983, they ended up shelling Beirut and retreating with their tails between their legs after 241 serviceman were killed in one of the first and most prominent Shiite-inspired suicide bombings in the region.

In a twist of irony, the USS Cole was deployed, having been put back into service after a hole was blown in its side by suicide bombers at the Yemeni port city of Aden.

To read an excellent account of Lebanon’s political and civil plight since the 1970s, including honest reporting on US, Israeli, Syrian, Palestinian and Iranian meddling in the tiny Mediterranean nation, pick up longtime Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk’s “Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War” (the first edition).