Is Italy a country with limited sovereignty over Hezbollah?
A post by Professor Dottori raises a question that should not be underestimated. Marco Orioles' italics
Italy, a country with limited sovereignty?
We will have heard him repeat who knows how many times the axiom according to which Rome was a subject of the American empire. But it is the first time that someone defines us as supine not to the Yankees but to the Lebanese Shiite Muslims known to the world as Hezbollah.
The provocative thesis attracted our attention above all because it does not come from a propagandist trawled on social media or from some heterodox intellectual looking for visibility. No, that very uncomfortable tweet originates from the very rare outburst of an illustrious strategy and geopolitical expert like Germano Dottori.
I'm taking a risk, but someone has to say certain things. Italy gave up its freedom to express itself on Iran at the very moment in which, in 2006, it deployed a thousand soldiers – now 1200 – in Hezbollah's lair – moreover equipped exclusively with light weapons
— Germano Dottori (@GermanoDottori) April 16, 2024
We would be under the thumb of the radical armed militia created forty years ago by Iran to control Lebanon, says Doctori in substance, because since 2006 we have deployed over a thousand soldiers in that country within the device called Unifil, i.e. the UN mission established that year with the dual task of acting as a buffer between two belligerents such as Hezbollah and Israel, which had just emerged from a devastating war that lasted two and a half months, and of presiding over the disarmament of Hezbollah itself.
But, and here lies the problem that Professor Dottori legitimately poses, in 18 years Unifil has carried out the first task very well (without, however, preventing periodic mutual bombings that flared up not by chance after 7 October); but as for the second objective – the disarmament of the militants – the outcome is a disaster.
Hezbollah today is much more armed and dangerous than then, and continues to act on behalf of Tehran as a factor of chaos and destabilization. All under the helpless gaze of hundreds of soldiers from various countries wearing the insignia of the UN.
And the result of this umpteenth Italian-style UN debacle is that now those men are a thorn in the side of the foreign policy of a government, the one led by Giorgia Meloni, which would like to play with free hands in that quadrant, openly defending Israel without fear of a vile retaliation against our peacekeepers that the Shiite militants would not hesitate to launch if, perhaps, Antonio Tajani released one too many statements.
Maybe we don't have the capacity, Meloni must have thought on Saturday night while Tehran's missiles rained down on Israel, but we Italians should also be there to defend Israel and the Jews from the lead and explosives of the ayatollahs and their Lebanese allies. And even if we didn't want to expose ourselves to that point, there would be so much anger in not being able to really raise our voice against a rogue state and its unpresentable allies in the certainty that the price to pay would be very high.
But the real issue raised by Dottori is another and a very thorny one: what is the meaning today of a military mission that is as expensive as it is ineffective in pursuing one of its key objectives, namely preventing an armed group from blackmailing and harming its internal and external adversaries? and even to friendly and generous countries like ours?
Perhaps Dottori made a mistake in not tagging Minister Crosetto. And while he was at it, also that Massimo D'Alema who in 2006, as our Foreign Minister, was director of the launch of that mission blessed with a memorable walk in Beirut arm in arm with his Lebanese colleague and one too many Hezbollah exponents.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/italia-sovranita-limitata-hezbollah/ on Wed, 17 Apr 2024 07:46:00 +0000.