The advisor to the Iranian Supreme Leader, Dr. Ali Velayati, went to extreme lengths in trivializing the lives of Lebanese people. He borrowed from religious text books to narrowly tailor his conception of the situation to his ideological priorities, disregarding the lived experience of the Lebanese. For him, bread and water are not merely no longer the only things Lebanese need to sustain themselves, they now come second to a more basic need: weapons. Elevating armament over bread and water, he presented them as the most basic need for survival.
Velayati’s approach set new standards for the Lebanese, mapping out their relationship to these weapons. They are unequivocally more important than bread and water, and he adds, the key to a dignified life. If bread and water are fundamental biological needs for individuals, the community, the tribe, and the state, weapons are as well. They are not only an existential need when the country is facing an immediate threat, and the state is not the only actor that must possess them. He is seemingly assigning roles: the state must provide its citizens with their basic needs, and a certain group must ensure its own needs. Indeed, he goes further. He rejects the notion that these are equal needs, present the arms and those who possess them above bread, water, and those who need them.
When the Supreme Leader’s advisor presents Hezbollah’s weapons as the ultimate existential need of the Lebanese, stressing that the instruments of power are more essential than the instruments of life, he is elevating to the essence of life. The crux of his message and the vision he seeks to impose on the Lebanese is: you have your biological needs, and we have our political needs; the weapons (what remains of them) are needed to safeguard our influence, which takes priority over bread and water; if there can only be or the other, deprivation, hunger and thirst and poverty the natural choice.
He also lays out another conceptual shift: weapons and the force using them is above the state, and militants are above citizens. This discourse speaks to a particular community’s collective consciousness, convincing it that sacrificing bread and water for arms ensures security and dignity. It is as if the advisor has not heard of the German strategic theorist Clausewitz. “An army marches on its stomachs,” as he tells us; how can the hungry fight? And how will the community endure, and how will the state survive?
At this extremely critical moment in Lebanese history- the Israeli enemy threatening military action that could devastate its demography and geography, sparing neither the state nor its people, and as envoys carry alarming warnings that an imminent war is about to wreak havoc on Lebanon in general, and the Shiite community in particular- the Supreme Leader’s advisor presented this vision for Lebanon, its state, and its people. He seeks to impose new existential priorities on the Lebanese, prioritizing his regime’s project over the needs of society. He conceived of the state as a battlefield and governed by weapons.
Dear esteemed Advisor (whose ideological priorities are above priorities of life) can your entire military and strategic arsenal, with its many branches, resolve the water crisis in the capital, Tehran? Would it not have been more prudent to allocate the funds you squandered on developing your nuclear program (which failed to you when your enemy, who is also our enemy, struck you) to secure drinking water; it would have been enough for all Iranians! Have some fear of God, for our sake and yours; able bodies are a prerequisite for able homelands. Peace.
