The Fruits of Appeasement...

It's not necessary to actively appease someone to get you into trouble.

It's enough when you cease to act and protect yourself, when you are sufficiently intimidated so that you do not see it possible to do anything.

There are, of course, nuances to this: what happens when one side simply loses the will to go out and continue to spend blood on a daily basis to defend their ways of life, when their opponents are more than happy to be ruthless and literally bloody-minded?

The one side will continue to be aggressive and continue to push to see how far they can go: the other side is just happy to be left alone as much as possible, and as long as someone else is targeted, then they're fine on acquiescing.

Hezbollah's long-term campaign of the destruction of Lebanon is bearing fruit: the Lebanese, it appears, have abandoned their country. Well, not so much their country as such, but much more the idea of their country. They, the Lebanese, continue to live in the past, content to pretend that the last 60 years never happened, and pretend that they don't, as it were, have this funny lump in their breast. They're in a state of denial because they have suffered so very long and heavily for mistakes: but by allowing Hezbollah to effectively negate the rule of law in Lebanon, the Lebanese have lost Lebanon.

It doesn't really exist anymore: Hezbollah has made it impossible for Lebanon to exist, and that's fine with them. They prefer the anarchy and the lack of law, since it means that they can simply intimidate the rest of the population to get their way.

Appeasement becomes a real opportunity when those targeted have things that they want to keep, but aren't willing to do what it takes to protect those things (here in the general sense, not the specific sense). Hence in order to avoid fighting a war, Chamberlain announced "Peace In Our Time" and waved a piece of paper from his hand, thus making war inevitable and more destructive than would have been the case otherwise.

In the case of Lebanon, the fruits of appeasement against Hezbollah has been the dismantling of the Lebanese state, slowly, surely, step by step. It could have been stopped, but only by a concentrated, concerted effort by a state that could not do so: the soul of Lebanon was torn out during the Civil War there, and while it keeps on trying to return, there are simply too many who want to have nothing better than for the state of Lebanon to vanish forever. People like Syria.


Hence appeasement bears bitter fruit: in the attempt to save Lebanon, of keeping civil war once again at bay, Lebanon has been sacrificed to save itself, as it appears that no one is willing to fight for it in the face of that group of bullies and thugs, financed by Iran, that is called Hezbollah.

Hezbollah doesn't want Lebanon: it's not interested in a country. It's much more interested in having a safe place to work from, and chaos is its best friend, allowing it to hide behind civilians, abject poverty and need. That way they can appear, with their Iranian-backed "social services", to be the only alternative, just as for shopkeepers paying the Mafia for protection, you can't count on the police being around to protect you when the thugs work you over.

Hezbollah doesn't want Lebanon: they want lawlessness and chaos, since Hezbollah offers order from chaos and services when everything else fails. Hezbollah only wants the Caliphate: everything else is a waste of time.

Syria doesn't want Lebanon: they want Greater Syria

Iran doesn't want Lebanon: a state means that they would be made responsible for their puppet's behavior, and while the Iranian financing of Hezbollah is an open secret, it's one that the Iranians prefer to remain that way, as it gives them plausible deniability.


And while both the Lebanese and Israel want Lebanon, they don't want it enough. Or more exactly, the Lebanese don't want it enough to start a new civil war (or continue the old one, however you prefer...), and unless the Lebanese want that, the Israelis aren't interested either.

Hence one of the very, very few even moderately successful states in the Middle East is being destroyed.

Hence are harvested the fruits of appeasement.