Target Lebanon

For John, BLUF:  This will get worse before it gets better.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Freelance Reporter Michael Totten, writing in World Affairs talks about Lebanon as "ISIS' Next Target".

ISIS has announced that Lebanon will be the next state to fall under the sway of its “caliphate.” According to Beirut's Daily Star newspaper, the only reason ISIS hasn't attacked yet in force is because they haven't decided on the mission's commander.

The Lebanese army is one of the least effective in the Middle East—and that's saying something in a region where the far more capable Syrian and Iraqi armies are utterly failing to safeguard what should be their own sovereign territory.

So France is going to send a three billion dollar package of weapons to Lebanon and the Saudis are going to pay for it.  It won't solve the problem any more than a full-body cast will cure cancer, but it beats standing around and not even trying.♠

Reporter Totten is optimistic over the long run, mentioning seventeen invading armies that came a cropper in Lebanon.  But in the short term the Christians, Shia and Druze who make up Lebanon's population will face the genocidal tendencies of Daesh.  The Daesh enjoy killing like Pol Pot and his Khymer Rouge, or Mao, or the 1939 Armies of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany taking down Poland and destroying the Polish Intelligentsia.

The good news, according to our Secretary of State, John Kerry, is that we have never been safer.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  I wonder what or who he was thinking about when he wrote "it beats standing around and not even trying".