Tomb of Imad Mughniyeh and Mustafa Badreddine in Beirut, Lebanon.
Every single foreign intervention has made the Middle East reconfigure itself against the interventionists. It has harshly counter-attacked, creating the opposite of the insurgents' desired effect. When we look at recent history (the last four decades since the PLO was expelled from Lebanon), the list is cataclysmic.
We find the formation of Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, the ousting of the Taliban regime, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Ghedaffi, the attempt to topple the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the attempt to divide Iraq, and the war on Yemen. The list bears witness to the unbelievable resources brought to bear by the US, Israel, Europe and their Middle Eastern allies in attempts at "regime change",
and their total failure at creating a "new Middle East".
In fact, they have managed instead to create generations of powerful non-state actors (or quasi-state actors).
They strengthened Iran's influence in the Middle East and brought Russia back into the international arena after the lull of Perestroika. But they have wrought huge destruction,
completely destroying the basic infrastructure of many countries and severely regressing this part of the world, creating more migration, misery, lack of services, trauma -
and anger toward the west. A huge amount of money has been paid by Middle Eastern countries, mainly at the request of and with the agreement of the US, debilitating Middle Eastern inhabitants and governments with one clear result: a poorer, unstable region -
and hostile to the West.
Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (successful in its objective to remove the "Palestinian Liberation Organisation" (PLO) a state within a state) helped give birth to an organised irregular army called Hezbollah, the "party of God". Lebanon was under the control of the Christian Maronites on one hand and the Palestinians on the other. The PLO and other minor Palestinian groups had attacked Israel sporadically from South Lebanon with blind soviet-made rockets (Katyusha) or even with a timer linked to small calibre blind-rockets abandoned in an olive-grove or orange field in the south of Lebanon, directed and launched in the direction of Israel.
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