I’ve known my Iranian friend Yasna for eleven years now. Over the years we’ve discussed all sorts of topics. But ger most recent message shook me: “Can you imagine what it means to feel a certain relief, exhilaration even, watching your country being bombed, because these same bombs that are destroying your land and killing your people might finally liberate you from despotism?” As I read those words, I couldn’t help but think: “I surely can imagine that, Yasna. I’ve been there, we’ve been there, time and again. But I am not sure, unfortunately, that this will necessarily be the outcome.”
Wars in this region never remain confined to the countries where they explode. They travel. They seep through borders, television screens, family histories, ideological loyalties, and, first and foremost, through religious affiliations. In Lebanon, the war on Iran is not a distant geopolitical event, regardless of the fact that it has already extended to this land. It is another mirror in which the country examines – and quarrels with – itself.
For some Lebanese, allegiance to Iran is seen as strategic, even honorable – part of a broader axis of resistance against Israel and America, the infamously “imperialist and colonialist” hegemony. For them, Iran represents one of the few regional powers willing to confront a global order that many in the Middle East experience as humiliating, exploitative, and hypocritical. The attack on Iran is therefore perceived not merely as a military escalation but as another chapter in a long history of domination imposed from outside the region.
For others, that same allegiance is the definition of political betrayal. It is proof that a Lebanese faction has subordinated the country to a foreign power and turned national sovereignty into a bad joke. In their eyes, loyalty to Tehran has meant dragging Lebanon into wars that were never ours to begin with.
Between these two perceptions lies a chasm that we know too well. Even patriotism here has been sectarianized. Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder. One community’s loyalty is another community’s treason. One person’s resistance is another person’s submission to foreign guardianship. The same gesture, the same alliance, the same slogan can be read as heroism by some and as national suicide by others.
But things are less simple than slogans would suggest. Many Lebanese who consider the Iranian regime authoritarian, criminal, and profoundly hostile to freedom are still far from euphoric at the spectacle of its possible collapse or forced undoing. Yes, some feel a certain relief at the thought that the Iranian people might at last rid themselves of a suffocating political system. Yet relief is not faith. Experience has made this region deeply suspicious of liberty delivered from the sky. We have seen too many wars marketed as emancipation.
Afghanistan was meant to be reborn after the Taliban were toppled. Iraq was supposed to emerge freer after Saddam Hussein. The same can be said about Libya after Qaddafi. The region is littered with the wreckage of such examples: religious and military tyrannies dismantled only to be replaced by chaos, occupation, fragmentation, or another form of ruin. Around here, the word “liberation” all too often ends in rubble.
So even among those who despise and vehemently oppose the Iranian regime, there remains a quiet skepticism about what kind of future might replace it. History has taught us to distrust democracy when it is forced on us by external powers, and salvation when it arrives escorted by missiles.
This skepticism is not ideological, at least not for everyone. It is not a bias. It is experiential. It is the accumulated memory of a region repeatedly promised deliverance by those who later vanished, leaving behind shattered states and exhausted populations.
Lebanon knows this pattern intimately. That is why many Lebanese, even those not immediately affected by the war, watch the unfolding events today with a complicated mixture of emotions: anger, hope, bitterness, dread. Anger at a wicked Iranian regime whose influence has deeply shaped Lebanon’s recent political life. Hope, perhaps, for a future in which the Iranian people, and therefore the Lebanese people, might reclaim their own destiny. But also dread that another geopolitical earthquake could send new tremors across an already fragile region. Lebanon rarely escapes the consequences of other people’s conflicts.
Truth be told, our patience has run out. It’s not just that we’re tired of paying the price for Hezbollah’s loyalty to Iran, its authoritarian instincts, its recklessness with our lives, its hijacking of our national will. We’ve also been bearing the cost of the calculations of the United States and Israel, from their wars and strategies waged over our heads, and from treating Lebanon as expendable terrain in struggles where human beings are reduced to collateral arithmetic.
The Lebanese experience has produced a particular political instinct: distrust in all directions (at least among those who haven’t been brainwashed into following the herd). Distrust of regional powers that claim to protect us while turning us into forward positions in their own battles. Distrust of international powers that speak the language of democracy while leaving behind devastation. Distrust, especially, of the seductive narrative that history is moving toward justice.
Perhaps this is the true Lebanese perspective on what’s been happening in Iran for those who truly qualify as independent thinkers: no automatic celebration, no simple condemnation, but a guarded, maybe even suspicious awareness.
Lebanon has learned, painfully, expensively, that in this part of the world, the fall of a dictatorial regime rarely means the rise of freedom. Sometimes it simply means the beginning of another war, of another kind. I’ve learned that too well over time.
And sooner or later, my friend Yasna will learn it too.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
Joumana Haddad
Joumana Haddad is a Lebanese author, journalist, and activist.
