Warning to Israel: Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants the charges dropped against Hizbollah – or else.

The UK Telegraph reports that it is not often that a state visit by a foreign president plunges the host nation into political turmoil.

But then Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence in Lebanon is no ordinary visit.

On one level, the Iranian president's controversial tour of southern Lebanon, where yesterday he was literally a stone's throw from the Israeli border, should be seen as yet another example of the publicity-grabbing exploits that have become the hallmark of this eccentric leader.

What better way to distract attention from Iran's deepening economic crisis – the direct result of Mr Ahmadinejad's intransigence over the nuclear programme – than to stage a high-profile visit to about the only place in the world where he can truly be guaranteed a popular welcome.
During the past three decades, Iran has invested billions of dollars in turning the Shia Muslim Hizbollah militia into one of the dominant forces in modern Lebanese politics.

When I covered the Lebanese civil war for this newspaper in the mid-1980s, Hizbollah – or The Party of God – was a fringe group in the shadow of the more mainstream Amal movement, which represented Shia interests in the Lebanese parliament.

At that time, Hizbollah's main claim to fame was its role in blowing up the American embassy and the US and French military barracks with suicide lorry bombs, which, at the time, was a novel terrorist technique that killed hundreds of people. The group also masterminded the hostage crisis that caused Terry Waite, John McCarthy and Brian Keenan to spend years chained to radiators in dank cells in the Bekaa Valley.

So the fact that Hizbollah is now Lebanon's main political party, and a leading member of the coalition government, shows how far Iran's pet militia has come during the past 25 years. More to the point, its leadership also shares Iran's nihilistic attitude towards the feisty little Jewish state that is located on the other side of Lebanon's southern border. Armed and equipped by Iran, Hizbollah has already provoked one war with Israel, in the summer of 2006. And, given the thousands of missiles and rockets that Tehran continues to smuggle to Hizbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, the militia clearly believes there is another conflict in the offing.

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