Saturday, December 09, 2006
Liberal Consensus Hardens for More Troops to Iraq;
Meet Senator Slither; Farewell, Jeane Kirkpatrick
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Here's comes Rep Silvestre Reyes of Texas, handpicked by Nancy Pelosi to head the House Intelligence Committee and he's calling for 20,000 more U.S. troops to be sent to Iraq. Reyes says they're needed to crush the Shi'a and Sunni militias. Didn't I tell to you right here, after the Nov 7 "peace moment" the polls, that the Democrats would fall into line behind Senator John McCain? The minute Jack Murtha made his run for House Majority leader the liberal establishment began to take a stand against all seditious talk of "immediate redeployment". You can scarcely open up the New York Times without tripping over a piece by Michael Gordon reporting yet another thoughtful military man he put up General Zinni in this capacity last week saying that the prudent short-term course would be to send more troops to Iraq.
You want more evidence of Democratic spinelessness? How about the confirmation of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense by the U.S. Senate, 95 to 2. Not a single Democrat voted against this slippery survivor of the Iran-contra scandal, who spent the early part of his intelligence career at the CIA and NSC, inflating the Soviet threat and leaking fictions about the KGB plot to kill the pope to neocon fantasists like Clare Sterling. The two No votes came from Santorum of Pennsylvania and Bunning of Kentucky. Some of the Democrats voting Aye this time voted No on Gates when he was up for confirmation as Bush Sr's CIA chief back in 1991.
In our national public life these days, if you want to make any realistic recommendation on policy options, you have to be over 75, plenty of money in the bank and with nothing left to lose. Take Jimmy Carter and James Baker. Carter denounces Israel's "imprisonment wall" and Baker slips Palestinians' right of return into his Study Group's road map to peace.
Another 80-year old, Jeane Kirkpatrick, apparently saw reason in her fading years. Her friend Jack Kemp says that she would meet him on the way to church and lament the folly of the US attack on Iraq. This ur-neo-con would, so Kemp said, denounce the younger neocons like William Kristol. I had to endure a servile interview with Kristol by NPR's Deborah Ames, in which he held forth on her fine distinctions between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
Since the point of Kirkpatrick's distinctions was to give intellectual buttress to crude imperial functions like cheering on Guatemalan mass murderers practicing genocide on Mayan Indians, Kristol at least reminded me of what a disgusting creature Kirkpatrick was, at least in the decades when she had measurable influence on U.S. foreign policy, in the Reagan years. As with all the Commentary crowd in the late 1970s the only intellectual challenge they ever offered was the matter of deciding whether they actually believed all the drivel they were writing. Kirkpatrick was one of the irksome, because she tricked out her absurdities with pretentious references to Hobbes and Kant, thus tipping off the rubes that here was a Great Mind at work.
I remember her at the Republican convention in New Orleans in 1980. Conservative queen bees like Kirkpatrick and Schafly had, in their proximate physical aspect, an undercurrent of erotic violence - Jeane was surely a closet case -- that didn't really come through on camera. Rooted under the rostrum in the Superdome, peering up into Kirkpatrick's flaring nostrils I could see planes of her face that were normally flattened out in the bland imagery of videotape.
Of course she was talking about "national security" with her lips puckered into a moue of cruel delight as she foretold how Dukakis and the Democrats would leave America bound at helpless beneath the Russian jackboot. The only jackboot I could keep in mind was her's: Jeane lashing savagely at the cuffed and whimpering body of effete liberalism.
Meet Senator Slither
The slithery junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama is ensuring himself a steady political diet of publicity by refusing to take his name out of consideration as a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. We're entering the time frame when all such aspirants have to make up their minds whether they can find the requisite money and political base. Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, the obvious peace and justice candidate, has already decided that he can't, which gives us a pretty revealing insight into the weakness of the left these days.
It's a no-brainer for Obama to excite the political commentators by waving a "maybe" flag. It keeps the spotlight on him, and piles up political capital, whatever he decides to do in the end.
It's depressing to think that we'll have to endure Obamaspeak for months, if not years to come: a pulp of boosterism about the American dream, interspersed with homilies about "putting factionalism and party divisions behind us and moving on". I used to think Senator Joe Lieberman was the man whose words I'd least like to be force fed top volume if I was chained next to a loudspeaker in Camp Gitmo, but I think Obama, who picked Lieberman as his mentor when he first entered the US Senate, is worse. I've never heard a politician so desperate not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright.
When Democrats fled Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq a year ago, few with more transparent calculation than Obama who voyaged to the Council on Foreign Relations on November 22, 2005, to soothe the assembled elites with such balderdash as "The President could take the politics out of Iraq once and for all if he would simply go on television and say to the American people 'Yes, we made mistakes" or "we need to focus our attention on how to reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq. Notice that I say 'reduce,' and not 'fully withdraw' or "2006 should be the year that the various Iraqi factions must arrive at a fair political accommodation to defeat the insurgency; and three, the Administration must make available to Congress critical information on reality-based benchmarks that will help us succeed in Iraq."
Some Democrats working for Ned Lamont in the recent senate race in Connecticut eventually taken by Lieberman, running as an independent, are exceptionally bitter about the role played by Obama who made the calculation that Lieberman would win, and that he would not forfeit political capital by doing anything for his fellow Democrat, Lamont. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton gets good reviews from such Lamont workers as a politician who did what she could for their man.)
These hard feelings go back as far as the notorious political dinner in Connecticut in Marcdh of 2005, when Obama traveled to Connecticut to hail the pro-war Lieberman to the state's Democrats.Obama, who runs a huge political fund-raising operation in Washington, knows where the money is, in the the right-center segment of the political landscape inhabited by the Democratic Leadership Council.
It's why he picked Lieberman, a DLC icon, as his mentor. The new arrival in Washington wanted to send out a swift signal to the corporate powers and Party donors that here was no boat-rocker from Chicago, but a safe pair of hands and an obedient pair of heels.
There ere was another, more substantive signal, keenly savored by the corporate world, where Obama voted for "tort reform", thus making it far harder for people to get redress or compensation.
As I wrote about Obama last year, Sometimes people comfort themselves with variants on what's called the intentional fallacy: in other words, as only the fifth black senator in US history, Obama has to bob and weave, placate the Man, while positioning himself at the high table as the people's champion. But in his advance to the high table Obama is diligently divesting himself of all legitimate claims to be any sort of popular champion, as opposed to another safe black, like Condoleezza Rice (whom Obama voted to confirm. The Empire relishes such servants.
And so, Obama, the constitutional law professor, voted to close off any filibuster of Alito, and fled Senator Russell Feingold's motion to censure the P:resident, declaring "my and Senator Feingold's view is not unanimous. Some constitutional scholars and lower court opinions support the president's argument that he has inherent authority to go outside the bounds of the law in monitoring the activities of suspected terrorists. The question is whether the president understood the law and knowingly flaunted it." That's not the question at all. The question is whether the Constitution permits its violation by the President, and the answer is no.
Obama, a self proclaimed educator in constitutional law, voted Yes on March 2 to final passage of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act, unlike ten of his Democratic colleagues.
A couple of weeks ago Obama unleashed another cloud of statesmanlike mush about Iraq to an upscale foreign policy crowd in Chicago. Trimming to new realities he's now talking about a four-to-six month time frame for beginning withdrawal from Iraq. Don't mistake this for any real agenda. It's a schedule that can be pulled in any direction, like a rubber mask from a Christmas stocking.
This week many Americans have stared aghast at the photos of Jose Padilla, manacled hand and foot, blinded by special goggles, being escorted by his US military jailers from his isolation cell to the dentist. His lawyers say that his horrible treatment , four years of total isolation and sensory deprivation, have rendered him incapable of defending himself.
The treatment of Padilla classed as "an enemy combatant" until US government prosecutors were forced to reclassify him as a criminal defendant earlier this year was obviously a diligent exercise in torture, akin to what has been meted out to "enemy combatants" held in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo. Last year Illinois' senior US senator, Dick Durbin, bravely got into trouble for likening conditions at Guantanamo to those in a Nazi or Stalin-era camp. This was one of Durbin's finer moments, as he read an FBI man's eyewitness describing how he had entered interview rooms "to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more."
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course."
The right-wing mad-dog crowd jumped on Durbin, and eventually he paid the penalty of having to eat crow on the Senate floor. His fellow senator from Illinois, Obama, did not support him in any way. He said, "we have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each other across the aisle and that is particularly pronounced when we make mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake once in a while...and what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope of how we've operated and interacted with people, will override whatever particular mistake we make."
That's three uses of the word "mistake". Obama had his fingers stuck in the wind as always. He bends to every breeze, as soon as he identifies it as coming from a career threatening quarter. This man is no leader.
"Happy Feet": Calvinism Takes A Hit
On a final note of uplift: Alya and I found ourselves at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle Friday night, watching Happy Feet, at the Imax. Cartoon movies about penguins is about my speed these days. Happy Feet is fine stuff, particularly for some who, in distant days, put my hands in front of my face as soon as the Ice Queen came on screen. It's a paean to antinomianism, to informalism in culture, to diversity, to sharing the earth's resources, to Hispanic homies, to... to... Not a single dead Mayan (penguin) anywhere to be seen. The imagery is basically out of Casper Friedrich and mid-nineteenth century German kitsch romanticism, which in its later expressionist form -- had a big input into Disney's artists back in the 1930s and early 1940s. Penguins brood atop soaring ice crags, or gaze in vertiginous forced perspective down immense abysses of snow and ice. The ideological contest is between despairing Calvinism, enacted by a Scottish Elder Penguin, and the Promethean defiance of our hero, Mambo the penguin mutant. There are fine cameo roles from killer whales, raptors and leopard seals. The message: we can have our fish and eat them too. Braced with Happy Feet and the late Gold's persuasive views on the abiotic origins of oil I can face 2007 with a light heart
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Thursday, December 07, 2006
Why V.P. Sharaa’s Statement is Important
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
BY Joshua Landis
Yes, Sharaa still matters. Sharaa has been an integral part of the new Asad regime. He has played "bad cop" to various "good cops." From 2003 to 2005, he was bad cop to Khaddam and Kanaan on the Lebanon issue ( More recently he has played bad cop to Walid Mualem, particularly on the UN investigation of the Hariri murder.
Khaddam wanted to go soft on Lebanon in 2004, permitting a free presidential election during the fall of 2004. Sharaa was the architect of Lahoud's extension. At the time, he argued that the UN Security Council would not take action against Syria with 1559. He was wrong, but was not punished for this at the time, despite wide-spread belief that he should have been by Syria's reformers. He was the instrument by which regime leaders split the "old guard." He articulated the anti-Khaddam line.
Sharaa also argued for the hard Syrian line on Iraq (Jihad) and resistance) in contrast to Khaddam. He probably believing that Saddam would put up more resistance than he did in opposing the American invasion. When this didn't happen and the US went on its Syria offensive, accusing Syria of aiding Iraq's Baathist deadeners, taking in Saddam's WMD, and opening a Ho Chi Min trail, Khaddam was given the Iraq portfolio. Khaddam tried to organize the Sunni tribal leaders in order to deliver them to the Americans and reopen a dialogue with Washington on the basis of delivering Iraqi Sunni cooperation for Lebanon. This strategy failed because Washington would not talk to its enemies, use diplomacy with the Syrians, or pay blackmail (whichever description you prefer).
Following the Hariri murder and the UN investigation of Syria's culpability, Sharaa and Asef Shawkat led a 5 man committee that was tasked with planning Syria's defense and strategy. Only when the aggressive Mehlis phase of the investigation had been undermined by the turning of Husam Husam testimony and the announced resignation of Mehlis was Sharaa kicked upstairs to VP and Mualem made Foreign Minister. Mualem was brought in show a change of Syrian course. He was to play the good cop and indicate to the UN that Syria would cooperate up to a point with the international investigation and try to find a graceful way to deescalate the confrontation in Lebanon and with the International community. By replacing Sharaa with Mualem at the end of 2005, Asad was suggesting that Syria believed it had dodged the Mehlis bullet and needed a new foreign policy face to try to break out of its isolation.
The return of Sharaa as spokesperson in yesterday's statement suggests that the regime leaders are taking him out of mothballs in order to initiate a "bad cop" phase. They may well believe that Washington is determined not to compromise on Lebanon and not to follow the Baker Plan recommendations by resuming real dialogue with Syria. This may mean that Syria is pulling up its socks and preparing to push the confrontation up a notch in order to punish Washington for its refusal to engage Syria and give ground in Lebanon and on the UN investigation.
Syria thinks it has won these battles, or will win them, and that Washington is just being obtuse by not finding a gracefully retreat (as the Baker report recommends) and negotiating with Syria to save what it can of its Lebanon policy without subjecting Lebanon and the region to needless confrontation. My hunch is that Syria is preparing to play for keeps in Lebanon on the issue of bringing down the Siniora government, even if it an escalation means further civil discord and risking violence that could get out of hand. It means blocking Hamas cooperation with Abu Abbas in Palestine and a prisoner return for Israel. It means obstructing American initiatives in Iraq and undermining the Malaki government. It means going to the mat with Saudi Arabia and tightening cooperation with Iran. In effect, Sharaa is saying to the West, "if you want to play this game of chicken, you are foolish. We are not going to blink first or veer from our well known course. You will lose in this game. If you do not negotiate with us in good faith, Lebanon will burn, Palestine will burn, and Iraq will burn. We have the cards and we will play them.”This is why I found Sharaa's statement important. From Alex's comments, I think he shares this concern.
This is no time for the US and Syria to be escalating their conflict. The dangers of further radicalization in the region are real and America’s hand is weak. My hunch is that Syria will win on more fronts that it loses. “Win” is perhaps the wrong word to use. Everyone will be a loser, but Syria will lose less than Lebanon, Palestine or Iraq.
Compromising with Hizbullah in Beirut will not mean a “Tehran on the Mediterranean” as Hisham Melham insisted it would in his PBS News Hour interview with me. This is why I posted my “Babes of Hizbullah” article several days ago. Lebanon will not become Iran, as some claim it will happen should ground be ceded to the Lebanese opposition. (See Helena Cobban's vociferous objection to this post on the grounds that it was sexist and exploitative. Also see her post at "Just World News," her site.)
Allow me to add one anecdote to explain why I believe Lebanon will not become like Khomeini’s Iran. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon forcing two hundred thousand Southern Lebanese to flee up north, a Shiite Imam occupied the apartment on the first floor of a building in which a Lebanese woman friend of mine was living. I had been teaching at International College in Beirut, but had moved to Damascus before the invasion to attend the University of Damascus.
The Imam brought body guards and militia men with him who became a powerful presence in the neighborhood (Saqiet al-Janzeer). They shut down the bars in the quarter and harassed by friend for living alone and for having male visitors to her apartment. She worried that Beirut would turn into Tehran. After some time, the Imam stopped enforcing his puritanical rules on the neighborhood and things returned to normal. The Shiites from the South adapted to Beirut rather than Beirut being transformed into Tehran.
There can be little doubt that finding a compromise with Hizbullah and Aoun will change things in Lebanon in a way that liberal, Western oriented Lebanese will dislike, but perhaps negotiating a compromise will be less damaging to their interests than forcing a confrontation that will become ugly? Having Hizbullah takes more power by force will not serve anyone’s interests
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
BY Joshua Landis
Yes, Sharaa still matters. Sharaa has been an integral part of the new Asad regime. He has played "bad cop" to various "good cops." From 2003 to 2005, he was bad cop to Khaddam and Kanaan on the Lebanon issue ( More recently he has played bad cop to Walid Mualem, particularly on the UN investigation of the Hariri murder.
Khaddam wanted to go soft on Lebanon in 2004, permitting a free presidential election during the fall of 2004. Sharaa was the architect of Lahoud's extension. At the time, he argued that the UN Security Council would not take action against Syria with 1559. He was wrong, but was not punished for this at the time, despite wide-spread belief that he should have been by Syria's reformers. He was the instrument by which regime leaders split the "old guard." He articulated the anti-Khaddam line.
Sharaa also argued for the hard Syrian line on Iraq (Jihad) and resistance) in contrast to Khaddam. He probably believing that Saddam would put up more resistance than he did in opposing the American invasion. When this didn't happen and the US went on its Syria offensive, accusing Syria of aiding Iraq's Baathist deadeners, taking in Saddam's WMD, and opening a Ho Chi Min trail, Khaddam was given the Iraq portfolio. Khaddam tried to organize the Sunni tribal leaders in order to deliver them to the Americans and reopen a dialogue with Washington on the basis of delivering Iraqi Sunni cooperation for Lebanon. This strategy failed because Washington would not talk to its enemies, use diplomacy with the Syrians, or pay blackmail (whichever description you prefer).
Following the Hariri murder and the UN investigation of Syria's culpability, Sharaa and Asef Shawkat led a 5 man committee that was tasked with planning Syria's defense and strategy. Only when the aggressive Mehlis phase of the investigation had been undermined by the turning of Husam Husam testimony and the announced resignation of Mehlis was Sharaa kicked upstairs to VP and Mualem made Foreign Minister. Mualem was brought in show a change of Syrian course. He was to play the good cop and indicate to the UN that Syria would cooperate up to a point with the international investigation and try to find a graceful way to deescalate the confrontation in Lebanon and with the International community. By replacing Sharaa with Mualem at the end of 2005, Asad was suggesting that Syria believed it had dodged the Mehlis bullet and needed a new foreign policy face to try to break out of its isolation.
The return of Sharaa as spokesperson in yesterday's statement suggests that the regime leaders are taking him out of mothballs in order to initiate a "bad cop" phase. They may well believe that Washington is determined not to compromise on Lebanon and not to follow the Baker Plan recommendations by resuming real dialogue with Syria. This may mean that Syria is pulling up its socks and preparing to push the confrontation up a notch in order to punish Washington for its refusal to engage Syria and give ground in Lebanon and on the UN investigation.
Syria thinks it has won these battles, or will win them, and that Washington is just being obtuse by not finding a gracefully retreat (as the Baker report recommends) and negotiating with Syria to save what it can of its Lebanon policy without subjecting Lebanon and the region to needless confrontation. My hunch is that Syria is preparing to play for keeps in Lebanon on the issue of bringing down the Siniora government, even if it an escalation means further civil discord and risking violence that could get out of hand. It means blocking Hamas cooperation with Abu Abbas in Palestine and a prisoner return for Israel. It means obstructing American initiatives in Iraq and undermining the Malaki government. It means going to the mat with Saudi Arabia and tightening cooperation with Iran. In effect, Sharaa is saying to the West, "if you want to play this game of chicken, you are foolish. We are not going to blink first or veer from our well known course. You will lose in this game. If you do not negotiate with us in good faith, Lebanon will burn, Palestine will burn, and Iraq will burn. We have the cards and we will play them.”This is why I found Sharaa's statement important. From Alex's comments, I think he shares this concern.
This is no time for the US and Syria to be escalating their conflict. The dangers of further radicalization in the region are real and America’s hand is weak. My hunch is that Syria will win on more fronts that it loses. “Win” is perhaps the wrong word to use. Everyone will be a loser, but Syria will lose less than Lebanon, Palestine or Iraq.
Compromising with Hizbullah in Beirut will not mean a “Tehran on the Mediterranean” as Hisham Melham insisted it would in his PBS News Hour interview with me. This is why I posted my “Babes of Hizbullah” article several days ago. Lebanon will not become Iran, as some claim it will happen should ground be ceded to the Lebanese opposition. (See Helena Cobban's vociferous objection to this post on the grounds that it was sexist and exploitative. Also see her post at "Just World News," her site.)
Allow me to add one anecdote to explain why I believe Lebanon will not become like Khomeini’s Iran. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon forcing two hundred thousand Southern Lebanese to flee up north, a Shiite Imam occupied the apartment on the first floor of a building in which a Lebanese woman friend of mine was living. I had been teaching at International College in Beirut, but had moved to Damascus before the invasion to attend the University of Damascus.
The Imam brought body guards and militia men with him who became a powerful presence in the neighborhood (Saqiet al-Janzeer). They shut down the bars in the quarter and harassed by friend for living alone and for having male visitors to her apartment. She worried that Beirut would turn into Tehran. After some time, the Imam stopped enforcing his puritanical rules on the neighborhood and things returned to normal. The Shiites from the South adapted to Beirut rather than Beirut being transformed into Tehran.
There can be little doubt that finding a compromise with Hizbullah and Aoun will change things in Lebanon in a way that liberal, Western oriented Lebanese will dislike, but perhaps negotiating a compromise will be less damaging to their interests than forcing a confrontation that will become ugly? Having Hizbullah takes more power by force will not serve anyone’s interests
We've Been Talking
It's a myth that the U.S. hasn't already engaged Syria and Iran.
BY JOEL HIMELFARB
As Washington waits breathlessly for luminaries like Jim Baker, Lee Hamilton, Vernon Jordan, Sandra Day O'Connor and the rest of the Iraq Study Group to tell us what to do about Iraq, it's past time to knock down a myth that appears to be driving the panel's deliberations: the notion that the Bush administration's refusal to talk with Iran and Syria is the reason for our inability to stabilize Iraq.
The premise--pushed by Democratic politicians and others--is absolutely false. The people pushing this, among them Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Sen. Chuck Hagel, seem intent on sandbagging President Bush into negotiating from a position of weakness over some form of "grand bargain" with some of our most deadly enemies. But the fact is that plenty of engagement has already been taking place. For one thing, Syria retains an embassy in Washington; and the United States has one in Damascus. As for Iran, there are plenty of opportunities for the United States to talk with it in forums such as the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, where both states are represented. And America has been trying for decades to resolve differences diplomatically with both regimes. Since the September 11 attacks, Washington has held discussions with Tehran and Damascus on a wide array of issues, including matters such as Afghanistan; al Qaeda's international terror networks; Iraq; Lebanon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The real issue today is that the Bush administration, which has been repeatedly burned in recent years when it tried to engage these governments, prefers discretion and holding lower-level talks. These regimes insist on holding well-publicized summits that yield them P.R. windfalls without forcing them to substantively change their policies. The fact is that, since the Carter's presidency, U.S. administrations of both parties have tried unsuccessfully to persuade these governments to end their support for terrorism and their efforts to sabotage Washington's efforts to facilitate peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Following Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's historic November 1977 peace mission to Israel, for example, the Carter administration attempted to persuade Syrian President Hafez Assad (father of the current Syrian strongman Bashar Assad) to join the Middle East peace process. Assad responded by making Damascus the headquarters of a rejection front dominated by the pro-Soviet terrorist groups like George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.
In 1982 and 1983, veteran U.S. diplomats Philip Habib and Morris Draper conducted months of arduous shuttle diplomacy in an effort to end the violence in Lebanon--a civil war that began in 1975, followed by Israel's 1982 military campaign to uproot Palestinian terrorist groups based there. Syria did everything it could to sabotage efforts to stabilize Lebanon: It likely facilitated the September 1982 assassination of Lebanese leader Pierre Gemayel and undoubtedly assisted the rise of the Iranian-backed Shi'ite terror organization Hezbollah, whose "credits" included the October 23, 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut which killed 241 U.S. servicemen. And for good measure, Syria waged an intimidation campaign that forced the Lebanese government to abrogate the U.S.-brokered May 1983 peace treaty it signed with Israel less than a year later.
In recent days, Mr. Baker, arguing the importance of talking to people we dislike, cites as an example his own shuttle diplomacy effort while serving as secretary of state in 1991, when he succeeded in cajoling Assad into participating in the Madrid conference on Middle East peace. He said that, even though his first 15 visits to Damascus did not succeed in persuading Assad to participate, the 16th try was a charm: The Syrian strongman showed up in Madrid after all. But what exactly did all of Mr. Baker's hard work achieve? Less than two years later, after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat embarked on the Oslo "peace process" at the White House with President Clinton looking on, Syria embarked on a campaign to sabotage any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement by supporting terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
During the 1990s, Rabin and subsequent Israeli leaders tried to negotiate with Assad an agreement in which Israel would return the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in a defensive war, to Syria in exchange of a peace settlement. But Assad blocked any real progress by refusing to negotiate seriously over security arrangements with Israel. In May 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon, whereupon Syria responded by aiding the Hezbollah buildup on Israel's northern border that led to war on July 12, 2006, after Hezbollah crossed the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers.
As all of its recent predecessors did with Hafez Assad, who died in June 2000 , the Bush administration has also repeatedly tried and failed to persuade his son and successor strongman, President Bashar Assad, to be more cooperative. David Schenker, who served as the Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestinian affairs adviser in the office of the Secretary of Defense from 2002 to 2006, notes that Washington sent at least five high-level delegations to Syria from 2001 until the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005 in an effort "to cajole Bashar Assad to change his unhelpful behavior."
The delegations dealt with issues such as Syria's efforts to destabilize Iraq; its continued interference in Lebanon; and its support for Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorist groups. All of these good-faith efforts failed. Perhaps the best known was Secretary of State Colin Powell's May 2003 visit to Damascus--one month after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and at the height of American power in the Bush era. Assad agreed to Powell's demand that he stop subverting Iraq, but once Powell left, the Syrian dictator continued business as usual.
If this is the way he behaved toward an American secretary of state at that time, how can we seriously believe things will change for the better now, given all of the problems the U.S. military is facing in Iraq; the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan; and the success of Hezbollah and its allies in bringing Lebanon to the verge of catastrophe.
If anything, good-faith U.S. efforts to reach out to the Islamic Republic of Iran dating back to the Carter Administration have been an even more abysmal failure. In the wake of the February 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a U.S. ally, the Carter Administration tried to reach out to establish a dialogue with the new Iranian government. So, on Nov. 1, 1979, National Security Adviser Brzezinski met in Algiers with Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, a relatively powerless Iranian "moderate."
In response, student radicals seized the American Embassy in Tehran, beginning the hostage crisis that continued until the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. The students received backing from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had little use for Bazargan and was intent on humiliating the "Great Satan." President Reagan--a political giant whose successes included ending the Cold War--fared little better in dealing with the Iranians, as evidence by the failed effort to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages captured by Iran's Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon.
Another major U.S. effort to talk with the Iranians occurred in 1998, after the election of Mohammed Khatami, who talked elliptically of dialogue with the West. In response, the Clinton Administration began to back away from the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, legislation imposing sanctions against foreign companies that invest in the Iranian oil and gas industries. Scholars Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin note in their book "Eternal Iran" that the softening of the U.S. position averted a crisis over a French investment of $2 billion in Iran's South Pars oil field. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright also apologized for the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that brought the Shah to power. And the Clinton administration, according to FBI Director Louis Freeh, dragged its feet in investigating the June 1996 bombing of a U.S. housing facility in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 American servicemen were killed, apparently by terrorists supported by Iran. All of this came to naught, as the Iranians demanded reparations from the United States and the Ayatollah Khamenei denounced rapprochement with Washington as "treason."
One area where the two countries were able to cooperate was Afghanistan, where both Washington and Tehran opposed the Taliban regime before and after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But Washington dramatically scaled back cooperation after Israel's January 2002 apprehension of the Karine-A, a ship carrying 50 tons of Iranian-supplied weapons to Arafat's Palestinian Authority. President Bush's inclusion of Iran in the "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address came just weeks after the Karine-A discovery. In May 2003, Washington reversed its willingness to cooperate with Iran after learning that it was harboring al Qaeda terrorists, including some who were implicated in a bombing in Saudi Arabia that month in which eight Americans were killed. In March, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, responding to European calls for a dialogue with Iran over its nuclear weapons program, announced that Washington would end its opposition to Iranian membership in the World Trade Organization and an array of other steps in an effort to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear weapons activities. Iran responded with defiance--and for good measure, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected last year, has made statements denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel's destruction a regular staple of his rhetoric.
Based on the historical record, the advocates of U.S. engagement with these regimes are delusional. The record, from Carter to Bush II, strongly suggests that neither regime has any interest in cooperating with us in Iraq, and are more likely than not to view the Carter-Brzezinski-Hagel approach as a demonstration of American weakness.
It's a myth that the U.S. hasn't already engaged Syria and Iran.
BY JOEL HIMELFARB
As Washington waits breathlessly for luminaries like Jim Baker, Lee Hamilton, Vernon Jordan, Sandra Day O'Connor and the rest of the Iraq Study Group to tell us what to do about Iraq, it's past time to knock down a myth that appears to be driving the panel's deliberations: the notion that the Bush administration's refusal to talk with Iran and Syria is the reason for our inability to stabilize Iraq.
The premise--pushed by Democratic politicians and others--is absolutely false. The people pushing this, among them Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Sen. Chuck Hagel, seem intent on sandbagging President Bush into negotiating from a position of weakness over some form of "grand bargain" with some of our most deadly enemies. But the fact is that plenty of engagement has already been taking place. For one thing, Syria retains an embassy in Washington; and the United States has one in Damascus. As for Iran, there are plenty of opportunities for the United States to talk with it in forums such as the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, where both states are represented. And America has been trying for decades to resolve differences diplomatically with both regimes. Since the September 11 attacks, Washington has held discussions with Tehran and Damascus on a wide array of issues, including matters such as Afghanistan; al Qaeda's international terror networks; Iraq; Lebanon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The real issue today is that the Bush administration, which has been repeatedly burned in recent years when it tried to engage these governments, prefers discretion and holding lower-level talks. These regimes insist on holding well-publicized summits that yield them P.R. windfalls without forcing them to substantively change their policies. The fact is that, since the Carter's presidency, U.S. administrations of both parties have tried unsuccessfully to persuade these governments to end their support for terrorism and their efforts to sabotage Washington's efforts to facilitate peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Following Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's historic November 1977 peace mission to Israel, for example, the Carter administration attempted to persuade Syrian President Hafez Assad (father of the current Syrian strongman Bashar Assad) to join the Middle East peace process. Assad responded by making Damascus the headquarters of a rejection front dominated by the pro-Soviet terrorist groups like George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.
In 1982 and 1983, veteran U.S. diplomats Philip Habib and Morris Draper conducted months of arduous shuttle diplomacy in an effort to end the violence in Lebanon--a civil war that began in 1975, followed by Israel's 1982 military campaign to uproot Palestinian terrorist groups based there. Syria did everything it could to sabotage efforts to stabilize Lebanon: It likely facilitated the September 1982 assassination of Lebanese leader Pierre Gemayel and undoubtedly assisted the rise of the Iranian-backed Shi'ite terror organization Hezbollah, whose "credits" included the October 23, 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut which killed 241 U.S. servicemen. And for good measure, Syria waged an intimidation campaign that forced the Lebanese government to abrogate the U.S.-brokered May 1983 peace treaty it signed with Israel less than a year later.
In recent days, Mr. Baker, arguing the importance of talking to people we dislike, cites as an example his own shuttle diplomacy effort while serving as secretary of state in 1991, when he succeeded in cajoling Assad into participating in the Madrid conference on Middle East peace. He said that, even though his first 15 visits to Damascus did not succeed in persuading Assad to participate, the 16th try was a charm: The Syrian strongman showed up in Madrid after all. But what exactly did all of Mr. Baker's hard work achieve? Less than two years later, after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat embarked on the Oslo "peace process" at the White House with President Clinton looking on, Syria embarked on a campaign to sabotage any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement by supporting terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
During the 1990s, Rabin and subsequent Israeli leaders tried to negotiate with Assad an agreement in which Israel would return the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in a defensive war, to Syria in exchange of a peace settlement. But Assad blocked any real progress by refusing to negotiate seriously over security arrangements with Israel. In May 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon, whereupon Syria responded by aiding the Hezbollah buildup on Israel's northern border that led to war on July 12, 2006, after Hezbollah crossed the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers.
As all of its recent predecessors did with Hafez Assad, who died in June 2000 , the Bush administration has also repeatedly tried and failed to persuade his son and successor strongman, President Bashar Assad, to be more cooperative. David Schenker, who served as the Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestinian affairs adviser in the office of the Secretary of Defense from 2002 to 2006, notes that Washington sent at least five high-level delegations to Syria from 2001 until the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005 in an effort "to cajole Bashar Assad to change his unhelpful behavior."
The delegations dealt with issues such as Syria's efforts to destabilize Iraq; its continued interference in Lebanon; and its support for Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorist groups. All of these good-faith efforts failed. Perhaps the best known was Secretary of State Colin Powell's May 2003 visit to Damascus--one month after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and at the height of American power in the Bush era. Assad agreed to Powell's demand that he stop subverting Iraq, but once Powell left, the Syrian dictator continued business as usual.
If this is the way he behaved toward an American secretary of state at that time, how can we seriously believe things will change for the better now, given all of the problems the U.S. military is facing in Iraq; the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan; and the success of Hezbollah and its allies in bringing Lebanon to the verge of catastrophe.
If anything, good-faith U.S. efforts to reach out to the Islamic Republic of Iran dating back to the Carter Administration have been an even more abysmal failure. In the wake of the February 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a U.S. ally, the Carter Administration tried to reach out to establish a dialogue with the new Iranian government. So, on Nov. 1, 1979, National Security Adviser Brzezinski met in Algiers with Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, a relatively powerless Iranian "moderate."
In response, student radicals seized the American Embassy in Tehran, beginning the hostage crisis that continued until the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. The students received backing from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had little use for Bazargan and was intent on humiliating the "Great Satan." President Reagan--a political giant whose successes included ending the Cold War--fared little better in dealing with the Iranians, as evidence by the failed effort to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages captured by Iran's Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon.
Another major U.S. effort to talk with the Iranians occurred in 1998, after the election of Mohammed Khatami, who talked elliptically of dialogue with the West. In response, the Clinton Administration began to back away from the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, legislation imposing sanctions against foreign companies that invest in the Iranian oil and gas industries. Scholars Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin note in their book "Eternal Iran" that the softening of the U.S. position averted a crisis over a French investment of $2 billion in Iran's South Pars oil field. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright also apologized for the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that brought the Shah to power. And the Clinton administration, according to FBI Director Louis Freeh, dragged its feet in investigating the June 1996 bombing of a U.S. housing facility in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 American servicemen were killed, apparently by terrorists supported by Iran. All of this came to naught, as the Iranians demanded reparations from the United States and the Ayatollah Khamenei denounced rapprochement with Washington as "treason."
One area where the two countries were able to cooperate was Afghanistan, where both Washington and Tehran opposed the Taliban regime before and after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But Washington dramatically scaled back cooperation after Israel's January 2002 apprehension of the Karine-A, a ship carrying 50 tons of Iranian-supplied weapons to Arafat's Palestinian Authority. President Bush's inclusion of Iran in the "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address came just weeks after the Karine-A discovery. In May 2003, Washington reversed its willingness to cooperate with Iran after learning that it was harboring al Qaeda terrorists, including some who were implicated in a bombing in Saudi Arabia that month in which eight Americans were killed. In March, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, responding to European calls for a dialogue with Iran over its nuclear weapons program, announced that Washington would end its opposition to Iranian membership in the World Trade Organization and an array of other steps in an effort to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear weapons activities. Iran responded with defiance--and for good measure, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected last year, has made statements denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel's destruction a regular staple of his rhetoric.
Based on the historical record, the advocates of U.S. engagement with these regimes are delusional. The record, from Carter to Bush II, strongly suggests that neither regime has any interest in cooperating with us in Iraq, and are more likely than not to view the Carter-Brzezinski-Hagel approach as a demonstration of American weakness.
The danger of engaging with the enemy
By Jeff Jacoby,
SHOULD THE United States turn to Iran and Syria for help in reducing the violence bloodying Iraq? James Baker's Iraq Study Group, out this week with its well-leaked recommendations, thinks direct talks with Tehran and Damascus would be a fine idea. I think so too -- right after those governments switch sides in the global jihad.
As things stand now, however, negotiating with Iran and Syria over the future of Iraq is about as promising a strategy for preventing more bloodshed as negotiating with Adolf Hitler over the future of Czechoslovakia was in 1938. There were eminent "realists" then too, many of whom were gung-ho for cutting a deal with the Fuehrer. As Neville Chamberlain set off on the diplomatic mission that would culminate in Munich, William Shirer recorded in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," Britain's poet laureate, John Masefield, composed a paean in his honor . When the negotiations were done and Czechoslovakia had been dismembered, the prime minister was hailed as a national hero. The Nobel Committee received not one, not two, but 10 nominations proposing Chamberlain for the 1939 peace prize.
Chamberlain and his admirers had been certain that Munich would bring "peace in our time." Instead it helped pave the way for war.
How many times does the lesson have to be relearned? There is no appeasing the unappeasable. When democracies engage with fanatical tyrants, the world becomes not less dangerous but more so.
PART ONE: Fighting to win in Iraq (By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist, 12/3/06)
That wasn't the fashionable view in 1938, however, and it isn't popular today. According to a new World Public Opinion poll, 75 percent of Americans agree that to stabilize Iraq, the United States should enter into talks with Iran and Syria. "I believe in talking to your enemies," James Baker declares. "I don't think you restrict your conversations to your friends."
But with totalitarian regimes like those in Iran and Syria, the effect of such "conversations" is usually negative. It buys time and legitimacy for the totalitarians, while deepening their conviction that the West has no stomach for a fight. No one was more pleased with Chamberlain's diplomacy than Hitler, for it proved that Germany was in the saddle, riding the democracies -- that the momentum was with Berlin, while London and Paris were flailing. The Baker panel's recommendations will bring similar satisfaction to Tehran and Damascus.
Shortly after 9/11, President Bush famously declared that every nation "now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." At every step of the way, Iran and Syria have unambiguously been with the terrorists.
As the world's foremost sponsors of radical Islamic violence, the State Department reported in April, "Iran and Syria routinely provide unique safe haven, substantial resources, and guidance to terrorist organizations." While the Assad regime engineers the assassination of Lebanese politicians, Iran's rabid president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calls openly for "death to America" and demands that Israel be "wiped off the map."
Syria was Saddam Hussein's most dependable Middle East ally, and almost from the moment the Iraqi insurgency began it was clear that Damascus was pouring fuel on the fire. Iran, too, works overtime to intensify the Iraqi bloodshed. ABC News reported last week on the discovery of "smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories." Among the finds: "advanced IEDs designed to pierce armor and anti-tank weapons." In other words, to murder US troops.
No regimes on earth have more to gain from an American defeat in Iraq than the theocracy in Iran and the Assad dictatorship in Syria. They have every incentive to aggravate the Iraqi turmoil that has so many Americans clamoring for withdrawal. "There is no evidence to support the assumption that Iran and Syria want a stable Iraq," writes Middle East Quarterly editor Michael Rubin, whose experience in the region runs deep. "Rather, all their actions show a desire to stymie the United States and destabilize their neighbor. More dangerous still . . . is the naive assumption that making concessions to terrorism or forcing others to do so brings peace rather than war."
The war against radical Islam, of which Iraq is but one front, cannot be won so long as regimes like those in Tehran and Damascus remain in power. They are as much our enemies today as the Nazi Reich was our enemy in an earlier era. Imploring Assad and Ahmadinejad for help in Iraq can only intensify the whiff of American retreat that is already in the air. The word for that isn't realism. It's surrender.
By Jeff Jacoby,
SHOULD THE United States turn to Iran and Syria for help in reducing the violence bloodying Iraq? James Baker's Iraq Study Group, out this week with its well-leaked recommendations, thinks direct talks with Tehran and Damascus would be a fine idea. I think so too -- right after those governments switch sides in the global jihad.
As things stand now, however, negotiating with Iran and Syria over the future of Iraq is about as promising a strategy for preventing more bloodshed as negotiating with Adolf Hitler over the future of Czechoslovakia was in 1938. There were eminent "realists" then too, many of whom were gung-ho for cutting a deal with the Fuehrer. As Neville Chamberlain set off on the diplomatic mission that would culminate in Munich, William Shirer recorded in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," Britain's poet laureate, John Masefield, composed a paean in his honor . When the negotiations were done and Czechoslovakia had been dismembered, the prime minister was hailed as a national hero. The Nobel Committee received not one, not two, but 10 nominations proposing Chamberlain for the 1939 peace prize.
Chamberlain and his admirers had been certain that Munich would bring "peace in our time." Instead it helped pave the way for war.
How many times does the lesson have to be relearned? There is no appeasing the unappeasable. When democracies engage with fanatical tyrants, the world becomes not less dangerous but more so.
PART ONE: Fighting to win in Iraq (By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist, 12/3/06)
That wasn't the fashionable view in 1938, however, and it isn't popular today. According to a new World Public Opinion poll, 75 percent of Americans agree that to stabilize Iraq, the United States should enter into talks with Iran and Syria. "I believe in talking to your enemies," James Baker declares. "I don't think you restrict your conversations to your friends."
But with totalitarian regimes like those in Iran and Syria, the effect of such "conversations" is usually negative. It buys time and legitimacy for the totalitarians, while deepening their conviction that the West has no stomach for a fight. No one was more pleased with Chamberlain's diplomacy than Hitler, for it proved that Germany was in the saddle, riding the democracies -- that the momentum was with Berlin, while London and Paris were flailing. The Baker panel's recommendations will bring similar satisfaction to Tehran and Damascus.
Shortly after 9/11, President Bush famously declared that every nation "now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." At every step of the way, Iran and Syria have unambiguously been with the terrorists.
As the world's foremost sponsors of radical Islamic violence, the State Department reported in April, "Iran and Syria routinely provide unique safe haven, substantial resources, and guidance to terrorist organizations." While the Assad regime engineers the assassination of Lebanese politicians, Iran's rabid president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calls openly for "death to America" and demands that Israel be "wiped off the map."
Syria was Saddam Hussein's most dependable Middle East ally, and almost from the moment the Iraqi insurgency began it was clear that Damascus was pouring fuel on the fire. Iran, too, works overtime to intensify the Iraqi bloodshed. ABC News reported last week on the discovery of "smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories." Among the finds: "advanced IEDs designed to pierce armor and anti-tank weapons." In other words, to murder US troops.
No regimes on earth have more to gain from an American defeat in Iraq than the theocracy in Iran and the Assad dictatorship in Syria. They have every incentive to aggravate the Iraqi turmoil that has so many Americans clamoring for withdrawal. "There is no evidence to support the assumption that Iran and Syria want a stable Iraq," writes Middle East Quarterly editor Michael Rubin, whose experience in the region runs deep. "Rather, all their actions show a desire to stymie the United States and destabilize their neighbor. More dangerous still . . . is the naive assumption that making concessions to terrorism or forcing others to do so brings peace rather than war."
The war against radical Islam, of which Iraq is but one front, cannot be won so long as regimes like those in Tehran and Damascus remain in power. They are as much our enemies today as the Nazi Reich was our enemy in an earlier era. Imploring Assad and Ahmadinejad for help in Iraq can only intensify the whiff of American retreat that is already in the air. The word for that isn't realism. It's surrender.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Lahad: Syria behind Gemayel’s murder
In rare interview, former South Lebanese Army commander Antoine Lahad addresses growing tension in Lebanon. Lahad, now living in Israel, is convinced that Syria is behind Pierre Gemayel’s assassination, doesn’t know why Israel gets so worked up over Hizbullah, and still hopes one day to return to his country
Roee Nahmias
Antoine Lahad, the former commander of the South Lebanese Army, is certain that Syria is behind the assassination of Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel .
“I have no doubt about who assassinated Lebanese Minister Pierre Gemayel last week. It was the Syrians, there’s no question. It could be that one of their proxies in Lebanon carried out the actual assassination, but the order came from Damascus,” Lahad said.
Now 79 and still sharp as a tack, Lahad cannot understand why Israelis insist on seeing things differently, as with our view of Hizbullah and our general approach to events in Lebanon .
“There are things that you ignore. Just last weekend around a million people took to the streets for Gemayel’s funeral. It was a political message for Lebanon as well as the outside world, even for Israel. The masses said that they oppose anyone who is against the establishment of the international court, that is, that they are against Hizbullah ,” he said.
When you saw Gemayel’s funeral on TV what did you feel?
I felt that Lebanon was being ripped apart, gripped on the one hand by Iran and Syria, and on the other by the US and Europe.
Ripped apart to the point where there is a chance of civil war?
There is a chance of civil war, but it’s still far away. The Lebanese have already tried that, and they know what the cost will be.
Yes, but one gets the impression that Hizbullah’s strength is growing, and in general, while there is no formal census, it appears that they represent the largest community in Lebanon, since the Shiites are some 40 percent of the population.
First of all, the Shiites are no more than 30 precent, at most a third, and not all of them support Hizbullah. There is the Shiite Amal movement, after all. Moreover, Hizbullah is not stupid. On the contrary, Nasrallah is very astute. He knows that if he brings his people to the streets with arms they will lose.
They have no chance to win if they are the ones who start a civil war. They will be at most a third, and they will be opposed by Christians, Sunnis, and Druze, who are about two thirds. If Nasrallah is the one who starts a civil war, ultimately he will be disarmed.
But Hizbullah is well armed. It’s received weapons from Iran.
So what? It has missiles north of the Litani River, according to reports, and it’s a fact that it’s not shooting them at Israel. So if it won’t shoot them at its enemy, do you think that it will shoot them within Lebanon? You have to understand that it has no chance because in Lebanon everyone has weapons at home. Therefore, Nasrallah can hold mass demonstrations but he can’t bring about armed clashes.
Is he interested in changing the Taif Accords and becoming the official political leader of Lebanon? And what is the chance of a Hizbullah coup?
He is not capable of changing the Taif Accords even if he wants to. Don’t forget: Lebanon has 17 different ethnic groups. Hizbullah simply cannot fight the others and certainly cannot control Lebanon democratically. Perhaps it wants to; after all Hizbullah is a Khomenist arm of Iran, but at the moment it cannot. And in general, in the Taif Accords there are clauses that have not been implemented, like the disarming of armed militias and having weapons controlled by the army only.
Lahad: 'If Nasrallah starts civil war, he will be disarmed' (Photo: Ofer Amram)
As for a coup, I’m Lebanese and he is Lebanese and I really don’t want there to be a coup. Today Nasrallah does not constitute a real threat to Israel, but if he becomes ruler of Lebanon, he will become a threat to Israel.
'I knew Hizbullah would become an obstacle because of your withdrawal' Lahad strongly opposed the way the IDF carried out its withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. He warned against unilateral withdrawal, but Israel refused to listen. He found out about the IDF withdrawal while in Paris, and the only thing he could do was to hear how his life’s work collapsed within hours.
“I didn’t oppose the withdrawal. On the contrary, I was even in France at that time on a mission to check what the chance was that a French force would enter in place of the SLA when Israel withdrew quickly, but I vehemently opposed a withdrawal without an agreement, and look what happened. When we were there, did Hizbullah have missiles? They had machine guns at most. My people held 46 outposts and the IDF another 11, and the entire picture was completely different," he said.
Getting Stronger
TIME: Iran, Syria helping Hizbullah rearm / Ynet
Based on intelligence sources, American weekly reports group has replenished nearly half of its pre-war stockpiles of short-range missiles and small arms with help from Damascus, Tehran. According to report, weapons transferred to secret Iranian base on outskirts of Damascus, shipped by truck across border into Lebanon
Full Story
“In truth, I was approached in 1998 by residents of Jezzine while we controlled that sector and they asked us to withdraw. In principle I supported a withdrawal with an agreement because I wanted to connect the south with Lebanon. I checked with then Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, and we even succeeded in convincing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to implement Security Council resolutions 425 and 426 and to withdraw from southern Lebanon, but the idea was shelved because there was no one with whom to conduct negotiations," he added.
"But Barak made a commitment at the time to withdraw unilaterally within a year, he won the elections and carried it out, and look what happened. In truth, I wasn’t at all surprised by what happened. I knew that Hizbullah would become an obstacle after the way in which Israel withdrew,” Lahad concluded.
How do you see the results of the recent war in Lebanon?
First of all, who said it was a war? At most it was several clashes, not a war. Second of all, I believe that Hizbullah was not the victor. Both sides lost, but Israel had achievements on the diplomatic front because this is the first time that an international force under UN sponsorship has come to separate Israel from Lebanon. Let me remind you that UNIFIL, which was in Lebanon until now, was there in the role of observers.
But Israel is having a real crisis, while it appares as if Hizbullah is only getting stronger. You wouldn't say that Hizbullah won?
What kind of victory is this? A thousand men succeeded in breaking Israel? Did it succeed in conquering one millimeter of Israel? Even in Lebanon people know that it cannot conquer one millimeter, and it certainly can’t ‘liberate Jerusalem,’ but it is using this to increase its strength within Lebanon. Who is Hizbullah? The U.S.? Is it an empire? Hizbullah is just the tail of the snake whose head is Iran and Syria.
Lahad also has implicit criticism for Israel: “You withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, and now you’ve fought them as if they’re a militia, but they are no longer a militia. Their type of warfare was not that of a militia. They did not hit and run. On the contrary. And what did Israel do? You didn’t go into one Shiite village besides a house-and-a-half in Maroun a-Ras. That’s not serious. Planes can destroy houses, but in order to succeed on the ground you have to send in infantry and the armored corps as well."
"And in general, Israel destroyed the bridges so that supplies would not be moved, correct? I am a military man, and such things have happened to us in the past. You know what you do in a situation like this? You bring in arms on donkeys. This isn’t serious,” he added.
Do you believe that Iranians are assisting them now?
No question about it. There are definitely Iranian supervisors there as well. The entire Iranian Embassy in Lebanon is full of supervisors. And Syria is assisting as well.
Has Syrian involvement not decreased following the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon?
On the contrary, it has only increased. Syria controls the figures with power in the political system: The president and the speaker of the Parliament, and in the realm of security it is involved in intelligence matters.
So you claim that Syria is behind the recent assassination, as well as the previous assassinations?
The Syrians are behind the assassinations, as well as the recent one, because they are afraid of the establishment of an international court, and they will do anything to torpedo its establishment. Another Syrian interest behind the assassination is the desire to cause conflict within the Christian community. I am from the Shuf Mountains. I know how these things work there.
But in Lebanon they say that perhaps they were elements within the Christian community, and that the assassination was perpetrated differently, not with explosives, as in the other recent assassinations, but with gunfire.
So what? Kamal Junblatt (a prominent Lebanese politician assassinated by the Syrians in 1977) was also killed by gunshots with a car that blocked his path.
What’s happening in Syria? In your estimation, is Assad in control there?
It is actually Syrian intelligence that controls the situation there. Bashar is really not like his father. Look at his speeches. Do you think his father would have spoken like that?
But he’s threatening to liberate the Golan Heights the way Hizbullah fought Israel.
He is afraid because he knows that you’ll destroy Syria. After all, you conquered the Golan Heights in 1967, and what have they done since then in the Golan Heights? Nothing. They aren’t even thinking about a war against you because they are afraid that you’d destroy them. His father, for example, formulated the idea of strategic balance with Israel, made an agreement with Iran, and invaded Lebanon. And he? He isn’t even thinking about war with Israel. They are simply not able. It is the Syrian regime that would pay the price of war—it would be in danger of a real coup d’etat.
And what about his constant declarations of peace toward Israel?
Assad is a member of the Alawites, and in Syria an Alawite simply cannot sign a peace agreement with Israel. If Sadat was assassinated then what do you think would happen to him? If he goes to war, he will be held to account, and if he makes peace, he will be held to account. There’s just one difference: That after a war he will perhaps hold on for a bit longer, because in spite of it all, he will earn a bit of empathy from the public after a war he has fought against Israel. Perhaps he wants peace, but he can’t make peace.
Even if you give him the entire Sea of Galilee. The Alawites in Syria are a minority, a bit more than a tenth of the population. I am sure that if he does this, there will be a coup in Syria. You also have to take into account the Muslim Brothers in Syria, who are very strong.
Overall, when it comes to Syria and Lebanon, you have to await the international inquiry. If it convicts Syria, then everything will change. Syria will undergo a real crisis and Lebanon will return to what it once was—before the era of Syrian involvement. And then, God willing, we’ll return to the ceasefire agreements we had with you and we’ll have a democratic state.
In the meantime, Lahad spends his time in Israel, in France—where his family has lived for several years—and in Belgium. He watches events in Lebanon on television and is very well-informed about what is happening there. When asked if he is optimistic or pessimistic, he prefers to use the word “realistic.” In any case, a return to Lebanon does not appear possible at this point.
And what has to happen in order for you to return to Lebanon?
It depends on many things. There has to be a court hearing there, but I object to that, even if I am promised a pardon. After all, a court hearing means that I committed a crime, which never happened. If everything returns to the way it was in Lebanon, I will know how and when to return, and no one will be able to stop me.
In rare interview, former South Lebanese Army commander Antoine Lahad addresses growing tension in Lebanon. Lahad, now living in Israel, is convinced that Syria is behind Pierre Gemayel’s assassination, doesn’t know why Israel gets so worked up over Hizbullah, and still hopes one day to return to his country
Roee Nahmias
Antoine Lahad, the former commander of the South Lebanese Army, is certain that Syria is behind the assassination of Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel .
“I have no doubt about who assassinated Lebanese Minister Pierre Gemayel last week. It was the Syrians, there’s no question. It could be that one of their proxies in Lebanon carried out the actual assassination, but the order came from Damascus,” Lahad said.
Now 79 and still sharp as a tack, Lahad cannot understand why Israelis insist on seeing things differently, as with our view of Hizbullah and our general approach to events in Lebanon .
“There are things that you ignore. Just last weekend around a million people took to the streets for Gemayel’s funeral. It was a political message for Lebanon as well as the outside world, even for Israel. The masses said that they oppose anyone who is against the establishment of the international court, that is, that they are against Hizbullah ,” he said.
When you saw Gemayel’s funeral on TV what did you feel?
I felt that Lebanon was being ripped apart, gripped on the one hand by Iran and Syria, and on the other by the US and Europe.
Ripped apart to the point where there is a chance of civil war?
There is a chance of civil war, but it’s still far away. The Lebanese have already tried that, and they know what the cost will be.
Yes, but one gets the impression that Hizbullah’s strength is growing, and in general, while there is no formal census, it appears that they represent the largest community in Lebanon, since the Shiites are some 40 percent of the population.
First of all, the Shiites are no more than 30 precent, at most a third, and not all of them support Hizbullah. There is the Shiite Amal movement, after all. Moreover, Hizbullah is not stupid. On the contrary, Nasrallah is very astute. He knows that if he brings his people to the streets with arms they will lose.
They have no chance to win if they are the ones who start a civil war. They will be at most a third, and they will be opposed by Christians, Sunnis, and Druze, who are about two thirds. If Nasrallah is the one who starts a civil war, ultimately he will be disarmed.
But Hizbullah is well armed. It’s received weapons from Iran.
So what? It has missiles north of the Litani River, according to reports, and it’s a fact that it’s not shooting them at Israel. So if it won’t shoot them at its enemy, do you think that it will shoot them within Lebanon? You have to understand that it has no chance because in Lebanon everyone has weapons at home. Therefore, Nasrallah can hold mass demonstrations but he can’t bring about armed clashes.
Is he interested in changing the Taif Accords and becoming the official political leader of Lebanon? And what is the chance of a Hizbullah coup?
He is not capable of changing the Taif Accords even if he wants to. Don’t forget: Lebanon has 17 different ethnic groups. Hizbullah simply cannot fight the others and certainly cannot control Lebanon democratically. Perhaps it wants to; after all Hizbullah is a Khomenist arm of Iran, but at the moment it cannot. And in general, in the Taif Accords there are clauses that have not been implemented, like the disarming of armed militias and having weapons controlled by the army only.
Lahad: 'If Nasrallah starts civil war, he will be disarmed' (Photo: Ofer Amram)
As for a coup, I’m Lebanese and he is Lebanese and I really don’t want there to be a coup. Today Nasrallah does not constitute a real threat to Israel, but if he becomes ruler of Lebanon, he will become a threat to Israel.
'I knew Hizbullah would become an obstacle because of your withdrawal' Lahad strongly opposed the way the IDF carried out its withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. He warned against unilateral withdrawal, but Israel refused to listen. He found out about the IDF withdrawal while in Paris, and the only thing he could do was to hear how his life’s work collapsed within hours.
“I didn’t oppose the withdrawal. On the contrary, I was even in France at that time on a mission to check what the chance was that a French force would enter in place of the SLA when Israel withdrew quickly, but I vehemently opposed a withdrawal without an agreement, and look what happened. When we were there, did Hizbullah have missiles? They had machine guns at most. My people held 46 outposts and the IDF another 11, and the entire picture was completely different," he said.
Getting Stronger
TIME: Iran, Syria helping Hizbullah rearm / Ynet
Based on intelligence sources, American weekly reports group has replenished nearly half of its pre-war stockpiles of short-range missiles and small arms with help from Damascus, Tehran. According to report, weapons transferred to secret Iranian base on outskirts of Damascus, shipped by truck across border into Lebanon
Full Story
“In truth, I was approached in 1998 by residents of Jezzine while we controlled that sector and they asked us to withdraw. In principle I supported a withdrawal with an agreement because I wanted to connect the south with Lebanon. I checked with then Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, and we even succeeded in convincing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to implement Security Council resolutions 425 and 426 and to withdraw from southern Lebanon, but the idea was shelved because there was no one with whom to conduct negotiations," he added.
"But Barak made a commitment at the time to withdraw unilaterally within a year, he won the elections and carried it out, and look what happened. In truth, I wasn’t at all surprised by what happened. I knew that Hizbullah would become an obstacle after the way in which Israel withdrew,” Lahad concluded.
How do you see the results of the recent war in Lebanon?
First of all, who said it was a war? At most it was several clashes, not a war. Second of all, I believe that Hizbullah was not the victor. Both sides lost, but Israel had achievements on the diplomatic front because this is the first time that an international force under UN sponsorship has come to separate Israel from Lebanon. Let me remind you that UNIFIL, which was in Lebanon until now, was there in the role of observers.
But Israel is having a real crisis, while it appares as if Hizbullah is only getting stronger. You wouldn't say that Hizbullah won?
What kind of victory is this? A thousand men succeeded in breaking Israel? Did it succeed in conquering one millimeter of Israel? Even in Lebanon people know that it cannot conquer one millimeter, and it certainly can’t ‘liberate Jerusalem,’ but it is using this to increase its strength within Lebanon. Who is Hizbullah? The U.S.? Is it an empire? Hizbullah is just the tail of the snake whose head is Iran and Syria.
Lahad also has implicit criticism for Israel: “You withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, and now you’ve fought them as if they’re a militia, but they are no longer a militia. Their type of warfare was not that of a militia. They did not hit and run. On the contrary. And what did Israel do? You didn’t go into one Shiite village besides a house-and-a-half in Maroun a-Ras. That’s not serious. Planes can destroy houses, but in order to succeed on the ground you have to send in infantry and the armored corps as well."
"And in general, Israel destroyed the bridges so that supplies would not be moved, correct? I am a military man, and such things have happened to us in the past. You know what you do in a situation like this? You bring in arms on donkeys. This isn’t serious,” he added.
Do you believe that Iranians are assisting them now?
No question about it. There are definitely Iranian supervisors there as well. The entire Iranian Embassy in Lebanon is full of supervisors. And Syria is assisting as well.
Has Syrian involvement not decreased following the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon?
On the contrary, it has only increased. Syria controls the figures with power in the political system: The president and the speaker of the Parliament, and in the realm of security it is involved in intelligence matters.
So you claim that Syria is behind the recent assassination, as well as the previous assassinations?
The Syrians are behind the assassinations, as well as the recent one, because they are afraid of the establishment of an international court, and they will do anything to torpedo its establishment. Another Syrian interest behind the assassination is the desire to cause conflict within the Christian community. I am from the Shuf Mountains. I know how these things work there.
But in Lebanon they say that perhaps they were elements within the Christian community, and that the assassination was perpetrated differently, not with explosives, as in the other recent assassinations, but with gunfire.
So what? Kamal Junblatt (a prominent Lebanese politician assassinated by the Syrians in 1977) was also killed by gunshots with a car that blocked his path.
What’s happening in Syria? In your estimation, is Assad in control there?
It is actually Syrian intelligence that controls the situation there. Bashar is really not like his father. Look at his speeches. Do you think his father would have spoken like that?
But he’s threatening to liberate the Golan Heights the way Hizbullah fought Israel.
He is afraid because he knows that you’ll destroy Syria. After all, you conquered the Golan Heights in 1967, and what have they done since then in the Golan Heights? Nothing. They aren’t even thinking about a war against you because they are afraid that you’d destroy them. His father, for example, formulated the idea of strategic balance with Israel, made an agreement with Iran, and invaded Lebanon. And he? He isn’t even thinking about war with Israel. They are simply not able. It is the Syrian regime that would pay the price of war—it would be in danger of a real coup d’etat.
And what about his constant declarations of peace toward Israel?
Assad is a member of the Alawites, and in Syria an Alawite simply cannot sign a peace agreement with Israel. If Sadat was assassinated then what do you think would happen to him? If he goes to war, he will be held to account, and if he makes peace, he will be held to account. There’s just one difference: That after a war he will perhaps hold on for a bit longer, because in spite of it all, he will earn a bit of empathy from the public after a war he has fought against Israel. Perhaps he wants peace, but he can’t make peace.
Even if you give him the entire Sea of Galilee. The Alawites in Syria are a minority, a bit more than a tenth of the population. I am sure that if he does this, there will be a coup in Syria. You also have to take into account the Muslim Brothers in Syria, who are very strong.
Overall, when it comes to Syria and Lebanon, you have to await the international inquiry. If it convicts Syria, then everything will change. Syria will undergo a real crisis and Lebanon will return to what it once was—before the era of Syrian involvement. And then, God willing, we’ll return to the ceasefire agreements we had with you and we’ll have a democratic state.
In the meantime, Lahad spends his time in Israel, in France—where his family has lived for several years—and in Belgium. He watches events in Lebanon on television and is very well-informed about what is happening there. When asked if he is optimistic or pessimistic, he prefers to use the word “realistic.” In any case, a return to Lebanon does not appear possible at this point.
And what has to happen in order for you to return to Lebanon?
It depends on many things. There has to be a court hearing there, but I object to that, even if I am promised a pardon. After all, a court hearing means that I committed a crime, which never happened. If everything returns to the way it was in Lebanon, I will know how and when to return, and no one will be able to stop me.
Losing Lebanon
The U.S. once saw it as a hope for democracy in the Middle East. Now the country is veering toward civil war. Here's how it all went wrong
By TIM MCGIRK / BEIRUT
Profile: Who is Sheik Hassan Nasrallah?
It's never a good sign for a country when the Prime Minister and most of his Cabinet members spend their days barricaded in an Ottoman-era compound. That's what Fouad Siniora and Lebanon's other top officials have done since Nov. 21, when gunmen assassinated Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel in broad daylight. Siniora's worries go beyond his personal safety. With Lebanon still trying to recover from last summer's 34-day war between Israel and the Shi'ite militant group Hizballah, the government has seen its authority undermined, renewed meddling from the country's neighbors and the growing assertiveness of Hizballah. Organized by Hizballah and its allies, about 800,000 protesters--a rather grand figure in a country of just 3.8 million--gathered in the center of Beirut last Friday to demand the resignation of Siniora. At the time, Lebanon's leader was in his barracks, surrounded by machine guns and barbed wire.
Lebanon wasn't supposed to turn out this way. In March of last year, President George W. Bush was hailing Lebanon as a shining beacon of his Administration's "democracy agenda" for the Middle East. Close to 1 million Lebanese had flooded into Beirut to demand that Syria pull its troops out of Lebanon and end its 29-year domination of the country. The U.S. State Department coined the protests the Cedar Revolution, a more folksy title than the Lebanese term, Independence Intifadeh, which smacked of radicalism. But with six ministers having resigned since Nov. 11, sectarian tensions rising and government officials fearing for their lives, the vision of a new Lebanon is dimming fast--and with it, the Administration's bid to build a positive legacy in the Middle East beyond the wreckage of Iraq.
There are worrying signs, in fact, that Lebanon may be closer to a total meltdown than at any time since the 1975-90 civil war. An Arab diplomat told TIME that General Michael Suleiman, the commander in chief of the Lebanese Army, recently admitted that his troops would be able to contain a series of demonstrations "for only a few weeks." If Hizballah organizes protests around the country similar to those in Beirut last week, "We will not be able to cope," Suleiman reportedly said. His concern was that because many of his troops are Shi'ite, they would refuse to act against their brethren within Hizballah.
The nightmare scenario is that Hizballah's show of strength could provoke a backlash against its mostly Shi'ite supporters by Lebanon's Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze communities. If that happens, most Lebanese believe the situation could quickly escalate into all-out civil war. As a river of pro-Hizballah demonstrators flowed toward Siniora's besieged compound last week, poultry seller Ahmad Sahd, 65, wept. "These youngsters didn't live through the civil war. I did. And it looks like it's starting again."
So why is the Cedar Revolution crashing down? Part of the answer rests outside Lebanon's borders. During the summer's war with Israel, Hizballah relied heavily on the Syrians for logistic, military and financial support. According to Israeli officials, Western diplomats in Beirut and Arab sources, Damascus acted as a conduit for Iranian weapons to reach Hizballah, allowing the group to fight the Israelis to a standstill.
Now it is payback time. Lebanese officials, along with Israeli military sources and Western diplomats, say that while Syrian President Bashar Assad may be willing to help pull the Bush Administration out of the Iraqi quicksand, he hopes to exact concessions that would allow him to treat Lebanon, where the Syrian regime has vast financial interests, as his private turf. And according to these same sources, he is unnerved by a U.N.-sponsored inquiry that implicates top Syrian officials in the February 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others. Assad is hoping that the international probe will peter out. Indictments issued by a U.N.-sponsored court against members of the Syrian leadership could critically weaken the Damascus regime and lead to U.N. sanctions against Assad's clique. Hizballah pulled its six ministers out of the 24-seat Cabinet rather than vote to support an international court to prosecute the Hariri case, and the assassination of Gemayel, the scion of a powerful Christian family and a fervent anti-Syrian, was seen as further warning to Siniora. His Cabinet voted anyway to recommend an international tribunal into the Hariri killing, pushing Hizballah into the streets last week.
Hizballah also accuses Siniora's ministers of secretly siding with Israel and the U.S. by failing to provide backup during the July-August war with Israel. With its massive street demonstrations, Hizballah hopes to intimidate the country's other parties into giving it more than the six Cabinet seats it had held, enabling it to block any legislation seen as contrary to the interests of Hizballah and its backers in Damascus and Tehran.
Whether Hizballah succeeds depends on how long it can capitalize on the p.r. boost it gained from waging war with Israel. Among Lebanon's downtrodden Shi'ites, Hizballah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah now enjoys mythical status. The many faces of Nasrallah appear everywhere. At times he is portrayed as a jolly preacher, a wise scholar or a glowering warrior with his turban like a black storm cloud overhead. When a starstruck woman requested the abaya, or robe, that he wore during the war, Nasrallah obliged, and since then TV crews have been following the woman across Lebanon as she displays this now holy garment for other faithful fans.
And yet even in Lebanon, Nasrallah isn't universally adored. Many Lebanese consider it a heroic but colossal blunder on Nasrallah's part to have provoked the Israelis by having his fighters stage a cross-border raid in July and kidnap two Israeli soldiers. War damage in Lebanon is assessed at $3.6 billion. More than 1,200 Lebanese died, and 3,700 were wounded. Another 974,184 were left homeless. Says parliamentarian Saad Hariri, son of the slain former Prime Minister: "When it starts raining and getting cold, people will realize what a huge mistake it was for Hizballah to start this war." What's more, the olive groves and hills of southern Lebanon are sown with more than 1 million bomblets from Israeli cluster bombs, say U.N. experts, making it hazardous if not lethal to wander into these areas.
Hizballah was badly swatted by the Israelis too. The Israeli military says it has the names of over 550 Hizballah fighters who were killed, including 400 belonging to the Iranian-trained élite special forces unit, the Nasr Brigade. In Lebanon, the thinking is that those numbers are probably inflated, that many of the dead were militants unaffiliated with Hizballah who grabbed a gun and joined the fighting. Whatever the body count, Hizballah has lost assets. As part of a cease-fire agreement, 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers and 15,000 Lebanese troops moved into southern Lebanon, long an exclusive preserve of Hizballah. As a result, Nasrallah's men lost possession of a number of strategic underground bunkers, complete with showers and dining halls, honeycombing the limestone hills for miles near the Israeli border. Many of its field commanders were killed in the fighting, and according to Lebanese and Israeli sources, Hizballah inquisitors are now weeding out and shooting suspected collaborators who helped the Israelis by pinpointing militia targets. And every Hizballah office in Beirut was sledge-hammered by Israeli warplanes. The rubble of concrete slabs, steel and scraps of clothing was scooped up by bulldozers into heaps; it has added a dozen large hills to the coastal landscape south of Beirut.
Hizballah's opponents say that as time passes, resentments toward Nasrallah are likely to build. That may be the main reason that Hizballah is again girding for war. The next round could be even uglier. While most of the other communities still have stockpiles of arms stashed away from the days of the civil war, Hizballah's force is stronger and better organized than its rivals, say Beirut-based diplomats. But the various players in Lebanon may find outside backers. The Christians could again find support from the Israelis; and the Saudis, who are alarmed at the growing Shi'ite influence in Lebanon through Hizballah, may find Sunni militias to bankroll. Sunni jihadists may also join the fray, turning Lebanon into a mini-Iraq. Lebanese intelligence recently broke up a ring of 200 Syrian-backed Islamists holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp who had a hit list of 36 Lebanese politicians.
Posters of Nasrallah, usually grinning, may crop up everywhere, but the cleric himself is still deep in hiding. During the summer's fighting, the Israelis made no secret that they were trying to assassinate him. Western diplomats in Beirut say they are trying to persuade the Israelis that killing the Hizballah boss is no longer a good idea. His murder could spark reprisals across the Middle East. Hizballah has ways of taking revenge. After Israelis targeted a previous Hizballah leader in 1992, the militia blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. Should Nasrallah be killed, Israeli missions today would be similarly at risk--as would U.S. interests around the world. But these sources say that the Israelis may be willing to court that danger if they have a chance to take out Nasrallah, whom they view as a particularly clever and dangerous enemy. The damage that Lebanon and the Middle East will face if another war breaks out could make the destruction caused by Hizballah and Israel last summer look like a brisk whirlwind by comparison.
With reporting by With reporting by Nicholas Blanford/Beirut, Aaron J. Klein/Biranit, Elaine Shannon/ Washington
The U.S. once saw it as a hope for democracy in the Middle East. Now the country is veering toward civil war. Here's how it all went wrong
By TIM MCGIRK / BEIRUT
Profile: Who is Sheik Hassan Nasrallah?
It's never a good sign for a country when the Prime Minister and most of his Cabinet members spend their days barricaded in an Ottoman-era compound. That's what Fouad Siniora and Lebanon's other top officials have done since Nov. 21, when gunmen assassinated Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel in broad daylight. Siniora's worries go beyond his personal safety. With Lebanon still trying to recover from last summer's 34-day war between Israel and the Shi'ite militant group Hizballah, the government has seen its authority undermined, renewed meddling from the country's neighbors and the growing assertiveness of Hizballah. Organized by Hizballah and its allies, about 800,000 protesters--a rather grand figure in a country of just 3.8 million--gathered in the center of Beirut last Friday to demand the resignation of Siniora. At the time, Lebanon's leader was in his barracks, surrounded by machine guns and barbed wire.
Lebanon wasn't supposed to turn out this way. In March of last year, President George W. Bush was hailing Lebanon as a shining beacon of his Administration's "democracy agenda" for the Middle East. Close to 1 million Lebanese had flooded into Beirut to demand that Syria pull its troops out of Lebanon and end its 29-year domination of the country. The U.S. State Department coined the protests the Cedar Revolution, a more folksy title than the Lebanese term, Independence Intifadeh, which smacked of radicalism. But with six ministers having resigned since Nov. 11, sectarian tensions rising and government officials fearing for their lives, the vision of a new Lebanon is dimming fast--and with it, the Administration's bid to build a positive legacy in the Middle East beyond the wreckage of Iraq.
There are worrying signs, in fact, that Lebanon may be closer to a total meltdown than at any time since the 1975-90 civil war. An Arab diplomat told TIME that General Michael Suleiman, the commander in chief of the Lebanese Army, recently admitted that his troops would be able to contain a series of demonstrations "for only a few weeks." If Hizballah organizes protests around the country similar to those in Beirut last week, "We will not be able to cope," Suleiman reportedly said. His concern was that because many of his troops are Shi'ite, they would refuse to act against their brethren within Hizballah.
The nightmare scenario is that Hizballah's show of strength could provoke a backlash against its mostly Shi'ite supporters by Lebanon's Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze communities. If that happens, most Lebanese believe the situation could quickly escalate into all-out civil war. As a river of pro-Hizballah demonstrators flowed toward Siniora's besieged compound last week, poultry seller Ahmad Sahd, 65, wept. "These youngsters didn't live through the civil war. I did. And it looks like it's starting again."
So why is the Cedar Revolution crashing down? Part of the answer rests outside Lebanon's borders. During the summer's war with Israel, Hizballah relied heavily on the Syrians for logistic, military and financial support. According to Israeli officials, Western diplomats in Beirut and Arab sources, Damascus acted as a conduit for Iranian weapons to reach Hizballah, allowing the group to fight the Israelis to a standstill.
Now it is payback time. Lebanese officials, along with Israeli military sources and Western diplomats, say that while Syrian President Bashar Assad may be willing to help pull the Bush Administration out of the Iraqi quicksand, he hopes to exact concessions that would allow him to treat Lebanon, where the Syrian regime has vast financial interests, as his private turf. And according to these same sources, he is unnerved by a U.N.-sponsored inquiry that implicates top Syrian officials in the February 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others. Assad is hoping that the international probe will peter out. Indictments issued by a U.N.-sponsored court against members of the Syrian leadership could critically weaken the Damascus regime and lead to U.N. sanctions against Assad's clique. Hizballah pulled its six ministers out of the 24-seat Cabinet rather than vote to support an international court to prosecute the Hariri case, and the assassination of Gemayel, the scion of a powerful Christian family and a fervent anti-Syrian, was seen as further warning to Siniora. His Cabinet voted anyway to recommend an international tribunal into the Hariri killing, pushing Hizballah into the streets last week.
Hizballah also accuses Siniora's ministers of secretly siding with Israel and the U.S. by failing to provide backup during the July-August war with Israel. With its massive street demonstrations, Hizballah hopes to intimidate the country's other parties into giving it more than the six Cabinet seats it had held, enabling it to block any legislation seen as contrary to the interests of Hizballah and its backers in Damascus and Tehran.
Whether Hizballah succeeds depends on how long it can capitalize on the p.r. boost it gained from waging war with Israel. Among Lebanon's downtrodden Shi'ites, Hizballah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah now enjoys mythical status. The many faces of Nasrallah appear everywhere. At times he is portrayed as a jolly preacher, a wise scholar or a glowering warrior with his turban like a black storm cloud overhead. When a starstruck woman requested the abaya, or robe, that he wore during the war, Nasrallah obliged, and since then TV crews have been following the woman across Lebanon as she displays this now holy garment for other faithful fans.
And yet even in Lebanon, Nasrallah isn't universally adored. Many Lebanese consider it a heroic but colossal blunder on Nasrallah's part to have provoked the Israelis by having his fighters stage a cross-border raid in July and kidnap two Israeli soldiers. War damage in Lebanon is assessed at $3.6 billion. More than 1,200 Lebanese died, and 3,700 were wounded. Another 974,184 were left homeless. Says parliamentarian Saad Hariri, son of the slain former Prime Minister: "When it starts raining and getting cold, people will realize what a huge mistake it was for Hizballah to start this war." What's more, the olive groves and hills of southern Lebanon are sown with more than 1 million bomblets from Israeli cluster bombs, say U.N. experts, making it hazardous if not lethal to wander into these areas.
Hizballah was badly swatted by the Israelis too. The Israeli military says it has the names of over 550 Hizballah fighters who were killed, including 400 belonging to the Iranian-trained élite special forces unit, the Nasr Brigade. In Lebanon, the thinking is that those numbers are probably inflated, that many of the dead were militants unaffiliated with Hizballah who grabbed a gun and joined the fighting. Whatever the body count, Hizballah has lost assets. As part of a cease-fire agreement, 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers and 15,000 Lebanese troops moved into southern Lebanon, long an exclusive preserve of Hizballah. As a result, Nasrallah's men lost possession of a number of strategic underground bunkers, complete with showers and dining halls, honeycombing the limestone hills for miles near the Israeli border. Many of its field commanders were killed in the fighting, and according to Lebanese and Israeli sources, Hizballah inquisitors are now weeding out and shooting suspected collaborators who helped the Israelis by pinpointing militia targets. And every Hizballah office in Beirut was sledge-hammered by Israeli warplanes. The rubble of concrete slabs, steel and scraps of clothing was scooped up by bulldozers into heaps; it has added a dozen large hills to the coastal landscape south of Beirut.
Hizballah's opponents say that as time passes, resentments toward Nasrallah are likely to build. That may be the main reason that Hizballah is again girding for war. The next round could be even uglier. While most of the other communities still have stockpiles of arms stashed away from the days of the civil war, Hizballah's force is stronger and better organized than its rivals, say Beirut-based diplomats. But the various players in Lebanon may find outside backers. The Christians could again find support from the Israelis; and the Saudis, who are alarmed at the growing Shi'ite influence in Lebanon through Hizballah, may find Sunni militias to bankroll. Sunni jihadists may also join the fray, turning Lebanon into a mini-Iraq. Lebanese intelligence recently broke up a ring of 200 Syrian-backed Islamists holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp who had a hit list of 36 Lebanese politicians.
Posters of Nasrallah, usually grinning, may crop up everywhere, but the cleric himself is still deep in hiding. During the summer's fighting, the Israelis made no secret that they were trying to assassinate him. Western diplomats in Beirut say they are trying to persuade the Israelis that killing the Hizballah boss is no longer a good idea. His murder could spark reprisals across the Middle East. Hizballah has ways of taking revenge. After Israelis targeted a previous Hizballah leader in 1992, the militia blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. Should Nasrallah be killed, Israeli missions today would be similarly at risk--as would U.S. interests around the world. But these sources say that the Israelis may be willing to court that danger if they have a chance to take out Nasrallah, whom they view as a particularly clever and dangerous enemy. The damage that Lebanon and the Middle East will face if another war breaks out could make the destruction caused by Hizballah and Israel last summer look like a brisk whirlwind by comparison.
With reporting by With reporting by Nicholas Blanford/Beirut, Aaron J. Klein/Biranit, Elaine Shannon/ Washington
Saturday, December 02, 2006
The Race to the Bottom Goes Global
The Big Boys of Financial Crime
By RALPH NADER
It is clear, in the midst of a seven year corporate financial crime wave, that the business moguls and their academic apologists, who make up the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation (CCMG) have no sense of irony. It is not enough that the CCMG's new report is recommending less law enforcement and accountability after years of Republican regimes addicted to de-regulation. The Big Boys want to make lower standards overseas an argument for starting a race to the bottom, in order for the U.S. financial markets to remain "competitive."
Here are some of CCMG's thirty-two recommendations, expected to be the goal of a big lobbying effort on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Congress next year:
1. Limit how and when state enforcement agencies can pursue cases of financial fraud on investors. This is designed to take care of any future Eliot Spitzers, who take their oath of office seriously instead of ceremoniously. Quite properly, the Governor-elect, present New York Attorney General Spitzer reacted, saying: "To eviscerate the power of the one set of regulators who did anything is absurd."
2. Governments should sue the corporations themselves only as a last resort and instead concentrate on the culpable officials in the company. That will give rise to all kinds of escape hatches and internal scapegoating by clever corporate attorneys. They do demand that companies pay the legal expenses of the accused, however.
3. Make it more difficult to convict defendants by requiring proof of actual knowledge of the specific fraud, which makes it easier for executives to get off the hook for criminal negligence. The "I didn't know" defense is to replace "you should have known."
4. Weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, including not applying the key section 404 on internal accounting controls to foreign companies if they have to "meet comparable standards" in their home country. What are "comparable standards?" This is a recipe for delay and loopholes. The record of "equivalency negotiations" under NAFTA and the World Trade Organization is enough to give rigorous pause to this slippery move.
5. Stricter cost-benefit analysis to any new SEC rules than is now in place. This it the time-dishonored technique of producing endless delays in issuing any rules a device that has devastated updating or declaring new health and safety standards in the consumer, worker and environmental areas. A corporate law firm's gold mine.
6. CCMG wants shareholder approval for any "poison pill" defenses against takeovers that the company officers and Boards institute. Apparently, this change would make companies more vulnerable to the lucrative business of mergers and acquisitions. But some investor advocates may like this enhancement of shareholder power, along with another proposal requiring a majority vote of shares to elect a company director.
In a broader context, CCMG opposes giving shareholders the power to vote on these gargantuan executive compensation packages that often amount to looting company assets and relooting them when the executive is asked to leave by the Board the so-called "golden parachute."
7. Either cap liability for auditors or give them outright immunity. After major accounting firms profited by looking the other way in big corporate scandals like Enron, WorldCom and the like, it takes a special brand of commercial hubris to stake out this position.
Once auditors are immune, the CCMG wants to let outside Directors escape liability for "corporate malfeasance," if they rely "in good faith" on the auditors. It isn't clear what non-good faith reliance would be like.
"If you take every single step on their list," declared Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, "you would have made it significantly more difficult to hold corporate criminals accountable for their crimes."
These corporate criminals have looted or drained trillions of dollars from workers, their pensions and millions of investors since 2000. Not 5 cents on the dollar have been recovered for their victims. Many of these recoveries have come through private litigation investor class actions mostly which the Big Boys want to restrict even more than their restrictive victory -- through the Securities Act of 1995. The more crimes, the more they drive for privileges and immunities from the rule of law.
It is not likely that many of these measures will get through the SEC or the new Congress, apart from some leniency for small companies under Sarbanes-Oxley. But they will deter efforts to strengthen the corporate criminal laws and regulations on both the corporations and, in the words of one prosecutor, "their lying, cheating and stealing" executives and accomplices.
The Big Boys of Financial Crime
By RALPH NADER
It is clear, in the midst of a seven year corporate financial crime wave, that the business moguls and their academic apologists, who make up the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation (CCMG) have no sense of irony. It is not enough that the CCMG's new report is recommending less law enforcement and accountability after years of Republican regimes addicted to de-regulation. The Big Boys want to make lower standards overseas an argument for starting a race to the bottom, in order for the U.S. financial markets to remain "competitive."
Here are some of CCMG's thirty-two recommendations, expected to be the goal of a big lobbying effort on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Congress next year:
1. Limit how and when state enforcement agencies can pursue cases of financial fraud on investors. This is designed to take care of any future Eliot Spitzers, who take their oath of office seriously instead of ceremoniously. Quite properly, the Governor-elect, present New York Attorney General Spitzer reacted, saying: "To eviscerate the power of the one set of regulators who did anything is absurd."
2. Governments should sue the corporations themselves only as a last resort and instead concentrate on the culpable officials in the company. That will give rise to all kinds of escape hatches and internal scapegoating by clever corporate attorneys. They do demand that companies pay the legal expenses of the accused, however.
3. Make it more difficult to convict defendants by requiring proof of actual knowledge of the specific fraud, which makes it easier for executives to get off the hook for criminal negligence. The "I didn't know" defense is to replace "you should have known."
4. Weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, including not applying the key section 404 on internal accounting controls to foreign companies if they have to "meet comparable standards" in their home country. What are "comparable standards?" This is a recipe for delay and loopholes. The record of "equivalency negotiations" under NAFTA and the World Trade Organization is enough to give rigorous pause to this slippery move.
5. Stricter cost-benefit analysis to any new SEC rules than is now in place. This it the time-dishonored technique of producing endless delays in issuing any rules a device that has devastated updating or declaring new health and safety standards in the consumer, worker and environmental areas. A corporate law firm's gold mine.
6. CCMG wants shareholder approval for any "poison pill" defenses against takeovers that the company officers and Boards institute. Apparently, this change would make companies more vulnerable to the lucrative business of mergers and acquisitions. But some investor advocates may like this enhancement of shareholder power, along with another proposal requiring a majority vote of shares to elect a company director.
In a broader context, CCMG opposes giving shareholders the power to vote on these gargantuan executive compensation packages that often amount to looting company assets and relooting them when the executive is asked to leave by the Board the so-called "golden parachute."
7. Either cap liability for auditors or give them outright immunity. After major accounting firms profited by looking the other way in big corporate scandals like Enron, WorldCom and the like, it takes a special brand of commercial hubris to stake out this position.
Once auditors are immune, the CCMG wants to let outside Directors escape liability for "corporate malfeasance," if they rely "in good faith" on the auditors. It isn't clear what non-good faith reliance would be like.
"If you take every single step on their list," declared Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, "you would have made it significantly more difficult to hold corporate criminals accountable for their crimes."
These corporate criminals have looted or drained trillions of dollars from workers, their pensions and millions of investors since 2000. Not 5 cents on the dollar have been recovered for their victims. Many of these recoveries have come through private litigation investor class actions mostly which the Big Boys want to restrict even more than their restrictive victory -- through the Securities Act of 1995. The more crimes, the more they drive for privileges and immunities from the rule of law.
It is not likely that many of these measures will get through the SEC or the new Congress, apart from some leniency for small companies under Sarbanes-Oxley. But they will deter efforts to strengthen the corporate criminal laws and regulations on both the corporations and, in the words of one prosecutor, "their lying, cheating and stealing" executives and accomplices.
Save Lebanon
Randa Takieddin
The degree of solidarity with former President Amin Gemayel shown following the assassination of his son, martyr Pierre Gemayel, is great enough to stir all the people of Lebanon to rise to the need to save their country.
Visits of condolence from resigned opposition ministers, Hezbollah MPs, and the expected visits by former minister Suleiman Franjieh, Talal Arslan, and perhaps even General Michel Aoun are signs of hope for this country.
Minister Pierre Gemayel's blood may be the price for saving the Lebanon he loved and worked and died for. Lebanon is in danger. Even Jordan's King Abdullah sounded the alarm bells when he warned that the region is threatened with civil wars: one in Lebanon, another in Iraq and the third in Palestine.
Still, there is a glimmer of hope that all the parties, from the opposition to the majority, will rise to save the situation, because the opposition and the majority are fully aware that a civil war is not in the interests of Lebanon.
The Resistance and Hezbollah confronted the Israeli enemy who sought to ruin and destroy Lebanon and start a civil war in the country, as well as in the Palestinian territories, to displace the Christians. Israel also wants Syria to be weakened, and for it to remain that way.
Did not the head of the Israeli Prime Minister's office himself say as much during the war on Lebanon? He was asked why Israel accused Syria of sending arms to Lebanon, and why it was destroying Lebanon's infrastructure; and why, consequently, did Israel blame Lebanon.
The answer was that Israel could quickly and ruthlessly strike Syria to change the status quo, but that it could not predict the outcome of such a change in the future.
It is obvious that Israel is working to provoke a new civil war in Lebanon, because it is convinced that this would rid it of Hezbollah. It is also clear that Syria is afraid of the International Tribunal, because it is aware of the impact of its outcome on it. Especially since the head of the International Investigation Committee, Judge Serge Brammertz, has asked for a six-month extension on the grounds of the evidence and significant amount of information he collected, and that he seeks further information in order to reveal the truth in a scientific and a professional manner unaffected by political interference.
Today, all the parties in Lebanon must make a move; in the same way they acted to express their condolences to President Amin Gemayel. They also have to be aware of the responsibilities that face the people, who endured many tragedies, destructive wars and worsening economic conditions.
It is impossible for all the people of Lebanon to immigrate to greener pastures. A great majority of the youth have become increasingly fed up with politics and politicians. They suffer because of the country's capricious situation and are tempted to abandon their country.
But where can they go? The doors of Europe are closed due to the high rate of unemployment and it is difficult for many to go abroad because they lack the means.
It is impossible, as any given Lebanese side cannot simply eliminate the others, or pretend that they do not exist. Therefore, it is the duty of every citizen of Lebanon to demand a better future that safeguards national dignity and sovereignty, and by extension, support the legitimate demand for the creation of the International Tribunal.
Hezbollah and the Aoun movement represent an important segment of the Lebanese people, and both should play a role in the nation's political decision-making process. Accordingly, the offer made by Minister Marwan Hamada to save the situation, which was turned down by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berry, is a golden opportunity for everyone.
Berry could have played the same role of the peacemaker and the savior, the role which is now being played by Amin Gemayel, whose son was martyred, like Ghassan Tueini's son, Gibran, and who has come to realize that salvation lies in reconciliation, not revenge.
Saving Lebanon from foreign intervention and from its enemies that seek to destabilize it internally has indeed become an urgent need.
Randa Takieddin
The degree of solidarity with former President Amin Gemayel shown following the assassination of his son, martyr Pierre Gemayel, is great enough to stir all the people of Lebanon to rise to the need to save their country.
Visits of condolence from resigned opposition ministers, Hezbollah MPs, and the expected visits by former minister Suleiman Franjieh, Talal Arslan, and perhaps even General Michel Aoun are signs of hope for this country.
Minister Pierre Gemayel's blood may be the price for saving the Lebanon he loved and worked and died for. Lebanon is in danger. Even Jordan's King Abdullah sounded the alarm bells when he warned that the region is threatened with civil wars: one in Lebanon, another in Iraq and the third in Palestine.
Still, there is a glimmer of hope that all the parties, from the opposition to the majority, will rise to save the situation, because the opposition and the majority are fully aware that a civil war is not in the interests of Lebanon.
The Resistance and Hezbollah confronted the Israeli enemy who sought to ruin and destroy Lebanon and start a civil war in the country, as well as in the Palestinian territories, to displace the Christians. Israel also wants Syria to be weakened, and for it to remain that way.
Did not the head of the Israeli Prime Minister's office himself say as much during the war on Lebanon? He was asked why Israel accused Syria of sending arms to Lebanon, and why it was destroying Lebanon's infrastructure; and why, consequently, did Israel blame Lebanon.
The answer was that Israel could quickly and ruthlessly strike Syria to change the status quo, but that it could not predict the outcome of such a change in the future.
It is obvious that Israel is working to provoke a new civil war in Lebanon, because it is convinced that this would rid it of Hezbollah. It is also clear that Syria is afraid of the International Tribunal, because it is aware of the impact of its outcome on it. Especially since the head of the International Investigation Committee, Judge Serge Brammertz, has asked for a six-month extension on the grounds of the evidence and significant amount of information he collected, and that he seeks further information in order to reveal the truth in a scientific and a professional manner unaffected by political interference.
Today, all the parties in Lebanon must make a move; in the same way they acted to express their condolences to President Amin Gemayel. They also have to be aware of the responsibilities that face the people, who endured many tragedies, destructive wars and worsening economic conditions.
It is impossible for all the people of Lebanon to immigrate to greener pastures. A great majority of the youth have become increasingly fed up with politics and politicians. They suffer because of the country's capricious situation and are tempted to abandon their country.
But where can they go? The doors of Europe are closed due to the high rate of unemployment and it is difficult for many to go abroad because they lack the means.
It is impossible, as any given Lebanese side cannot simply eliminate the others, or pretend that they do not exist. Therefore, it is the duty of every citizen of Lebanon to demand a better future that safeguards national dignity and sovereignty, and by extension, support the legitimate demand for the creation of the International Tribunal.
Hezbollah and the Aoun movement represent an important segment of the Lebanese people, and both should play a role in the nation's political decision-making process. Accordingly, the offer made by Minister Marwan Hamada to save the situation, which was turned down by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berry, is a golden opportunity for everyone.
Berry could have played the same role of the peacemaker and the savior, the role which is now being played by Amin Gemayel, whose son was martyred, like Ghassan Tueini's son, Gibran, and who has come to realize that salvation lies in reconciliation, not revenge.
Saving Lebanon from foreign intervention and from its enemies that seek to destabilize it internally has indeed become an urgent need.
The degree of solidarity with former President Amin Gemayel shown following the assassination of his son, martyr Pierre Gemayel, is great enough to stir all the people of Lebanon to rise to the need to save their country.
Visits of condolence from resigned opposition ministers, Hezbollah MPs, and the expected visits by former minister Suleiman Franjieh, Talal Arslan, and perhaps even General Michel Aoun are signs of hope for this country.
Minister Pierre Gemayel's blood may be the price for saving the Lebanon he loved and worked and died for. Lebanon is in danger. Even Jordan's King Abdullah sounded the alarm bells when he warned that the region is threatened with civil wars: one in Lebanon, another in Iraq and the third in Palestine.
Still, there is a glimmer of hope that all the parties, from the opposition to the majority, will rise to save the situation, because the opposition and the majority are fully aware that a civil war is not in the interests of Lebanon.
The Resistance and Hezbollah confronted the Israeli enemy who sought to ruin and destroy Lebanon and start a civil war in the country, as well as in the Palestinian territories, to displace the Christians. Israel also wants Syria to be weakened, and for it to remain that way.
Did not the head of the Israeli Prime Minister's office himself say as much during the war on Lebanon? He was asked why Israel accused Syria of sending arms to Lebanon, and why it was destroying Lebanon's infrastructure; and why, consequently, did Israel blame Lebanon.
The answer was that Israel could quickly and ruthlessly strike Syria to change the status quo, but that it could not predict the outcome of such a change in the future.
It is obvious that Israel is working to provoke a new civil war in Lebanon, because it is convinced that this would rid it of Hezbollah. It is also clear that Syria is afraid of the International Tribunal, because it is aware of the impact of its outcome on it. Especially since the head of the International Investigation Committee, Judge Serge Brammertz, has asked for a six-month extension on the grounds of the evidence and significant amount of information he collected, and that he seeks further information in order to reveal the truth in a scientific and a professional manner unaffected by political interference.
Today, all the parties in Lebanon must make a move; in the same way they acted to express their condolences to President Amin Gemayel. They also have to be aware of the responsibilities that face the people, who endured many tragedies, destructive wars and worsening economic conditions.
It is impossible for all the people of Lebanon to immigrate to greener pastures. A great majority of the youth have become increasingly fed up with politics and politicians. They suffer because of the country's capricious situation and are tempted to abandon their country.
But where can they go? The doors of Europe are closed due to the high rate of unemployment and it is difficult for many to go abroad because they lack the means.
It is impossible, as any given Lebanese side cannot simply eliminate the others, or pretend that they do not exist. Therefore, it is the duty of every citizen of Lebanon to demand a better future that safeguards national dignity and sovereignty, and by extension, support the legitimate demand for the creation of the International Tribunal.
Hezbollah and the Aoun movement represent an important segment of the Lebanese people, and both should play a role in the nation's political decision-making process. Accordingly, the offer made by Minister Marwan Hamada to save the situation, which was turned down by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berry, is a golden opportunity for everyone.
Berry could have played the same role of the peacemaker and the savior, the role which is now being played by Amin Gemayel, whose son was martyred, like Ghassan Tueini's son, Gibran, and who has come to realize that salvation lies in reconciliation, not revenge.
Saving Lebanon from foreign intervention and from its enemies that seek to destabilize it internally has indeed become an urgent need.
REWARD FOR JUSTICE STOP THE STATE SPONSORING TERRORISM
By LFP
The United States needs Syria in the Middle East puzzle. A good Syria, good for the region, not a bastard one, for stability in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and the levant.What we have today is a regime that is mass murdering the peace in Iraq, assassinatin democracy in Lebanon and destabilizing Israel along with Hezbollah and Iran.The Syria of Assef Shawkat does not need the Baker commission, it is too deep conducting a terror alliance with Iran, coordinating the defeat of the United States in the Middle East.The United States Saudi candidates for a new Syria are too weak to deliver.The United State intelligence community is losing so much unnecessarily. Time on Syria adopting the wrong strategy, courting this regime is a mistake.Iraq 2006 is not the Florida 2000 elections. The James Baker Iraq study group will be an anticipated disaster for the US The Middle East needs a bold leadership.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Lebanon is one piece on a chess board, and its fate cannot be decided in isolation...
Charles Glass:
Another casualty of the Syrian-Israeli war Everyone in Lebanon knows someone who has been assassinated. We also know people who are about to be assassinated. Israel wants to murder the Hizbollah leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah - just as it killed his predecessor, with his wife and son, in 1992. Syria's intention to murder the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, is no secret - any more than was its assassination of his father in 1977. Last summer, while Israel was bombing Lebanon, I visited many friends whose houses were barricaded, not against the Israeli rockets, but to deter Syrian car bombs. Young Pierre Gemayel, whose uncle was murdered in 1982, is only the latest casualty in a war between Israel and Syria on Lebanese soil that threatens to return the country to the pointless war that it fought from 1975 to 1990.Ghassan Tueini, the editor and publisher of leading Beirut daily, An Nahar, called the civil war "la guerre pour les autres". The others he referred to were Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Americans and Soviets. He has the same opinion now of the unfolding calamity and little love for Syria or Israel. His mountain house above Beirut once welcomed visitors of all backgrounds without appointment. Now, cars stop at security gates where armed men check them before they can enter. His son, Gibran Tueini, was murdered last December for the prominent role he played in the opposition to Syria's residual influence in Lebanon - killed as were the brave journalist Samir Kassir and the former Communist Party chief George Hawi.Ghassan Tueini, who is now 80 years old, finds his name on all the lists circulating in Lebanon of those Syria allegedly wants to eliminate. I asked him why Lebanon couldn't settle down after its long war. "Why do you expect us to be different from other people?" he asked me back. "Remember the trauma of the people of Berlin. Germany did not recover overnight." Germany, like Lebanon, remained occupied for years after the war ended. Lebanon's formal military occupation, by Syria in the north and Israel in the south, may be over, but neither of the former occupiers will leave it alone. It is time for them to withdraw their interference just as they did their armies. But who will force them?Lebanon is one piece on a chess board - and its fate cannot be decided in isolation from the rest. Syrian and Israeli policies have more impact than the decisions of Lebanon's elected leaders. Both neighbours - probably the worst any country could ask for - have visions of the Lebanon they want. Syria prefers one where it can choose the president, parliament, prime minister and cabinet. Israel wants to rid Lebanon of what is undoubtedly its most popular political party, Hizbollah. It would also like a compliant, pro-American president and government of the kind it tried to implant by force in 1982.So, what can the US do? I can tell you what it has done. In 1976, the then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, approved the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. In 1982, his successor, Al Haig, encouraged Israel's invasion. Then, in 1990, another American secretary of state, James Baker, gave the go-ahead for the Syrian army to return to the parts of Lebanon from which it had been excluded in 1982. Neither Syria nor Israel entered Lebanon without an American okay. An American diktat could keep them both out, if the US cared as much about Lebanon as its politicians claim.The only solution for Lebanon is for Syria and Israel - as well as, now, Iran - not to interfere in its internal affairs. Many Lebanese were grateful in 2005 for American and French support of UN Resolution 1559, that forced the Syrian withdrawal. Their gratitude however did not extend to thanking America for permitting - actually, abetting - Israel's 34-day onslaught on the country this past July and August. Nor are they thankful for the Israeli air force's continuing intrusion into Lebanese airspace. The United States, whether or not its obedient acolytes in London lend rhetorical backing, could draw some red lines: neither Israel nor Syria should be allowed to use the other as a pretext for toying with Lebanon. The US could go a step further and sponsor a treaty between Israel and Syria over the occupied Golan Heights.The Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis - often on Lebanon's fertile ground - because no one in Washington has the integrity or the wisdom to force a peace that gives the Palestinians a place to live independently and Israel the chance to be something more interesting than a local military superpower. When Israeli soldiers stop uprooting olive trees in the West Bank and protecting settlers on the Golan, the Lebanese won't live in fear that someone is inciting them to war once again.
Charles Glass:
Another casualty of the Syrian-Israeli war Everyone in Lebanon knows someone who has been assassinated. We also know people who are about to be assassinated. Israel wants to murder the Hizbollah leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah - just as it killed his predecessor, with his wife and son, in 1992. Syria's intention to murder the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, is no secret - any more than was its assassination of his father in 1977. Last summer, while Israel was bombing Lebanon, I visited many friends whose houses were barricaded, not against the Israeli rockets, but to deter Syrian car bombs. Young Pierre Gemayel, whose uncle was murdered in 1982, is only the latest casualty in a war between Israel and Syria on Lebanese soil that threatens to return the country to the pointless war that it fought from 1975 to 1990.Ghassan Tueini, the editor and publisher of leading Beirut daily, An Nahar, called the civil war "la guerre pour les autres". The others he referred to were Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Americans and Soviets. He has the same opinion now of the unfolding calamity and little love for Syria or Israel. His mountain house above Beirut once welcomed visitors of all backgrounds without appointment. Now, cars stop at security gates where armed men check them before they can enter. His son, Gibran Tueini, was murdered last December for the prominent role he played in the opposition to Syria's residual influence in Lebanon - killed as were the brave journalist Samir Kassir and the former Communist Party chief George Hawi.Ghassan Tueini, who is now 80 years old, finds his name on all the lists circulating in Lebanon of those Syria allegedly wants to eliminate. I asked him why Lebanon couldn't settle down after its long war. "Why do you expect us to be different from other people?" he asked me back. "Remember the trauma of the people of Berlin. Germany did not recover overnight." Germany, like Lebanon, remained occupied for years after the war ended. Lebanon's formal military occupation, by Syria in the north and Israel in the south, may be over, but neither of the former occupiers will leave it alone. It is time for them to withdraw their interference just as they did their armies. But who will force them?Lebanon is one piece on a chess board - and its fate cannot be decided in isolation from the rest. Syrian and Israeli policies have more impact than the decisions of Lebanon's elected leaders. Both neighbours - probably the worst any country could ask for - have visions of the Lebanon they want. Syria prefers one where it can choose the president, parliament, prime minister and cabinet. Israel wants to rid Lebanon of what is undoubtedly its most popular political party, Hizbollah. It would also like a compliant, pro-American president and government of the kind it tried to implant by force in 1982.So, what can the US do? I can tell you what it has done. In 1976, the then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, approved the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. In 1982, his successor, Al Haig, encouraged Israel's invasion. Then, in 1990, another American secretary of state, James Baker, gave the go-ahead for the Syrian army to return to the parts of Lebanon from which it had been excluded in 1982. Neither Syria nor Israel entered Lebanon without an American okay. An American diktat could keep them both out, if the US cared as much about Lebanon as its politicians claim.The only solution for Lebanon is for Syria and Israel - as well as, now, Iran - not to interfere in its internal affairs. Many Lebanese were grateful in 2005 for American and French support of UN Resolution 1559, that forced the Syrian withdrawal. Their gratitude however did not extend to thanking America for permitting - actually, abetting - Israel's 34-day onslaught on the country this past July and August. Nor are they thankful for the Israeli air force's continuing intrusion into Lebanese airspace. The United States, whether or not its obedient acolytes in London lend rhetorical backing, could draw some red lines: neither Israel nor Syria should be allowed to use the other as a pretext for toying with Lebanon. The US could go a step further and sponsor a treaty between Israel and Syria over the occupied Golan Heights.The Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis - often on Lebanon's fertile ground - because no one in Washington has the integrity or the wisdom to force a peace that gives the Palestinians a place to live independently and Israel the chance to be something more interesting than a local military superpower. When Israeli soldiers stop uprooting olive trees in the West Bank and protecting settlers on the Golan, the Lebanese won't live in fear that someone is inciting them to war once again.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Another Killing in Lebanon
NYTIMES
It is too early to know who ordered this week’s assassination of the Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel, but there are many reasons to suspect Syria. Mr. Gemayel opposed Syria’s unrelenting campaign to dominate Lebanon’s fragile democracy. If the cabinet now loses even one more minister, through intimidation or worse, Lebanon’s pro-Western government will collapse — a collapse that Hezbollah, Syria’s ally and henchman, has been publicly seeking.
In a Middle East plagued by constant tragedy and defeat, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and the ousting of Syrian troops last year was a rare and precious victory. The United States and the international community must now rally to support Prime Minister Fouad Siniora — with cash, security advisers, and anything that might help him and his government survive.
Damascus must also be told that it will pay a high price — in scorn, isolation and sanctions — if it is found to have ordered Mr. Gemayel’s death, or the deaths or maiming of a half-dozen other anti-Syrian politicians and journalists. Hezbollah must be told that it will be shunned if it tries to grab power through further violence or intimidation.
The United Nations took an important step this week, approving the creation of a tribunal to prosecute the killers of Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister. The only question there is which top Syrian official gave the order.
This page believes that the United States needs to begin a dialogue with Syria, about Iraq and regional peace. But President Bashar al-Assad needs to understand that neither the tribunal nor Lebanon’s independence will ever be on the bargaining table. Europe, Russia and all of Syria’s neighbors need to join Washington in delivering that message.
Hezbollah has been insisting on veto power over all government decisions, including whether it will participate in a U.N. tribunal. If there is any possible good to come from Mr. Gemayel’s death, it is that Hezbollah will now have to postpone its announced plan to call thousands of demonstrators into the street to bring down the government. We hope Mr. Siniora can use this time to rally the majority of Lebanese who still believe in national reconciliation and the spirit of the Cedar Revolution.
We would urge Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to go immediately to Beirut, except we’re not sure she would be welcome after President Bush’s failure last summer to restrain Israel’s disastrous air war. Ms. Rice might still do some good if she brought with her a large group of European and moderate Arab foreign ministers. That is a sad admission about the limits of American influence. But Mr. Siniora needs all the help he can get.
NYTIMES
It is too early to know who ordered this week’s assassination of the Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel, but there are many reasons to suspect Syria. Mr. Gemayel opposed Syria’s unrelenting campaign to dominate Lebanon’s fragile democracy. If the cabinet now loses even one more minister, through intimidation or worse, Lebanon’s pro-Western government will collapse — a collapse that Hezbollah, Syria’s ally and henchman, has been publicly seeking.
In a Middle East plagued by constant tragedy and defeat, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and the ousting of Syrian troops last year was a rare and precious victory. The United States and the international community must now rally to support Prime Minister Fouad Siniora — with cash, security advisers, and anything that might help him and his government survive.
Damascus must also be told that it will pay a high price — in scorn, isolation and sanctions — if it is found to have ordered Mr. Gemayel’s death, or the deaths or maiming of a half-dozen other anti-Syrian politicians and journalists. Hezbollah must be told that it will be shunned if it tries to grab power through further violence or intimidation.
The United Nations took an important step this week, approving the creation of a tribunal to prosecute the killers of Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister. The only question there is which top Syrian official gave the order.
This page believes that the United States needs to begin a dialogue with Syria, about Iraq and regional peace. But President Bashar al-Assad needs to understand that neither the tribunal nor Lebanon’s independence will ever be on the bargaining table. Europe, Russia and all of Syria’s neighbors need to join Washington in delivering that message.
Hezbollah has been insisting on veto power over all government decisions, including whether it will participate in a U.N. tribunal. If there is any possible good to come from Mr. Gemayel’s death, it is that Hezbollah will now have to postpone its announced plan to call thousands of demonstrators into the street to bring down the government. We hope Mr. Siniora can use this time to rally the majority of Lebanese who still believe in national reconciliation and the spirit of the Cedar Revolution.
We would urge Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to go immediately to Beirut, except we’re not sure she would be welcome after President Bush’s failure last summer to restrain Israel’s disastrous air war. Ms. Rice might still do some good if she brought with her a large group of European and moderate Arab foreign ministers. That is a sad admission about the limits of American influence. But Mr. Siniora needs all the help he can get.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
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