LEBANON: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire

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The banner headline across Thursday’s edition of the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese paper al-Safir was strident: ‘Washington officially requests turning Lebanon into an allied military base.’

Citing what it said were excerpts from official minutes of meetings between U.S. and Lebanese officials, the paper reported that the U.S. proposed an official agreement increasing American aid for Lebanon’s military, including training centers in Sunni-dominated northern Lebanon, in exchange for bringing Lebanon closer into the American sphere of influence.

The U.S. ambassador quickly denounced the report in unsually harsh terms. ‘I usually laugh in the morning from the jokes that are jokes on the [Lebanese newspaper pages],’ Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman told reporters, as translated from Arabic. ‘But this article is simply ... making up news and not reporting it.’

Another piece of scandalous tripe in the notoriously unreliable Arabic press? Not so fast. By Thursday evening, Pentagon official Eric Edelman, who met quietly with Lebanese security officials this week, suggested that there might be some truth to the rumors. Indeed, he said, Americans had pitched stronger defense ties between Washington and Lebanon, which has for decades been a client if not a puppet of Syria’s Russian-backed military.

‘What we’ve been trying to do consistently is to create circumstances in which Lebanon can have a strong state, strong army, a democratic system with the military accountable to civilian control and to the government and to the peoples’s represenatatives in parliament,’ he told Washington correspondents of a Lebanese television station.

Edelman also said that he could foresee a time when Lebanon could be at peace with another U.S. ally in the region: Israel, which Beirut now considers an enemy. ‘I don’t see any reason why Israel and Lebanon have to be enemies,’ said Edelman.

Israel and the Shiite militant group Hezbollah fought a month-long war last year that left more than 1,000 dead and devastated large swathes of Lebanon’s infrastructure.

— Raed Rafei and Borzou Daragahi in Beirut