Burn of the Day

We *are* trying to manipulate the market on a Lebanese export.

Terrorists.

We aim to create as much scarcity of that product as possible 📉

So fight it in Israel and leave Lebanon out of it!

I feel personally taken aback by some of the comments here. Have you ever set foot in Lebanon?

Firstly it’s not “third world” as implied in Wilfred Riley’s tweet. Up until the civil war broke out in 1975, it was a thriving and prosperous nation. The “Paris” of the Middle East. It has had the misfortune of its geographical location and it has been used as a toilet for every neighbouring nation including Iran-created terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and including Israel who has not always acted in the best interest of its neighbour. Israel only cares about Israel. Everything else is collateral damage.

Look at the geographical location of Lebanon and its geographical make-up and understand why it is the way it is today. Yes, it’s resources have been taken advantage of during the last half of a century so who is kidding who. The middle class are even fearful for tomorrow. You and I can sit in behind our keyboards unaffected by the looming thought of war.

Yet, despite the misfortune of war that its people have endured, there are tourists (Lebanese and not Lebanese) going there right now to holiday and visit because it still is the jewel in the Middle East.

Our Lord walked in Lebanon.

Lebanon has given us more Saints per capita than most Western Nations. And its diaspora around the world have built more Church communities and kept the faith alive when the west have shamefully abandoned theirs. Including in the US and including Australia and everywhere else they have immigrated.

Lebanon is NOT Hezbollah. It is where my mother and father were born. It is where I still have family. It is a place I have had the fortune to visit twice. I hope to take my children there one day. Pray for Peace in Lebanon – the people there deserve your prayers.

I rarely disagree with you Don.

*As for Lebanon, the days when the Christian minority had much say as to what happens in that country is in the past.*

No it will change, as all things do. The Lebanese constitution states that President must be a Maronite Christian. Unfortunately Michel Aoun the current President has formed an alliance with Hezbollah and become very wealthy in the process. It’s a complicated saga, but it stems from Christian faction failing to see eye to eye. Much like what happens in Western nations.

Lebanese Christians have always had the support of expatriates who number far greater than the population there and they continually send money to family there to ensure that. They also own generational land in the North. When unrest occurs in Beirut they flee to the North.

I would side with Israel over a Muslim population any day of the week and in a heartbeat. I would not side with Israel over a Christian population. Any Christian population. Ever. At any cost.

I don’t support what your current US administration is doing. It’s weak. I know Israel can defend itself in a more targeted manner with little collateral damage to its neighbour. But it would rather make a big statement which probably won’t have any outcome for the October 30 victims.

When Trump gets in he’ll put his house back in order. And nuke the living daylights out of Iran. God-willing.

Firstly it’s not “third world” as implied in Wilfred Riley’s tweet. Up until the civil war broke out in 1975, it was a thriving and prosperous nation. The “Paris” of the Middle East. 
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The Maddison Project has compiled some useful data on Lebanon’s historical GDP per capita, which you can compare with that of the United States. Here are the ratios.
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1950-1974: 0.32 (median of 25 observations)
1975-1990: 0.15
1991-2005: 0.16
2006-2018: 0.24
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Even during it’s salad says, its comparative affluence made it a middle income country. In our own time, similarly situated countries would be Turkey, the Balkan states, and a scrum of Latin American countries (though Latin America suffers high crime rates you don’t see elsewhere, which diminishes quality of life).
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 It has had the misfortune of its geographical location and it has been used as a toilet for every neighbouring nation including Iran-created terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and including Israel who has not always acted in the best interest of its neighbour.
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There is nothing wrong with its geographical location. It has the most agreeable set of biomes in the Arab world. Its problem has been that social fragmentation begat political weakness, rendering it readily penetrable. They were buffalo’d by the other states into accepting on their soil the presence of paramilitaries under the command of Yasser Arafat, George Habash, and other gang bosses. Arafat et al used Lebanese bases to attack Israel, and Israel retaliated. The Lebanese government’s efforts to constrain these characters generated intramural political disputes in Lebanon, as Sunni interest thought the Lebanese military ought to be attacking Israel. Arafat et al elected to intervene in intramural disputes between Lebanese political factions, as did Syria (and, after a time, Israel).
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People who babble about natural resources as generators of political action never bother to enumerate the contribution resources in general make to economic well-being, much less calculate the comparative benefit of seeking one source over another. In case of a war of general mobilization which may make crucial resources physically unavailable, you might be motivated to seize resources. We haven’t been in a state of general mobilization since 1945. You’re going to have to scrounge for circumstances in which you could make a business case for militarily seizing natural resources. The closest you come to one is Robert W. Tucker’s argument (published in 1975) for conquering the segment of the Arabian peninsula which abuts the Persian Gulf. NB, by 1985, the development of oil exploration and trade outside the Gulf had ruined the ability of the OPEC countries to set prices, so even Tucker’s argument was discredited in retrospect.
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Strange as it may seem to you, non-pathological sovereign countries care about their own well-being before that of anyone else and have a political elite with a vigorous sense of the common interest. (The contemporary occident, especially the EU, show you what happens when the political class stops caring about the welfare of the vernacular population). Hezbollah, quite gratuitously, attacks Israel. Hezbollah wishes to avoid being attacked by Israel, they can turn their attention elsewhere.
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There’s a residual Christian population in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, but for the most part the country’s Christians live farther north and always have. Hezbollah is drawn from the Shi’ite population, who live in the south.

When you’ve learned the distinction between ‘farther north’ and ‘far north’ get back go me. The Christian population has always been concentrated in Mount Lebanon, the area around Zahle, and the eastern half of greater Beirut. These are not the areas where Hezbollah is in charge.
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Assassinations are manifestations of disorder. as is political violence generally. The political order from 1943 to 1975 was regulated by a compact agreed to by bosses within the various confessions. It was a jerry-rigged affair whose stability was under threat every few years and it eventually collapsed. They rigged up another such compact after 1990. The Lebanese state has never been a vigorous affair.
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The area might have been better off if Britain and France had sorted the territory of the Fertile Crescent differently between 1918 and 1939, dividing the Mesopotamian territory into three states, setting up a fourth state in the steppes of the Levantine interior, and setting up a series of cantons on the coast sorted by confession, attaching the Sunni canton to the interior state and maintaining the others (Alawite, Christian, Shi’ite, and Jewish) as long-term dependencies of France or Britain. The thing is, you only know the pitfalls of the path you take.