The head of Hezbollah’s executive council on Monday blasted the Obama administration for intervening in Lebanon’s affairs and sowing “crises” in the country:

“We are to this day still working with all our might to ward off the specter of strife [hanging over] our country – a strife we have rejected because it is a U.S. scheme together with an Israeli project that is the basis for the discord moving from one region to another,” the head of Hezbollah’s executive council, Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, said in a statement issued Monday.

“This is the destructive American project against Syria and the entire region – which aims to instill fighting and pushes with all its might to keep the bloodshed and destruction,” he said. “Our enemies and their tools are attacking us every day and every hour so that we abandon our resistance … while our answer was and still is that we won’t be dragged into strife and that the weapons of the resistance will remain with us,” he said.

Safieddine – who regularly and venomously attacks Israel – is reportedly Iran’s favored candidate to ultimately succeed Hassan Nasrallah as head of the Iran-backed terror organization. Safieddine’s powerful clan (also spelled Safiedine) has family ties to the Nasrallahs, and also includes a number of influential members of the Arab-American business community in the Detroit area of the U.S.

Lebanon is facing the risk of political collapse. Two weeks ago Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati resigned after failing to overcome Hezbollah’s objections to the reappointment of a key Hezbollah critic to Lebanon’s internal security forces. Hezbollah has meanwhile been pushing controversial legislation through Lebanon’s parliament that would revise the country’s electoral system in a way that would solidify the group’s grip over the Lebanese political system. The so-called Orthodox Gathering law has been criticized by a range of U.S. diplomats.

Analysts have raised eyebrows at claims by Hezbollah and others that criticizing or even working to isolate the organization somehow destabilizes Lebanon. Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellow Tony Badran has recently pointed out that it’s Hezbollah’s work on behalf of Iran – which has seen the group go all-in on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria – that is tearing Lebanon apart along sectarian lines and threatening to drag the country to war:

The proposition that targeting Hezbollah would negatively impact Lebanon presupposes that the group currently contributes to stability. Such a view requires quite the suspension of disbelief. In reality, Hezbollah has thoroughly subverted the country and its citizens in virtually every aspect…

The most obvious threat has been and continues to be Hezbollah’s illegal arsenal. As I have written in recent weeks, Hezbollah’s effort to transport into Lebanon the strategic weapons it had stored in Syria is placing the country in tremendous danger. What makes the peril inescapable is the fact that Hezbollah has turned entire population centers into military sites. It has embedded its military infrastructure inside towns and villages all throughout the country. The Israelis have already struck one such convoy in Syria. However, eventually Hezbollah may succeed in bringing another convoy across the border. This will surely prompt another Israeli strike, which in turn is sure to result in significant collateral damage.

Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria has had other deleterious effects on Lebanon and its fragile social fabric. By joining the war on the side of the Assad regime, Hezbollah is also acting as the regime’s flank in Lebanon. As such, it has taken action against Lebanese Sunnis who are assisting the Syrian opposition. Whenever the Shiite group could not do so itself, it has relied on its allies in the military and security apparatuses to perform a task on its behalf, as we witnessed in the Arsal incident several weeks ago.

The damage has been, therefore, double. On the one hand, Hezbollah further exacerbated Sunni-Shiite tensions. Already it had brought those communal relations to the brink in May 2008, when it assaulted Sunni neighborhoods of Beirut (and the Druze Shouf Mountains), killing dozens. On the other hand, it pitted the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) against the Sunni community, which has come to view the Party of God’s relationship with the LAF with great suspicion.

Badran’s analysis continues by unpacking how Hezbollah “not only undermines Lebanon’s security, institutions, and political system, but is also on track to compromise its foreign relations, ruin its financial system, and destroy whatever remains of its social cohesion.”

[Photo: KataebTV / YouTube]