Ahmadinejad's scheduled visit to Lebanon next week signifies for many an attempt to officially subdue this country and recruit it into the camp of “defiance” led by Iran and Syria, after it had resisted throughout the five years since the assassination of Rafic Hariri. To others it signifies the natural conclusion of the journey of political, military and demographic changes which the Land of the Cedars has witnessed since Syria first entered it in 1976. Yet in both these cases, there is a realistic outcome, announcing Iran's extension to the borders of Israel and the Mediterranean Sea, making it a main party to the region's balances of power, with their problems and their solutions. But the current Iranian expansion in many directions is reminiscent of a role once played by the Soviet Union, which preceded Tehran to the Syrian coastline and to arming the Palestinians, and through them some of the Lebanese. The USSR, in the course of its confrontation with the United States and the West, also held treaties of friendship and cooperation with some countries, among them Syria, Egypt and the former South Yemen, which allowed it to interfere in decisions concerning the region and to encourage one trend and antagonize another. This is before it disintegrated and disappeared, as a result of it entering into competitions that exceeded its own capabilities as well as its commitments to preserving regimes and countries that orbited around it, alliances of which modern Russia has inherited only symbolic friendships that mean little in the policies it follows today. And just like the Soviets who preceded it, Iran proclaims its enmity to the West, and especially the US. Its leaders repeatedly assert the need to drive out Western interests from the region stretching from Afghanistan to Latakia through Baghdad, and the fact that Iran alone can fill the vacuum, politically, militarily and economically, in provisional cooperation with Turkey. Also like the Soviets, Tehran adopts and burdens it faltering economy with providing tremendous assistance in terms of funding and armament to its direct allies: Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, as well as Iraqi and Afghan factions. It also allocates some massive investments to a traditional arms race aimed at asserting its military superiority over countries in the region, and others to building nuclear capabilities, of which fatwas and statements of denial are useless to conceal the final nature. Soviet Moscow went bankrupt and did not have sufficient funds to pay the salaries of the employees of its vast empire, when it was no longer producing as much as it was spending, and after it got itself implicated in an armament program to challenge the US's “star wars”, one requiring enormous budgets, at a time when its revenue from hard currency decreased and the burden of its commitments towards countries like East Germany, Cuba and all the members of the East European “security belt”, increased. And although Iran's wealth of oil and natural gas provides it so far with a surplus of hard currency, it cannot be compared to the colossal capabilities, including in terms of oil and natural gas as well, which the Soviet Union kept in store and which failed to save it – especially as the impact of escalating international sanctions on Iran's economy has gradually begun to appear, in addition to the failure of internal development policies and to increased spending on armament and on groups loyal to Iran. All of this places the “Islamic Persian Empire” in a situation similar to that witnessed by the Communist Bloc on the eve of its collapse, as it surrounds itself with a great deal of enemies and expands beyond its actual capabilities, where recent zones of influence are soon to turn into deadly burdens, among them of course Lebanon and Iraq.
