| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2005 5:08 pm Post subject: Half a Million Gather for Pro-Syrian Rally to Defy US Vision |
| Half a Million Gather for Pro-Syrian Rally to Defy US Vision
Looks like all those Israeli-USA (Zionist Neocon) orchestrated 'protests' in Lebanon pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands that showed up in Lebanon today in support of Hizbollah which had successfully drove the Israelis out of southern Lebanon in 2000:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7023538/
Looks like I am not the only one who knows about the Zionist (JINSA/CSP/PNAC) Neoconservative 'A Clean Break' (war for Israel) agenda:
'A Clean Break' (from James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jewish Neocons use 'democracy' to mask war for Israel agenda
http://www.vdare.com/misc/macdonald_neoconservatism.htm
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zionist Neocons after Syria for Israel
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5150
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.kurtnimmo.com/blog/
March 08, 2005
More than 500,000 Lebanese Respond to Bush, Chirac, and Sharon
Here’s the deal in Lebanon: between 500,000 and a million Lebanese turned out to tell Bush and Chirac they don’t want Syria out of their country, not because they particularly love the Syrians but rather because they are deathly afraid of what will happen if the Syrian military leaves. “Hundreds of thousands of pro-Syrian demonstrators have gathered in Beirut to denounce what they see as Western interference in Lebanon,” reported al-Jazeera earlier today. “No to foreign interference,” banners read. “Beirut is free, America out,” protesters chanted.
“Syrian forces are credited with helping end the civil war that tore Lebanon apart,” notes Reuters. “Christian, Muslim and Druze militias fought each other. Battles also erupted within rival communities. About 150,000 people are thought to have died.”
Such encapsulated history lessons do not get to the bottom of why there was a civil war in Lebanon—and why there may be another one if Syria departs.
In 1975, when the civil war began, the Christian Maronites refused to share political and economic power with the Muslim majority. “Although the two warring factions were often characterized as Christian versus Muslim, their individual composition was far more complex,” writes Ayman Ghazi. “Those in favor of maintaining the status quo came to be known as the Lebanese Front. The groups included primarily the Maronite militias of the Jumayyil, Shamun, and Franjiyah clans, often led by the sons of zuama. Also in this camp were various militias of Maronite religious orders. The side seeking change, usually referred to as the Lebanese National Movement, was far less cohesive and organized. For the most part it was led by Kamal Jumblatt and included a variety of militias from leftist organizations and guerrillas from rejectionist Palestinian (nonmainstream PLO) organizations.”
It must be remembered that Syria basically intervened in Lebanon to prevent the defeat of the Christian Maronites. “Syria involved itself initially to protect Christians from defeat at the hands of the Muslims. President Asad of Syria had been duped by Henry Kissinger and the Israelis into believing that if he, Asad, did not enter the war to rein in the PLO and the Muslims, then Israel would have to go in and do the job itself, a prospect Asad found terrifying. Kissinger played skillfully on Asad’s fears and succeeded in dividing the Arabs further to the benefit of Israel.” (See Ted Thornton, Civil War in Lebanon, 1975-1989.)
In 1980, when the Muslims took action against the Christian Maronite Phalange Party militia—the Phalange began as a fascist party inspired by the Nazis in 1936—the Israelis intervened on the behalf of the Phalange, shot down two Syrian helicopters, and the Syrians responded by introducing SA-2 and SA-6 surface-to-air missiles into Lebanon; this escalation threatened to turn the Lebanese civil war into a regional conflict. Two years later, on June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to wipe out the PLO—obviously, the PLO and few Palestinians would not have been in Lebanon if Israel had not ethnically cleansed them over the preceding three decades—and encircled west Beirut and began a three-month siege of Palestinian and Syrian forces in the city, resulting in 12,000 killed and 30,000 wounded (see Abdulhadi Khalaf, Invasion and resistance: Beirut 1982, Baghdad 2003).
Israel and the United States worked hand-in-hand in the effort to kill thousands of Lebanese. “The US government backed Israel to the hilt,” writes John Rose. “Immediately before the invasion, General Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Defense Minister and the man most responsible for the prosecution of the war in Lebanon, visited Washington where he informed US Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger that Israel must act in Lebanon. Pentagon figures reveal a massive surges of military supplies from the United States to Israel in the first three months of 1982. Delivery of military goods was almost 50 per cent greater than in the preceding year.”
Rose’s account makes mention of the Israelis targeting hospitals, a brutal tactic since taken up by the United States in Iraq. “In the first bombing of Beirut in June, a children’s hospital in the Sabra refugee camp was hit and the Gaza Hospital near the camps was reported hit. ‘There is nothing unusual’ in the story told by an operating room assistant who lost both hands in the attack. ‘That the target of the air strike was a hospital, whether by design or accident, is not unique either,’ reported William Branigan in the Washington Post. The Acre Hospital was again hit on 24 June, along with the Gaza Hospital and the Islamic Home for Invalids where ‘the corridors were streaked with blood.”
In order to understand why millions of Lebanese fear the Israelis and Americans, it is worth quoting Rose at length:
As the battering of Beirut reached new heights of savagery, the popularity of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin soared to record heights. A mid-August poll showed that 80 per cent of Israelis supported the invasion of Lebanon (it was supported by the Labour opposition in the Israeli parliament) and 64 per cent approved the decision to go beyond the 25-mile zone—at which the early propaganda had said the Israelis would stop.
(…)
The Israeli opposition Labour Party did nothing to stop the invasion of Lebanon. With just two exceptions, Labour voted with the ruling Likud party to support the invasion. This fitted exactly the mood of Labour supporters, 91 per cent of whom backed the war.
(…)
In the period immediately following the bombing of Beirut on 12 August, the United States government became heavily involved in the arrangements concerning the evacuation of the PLO from the city. An American peacekeeping force was sent in with the dual responsibility of overseeing the departure of the PLO and safeguarding the remaining civilian Palestinian population.
(…)
Shortly after this, the Israeli Defence Forces moved into Beirut and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila began … The American government, like Begin and Sharon, did not actually have their fingers on the triggers of the guns, but their complicity cannot be in doubt. [Fascist Phalange militias, at the behest of Sharon, were the ones who had “their fingers on the triggers of the guns” at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, killing between 700 and 800 people.]
“The Lebanese are stunned,” Robert Fisk reported in January. “They know that the regional tour of the US neo-conservative deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, with his demands for a Syrian withdrawal and the disarmament of the anti-Israeli Hizbollah militia, is part of Israel’s agenda in Lavant. A weakened Syria, along with a pliant Lebanon without any anti-Israeli forces on its border, is almost as pleasant for Washington and its Israeli friends as an emasculated, American-dominated Iraq.”
As well, as in Iraq, sectarian and ethnic violence in Lebanon works in the favor of Israel and the United States—once again imposing, as the French did before them, the colonial rule of divide and conquer, and thus, as Zbigniew Brzezinski said of Asia, preventing collusion and maintaining security dependence among the vassals—and this is precisely what will happen after Syria departs. Millions of Lebanese know this and that is why they poured in the streets in record numbers, demanding Israel and the United States keep their hands off Lebanon. Syrian troops in their country are a secondary matter entirely.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.kurtnimmo.com/blog/
March 12, 2005
Syria and Lebanon: Big Time Double Standards
If you were a Syrian, what would you think? Here’s the United Nations, specifically envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian, telling Bashar Assad to get out of Lebanon and be quick about it, or face “economic isolation,” as the Washington Post puts it. Roed-Larsen used UN. Resolution 1559 like a stick against Assad. “If he doesn’t deliver, there will be total political and economic isolation of his country. There is a steel-hard consensus in the international community,” warned another UN official.
Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the south, the outlaw state of Israel has violated literary dozens of UN resolutions (see this list). Israel has racked up violations of international law for raids on Gaza and the West Bank, raids against Syria, raids against Jordan, raids against Lebanon, raids against Iraq, raids against Tunisia, expulsions of Palestinians, annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, and violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
You may remember Roed-Larsen’s comment last year about the “deterioration of law and order in Palestinian areas,” a comment deputy Israeli ambassador Arye Mekel agreed with. If you were a Palestinian, you might be angry with this European bureaucrat for taking the Palestinian Authority to task while Israelis settlers and soldiers murder Arab school children, bulldoze homes (with people still inside), and assassinate your leaders.
If you were a Syrian, you might think there is a double standard at work here. Terje Roed-Larsen has not threatened Ariel Sharon with “total political and economic isolation.” If you were Syrian, you might wonder why the hell some European white man is threatening your country. The last time the United Nations talked like this against Arabs, 500,000 Iraqi children died. If you were a Syrian, you might remember a little bit of history, for instance the fact Lebanon was at one time considered part of Syria—that is until the French arrived and started carving things up in their own interest and against the interests of the Syrians. If you were Syrian, you might realize that in fact most of the borders in the Middle East were contrived by white Europeans for their benefit and when the Arabs refused to pay along with this nonsense thousands of them were slaughtered. Winston Churchill made no bones about it: recalcitrant Arabs should be gassed. Some eighty years after Churchill said this, the United States used mustard gas against the people of Fallujah. For Arabs, nothing much has changed over the last century or so.
If you were Lebanese, no doubt you’d be afraid of the future. “Lebanon confronts nightmare today. As the Syrian army begins its withdrawal from the country this morning, after mounting pressure from President George Bush—whose anger at the Syrians has been provoked by the insurgency against American troops in Iraq—there are growing signs that the Syrian retreat is reopening the sectarian divisions of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war,” writes Robert Fisk. “Have we forgotten 150,000 dead? Have we forgotten the Western hostages? Have we forgotten the 241 Americans who died in the suicide bombing of 23 October 1983? This democracy, if it comes, will be drenched with blood–but the blood will be that of the Lebanese who live here, not that of the foreigners who wish to bestow freedom upon them… in the absence of these ’sisterly’ Syrian soldiers, civil conflict might suddenly—mysteriously—return to Lebanon.”
This is precisely what the Bushcons and the Likudites in Israel want—a return to civil strife and ethnic conflict in Lebanon. As Nasser H. Aruri writes in the foreword to Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was “calculated to produce results deemed beneficial both to American strategic interests and to Israeli expansionist goals. The interests of the Reagan administration and Israel’s Likud government coalesced around three objectives: the destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure in Lebanon, the redrawing of the political map in Lebanon, and the reduction of Syria to manageable proportions.” More than 20 years later, not much has changed, except the diminishment of radical Palestinian elements in Lebanon. “The 1982 ‘operation,’ as well as its predecessor, the ‘Litani Operation’ of 1978, were part of the long-standing Zionist strategy for Lebanon and Palestine,” writes Aruri. “In fact, that strategy, formulated and applied during the 1950s, had been envisaged at least four decades earlier, and attempts to implement it are still being carried out three decades later. On November 6, 1918, a committee of British mandate officials and Zionist leaders put forth a suggested northern boundary for a Jewish Palestine ‘from the North Litani River up to Banias.’ In the following year, at the Paris peace conference, the Zionist movement proposed boundaries that would have included the Lebanese district of Bint Jubayl and all the territories up to the Litani River. The proposal emphasized the ‘vital importance of controlling all water resources up to their sources.’”
Juat about everybody who lives in the Middle East knows what the Zionists are all about—stealing land and water and reducing the Arabs—especially Muslim Arabs—into third class citizens in their own countries. As Hezbollah demonstrated in 2000, when they ran the IDF out of southern Lebanon, this will no longer be as simple as it once was and this is why the Zionists have included the Bushcons in the operation. France and the United States believe they can “moderate” Hezbollah and eventually convince it to disarm and demobilize its militias. It’s not going to happen so long as Israel has a military presence on the border and occupies Shebaa Farms and periodically attacks Lebanese villages and Beirut.
Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians are not stupid. They know the problem is not Hezbollah or even Hamas, but the Americans and the Israelis. “For 30 years, America has tolerated—even supported—Syria’s military presence in Lebanon. In 1976, both the Israelis and the Americans wanted Syrian troops in Lebanon—because they would be able to ‘control’ the 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon–but now Mr Bush’s real concern is Syria’s supposed support for the insurgency in Iraq,” writes Robert Fisk. “The irony is extraordinary: 140,000 American troops occupy Iraq—we shall leave the Israeli occupation forces in Palestinian lands out of this equation—while their President demands the withdrawal of 14,000 Syrian troops from Lebanon. Democracy indeed!”
As almost any Syrian or Lebanese can tell you, democracy has nothing to do with it. The Arab and Muslim Middle East “with its ethnic minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-destructive, as we can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran and now also in Syria, is unable to deal successfully with its fundamental problems and does not therefore constitute a real threat against the State of Israel,” Oded Yinon wrote in the 1980s.
How things change. Both Hezbollah and the persistent resistance in Iraq pose serious threats to the Zionist plan for the Middle East. Bush may push a “Cedar revolution” in Lebanon—hoping for an engineered democracy that will eventually “mainstreamize” Hezbollah and flat line its radical appeal—but this will not happen, as between 500,000 and over a million Lebanese indicated earlier this week: Hezbollah represents resistance to Pax Americana and Pax Israelica. Backing Syria in a corner and threatening to bomb Iran will not change this. In fact, if the United States attacks Iran, this will catalyze Shia radicalism. As an example of how this works, consider how the French and US military headquarters were razed by Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, slaughtering more than 300 servicemen after US warships shelled Muslim areas of Lebanon in support of Amin Gemayel, a Falangist (i.e., fascist) Maronite Christian and Israeli sock puppet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is not democracy that's on the march in the Middle East by Seumas Milne, The Guardian, March 10, 2005
The claim that democracy is on the march in the Middle East is a fraud. It is not democracy, but the US military, that is on the march.
It is not democracy that's on the march in the Middle East
Managed elections are the latest device to prop up pro-western regimes
Seumas Milne
Thursday March 10, 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1434294,00.html
For weeks a western chorus has been celebrating a new dawn of Middle Eastern freedom, allegedly triggered by the Iraq war. Tony Blair hailed a "ripple of change", encouraged by the US and Britain, that was bringing democracy to benighted Muslim lands.
First the Palestinians, then the Iraqis have finally had a chance to choose their leaders, it is said, courtesy of western intervention, while dictatorships such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are democratising under American pressure. And then in Lebanon, as if on cue, last month's assassination of the former prime minister triggered a wave of street protests against Syria's military presence that brought down the pro-Damascus government in short order.
At last there was a democratic "cedar revolution" to match the US-backed Ukrainian "orange revolution" and a photogenic display of people power to bolster George Bush's insistence that the region is with him. "Freedom will prevail in Lebanon", Bush declared this week, promising anti-Syrian protesters that the US is "on your side". The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, is expected to join the cheerleaders for Arab democracy in a speech today and warn the left not to defend the status quo because of anti-Americanism.
The first decisive rebuff to this fairy tale of spin was delivered in Beirut on Tuesday, when at least 500,000 - some reports said it was more like a million - demonstrators took to the streets to show solidarity with embattled Syria and reject US and European interference in Lebanon. Mobilised by Hizbullah, the Shia Islamist movement, their numbers dwarfed the nearby anti-Syrian protesters by perhaps 10 to one; and while the well-heeled Beiruti jeunesse dorée have dominated the "people power" jamboree, most of Tuesday's demonstrators came from the Shia slums and the impoverished south. Bush's response was to ignore them completely. Whatever their numbers, they were, it seems, the wrong kind of people.
But the Hizbullah rally did more than demolish the claims of national unity behind the demand for immediate Syrian withdrawal. It also exposed the rottenness at the core of what calls itself a "pro-democracy" movement in Lebanon. The anti-Syrian protests, dominated by the Christian and Druze minorities, are not in fact calling for a genuine democracy at all, but for elections under the long-established corrupt confessional carve-up, which gives the traditionally privileged Christians half the seats in parliament and means no Muslim can ever be president. As if to emphasise the point, one politician championing the anti-Syrian protests, Pierre Gemayel of the rightwing Christian Phalange party (whose militiamen famously massacred 2,000 Palestinian refugees under Israeli floodlights in Sabra and Shatila in 1982), recently complained that voting wasn't just a matter of majorities, but of the "quality" of the voters. If there were a real democratic election, Gemayel and his friends could expect to be swept aside by a Hizbullah-led government.
The neutralisation of Hizbullah, whose success in driving Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 won it enormous prestige in the Arab world, is certainly one aim of the US campaign to push Syria out of Lebanon.The US brands Hizbullah, the largest party in the Lebanese parliament and leading force among the Shia, Lebanon's largest religious group, as a terrorist organisation without serious justification. But the pressure on Syria has plenty of other motivations: its withdrawal stands to weaken one of the last independent Arab regimes, however sclerotic, open the way for a return of western and Israeli influence in Lebanon, and reduce Iran's leverage.
Ironically, Syria's original intervention in Lebanon was encouraged by the US during the civil war in 1976 partly to prevent the democratisation of the country at the expense of the Christian minority's power. Syria's presence and highhandedness has long caused resentment, even if it is not regarded as a foreign occupation by many Lebanese. But withdrawal will create a vacuum with huge potential dangers for the country's fragile peace.
What the US campaign is clearly not about is the promotion of democracy in either Lebanon or Syria, where the most plausible alternative to the Assad regime are radical Islamists. In a pronouncement which defies satire, Bush insisted on Tuesday that Syria must withdraw from Lebanon before elections due in May "for those elections to be free and fair". Why the same point does not apply to elections held in occupied Iraq - where the US has 140,000 troops patrolling the streets, compared with 14,000 Syrian soldiers in the Lebanon mountains - or in occupied Palestine, for that matter, is unexplained. And why a UN resolution calling for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon has to be complied with immediately, while those demanding an Israeli pullout from Palestinian and Syrian territory can be safely ignored for 38 years, is apparently unworthy of comment.
The claim that democracy is on the march in the Middle East is a fraud. It is not democracy, but the US military, that is on the march. The Palestinian elections in January took place because of the death of Yasser Arafat - they would have taken place earlier if the US and Israel hadn't known that Arafat was certain to win them - and followed a 1996 precedent. The Iraqi elections may have looked good on TV and allowed Kurdish and Shia parties to improve their bargaining power, but millions of Iraqis were unable or unwilling to vote, key political forces were excluded, candidates' names were secret, alleged fraud widespread, the entire system designed to maintain US control and Iraqis unable to vote to end the occupation. They have no more brought democracy to Iraq than US-orchestrated elections did to south Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s. As for the cosmetic adjustments by regimes such as Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's, there is not the slightest sign that they will lead to free elections, which would be expected to bring anti-western governments to power.
What has actually taken place since 9/11 and the Iraq war is a relentless expansion of US control of the Middle East, of which the threats to Syria are a part. The Americans now have a military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar - and in not one of those countries did an elected government invite them in. Of course Arabs want an end to tyrannical regimes, most of which have been supported over the years by the US, Britain and France: that is the source of much anti-western Muslim anger. The dictators remain in place by US licence, which can be revoked at any time - and managed elections are being used as another mechanism for maintaining pro-western regimes rather than spreading democracy.
Jack Straw is right about one thing: there's no happy future in the regional status quo. His government could play a crucial role in helping to promote a real programme for liberty and democracy in the Middle East: it would need to include a commitment to allow independent media such as al-Jazeera to flourish; an end to military and financial support for despots; and a withdrawal of all foreign forces from the region. Now that would herald a real dawn of freedom.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hariri Reportedly Assassinated To Make Way For Large US Air Base In
Lebanon
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
3-12-5
According to high-level Lebanese intelligence sources-Christian and
Muslim-former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was reportedly
assassinated in a sophisticated explosion-by-wire bombing authorized
by the Bush administration and Ariel Sharon's Likud government in
Israel.
There are also strong indications that the Hariri assassination was
carried out by the same rogue Syrian intelligence agents used in the
2002 car bombing assassination of Lebanese Christian leader Elie
Hobeika, who was prepared to testify against Sharon in a Brussels
human rights court. That case involved the Israeli Prime Minister's
role in the 1982 massacre by Israeli troops of Palestinian refugees
at the Sabra and Chatilla camps in Beirut. The Hariri assasination
used wire-bombing technology because Hariri's security personnel used
electronic countermeasures to fend off a remote control bomb using
wireless means. It has been revealed that the Bush administration has
used Syrian intelligence agents to torture al Qaeda suspects through
the program known as "extraordinary rendition."
Hariri, a pan-Arabist and Lebanese nationalist, was known to
adamantly oppose the construction of a major U.S. air base in the
north of Lebanon. The United States wants Syrian troops completely
out of Lebanon before construction of the base is initiated. Hariri's
meetings with Hezbollah shortly before his death also angered
Washington and Jerusalem, according to the Lebanese intelligence
sources.
Washington and Jerusalem media experts spun Hariri's assassination as
being the work of Syrian intelligence on orders from President Bashar
Assad. However, a number of Middle East political observers in
Washington claim that Hariri's assassination was not in the interests
of Assad, but that the Bush and Sharon administrations had everything
to gain from it, including the popular Lebanese uprising against the
Syrian occupation.
Lebanese intelligence sources report that even without a formal
agreement with Lebanon, the contract for the northern Lebanese air
base has been let by the Pentagon to Jacobs Engineering Group of
Pasadena, California. Other construction support will be provided by
Bechtel Corporation.
Jacobs Engineering and Jacobs Sverdrup are currently contracted for
work in Saudi Arabia for Aramco, Iraq for the U.S. occupation
authority, Bosnia, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Yemen,
Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Lebanese air base is reportedly to be used as a transit and
logistics hub for U.S. forces in Iraq and as a rest and relaxation
location for U.S. troops in the region. In addition, the Lebanese
base will be used to protect U.S. oil pipelines in the region (Baku-
Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Mosul/Kirkuk-Ceyhan) as well as to destabilize the
Assad government in Syria. The size of the planned air base
reportedly is on the scale of the massive American Al Udeid air base
in Qatar.
A number of intelligence sources have reported that assassinations of
foreign leaders like Hariri and Hobeika are ultimately authorized by
two key White House officials, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and
Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams. In addition, Abrams
is the key liaison between the White House and Sharon's office for
such covert operations, including political assassinations.
"Abrams is the guy they [the Israelis] go to for a wink and a nod for
such ops," reported one key source.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based journalist and columnist and
the co-author of "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George
BushII."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Neoconservatism is a Jewish movement (even if not all Jews support it) as 'democracy and liberty/freedom' are being used to mask the war for Israel agenda:
http://www.vdare.com/misc/macdonald_neoconservatism.htm
Last edited by Alpha on Sun Mar 13, 2005 1:17 am; edited 7 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2005 6:01 pm Post subject: Half a Million Gather for Pro-Syrian Rally to Defy US Vision |
| From: "Imad Khadduri"
To: Undisclosed-Recipient@,
Subject: About 20%
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 22:30:37 -0500
"Many of those tens of thousands were Hizbollah families who had fought the Israelis during their occupation of southern Lebanon, been arrested by the Israelis, imprisoned by the Israelis and feared that American support for Lebanon meant not "democracy" but an imposed Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty....
..."The fleets came in the past and were defeated; and they will be defeated again," Hizbollah's leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, said in reference to the Americans. Ironically, President Bush was to refer within hours to the killing of 241 US Marines in Beirut in October 1982, as if their deaths were the responsibility of al-Qa'ida. To the Israelis, Nasrallah said: "Let go of your dreams for Lebanon. To the enemy entrenched on our border, occupying our country and imprisoning our people, 'There is no place for you here and there is no life for you among us: Death to Israel'....
...Lebanon can no longer be taken for granted. The "cedar" revolution now has a larger dimension, one that does not necessarily favour America's plans. If the Shia of Iraq can be painted as defenders of democracy, the Shias of Lebanon cannot be portrayed as the defenders of "terrorism". So what does Washington make of yesterday's extraordinary events in Beirut?"
Half a Million Gather for Pro-Syrian Rally to Defy Vision of U.S., by Robert Fisk March 9, 2005
With all the news coverage on the above Lebanese demonstartion called for by Hizbollah, I could not find a mention of a significant pointer.
Robert Fisk estimated the size of the demonstration at about 500,000 while others put it as high as 1,000,000. Assuming the number is somewhere in between, Lebanon's population is about 3.5 million people. That means about 20% of the Lebanese participated in that demonstration.
Is that loud enough for Bush to hear? I doubt it.
Wha?? I can't hear you ... ...... (psst.. Blair is on your left, not to your right)
(See attached)
http://abutamam.blogspot.com
====
The whole article by Fisk is below (as The Independent charges money for it):
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=618139
Go to Original
Half a Million Gather for Pro-Syrian Rally to Defy Vision of U.S.
By Robert Fisk
The Independent U.K.
Wednesday 09 March 2005
It was a warning. They came in their tens of thousands, Lebanese Shia Muslim families with babies in arms and children in front, walking past my Beirut home. They reminded me of the tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims who walked with their families to the polls in Iraq, despite the gunfire and the suicide bombers.
And now they came from southern Lebanon and the Bekaa to say they rejected America's plans in Lebanon, and wanted - so they claimed - to know who killed Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister murdered on 14 February, and to reject UN Security Council Resolution 1559 which demands a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarmament of the Hizbollah guerrilla movement, and to express their "thanks" to Syria. This was a tall order in Lebanon.
But only 100 yards from the Lebanese opposition protests, the half-million - for that was an approachable figure, given Hizbollah's extraordinary organisational abilities - stood for an hour with Lebanese flags, and posed a challenge to President George Bush's project in the Middle East. "America is the source of terrorism", one poster proclaimed. "All our disasters come from America".
Many of those tens of thousands were Hizbollah families who had fought the Israelis during their occupation of southern Lebanon, been arrested by the Israelis, imprisoned by the Israelis and feared that American support for Lebanon meant not "democracy" but an imposed Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty.
There were Syrians in the crowds - indeed, I saw buses with Syrian registration plates that had brought families from Damascus - but almost all the half million were Lebanese Shias and they wanted to reject 1559 because it called for Hizbollah to be disarmed. They were perfectly happy to see the Syrians leave (who now remembers the Syrian massacre of Hizbollah members in Beirut in 1987?) but, bearing in mind Syria's transit of weapons from Iran to Lebanon, Hizbollah wanted to be regarded as a resistance movement, not a "militia" to be disarmed. What the Shia were saying was that they were a power, just as they said when they voted in Iraq. In Lebanon, Shia Muslims are the largest religious community.
Syria is run by a clique of Alawis - who are Shia - and Iraq is now dominated by Shia Muslims who voted themselves into power, and Iran is a Shia nation. So when President Bush said "the Lebanese people have the right to determine their future free from domination of a foreign power", the power the Shias were thinking of was not Syria but the United States and Israel.
And 100 yards away, the demonstrators who have bravely protested against the murder of Rafik Hariri have become factionalised, courtesy of the Syrians. At night, the opposition protesters are largely Christian. Yesterday's Hizbollah rally, while it contained the usual pro-Syrian Christians, was essentially Shia. And their message was not one of thanks to President Bush.
"The fleets came in the past and were defeated; and they will be defeated again," Hizbollah's leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, said in reference to the Americans. Ironically, President Bush was to refer within hours to the killing of 241 US Marines in Beirut in October 1982, as if their deaths were the responsibility of al-Qa'ida. To the Israelis, Nasrallah said: "Let go of your dreams for Lebanon. To the enemy entrenched on our border, occupying our country and imprisoning our people, 'There is no place for you here and there is no life for you among us: Death to Israel'."
Nasrallah's take on the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war was predictable. The crowds were meeting on the front lines that had separated the Lebanese during the civil war; indeed, on the very location of the Christian-Muslim trenches of that conflict. "We meet today to remind the world and our partners in the country," Nasrallah said, "that this arena that joins us, or the other one in Martyrs' Square, was destroyed by Israel and civil war and was united by Syria and the blood of its soldiers and officers."
This was an inventive piece of history. Israel certainly killed many thousands of Lebanese - more than the Syrians, although their soldiers took the lives of many hundreds - but the half million roared their approval.
So what did all this prove? That there was another voice in Lebanon. That if the Lebanese "opposition" - pro-Hariri and increasingly Christian - claim to speak for Lebanon and enjoy the support of President Bush, there is a pro-Syrian, nationalist voice which does not go along with their anti-Syrian demands but which has identified what it believes is the true reason for Washington's support for Lebanon: Israel's plans for the Middle East.
The Beirut demonstration yesterday was handled in the usual Hizbollah way: maximum security, lots of young men in black shirts with two-way radios, and frightening discipline. No one was allowed to carry a gun or a Hizbollah flag. There was no violence. When one man brandished a Syrian flag, it was immediately taken from him. Law and order, not "terrorism", was what Hizbollah wished. Syria had spoken. President Bashar Assad's sarcastic remark about the Hariri protesters needing a "zoom lens" to show their numbers had been answered by a demonstration of Shia power which needed no "zoom".
And in the mountains above Beirut, still frozen under their winter snows, few Syrians moved. There were Syrian military trucks on the international highway to Damascus but no withdrawal, no retreat, no redeployment. The Taif agreement of 1989 stipulated that the Syrians should withdraw to the Mdeirej heights above Beirut, which they have now agreed to do, 14 years later than they should have done.
The official document released by the Lebanese-Syrian military delegation in Damascus suggests this is a new redeployment and that in April the Syrian forces, along with their military intelligence personnel, will withdraw to the Lebanese-Syrian border.
But the question remains: will they retreat to the Syrian side of the frontier, or sit in the Lebanese-Armenian town of Aanjar, on the Lebanese side, where Brigadier General Rustum Gazale, the head of Syrian military intelligence, still maintains his white-painted villa?
Either way, Lebanon can no longer be taken for granted. The "cedar" revolution now has a larger dimension, one that does not necessarily favour America's plans. If the Shia of Iraq can be painted as defenders of democracy, the Shias of Lebanon cannot be portrayed as the defenders of "terrorism". So what does Washington make of yesterday's extraordinary events in Beirut?
Last edited by Alpha on Tue Mar 15, 2005 6:00 am; edited 6 times in total | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2005 3:33 am Post subject: K.Nimmo: Israel/US bent on carving up Arab states |
| From: "Ronald" <ronald.bleier@g...>
Date: Sat Mar 5, 2005 7:48 pm
Subject: K.Nimmo: Israel/US bent on carving up Arab states
Nimmo is pointing to the most important issue involving US/Israeli pressure on Syria: namely creating the conditions for a new civil war, roughly analogous to what is happening in Iraq. He links to Leupp's important interview in Counterpunch. I'm just wondering why he gets so optimistic half way through. The forces of chaos are in the saddle. --RB
http://www.kurtnimmo.com/blog/
The “Hezbollah Model” in Lebanon and Iraq
March 05, 2005
If you want to get a handle on the situation in Lebanon, read Gary Leupp’s interview with Fadi K. Agha, the foreign policy advisor to president Emil Lahoud. Agha’s take on the situation—almost completely at variance with the view presented by the corporate media here in the United States—is a short primer on Lebanese history, Hezbollah, Strausscon intentions, and Israeli aggression.
As Israel Shahak wrote in the preface of Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” Israel has a burning desire to fragment “all Arab states into smaller units,” in other words balkanize the whole of the Arab and Muslim Middle East. Israel’s second invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was but one operation of a larger plan to “see not only Lebanon, but Syria and Jordan as well, in fragments… What they want and what they are planning for is not an Arab world, but a world of Arab fragments that is ready to succumb to Israeli hegemony,” a plan shared by the Bush Strausscons.
Oded Yinon writes in his report: “Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon.”
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon essentially created Hezbollah and the “Hezbollah model,” for lack of a better term, and this model will ultimately stymie the Likudite and Strausscon plan to balkanize the Arab and Muslim Middle East. As Agha notes, Hezbollah “lead to the first Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab lands UNDER DURESS. This, and the fact that Hezbollah has been emblematic of a ‘culture of resistance’ in the Middle East, has never been forgiven.” In fact, the current Likudite-Strausscon machination—beginning with the murder of Rafiq al-Hariri and the fabricated “Cedar revolution” now emerging—is aimed at Hezbollah because the defeat of Israel as it attempted to implement the plan detailed by Oded Yinon “has never been forgiven.” The “Hezbollah model,” currently underway in Iraq—with important differences—has demonstrated that popular resistance can defeat the Likudite-Strausscon plan as outlined by Yinon.
Agha writes:
Tel Aviv, will not miss an opportunity to blame any calamity that befalls it on Syria and Hezballah. The sad part is that Israel produces “evidences” that are always “bought” in Washington. Listen, Israel remains the only world occupying force who gets away with murder. Constantly blaming Syria, Hezbollah … is a sorry attempt by Tel Aviv to shift the blame for its unsuccessful policy of “security first.” Basically, one need not be a wizard to determine that a despaired people, a humiliated people a people in CONSTANT MOURNING, will go to any length in extracting vengeance from those who dislocate , humiliate and murder his brethren.
And this is where the Likudite-Strausscon plan breaks down: humiliated people will always resist invasion and occupation, as they did in Vietnam and Algeria, to name but two of the more obvious examples. Arabs and Muslims are no longer so easily diverted by the “divide and rule” tactics used by colonial powers in the last century, as the ongoing struggle against occupation in Iraq demonstrates. Bush and Sharon want the Syrian military to leave Lebanon and thus usher in a return to the sectarian strife and civil war that worked so well in their favor in the not too distant past. Israel and the United States hope for a “Cedar revolution” government in Lebanon that will disenfranchise and demilitarize Hezbollah. However, this will not happen—although the Hezbollah political party may eventually be ejected from parliamentary politics—the struggle against Israeli aggression will continue and the resistance against American occupation of Iraq will increase and intensify until the United States suffers the fate the Israelis suffered in Lebanon in 2000—total defeat and evacuation with its tail tucked between its legs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Ronald" <rbleier@igc.org>
To: "rbleier" <rbleier@igc.org>
Subject: *K.Nimmo: Israel's broken record: Attack Iran
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 21:46:23 -0500
Once again, Nimmo gets it exactly right. Some points to be emphasized.
The Bush administration has no agenda other than war.
Once again the coming attacks on Iran and Syria and Lebanon will be a war for Israel. (What are the war for oil folks gonna say this time?) And once again the major media will be shilling for whatever Bush decides to do. The only question is: Who will be the next Judith Miller?
When will US and Western Zionists realize that they are supporting endless war and the new dark age even as the leftists among them curse Bush? The answer of course is never. --Ronald
http://www.kurtnimmo.com/blog/
Israel's Broken Record: Attack Iran
It's like a broken record: Israel will attack Iran, Israel will attack Iran. Iran is working on nukes, Iran is working on nukes, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran is not working on nukes. Now we are told the Israelis have created a mock version of Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant in order to practice assaults on the facility. Ha'aretz reports “Israel would use F-15 fighter planes and its air force's elite Shaldag [Kingfisher] unit in the attack.” For months now, Israel has sent the same message over and over: Iran is close to finishing construction on a nuke (call it the George Bush effect; there is no evidence Iran is building a nuke; uranium enrichment is not the same thing as building a nuke, thus Israel is exaggerating and lying as a pretext to attack). Another part of the message is that Iran cannot be trusted, it is a nation of crazed Muslims who want to kill all Israelis. In fact, if Israel has said anything consistently, it is that every single Arab and Muslim wants to kill Jews and push them into the sea.
Last year it was figured the IAEA would be used as a cudgel to beat Iran into submission and impose Iraq-like sanctions on the country. But over the last few months the US and Israel have consistently beat the war drums. Every few weeks Israel comes out with another Iran nuke story. “Heading off Iran's attempt to attain nuclear capability is one of the Mossad's main missions, and the foreign media is one of the most important instruments utilized in this effort,” Aluf Benn wrote in Haaretz in 2003. “Mossad agents supply foreign journalists with information about Iran's nuclear efforts; such foreign reports, the Mossad expects, support the international campaign to thwart Iran's nuclear weapons program.” Lately, however, Iran has been telling the US and Israel to go suck an egg—it will not stop uranium enrichment, it feels uranium enrichment is in its national interest and Israel and the United States should butt out.
Now we have Mossad agents pulling fire alarms, telling the world they are actually practicing bombing Iran. Mossad, the Likudite faction in Israel, and the Strausscons in the United States want you to know they plan to bomb Iran very soon. If they do this all hell will break loose. Natanz is not Ain Saheb. Iran is not Syria. The Likudites and the Strausscons realize that any attack on Iran would solidify the position of the fundie mullahs. “Tehran, experts expected, could move Iraqi Shiite groups to launch attacks against US occupation forces, already facing a hellish situation amid a bubbling cauldron of chaos and anarchy in the war-scarred country. They can also provide these groups with human and logistic support,” Islam Online reported last year. “The Islamic Republic could also use Southern Lebanon, controlled by the Lebanese resistance movement Hizbullah which can not stand neutral regarding an Israeli attack on Iran.” As the experts cited by Islam Online see it, this “could spill over to a Syrian-Israeli confrontation.”
Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah—three targets at the top of the Likudite-Strausscon mafia hit list. Israel wants to start a war—the Strausscons call it World War IV—and get the United States to fight it. The NED and Republican NGO engineered “Cedar revolution” in Lebanon will of course not pan out—not if the Muslim majority in Lebanon, who know a scam when they see it, have anything to say about it—and even if they do manage to get “moderates” (Christian Maronite fascists) back in power, this will not put an end to Hezbollah who understand the true nature of the Israeli colonialist settler state: Israel hungers for southern Lebanon, its land and water, and it will stop at nothing to pitch Lebanon—indeed, the entire region—into war and chaos. Fragmenting and balkanizing the Arab and Muslim world remains a long-held Zionist dream.
In the propaganda campaign for total war (and the Haaretz item above is simply the latest element of this on-going propaganda blitz) we are told “Israel is worried that a preemptive strike against Iran could provoke ‘a ferocious response,’ including attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets abroad, as well as Lebanese-based rocket attacks on northern Israel,” which is of course precisely what the Likudites want, especially among the Shia in southern Iraq who will undoubtedly be agitated if Israel attacks Iran. A Shia jihad declared against the infidels is exactly what the Likudites and the Strausscons want. It will provide an excuse for even more military action on the part of the United States, possibly in Iran and Lebanon as well as in Iraq. Of course, this is completely insane, since the US cannot contain a couple hundred thousand Sunni resistance fighters in Iraq let alone an influx of possibly millions of Muslims from Iran. For the Strausscons and Israelis, bombing Iran is a way to up the ante and set in motion a series of events that will result in total war. In order to for the American people to find the “stomach” (as the Strausscon godfather, Norman Podhoretz, deems it) for total war, a few terrorist events closer to home may be required. Mossad has plenty of experience pulling off such events.
Israel, however, did not learn its lesson in southern Lebanon. “The increasingly effective operational capabilities of the resistance prove once more that it takes a small group of determined fighters armed with light arms and ‘weighty’ faith to expose zionist pretentious claims to invincibility and omnipotence as nothing short of a hollow myth,” Khalil Osman wrote in 1998, before Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon.
It will be a “hollow myth” that drives the Likudite-Strausscon war against the Arab and Muslim Middle East. It is no longer 1920 and the Arabs are not so easily divided and ruled. If Israel attacks Iran, a Hezbollah-styled resistance will spread across the Middle East and may even join together with the Sunni resistance in Iraq, even though the corporate media loves to tell us the Shia want nothing more than to put down the Sunni rebellion. Regardless of what the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times says, at the end of the day the common enemy is the US-Israel alliance.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0005345.html
A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties
by Oded Yinon (with a foreword by, and translated by Israel Shahak)
Foreword
The following essay represents, in my opinion, the accurate and detailed plan of the present Zionist regime (of Sharon and Eitan) for the Middle East which is based on the division of the whole area into small states, and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states. I will comment on the military aspect of this plan in a concluding note. Here I want to draw the attention of the readers to several important points:
1. The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Ze'ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha'aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the "best" that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: "The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi'ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part" (Ha'aretz 6/2/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old.
2. The strong connection with Neo-Conservative thought in the USA is very prominent, especially in the author's notes. But, while lip service is paid to the idea of the "defense of the West" from Soviet power, the real aim of the author, and of the present Israeli establishment is clear: To make an Imperial Israel into a world power. In other words, the aim of Sharon is to deceive the Americans after he has deceived all the rest.
3. It is obvious that much of the relevant data, both in the notes and in the text, is garbled or omitted, such as the financial help of the U.S. to Israel. Much of it is pure fantasy. But, the plan is not to be regarded as not influential, or as not capable of realization for a short time. The plan follows faithfully the geopolitical ideas current in Germany of 1890-1933, which were swallowed whole by Hitler and the Nazi movement, and determined their aims for East Europe. Those aims, especially the division of the existing states, were carried out in 1939-1941, and only an alliance on the global scale prevented their consolidation for a period of time.
The notes by the author follow the text. To avoid confusion, I did not add any notes of my own, but have put the substance of them into this foreward and the conclusion at the end. I have, however, emphasized some portions of the text.
Israel Shahak
June 13, 1982
A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties
by Oded Yinon
This essay originally appeared in Hebrew in KIVUNIM (Directions), A Journal for Judaism and Zionism; Issue No, 14--Winter, 5742, February 1982, Editor: Yoram Beck. Editorial Committee: Eli Eyal, Yoram Beck, Amnon Hadari, Yohanan Manor, Elieser Schweid. Published by the Department of Publicity/The World Zionist Organization, Jerusalem.
SNIPPED.......please use LINK at top of page to retrieve the rest of this fascinating read...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Understanding Hezbollah
Of Lebanon
By Sam Hamod, PhD
3-13-5
"Hizbollah has driven the Israelis out of southern Lebanon and kept them out-to this day, it is the force that stands guard against another Israeli invasion of Lebanon."
Isn't it why the U.S. Administration has a grudge for Hezbollah?
"Even with planes and helicopters, the Israelis could not sustain themselves in Lebanon;
they were defeated by the Hezbollah. They have sought political revenge ever since."
"But there is no end to lies that the Zionists will go to because of
their shame at being beaten by Hezbollah."
It is time America understood Hezbollah for what it really is, not what the Israelis and their Zionist friends say it is. Unfortunately, our President, Bush, and Conde Rice, misunderstand, or prefer to remain ignorant of, the truth about Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is a social, political, educational, medical and military organization based primarily among the Shi'a of Lebanon. In addition, Hezbollah also includes many Sunni and even Christians who ally themselves with Hezbollah because of the good this organization does in Lebanon. Many of the doctors who work in their centers, as well as teachers in their schools are Christian and Druze.
As the Christian President of Lebanon, Emile Lahoud said of Hezbollah, when it was under attack by Presiden Bush, "Hezbollah is an integral part of the Lebanese government, it is also part of our military, it part of our social order." This was echoed by the late, beloved, Prime Minister, Rafik Harriri.
This is the truth about Hezbollah; not what Bush and his Zionist cronies, and the uneducated Conde Rice has to say about the organization.
Let us look at what Hezbollah has done in Lebanon: it has set up over 50 hospitals; it has set up over 100 schools (secular schools primarily) and many libraries; it has participated in the governing of Lebanon in the parliament and in the life of the country; it has driven the Israelis out of southern Lebanon and kept them out-to this day, it is the force that stands guard against another Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Many of us who witnessed that, and Robert Fisk, the esteemed, award-winning columnist for the Independent of the United Kingdom, will back me up on this, we saw Hezbollah fighters, armed with small arms, mines, bazookas chase the Israeli tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, armored cars and troops out of Lebanon. It was an amazing sight to behold; this is fact. Even with planes and helicopters, the Israelis could not sustain themselves in Lebanon; they were defeated by the Hezbollah. They have sought political revenge ever since.
Thus, at this point, Israel is the biggest campaigner to have Hezbollah labeled a "terrorist organization" by the world-but all that Hezbollah did was to kick the Israelis out of Lebanese land-to kick the occupying Israeli IDF off of Lebanese soil This was defensive action; not offensive action.
Hezbollah has never invaded Israel, nor has Hezbollah ever attacked Americans-though the U.S. media said it has.This is nothing but a lie. True, some of the Shi'a did fight back, as Amal, against the Americans when the American troops were siding with the Falangist Gemeyal family in attacking the Muslims, especially the Shi'a-but it was not then Hezbollah and every honest historian knows this. But there is no end to lies that the Zionists will go to because of their shame at being beaten by Hezbollah.
So why is Hezbollah labeled as a "terrorist organization"-it's pure and simple, because it is a strong nationalist Lebanese force that refuses to bow to Israel or America or the Falangists.
Remember in America the patriots who fought against the British; Hezbollah is like those American patriots-just fighting for their land, their country. As an American, I am all for that. Any decent, educated and moral human being is for that.
We must call those who label as liars those who call Hezbollah a "terrorist organization" because they have no facts to back up their assertions. That Hezbollah defeated the Israelis is a fact, that the Israelis were an illegal occupying force in southern Lebanon (the area of the Shi'a) is a fact, that Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese defense forces is a fact, that Hezbollah ever attacked American troops is an out and out lie.
It is time the world, especially the American people, knew the truth about Hezbollah and its charitable work, its social work, its medical work, its educational work and its standing in the hearts of most Lebanese and its standing in the Lebanese government. The lies of President Bush and his mistress of state, Conde Rice, must be undone. Tell your friends the truth; perhaps in that way, the truth will prevail over the propaganda Bush and Rice are putting out in the world.
Professor Sam Hamod is an expert on the Middle East and has written extensively on the Arab world, Islam and other parts of the Third World; he is the founder and editor of 3rd World News and 3rd World News Service in Wash, DC (retired); Director of The Islamic Center of Wash, DC (retired) and has taught at Princeton, Michigan & Iowa; he may be reached at shamod@cox.net Dr. Hamod also edits
http://www.todaysalternativenews.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is a reality check for what is going on in Lebanon:
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_international&Number=293452077#Post293452077
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
www.counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp03152005.html
The Plan is Still on Track
Bush Strategy for Syria, Lebanon and Iran
By GARY LEUPP
March 15, 2005
"Oh yes, sir, not only is it Afghanistan. There's a list of countries. We're not that good at fighting terrorists, so we're going after states: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Iran. There's a five-year plan."
A Pentagon general to Gen. Wesley Clark, Nov. 2001
As someone who believes that the Bush administration fully intends to implement the neocon plan for regime change in Syria, Iran, and Lebanon in the next couple years, I've watched it and the compliant media build the cases necessary for attack. Just as the disinformation apparatus spun out charges one after one against Iraq (many of them now forgotten, although they produced a climate of fear and hatred and served their psy-war purpose at the time) from 9-11 to March 2003, so they have piled on accusations and insinuations against Syria, Iran and Lebanon's Hizbollah.
These charges collect, growing ever more shrill. Syria stands accused of sponsoring terrorism, having weapons of mass destruction, facilitating foreign fighters' entry into Iraq (to fight other foreign fighters in Iraq), hosting fleeing Iraqi Baathists, providing banking services for the Iraqi insurgents, occupying Lebanon in defiance of the people's will, encouraging Hizbollah attacks on Israel, orchestrating a legal change authorizing an extension of the (Christian pro-Syrian) Lebanese president's term, and (although this is only insinuated) assassinating former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri. Every Palestinian suicide-bomber attack on Israelis is laid at the Syrian doorstep. "Axis of Evil" component Iran is also charged with sponsoring terrorism, assisting anti-US forces in Iraq, and funding Hizbollah and Palestinian organizations. In addition it's accused of seeking to produce nuclear weapons. As was case with Iraq, the possible presence in Iran of al-Qaeda forces fleeing Afghanistan in 2001-2 has been represented as active Iranian complicity in al-Qaeda terrorism. Hizbollah, long vilified by the U.S., is repeatedly linked to terrorist actions taken in Israel by Palestinian groups. The list of reasons for regime change lengthens.
But there have been some developments in the last week that some interpret as setbacks for the neocons' Five Year Plan. The administration has agreed to support the Europeans' negotiations with Iran pertaining to the Iranians' nuclear program, and by some accounts to accept Hizbollah's role in Lebanese politics. There is a curious dialectic at work here, but I don't think it fundamentally affects the Plan.
Following the February 14 assassination of Rafik Hariri, the U.S. baselessly implicated Syria, stepping up the pressure on Syria building since the passage of UNSC resolution 1559 last September. Anti-Syrian demonstrations conducted by young well-heeled Lebanese, labeled by the mainstream press the "Cedar Revolution" and compared to the U.S.-financed "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine (but labeled the "Gucci revolution" by critically-minded observers) culminated in a rally of 70,000 March 7 demanding the withdrawal of Syrian troops. The U.S. press true to form lauded the "successes" of Bush's Middle East policy, driven supposedly by the heroic impulse to bring "freedom" to benighted Arabs, and pronounced the president's policies vindicated by the happy telegenic faces in Beirut.
Syria buckled under, and declared it will withdraw the last 14,000 of the 45,000 troops it has deployed in Lebanon originally at Lebanese request. To save face it stated that it is merely following through on the Taif agreement of 1989.
The U.S. responded: That's not good enough. Bully Bush brandishing Resolution 1559 (as though it held greater weight than any of the resolutions pertaining to Israel blithely ignored by the Jewish state) demanded all Syrian forces be out by May. Upping the ante, he also demanded the 1000-plus intelligence officers be withdrawn as well. (But given the nature of the intelligence field, it will be difficult to ascertain whether any Syrian spies remain. Thus it will always be possible, citing unspecified intelligence sources, to assert that some intelligence officers linger and hence Syria is "defying the international community" by their presence. As was the case with Iraq, the U.S. heaps upon Syria demands that it either cannot meet or cannot prove having met; the point is not really to get Assad to change but to change---i.e. topple---the Syrian regime and implant a client pro-U.S., Israel-friendly one. By the way, surely there are U.S. intelligence officers in Lebanon; wasn't CIA station chief William Buckley executed there by kidnappers in 1984? What if Syria was to demand, tit-for-tat: "Get your spies out and we'll do the same"?)
March 8: In response to all the above, Hizbollah organized a massive rally of 500,000 in Beirut to express gratitude to Syria, and to demand that the U.S. stop interfering in Lebanese affairs. Christians and Sunnis as well as Shiites participated in this nationalist-themed demonstration. It was too huge for the U.S. media to ignore, although it was downplayed, and explained away by some (like Al Hunt on CNN's "Capital Gang") as involving thousands bussed in from Syria.
The U.S. responded to the embarrassingly substantial demo by intimating that it would be willing to accept a Hizbollah role in Lebanese politics, but quickly backtracked on the question (suggesting ongoing debate in the administration) and pressured the EU that has long resisted such a move to list Hizbollah as a "terrorist organization." In return for Europe's shift, the U.S. agreed to support Europe's efforts to peacefully resolve the Iranian nuclear issue. If Iran agrees not to enrich uranium, the U.S. will support Iran's admission into the WTO and won't object to its purchase of spare civilian aircraft parts from the EU.
Do these moves represent some slippage in the neocon program, or just clever tactics? I think the latter. The new Euro-American united front will tell Hizbollah, "We understand you are the largest political party in Lebanon and command much respect and support. We know that the Lebanese constitution revised in 1989 gives the Christian minority 50% of parliamentary seats and the presidency, and so long as you agree with that set-up and also disband your militia and cease attacks on Israel we'll take you off our terror list and work with you." Hizbollah will say "no thank you," and so despite its show of strength March 8 will remain a target. Thus the Lebanese state in which Hizbollah plays a prominent mainstream political role will remain a target, along with Syria.
Iran, allied with Syria and Hizbollah and enjoying cordial relations with the still unannounced quasi-independent regime in U.S.-occupied Iraq, will say "no thank you" to the U.S.-EU offer to exchange airplane parts for Iran's unquestionable right by international law to enrich uranium. This for the Iranians is a matter of national pride, and the neocons know it. They also know that the Netherlands, Japan and other nations without nuclear weapons programs have been allowed to master the nuclear cycle. But U.S. policy has been to deny Iran, specifically, that right for one reason alone: Israel.
Iran, of course, has stated repeatedly that it does not plan or wish to produce nuclear weapons, and its religious leadership has condemned them as "un-Islamic." Iran has opened itself up to the most intrusive IAEA inspections ever; the agency head Mohamed ElBaradei has reported no evidence that Iran is working on a nuclear weapons program; and a Bush-appointed bipartisan commission investigating the issue states that U.S. intelligence provides no evidence either.
But the neocons aren't impressed with such reports. They reason as follows. If Iran enriches uranium, there's the possibility it will produce nuclear weapons and use them against Israel. To quote Gen. Clark again: he told the Guardian in August 2002 that, "Those who favor [the attack on Iraq] now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel."
Not against the U.S. but against Israel. Bush administration policy is to prevent any nation hostile to Israel (any embracing the historical narrative according to which the settler-state established itself at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population) from mastering the nuclear cycle since such mastery would constitute an "existential threat" to the Jewish state. One could argue, as some do, that a nuclear Iran would merely counterbalance the existing nuclear Israel and that the two could coexist as did the U.S. and USSR throughout the Cold War, when the "mutually assured destruction" doctrine prevailed. But the Bush administration has made its policy clear: if Iran seems poised to enrich uranium, either Washington or Israel (remember the bombing of Osiraq in 1981?) will preempt that possibility.
The Bush administration meanwhile knows that Syria will not be able to demonstrate compliance with Washington's mounting demands, and that Hizbollah will not dismantle its much-admired militia that drove the invading Israelis from south Lebanon in 2000. They know Iran will not---in deference to the feelings of a nuclear power illegally occupying and settling Arab lands and brutally suppressing a popular uprising---agree to accept second-class citizenship in the community of nations by agreeing to never, ever do what international law allows: enrich uranium. The neocons know that when Syria, Hizbollah and Iran say no to their accelerating schedule of unreasonable demands, they'll maintain their case for attacks. But this time they'll have Europe (notably a wheeling and dealing imperialist France, which is doing business with the U.S. regarding its former Syrian and Lebanese colonies, to say nothing of Haiti), on their side as they pursue their five-year regime change plan.
* * * * * * *
I suspect that many Americans first hear about Syria when as children they encounter the familiar Christmas story: "Now it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria" (Luke 2:1-2). The author of the Gospel of Luke like other subjects of the Roman Empire regarded Palestine as part of "Coele-Syria," which also embraced Syro-Phoenicia or what we now call Lebanon. Syria has in various historical periods stretched from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, overlapping parts of modern Iraq. Some very important Syrian towns such as the early Christian center of Edessa fall within modern Turkey. Many Christian texts were authored in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic. (Aram is a synonym for Syria that often occurs in the Bible.)
Under the Ottoman Empire, Lebanon and today's Syria constituted the province of Greater Syria. The Lebanese region had a majority Christian population, which from the time of Napoleon's Middle East conquests France determined to protect from attacks by Druze and other religious communities. Under French pressure, the Ottomans granted Lebanon some local autonomy. After World War One, the League of Nations granted France a mandate over the "Levant states" (Syria and Lebanon), insuring French control of the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline from Iraq to Tripoli. The modern state of Lebanon was drawn by a French colonialist's pen and designed to be a majority-Christian state aligned with France and serving French geopolitical interests. But its long history is generally coextensive with that of neighboring Syria. President Bush has a BA in history from Yale, but he probably has no clue about all this history, other than what he encounters when people read to him from the Bible. Maybe someone's told him that Israel's King David once conquered Syria, and "put garrisons in Syria of Damascus: and the Syrians became servants to David, and brought gifts. And the Lord preserved David withersoever he went" (2 Samuel 8:6). Recall that Bush told Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in 2003 that "God told me to smite [Saddam Hussein]. And I smote him"? The man truly believes he's doing the Lord's will, like King David, and that God will bless him too with victory.
The French allowed Lebanon to become a "self-governing republic" in 1926, but it remained subject to French control, including under the fascist Vichy regime in 1940 and the Free French with their British allies from 1941 to 1944. In the latter year Lebanon became an independent nation, with a constitutional arrangement apportioning parliamentary power to the various communities: Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Druze. 60% of parliamentary seats went to the Christians, principally Maronites, and the presidency was to always be held by a Christian.
The demographics of Lebanon have changed significantly since 1944. The Muslim birthrate is higher than the Christian, and although for political reasons there have been no comprehensive censuses taken in Lebanon since 1933, it was clear by the mid-1950s that Christians held a disproportionate share of power. This prompted a Muslim uprising in 1958, backed by Syria; its proximate cause was an effort by Christians to unconstitutionally extend the term in office of the Christian president. (Compare the recent controversy over the extension of Emile Lahoud's presidency, which the U.S. treats as some sort of scandal.) 5000 foreign troops, not from a neighboring brotherly country but from the distant and culturally alien U.S.A. arrived to maintain order and "protect U.S. interests." In the 1970s, Muslim frustration with the power structure led to a civil war, claiming 60,000 lives before Syria, at Lebanese (and specifically Lebanese Christians') request, sent troops in to restore order. This was done with French, and tacit U.S., approval. Bush won't tell his flock about these things.
Lebanon was invaded and partly occupied in 1982 by Israeli forces headed by current Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, whom Bush has lauded as "a man of peace." Reacting to PLO attacks from refugee camps in southern Lebanon, Israeli troops advanced way up to Beirut, where Israeli forces watched passively as local Christian fascists (Phalangists) slaughtered two thousand Palestinians (mostly children) in the Shattila and Sabra camps. The PLO leadership headquartered in Beirut was obliged to flee Lebanon for Tunisia. U.S. troops again intervened, alongside French troops, but being associated with Israel and the Christian fascists, these met with fierce opposition from local forces including the newly formed Shiite militia Hizbollah. President Reagan pulled out the Marines after 241 were slain in a Hizbollah attack in October 1983.
Israeli invaders redeployed to the south as Syria, avoiding confrontation with the Israelis, sent in reinforcements to stabilize the situation. Syria's alliances shifted from the Christian community to the Shiites and Palestinians. Hizbollah, with Shiite Iran's support, emerged as a large political organization respected for its provision of social services (schools, hospitals) for many in Lebanon. It not only acquired significant representation in the skewed Lebanese parliamentary system but also drove out the Israelis from southern Lebanon (Sheba Farms excepted) in 2000.
Lebanon today is arguably the most democratic country in the Arab Middle East, with numerous political parties, a relatively free and lively press, and a largely secular culture. The Syrian presence, increasingly discreet, and much less in-your-face than the far less welcomed U.S. presence in neighboring occupied Iraq, hasn't altered that. Bush, who has come to pose as a Wilsonian missionary of democracy to the lost souls of the benighted Muslim world, depicts Lebanon as a nation victimized by foreign occupation, yearning for the sort of freedom only the U.S. can confer.
Concerning the upcoming Lebanese elections, Bush has stated that free elections can't be held under occupation, or even in the context of a Syrian intelligence presence. He says this having orchestrated elections in locked-down Iraq, their results still unannounced more than six weeks after the poll, results that will certainly be influenced by U.S. intelligence operatives in that unfortunate occupied country. One wants to refer the hypocrite to Matthew 7:3-5: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote of thine eye; and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hezbollah kicked the land grabbing Israelis out of southern Lebanon (except for Sheba Farms) in 2000.... We are heading right for the rest of the 'A Clean Break' agenda of going after Syria via Lebanon that Bamford conveys on pages 261-269 of 'A Pretext for War' (check out http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/03/16/the-plan-is-still-on-track-bush-strategy-for-syria-lebanon.php ):
Hezbollah Rejects Bush's Suggestion
19 minutes ago
By SAM F. GHATTAS, Associated Press Writer
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Hezbollah's leader on Wednesday rejected a suggestion by President Bush (news - web sites) that his militants disarm and enter the political mainstream, saying the group will never leave Lebanon defenseless.
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah criticized Bush for not responding to Lebanese demands that Israeli warplanes stop flying over Lebanon, and for not calling on Israel to release its Lebanese detainees.
"He (Bush) does nothing to stop the overflights and its aggression or for the release of the prisoners. Instead, he provides it (Israel) with protection," Nasrallah said in a three-hour interview on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television.
"We are ready to remain until the end of time a terrorist organization in Bush's view, but we are not ready to give up protection of our country, our people, their blood and their honor," Nasrallah said.
The United States has long condemned Hezbollah, but Bush has said that the Iranian-backed militant group could shed its terrorist label and win U.S. recognition if it disarms and stays out of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
"Hezbollah is on the terrorist list for a reason, and remains on the terrorist list for a reason," said Bush.
But Bush said Washington looked forward to working with the elected leaders of "a free — truly free, Lebanon."
Lebanon is to hold legislative elections next month, and Bush has demanded that all Syrian troops and intelligence officials leave the country before the elections.
Under intense international pressure, Syria's 14,000 troops have been pulling back into Syria and the Lebanese side of the border. On Wednesday Syrian intelligence agents ended their 18-year presence in Beirut.
Drawing its support from Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites Muslims, Hezbollah is widely admired in the country and the Arab world for its military role in forcing Israel to leave southern Lebanon in 2000 after an 18-year occupation.
Nasrallah said it was "very big fallacy" that Hezbollah sought to disrupt Palestinian-Israeli peace.
"We don't carry out operations in occupied Palestine ... The Israelis say Hezbollah is behind the operations by Palestinian factions. This is not true. This is a honor that we don't claim," he added.
Nasrallah said "the core" of Bush's remarks was disarmament.
"The real goal before the eyes of the Americans and the Israelis is disarming Hezbollah and undermining the most important elements that Lebanon possesses," Nasrallah said.
"What is required is that Hezbollah be disarmed so that Lebanon can be left without protection," he added.
Nasrallah's strong statements contrasted sharply with the more moderate comments made earlier in the day by a member of Hezbollah's political bureau, Nawaf Moussawi.
In an interview with Al-Arabiya satellite television, Moussawi said Bush was "trying to propose an approach different from the traditional American approach toward Hezbollah."
Hezbollah has repeatedly spurned calls to disarm. Its deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem, said last week the group would not disarm as long as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict persists and poses a threat to Lebanese security.
In the past month, Hezbollah has demonstrated its political influence by organizing two huge rallies in support of Syria's military presence in Lebanon. On Tuesday, Hezbollah supporters took part in an anti-U.S. protest of several thousand people outside the American Embassy in Beirut.
At the same time, there have been calls for the United States to support moves to nudge Hezbollah into mainstream political life in Lebanon as Washington pushes for an end to Syrian influence there.
The United States and many other Western nations have linked Hezbollah to the pro-Iranian militants that carried out the suicide bombings of the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marine base, killing about 270 Americans, during the 1980s. Hezbollah was also widely blamed for the kidnapping of Americans in Beirut during the 1975-90 civil war.
Hezbollah denies links to those militants and kidnappers.
Last edited by Alpha on Thu Mar 17, 2005 6:51 am; edited 6 times in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2005 6:43 am Post subject: If Syria Expected To Withdraw from Lebanon, Shouldn't Israel |
| If Syria Expected To Withdraw from Lebanon, Shouldn't Israel
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0304-25.htm
Published on Friday, March 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
If Syria Is Expected To Withdraw from Lebanon, Shouldn't Israel Withdraw From the Occupied Territories?
by Bill Fletcher, Jr.
I have been following events in Lebanon very closely for quite some time, but I have been especially concerned about developments since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. There are two points about recent events that continue to gnaw at me.
The first is the alleged Syrian connection. While the Bush administration and many in the US media have either implied or alleged that the Syrian government was behind the assassination, going so far as to assert that this connection is obvious, I remain unconvinced. What I keep asking is this: what would the Syrians have to gain by such an assassination at this time? Syria has been ‘under the gun’ of the Bush administration for quite some time. The so-called “Syrian Accountability Act,” which imposed sanctions on Syria, was one step in an escalation of tensions. The allegations by the Bush administration of Syrian collaboration with the Iraqi resistance, and their simultaneous underplaying of Syrian assistance to the USA in anti-Al Qaeda operations, has set the tone for relations between the two countries. Thus, my question remains: what would the Syrians have to gain by such an assassination right now?
To be honest, it seems that there are other parties that have a greater interest in such an assassination precisely because the Syrians would be blamed. A focus on Syria would increase the likelihood of US military (covert or overt) action against Syria and further the country's isolation. And, of course, there is no Soviet Union for the Syrians to turn to for assistance. It, therefore, makes little sense that the Syrians would carry out such a high profile action at this time when they would know that the ramifications could be disastrous.
The second point concerns the demand for a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Leaving aside, for a moment, the Syrian rationale for their troops being in Lebanon, it should go without saying that all countries should enjoy the right to national self-determination. That should mean that countries do not invade one another, or station their troops in a permanent occupation or semi-occupation of another country.
That said, we now are treated to regular sermons by the Bush administration about the unfair and illegal existence of the Syrian deployment of troops to Lebanon without any acknowledgement that (1)the US is occupying Iraq, with no end in sight, and (2)to the south of Lebanon there is an occupation and military deployment that has been going on since 1967. Needless to say I am referencing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
What is so striking about the Bush silence (and hypocrisy) around the Syrian troop question is that in 1967, shortly after the 6-Day War during which Israel occupied vast tracks of Arab land, the United Nations issued a resolution calling for the immediate end to the Israeli occupation and their pull out from the territories. In the nearly thirty-eight years since then, the Israeli government has ignored this resolution and all subsequent calls for withdrawal, and instead instituted an internationally illegal program of establishing settlements on Palestinian land. During this time the US, under various administrations, has done nothing to pressure the Israelis to withdraw: no sanctions, no coalition of the willing, no nothing.
So, we are told that somehow Syrian troop deployments in Lebanon are bad, while Israeli troops and settlements on Palestinian territory are either acceptable or are to be treated with respectful silence.
When one considers these facts, and contrasts them with the actual statements by the Bush administration, does anyone have to ask why the US has so little moral credibility when it comes to international affairs? Does anyone have to further ask why the US is increasingly hated in the Arab and Muslim worlds? In an era when those in power do not seem to be constrained by the facts on the ground, perhaps an answer to these questions is too obvious to verbalize.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the president of TransAfrica Forum, a Washington, DC-base non-profit organizing and educational center formed to raise awareness in the USA regarding issues facing the nations and peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. He can be reached at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org or 202-223-1960, ext 131
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is happening with Syria/Lebanon seems to be in accordance with what James Bamford mentions about the 'A Clean Break' (war for Israel) agenda on pages 261-269 of his 'A Pretext for War' book which one can read via the following URL:
'A Clean Break' (from James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
Last edited by Alpha on Wed Mar 09, 2005 11:01 pm; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2005 5:26 pm Post subject: The Orange Putsch Derailed |
| The Orange Putsch Derailed
By Israel Shamir
Half-a-million of Lebanese gathered in Beirut to reject the Israeli-American attempt to carry out an Orange putsch like the one they supported in Ukraine. “Lebanon is not Ukraine, Lebanon is not Georgia”, - proclaimed Sheikh Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah – “Syria is a friend, not an invader”. It seems that President Bush and his allies were too hasty when they proclaimed the arrival of “democracy” (read: American rule) in the Arab world. The majority of people of Lebanon made the timely presentation of their cause. The US, following the example of fascists of 1930s, chose to support putsch as the best way for their supporters to reach power. The Lebanese made us all proud, and they sent an encouragement to the anti-Orange forces around the world. Indeed, democracy should arrive by democratic means, not by a putsch. May it be that the Lebanon is the turning point, the bulwark that will break down the wave of US-orchestrated putsches. Israeli observers noted that the US administration tripped again on the live wire of Beirut, and that their pursuit of ‘democracy’ let out the mighty force of popular resistance.
The Beirut demonstration came after a few weeks of increasing pressure on Syria. The Israeli-American offensive increased its scope after the Russian decision to sell defensive weapon systems to Syria. Soon afterwards, assassination of Hariri was blamed – without any evidence and contrary to all logic – on Damascus. Israel accused Syria of orchestrating the recent bombing in Tel Aviv night club. Worryingly, Mahmud Abbas, the new Palestinian leader, made a hasty remark in an interview to the British newspapers, which was read as an agreement with the Israeli view. Though he corrected his words lately, such slip of a tongue should make us wary of Abbas’ readiness to fit into Israeli plans in the region.
Syria is more than just a neighbour for Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. These three countries, together with Jordan, are parts of the bigger unit, Bilad a-Sham, the historic Syria, sometimes wrongly described as Greater Syria. Divided by the Imperial powers, the parts of Syria are still united by language, tradition, culture. In the absence of imperial interference, they will unite politically, too. Our support of Damascus is a necessary pledge of this future unification.
More than 500,000 Lebanese Respond to Bush, Chirac, and Sharon
Kurt Nimmo
March 08, 2005
Here’s the deal in Lebanon: between 500,000 and a million Lebanese turned out to tell Bush and Chirac they don’t want Syria out of their country, not because they particularly love the Syrians but rather because they are deathly afraid of what will happen if the Syrian military leaves. “Hundreds of thousands of pro-Syrian demonstrators have gathered in Beirut to denounce what they see as Western interference in Lebanon,” reported al-Jazeera earlier today < http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4A02EB97-5B87-4F28-8B
91-523CCAA3FE92.htm > . “No to foreign interference,” banners read. “Beirut is free, America out,” protesters chanted.
“Syrian forces are credited with helping end the civil war that tore Lebanon apart,” notes Reuters < http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyI
D=7840996&pageNumber=2 >. “Christian, Muslim and Druze militias fought each other. Battles also erupted within rival communities. About 150,000 people are thought to have died.”
Such encapsulated history lessons do not get to the bottom of why there was a civil war in Lebanon—and why there may be another one if Syria departs.
In 1975, when the civil war began, the Christian Maronites refused to share political and economic power with the Muslim majority. “Although the two warring factions were often characterized as Christian versus Muslim, their individual composition was far more complex,” writes Ayman Ghazi < http://www.ghazi.de/civwar.html >. “Those in favor of maintaining the status quo came to be known as the Lebanese Front. The groups included primarily the Maronite militias of the Jumayyil, Shamun, and Franjiyah clans, often led by the sons of zuama. Also in this camp were various militias of Maronite religious orders. The side seeking change, usually referred to as the Lebanese National Movement, was far less cohesive and organized. For the most part it was led by Kamal Jumblatt and included a variety of militias from leftist organizations and guerrillas from rejectionist Palestinian (nonmainstream PLO) organizations.”
It must be remembered that Syria basically intervened in Lebanon to prevent the defeat of the Christian Maronites. “Syria involved itself initially to protect Christians from defeat at the hands of the Muslims. President Asad of Syria had been duped by Henry Kissinger and the Israelis into believing that if he, Asad, did not enter the war to rein in the PLO and the Muslims, then Israel would have to go in and do the job itself, a prospect Asad found terrifying. Kissinger played skillfully on Asad’s fears and succeeded in dividing the Arabs further to the benefit of Israel.” (See Ted Thornton, Civil War in Lebanon, 1975-1989: http://www.nmhschool.org/tthornton/mehistorydatabase/civil_w
ar_in_lebanon.htm .)
In 1980, when the Muslims took action against the Christian Maronite Phalange Party militia — the Phalange < http://countrystudies.us/lebanon/85. > began as a fascist party inspired by the Nazis in 1936 — the Israelis intervened on the behalf of the Phalange, shot down two Syrian helicopters, and the Syrians responded by introducing SA-2 and SA-6 surface-to-air missiles into Lebanon; this escalation threatened to turn the Lebanese civil war into a regional conflict.
Two years later, on June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to wipe out the PLO—obviously, the PLO and few Palestinians would not have been in Lebanon if Israel had not ethnically cleansed them over the preceding three decades—and encircled west Beirut and began a three-month siege of Palestinian and Syrian forces in the city, resulting in 12,000 killed and 30,000 wounded (see Abdulhadi Khalaf, Invasion and resistance: Beirut 1982, Baghdad 2003: http://www.lebanonwire.com/0304/03041410DS.asp ).
Israel and the United States worked hand-in-hand in the effort to kill thousands of Lebanese. “The US government backed Israel to the hilt,” writes John Rose < http://www.doublestandards.org/rose1.html >. “Immediately before the invasion, General Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Defense Minister and the man most responsible for the prosecution of the war in Lebanon, visited Washington where he informed US Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger that Israel must act in Lebanon. Pentagon figures reveal a massive surge of military supplies from the United States to Israel in the first three months of 1982. Delivery of military goods was almost 50 per cent greater than in the preceding year.”
Rose’s account makes mention of the Israelis targeting hospitals, a brutal tactic since taken up by the United States in Iraq. “In the first bombing of Beirut in June, a children’s hospital in the Sabra refugee camp was hit and the Gaza Hospital near the camps was reported hit. ‘There is nothing unusual’ in the story told by an operating room assistant who lost both hands in the attack. ‘That the target of the air strike was a hospital, whether by design or accident, is not unique either,’ reported William Branigan in the Washington Post. The Acre Hospital was again hit on 24 June, along with the Gaza Hospital and the Islamic Home for Invalids where ‘the corridors were streaked with blood.”
In order to understand why millions of Lebanese fear the Israelis and Americans, it is worth quoting Rose at length:
As the battering of Beirut reached new heights of savagery, the popularity of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin soared to record heights. A mid-August poll showed that 80 per cent of Israelis supported the invasion of Lebanon (it was supported by the Labour opposition in the Israeli parliament) and 64 per cent approved the decision to go beyond the 25-mile zone—at which the early propaganda had said the Israelis would stop.
(…)
The Israeli opposition Labour Party did nothing to stop the invasion of Lebanon. With just two exceptions, Labour voted with the ruling Likud party to support the invasion. This fitted exactly the mood of Labour supporters, 91 per cent of whom backed the war.
(…)
In the period immediately following the bombing of Beirut on 12 August, the United States government became heavily involved in the arrangements concerning the evacuation of the PLO from the city. An American peacekeeping force was sent in with the dual responsibility of overseeing the departure of the PLO and safeguarding the remaining civilian Palestinian population.
(…)
Shortly after this, the Israeli Defence Forces moved into Beirut and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila began … The American government, like Begin and Sharon, did not actually have their fingers on the triggers of the guns, but their complicity cannot be in doubt. [Fascist Phalange militias, at the behest of Sharon, were the ones who had “their fingers on the triggers of the guns” at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, killing between 700 and 800 people.]
“The Lebanese are stunned,” Robert Fisk reported in January < http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles442.htm >. “They know that the regional tour of the US neo-conservative deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, with his demands for a Syrian withdrawal and the disarmament of the anti-Israeli Hizbollah militia, is part of Israel’s agenda in Levant. A weakened Syria, along with a pliant Lebanon without any anti-Israeli forces on its border, is almost as pleasant for Washington and its Israeli friends as an emasculated, American-dominated Iraq.”
As well, as in Iraq, sectarian and ethnic violence in Lebanon works in the favor of Israel and the United States — once again imposing, as the French did before them, the colonial rule of divide and conquer, and thus, as Zbigniew Brzezinski said of Asia, preventing collusion and maintaining security dependence among the vassals — and this is precisely what will happen after Syria departs. Millions of Lebanese know this and that is why they poured in the streets in record numbers, demanding Israel and the United States keep their hands off Lebanon. Syrian troops in their country are a secondary matter entirely.
:: Article nr. 10240 sent on 09-mar-2005 04:19 ECT
:: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=10240
:: The incoming address of this article is :
kurtnimmo.com/blog/index.php?p=602
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: "readers" <shamireaders@yahoogroups.com>
From: "Israel Shamir"
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 09:24:49 +0200
Subject: [shamireaders] Your responses on Lebanon
To subscribe to this group, send an email to: shamireaders-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
The items published in the group can be seen on
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shamireaders/messages
Your responses on Lebanon:
From Farah, Beirut:
Dear my friend Adam Israel Shamir,
Thank you for this article. I happen to take a day off work to see the nationalist response to the pro American "Opposition" on the streets of Beirut. Not only that, but I was sure to tape the whole thing as a historical document for those who tend to forget.
I am writing to correct one item in your first few lines and that is the number of those who gathered to Beirut according to Agene France was 1,600,000 people and not what the LBS. (Rightist Kata'eb TV) preferred to say. The numbers blinds them. Although I am a Christian Orthodox and I know where these guys are coming from and why they are scared from the Moslem majority in the future. This is history and neither Bush nor Chirac can help them if they do not help themselves. They are as racist as some of your "friends" in the Israeli right. Note the wise Lebanese Christians on the other side of the opposition!!
Good luck to you and hope to meet one day.
Farah
From Ramy, a Lebanese abroad:
Hello Israel Shamir,
As usual an excellent article about the Middle East!
I don't always tend to agree on everything you say, but reading you always brings a lot of new elements and entertaining reading for a subject that millions of people are very passionate about.
On this particular article, i felt i needed to express some disagreement point on your view of the situation, which is honest, interesting and intelligent.
Nevertheless, Lebanon has always been a complicated issue including many layers of ethnic, religious, local and international aspects.
The presence of Syria in Lebanon is not as black and white as you see it, it looks like different layers of grey.
The essence of Lebanon is all its mosaic of above mentioned people mixing and compromising on a way of moving ahead in a complicated equilibrium. Syria has dealt a strong blow to this equilibrium! It has been ages that part of the Lebanese (Christians mainly) have been out of the game. Syria with it's presence, have in a way helped to settle the internal disputes that was tearing apart Lebanon.
But since then, in the name of stability they have been pushing ahead their own agenda. The Christians have been completely left out of the political game, and everyone that didn't agree with the way things had to run, was either eliminated, exiled, pushed aside, or simply disappeared.
Hezbollah have been armed to the teeth, with no other party or political entity, not even the Lebanese army able to match it or equilibrate. Their secret service have divided and conquered all aspects of Lebanese political and economical life. All the deputies (l'exception confirme la règle) have been either bought, bribed, threatened, or manipulated somehow.
An important part of the Christian community have had to leave Lebanon to find a better future for themselves, not finding a say in the current events that shapes their country, nor finding work for the younger generation that have been outnumbered by cheap Syrian workforce..
The list is pretty long. It is true that Syria helped Lebanon, and Lebanon should be faithful to Syria's interest. But our claim for independence has nothing to do with the agenda of Israel or France or anyone else.
The demonstration on the street, were spontaneous, genuine and reflected a "ras le bole" with Syrian interference in all aspects of our life. No one in Lebanon is asking for the disarming of Hezbollah, not even Joumblat! No one is asking for war with Syria, and if Israel intervened, all the Lebanese, including the Christians would take up arms against it. We are not even asking for a defeat to Syria, on the contrary, we are all saying that we want to keep our privileged ties with our neighbor, wit which we are going to live for many years to come. No one should try to harm our ties, because even economically we are interdependent.
It would be wrong to side with anyone who sides against Syria or Hezbollah.
But "les dés sont jetés", We are a minority made out of all strange constellation of mosaic (Christians, Maronites, Druze, Moslem, Sunnis, and even Shias). Syria have been intimidating us for too long. Many have lost children, or loved ones that they never heard about anymore. Syria is not Sweden, and military rule is still the order of the day. So this demonstration was a last cry from the opposition to be heard. They concretely played with their lives by demonstrating against Syria and the orders of the government against the demonstration.
This in itself expresses the feeling that people can't take it anymore, and would risk their lives to say it. We know that Hezbollah can get twice as many people to demonstrate, this is not the issue. Either Hezbollah is a Lebanese player that wants the good of Lebanon and all of Lebanon, or those people that demonstrated in the opposition feel they have lost everything, and have nothing more to lose except hope and their lives. This would make Lebanon vulnerable to all kind of outside pressure, because people would form alliances with the devil himself if he could get their hopes for a better future up.
There is desperation in the air. People in Lebanon should have a say on how Lebanon is run, and the interest of the Lebanese people should come first. As long as the Syrian troops and intelligence are manipulating all the elections and appointing whomever they want against the constitution (Emil Lahoud), then there is no hope. Today Hezbollah is the main player and have the balance of Lebanon in their hand. Either they keep on waving the Lebanese flag, and gets the respect of everyone, or they decide to be the agents of Syria, and a bleak future is ahead for Lebanon. The opposition is against the wall. They have nothing more to lose. Hizbollah can save them and give a better future for Lebanon. If Syria interferes, or anyone else is shot or bombed or killed, the opposition will be polarized, and desperation gets us nowhere. There will be many killed, there will be interference from abroad, the Syrian regime will not stand unhurt, Hezbollah will be taken into a Lebanese civil war, and Israel would make sure to undermine it anyway it can. And the Christian would commit again atrocities, and eventually they will be a marginalized small majority that have almost nothing and no voice to say in the future of Lebanon...
It is a bleak future, But the window of opportunity is slim. Syria is playing wisely leaving the Lebanese alone. But out of this standoff, Lebanon would emerge either stronger or much much weaker. Unfortunately with Israel as our neighbor, I think the events in Palestine might push Lebanon over the brink. I have the impression that if Israel wants a settlement, it will not allow to have Hezbollah intact on their border. So if the price of a civil war in Lebanon is necessary to remove the powers of Hezbollah, I don't think Israel would think it twice. Particularly with Sharon managing it. Let's hope I am mistaken, and Israel is wise enough to understand that adventures in Lebanon never ends like one suspects them to end. Let me hope hat Israel would be wise enough to manage a truce with Hezbollah instead of confronting everything with their war machinery.
Inshallah that one day we would be able to cross the frontier in peace and live like every democratic state live in the world in peace.
I know that you have visited Sweden many times, Have you had the chance to travel by road to Norway or Denmark or Finland? If it wasn't for a small sign on the road you would probably not even notice that you left a country to enter another one. That is the true term of democracy, of human rights, and the stamp of a modern society living in dignity. It always makes my heart beat so fast to think that I have just crossed a border, how easy it could be to live this way. Only saluted by a lazy moose crossing the road. Why can't we be like this?
All the best
From Anwar Sacca, Lebanon
We do things differently in Lebanon! Forget the Ukraine, forget Georgia! In Lebanon it is being currently dubbed the Gucci revolution! Attached is a snapshot of a lady who brought her Sri Lankan maid along with her to protest Syria's presence in Lebanon! (The bag the maid is carrying probably contains some provisions to sustain her during the sleep-in!)
Below is a comment that a friend of mine picked up from BBC.com:
"Some people here are jokingly calling the phenomenon "the Gucci revolution" - not because they are dismissive of the demonstrations, but because so many of those waving the Lebanese flag on the street are really very unlikely protestors.
"There are girls in tight skirts and high heels, carrying expensive leather bags, as well as men in business suits or trendy tennis shoes.
"And in one unforgettable scene an elderly lady, her hair all done up, was demonstrating alongside her Sri Lankan domestic helper, telling her to wave the flag and teaching her the Arabic words of the slogans."
-----------------------------
La Brea in Lebanon?
by
Tom Mysiewicz
Conventional palaeontologist wisdom holds that the fabled tar pits of La Brea in Southern California were created as follows: the tar pits formed, a thin layer of water covered them, herbivores went out on the water and became entrapped, causing large predators (such as sabre-tooth tigers) to follow them out and become entrapped in turn. I've always wondered about this--you'd think normally cautious animals would realize that something was up after the first bunch went this way?
The reaction of some U.N. members and even "old Europeans" such as the French and Germans to the sudden "crisis in Lebanon" and the "evil Syrians" makes me think I have a new explanation for La Brea: mass insanity. Perhaps there was something in the water?
Syria has had the thankless task of keeping peace in Lebanon for over 15 years. Unlike the Israelis--who reportedly killed over 35,000 civilians and oversaw the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps--and the Americans, the Syrian presence has been successful. No massacres of Christians, Druze or Muslims. No civil war.
Suddenly, a free election cannot be held in Lebanon unless the Syrian occupiers leave. The U.S. has certainly led by example in this regard!
Even Russia, which has sold the Syrians defensive weapons despite massive U.S. and Israeli pressure, seems to be wavering and is holding talks with Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.
Just what can we expect in Lebanon after the evil Syrians leave? Probably an eventual resumption of civil war that will require a U.N. force to control. And this will place the troops (probably some French ones) that would not enter the Iraq quagmire into a slightly geographically removed one.
As for Jumblatt, one must remember that the Druze are cut from the same cloth as the anti-Islamic Fatemites and Assassins and trace their pedigree back to the gnostics and Kabbalism (source of the Templars and modern Freemasonic movements as well). They can--with the Christian militias--be expected to ultimately side with pro-Israeli forces in Lebanon. And this can be expected to produce further pressure to internally topple Assad in Syria.
Unlike many of the poor creatures whose bones make up the La Brea of today, those waiting to enter Lebanon will not have the excuse of having small brains or being prehistoric.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5039
Lebanon's Hollow 'Cedar Revolution'
More media hype from the usual suspects
by Justin Raimondo
From Lille, Bahrain
Greetings, I watched the demonstrations yesterday - will they be able to withstand the pressure? does no one remember the last naqba in Beirut? One often wonders why we abide by artificial colonial borders or indeed jump when reprimanded by the colonials? not a single 'world leader' has commented or acknowledged the abnormalities we are constrained to live by nor indeed the ghastly consequences of imbecilic colonial legacies which they enforce tenaciously. Not a single reality is mentioned although they are all complicit in the current carnage. The UN is nothing but a colonial camouflage, what plausibility do they have?
From Joh Domingo, Australia:
I have a problem with Robert Fisk and his infatuation with Hariri. Tonight I watched a segment of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's 'Nightline', that featured an interview with Fisk. While Fisk repeated his usual popular jargon, he several times asserted that Hariri was a 'great Man, in many ways a flawed man, but a great man'. He also stressed that while Hariri was an extremely personable politician, he was a ruthless businessman.
Now I am not the Lebanese expert that Robert Fisk is, but even I can recognize that something was leaking from the radiator of this 'great man' who is at once a Mother Theresa and a 'ruthless businessman'. More so when one examines the power he exerted on the Lebanese economy during his reign as part of a troika of PM, President and Speaker in Lebanese politics.
By all accounts he had made a fortune in Saudi Arabia estimated at several hundred million dollars by 1988, when he began distributing some of this largesse in the rebuilding of Sidon. At that time Lebanon was practically a failed state. The bulk of his wealth was held in International securities and Assets, in addition to his majority stake in the Saudi Construction Company Solidère, which began to transfer its operations to Lebanon to participate in the major reconstruction after the civil war. At the end of his 1992-1996 term as Prime Minister, his fortune is estimated to have ballooned to 10 Billion Dollars, and Lebanon's foreign debt had climbed to 20 Billion dollars. This in a country estimated have only 3.5 million people.
Who was Prime Minister during this period, the 'affable politician' or the 'ruthless businessman'? Bear in mind that Lebanese political stability relies on a balance between the PM, Speaker and President. In reality, the bulk of executive power resides in the President and Prime Minister. Hariri served with Elias Hrawi, considered a weak president. A circumstance that should cause us to pause when evaluating his relationship with the vastly more experienced and stronger Emile Lahoud, whose extended term was said to be the primary reason for Hariri' resignation. Could it be that Lahoud was more inclined to obstruct profiteering and corruption than his predecessor?
Lost in all the babble is the widespread belief that the Hariri troika was considered to be a hotbed of corruption. During the entire period of Hariri's first term as PM, Lebanon provided no official accounting for public income and expenditure. Eighty five percent of the budget was funded with loans and the average annual budget of 6 Billion Dollars (US Dollars) was exceeded by an average 2 billion dollars of off-book expenditures. When Hariri left office in 1998, his finance Minister Saniora, 'disappeared' these files.
It seems more than likely that Hariri resigned in a pique because he found a tighter regime when he returned to office, as Lahoud had had a more powerful PM in Dr. Hoss. He probably found the regulated finance ministry stifling and adopted a strategy of waiting out the term of Lahoud. This strategy was dramatically foiled when Syria interfered with the Lebanese constitution to reinstall Lahoud for another 3 years. Moguls do not like their plans disrupted.
Robert Fisk should be more circumspect about the warm fuzzy feeling one gets when a rich and powerful man breaks bread with a lowly newspaper reporter. They usually do so for very good reasons.
JohD
March 8, 2005
From Syria's Retreat to Civil War?
Lebanon's Nightmare
By ROBERT FISK The Independent.
-------------------
From Jim Dean, Atlanta
The Lebanon crisis is a complicate story due to the great diversity of the Lebanese people and their various political and religious groups. But they have all grown savvy of the divide and conquer game. The slaughter of the invasion of the early 80's is fresh on everyone's minds.
As is mentioned below, the US supply chain backed that whole operation. Most Americans don't know that when the PLO left Beirut we pledged to remain at least 30 days and protect the Pal civilians that were left behind. We pulled out after two weeks and Sharon pulled the trigger on the Sabra and Shatilla massacres.
I have interviewed an American/Palestinian nurse who lives here, who along with a Sabra camp foreign medical unit was stripped and put up against the wall, on their way to joining those being bulldozed into the mass grave. An Israeli officer interceded and suggested to the Phalangist executioners that killing a foreign medical staff might not be such a good idea. She was most grateful. This is the only eye witness, a very credible one, I have found of an Israeli in the camps while the massacres were going on.
The poll numbers I sent you yesterday showed that even the Hezbollah folks mostly want Syrian troops eventually out, but the Lebanese people want to be in control of how and when that is done. They wisely don't want to end up in worse shape than they are now, and they have experienced what Israel and America 'coming it to help out' can be like.
So here we have a massive public demonstration, backed up by Zogby poll numbers, showing that across all the religious and political party lines the Lebanese people are more afraid of Israel and us than they are of Syria. That is the reality of US foreign policy failure in the Mid East, a failure on a massive scale.
We used to say during the cold war...'communism comes out of the barrel of a gun'. What we are seeing now is 'democracy coming out of the barrel of a gun.'
And as for the Mid East 'Soviet influence' which we used to justify our intervention there, Jerry Levin, the CNN Beirut chief/Hezbollah hostage told me that dead Soviet agents were a much more common occurrence in Lebanon in the 80's than were Western ones. The American public was never told this, as it undermine the 'Red Menace' scenario.
The administration will never spinmeister it's way into an improved MidEast situation. The real underlying problems will have to be dealt with for any real permanent solution and lasting peace. The NeoCons have chosen to spread democracy from the barrel of the gun. Bush has bought into it.
They are now in all the top slots, with Bolton just getting the UN slot. So US policy will be force. The targets will resist and have a lot of public support. But the NeoCons are betting that the never ending carnage, if we can switch over to the natives doing most of the dying, will eventually drop off the American public's radar. So we will continue to support a numerical minority against majorities, and they will be totally dependent on us for their survival, and be good friends. That is the democracy that we have in mind. I don't think the Founding Fathers would have approved.
I am hearing that the NY Times is sitting on a story that the Shia actually won 56% of the Iraqi vote and that we had our hands in the pot to assure that no one group could gain complete control. It may not be true, and if it is, it may never be confirmed. The provisional authority candidates, despite all the financial goodies they have to offer, got crushed in the elections. Chalabi has been passed over. The evolving leadership doesn't trust the US. They are certain we are there to dominate them, but they have to walk the tightrope of 'democracy from a barrel of a gun'. This is all very dangerous...for all of us.
Jim Dean...Heritage TV
Last edited by Alpha on Thu Mar 10, 2005 3:35 pm; edited 2 times in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2005 5:45 pm Post subject: 'International pressure on Syria is due to Israel’ |
| 'International pressure on Syria is due to Israel’
* Reza Asefi says respects joint decision taken by Syria, Lebanon
TEHRAN: Iran's foreign ministry asserted on Sunday that mounting international pressure on Syria to pull its troops out of Lebanon once and for all was merely part of a plot orchestrated by Israel.
“It should be noted that the pressures on Syria, using the pretext of pulling out of Lebanon, is apparently a predetermined plan by the Zionist regime in order to guarantee the expansionist policies of Israel,” said foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.
Iran is Syria's closest regional ally. Asefi said that for Iran, the issue of Syrian troops in Lebanon was a “bilateral matter” to be worked out between Beirut and Damascus.
“We respect any joint decision taken by Syria and Lebanon,” Asefi said, while also urging the Lebanese to “pay attention to their country's sensitive circumstances and not to jeopardise their unity and integrity.”
Syria's leader Bashar al-Assad announced Saturday the redeployment of his country's troops from Lebanon to the eastern Bekaa valley and then to the Syrian border, but he did not give a timetable.
The announcement came amid international pressure, led by France and the United States, on Damascus to end its three-decades-old military presence in Lebanon under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1559 which they sponsored last year. afp
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_7-3-2005_pg4_25 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2005 6:52 pm Post subject: 'Democracy Now' discusses pro-Syrian Demonstration |
| 'Democracy Now' discusses pro-Syrian Demonstration
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/09/1448225
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lebanon Deputies Back Pro-Syrian PM's Return
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4332117.stm
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NEXT CRUSADES
By Uri Avnery – March 5, 2005
http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article346.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery03072005.html
Many years ago, I read a book called "The Quiet American" by Graham Greene. Its central character is a high-minded, naive young American operative in Vietnam. He has no idea about the complexities of that country but is determined to right its wrongs and create order. The results are disastrous.
I have the feeling that this is happening now in Lebanon. The Americans are not so high-minded and not so naive. Far from it. But they are quite prepared to go into a foreign country, disregard its complexities, and use force to impose on it order, democracy and freedom.
Civil war: Lebanon. Lebanon is a country with a peculiar topography: a small country of high mountain ranges and isolated valleys. As a result, it has attracted throughout the centuries communities of persecuted minorities, who found refuge there. Today there are, side by side and one against the other, four ethno-religious communities: Christians, Sunnis, Shi ' ites and Druze. Within the Christian community, there are several sub-communities, such as Maronites and other ancient sects, mostly hostile to each other. The history of Lebanon abounds in mutual massacres.
Such a situation invites, of course, interference by neighbors and foreign powers, each wanting to stir the pot for its own advantage. Syria, Israel, the United States and France, the former colonial master, are all involved.
Exactly 50 years ago a secret, heated debate took place among the leaders of Israel. David Ben-Gurion (then Minister of Defence) and Moshe Dayan (the army Chief-of-Staff) had a brilliant idea: to invade Lebanon, impose on it a "Christian major" as dictator and turn it into an Israeli protectorate. Moshe Sharett, the then Prime Minister, attacked this idea fervently. In a lengthy, closely argued letter, which has been preserved for history, he ridiculed the total ignorance of the proponents of this idea in face of the incredibly fragile complexity of the Lebanese social structure. Any adventure, he warned, would end in disaster.
At the time, Sharett won. But 27 years later, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon did exactly what Ben-Gurion and Dayan had proposed. The result was exactly as foreseen by Sharett.
Anyone who follows the American and Israeli (there is no difference) media, gets the impression that the present situation in Lebanon is simple: there are two camps, "the supporters of Syria" on the one side, the "opposition" on the other. There is a "Beirut Spring". The opposition is a twin sister of yesterday's Ukrainian opposition, and loyally imitates all its methods: demonstrations opposite the government building, a sea of waving flags, colorful shawls, and, most importantly, beautiful girls in the front row.
But between the Ukraine and Lebanon there exists not the slightest similarity. The Ukraine is a "simple" country: the east tends towards Russia, the west towards Europe. With American help, the west won.
In Lebanon, all the diverse communities are in action. Each for its own interest, each plotting to outfox the others, perhaps to attack them at a given opportunity. Some of the leaders are connected with Syria, some with Israel, all are trying to use the Americans for their ends. The jolly pictures of young demonstrators, so prominent in the media, have no meaning if one does not know the community which stands behind them.
Only thirty years ago these communities started a terrible civil war and all of them massacred each other. The Christian Maronites wanted to take over the country with the help of Israel, but were defeated by a coalition of the Sunnis and Druze (the Shi ' ites played no significant role at that time). The Palestinian refugees, led by the PLO, who formed a kind of fifth "community", joined the battle. When the Christians were in danger of being overrun, they called on the Syrians for help. Six years later, Israel invaded, with the aim of evicting both the Syrians and the Palestinians and imposing a Christian strongman (Bashir Gemayel).
It took us 18 years to get out of that morass. Our only achievement was to turn the Shi ' ites into a dominant force. When we entered Lebanon, the Shi ' ites received us with showers of rice and candies, hoping that we would throw out the Palestinians, who had been lording it over them. A few months later, when they realized that we did not intend to leave, they started to shoot at us. Sharon is the midwife of Hizbullah.
It is difficult to foresee what will happen if the Syrians accede to the American ultimatum and leave Lebanon. There is no indication that the Americans are concerned with the creation of a new fabric of life for the Lebanese communities. They are satisfied with babbling about "freedom" and "democracy", as if a majority vote could create a regime acceptable to all. They do not understand that "Lebanon" is an abstract notion, since for almost all Lebanese, belonging to their own community is vastly more important than loyalty to the state. In such a situation, even an international force will be of no help.
The re-ignition of the bloody civil war is a distinct possibility.
Civil war: Iraq. If a civil war breaks out in Lebanon, it will not be the only one in the region. In Iraq, such a war - if almost secret - is already in full swing.
The only effective military forces in Iraq, apart from the occupation army, are the Kurdish "Peshmerga" ("Those who face death"). The Americans use them whenever they are fighting the Sunnis. They played an important role in the battle of Fallujah, a big town that was totally destroyed, its inhabitants killed or driven out.
Now the Kurdish forces are waging a war against the Sunnis and Turkmens in the north of the country, in order to take hold of the oil-rich areas and the town of Kirkuk, and also to drive out the Sunni settlers who were implanted there by Saddam Hussein.
How can such a war be practically ignored by the media? Simple: everything is swept under the carpet of the "war against terrorism". But this small war is nothing compared to what may happen in Iraq, once the time comes for deciding the future of the country. The Kurds want complete autonomy, or independence by another name. The Sunni would not dream of accepting the rule of the Shi ' ite majority, which they despise, even if came about in the name of "democracy". The outbreak of a full-fledged civil war may only be a question of time.
Civil war: Syria. If the Americans succeed, with our discreet help, in breaking the ruling Syrian dictatorship, there is no assurance at all that it will be replaced by "freedom" and "democracy".
Syria is almost as splintered as Lebanon. There is a strong Druze community in the south, a rebellious Kurdish community in the north, an Alawite community (to which the Assad family belongs) in the west. The Sunni majority is traditionally divided between Damascus in the south and Aleppo in the north. The people have resigned themselves to the Assad dictatorship out of fear of what may happen if the regime collapses.
It is not likely that a full-scale civil war will break out there. But a prolonged situation of total chaos is quite likely. Sharon would be happy, though I am not sure that it would be good for Israel.
Religious fervor: Iran. The main American objective is, of course, the overthrow of the Ayatollahs in Iran. (It is a little bit ironic that at the same time the Americans are helping to install the Shi ' ites in power in neighboring Iraq, where they insist on introducing Islamic law.)
Iran is a much harder nut to crack. Unlike Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, this is a homogenous society.
Israel is now openly threatening to bomb the Iranian nuclear installations. Every few days we see on our TV screens the digitally blurred faces of pilots boasting of their readiness to do this at a moment's notice.
The religious fervor of the Ayatollahs has been flagging lately, as happens with every victorious revolution after some time. But a military attack by the "Big Satan" (the US) or the "Little Satan" (us) may set fire to the whole Shi ' ite crescent: Iran, South Iraq and South Lebanon.
And here, too. Israel, too, has recently witnessed a tiny civil war.
In the Galilean village Marrar, where a Druze and an Arab Christian community have been living side by side for generations, a bloody incident suddenly erupted. It was a full-fledged pogrom: the Druze fell upon the Christians, attacking, burning and destroying. By a miracle, nobody was killed. The Christians say that the Israeli police (many of whose members are Druze) stood aside. The immediate reason for the outbreak: some doctored nude pictures on the Internet.)
It is easy to ignite a civil war, whether out of fanaticism or out of intolerable naivete. George Bush, the (not-so-)Quiet American, runs around the world hawking his patent medicines, "freedom" and "democracy", in total ignorance of hundreds of years of history. Hard to believe, but he draws his inspiration from a book by our own Nathan Sharansky, a very small genius, to say the least.
Every human being and every people has a right to freedom. Many of us have shed their blood for this aim. Democracy is an ideal that every people has to realize for itself. But when the banners of "freedom" and "democracy" are hoisted over a crusade by an avaricious and irresponsible super-power, the results can be catastrophic.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Uri Avnery is an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, a three-time member of Israel's parliament, and a peace activist with the Gush Shalom center. Some of his writing appears in the recently-published work, The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery04102003.html
April 10, 2003
The Night After
The Easier the Victory, the Harder the Peace
By URI AVNERY
It is now fashionable to talk about "the day after". Let's talk about the night after.
After the end of hostilities in Iraq, the world will be faced with two decisive facts:
First, the immense superiority of American arms can beat any people in the world, valiant as it may be.
Second, the small group that initiated this war--an alliance of Christian fundamentalists and Jewish neo-conservatives--has won big, and from now on it will control Washington almost without limits.
The combination of these two facts constitutes a danger to the world, and especially to the Middle East, the Arab peoples and the future of Israel. Because this alliance is the enemy of peaceful solutions, the enemy of the Arab governments, the enemy of the Palestinian people and especially the enemy of the Israeli peace camp.
It does not dream only about an American empire, in the style of the Roman one, but also of an Israeli mini-empire, under the control of the extreme right and the settlers. It wants to change the regimes in all Arab countries. It will cause permanent chaos in the region, the consequences of which it is impossible to foresee.
Its mental world consists of a mixture of ideological fervor and crass material interests, an exaggerated American patriotism and right-wing Zionism.
That is a dangerous mixture. There is in it something of the spirit of Ariel Sharon, a man who has always had grandiose plans for changing the region, consisting of a mixture of creative imagination, unbridled chauvinism and a primitive faith in brute force.
Who are the winners?
They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers.
For many years, this was a marginal group that fostered a right-wing agenda in all fields. They fought against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and drugs. When Binyamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel, they offered him advise on how to fight the Arabs.
Their big moment arrived with the collapse of the Twin Towers. The American public and politicians were in a state of shock, completely disoriented, unable to understand a world that had changed overnight. The neo-cons were the only group with a ready explanation and a solution. Only nine days after the outrage, William Kristol (the son of the group's founder, Irving Kristol) published an Open Letter to President Bush, asserting that it was not enough to annihilate the network of Osama bin Laden, but that it was also imperative to "remove Saddam Hussein from power" and to "retaliate" against Syria and Iran for supporting Hizbullah.
Following is a short list of the main characters. (If it bores you, skip to the next section).
The Open Letter was published in the Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol with the money of ultra-right press mogul Rupert Murdoch, who donated $ 10 million to the cause. It was signed by 41 leading neo-cons, including Norman Podhoretz, a Jewish former leftist who has become an extreme right-wing icon, editor of the prestigious Encounter magazine, and his wife, Midge Decter, also a writer, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Studies, Robert Kagan, also of the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, and, of course, Richard Perle.
Perle is a central character in this play. Until recently he was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board of the Defense Department, which also includes Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross. Perle is a director of the Jerusalem Post, now owned by extreme right-wing Zionists. In the past he was an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, who led the fight against the Soviet Union on behalf of the Jews who wanted to leave. He is a leading member of the influential right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Lately he was obliged to resign from his Defense Department position, when it became known that a private corporation had promised to pay him almost a million dollars for he benefit of his influence in the administration.
That Open Letter was, in effect, the beginning of the Iraq war. It was eagerly received by the Bush administration, with members of the group already firmly established in some of its leading positions. Paul Wolfowitz, the father of the war, is No. 2 in the Defense Department, where another friend of Perle's, Douglas Feith, heads the Pentagon Planning Board. John Bolton is State Department Undersecretary. Eliot Abrams, responsible for the Middle East in the National Security Council, was connected with the Iran-Contra-Israel scandal. The main hero of the scandal, Oliver North, sits in the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, together with Michael Ledeen, another hero of the scandal. Headvocates total war not only against Iraq, but also against Israel's other enemies, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department.
Most of these people , together with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are associated with the "Project for the New American Century", which published a White Paper in 2002, with the aim 'to preserve and enhance this 'American peace'"--meaning American control of the world.
Meyrav Wurmser (Meyrav is a chic new Israeli first name) is Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. She also writes for the Jerusalem Post and is co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute that is, according to the London Guardian, connected with Israeli Army Intelligence. MEMRI feeds the media and politicians with highly selective quotations from extreme Arab publications. Meyrav's husband, Davis Wurmser, is at Perle's American Enterprise Institute, heading Middle East Studies. Mention should also be made of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy of our old acquaintance, Dennis Ross, who for years was in charge of the "peace process" in the Middle East.
In all the important papers there are people close to the group, such as William Safire, a man hypnotized by Sharon, in the New York Times and Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. Another Perle friend, Robert Bartley, is the editor of the Wall Street Journal.
If the speeches of Bush and Cheney often sound as if they came from the lips of Sharon, one of the reasons may be that their speechwriters, Joseph Shattan, Mathew Scully and John McConnell, are neo-cons, as is Cheneys Chief-of-Staff, Lewis Libby.
The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's Republican party. The founding fathers were Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, who once got a jet plane as a present from Menachem Begin, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network, which help to finance the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem of J.W. van der Hoeven, an outfit that supports the settlers and their right-wing allies.
Common to both groups is their adherence to the fanatical ideology of the extreme right in Israel. They see the Iraq war as a struggle between the Children of Light (America and Israel) and the Children of Darkness (the Arabs and Muslims).
By the way, none of these facts are secret. They have been published lately in dozens of articles, both in American and world media. The members of the group are proud of them.
The Zionist general.
The man who symbolizes this victory is General Jay Garner, who has just been appointed chief of the civilian administration in Iraq.
He is no anonymous general who has been picked accidentally. Garner is the ideological partner of Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-cons.
Two years ago he signed, together with 26 other officers, a petition organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, lauding the Israeli Army for "remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority," which is certainly news to the Israeli peace forces. He also stated that "a strong Israel is an asset that American military planners and political leaders can rely on."
In the first Gulf War he praised the performance of the Patriot missiles, which had failed miserably. After leaving the army in 1997, he became, not surprisingly, a defense contractor specializing in missiles. It was alleged that he landed non-competitive Pentagon contracts. This year he obtained a defense contract for $ 1.5 billion, as well as a contract for building Patriot systems in Israel.
Therefore, there can be no better candidate for the job of chief of the civilian administration in Iraq, especially at a time when contracts for billions of dollars for reconstruction have to be handed out, to be paid for by Iraqi oil.
A new Balfour declaration.
The ideology of this group, that calls for an American world-empire as well as for a Greater Israel, reminds one of bygone days.
The Balfour declaration of 1917, that promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, had two parents. The mother was Christian Zionism (among whose adherents were illustrious statesmen like Lord Palmerston and Lord Shaftesbury, long before the foundation of the Zionist movement), the father was British imperialism. The Zionist idea allowed the British to crowd out their French competitors and take possession of Palestine, which was needed to safeguard the Suez Canal and the shorter sea route to India.
Now the same thing is happening again. Last year Richard Perle organized a briefing in which a speaker proposed war not only on Iraq, but on Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well, in order to secure the world's oil heartland. Iraq, he asserted, was only the pivot. One of the justifications for this design is the need to defend Israel.
To bet on our life?
Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence on the center of world power.
But this tendency troubles me. We are like a gambler, who bets all his money and his future on one horse. A good horse, a horse with no current competitor, but still one horse.
The neo-cons will cause a long period of chaos in the Arab and Muslim world. The Iraqi war has already shown that their understanding of Arab realities is shaky. Their political assumptions did not stand the test, only brute force saved their undertaking.
Some day the Americans will go home, but we shall remain here. We have to live with the Arab peoples. Chaos in the Arab world endangers our future.
Wolfowitz and Co. may dream about a democratic, liberal, Zionist and America-loving Middle East, but the result of their adventures may well turn out to be a fanatical and fundamentalist region that will threaten our very existence.
The partnership of the neo-cons and the Christian fundamentalists may engender counter-forces in Washington. And if Bush is defeated in the next election, like his father after his victory in the first Gulf War, this whole gang will be thrown out.
The Bible tells us about the kings of Judea, who relied on the then world power, Egypt. They did not appreciate the rise of forces in the east, Assyria and Babylon. An Assyrian general told the king of Judea: "Behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it." (II kings 18, 21).
Bush and his gang of neo-cons is not a bruised reed. Far from it, he is now a very strong reed. But should we bet our whole future on this?
Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist. His essays are included in The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
