On: 'Lebanon is being held hostage to Hezbollah acting at Iran's behest'

April 23rd, 1805

The news from the Mediterranean confirms a principle I have long observed in the affairs of nations: that a people cannot be free when their sovereignty is mortgaged to a foreign power. This Hezbollah, a faction armed and directed by Persia, presumes to draw an entire nation into a war not of its own choosing. The parallel is too clear to ignore. It is the very grievance we cataloged against George III - “He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us” - but here, the abdication is from within. A government that cannot, or will not, restrain a private army within its borders is no government at all; it is a captive.

The specific, accumulating injuries are plain: the decision for war made not in the halls of the Lebanese republic, but in Tehran; the ruin of Lebanese towns and livelihoods for a cause that is not Lebanon’s own; the reduction of a people’s destiny to a mere instrument in another’s strategic design. This is not self-government. It is the negation of the social compact. When a single faction, owing its allegiance to a distant despotism, can command the fate of a nation, then the consent of the governed is a fiction. The Lebanese are told they live in a republic, while a state within the state holds the actual powers of war and peace.

I see in this the perennial struggle between the principle of national self-determination and the reality of foreign domination. The architecture of a free society requires that the will of the whole people, through their constituted representatives, direct its course. To have that will supplanted by a cabal acting at the behest of a foreign crown is to live under a most insidious form of tyranny. It is a lesson written in the blood of every conflict: liberty cannot survive where the sword is answerable to any master but the law. The people of Lebanon are, in effect, taxed without representation - not in coin, but in the far dearer currency of their sons’ lives and their country’s ashes.