Tag: lebanon

Who’s playing games?

So Russia is helping Syria get some PR points by trying to name and shame countries that are not cooperating with the Brammertz report — which probably includes at least France. But why is this “playing games,” as the NY Sun predictably puts it, when the same pressure was put on Syria and that it has, according to Brammertz, been helpful with the investigation?

And what’s with the French anyway — are they afraid Brammertz will find out Rafik Hariri was one of Jacques Chirac’s biggest fundraisers?

Lebanese fear ending up like Egypt

The economic side of Lebanon’s current crisis is examined at the Nation:

But in most conversations with people at the sit-in and protests, economic concerns quickly emerge: Siniora’s government is corrupt, has failed to reduce Lebanon’s crippling $41 billion public debt and has done little to improve people’s lives. Shiites are especially forgotten in the country’s economic planning. Many at the sit-in have been out of work for years, or lost their jobs after the recent war.

“Our country is getting poorer, and Siniora’s government is not talking about it,” says Hadi Mawla, a 22-year-old graphic design student who came from the dahiyeh on the protest’s first day, which drew hundreds of thousands to downtown. “Our standard of living is falling, while other Arab countries are improving. We Lebanese used to make fun of other Arab countries. Now they have great big cities like Dubai. And we’re going to end up like Egypt–with a very poor class, a very rich class and nothing in between.”

Nice to see the crisis being covered beyond the political element — at that dig at Egypt is rather amusing considering that the Egyptian government is always warning that it is afraid it will end up like Lebanon!

Also see: U.S. Readies Security Aid Package To Help Lebanon Counter Hezbollah

Hizbullah at war

Frequent Arabist reader Andrew Exum has penned an interesting report for WINEP on Hizbullah’s military tactics and strategy in this summer’s war. Andrew eschews the politics of the war to focus on Hizbullah’s surprising military prowess, bringing the perspective of his experience with the US Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most military accounts of the war have relied overwhelmingly on Israeli military sources — which is hardly surprising since they have made themselves much more available than Hizbullah’s military leaders, who probably prefer to lay low for obvious reasons — but Andrew did get some information from Lebanon. I particularly like his analysis of the impressive resistance encountered during Israel’s ground offensive:

Hizballah’s tenacity in the villages was, to this observer, the biggest surprise of the war. As has been mentioned already, the vast majority of the fighters who defended villages such as Ayta ash Shab, Bint Jbeil, and Maroun al-Ras were not, in fact, regular Hizballah fighters and in some cases were not even members of Hizballah. But they were men, in the words of one Lebanese observer, who were “defending their country in the most tangible sense—their shops, their homes, even their trees.”

All the same, the performance of the village units was exceptional. Their job—to slow and to bleed the IDF as much as possible—was carried out with both determination and skill. In Maroun al-Ras, nearby Bint Jbiel, and other villages, Hizballah made the IDF pay for every inch of ground that it took. At the same time, crucially, Hizballah dictated the rules of how the war was to be fought. Or as one observer put it, “This was a very good lesson in asymmetric warfare. This was not Israel imposing its battle on Hizballah but Hizballah imposing its battle on Israel.” The narrow village streets of southern Lebanon do not lend themselves to tank maneuver, so the IDF would have to fight with infantry supported by armor, artillery, and air power. This kind of fight negated many of the IDF’s natural advantages and forced the IDF ground forces to fight a very different kind of battle than the one for which they had trained.

So the heroes of this war were ordinary people — although probably with some past military/guerrilla experience — defending their villages. Elsewhere in the report Andrew posits that the most experienced Hizbullah fighters, further up country, did not even see that much action. In my mind this makes the Lebanese Army’s inaction even more shameful: once again, ordinary villagers in the south were abandoned into the hands of foreign invaders.

Siniora, Olmert, Bandar met in Sharm in October?

I don’t have time to comment but to say wow:

A secret meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora took place in Egypt last October, the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency reported.

The report quoted a “well-informed Arab source” who spoke about the meeting, which was said to take place during the Muslim festival ‘Eid Al-Fitr, following the month-long fighting between Israel and Hizbullah on the Israeli-Lebanese border.

The meeting took place in a discreet part of the Sharm A-Sheikh resort.

As well as the Israeli and Lebanese premiers, it was attended by top Egyptian political advisor Osama El-Baz and Saudi Prince Bandar Bin ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz, who heads the Saudi National Security Council, the source said.

The meeting was said to last for five hours, during which participants discussed cooperation between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and allied forces in Lebanon, in contesting the common threat from Tehran and Damascus, as well as from Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

According to the source, Olmert told Siniora that the extensive international presence in Lebanon and the American support for Lebanon’s allies created an unprecedented opportunity to relieve Lebanon of Iranian-Syrian influence.

All this Shia vs. Sunni talk going on right now is extremely alarming…

ندوة: لبنــــــــان بين السياسة والطائ�ية

The Center for Socialist Studies is organizing a talk on “Lebanon: Between Politics and Sectarianism,” Sunday 17 December, 7pm. Speakers include:

Dr. Refa’at Seed Ahmad, Director of the Jaffa Center for Studies
Engineer Wael Khalil, Socialist activist

لبنان بين السياسة والطائ�ية

ندعوكم لحضور ندوة �ي مركز الدراسات الاشتراكية بعنوان:
لبنــــــــان بيـن السـياسة والطـائ�ية
يتحدث �يها
د. ر�عت سيد أحمد، مدير مركز يا�ا للدراسات والأبحاث
وائل خليل، مركز الدراسات الاشتراكية
وآخرين

وذلك يوم الأحد 17/12/2006
الساعة7:00 مساء
مركز الدراسات الاشتراكية
7 شارع مراد- الجيزة

PINR on Gemayel

I’ve been getting these PINR reports for over a year but could never figure out who they (PINR) were exactly – they never replied to my emails. Still, they often have interesting stuff, as in their take on the Gemayel assassination.

Intelligence Brief: Pierre Gemayel Assassinated in Lebanon
Drafted By:
http://www.pinr.com

On November 21, Pierre Gemayel, a prominent Christian Maronite politician, was assassinated in the Christian Beirut suburb of Jdeideh. The assassination adds a new, powerful element of instability to an already fragmented political scene characterized by increasing tension between the different political, ethnic and confessional factions in Lebanon.

Several important members of the anti-Syrian coalition, such as Sunni leader Saad Hariri and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, accuse Damascus of ordering the assassination. They accuse the Syrian leadership of seeking renewed influence in Lebanon, and they consider the killing an attempt to further weaken the pro-Western Lebanese government led by Prime Minister Fuad Siniora. Syria, however, denies any involvement in the murder.

The assassination of Gemayel occurred the same day that Syria took an important foreign policy step by restoring its diplomatic relations with Iraq after 25 years. This decision was a breakthrough for Damascus’ diplomatic attitude because such a step displayed Syria’s will to play a new role in Iraq, which, for Washington, is a critical concern.
Continue reading PINR on Gemayel

About Pierre Gemayel

I’ve been getting emails asking why I haven’t written about Pierre Gemayel. The reason is simply that I’m extremely busy until the end of the week.

Still, a few points:

– Obviously I am worried about what’s next in Lebanon and horrified at the continued string of political assassinations. This is the last thing the country needs right now and I hope that Hizbullah sees in it an opportunity to rejoin the government, perhaps on better terms for its representation in the cabinet, but drops its opposition to international tribunals.

– I think some of the media is unfair in portraying Pierre Gemayel as a warlord. While his family is responsible for some of the worst episodes of the civil war, he was too young to have been part of them. He may represent the feudal side of Lebanese politics and have been a political lightweight, but that doesn’t mean his death doesn’t matter. Especially if his replacement is going to be an actual old-school Phalangist. That being said, I have no particular insight into who replaces him.

– This issue was a good test of the new al-Jazeera English. I thought their coverage was pretty decent and intelligent in the commentary but not so much in the pace of news reporting. CNN, in comparison, had quite a politically biased commentator from Beirut (her name escapes me) but faster-paced coverage. That’s my impression from watching about an hour of TV after the event broke out. CNN really does amazing amounts of Hariri propaganda though, the other channels are more varied. No wonder CNN got the first interview with Saad Hariri – who didn’t come across as badly as I expected him to, actually. In any case, Hariri, John Bolton and the media in general have set the tone: Syria did it.

– In a sense I am left with the same impression as when Rafiq Hariri was killed: how stupid is it for Syria to have done this, yet who else than Syria? Are all the assassinations that have taken place since then related? Are they all by the same group? Even Zvi Bar’el of Haaretz is asking himself those questions. And if not Syria directly or indirectly via its Lebanese allies, then who? Pranay Gupte writes in the New York Sun (which I don’t generally trust) that it could be another Christian faction – Michel Aoun’s or Samir Geagea’s.

– Watching Lebanese pundits on various channels yesterday, I noticed how one word kept being avoided in the conversation about Syria, Lebanon, etc. The word was “Hizbullah.”

– Not being a Lebanon expert I have to rely on the opinion of those people I trust. Rami Khouri has a piece for Agence Global that gives few details but sets the (pessimistic) mood.

– I share Angry Arab’s distaste for the UN condemnation of the assassination of Gemayel as a breach of Lebanese sovereignty. Not only are they making assumptions prior to investigation, but where were they when over 1,200 people were assassinated by Israel bombs this summer?

HRW and the Lobby

Since I attacked Human Rights Watch on this site for what I still maintain was a biased (in favor of Israel) coverage of the first two weeks (at least) of this summer’s Lebanon war, it seems fair to me to bring attention for the virulent attack against HRW and its head, Kenneth Roth, by the usual Zionist agitators in response to its more balanced coverage starting about three weeks into the war. This NYRB article looks at that in depth, especially the role of a newspaper that regular readers will know I consider one of the most dangerous and hateful mainstream publications in the US, the New York Sun:

To the extent that the current campaign against Human Rights Watch is organized the driving force has been a newspaper launched in 2002, The New York Sun, which accused Kenneth Roth of anti-Semitism in a two-column editorial. The Sun is edited by Seth Lipsky, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was the founding editor in 1990 of The Forward, an English-language Jewish weekly that sought to link itself to the tradition of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward, a newspaper with a social-democratic political outlook that had a wide readership among Yiddish-speaking immigrants. (Isaac Bashevis Singer published most of his work in the Jewish Daily Forward.) But Lipsky was forced out in 2000 because some of the owners of The Forward found him too right-wing. He launched The New York Sun with investments from the publishing tycoon Conrad Black (who is now being prosecuted for corporate crimes) and other financial backers intent on promoting neoconservative views. Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, became a columnist and the Sun’s contributors have included right-wing commentators such as R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. and Peggy Noonan.

On July 25, just two weeks after the beginning of the war in Lebanon, the Sun published an attack on Human Rights Watch by Avi Bell, whom it identified as a law professor at Israel’s Bar Ilan University and a visiting professor at Fordham University Law School. Bell attacked a Human Rights Watch statement published the previous week entitled “Questions and Answers on Hostilities Between Israel and Hezbollah”; he particularly objected to a question it posed, “What is Hezbollah’s status in relation to the conflict?,” and to the answer supplied by HRW:

Hezbollah is an organized political Islamist group based in Lebanon, with a military arm and a civilian arm, and is represented in the Lebanese parliament and government. As such a group, and as a party to the conflict with Israel, it is bound to conduct hostilities in compliance with customary international humanitarian law and common Article 3.

This was deficient, according to Bell, because it did not address the question of aggression, and he accused Human Rights Watch of “whitewashing Hezbollah’s crimes of aggression.” Another alleged fault was the failure to label Hezbollah’s acts as genocide despite the fact that Hezbollah’s leader had made statements indicating a desire to kill Jews. In early September Joshua Muravchik, writing in The Weekly Standard, also criticized HRW’s failure to denounce aggression and claimed that HRW failed to accuse Hezbollah of genocide because this would divert it “from its main mission of attacking Israel.”

Read on — it’s really a fascinating piece about how some media institutions such as the Sun and that act as an informal right-wing Israel “lobby” of the kind Walt and Mearsheimer wrote about — as well as about how an institution such as HRW (which despite its different standards for Israel and other states does a great job reporting on the Arab world generally, especially Egypt and Iraq) has to do to defend itself from these attacks.

(By the way: what is it about New York City; it has no decent daily newspaper!?! Don’t even bring up the Times…)