US Plot A Middle East ‘Coup’ To Bail Out Netanyahu!

Right, so US backed coups, the interference in other nations electoral cycle’s in order to bring about a desired result. It’s what the US like to accuse the likes of Vladimir Putin of isn’t it? Russian interference in western democracies and all of that, but the US is far from innocent in this regard. The Ukrainian coup in 2014, which in no small part has driven the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia is one alleged example, Putin notably accusing the US of involvement there, but whether you buy that notion or not, coups with US involvement I’ve discovered this morning literally have their own Wikipedia page, there have been so many instances, most recently the attempt to subvert the election results in Venezuela and the successful deposition of socialist Evo Morales in Bolivia.
Well now the US sees an opportunity to once again interfere in the Middle East, as it has in previous years such as in Syria and very nearly caused civil war in Palestine back in 2007, when it encouraged the Fateh faction of the Palestinian National Authority to attempt to depose the Hams Prime Minister of Gaza, at that point a certain Ismail Haniyeh, the same man assassinated in Tehran in July, which partly prompted Iran’s most recent airstrike on Israel.
But in a bid to yet again do despotic Benjamin Netanyahu a favour and give Iran a headache, the US is turning it’s sights on Lebanon.
Right, so the US planning a coup on another country well I never! As I said in my intro there have been so many now, it literally has it’s own Wikipedia entry, so the US have a brass neck to ever accuse other nations of planning coups or to interfere in the electoral process of another country, but they’ve now hit upon the idea of getting a puppet President installed in Lebanon thanks to that government ongoing political disarray, not least exacerbated by the fact they believe Hezbollah are scattered after Israeli rocket attacks, including the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and those pager attacks they committed taking out other parts of the Hezbollah leadership. That as Israel have learnt to their cost, hasn’t necessarily translated down to the front line of course, and with Hezbollah a political party in Lebanon with 13 seats in the Lebanese legislature, it might not be true there either.
Now as I covered the other day in a video, the Lebanese foreign minister Abdallah Rashid Bou Habib has been in the US and he dropped a bombshell during a televised interview on PBS with Christiane Amanpour, that the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had agreed to a 21 day ceasefire, which Lebanon had been told Israel had agreed to, by the US and France who had apparently negotiated this deal, only for Israel to then make a mockery of it’s so called allies by launching their successful assassination attempt of Nasrallah almost immediately afterwards. If I was Lebanon therefore, I wouldn’t care too much about what the US was saying to me, but in talks Bou Habib had with his US counterpart, the push was on that Lebanon elect a new president.
Now Lebanon have been without a president at all since 2022. The last president was Michel Aoun, who you might have thought could have just remained in post until a successor was elected if there was a problem with this, but Lebanon’s constitution forbids any president from serving two consecutive terms. Aoun could return later after somebody else had a go, but he is forbidden from doing so concurrently, therefore on the eve of the end of his tenure, he left his post and went home and the two years on Lebanon still has no president.
It's not the first time this has happened though, Lebanon had the same problem in 2014, they couldn’t pick a new president, so the post remained vacant until late 2016, when Aoun took up the post. There’s no such thing as an interim or caretaker president. It’s a constitutional issue the country needs to deal with really, though they seem to get on fine despite it, but it also isn’t for anyone else to tell them how to do it, though enter the US to damn well try.
Lebanon pick their president from amongst their current crop of elected representatives. A two thirds majority is required and if they don’t get it, they try again and if they still don’t get it, the post remains vacant until such time as somebody does. This might seem a bit odd you imagine the head of the lead party would be President or some such, but it doesn’t work like that. Lebanon has many political parties, which often don’t really consist of anything more than negotiated electoral lists, no one party has ever won more than 12.5% of the parliamentary seats and no coalition in Lebanon’s history until 2005 had secured more than a third of seats, so minority coalition governments are the norm and therefore presidents get elected from amongst parliament as a whole.
Now Axios claim that one of the sticking points for electing a replacement President to Michel Aoun has been Hassan Nasrallah. He was solidly behind a candidate called Suleiman Frangieh, but given the nature of the Lebanese parliament and Hezbollah’s representation within it, it’s very hard to see how Nasrallah alone could stymie the election of a new president on his own. Nevertheless, the narrative now is that with him gone and the US chatter to the Lebanese delegation present, Lebanon should elect a new President now and are applying pressure to force this point.
For example, the ongoing exchange of fire between Lebanon and Israel that had been going on since right after Israel’s invasion of Gaza following the night of October 7th had reached such a point that the US attempted to bring forward a diplomatic solution to end the conflict before it got worse. This happened back in June. It failed, it was always going to when the US kept taking the position of if you go to war fully we’re on Israel’s side.
Well now war is all but now happening, the formal announcement is all we’re basically missing here, Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister – because they can have one of those – Najib Mikati has apparently in the last few days, since the assassination of Nasrallah, apparently asked Joe Biden’s adviser Amos Hochstein that he wanted to move forward with the diplomatic solution now, only to be told that is now off the table, because matters on the ground have changed.
What has changed? Things have got worse, a diplomatic solution would still be the answer anyone with a right mind would work towards, but not now so for the US it seems, as opportunity presents itself instead.
Hochstein has told Mikati that his priority now should be the election of a new President and that this election actually should precedence over any diplomatic solution. The relevant paragraph from the Axios coverage of this story reading:
‘The U.S. officials said the first priority is electing a Lebanese president, then reaching a diplomatic solution to the conflict at the Israeli-Lebanese border based on a UN resolution that was adopted after the 2006 war in Lebanon but never fully implemented, and then appointing a new Lebanese prime minister.’
That resolution is of course UN Resolution 1701, which called for a permanent ceasefire and a buffer zone following the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, the wording of the resolution itself calling for ‘the immediate cessation by Hezbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations” in Lebanon.’
So electing a new president takes precedence over peace now? Bonkers. Also made clear to Lebanon is the fact that Lebanon should elect a president who represents the majority of Lebanese and who is not aligned with one team against another, such is the factional nature of the Lebanese parliament.
With Hezbollah having in the eyes of the US administration having been hobbled through the loss of Nasrallah, they think they can get someone suitable in post, and of course any diplomatic solution would tacitly hinge on their sort, the right sort, being elected, to my mind the inference there is pretty clear. But there is a massive, glaring problem with all of this, and with the US having very little control over Netanyahu anymore it seems, though clearly that doesn’t stop them arming him, it’s very difficult to see how this could be overcome.
Lebanon is being pummelled, a million people have been displaced, it’s a good job they don’t have to vote, but it’s very difficult to imagine how their representatives in the Lebanese parliament can vote through a presidency when they have their interests to represent and this is being foisted on them as a priority by a foreign government who if push comes to shove, will side with their enemies in Israel any day of the week over them.
If Hezbollah’s choice was Suleiman Frangieh, his opponent, who also narrowly led in the last round of voting, is a guy much more US centric on the face of it, called Jihad Azour.
Azour is an economist, worked in the private sector in consultancies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and McKinsey & Company, has interests in venture capital, has been an advisor to the International Monetary Fund, has taught economics at the American University of Beirut and well after all that and there’s even more it’s not hard to see why the US might heavily favour this guy anyway, these are very westernised capitalist entities that he’s been involved with.
The elephant in the room though, is still Israel. Would they stop trying to instigate a wider war? Would Lebanon prove to be at risk of civil war again, if an ostensibly capitalist minded western friendly president came in, a US poodle per se, rather than someone more independently minded? I see no reason for Lebanon to trust the US here because they are unequivocally on Israel’s side. All of this pressure the US is putting on Lebanon is in Israel’s interest not theirs, though equally, without a president it does leave the Lebanese government someone weakened, so which way will they go, or will they even go down the road of holding such a vote with so many greater concerns as the attacks from Israel continue? It’s one to watch. An even bigger question for me though is that if the US can spend so much time plotting to take down or replace political leaders in the Middle East, putting their legislatures under pressure to do so, why aren’t you starting with Knesset and Benjamin Netanyahu? Makes much more sense to me!
Meanwhile, for more details on that explosive revelation from Lebanon’s foreign minister regarding that 21 day ceasefire which they had agreed to, which Hasan Nasrallah had agreed to and which Netanyahu allegedly broke his word on, if he ever really agreed to such a ceasefire anyway, I have my doubts, which would mean another fast one pulled on Lebanon by the US, check out this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.