(CNSNews.com) – As Lebanon prepares for an election that could have significant implications for the broader region and U.S. policies, Washington and Tehran are sending signals of support to each of the two main camps vying for control of the Arab world’s most dynamic democracy.
 
On Friday, Vice President Joe Biden reportedly will make a brief stopover in Beirut on the tail-end of a trip to the Balkans. Lebanese media quote government officials as saying Biden will meet with Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and President Michel Suleiman.
 
Although U.S. officials will be at pains not to link the visit with the June 7 election, Washington has been a firm supporter of Siniora, whose “March 11” bloc, led by Saad Hariri, faces a tough challenge from the opposition “March 9” bloc that includes Hezbollah, the Shi’ite group designated by the State Department for more than a decade as a foreign terrorist organization.
 
During a visit to Beirut last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sidestepped reporters’ questions on the likelihood of Hezbollah and its allies winning the election, but stressed that the U.S. would “continue to support the voices of moderation.” She also said the U.S. wanted to see free elections, with no “outside interference.”
 
Clinton did not mention Iran, but Tehran’s support for Hezbollah – which the Islamic Revolutionary Guards helped to establish in the early 1980s and has sponsored since – is an open secret.
 
Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, this week described Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah as a “world hero” and reiterated Iranian support for both Hezbollah and Hamas.
 
Larijani earlier disputed charges that Iran is seeking to expand its influence abroad. “If today we help Hezbollah, it is because we feel responsibility and not because we want to create an empire,” the Fars news agency quoted him as saying.
 
Apart from financial and other forms of practical support, Iran and Hezbollah share the doctrine known as Wilayet al-Faqih (“guardianship of the scholars”), a Shi’ite model of government devised by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and that forms the basis of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
 
While Hezbollah is an armed faction – blacklisted in its entirety or in part by the U.S. and several other Western countries as a terrorist group – it also carries out political functions and runs social and health projects.
 
Nasrallah said in a speech last Friday that his group would have no problem governing the country.
 
He said an organization “that defeated Israel” – a reference to the July 2006 war which Hezbollah claims to have won – would have no difficulty ruling a country even 100 times the size of Lebanon.
 
Hezbollah dominates the March 9 bloc along with the fellow Shi’ite Amal movement and the allied Free Patriotic Movement, a secular bloc led by former military chief Michel Aoun, an ethnic Christian.
 
A victory next month for the March 9 forces would pose a challenge for the U.S. reminiscent of Hamas’ triumph in Palestinian Authority parliamentary elections in early 2006.
 
International observers gave the Palestinian election the thumbs-up, leaving an administration that had championed democracy in the Middle East with the headache of how to deal with a government run by a terrorist organization.
 
In conjunction with its partners in the so-called Mideast “Quartet” – Russia, the European Union and the United Nations – Washington refused to deal with Hamas  unless it recognized Israel, renounced violence, and adhered to previous agreements signed between Israel and Palestinian leaders.
 
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs in March laid out a similar position with regard to Hezbollah, saying it would have to renounce terrorist activities and recognize Israel’s right to exist before any engagement with the U.S.
 
U.S officials have also said that the Obama administration will not follow the line adopted recently by Britain of distinguishing between military and political “wings.”
 
‘Third Republic’
 
For an American administration, dealing with Hezbollah would be even more sensitive than dealing with Hamas. Dozens of Americans have been killed in attacks carried out by the Palestinian group in Israel, but until al-Qaeda struck on 9/11, Hezbollah was responsible for the deaths of more Americans in terrorist attacks than any other terror group.
 
Hezbollah has given no signal of willingness to meet either of the requirements cited by Gibbs.
 
Its 2009 election platform contains no reference to relinquishing its weapons, a demand contained in two U.N. Security Council resolutions passed since 2004.
 
Hezbollah’s position on Israel remains equally uncompromising. Announcing the platform last month, Mohammed Ra’ad, head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, reaffirmed “our enmity to Israel.” Nasrallah in a speech on Monday called Lebanon’s southern neighbor a “cancerous body” that had been planted in the heart of the Arab and Islamic region and could never be legitimate.
 
The political system in Lebanon has been delicately balanced between Sunnis, Shias and Maronite Christians, in line first with an agreement reached at the time of independence from France during World War II (“the first republic”), and later with an accord in 1989, at the end of the civil war (“the second republic”). Under these agreements, the president is a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni and the parliamentary speaker a Shi’ite.
 
Hezbollah’s allies are now campaigning under the slogan “The Third Republic,” underlying their view that the election marks another turning point for the Lebanese state.
 
Amin Gemayel, a Maronite and former Lebanese president, was quoted by the An-Nahar daily Tuesday as saying that the “third republic” would in fact be “a republic of Hezbollah, its cadres, and what they will bring to their country – a republic of Hezbollah’s weapons.”
 
In a recent analysis of the Hezbollah platform, Israeli scholars Yair Minzili and Shimon Shapira noted the top priority it gives to a push to abolish the sectarian political system in Lebanon.
 
Hezbollah’s plan to end the sectarian system, Minzili and Shapira argued in an article published by the Institute for Contemporary Affairs in Jerusalem, would advance it towards its goal – “the establishment of an Islamic state that provides political expression to the Shi’ite majority and a complete Iranian takeover of Lebanon.”
 
“Are the Lebanese ready for a Wilayet al-Faqih type rule in Lebanon?” the independent Lebanese news site Ya Libnan asked in a commentary on Tuesday.
 
“All the Lebanese should seriously think about this before casting their vote on June 7.”