Mullah Trumps Eagle

The Lebanese Prime Minister might have met the American President, but don’t be too happy, Iran is where the real power has moved

Nothing cheered up the March 14 supporters more than the sight of their champion Mr. Seniora shoulder to shoulder with the man who’s supposed to be the world’s most powerful. The pictures of the smiling men getting all chummy with each other were gleefully posted in Almustaqbal’s and Annahar’s front pages this morning.

Yet with all the swagger, the pomp and the work launches in the oval office, the real power in the region is moving to Tehran, where a Hezbollah delegation sneaked with much less fanfare to “congratulate” the Iranians for their new Nuclear prowess.

This letter by Arnold Pedowitz to the New York Times explains very well the American predicament with Iran:

President Bush should be held responsible for Iran’s nuclear threat. He recklessly attacked Iraq with no exit strategy [..] In doing so, President Bush abused the moral imperative, wasted our fiscal and human resources, embittered the Arab world and squandered this country’s limited tolerance for war. Now, when confronted with a true threat, we have been rendered powerless.

The key word here would be powerless. Iran has played the game right. It surprised the world with enriching Uranium and, by raising the stakes and consolidating its alliances, has being playing the brinkmanship game with much more skill than the Americans.

The sad thing is the implication of such power shift on Lebanon. When a UN diplomat asks Syria to “establish embassies and delineate the border between Syria and Lebanon”, the now-smug Iranian-backed Hezbollah can feel free to publicly denounce him as “serving Israel’s agenda”.