From Russia With Love

I do not like the international trade in arms, and this post should be read in that light. Russia's latest deal with Syria is at least not the Syrian purchase of weapons from Russian companies out of Russian taxpayer aid, which is how American arms deals with Israel work. Russia is doing this deal with a country in which there are Christian-majority provinces, and Christian festivals as public holidays, but which remains in a formal state of war with a country founded on the bloody mass eviction of Christians.

And if some of these armaments find their way into the hands of Hezbollah, well, if Hezbollah ever seriously believed in velayat-e faqih as the basis of the state, then it long ago ceased to do so, at least if the exercise of that guardianship was to be confined in practice to Shi'ite or even to Muslim clerics and scholars, and instead more than accepted that Lebanon was Lebanon, unlike the adversary against which it is in many ways both the first and the last line of Lebanon's defence. Of course Russia, pre-eminent among the Slavs in their historic role as the gatekeepers of Christendom, would wish to arm Syria, and would not be too nonplussed, to say the very least, if some of those arms ended up on that first and last line of defence.

Therefore, Hezbollah has recently been brought to power, entirely peacefully and constitutionally, as part of a coalition engineered by, and largely made up of, Maronites and Armenians, and headed, as the Constitution requires, by a Sunni. Rather a lot has changed since the deal that the Christians would give up identification with Europe, especially France, if the Muslims gave up all hope of union with Syria. The old ties to France and to Syria now match and mirror each other, while the old ties to Syria now bring with them new ties to Iran. Those should be matched and mirrored by new ties to Britain.

And if with Syria comes Russia, then with Britain why not the new Egypt, founded on the urgently necessary, perfectly plausible, and ideally British-brokered deal between the Copts and the British-created, still Anglophile, basically socialistic Muslim Brotherhood, a potential guardian of the Sunni interest in Lebanon?