Lebanon-Israeli Conflict
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John Kiriakou has argued that Israel has no interest in allowing Lebanon to recover or prosper, describing the country's trajectory as a deliberately engineered failed state.

Assessment of Israeli intent

Asked how realistic the "Greater Israel" project was with respect to Lebanon, Kiriakou said Israel had "guaranteed that Lebanon will be a failed state," adding that he did not believe any Israeli government would allow Lebanon to flourish as a nation. He predicted continued Israeli attacks and forced displacement of civilians.

Displacement and humanitarian toll

Kiriakou cited a statistic he had read the day before the interview that as many as 700,000 Lebanese would be internally displaced by the end of the week, calling it "a humanitarian disaster" that most of the world was ignoring because attention was focused on the war unfolding in Iran. He noted that Lebanon already lacked sufficient food, medical care, and clean water, and said the situation would "only get worse."

He connected this to remarks made two weeks earlier by Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, who told Tucker Carlson he had "no problem with Greater Israel" and said Israel should "just take" all Arab land from the Euphrates River to the Nile. Kiriakou said that if this reflected the attitude of the sitting US ambassador, "we should all be living in fear."

Elsewhere, Kiriakou says Huckabee told Tucker Carlson directly that Israel "can take all, take the whole Middle East. I don't care", the same "Greater Israel" indifference restated in a separate interview. Kiriakou separately argues Huckabee, in his role as ambassador, should have been fired for welcoming Jonathan Pollard into the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and feting him "like a hero." He makes the same case elsewhere in stronger terms, saying Huckabee saw himself as "more Israeli than American" even before becoming ambassador, calling him "actually dangerous to US foreign policy" who "needs to be removed" for feting "the traitor Jonathan Pollard in the American embassy like some kind of hero."

A long, difficult history, and little remaining U.S. interest

In a separate interview, Kiriakou places the current conflict in a longer arc: Lebanon has hosted a major U.S. presence since the early 1970s and has been the site of repeated terrorist attacks, including the 1983 Marine Corps barracks bombing, along with the assassination and kidnapping of American ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, and embassy employees over the decades. Despite that history, he says, the U.S. today has little real national interest in Lebanon, a point he says made him surprised when Washington announced it was building a large new embassy there.

The city-block doctrine

Kiriakou separates the judgement from the target. "You don't have to like Hassan Nasrallah at all or what he stands for or his politics or whatever to acknowledge that what Israel did in Lebanon was a war crime." What distinguishes it, in his account, is not intensity but method, and it is a matter of policy rather than of incident: if a target is located in a block of apartments, "they will blow up the entire city block and kill a thousand people if they think they can get that one guy. That one. Nobody else does that."

He places the September 2026 strike on Qatar in the same frame, an attack in broad daylight on the host of the largest American air base in the world, carried out with American weapons, to which Washington's answer was that it had not been informed in advance. "With our own weapons, thank you. With our own weapons."

2026: the failed-state verdict

Asked in 2026 how realistic the Greater Israel project was as far as Lebanon was concerned, John Kiriakou answered in terms of Lebanese statehood: "I think that the Israelis have guaranteed that Lebanon will be a failed state. I don't think any Israeli government is going to allow Lebanon to flourish as a nation."

He expected continued attacks and continued forced displacement, and cited a figure of as many as 700,000 internally displaced by the end of that week, a humanitarian disaster going largely unwatched because attention was on Iran. The episode is treated at South Lebanon displacement, 2026.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Israel
- Lebanon
- Jonathan Pollard
