Two recent developments indicate that Syria’s future is at an important crossroads.
In early May, the Arab league announced that it would re-admit Syria after a nearly 12-year suspension dating back to the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. In response, a bipartisan group of 35 U.S. lawmakers introduced the “Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act of 2023,” which, among other things, calls for an inter-agency “report of the steps the United States is taking to actively deter recognition or normalization of relations by other governments with the Assad regime.” It also expands the Caesar Act sanctions on the Syrian regime, which have been in place since 2020.
The Biden administration has also stated its opposition to the Arab League’s decision.
A Quincy Institute panel hosted on Friday sparked several moments of interesting debate between University of Oklahoma professorJoshua Landis, (who wrote recently for RS in favor of normalization), and former U.S. Ambassador William Roebuck, on the effectiveness of the Caesar Act sanctions and whether it makes sense to keep them in place.
See the exchange here:
Watch the full event, which also featured Quincy Institute senior research analyst Steve Simon, former Special Representative for Syria Engagement James Jeffrey, and Duke University Law professor Mara Revkin, here:
Blaise Malley is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He is a former associate editor at The National Interest and reporter-researcher at The New Republic. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, The American Conservative, and elsewhere.
A black strip placed by censors masks the identity of a detainee in an undated photo from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, among 198 images released in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense in Washington, DC February 5, 2016. REUTERS/DoD/Handout via Reuters
“To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me… The time I spent in Abu Ghraib — it ended my life. I’m only half a human now.” That’s what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to suffer a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.
He was never even charged with a crime — not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross’s estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country’s War on Terror.
The Abu Ghraib “Scandal”
On April 28th, 2004, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.
Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word “scandal” still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.
Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 — Al Shimari v. CACI — brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI’s role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial — the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees — finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.
The Road to Abu Ghraib
”My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… And therefore, I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush’s administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their “Global War on Terror,” but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.
As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing “evidence” of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.
Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to “soften up” detainees, and took a “see no evil, hear no evil,” approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.
In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they “did not apply precisely” in Iraq.
In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: “Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison.”
Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
Simulating Atonement
Once the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and “equally sorry that people who’ve been seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”
As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush’s behavior was a classic case of “simulated atonement,” aimed at offering an “appearance of genuine confession” while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an “apologia” for what happened — two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.
In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.
In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib — investigations and justice — would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein’s reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, “accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime.”
True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush’s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America’s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.
Weapons of American Imperialism
On March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his “fellow citizens.” He opened by saying that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would “witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.”
There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and a country that “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.” Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam’s regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t and he knew it.) If that wasn’t enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”
Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had “no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”
The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.
When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein’s portrait with a sign that said, “America is the friend of all Iraqis.” To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.
In his essay “Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives,” Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that “the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle.”
As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism — an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I’m discussing as “prison imperialism.”) The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)
Beyond Spectacle and Towards Justice
What made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it’s important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.
One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.
Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me — and other Muslims and Arabs — 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.
Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib’s survivors, as witnesses – even distant ones — to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It’s crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture — extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.
Two decades after those photos were released, what’s crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make — whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.
This piece has been republished with permission from TomDispatch.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken poses during a group photo session with Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah and other representatives of the Gulf Cooperation Council on the day of the Joint Ministerial Meeting of the GCC-U.S. Strategic Partnership to discuss the humanitarian crises faced in Gaza, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, April 29, 2024. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/Pool
Last year’s Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza, which has killed roughly 35,000 Palestinians, have impacted relationships within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — members appear to be moving closer together.
As the Gaza war expands into Lebanon, Yemen, the Red Sea, and elsewhere, and while Iran and Israel’s hostilities brought the region into uncharted waters earlier this month, the monarchies on the Arabian Peninsula are strengthening ties within the larger Gulf Arab family.
In a historical context, this makes complete sense. To understand why, it is useful to first go back to the chaotic period of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
For the Persian Gulf’s Arab monarchies, 1979 was a terrifying year. To varying degrees, the Western-backed Gulf Arab leaders saw both Iran’s Islamic revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as dangerous developments. By 1981, the six conservative Gulf Arab states — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — came together to bolster their collective security by establishing the GCC.
Over the decades, the GCC states have put their ideological and geopolitical differences aside in the interest of growing Gulf Arab unity, particularly during periods of increased instability. Cases include the 1990/91 Kuwaiti crisis, the 2010/11 Arab Spring uprisings, the meteoric rise of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in mid-2014, and the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
By the same token, at times of greater stability in the region and fewer threats to the Gulf Arab monarchies, internal divisions and differences between the GCC members have tended to elevate to the surface.
It was no coincidence that the first GCC crisis broke out in March 2014. At that time, the revolutionary tide of the Arab Spring had largely dissipated and the counter-revolutionary Gulf Arab states — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain — felt the need to pressure Qatar into abandoning the pro-revolutionary and Islamist-friendly policies that shaped Doha’s approach to many of the 2010/11 uprisings which shook the Arab world. Yet, that GCC spat ended later that year after ISIL had usurped large portions of Iraq and Syria.
Then, the second GCC crisis, which was an outcome of basically the exact same issues that led to the first GCC crisis, erupted in mid-2017 when ISIL was significantly less powerful.
Although the Gulf Arab states — unlike Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria — do not share land borders with Israel-Palestine, all six GCC members are extremely worried about the situation in Gaza and its ramifications for the wider region, including the Persian Gulf. Among the Gulf Arab monarchies, there is much common cause and shared concerns about further regionalization of the Gaza war. These concerns have led to Gulf Arab officials becoming increasingly frustrated with U.S. leadership in the region and the Biden administration’s refusal to pressure Israel into agreeing to a ceasefire.
“[The] war in Gaza has unified GCC [states] in terms of moral, political, and diplomatic solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinians,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a Dubai-based Emirati political scientist, in an interview with RS. “Israel has become a killer machine in Gaza for the past 200 days and this is to nobody’s liking in the Arab Gulf states,” he added.
There are important domestic ramifications to consider too. Officials in the Gulf Arab monarchies fear the potential for the Palestinian cause to mobilize and/or radicalize their own citizens in ways that could upset the status quo in GCC states and the wider region. Palestine-related protests in Egypt and Jordan have potential to fuel significant unrest in those two countries, whose stability is vitally important to the Gulf Arabs.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) recently spoke by phone with the president of the UAE Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ) and the emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim. In these two conversations, the Gulf Arab leaders discussed the heightening of regional tensions and threats to stability and security in the Middle East. MbS, MbZ, and Emir Tamim all agreed on the need to mitigate security risks and take measures to prevent the region’s crises from spiraling out of control.
On April 22, Oman’s Sultan Haitham paid his first visit to the UAE since he became his country’s head of state in January 2020. While in Abu Dhabi, Sultan Haitham and MbZ discussed a host of issues at the bilateral, regional, and global levels. During Sultan Haitham’s visit, companies from Oman and the UAE signed $35.12 billion worth of deals in various sectors such as transport and energy. The Omanis and Emiratis are focused on advancing their countries’ economic integration through various projects and initiatives, most notably the Etihad Rail which links Oman’s Sohar port to Abu Dhabi.
The GCC states have come a long way in terms of mending fences since the historic al-Ula summit of January 2021 officially ended the Emirati- and Saudi-led blockade of Qatar. Indeed, it was not long ago when a phone call between MbS and Emir Tamim, or between MbZ and the Qatari emir, would have created many headlines given the extent to which Saudi-Qatari and Emirati-Qatari relations had deteriorated. “The Gaza war has brought Qatar and the UAE closer,” Abdulla told RS.
These past rifts within the GCC were not only about Qatar. The UAE and Oman were having their share of problems in bilateral affairs throughout Sultan Qaboos’s final decade on the throne. Yet, Sultan Haitham’s recent visit to the UAE underscored how the leadership in both Muscat and Abu Dhabi are focused on both playing their diplomatic cards to try to bring regional crises under control while also pushing ahead with their economic transformations at home through ambitious visions aimed at eliminating their economic dependence on hydrocarbons.
In all GCC states, there is an understanding that more discussions between their leaders and growing levels of inter-GCC cooperation across a host of domains is necessary to achieve progress on both fronts. The Gulf Arab monarchies realize that this is not a time for internal divisions and friction between the different royal families to prevent the six GCC members from reaching their potential through greater Gulf Arab unity.
GCC states have strengthened their relationships with each other since October 7 because “there needed to be coordination given that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE are playing leadership roles in this conflict,” said Aziz Alghashian, a fellow with the Sectarianism, Proxies & De-sectarianisation project at Lancaster University.
Nonetheless, while the GCC members are bolstering their cooperation as Israel’s war on Gaza rages, some experts believe that competition between the Gulf Arab states vis-à-vis Gaza might emerge after the dust settles and the post-war phase begins in the Palestinian enclave.
“There is potential that it could be turbulent in the future once there is a real process of addressing the day after in Gaza and that could [relate to] aspects of burden sharing [and] aspects of competition,” Alghashian said. “So, there is that to look out for in the future. Maybe it’s speculative for now, but I don’t think we should count it out.”
As most EU governments and the bloc’s high representative for foreign policy Josep Borrell try to emphasize the need to de-escalate tensions between Iran and Israel, the European Parliament has moved sharply in the opposite direction.
During its plenary session on April 25 the body adopted a resolution on “Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel, the need for de-escalation and an EU response” which included a series of ostensibly tough measures to set that response into motion.
Already the title betrays a pro-Israeli bias: it refers to Iran’s drone and missile attacks on Israel, but not to the equally unprecedented, and lethal, Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, which was the direct trigger of the Iranian strike in the first place. Titles matter as they frame the debates and resolutions.
It’s easy to be cynical about Iran’s appeals to the inviolability of diplomatic premises when its revolutionary regime held the U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 — an act never repudiated, much less apologized for, by the Islamic Republic. Regardless of Iran’s track record, however, as a self-proclaimed guardian of the international legality, the EU could be expected to be consistent on the matter.
The resolution does refer to the bombing of the Iranian consulate, but in a rather clever-by-half fashion: it “deplores” the attack but won’t say who perpetrated it. A last-minute amendment by the Left faction in Parliament pointing to the Israeli authorship was rejected by the majority.
But the real issue is the trifecta of measures within the resolution called for by the MEPs: invoking the snapback of all UN sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program if Iran fails to comply with its nuclear obligations under the JCPOA by a deadline to be set unilaterally by the E3 (France, Germany, the UK); adding the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to the EU terrorist list; and designating the Lebanese Hezbollah as terrorist organization in its entirety (currently only the military wing, not its affiliated political party, is classified as “terrorist” by the EU).
The Trans-Atlantic Institute, the Brussels-based office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has hailed the adoption of these measures as a “historic, momentous decision” and praised the Parliament for “real leadership by calling for an end to the years of fruitless and toothless diplomacy that has only emboldened the regime in Iran.”
Yet the adopted measures do not amount to much. The European Parliament’s resolutions are not binding. The body does not set the EU’s foreign policy — it’s a prerogative of the Council of the EU. The decisions of the Council are taken by consensus among the 27 member states, at a proposal of the high representative Borrell who sets the agendas of the meetings of the bloc’s foreign ministers.
While the E3 is concerned with Iran’s nuclear progress, and French President Emmanuel Macron hinted in the wake of the Iranian strike on Israel that pressure has to be increased on Tehran also on the nuclear file, to trigger a snapback of the U.N. sanctions would require a political agreement with Washington. This may not be forthcoming as Biden signaled unwillingness to escalate matters with Tehran further. An U.N. snapback would most likely lead to Iran abandoning the Non-Proliferation Treaty and expelling the remaining International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, which, in turn, would dramatically increase the risk of an Israeli military action against the Iranian nuclear infrastructure or an Iranian push for a nuclear bomb. A big war in the Middle East is certainly not what Biden needs in the election year.
Of note, Borrell himself evinced a considerable skepticism about the usefulness of escalating sanctions during the parliamentary debate. He underscored that “sanctions are not policy, but only a tool of policy,” and that decades of piling sanctions on Iran have not led to positive changes in Iran’s policies. Rather than expressing support for the MEPs’ mulled ultimatum on the snapback, he stressed continued commitment to the nuclear diplomacy with Tehran.
As to the mounting pressure to include the IRGC in the EU terrorist list, that, again, requires unanimity of the member states and, as Borrell repeatedly stressed, a judicial ruling in an EU member state implicating the IRGC in a terrorist activity. At the moment, none of these conditions seem to be present. Germany is leading the way for a tougher approach, but not all the member states are convinced that prescribing an entire security body of a foreign nation would advance the EU interests. Spain and Italy are among notable skeptics.
And the designation itself would largely be symbolic. The EU already has, and uses, the necessary tools to sanction individual IRGC members and related entities for a host of transgressions, such as human rights abuses and support for violent activities and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The full prescription of Hezbollah as a terrorist group — a long-term goal of the AJC — has likewise proved to be elusive. In 2013, in response to the French pressure to punish the Lebanese organization for its role in supporting Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the EU has invented a creative solution: designate the military wing of Hezbollah, but not the political one, in order to keep venues of dialogue with this influential Lebanese actor open.
Designating Hezbollah entirely would deprive the EU of that direct contact. That would be counterproductive as the EU leaders are clearly worried about the potential fallout of the war in the Middle East on Lebanon’s precarious stability — the country hosts 1.5 million Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians which could be heading to Europe in the case of further destabilization.
Of further note, several European countries, such as Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Poland, deployed troops on the Lebanese-Israeli border as part of the UNIFIL peace-keeping mission. Declaring Hezbollah terrorist could potentially make these troops targets. These are far weightier considerations for the EU decision-makers than a European Parliament resolution.
In sum, more than a turning point in the EU strategy towards Iran, the European Parliament’s resolution may not add up to much more than a simple virtue-signaling exercise. Yet it would be wrong to completely dismiss its significance: its political message testifies, once again, to the abysmal state of the EU-Iran relations.