Geagea sees Lebanon's moment to defang Hezbollah

“There is no Hezbollah and Iran — there’s just Iran,” Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea has said in an interview with U.S. news portal POLITICO, adding that “for Tehran, there are no borders between Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, no frontiers.”

Geagea argued that Lebanon is now being presented with a “prime opportunity” to “free itself from Tehran’s stultifying grip,” POLITICO said.

“That’s a potentially dangerous position,” it added.

If Lebanon “gets it right this time,” Geagea hopes “Hezbollah won’t have any choice but to disarm” and disband its forces, if parliament orders it to do so. He also believes Lebanon’s Shiites “bit by bit will realize that whatever Hezbollah told them in the past was not true and that Hezbollah led them to the catastrophe they’re in.”

Asked whether that means “Israel was doing Lebanon a favor by attacking Hezbollah,” Geagea said: “Being Lebanese, I cannot approve of any attack on Lebanon.” But the war’s “side-effects are something else,” he conceded. “The Israelis have their priorities. This is their business. We have our business.”

This time, Lebanon must be serious about implementing United Nations Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, he argued.

“We have been living for the past 20, 30, 40 years without a real state in Lebanon. All the strategic decisions for Lebanon have been made outside the country,” Geagea lamented. Change has to come “for our own sake, not for America’s, nor for Israel’s,” he added.

Politicians and parties should stop trying to square the circle of the old sectarian politics. “We need a clear path because it is really unacceptable for a country like Lebanon to endure more than 35 years living in a bubble of lies,” he said.

The first step is to agree a president -- the presidency has been vacant for more than two years because of political wrangling and Hezbollah vetoes. Whoever is chosen must be someone who is serious about driving reform, Geagea said. General Joseph Aoun, commander-in-chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces, was one candidate who fitted the profile, Geagea said — but he left open the possibility of other names, too.

Geagea acknowledged he didn’t have a detailed road-map in mind.

“If you have a thousand problems, you can’t try to solve them all at the same time. You have to go step by step, then try to gather momentum. This is what we are trying to do. I would be lying if I told you I know all the steps. No, but I know the direction,” he said.