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Lebanon Crisis
A new crisis has grown up in Lebanon and is about to explode. To understand what is going on we will have to recap some recent history.
In 2005 the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, a Saudi-Lebanese building magnate and politician who plundered the Lebanese while rebuilding Beirut at their cost and to his benefit, was assassinated with a car bomb explosion. Following that the Bush administration managed to install a UN tribunal to investigate the assassination.
The German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who earlier had been handy in manipulating other issues the empire was interested in, was installed as commissioner to investigate the case. His organization leaked a lot of rumors and false details. Eventually Mehlis accused Syria on the basis of now retracted false and bought witnesses and imprisoned for several years four Syria-friendly Lebanese officers. For lack of any evidence against them and Syria Mehlis successor Bramerz later set the officers free.
By that time there was less interest in Washington and Tel Aviv to accuse Syria and more interest to somehow get Hizbullah, the Shia resistance and political movement which had kicked the Israeli occupation out of South Lebanon and won a short war against it in 2006. In May 2009 a, likely Israeli, source leaked a rumor to the German news weekly Der Spiegel that the tribunal will implicate high ranking Hizbullah members in the Hariri assassination.
Hizbullah's chief Nasrallah is keen to not have is movement accused. After rumors of a tribunal indictment grew, he convened a big rally and provided some evidence, including captured Israeli drone videos, that pointed to an Israeli involvement in the Hariri killing.
Lebanon is ruled by a unity government which includes all major religious sects within two blocks. Hariri's son Saad, a Sunni, is the prime minister and with some Christian and other groups makes up the Saudi and U.S. supported "March 14" alliance. The Shia Hezbollah and the Christian group of former general Aoun are the Syrian supported "March 8" block which also holds cabinet seats.
A tribunal indictment of Hizbullah could lead to a new civil war in Lebanon. While the U.S. and Israel would probably favor such a war, the Lebanese, the Syrians and the Saudis, who have invested heavily in Lebanon, would rather prefer peace. Accordingly there have been talks between Syria and the Saudis to avoid a conflict.
The mechanism to do so would be a Lebanese cabinet decision to stop to pay for the tribunal and to preemptively reject its findings.
Yesterday the March 8 block announced that it would leave the cabinet, and thereby illegitimize the Lebanese government, if Hariri junior does not agree to that solution. But it seems that USisrael vetoed this outcome and Washington pressed Hariri junior, who was in Washington today, not to agree to any move against the tribunal.
After Hariri's meeting with Obama 11 ministers in the Lebanese cabinet have resigned and the government is no longer able to make any decision.
So how will this end?
The well informed Friday Lunch Club guesses:
After some tractions, we are headed to a government of 'One Color' headed by a Sunni 'hardliner' from the shelved ranks of the Opposition! We do not foresee any trouble on the ground, because all indications do point to a state of 'panic within the ranks of March 14'. However, we are told by Senior Opposition figure &(regional representatives) that should they 'squirm', the riposte is ready.
I'd like that outcome, but there are some possible violent spoilers the U.S. and/or Israel could use to prevent it.
The real issue for Lebanon here isn’t some huge existential crisis that will cause the state to dissolve into warring factions. The lessons of the 1980’s are still fresh enough in everyone’s minds to prevent some idiot megalomaniac from cranking up members of one sectarian faction, and convincing them to go into war with the others, for at least another 25 years or so.
No the real issue is the fact that this ‘white anting’ of an artificial state has been going on for decades, and is designed to ensure that it never does achieve any sort of sovereign national identity.
Of course one of the long term effects of this continual hacking away at the foundations of the Lebanese state by amerika & Israel is that, in 25 years when people are still angry, the issue of the sectarian gerrymander remains unresolved, and many will not have experienced the hideous reality of a civil war, foreign agents will be able to foment armed conflict between Lebanese.
I have no doubt that the Hariri killing was committed at the behest of Israel and amerika but it is unlikely that that could ever be proven since the trail has become so muddied with all the false witnesses and fit-ups, so one is left with the only evidence that is possible in an ME full of corrupt self-serving judeo-xtian assholes. Cui Bene? Both Israel and amerika have gained massively from the assassination. We discussed it in here endlessly at the time & afterwards, that Hariri Snr, who was at heart a pragmatist, who had been round the block a few times, had been willing to reach a reasonable understanding with Syria and Hezbollah.
Neither of them was pissed with him. The Saudis may have felt like the meat in the sandwich between Syria and amerika; but a stable Levant (which is what Hariri, Syria & Hezbollah were promising) was also in the interests of Saudi Arabia who have considerable investment in Lebanon and had installed Hariri for exactly that reason.
That leaves amerika and israel, both of whom have been doing everything they can to keep Lebanon a barely functioning container filled with warring factions too busy arguing with each other to present a united front against the ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley.
For is the diversity of Lebanon that makes it so difficult to suborn in the same way Egypt was suborned on the judeo-xtian beach-head’s southern flank.
Any attempt to install a dictator for life in Lebanon would certainly fail because of that cultural diversity, so the judeo-xtian invaders have decided that it is necessary to keep Lebanon divided against itself, because if Lebanon were left alone to evolve into a sovereign state that was a genuine & enduring expression of Lebanese people’s political beliefs, it would be implacably opposed to the invaders squatting just South of them, who murder members of the extended families of Lebanese every day.
There is no need to list the litany of aggressive actions which the invaders and their support base have inflicted upon the people of Lebanon; most of us are familiar with the most egregious.
It must be especially galling to the judeo-xtian invading force that the more they seek to divide Lebanese people, the more united they become.
This is the real danger of representative governments, even Gerry-mandered ones, which is why Dubya’s determination to establish representative govts in those areas of the ME he invaded, were meet with derision and outright hostility by old school imperialists like James Baker.
The true judeo-xtian ME imperialists mush prefers a despot such as Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali of Tunisia. Over the next few weeks we are bound to hear a lot of horror stories about Ben Ali, and the torture chambers, imprisonment without trial and all the other nasty things he did to his people. People will say to themselves “see those nasty Arabs/Africans/whatever can’t be trusted to govern ‘nicely’ no one ever asking why it is nothing had been said about this den of iniquity in the decades of Ben Ali’s rule.
They would do better to ask themselves why it is that the great protector of the African people Barack Oblamblam didn’t have a word to say about Ben Ali and his nastiness until he had gotten him bundled onto a plane outta Tunisia, after first ensuring a smooth succession to a new improved despot.
It took until Friday by which time Ben Ali would have ‘touched down’ in his undisclosed new location before Oblamblam mumbled that :
he applauded the courage and dignity of protesting Tunisians, and urged all parties to keep calm and avoid violence .
Yeah, you can almost hear Pete Townsend’s power chords as he windmills into the intro of “Won’t get fooled again” . (Sorry bout that – the image of that song being played by aged fat farts at an amerikan “concert for 911” or whatever they called it just appeals to my sense of irony. Perhaps we could have a contest b. Count The Ironies”)
Where was I oh yeah “Old School Tunisia” is exactly the sort of state favoured by the empire, hopefully the Tunisians realise this and don’t fall for the scam. Their only chance is to force some sort of division among the security forces, between those loyal to Ben- Ali and the pragmatists who don’t much care who it is they are raping and torturing for.
It has happened but without having soldiers who feel some support for the people in the military it is unlikely to happen. I don’t know enough about the political forces in Tunisia. France still trains and arms the Tunisian army and prolly the torturers too, although amerika and israel have prolly gotten involved over the last decade of ‘gwot’.
When are the French people gonna wake up to the horror that their country’s continued imperialism inflicts on Africa & the Pacific?
It shits me that france continually gets off scot free when the role of whitefellas in creating mayhem on the planet is examined.
The french govt’s only real concern over the Tunisian mess they created, appears to be that a/the insurrection doesn’t spread to Algeria.
A bit unlikely, the poor old Algerians learnt a lesson a la Lebanon first hand when they last went for a representative govt back in 1991 – hundreds of thousands of villagers ethnically cleansed by the government they didn’t elect- France and amerika backed the old boss into refusing to accept the result. Ooh fancy that! Shades of Robert Mugabe what?
After 911 the amerikans had all of those who won a seat back in 1991 declared to be a terrorist, of those alive, many are still incarcerated now.
b/ That there isn’t a “negative impact immigration wise”. Now that is complicated but at its heart what it means, is that france wants to be able to continue to cream North Africa’s best and brightest; (the economists, doctors, and IT professionals Africa desperately needs) to accept them into france to plug gaps in its own labour market. That must occur without letting in any ‘unskilled’ Tunisians or Algerians. There is no work for the unskilled in france now; apart from which bourgeois North Africans only rarely lift their heads from the time-constrained working and consuming to think about ‘making things better’. In other words ideal citizens for the ‘new europe’.
So while it is alarmist to consider that Lebanon’s resistance to doing as the judeo-xtian invaders instruct will start a civil war tomorrow, in light of what these racist and greedy assholes are up to throughout the ME, it is not unreasonable to consider the invader’s role as being 100% destructive.
They intend to keep on chipping away at the fabric of the Lebanese state not to create any huge conflagration, but to ensure Lebanon remains too busy patching itself up to ever improve Lebanon’s viability.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 15 2011 23:05 utc | 8
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