US envoy Tom Barrack, who last week promised that his visit to Lebanon would be his last and that the US was demanding the country enter negotiations with Israel, is back to railing against the Lebanese officials, calling Lebanon a “failed state” over the weekend at a summit in Bahrain.
This comes amid ongoing Lebanese efforts to try to enter negotiations with Israel, which Barrack informed Lebanon just a week prior that Israel has rejected out of hand, and amid ongoing Israeli threats to escalate their ongoing attacks on Lebanon.
Israeli media is suggesting that the threatened escalation, and indeed the actual escalation, are being done in part to try to pressure the Lebanese into negotiations. This appears to fly in the face of the reality that Lebanon has been calling for those negotiations for weeks and has been told Israel refuses.
US Ambassador to Turkey Thomas Barrack | Image from Reuters
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun reiterated over the weekend that Lebanon is fully ready to negotiate with Israel, saying that any talks require “mutual willingness,” which Israeli escalations underscore is simply not the case.
Barrack has suggested the US might press Israel to enter into the talks, but he did so amid denunciations of Lebanon and saying that the US would “support its ally” if it enters into another war with Lebanon.
Barrack went on to make multiple false claims about Lebanon, claiming the nation has no electricity and no running water, both of which Lebanon plainly has, and that “the state is Hezbollah,” which contradicts the reality that Hezbollah is an opposition party within Lebanon, and certainly not “the state.”
This is part of the usual Barrack bellicosity and threats toward Lebanon, which seems to be based on an imagined situation of what the country is actually like, which is proving a growing embarrassment for the United States, who finds their envoy telling reporters that they are “animalistic” for asking questions he doesn’t want to answer, and seemingly threatens the outright destruction of Lebanon several times of month of late.
In the end, the Barrack threat to drop the Lebanese file entirely and stop visiting Beirut could be a blessing in disguise, as his visits have done nothing but raise further tensions in the region and reiterate that the US has no intention of doing anything with respect to Lebanon that Israeli hawks wouldn’t approve of.
