Last Lines of Defence

Saddam Hussein was better than what has replaced him. That is simply undeniable. In any case, he would probably have been dead by now.

Nor was any of what has happened since his removal unpredictable at the time. It was predicted by everyone outside the weird, cult-like political-media bubble around Tony Blair.

Moreover, our strategic interest was to keep Saddam in place.

He kept a lid on everything from what is now IS, to the Peshmerga (internationally classified as terrorists next door in NATO Turkey), to the forces that eventually accrued to al-Maliki.

And he balanced Iran, which balanced him while keeping the lid on assorted elements from the PMOI-MEK to Jundullah. As Iran still does where lid-keeping is concerned.

Iran is now our active ally against the IS that we have created. Both our direct ally and, through Hezbollah, our ally by proxy. And there is is Assad, the Protector of Holy Mother Church as surely as Saddam was. 

Welcome to the new Coalition of the Willing.

That is the context in which to understand Hezbollah's killing of Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi as he was preparing to launch IS attacks into Lebanon from his base in Syria.

There are two Hezbollah Cabinet Ministers in Lebanon, under a President who has to be a Maronite Christian and a Prime Minister who has to be a Sunni Muslim.

A party of government killed a foreign terrorist operative who was about to attack the country governed by that party.

Mercifully, we tend not to go in for parties with armed wings over here, or at not least on this side of the Irish Sea.

But honestly, how different was this from if the SAS had taken him out? Except that Lebanon is already under direct attack from IS.

We should view this as Allied action. We managed that for the Tsar. We managed it for Stalin and Mao. We managed it for Saddam, once. We managed it for Assad the Elder. We managed it for Gaddafi, briefly.

Iran, Hezbollah and Assad the Younger should be a doddle.

The Christian-Muslim political split in Lebanon, like Maronites who define themselves as Phoenicians rather than as Arabs, is all very last century, and is kept going by the sort of Americans and Australians, even in the same cities, who kept the Irish Troubles going long after almost everyone in Ireland would otherwise have given them up.

In Lebanon, it is now mostly about Salafism and Saudi domination, as well as opposition to Zionism of course, with Catholic and Orthodox churches publicly praying for Hezbollah as "the brothers in the South" and "our last line of defence", and with Christian and even some Sunni parties cheerfully sitting in coalition with it, running the country on a day-to-day basis.

Insofar as Israel is at war with Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, then she is now at war on the same side as IS. If IS is now our enemy, then the IDF is now a body of our enemy combatants, and British Citizens in it are guilty of treason.