generalspeaking

The blast, according to Prime Minister Hassan Diab, was a "major national disaster". And that description -- of a country that underwent a violent civil war, that has been since then rife with assassinations and conflicts, that is harbouring a million Syrian refugees, that is undergoing a financial crisis, and trying to cope with its part of a global pandemic, while its citizens face hardships in a country that must import 80 percent of the food required to feed an entire population, even as it struggles to pay for that food, begging for loans it may never pay back -- may be seen as an understatement.

This is an Arab nation of historic past efforts to deal with its sectarian divides. Where the decision to include the major representatives of Sunni, Shia, Christian, Druze in a shared government worked very well -- for a while. A country with more than its share of problems, but an equally large share of geological grandeur in natural beauty, admired as a Mediterranean Eden. A popular tourism attraction for the Middle East, in a forward-looking country able to deal effectively with disparate demographics and sectarian and tribal differences.

Wealthy Gulf states with the wherewithal to aid Lebanon financially, will not. For the simple enough reason that they fear any financial aid will end up benefiting the terror group Hezbollah, the Party of God, that has been responsible, along with Iran's al-Quds branch of the Republican National Guard Corps, in ensuring that Syrian oppression of its Sunni citizens where over a half million such citizens have died in an uncivil insurrection, targeted by barrel bombs and chemical weapons, continues.

Hezbollah, the Party of God that owes allegiance to the Islamic Republic of Iran, has gifted Lebanon to Iran. The fiction that Hezbollah has a military wing and a political wing is one that also helped to propel it into government in Lebanon, where assassinations of its detractors are just a reflection of how matters are settled in the Byzantine byways of the Middle East, to leverage its way to manipulating, then managing the government of Lebanon.

Lebanon has been a wan shadow of its former self for decades. It becomes less and less of a nation, its health as a country deteriorating year by year. That Hezbollah uses the country as a cache for its voluminous munitions depots is no one's secret. Nor is it any secret that Hezbollah will eventually be involved in a pincer strategy along with Iran and Syria and Hamas to try once again to contest Israel's existence in the Middle East.

In preparation for that great adventure, Hezbollah, like Hamas, stockpiles the munitions and weaponry that gives them confidence they can carry out their sacred mission of genocidal obliteration. Their shared habit of stockpiling missiles, rockets, munitions within crowded civilian enclaves to ensure their safety, deliberately oblivious to the safety of civilian populations among whom these stockpiles exist guarantees that eventually and occasionally accidents will occur.

As one such did yesterday when a vast stockpile of ammonium nitrate housed in Beirut's dock area next to a warehouse of fireworks among which some may have spontaneously erupted in sparks to set off a major conflagration when the ammonium nitrate exploded, once, twice, cratering that part of the city and sending repercussions as far as Cyprus. Killing over a hundred civilians, wounding four thousand, rendering 300,000 people homeless.