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Did Israel Kill al-Hariri to Set the Stage for a
Confrontation with Hezbollah?
Kurt Nimmo
02/22/05 -- I don’t know how many citizens of the
Empire surf the web looking for the truth. It is sincerely
depressing reading the corporate press in the United States,
hacking through the chaff, looking for the wheat, reading between
the lines in search of the truth. I scan the New York Times, the
Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, etc, looking
for stories that make sense. It is comforting to know there are
journalists out there—not in the United States—who tell it
like it is. For instance, Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun.
Margolis
writes of the Rafik al-Hariri assassination:
A Syrian role in the crime defies logic, though not
possibility. Syrian President Bashar-el-Assad’s regime is
desperately seeking to avoid providing U.S. President George W.
Bush with a pretext for war and has urgently sought improved
relations with Washington.
But Bush, the Strausscons, and the scary Israeli Likudites—who
provide the ideological foundation for Bush’s foreign policy in
the Middle East—are not interested in improved relations or
peace for that matter. In fact, they want to destabilize Syria and
go after Hezbollah. “Israel would welcome Syria’s implosion,
as it did Iraq’s. Hence current Israeli efforts to press the
White House and Congress to overthrow Syria’s unloved, isolated
regime, whose only ally is Iran—itself a leading target on
America’s Mideast hit list.”
Washington has totally adopted Israel’s view that Syria is
a dangerous threat and a supporter of terrorists—meaning
Palestinian resistance groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad and
Lebanon’s welfare and resistance organization Hezbollah.
Israel is determined to take revenge on Hezbollah, which
defeated its attempts to turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate
and drove Israeli occupation forces from Lebanon—a small but
vicious war this writer saw firsthand.
Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s rightist Likud Party may be
renewing previous efforts to bring Lebanon back into Israel’s
sphere of influence. For the past quarter century, Syria and
Israel have waged a dirty war of bombings and assassinations to
dominate Lebanon and Jordan.
The White House is hoping its threats and economic siege of
Syria will provoke the overthrow of the Assad regime. This
strategy might work.
As Margolis points out, many Syrians want to get rid of Assad
and the Ba’athists, “but fear sudden change will produce chaos
or civil war.”
Although Margolis does not say as much, this is precisely what
Israel and the venal Strausscons want—chaos, misery, death,
starvation, ethnic strife, and endless violence in not only Syria
and Iran but the entire Arab and Muslim Middle East.
Last week, newspapers “from around the world … raised
accusation fingers to Israel regarding the assassination of
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri,” reports Arabic
News. In Turkey, Prague, Paris, and elsewhere newspaper
columnists and reporters put two and two together and came up with
Israel. “Israel involvement in the crime is a fait accompli, it
doesn’t need a fortune-teller to inform reality,” writes Yeni
Asya. “In Paris, L’Humanite Newspaper, for its part, said that
Israel could be behind murdering Hariri, stressing that Israel has
an interest in the crime, namely to be far away from the
resumption of peace process which Syria repeatedly called for.”
Iran’s former ambassador to Syria Ali-Akbar Mohtashamipour
blamed al-Qaeda—in essence the same as blaming the United States
and Israel. The goal behind the al-Hariri assassination, according
to Mohtashamipour, is to not only create ethnic conflict and civil
war in Lebanon but also the “disarmament of the Islamic
resistance forces in Lebanon,” namely Hezbollah, the Turkish
Weekly reports. Israel’s humiliating forced withdrawal from
southern Lebanon still irks the Likudites. “‘This was a big
success for the Lebanese Hizbollah,’ boasted Mohtashamipour,
adding that today, Lebanese president, government, all parties,
even Katayib party and phalanges, are among the staunch supporters
of Hizbollah, willing to see Islamic Resistance forces continue to
guarantee security in southern Lebanon,” in other words prevent
Israel from re-invading and occupying the country.
“The maneuvers against Syria manifest as well the
unprecedented coordination of US and Israeli policy in the
region,” notes Bill
Van Auken. “Damascus is a primary target because it has
provided sanctuary to Palestinian groups that have opposed Israel,
including the Islamist organization Hamas. It has also failed to
curb the growing influence of the Lebanese Shiite movement,
Hezbollah, which forced Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon
after 20 years of occupation. It is hoped in both Washington and
Tel Aviv that either forcing Syrian troops out of Lebanon or
carrying out ‘regime change’ in Damascus will undermine
Hezbollah’s position and open the door for renewed Israeli
control on both sides of its northern border.”
But even if Syria removes its troops from Lebanon, this will
not weaken Hezbollah to any significant degree since many Lebanese
support the organization, as noted above. “Hezbollah
Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah told hundreds of thousands of
people in Beirut, ‘Resistance is the choice of our nation and
the enemy cannot disparage us,’” reports UPI.
Nasrallah said the Bush administration is “an enemy to this
nation because it supports Israel with money and weapons, because
it wants to humiliate our people.”
No doubt Nasrallah’s comments were inspired by the partial
failure of Condi Rice’s consensus shopping spree in Europe last
week. “France has rebuffed appeals by both Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and the Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom,
to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, which would prevent
it from raising funds in Europe through charity groups,” reports
the New
York Times. “This is a difficult issue because Hezbollah has
military operations that we deplore, but Hezbollah is also a
political party in Lebanon,” said a European official. Another
“European diplomat said that the issue of calling Hezbollah a
terrorist organization was discussed in Brussels on Wednesday at a
meeting of the Clearing House, a unit of the European Union that
meets in confidential sessions to review terrorist activities in
Europe. The group could reach no consensus, the diplomat said.”
And yet another told European diplomat told the Associated
Press, “So many things are taking place in Lebanon in which
Hezbollah plays a political role, so an (EU) decision requires an
important political dimension.”
Hezbollah is not going anywhere, even if the Likudites and
Strausscons manage to evict Syria from Lebanon and arm-twist
Europe into putting the organization on a starvation diet. As Nasrallah
warned on the eve of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the “people
of this region will receive you with rifles, blood, arms,
martyrdom and martyrdom operations,” a fact that increasingly
bedevils the Pentagon in Iraq. It appears the Iraqi resistance is
doing fine on its starvation diet.
Finally, as Daniel
Byman writes for the CFR journal Foreign Affairs, “a U.S.
military operation [against Hezbollah] would have to involve a
sustained counterinsurgency campaign—something that Israel tried
for 20 years, only to find that its efforts strengthened
Hezbollah’s resolve and increased its local and regional appeal.
In response to a U.S. attack, Hezbollah might activate its cells
in Asia, Europe, and Latin America—and possibly in the United
States itself. The United States, furthermore, is today in a far
worse position militarily and diplomatically than it was before
the war in Iraq. Occupying Iraq is tough enough; a fight in the
Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon, would only make
things worse.”
Of course, this does not mean Bush and the Strausscons, at the
behest of the Likudites in Israel, will not attempt such insanity.
In the meantime, they will busy themselves with killing popular
Lebanese leaders and attempt to get Syria evicted from Lebanon as
a precursor to invading Syria and Iran—the latter, according to
Scott Ritter, possibly as soon as June.
Kurt Nimmo. Visit Kurt's website http://kurtnimmo.com/
Copyright © Kurt Nimmo
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