US Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack continued on his rather confusing visit to Lebanon, making it even more difficult to pin down exactly what the US position on the country is at any given time with a combination of threats and reassurances.
Barrack met with President Aoun and Prime Minister Salam yesterday, and notably dismissed the very idea of trying to get Israel to stop attacking Lebanon on a daily basis, saying the US has “no business” doing so. In a post-meeting interview, he also insisted the US demand for Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah didn’t come with any associated threats, despite having publicly made such threats himself a little over a week prior.
It seems the threats were even more recent than that, as media reports now cite sources as saying Barrack made threats against Lebanon at the very meeting he followed up with a press conference insisting there were no threats. He threatened to withdraw the entire Lebanon file if the cabinet doesn’t unanimously agree to a specific timetable to fully disarming Hezbollah.
US Ambassador to Turkey Thomas Barrack | Image from Reuters
Barrack reported told Aoun and Salam that the demand was open for discussion and the US position was “irreversible,” which naturally meant that not long after he met with Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri and seemingly reversed the whole position again.
Barrack met with reporters following the Berri talk and declared that no matter what the US “is never gonna abandon Lebanon,” despite the threat to withdraw the file from just 24 hours prior was effectively that they would abandon Lebanon if they don’t capitulate to US demands.
Barrack followed this assurance up by telling reporters that “you should all be hopeful” and that “everything is gonna be okay.” There has yet to be a report about what actually was said behind closed doors with Berri, though given the recent history, there’s plenty of reason to doubt Barrack’s own run-down of the bright future.
Barrack has been doing this for awhile, particularly with Lebanon, since taking the Turkey ambassadorship in May and also being given the effective run of the administration’s Syria and Lebanon policies.
In June he demanded the Hezbollah disarmament by November, though when the Lebanese government responded with a rejection in early July, he declared himself to be “unbelievably satisfied” at the response, then suggested Lebanon might just be taken over outright by Israel and Syria for not giving in to US demands.
And at the same time he insisted the US could not and should not get Israel to stop attacking Lebanon, he was publicly criticizing Israel for attacking Syria, declaring the ongoing attacks there “intolerable.”
Israel has yet to chime in on all this, but has continued to attack both nations with no signs it is contemplating halting. On Monday, they attacked and killed one person in Bint Jbeil, in southern Lebanon, and in keeping with IDF’s own narrative, declared that person was an important figure in Hezbollah’s Radwan Force, with no evidence provided that this was actually the case.
Israel effectively always declares anyone they kill in attacks on Lebanon as a key Hezbollah figure, and a disproportionate number of those are with the Radwan Force, a relatively small elite force of the group. Since the ceasefire went into effect last November, Israel has carried out thousands of strikes on Lebanon, killing hundreds of people.
