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Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
The Secret War Against Hizbollah
Alberto Cruz
The United States' new strategy in Lebanon
A time-worn adage in journalism says that redundancy enables a better understanding of language, so here we go again : the tree of Iraq stops us seeing the Middle East wood. Absorbed in our navel-gazing, we behave like children covering our ears to stave off a reality we find distasteful. That happens in Iraq when we refuse to acknowledge that there are more variables than are apparent when trying to pin down what is happening in that country and it also happens in Lebanon when reality smacks us in the face. Reality turns up to find us, not asleep, but otherwise engaged.
The United States' new strategy in Lebanon
A time-worn adage in journalism says that redundancy enables a better understanding of language, so here we go again : the tree of Iraq stops us seeing the Middle East wood. Absorbed in our navel-gazing, we behave like children covering our ears to stave off a reality we find distasteful. That happens in Iraq when we refuse to acknowledge that there are more variables than are apparent when trying to pin down what is happening in that country and it also happens in Lebanon when reality smacks us in the face. Reality turns up to find us, not asleep, but otherwise engaged.
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- Source: informationclearinghouse.info, 12/6/2007.
Into this scenario one has to add that the aid (almost US$8bn) promised to the Siniora government by the Western powers and many Arab countries during January's Paris summit not only never came but is in fact generating debt. Treasury minister Jihad Azour has had to recognize that the bogged-down political situation is going to cost Lebanon a billion dollars since the neo-liberal economic measures promised in order to get that aid cannot be implemented. Parliamentary assent is required for that to happen and the opposition is clear that there will be no parliamentary quorum so long as elections are not called or else until a national unity government is installed. One must not forget that Saudi Arabia has big financial interests in Lebanon that cannot proceed so long as the current parliamentary boycott persists.
The US and its European and Arab allies are doing all they can to avoid the collapse of the Siniora government because that would be seen by the Arab peoples as an unequivocal sign of US decline in the Middle East. For that reason every change in the current correlation of forces in Lebanon (where the Shia population is under-represented in the government despite forming 40% of the coutnry's population) needs to be blocked, which in turn explains Siniora's resistance to the opposition forces' democratic proposals : either a government of national unity or a bringing forward of elections.
The US plan is being implemented by Fouad Siniora's government which has not hesitated for a moment to accuse Syria of protecting and arming Fatah al Islam. With this episode, on the one hand strong tensions are built up with the aim of softening the positions of countries critical of US, French and British efforts to secure a new UN Sceurity Council resolution to extend UNIFIL's mission, to control the Syrian frontier under the pretext of arms smuggling and to justify a kind of international tutelage of Lebanon. The new French President Nicolas Sarkozy will have his first test to see if he maintains the policy of his predecessor Jacques Chirac who has received favours and money from Saad Hariri and who in return supported him unconditionally following his father's assassination.
Time, an implacable judge, has ended up vindicating people who have been right all along despite the campaigns of the Western mass media. No one can dispute that Hizbollah's victory over Israel is perhaps the most striking event so far in the 21st century, given that it put an end to one of the myths of the 20th Centruy, the invincibility of Israel. It is what Middle East experts are beginning to call the "Hizbollah effect" and it has overturned neocolonial designs in this part of the world. That is why from almost the very moment it acknowledged Israel's defeat the United States has set in motion a secret war against the Lebanese political-military movement.
In the course of a visit to some of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon (Nahr Al Bared, Ein el Helwe, Chatila y Burj el Barajne) in December 2006 during an impressive popular mobilization for a representative national government in Lebanon (5), leading members of the Popular Council that governs Nahr al Bared spoke with me about the existence among them of Fatah al Islam whom they did not describe as a Palestinian organization since it was made up mostly of Saudis, Morrocans, Algerians, Jordanians, Yemenis and Egyptians , "many of them jihadists in Iraq".
The Second Report of Ban Ki-moon
On May 7th this year the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, published his second report on Lebanon (the fifth in all since the end of last summer's hostilities). In it he maintained the previous line and drew even further away from the attempted even-handedness of his predecessor Kofi Annan in the report Annan published prior to his retirement in December 2006, the third overall. Nothing is squandered in Ban Ki-moon's report (3) and the accusations against Hizbollah for not disarming and against Syria and Iran are constant throughout the document's 14 pages and 66 points.