Regarding the Lebanese–Israeli negotiations, which have not yet begun and whose ambiguities still far outweigh what is clear, Hezbollah, along with its supporters and allies, has been waging a broad campaign of slander. Since these polemicists anchor their positions in specific doctrines and political figures, it is useful to revisit episodes from the histories of those schools and leaders to shed light on their contradictions and double standards.
Khomeini has often been associated with an uncompromising, principled stance that does not bargain over what it considers right. Yet just months after leading an uprising, during which he unleashed a torrent of insults against the United States, he sent a message to the US government through Professor Kamarai, a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence at the University of Tehran. According to a report issued by the Central Intelligence Agency, Khomeini claimed in that message that he was not hostile to American interests in Iran. On the contrary, he indicated that he believed an American presence was necessary to balance Soviet, and perhaps British, influence.
Fifteen years later, from exile in France, he sent another message to the American administration, seeking to convince it that change in Iran would not impede US access to Iranian oil and asking it to use its influence to prevent the army from staging a coup.
At the time, there was speculation that, preoccupied with the Cold War, the United States had provided some assistance to Khomeini to keep out the Tudeh (communist) Party and, by extension, Soviet influence.
What is known to have occurred, and is not mere speculation, is the scandal that came to be known as the Iran-Contra Affair, exposed in 1986. This involved an illegal covert operation to fund the Nicaraguan Contras’ war against the Sandinistas through arms sales to Iran. Israel acted as an intermediary and partner. It appears that Tel Aviv was less hostile to Khomeini’s regime than both were to the Iraqi regime. Accordingly, it supplied Tehran with American-made missiles and spare parts and helped open and expand secret channels of communication between the United States and Iran.
As for the nationalist radicals, they too, in all their diversity, have a history of “dancing with the devil.” In 1967, Gamal Abdel Nasser accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which called for an end to the state of war, recognition of the sovereignty of all states in the region, and respect for their right to live in peace. Three years later, he agreed to the plan proposed by US Secretary of State William P. Rogers, an American framework for implementing the resolution that called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces in exchange for ending the state of war and mutual recognition.
More recently, three audio recordings surfaced in which Nasser expressed a desire to end the cycle of wars. The most notable is a conversation with Muammar Gaddafi. In it, the Egyptian leader mocked the notion of the “full liberation of Palestine,” suggesting instead that realistic solutions be limited to recovering the territories occupied in 1967. More broadly, the recordings affirm that Nasser had been seeking an end to perpetual conflict.
After his death, Nasser’s deputy and partner since the 1952 coup, Anwar al-Sadat, fought the October 1973 war to “set the peace process in motion,” a trajectory that later culminated in the Camp David Accords.
For his part, Saddam Hussein also contributed his share of what could be described as “treachery.” To cut off Iranian support for the Kurdish uprising, he granted the Shah of Iran, through the Algiers Agreement in 1975, half of the Shatt al-Arab. He also ended his support for Iranian opposition figures and expelled Khomeini from Najaf.
After the Iranian Revolution and the escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran following the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, Saddam presented himself to Washington as the ideal candidate to fill the role of America’s man in the Gulf after it had been vacated by the Shah. He portrayed Iraq as a barrier against Khomeini’s revolution that would serve Western interests. Diplomatic relations between the United States and Iraq were indeed restored in 1984. Saddam famously met twice with Donald Rumsfeld, then a special envoy for President Ronald Reagan, and Iraq received intelligence support and economic facilitation from the United States during its war with Iran.
As for Saddam’s “half-brother” in Baathism, Hafez al-Assad, following the 1974 disengagement agreement brokered by Henry Kissinger and his army’s entry into Lebanon in 1976, as part of an implicit arrangement with the United States and Israel, his regime entered public negotiations with Israel at the 1991 Madrid Conference. Three years later, he sent Hikmat al-Shihabi to hold peace talks in Washington. What had been proximity talks, with an American mediator shuttling messages between the parties, evolved by 2000 into direct trilateral meetings involving Farouk al-Sharaa, Bill Clinton, and Ehud Barak.
As for Marxist–Leninist leftists, they rarely mention that in early 1918 Vladimir Lenin granted enormous concessions to what he described as “German imperialism” through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. These concessions included relinquishing vast territories containing large populations, agricultural wealth, industrial resources, and strategic buffer zones, as well as granting Germany access to Ukrainian grain and food supplies at a time of severe shortages. In addition to losing the Baltic coast, the Bolsheviks agreed to demobilize large portions of the army and navy.
All of them acted on the premise that necessity permits the impermissible. Yet Lebanon remains a different matter.
