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Arlington, VA—“The Iranization of Lebanon?” was the title of a Friday afternoon seminar at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a question to which the panelists responded with a resounding “yes.” As three panelists examined the growing influence of Iran in Lebanon, Chairman Yonah Alexander of the International Center for Terrorism Studies stated the importance of examining the issue in the greater context of the Middle East, urging all to “look at the forest and not just the trees.”

“There is nothing new under the sun,” Alexander further stated, elaborating that the question of who wins and who loses in Lebanon had remained unanswered for over a quarter of a century, although the key players had changed. According to him, a “balance of weakness” has long persisted among the factions warring for power in Lebanon, but with the rise of the Hezbollah, that has shifted to a balance of power benefiting Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s supporter, Iran.

Following Alexander’s opening remarks, Issam Saliba, a Middle East foreign law specialist from the Law Library of Congress, labeled Iran the “mentor and financier of Hezbollah” and argued that Iran’s patronage of Hezbollah has been part of a larger strategy of the Iranian government to become a regional great power.

Four factors contribute to the sustainability of the current regime in Tehran, Saliba said. The first two factors outline Iran’s ideological stance against the existence of Israel and its material support for anti-Israel groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, as a source of legitimacy that resonates among Arab states with anti-Israel beliefs.

“The removal of obstinate foes of Iran,” is the centerpiece of the Saliba’s third and fourth factors. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq removed from power the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, two adversaries whose absence left a political power vacuum. Saliba pointed to the Shi’i alignment between Iran and certain regions in Iraq as an indication that this void would be reclaimed by Iran.

“The question remains,” Saliba concluded, “how to limit Iran’s influence in the Middle East.” For him, a simple answer does not exist, but a pre-requisite does: the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, without which, Saliba argued, no one “can curb Iran.”

The second panelist, Nimrod Raphaeli of the Middle East Media Research Institute, focused his remarks on the religious link between Iran and Hezbollah, calling Hezbollah an Iranian creation intended to adhere to Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of a religious state lead by the velayat-i faqih. He boldly argued that Iran has made a “persistent, strategic, and deliberate effort” to “Iranize” Lebanon as part of a grand Iranian plan to secure both a Mediterranean and a Persian Gulf presence.

The final speaker, Avi Beker, professor in Georgetown University’s Government Department and former Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress, began his comments by evoking Fukuyama’s famous work “The End of History?”, and by asking a similarly provocative question: “Is this the end of the history of Lebanon?”

In response to this question, Beker proposed six outcomes of the rise Hezbollah that signal a major shift in the history of Lebanon: 1) the end of a tolerated Christian presence in the Middle East; 2) the end of Arab nationalism and its replacement by pan-Islamism; 3) the end of the “democratic experiment” in the Middle East; 4) the re-emergence of the Sunni-Shi’i clash within Islam; 5) the failure of the international community to confront the Lebanese crisis; and 6) the failure of the US to do the same.

Beker compared the IAEA’s failure to ensure Iran’s compliance with nuclear protocols with the international community’s continuing failure to stop Iran’s intervention in Lebanon. He argued that if international organizations and the United States fail to resolve the crisis in Lebanon, their failure will be an Iranian success and will signal to Iranian leaders that they may act with relative impunity.

Saliba and Raphaeli agreed, during the question and answer session, that Iran will seek a weak, unstable Iraq in order to assert its own growing influence in Shi’i majority areas and in the Iran-Iraq border regions.

Raphaeli added that at the heart of Iran’s involvement with Hezbollah is its goal to surround and target Israel in the Mediterranean region. Beker continued by predicting that Iran will continue to seek “veto power” over prominent issues in the Middle East much in the same way that Hezbollah exerts veto power in Lebanon.

Alexander referenced his opening remarks as he brought the session to a close and repeated that the “Iranization” of Lebanon has implications not only in the Middle East but throughout the world. The “long arm of Iran is all over the place,” he said.

But when it comes to the future, he concluded, “Whether it’s the end of history or nothing new under the sun, the only certainty is that there is uncertainty.”