For Iran, Hezbollah Remains Indispensable

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

During the latest Mideast conflict, Tehran has signaled that its red lines extend far beyond its borders. On June 7, that point was driven home with force. An Israeli strike that hit Beirut’s southern suburbs was followed by Iran launching multiple waves of ballistic missiles toward Israel, the first direct attack on that nation since April.  Iran’s leadership and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are increasingly willing to accept greater risks in a bid to project power across the region.

Lebanon, and Hezbollah in particular, remain among Iran’s most important red lines in any potential agreement with the United States. Hezbollah is not merely a political or military ally but an integral component of its long-term strategic vision for the Middle East. It is part of a partnership forged over decades.

Muhammad Javad Habibi, a political scientist and contributor to the Tehran Times, feels that the war has fundamentally altered how Iranian policymakers understand future confrontations with the United States and Israel.

“The recent war appears to have strengthened a belief among many Iranian policymakers that future confrontations with the United States and Israel will not be limited to a single battlefield or a single issue,” Habibi told the left-wing American news website Mondoweiss.

“From Tehran’s perspective, the conflict demonstrated that military pressure, economic pressure, information campaigns, and diplomatic pressure are increasingly being applied simultaneously. As a result, Iranian decision-makers appear less willing than before to compartmentalize regional alliances and security concerns from negotiations,” Habibi stated.

That helps explain why Lebanon has moved closer to the centre of Iran’s strategic calculations. Iran’s support for Hezbollah is a signal to allies and would-be partners: Tehran will not abandon you. Support for Hezbollah is tied not only to military considerations but also to credibility.

Like other regional and global powers, Iran relies not only on military capabilities but also on its reputation for standing by its allies. From this perspective, support for Hezbollah is about maintaining a regional network that policymakers consider essential to Iran’s deterrence posture.

Lebanon is more than a regional flashpoint. It is emerging as a test case for a broader Iranian effort to redefine the terms on which future negotiations with Washington will be conducted.

“The issue of Lebanon is not only related to Iran,” according to Farshad Shariat, a professor of political science at Imam Sadiq University in Tehran. “It concerns the broader Islamic world.” Developments in Lebanon, Shariat told Mondoweiss, are often viewed by Iranian political elites as part of a wider struggle over sovereignty, foreign intervention, and the future direction of the region.

Since it’s unlikely that Hezbollah will give up its war against Israel, one that the Lebanese government is incapable of stopping, Israel’s ongoing campaign is unlikely to end anytime soon. And so the Israeli war with Iran will continue in some form, regardless of whether Washington and Tehran stop fighting.

Disarmament was the purpose in theory of the November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah that the Iranian proxy violated at the beginning of the current war. But that task was left to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which proved they were not up to the job. The man in charge of the LAF, General Rodolphe Haykal, has been politically aligned with Hezbollah for years. Obviously, Israel is in no mood to trust its security to the promises of weak politicians in Beirut.

Hezbollah’s power rests with Lebanon’s Shia Muslim population, which before the 1980s was by far the poorest and most marginalized community in the state. That began to change when Imam Musa al-Sadr emerged as a prominent advocate for greater Shia political recognition and socio-economic development. He became one of the leading social and political figures within the Shia community, founding the Amal Movement, before his disappearance in Libya in 1978. 

In the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Tehran deployed operatives of the IRGC to Lebanon to establish Hezbollah amid the country’s civil war. Hezbollah and Amal emerged as the dominant representatives of the Shia community and political heavyweights in Lebanon. 

Hezbollah’s power rests not only on its military apparatus, but also in its ability to maintain extensive patronage networks throughout Lebanese institutions. Since the 1992 parliamentary elections, the Amal Movement and Hezbollah have largely commanded the 27 seats in the parliament reserved for Shia Muslims.

“There is Shia opposition, but we still do not see a real structured political opposition with a vision and a project,” Bashshar Haydar, professor of philosophy and the Mohammad Atallah chair of ethics at the American University of Beirut, told the news website This is Beirut. 

Amid escalating fighting with Israel, Hezbollah’s ability to mobilize its traditional support base may be weakening, Mona Fayad, added professor of psychology at the Lebanese University. The main obstacle facing the Shia opposition is the social and psychological legacy of Hezbollah’s decades-long dominance. This requires overcoming fear. Only then, she contends, can a sustainable Shia opposition take shape, one that can both challenge Hezbollah and offer a credible alternative to the system that has sustained it for decades.

While Hezbollah’s capacity to mobilize its base has visibly declined, those Shia who challenge the party remain vulnerable, reinforcing the need for institutional protection. Until that changes, Hezbollah will continue to rule southern Lebanon as an Iranian proxy.

 

Thinking The Unthinkable: What If Canada Breaks Up?

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

Canada, a decade after horrible mismanagement under the Trudeau Liberals, is in greater danger of internal dissolution than ever before, and U.S. President Donald Trump isn’t making things any better, either.

This fall, Alberta will be holding a “pre-referendum” on independence, and in Quebec, a forthcoming election again raises the possibility of a separatist Parti Québécois government in that province. These are no idle threats. Alberta’s grievances have simmered for decades. As for Quebec, it is already virtually a de facto nation.

So there’s no sense avoiding such hard questions. In the past century, we have seen states like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia disappear, creating almost 25 new countries. Somalia and Sudan have lost territories. East Timor wrested independence from Indonesia in 2002. Many other countries in the Global South deal with separatist movements and hang on for dear life. In Europe, Belgium has been virtually hollowed out as a unified state. Even the United Kingdom has robust sovereigntist movements in Scotland and Wales.

Canada is a large country of very disparate regions. It basically exists because it was the part of British North America that failed to join the United States, and managed to contain, for better or worse, French Canadian national desires within Quebec.

Look at a cartogram of the country. That’s a map where the shape of geographic areas are increased or decreased in proportion to their population. We see the area from Quebec City through to Windsor as a giant “island.” This narrow, densely populated strip accounts for roughly half of Canada’s entire population of about 41 million.

Pockets of population are scattered throughout the Maritimes, in the prairies, and British Columbia. The far north virtually disappears. In effect, Canada becomes an archipelago. The “empty” space between the populated areas of Ontario and Winnipeg effectively splits the country at that point.

Should Canada disintegrate, Quebec will obviously become independent. Everything in the province is called “national,” including the legislature. It refers to itself as “L’état du Québec.” On November 27, 2006, the House of Commons passed a motion officially recognizing that “the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.” No need to elaborate.

But what about the other provinces and territories? Out west, Alberta and Saskatchewan (as one unit), and British Columbia, could stand on their own as two sovereign entities. Those two prairie provinces could be combined into a country called “Buffalo,” which was a widely discussed proposal for a massive new western province in the early 20th century, combining the southern halves of present-day Alberta and Saskatchewan. British Columbia could incorporate Yukon, and Buffalo include the Northwest Territories.

 As for the rest of the country, should Canada collapse, the other provinces will have to make their own decisions for their futures. Newfoundland has a distinctive sense of nationhood and would make a go of it, but it would need to keep Labrador from Quebec – which has historic claims to it – from seizing it. (It’s why it expanded its name to “Newfoundland and Labrador” in 2001. To name is to claim.) Might that yet involve a war?

The Maritimes could make compacts of free association with the United States, either individually or as a federated Maritime state, though New Brunswick might end up partitioned, with Quebec incorporating the Acadian areas, leaving a rump jurisdiction as a stand-alone or in union with Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Nunavut could merge with an independent Greenland to create a northern Inuit nation.

What’s left? Ontario would, probably along with Manitoba, remain in the country called “Canada,” as one of at least five successor states, and perhaps more.

But let’s face it: already Alberta and British Columbia are already at loggerheads over pipelines, and so are Newfoundland and Quebec regarding hydroelectric dams in Labrador. Interprovincial trade remains mostly an idea. Perhaps the old idea among Quebec advocates of independence, “sovereignty-association,” which meant sovereignty for Quebec within an economic association or union with the rest of Canada, could be broadened to turn the entire country into a version of the European Union.

What of indigenous peoples? The First Nations are, maybe unwittingly, now being used by the Laurentian elites as a cat’s paw against Alberta. The same ideology can be targeted against any provincial “nationalism,” which to the woke crowd is considered “white supremacy,” even if it gains favour with “racialized” people. It’s a way of dampening genuine provincial democracy, at least outside Quebec; there, it won’t work, since the French Canadians in effect see themselves as sort of “indigenous,” at least against the rest of Canada.

The indigenous groups might gain some kind of “national-cultural autonomy” but would probably not attain any kind of separate territorial status within these new polities. They are too small in numbers for that. All these new entities, except perhaps the Ontario-Manitoba “Canada,” would become republics, starting from scratch, like the 1776 Thirteen Colonies in the U.S. They would not be successor states and would inherit no ties or treaties going back to the “Crown,” so all former treaty rights with indigenous entities would probably cease.

None of this is very pleasant to think about, but refusing to face such dire possibilities does no good and leaves people more unprepared for what may come.