Category Archives: Hezbollah

Hezbollah identifies undercover CIA officers in Lebanon in dangerous spy war

The Associated Press reports: The militant group Hezbollah has revealed the identities of CIA officers working undercover in Lebanon, a blow to agency operations in the region and the latest salvo in an escalating spy war.

Hezbollah made the names public in a broadcast Friday night on a Lebanese television station, al-Manar. Using animated videos, the station recreated meetings purported to take place between CIA officers and paid informants at Starbucks and Pizza Hut.

The disclosure comes after Hezbollah managed to partially unravel the agency’s spy network in Lebanon after running a double agent against the CIA, former and current U.S. intelligence officials said. They requested anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

In June, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah bragged that his group had identified at least two spies working for the CIA. It is not clear whether one of those spies was, in fact, the same double agent working for Hezbollah, which is considered a terrorist group by the U.S. Nasrallah has called the U.S. Embassy in Beirut a “den of spies.”

The fiasco happened despite top CIA officials being warned to be extra careful when handling informants after Hezbollah and Lebanese officials arrested scores of Israeli spies in 2009.

The outing of the officers is particularly damaging because it will hinder the ability of these CIA employees to work overseas again — especially in the Internet age where references to their names will be widely available to other foreign intelligence agencies.

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Iran captures ‘lost’ U.S. spy drone — the first remote hijacking?

Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone

The Los Angeles Times reports:

A drone that Iranian officials claimed to have shot down may be an unarmed U.S. reconnaissance aircraft that went missing over western Afghanistan late last week, according to U.S.-led forces in that country.

“The operators of the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status,” NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan said in a statement.

Iranian media reported Sunday that the country’s armed forces had shot down a U.S. drone that they said violated Iranian airspace along the eastern border. Iran borders Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east.

An Iranian military official quoted by the official Islamic Republic News Agency said the aircraft suffered minor damage and was in the possession of the armed forces. He identified the aircraft as an “RQ170” type drone and said Iranian forces were “fully ready to counter any aggression.”

When the existence of the RQ-170 first entered the public domain after it was photographed in Afghanistan, it quickly got dubbed the “Beast of Kandahar.”

As a highly classified stealth aircraft the question was: why would the US be flying a drone designed to evade radar when the Taliban have no radar? Speculation suggested that its areas of operation were more likely over Pakistan and perhaps spying on nuclear facilities in Iran.

In May this year the Washington Post reported that this aircraft had indeed been used to “fly dozens of secret missions deep into Pakistani airspace and monitor the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed.”

So how did the operators manage to lose such valuable piece of equipment last week? Someone fell asleep at the wheel? Very unlikely during such a critical intelligence operation. A technical malfunction? Maybe, but in such an event it would seem more likely that the aircraft would have crashed and been destroyed.

Another possibility is that “lost control” is another way of saying hijacked. In other words, U.S. remote pilots lost control as Iranians took control.

There maybe a connection with another drone story — this one about a drone that Israel lost.

Late last month, Richard Silverstein “revealed” that an Israeli drone brought down over Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah had been booby-trapped and later unwittingly taken to a weapons depot where it was remotely detonated. It was a story so implausible that it seemed like Israeli intelligence could only feed it to a scoop-hungry blogger since most journalists simply wouldn’t take it seriously.

If the story was indeed an Israeli fabrication then it was probably concocted in order to cover up a much more important story: that Hezbollah has managed to refine its tools of electronic warfare to a point that puts in jeopardy all of Israel’s drone missions over Lebanon.

If that was the case this would have serious consequences since it is widely assumed that in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, reprisal attacks on Israel from Lebanon would swiftly follow. In such a situation, Israel could not afford to have lost one of its most valuable intelligence gathering tools — the means on which it might depend to prevent missile strikes on Tel Aviv.

In other words, if Israel’s ability to defend itself from attacks from Lebanon has been significantly degraded, it might need to be a bit more cautious about threatening to attack Iran.

Israel is flying less sophisticated drones than the RQ-170, but even so, whatever skills Hezbollah has been acquiring in its counter-drone operations it has very likely been sharing with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Might this provide part of the explanation about how the U.S. lost and Iran found a drone that supposedly went “missing”?

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The undeclared war against Iran

Jeffrey Goldberg often sounds like he’s agitating for war on Iran, but even for impartial observers, there is as he notes, plenty of evidence that the war has already begun.

Following a (perhaps not-so-mysterious) explosion on a military base last month that took with it the life of Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam — one of the Iranian missile program’s most distinguished OGs — comes news of a second explosion in Isfahan this past Monday, which according to sources “struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.”

Of course, accurate news out of Tehran is hard to come by, but if you want to take this a step further, one might consider Tuesday’s (perhaps not-so-spontaneous) storming of the British embassy by Iranian “students” to be quite an effective smokescreen in keeping news of this second explosion from making serious waves. If you’ve had a lot of coffee, it’s also worthy to note that on Monday evening, following the explosion in Iran, four missiles fired from southern Lebanon struck Israel–the first such incident in over two years.

I’m not entirely convinced, but it’s not unreasonable to group these recent explosions with the Stuxnet virus of last summer that haywired an uranium enrichment facility in Natanz; last October’s explosion at a Shahab missile factory; the killing of three Iranian nuclear scientists in the past two years, last November’s attempted assassination of Fereydoun Abbasi-Davan — a senior official in the nuclear program — and rumblings of a second supervirus deployed this month as proof that the West’s war on Iran’s nuclear program is getting less covert by the minute.

Greg Scoblete spells out why Washington has not and will not seek public support for this war.

If President Obama told the public that America was working with Israel to murder Iranian scientists and blow up Iranian buildings and sabotage Iranian infrastructure and that the Iranians might seek to retaliate in kind, it would implicitly cast Iranian motives as rational.

As we saw in the run up to the Iraq war, one of the key arguments advanced against Saddam Hussein is that he would do something irrational (hand over WMD to al-Qaeda) and hence couldn’t be trusted. Iranian irrationality and religious fanaticism is also a critical component in the case for taking military action against their nuclear program. A key to sustaining the aura of irrationality is to strip out any of the strategic context of Iranian actions.

This is how the Soviet Union handled political dissent: portray your political enemies as insane. Then you can refuse to listen to whatever they say and justify whatever sanction is deemed necessary for their restraint.

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Assad: Syria will shower Tel Aviv with rockets if attacked by foreign powers

Haaretz reports:

Syria will strike Israel and “set fire” to the Middle East if foreign forces choose to launch a military strike on the protest-ridden country, the Iranian news agency Fars quoted Syrian President Bashar Assad as saying on Tuesday, referring to remarks made by the Syrian leader during a meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu last August.

During a meeting with the Turkish FM, the Fars report claimed, Assad indicated that Syria would not hesitate to strike major Israeli cities if it was attacked.

“If a crazy measure is taken against Damascus, I will need not more than 6 hours to transfer hundreds of rockets and missiles to the Golan Heights to fire them at Tel Aviv,” Assad said.

In addition, Fars reported that the Syrian president told the Turkish FM that he would also call on Hezbollah in Lebanon to launch a rocket attack on Israel, adding: “All these events will happen in three hours, but in the second three hours, Iran will attack the U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf and the U.S. and European interests will be targeted simultaneously.”

Assad’s comments to the Turkish FM came after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earlier Tuesday he would set out his country’s plans for sanctions against Syria after he visits a Syrian refugee camp near the border in the coming days.

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Evidence that al Qaeda killed Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005

Part Two of an interview with Gareth Porter:

Part One:

See also, Hariri Bombing Indictment Based on Flawed Premise and Tribunal Concealed Evidence Al-Qaeda Cell Killed Hariri, by Gareth Porter.

For more background on the history of Lebanon, see the RealNews series parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten.

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Syrian opposition decides to take up arms against Assad regime

Deutsche Presse-Agentur reports:

The leader of the Revolutionary Council of the Syrian Coordination Committees, Mohammad Rahhal, said in remarks published Sunday that the council took the decision to arm the Syrian revolution.

Since mid-March pro-democracy protests have engulfed most of Syria calling for political and economic reforms as well as for the ousting of Syrian president Bashar Assad.

“We made our decision to arm the revolution which will turn violent very soon because what we are being subjected to today is a global conspiracy that can only be faced by an armed uprising,” he told the London-based As-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper. Circumstances no longer allow dealing peacefully with the regime’s “crimes,” he added. “We will use whatever arms and rocks … We will respond to the people’s calls to arm the revolution,” he said.

“Confronting this monster (the Syrian regime) now requires arms, especially after it has become clear to everyone that the world only supports the Syrian uprising through speeches,” he added. Rahal lashed out some Arab regimes and described them as “cowards.”

Haaretz reports:

Turkish President Abdullah Gul said he has lost confidence in Syria, and that the situation has reached a point where changes would be too little too late, Turkish state-run news agency Anatolian reported on Sunday.

Commenting on the situation in Turkey’s neighbor, Gul told Anatolian in an interview: “We are really very sad. Incidents are said to be ‘finished’ and then another 17 people are dead.”

He continued, asking, “how many will it be today? Clearly we have reached a point where anything would be too little too late. We have lost our confidence.”

Earlier this month Gul, who like other Turkish leaders has piled pressure on Syria to end a violent crackdown on protests, appealed to Syrian President Bashar Assad not to leave reforms until it was too late.

Hürriyet Daily News reports:

Turkey would side with the Syrian people if it has to make a choice between the neighboring country’s government and its citizens, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said late Thursday.

“We would choose the people, because what is permanent for us is the brotherhood of the Syrian and Turkish people. Our side is certain. We are with the Syrian people and we will continue to be,” Davutoğlu said in an interview with the private news channel NTV.

Davutoğlu earlier this month traveled to Damascus to convey a “last warning” to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to end the bloodshed. The neglect of this advice by the Syrian regime and its continued military operations against the Syrian people during the holy month of Ramadan have caused deep frustration and anger in Ankara, whose ties with Damascus had flourished in recent years. Turkey has repeatedly called on al-Assad to initiate reforms but has stopped short of calling for his departure.

“There is a vicious cycle, we want Syria to immediately break this cycle,” Davutoğlu told NTV, adding that Turkey was ready for any scenario.

Though he ruled out a foreign military intervention, the minister said Turkey “cannot accept human-rights violations either. Our ‘zero problems with neighbors’ policy does not mean we’ll turn our back to such violations.”

When asked what message he conveyed to al-Assad in Damascus, Davutoğlu said: “[I said] we stood by you against possible interventions by other countries. But now if we have to make a choice between you and [your] people in this current problem of yours, we’ll side with the people. Because what is lasting and what will endure until eternity is the brotherhood of the people of Turkey and Syria.”

Tom Rogan writes:

External pressure is building on President Bashar al-Assad. Along with the EU and US, key regional actors including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have taken steps to distance themselves from the faltering Syrian regime. Further, as Meir Javedanfar argues on this site, the Iranian clerical leadership will only support Assad to the degree that this support serves their on-going Islamic revolution.

These states are calibrating their policies towards Syria with an eye on Assad’s potential fall from power and the consequences likely to follow. Hezbollah’s approach under leader Hassan Nasrallah is no different. As David Hirst notes, Nasrallah has made Hezbollah “the most influential political player in Lebanon and probably the most proficient guerrilla organisation in the world”. Nasrallah does not risk jeopardising these successes lightly.

Clearly, because of the major forms of support that Assad provides, Hezbollah has a vested interest in his political survival. This Syrian support includes the provision of material supplies and a relatively safe haven for Hezbollah leaders. Syria also acts as a reliable ally through which supplies of money and weapons can transit from Iran to Lebanon. And, as Randa Slim explains, Assad’s regime provides a legitimating and supportive Arab state to balance Iran. This complements Hezbollah’s intended appearance as a cross-sectarian liberation force, a force struggling not just for Shia Islam but for the subjugated “oppressed” in general.

However, as important as Assad’s support is to Hezbollah, the survival of his regime does not take precedence over Hezbollah’s objectives: the defeat of Israel, the marginalisation of American influence and the creation of a regional arc of Shia theocracies.

Accordingly, Hezbollah’s support for Assad is predicated on its perception of his political survival as both realistically possible and compatible with Hezbollah’s objectives. Hezbollah thus must consider the impact of its stance regarding Assad in the context of political environments in Syria, Lebanon and beyond.

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The Arab Spring exposes the identical hypocrisy of both the US and Hassan Nasrallah

Hamid Dabashi writes:

Hassan Nasrallah is in trouble. This time the troubles of the Secretary General of Hezbollah, which were hitherto the source of his strength, are not coming from Israel, or from the sectarian politics of Lebanon. Seyyed Hassan’s troubles, which this time around are the harbingers of his undoing as an outdated fighter, are coming from, of all places, the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring, the transnational uprising of masses of millions of people from Morocco to Oman, from Syria to Yemen, is making the aging warrior redundant – his habitually eloquent tongue now stuttering for words. Two years ago, he thought he got away with rejecting the democratic uprising in Iran (whose brutal ruling regime is his principle patron and financier), as a plot by the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. And he did – aided and abetted by the moral and intellectual sclerosis of a segment of Arab intellectuals who thought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Islamic theocracy were the vanguard of “resistance” to US/Israel imperialism in the region and thus should be spared from criticism. And then Tunisia happened, and Egypt, and Libya, and Bahrain, and Yemen – and then, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei’s nightmare, Syria happened. It is a sad scene to see a once mighty warrior being bypassed by the force of history, and all he can do is to fumble clumsily to reveal he has not learned the art of aging gracefully.

When Hasan Nasrallah came to the defence of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, signs of frailty were all over the old fighter’s countenance. He asked Syrians for patience. He admitted mistakes had been made by Syrians in Lebanon. He promised Assad would do reforms. He pleaded for time. Deja vu: For an uncanny moment the Hezbollah fighter sounded and looked like the late Shah of Iran days before his final demise early in 1979: desperate, confused, baffled by the unfolding drama, worriedly out of touch with what was happening around him.

“Hassan Nasrallah,” according to an Al Jazeera report on 25 May 2011,”has called on Syrians to support president Bashar al-Assad and enter into dialogue with the government to end weeks of ongoing protests across Syria.”

This is a far different cry than when the democratic uprising in Iran started in June 2009 and Nasrallah readily dismissed and ridiculed it as an American plot. These were Arabs up against their corrupt and cruel leaders, not “them Persians” whose money was good but their historic struggles for their civil liberties a plot by the Saudis, the Israelis, and the US.

“Bashar is serious about carrying out reforms,” he was now pleading with his audience, “but he has to do them gradually and in a responsible way; he should be given the chance to implement those reforms.” When Nasrallah made these remarks more than 1000 Syrian civilians had been gunned down by Bashar Assad’s army and security forces, serving the Assad dynasty for about forty years.

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Hezbollah and the Arab revolution

Larbi Sadiki writes:

Is there something amiss within Hezbollah?

It rose from the ignominy of oblivion, feudal exploitation, sectarian bias, and overall marginalisation to occupy political centre stage. In fewer than thirty years it converted Shia socio-political weightlessness into a counterbalancing political gravity.

It stood up against the Israeli Goliath. It survived the “incendiaries” dropped on it by Arab politicians arrayed against it from Amman to Cairo. It outclassed its enemies within and outside of Lebanon, with imaginative political guile and fine calculation against all odds.

But resisting the Goliath of Tel Aviv while embracing the lion of Damascus risks a decreasing commitment to Arab revolution within “the Party of God” – and to its own revolutionary standing.

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Obama weighs talking to the Taliban, Hezbollah

David Ignatius writes:

In a rapidly changing Islamic world, the Obama administration is weighing how best to talk with adversaries such as the Taliban and, perhaps, Hezbollah.

One model for the administration, as it thinks about engagement of enemies, is the British process of dialogue during the 1990s with Sinn Fein, the legal political wing of the terrorist Irish Republican Army. That outreach led to breakthrough peace talks and settlement of a conflict that had been raging for more than a century.

In the case of the Taliban, the administration has repeatedly stated that it is seeking a political settlement of the war in Afghanistan rather than a military one. That formula sometimes seems hollow when more than 100,000 U.S. troops are in combat. But it got more definition last month from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who opened the doors wider for dialogue.

Clinton, in a Feb. 18 speech to the Asia Society, subtly altered the terms for Taliban participation in peace talks. She repeated the administration’s “red lines for reconciliation” — that Taliban representatives must renounce violence, reject al-Qaeda and abide by the Afghan constitution. But rather than making these preconditions for talks, as before, she said they were “necessary outcomes of any negotiation.”

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International alliance forming to stop Gaddafi

Libya’s Deputy Permanent UN Representative warns that a convoy of 400 military vehicles are headed to destroy Ajdabiya and that the UN must intervene in the coming hours.

The New York Times reports:

The prospect of a deadly siege of the rebel stronghold in Benghazi, Libya, has produced a striking shift in tone from the Obama administration, which is now pushing for the United Nations to authorize aerial bombing of Libyan tanks and heavy artillery to try to halt the advance of forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

The administration, which remains deeply reluctant to be drawn into an armed conflict in yet another Muslim country, is nevertheless backing a resolution in the Security Council that would give countries a broad range of options for aiding the Libyan rebels, including military steps that go well beyond a no-flight zone.

Administration officials — who have been debating a no-flight zone for weeks — concluded that such a step now would be “too little, too late” for rebels who have been pushed back to Benghazi. That suggests more aggressive measures, which some military analysts have called a no-drive zone, to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from moving tanks and artillery into Benghazi.

The United States is insisting that any military action would have to be carried out by an international coalition, including Libya’s Arab neighbors.

The rapid advance of forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, combined with rising calls from the Arab world to prevent a rout of the opposition, has changed the calculations of the administration, which had clung to a belief that interfering in a Middle East uprising could provoke an anti-American backlash.

“The turning point was really the Arab League statement on Saturday,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday to reporters traveling with her in Cairo. “That was an extraordinary statement in which the Arab League asked for Security Council action against one of its own members.”

Mrs. Clinton said she was hopeful that the Security Council would vote no later than Thursday. The American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, is in intensive negotiations over the language of a resolution, sponsored by Lebanon, another Arab state, and backed by France and Britain.

This about-turn in the Obama administration’s position is being viewed with a measure of skepticism in some quarters. “Privately, some European officials expressed frustration with the Obama administration, with one saying he believed it was supporting strong measures in an attempt to draw a veto.”

What is particularly noteworthy is that the resolution is sponsored by Lebanon. Even while the country is still in the process of forming a new government, this UN initiative can most likely be attributed to Hezbollah, now the dominant political force in Lebanon.

Soon after the Feb 17 Revolution began, Hezbollah issued a strong condemnation of Gaddafi. On Feb 22, the Ahlul Bayt News Agency reported:

Hezbollah lashed out Monday at the “crimes committed by the Gaddafi regime” in Libya:
“Anyone with honor and consciousness in this world cannot, and should not, keep silent on the massacres that the Gaddafi regime is committing across the country on a daily basis, namely in Benghazi.

Terror and violence do not protect a regime that was founded on corruption and crime, from the will and determination of a people that has taken its decisive decision,” a Hezbollah statement read.

“Hezbollah firmly condemns crimes committed by the Gaddafi regime against the oppressed Libyan people. We also offer our sincere condolences to the families of those who were unjustly killed, just for demanding their rights. Hezbollah expresses support to the revolutionists in Libya and we pray that they will triumph over this arrogant tyrant,” the statement added.

“The criminality of this tyrant had first struck us deeply as Lebanese, when he kidnapped the Imam of the resistance Sayyed Moussa Sadr with his two dear companions. We ask Almighty Allah that the honorable revolutionists in Libya would be able to liberate Imam Sadr and his companions, just as they would be able to free Libya from all of its chains,” the statement concluded.

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Hezbollah backs Egypt protests

Al Jazeera reports:

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said that protesters calling for the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, are changing the region with their battle for “Arab dignity”.

In his first comments since unrest began in Egypt almost two weeks ago, Nasrallah said on Monday that his Shia movement did not intend to intervene in the “internal business” of protesters, or to influence their decisions.

“Your movement will entirely change the face of our region for the interest of its own people,” Nasrallah said in a televised address to a Beirut conference held in support of the Egyptian protests.

“You are going through the battle of Arab dignity, restoring the dignity of Arab people.”

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Hezbollah backs billionaire Najib Mikati as Lebanese prime minister

Bloomberg reports:

Mikati “is seen as a genuinely neutral figure,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a research adviser at the Doha Institute in Qatar. He “is balanced and enjoys good relations with Syria and Saudi Arabia,” the two main powerbrokers in Lebanon, she said.

Syria, Hezbollah’s backer, was initially blamed for Hariri’s killing by many Lebanese, and withdrew its troops from the country following a wave of protests. Both Syria and Hezbollah have denied responsibility for the murder.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, said in a televised speech yesterday that his group and its allies will seek to form a national unity government if their candidate wins the nomination.

Hezbollah backed Mikati when he was premier for three months in a caretaker government before the 2005 parliamentary elections. The group’s initial choice for the premiership this time was Omar Karami, 76, a pro-Syrian politician. Karami declined to be nominated citing his age and health, Hamdan said.

Mikati, from the northern city of Tripoli, is worth $2.5 billion according to Forbes magazine. He founded Investcom, which runs phone networks in emerging markets, with his brother, Taha, in 1982. MTN Group Ltd., Africa’s largest mobile-phone operator, bought the company in 2006 for $5.5 billion.

Mikati called for “solidarity to bring the country out of this severe crisis,” and said his candidacy isn’t “a challenge to anyone,” according to a statement on his website.

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Lebanon Druze leader Walid Jumblatt sides with Hezbollah in crisis

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The U.S.-backed parliamentary coalition led by caretaker Prime Minister Saad Hariri was on the verge of losing its tenuous grip on the Lebanese government after a key politician defected Friday to support the Shiite militant group Hezbollah.

The decision by Walid Jumblatt, a Druze chieftain and longtime player amid Lebanon’s fractious parties, to back Hezbollah, which is supported by Syria, highlighted the dangerous regional maneuverings across the troubled Lebanese political scene. The move was a blow to Washington, which had worked with Hariri until his 14-month-old unity government collapsed this month.

“The party will stand firm in support of Syria and the resistance,” Jumblatt, head of the Progressive Socialist Party, said at a news conference in Beirut. He did not, however, reveal how many of the 11 members of parliament with his party would side with him. But Jumblatt’s support is crucial for any party jockeying to form a government.

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Turkey’s rise points to the post-American Middle East

In the New York Times, Anthony Shadid writes:

In a series of stalemates — from the Arab-Israeli conflict to Lebanon — Turkey has proved the most dynamic, projecting an increasingly assertive and independent foreign policy in an Arab world bereft of any country that matches its stature. Its success is a subtle critique of America’s longstanding policy in the Middle East of trying to isolate and ostracize its enemies. From Hezbollah here to the followers of a populist, anti-American cleric in Iraq, Turkey has managed to forge dialogue with America’s enemies and allies alike.

“Turkey has become, I think, until the contrary is proven, an indispensable state in the reorganizing of this region,” said Sarkis Naoum, an analyst and prominent columnist in Beirut.

So far, the interventions of Turkey and others in the Lebanese crisis are mostly symbolic, ventures into a maddeningly complex political landscape that hews to a formula of “no victor, no vanquished.” But in contrast to past crises, when Turkey was virtually irrelevant, the new effort signals the country’s ascent as a regional superpower.

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After the collapse of the Lebanese government — what next?

Lebanon’s government collapsed on Wednesday while Prime Minister Saad Hariri was in Washington. It wasn’t until today that he returned to Beirut.

Robert Fisk writes:

There are many who believe that Lebanon will now descend into a civil war, similar to the fratricidal conflict which it endured from 1976 to 1980. I doubt it. A new generation of Lebanese, educated abroad – in Paris, in London, in America – have returned to their country and, I suspect, will not tolerate the bloodshed of their fathers and grandfathers.

In theory, Lebanon no longer has a government, and the elections which were fairly held and which gave Saad Hariri his cabinet are no more. President Michel Suleiman will begin formal talks on Monday to try to create a new government.

But what does Hezbollah want? Is it so fearful of the Hague tribunal that it needs to destroy this country? The problem with Lebanon is perfectly simple, even if the Western powers prefer to ignore it. It is a confessional state. It was created by the French, the French mandate after the First World War. The problem is that to become a modern state it must de-confessionalise. But Lebanon cannot do so. Its identity is sectarianism and that is its tragedy. And it has, President Sarkozy please note, a French beginning point.

The Shias of Lebanon, of which Hezbollah is the leading party, are perhaps 40 per cent of the population. The Christians are a minority. If Lebanon has a future, it will be in due course be a Shia Muslim country. We may not like this; the West may not like this. But that is the truth. Yet Hezbollah does not want to run Lebanon. Over and over again, it has said it does not want an Islamic republic. And most Lebanese accept this.

But Hezbollah has made many mistakes. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, talks on television as if he is the President. He would like another war with Israel, ending in the “divine victory” which he claims his last war, in 2006, ended in. I fear the Israelis would like another war too. The Lebanese would prefer not to have one. But they are being pushed further and further into another war which Lebanon’s supposed Western friends seem to want. The Americans and the British would like to hurt Iran. And that is why they would like Hezbollah to be blamed for Mr Hariri’s murder – and for the downfall of the Lebanese government.

Nicholas Noe sees the greatest threat of war emanating from Israel, which having downgraded the threat from Iran, sees Hezbollah as its most immediate military threat. If such a war is to be averted, Washington will need more courage and imagination than have thus far been in evidence.

The Obama administration seems to believe that in order to stave off the logic of approaching war, it should try to manoeuvre Hezbollah into a tough position, thereby restraining it from pushing at the military red line. According to this thinking, to have accepted a Saudi-Syrian sponsored agreement regarding the Hariri tribunal actually would have only emboldened Hezbollah.

This approach is clearly less triumphal than during the heady Bush years (reflecting the changed balance of power in the Middle East as well as a less violence-focused mindset) but the overall direction is similar: throw whatever short-term pressure tools you have against the problem, rhetorically back up your narrow set of “friends” and hope for a miracle, since productive negotiations are essentially unrealistic – this time less because of “evil” opponents than an immovable Israeli ally.

The problem, however, is that Hezbollah will not be substantially boxed in by an indictment from the tribunal, since its domestic enemies are so militarily weak. Moreover, the party is apparently betting that an Israeli “pre-emptive” strike would overwhelm any domestic opposition, especially given Israel’s long history of obtusely, and sometimes wantonly attacking Lebanon as a whole.

Finally, the scent of domestic turmoil and indigenous opposition to Hezbollah is likely to entice Israel further into believing that the time is ripe for a strike against it.

All of which means the Obama administration really only has one good option. The current political breakdown in Lebanon will not be solved without bold steps towards peace that will involve concessions, especially, and perhaps most importantly, via the Syrian track.

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Troubling trends in the Middle East

In an examination of the “five mostly troubling trends from 2010 that will probably define and plague the Middle East for the year ahead,” Rami G Khouri writes:

The transformation of the formerly localized Arab-Israeli conflict into the fulcrum of a much wider regional confrontation with strong religious overtones bodes ill for the region in the years ahead.

The Arab-Israeli conflict now anchors a much more violent and complex stand-off that sees some Arab states (notably Syria), Iran and powerful Arab Islamist resistance movements like Hamas and Hezbollah working together to repel not only Israeli territorial aggression, but what they see as wider American-Israeli hegemonic ambitions in the Arab-Islamic Middle East.

The narrow competing claims of Palestinians and Israelis in a small corner of the region have now transformed into a regional and quasi-global existential battle among powerful actors who seem prepared to fight to the finish.

Large regional and global conflicts will now more easily find local proxies to wage the battle, while local feuds will often escalate quickly into more fierce and intractable conflicts because of the association with foreign actors.

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