by Mitchell Plitnick
All eyes are on US President Barack Obama as he contemplates how to deal with the fact that the Syrian government might have crossed a red line he never should have drawn. The Israelis, even while abstaining from pressuring Obama to act in Syria, meanwhile know [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
All eyes are on US President Barack Obama as he contemplates how to deal with the fact that the Syrian government might have crossed a red line he never should have drawn. The Israelis, even while abstaining from pressuring Obama to act in Syria, meanwhile know their own decisions are no less troublesome.
Obama dug himself a hole when he declared that Syria’s use of chemical weapons would be a casus belli. Now that it appears that Sarin gas was used in Syria (although such use is certainly not as destructive as some of the “conventional” bombardment that has been employed), Obama is in a quandary. There is no more or less of a reason to significantly increase the US’ involvement in Syria than there was before, but the forces that have been calling for intervention have an enormous new chip to play.
This might be comforting to Israel, because they have to be very concerned about what is happening in Syria right now, and that concern is not based on whether or not Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces used sarin gas. The Syria situation is everything the issue with Iran is not.
Iran represents a potential threat to Israel’s position as a nuclear hegemon and to the whole US-Israel-Saudi matrix of power in the region. But despite the hysteria, those in charge in Israel know very well that Iran has not yet made the decision to construct a nuclear weapon and that, even if they got one, the situation would be one of a nuclear standoff, not an imminent Iranian attack on Israel.
Public rhetoric reflects something different, but no one in the halls of the Israeli Knesset or in Washington thinks Iran will simply decide to push the nuclear button. That reality is precisely why it was so important for AIPAC and other anti-Iran forces to eliminate a containment strategy early on; they knew it was by far the most sensible policy in terms of avoiding war, but would weaken the regional position of the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf compatriots.
Syria is, from the Israeli point of view, a completely different matter. The chemical and biological weapons stockpiles are surely a real concern, but the issue is much wider than that.
While Israelis view Assad as an enemy, they’re well aware that their border with Syria has been basically quiet for forty years. Assad kept things stable while supporting Hezbollah’s activities in Southern Lebanon. Now that situation will likely drastically change.
It remains possible that Assad will prevail, but even if he does, the status quo ante is lost forever. It is very difficult to predict what an Assad regime will look like if he does win. One thing we know is that after all the anti-Assad rhetoric and repeated calls for him to step down, the international community will not be able to simply accept his victory. So Syria will be isolated, at least for a while, even from the rest of the Arab League. How does that affect Syria’s behavior vis-a-vis Israel, Hezbollah, Jordan, Turkey and Iran? Much will depend on the circumstances of any Assad victory, but in any case, it’s currently unpredictable.
The far more likely scenario, though, is that Assad will eventually be toppled and the various opposition groups will begin vying for power. That contest will undoubtedly prolong the extreme violence in Syria, but it will also be a battle for the hearts and minds of the Syrian people. That could well mean engaging Israel directly or by increasing support for Hezbollah. Do we really expect that Israel will just sit back and wait to see what will happen?
The fighting groups in Syria are certainly not all Salafist, al-Qaeda-type groups. But that does describe a number of them, and others are highly sectarian. Various groups are being backed by competing outside powers, including Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, with the US and its allies being a peripheral player even among those who are involving themselves from a distance. Iran and Hezbollah have also been working to support groups friendly to them so that they will continue to have an influential presence in the event Assad falls.
Now things get even more complicated. Israel had wisely avoided pushing the US toward intervention, until they announced their finding of the use of chemical weapons, which was likely a way to try to get the US to carry out or go along with an Israeli operation specifically targeting such weapons. Israel is really not anxious to see the US get more involved in Syria, another striking contrast with the Iran situation. It may turn out that US involvement is the best of a host of unpalatable options, but Israel is well aware that escalation in Syria is not in its interest.
The problem is that Hezbollah yesterday raised the possibility of their own direct intervention. A long-term Hezbollah presence in Syria is not likely something that Israel will sit still for. Tensions are flaring on the Israel-Lebanese border, not to mention the ongoing pressure cooker within Lebanon itself, which has been turned up much higher because of the Syrian civil war.
It is impossible to conceive of Israel sitting by quietly if Hezbollah becomes an active participant in Syria. That impossibility stems from the concern Israel has held from the day the armed conflict began, namely that Hezbollah would have access to Syrian weapons, chemical and conventional. Moreover, Israel would be quite concerned that Hezbollah would then have an established fighting presence on both the Lebanese and Syrian borders.
At this stage, there is no reason to believe that Hezbollah Secretary-General Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah’s implication that direct intervention in Syria is on the table is anything more than bluster. Still, it cannot be dismissed. With each day, the likelihood of Assad holding on to power becomes dimmer and dimmer, and just from the sheer numbers, the greatest possibility by far is that a subsequent Syrian regime, or even a conglomeration of mini-states, is not going to be friendly to the Shi’ite militia/party. That’s why Iran continues to back Assad, and Hezbollah has a compelling reason to involve itself more directly in Syria: to bolster the minority forces that might be aligned with them in a post-Assad Syria.
With or without US involvement, these concerns are going to be present for Israel. The Israelis are not totally blind to the ramifications of taking action on their own, of course. But even though rumors of a recent Israeli strike on a chemical weapons depot in Syria appear unfounded, the dual concerns of chemical weapons falling into hands more likely to use them against Israel than Assad, and of a new regime with Salafist or similar tendencies taking power in Syria, are going to compel dramatic Israeli action sooner or later.
Though the Israeli-Syrian border has been quiet for decades, Israel is mindful of the role the pre-Assad Syrian state played in the run-up to the 1967 war. The early Ba’athist regime was more aggressive, consistently engaging Israel and causing then Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to take many of the steps that eventually led to Israel launching the war, steps that he vainly hoped would mollify Syria and convince them to let Nasser handle the confrontation with Israel.
The Assad regime, both father and son, avoided such actions. A new Syrian regime may well embrace them, and given the widespread changes in the region, that prospect is sure to make Israel extremely anxious. Of course, an agreement with the Palestinians would go a long way toward blunting that threat, but that’s nothing but a pipe dream at this point.
Ultimately, the fact that the Israelis believe they have real and immediate reasons to act in Syria (unlike with Iran) — even if they’re reluctant to do so — might be the factor that eventually pushes the US and/or Europe to intervene. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make intervention any wiser or more likely to bring about positive results.
]]>My sense from afar is that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his friends and backers in Tehran are sending a fairly blunt message to the west [...]]]>
My sense from afar is that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his friends and backers in Tehran are sending a fairly blunt message to the west (whose leaders often like to describe themselves as the “international community”) that regime change is indeed a game that more than one side can play.
Could well be, but I’m not convinced this move is as contrived as that. Cobban, who I’ll readily admit knows much more about these things, notes that “(?former)” Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s major backer, Saudi Kind Abdullah, hasn’t been heard from recently and is rumored to be ill, which suggests a broader general disarray. With charges looming by a U.N.-affiliated tribunal for the assassination of Hariri’s father — which will likely indict Hezbollah members — the Shia militia and social/political organization could simply be taking cover.
Nonetheless, if Cobban’s theory is right, things look worrisome. She points to U.S. and Western weakness around the region, and offers this warning:
… If Nasrallah and his friends in Tehran (especially Supreme Leader Khamenei) indeed think the time has come to give the western house of cards in the Middle East a little nudge in Beirut to see what happens, the fallout from this could well end up extending far beyond Lebanon’s tiny confines.
This is Cobban at her best, with a trove of good contacts and broad contextual knowledge, giving informed comment from the U.S. (I think). I look forward to seeing what she writes after her scheduled trip to Beirut next month.
]]>If you cook dinner for a large crowd and manage to flub the execution, mangle the presentation, and poison your guests, you find another hobby, right?
If you [...]]]>
If you cook dinner for a large crowd and manage to flub the execution, mangle the presentation, and poison your guests, you find another hobby, right?
If you so much as considered answering “yes” to that question, congratulations: you’re not a neoconservative. Hash, you see, springs eternal from the neocon breast, so no amount of injury to others or humiliation to oneself – indeed, not even removal from the kitchen – can silence them for long, if at all.
Examples unfortunately abound, but today’s shaman of shamelessness is Walid Phares, whose latest drivel in the Wall Street Journal (“Prosecute Hezbollah”, November 9) would make history’s top propagandists proud. Phares, who not only admits but actually boasts that he is part of the neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, simply cannot be taken seriously as a voice for anything but Israel and its apologists, but it’s the opinion pages of the Journal, so there you have it. As the sub-headline — “There is no hope for Lebanon unless the UN and the West will enforce the tribunal’s findings on the Hariri assassination” — would have us believe, the article itself purports to explain the need for assertiveness in defense of justice.
Down through the ages, propagandists of all bents have viewed their craft as a forgiving one because even when they’re wrong, they can still be right – so long as a sufficient proportion of the audience remains unaware of (or unconcerned by) their errors/lies. Here Phares is at his very best, or worst depending on one’s perspective, mixing fact and fiction with glorious abandon. A partial dissection follows.
The headline of the piece gives away its author’s intention to stir the pot, flouting as it does the very assurance of Hezbollah’s domestic rivals in Lebanon that even if some of its members are indicted in the 2005 bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and almost two dozen others, the party itself will not be on trial. The subhead, of course, is just there to create a subliminal impression that a court (which has yet to issue an indictment despite five years of investigation) already has arrived at “findings” linking Hezbollah to an assassination.
The opening sentence gets right to the point that whoever is indicted will ipso factobe the guilty party, perhaps dispensing with all the time and money that would have to be wasted on a trial. The next one treats as a given the by-now familiar misidentification of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) as an “international” court, even though it single-largest contingent of jurists is Lebanese, and asserts – on the basis of absolutely no public evidence whatsoever from anyone, anywhere – that “Hezbollah features prominently” in the assassination.
The first course is a bowl of traditional guilt-by-association tying Hezbollah to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accompanied by an artful insinuation that Tehran has tried to intimidate the court, and garnished with a dollop of old-fashioned bitters, belittling Hezbollah and its members as “minions” of a foreign power. Next to be dished out are complaints that Hezbollah and its most important backers, Iran and Syria (“Axis of Evil” is taken; how about “Triumvirate of Trouble”?) have “threatened” the Lebanese government – of which Hezbollah is a part – by indicating, naturally enough, that they will resist any attempt by the STL to serve as a stalking horse for Israel by unsaddling the only contestant who has ever got the better of the Israeli military.
This is followed by a generous but unsophisticated helping of sleight-of-hand, as Hezbollah is credited with fulfilling its threats. How do we know? Because a number of “anti-Hezbollah lawmakers and journalists” were attacked and “several anti-Syrian neighborhoods” were bombed “[b]etween July and December 2005”. Multiple misfortunes befall this dish: Hezbollah didn’t threaten those people or those neighborhoods; the attacks began in late 2004, not mid-2005; and several of the victims – not to mention countless residents of the neighborhoods – were anything but “anti-Hezbollah”.
The next plate features Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, skewered as a liar who in 2006 “claimed he was negotiating with Lebanon’s leaders to surrender his weapons, only to trigger a devastating war with Israel”. History records that Nasrallah’s party did, in fact, discuss what was to be done with its arsenal – retained after the 1975-1990 civil war because its mission was to deter and/or resist Israeli adventurism rather than to battle other sectarian militias – with its counterparts. It also makes plain that while Hezbollah did carry out a cross-border ambush of an Israeli patrol, in keeping with a long-stated policy of obtaining bargaining chips to gain the release of hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian detainees, it had no reason to even suspect, based on previous experience, that the response would be an all-out war, with emphasis on women and children. The sauce on all this is a thin presumption that, following the war, Hezbollah proceeded to kill several more Lebanese politicians, including at least two whose deaths are widely presumed to have been ordered by rivals within their own pro-Western camp.
The main course consists of an assertion that conviction in the Hariri case would cripple Hezbollah and ruin “the image it cultivates as a legitimate resistance movement”. Given Phares’s own record of having opposed Hezbollah even in the 1990s, when Israeli occupation forces were recruiting reluctant collaborators by kidnapping and raping their sisters, he is hardly qualified to predict such a verdict, let alone to render one. In any event, the STL could convict Hezbollah and its entire leadership of every crime conceivable, and it wouldn’t amount to a hiccup because the group’s supporters are convinced – not without reason – that the court is stacked against them.
There is more before dessert, but none of it merits mention except to note that the truth is generally on the side and often left altogether off the table.
The sweet stuff at the end, however, is one to remember. Here Phares closes with a flourish by declaring: “When the Special Tribunal issues its final verdict, let’s hope for Lebanon and the region’s sake that the UN and the West [i.e. the Security Council and the United States] will have the courage to enforce the prosecutors’ findings”. Having been prepared in a latrine rather than a kitchen, it is no surprise that this one fails the smell test with gusto.
In various permutations, “the UN and the West” have made a meal of Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East for generations. More importantly, the whole concept of a trial is intended to thoroughly test the prosecutors’ claims (not their “findings” – that’s for the judges) in order to avoid even the appearance of a rush to judgment or any other miscarriage of justice. Which proposition is more disturbing – that Dr. Phares really has no idea how criminal trial procedures work, or that he will be fully sated if this case is already cooked?
Marc J. Sirois is an independent analyst based in Beirut, where he was managing editor of The Daily Star newspaper from 2000-2003 and 2006-2009.
]]>The run-up to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Lebanon called forth a barrage of comment from neoconservative circles. Unlike the savvy campaign for war in Iraq, [...]]]>
The run-up to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Lebanon called forth a barrage of comment from neoconservative circles. Unlike the savvy campaign for war in Iraq, however, they now tend to make straightforward claims that are self-evidently at odds with reality.
In other words, they’re not even telling very good lies any more.
A case in point was Iraq War propagandist Judith Miller’s Fox News article, whose central complaint seems to be that Ahmadinejad’s trip came at the behest of a single party, the Shia party/militia Hezbollah, rather than in response to an official invitation from the Lebanese government; “Who Invited You?” her headline indignantly blared.
Two problems undermined this approach. The first was that then-Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh quite publicly relayed just such an invitation to Ahmadinejad from his Lebanese counterpart, Michel Sleiman, in July 2008. The other was that Sleiman travelled to the Islamic Republic in November of that same year, making a reciprocal visit by Ahmadinejad what should have been a foregone conclusion.
That likelihood was placed in considerable doubt by the U.S. government’s having presumed the right to draw up Lebanon’s diplomatic schedule. While Miller rightly reported that Washington viewed the visit as “provocative,” she neglected to mention that heavy American pressure was applied on Beirut to cancel the visit. The U.S. demand was made in the name of Lebanese sovereignty (yes, really), which is rather ironic coming from a country that has supplied the tools for Israel’s occupation and violation of Lebanese territory, airspace and maritime boundaries for decades.
Undaunted by the untruths at the core of her position, Miller proceeds to expand on it. She asserts that other than the Iran’s close allies, Hezbollah, “Lebanon’s other political leaders … undoubtedly don’t share the love” for Ahmadinejad. Another falsehood: by any genuinely democratic standard, Lebanon’s most important political leaders do share that love. The parties that represent Lebanon’s largest sectarian community – its Shia population — are Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah and Speaker Nabih Berri’s AMAL, both of which enthusiastically welcomed Ahmadinejad. In addition, the Christian politician with the strongest bloc in Parliament, former Army Commander Michel Aoun, also supported the visit. Together, these parties and their allies received well over 50 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary elections.
Next we are treated to a brazen description of Ahmadinejad as “the man whose country is indirectly responsible for having killed [current Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s] father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.” Until the recent thaw between the top suspect — Syria — and the Hariri family’s benefactors in the Saudi royal family, no serious analyst even mentioned Hezbollah as a possible participant in the 2005 assassination. Now, in the absence of charges or hard public evidence, we are to presume Hezbollah’s guilt – and, by association, Iran’s – as established fact.
We are then told that the Hariri killing “sparked massive protests throughout Lebanon. This so-called ‘Cedar Revolution’ succeeded in forcing Syria, Iran’s neighbor and main Sunni Muslim ally, to withdraw the 14,000 ‘peace-keeping’ forces it had been keeping in Lebanon since the end of that country’s bloody civil war in 1990.” A few more problems. There were huge demonstrations (both for and against Syria), but all of the protests of any notable size took place in Beirut. Also, the term “Cedar Revolution” was coined by someone at the U.S. State Department. Would someone please tell American journalists to stop using it? In addition, unless someone has radically altered the map of the region (again), Syria and Iran do not share a border — they are neighbors in the same way that Iran and Lebanon are. And one more thing: Syria sent about 25,000 troops into Lebanon in 1976 — not 1990 – at the request of the latter’s president and with an Arab League mandate to foster stability amid the raging civil war.
Next, Hariri the younger is dismissed as “turning out to be anything but his father’s son.” In support, Miller trots out an Israeli journalist, Smadar Perry, to belittle Saad for having met with “Nasrallah (his father’s executioner)” and the “mastermind,” Syrian President Bashar Assad. Neither the American nor the Israeli, apparently, knows anything about the late Rafik Hariri, who made a career out of seeking and reaching accommodations with and among all the powerbrokers – both foreign and domestic, including, for years, the Syrians – in Lebanon’s cramped and chaotic political arena.
At this point we are apprised of the role of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which is supposed to look into the assassination. It is described, however, as a “UN panel,” which it is not: instead, the STL is a hybrid court whose judges will include Lebanese jurists and whose legality under the UN Charter is highly debatable owing to several factors — not least its having been created without the acquiescence of Lebanon’s Parliament.
Then another unabashedly pro-Israeli source — a report from the AIPAC-formed Washington Institute for Near East Policy — is put forth to assert that Ahmadinejad’s trip is intended to apply pressure on Saad Hariri “and his Lebanese and Western allies” to cancel Lebanon’s support for the court, “which Lebanon has been financing.” Actually, Lebanon is responsible for just 49% of the bill – and not a few Lebanese question the value of the investment because the court is widely viewed as a political tool of the pro-Western camp.
Next we are treated to a quote attributed to Nasrallah by yet another rabidly pro-Israeli actor, MEMRI, which tries to smear the cleric by tying him to a favorite American bogeyman, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Not very artful, and even less relevant given that the date of its alleged provenance was more than two decades ago.
Then Miller hauls out a fellow neoconservative journalist, Lee Smith, who is used to a) make the point that Hezbollah’s real targets are Israeli and Arab public opinion; b) dredge up the familiar lie that Ahmadinejad has threatened to ‘wipe Israel off the map’; and c) reduce Nasrallah (leader of Hezbollah since 1992) to a “creation” of Ahmadinejad.
Finally, near the end of this avalanche of error, another point from Lee Smith is then applied which almost (however inadvertently) recovers the whole article: “By continuing to fight to liberate Jerusalem,” he is quoted as telling us, Tehran has “picked up the banner of Arab nationalism [sic] that the Sunni Arab regimes had tossed by the wayside. Here was another reason for the Arab masses to despise their cruel and now obviously cowardly rulers – and admire a Shia and Persian power they might otherwise fear and detest.” Some of those Arab regimes never took up the banner of Arab nationalism in the first place, and Iran’s emphasis is on Islamic solidarity, but the point is the same – by all but the most warped definitions of international law, at least half of Jerusalem is an occupied city, a fact which plenty of Arabs and other Muslims regard as unacceptable.
Here, then, is the real reason why America and Israel fret over the likes of Ahmadinejad: their policy has always been to divide and control (Arab vs. Persian, Sunni vs. Shia, oil producer vs. consumer, monarchist vs. republican, etc.) and anyone who even speaks about uniting these elements – regardless of how unsuccessful he is likely to be – threatens to expose the glaring weakness at the heart of their position.
Marc J. Sirois is an independent analyst based in Beirut, where he was managing editor of The Daily Star newspaper from 2000-2003 and 2006-2009.
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