Makram Rabah
Published: 26 August ,2026: 01:43 PM GST Updated: 26 August ,2026: 03:46 PM GST
There is a familiar ritual in Beirut. The Lebanese state takes a decision, announces it with solemn language about sovereignty, waits for the pressure to build, and then begins searching for an administrative formula that allows it to retreat without admitting that it has faltered.
The handling of Mohammad Reza Sheibani is becoming another example.
In March, Lebanon withdrew its approval of Sheibani’s accreditation as Iran’s ambassador-designate, declared him persona non grata and formally asked him to leave the country. It was an unusually clear exercise of Lebanese sovereign authority toward Tehran. Five months later, General Security granted the same man six months of residency, this time not as a diplomat but as an ordinary Iranian citizen.
Perhaps the paperwork is legal. Politically, that is beside the point.
A state cannot declare that a foreign representative is no longer welcome and then pretend that his continued presence becomes politically meaningless because he has changed passports or immigration categories. Foreign Minister Youssef Rajji himself had argued days earlier that the persona non grata decision left no room for such maneuvering.
This is precisely how sovereignty is eroded in Lebanon: not always through dramatic capitulation, but through a thousand small accommodations.
Every time the government convinces itself that avoiding confrontation is an act of prudence, it postpones the confrontation required to restore its own authority. And every retreat teaches Iran and Hezbollah the same lesson: wait long enough, apply enough pressure, and the Lebanese state will eventually find a formula to accommodate the reality imposed upon it.
But there is an even greater problem with the Sheibani affair. It is a distraction.
Lebanon’s principal Iranian problem is not one diplomat sitting in Beirut, however politically provocative his presence may be. Diplomats can be expelled. Ambassadors can be replaced. Embassies operate in the open.
The real question is what Iran has been allowed to build underneath the Lebanese state.
While Beirut debates whether Sheibani may remain for another six months as a “private citizen,” a far more serious confrontation is unfolding around the Ali al-Taher ridge in southern Lebanon. The area contains a vast Hezbollah underground military network that Israeli and other reports describe as a major command complex. Recent Israeli security assessments cited by Lebanese media have claimed that Hezbollah fighters and members of Iran’s IRGC remains inside parts of that tunnel system as Israeli forces attempt to isolate them. Those claims require independent verification, but their implications should be impossible for the Lebanese government to ignore.
If IRGC officers or soldiers are indeed operating from military installations on Lebanese territory, then the question of Iranian interference has moved far beyond diplomatic etiquette.
It becomes a question of foreign military presence. That should be the scandal.
The Lebanese government should be demanding to know whether Iranian military personnel are deployed inside Lebanon, under whose authority they entered, who protects them, what role they play in Hezbollah’s military infrastructure and, above all, how the Lebanese Army intends to establish exclusive control over such installations.
None of this legitimizes Israeli military operations inside Lebanon. Sovereignty cannot be restored by outsourcing it to Israel. On the contrary, the fact that Israel can conduct military operations around an underground Hezbollah complex on Lebanese territory while the Lebanese government debates the residency status of an Iranian diplomat illustrates the depth of the state’s failure.
Lebanon is squeezed between two violations of its sovereignty because it has spent decades refusing to exercise that sovereignty itself.
The Sheibani episode therefore matters, but not because Sheibani himself represents the greatest Iranian threat to Lebanon. It matters because the government’s retreat over his presence reveals the same instinct that has crippled the state for years: Avoid the difficult decision today and hope the problem becomes more manageable tomorrow. It never does.
Sovereignty is not restored through speeches, legal technicalities or carefully calibrated gestures. It is restored when the state decides that its decisions have consequences and that no foreign power – friend, enemy or self-appointed protector – is entitled to maintain a political or military reality on Lebanese soil outside the authority of the Lebanese Republic.
Until Beirut understands that, the argument over one Iranian ambassador will remain exactly what it is: a sideshow to the much larger question of who actually exercises power in Lebanon.
