LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
February 05/2010

Bible Of the Day
Matthew 5/21-26: "5:21 “You have heard that it was said to the ancient ones, ‘You shall not murder;’* and ‘Whoever shall murder shall be in danger of the judgment.’ 5:22 But I tell you, that everyone who is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment; and whoever shall say to his brother, ‘Raca!’ shall be in danger of the council; and whoever shall say, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of the fire of Gehenna. 5:23 “If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has anything against you, 5:24 leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. 5:25 Agree with your adversary quickly, while you are with him in the way; lest perhaps the prosecutor deliver you to the judge, and the judge deliver you to the officer, and you be cast into prison. 5:26 Most certainly I tell you, you shall by no means get out of there, until you have paid the last penny. "

Free Opinions, Releases, letters & Special Reports
Peace will be found in Damascus, not Ramallah By Ari Shavit/Haaretz/February 04/10
Netanyahu cool to calls for fresh Syria talks/Haaretz/January 04/10
Plane Victims' Families Accuse US of Spying/By Sawsan al-Abtah/Asharq Al-Awsat/February 04/10
Iran…Sweet Talk/By: Tariq Alhomayed/Editor-in-Chief of Asharq Al-Awsat/February 04/10
Did Jesus Pray to Allah?/New West/February 04/10
Diplomacy on the line in Iran/The Daily Star/February 04/10
Iran's leaders are worried about history's forward march/By Said Amir Arjomand/February 04/10
Children of a 'lesser' Lebanese citizen/By Dima Dabbous-Sensenig/February 04/10
Follow the money/Joshua Hersh/National/February 04/10

Latest News Reports From Miscellaneous Sources for February 04/10
Najjar Calls for Barring Security Forces from Entering Justice Palaces without Permission/Naharnet
Hizbullah's Moussawi Meets Williams, Says Israeli Threats Not Necessarily Introduction to War/Naharnet
Moallem: War with Syria will be total/Jerusalem Post
Israeli FM: FM: Syria must withdraw Golan Heights demand/Ynetnews
Syria is sharing intelligence with US and UK'/Ha'aretz
Sison to Geagea: Palestinian Bases Outside Camps are Source of Concern/Naharnet
Berri: Special committee would help prepare to end sectarianism/Daily Star
Cabinet voices united stance against Israeli threats/Daily Star
Mukhaiber calls for dissolving Lebanese-Syrian council/Daily Star
Hariri to visit Syria when border deal read/Daily Star
Maronite Bishops voice hope for improved stability/Daily Star
PM to host talks on row over Dar al-Fatwa 'graft'/Daily Star
Wreckage from crashed plane found in Syrian waters/Daily Star
Finance Ministry mulls higher VAT rate/Daily Star
 Ministry of Displaced launches website/Daily Star
Tashnag party celebrates 119th anniversary/Daily Star
Lebanon storms resume following brief warm spell/Daily Star
Veteran politician Henri Edde dies/Daily Star
Interior Ministry processes overdue nationality applications/Daily Star
Lebanon files UN complaint against Israel over abduction/Daily Star
Court work grinds to halt as bar association strikes/Daily Star

New Search for Crashed Ethiopian Jet Set to Resume at 6am Friday
Naharnet/Stormy weather has suspended search for victims or the remains of an Ethiopian plane that crashed off the Lebanese coast.
Weather conditions are expected to improve late Thursday. Search operations were set to resume at 6 am on Friday with a new integrated Lebanese-international action plan under a "Central Operations Room" (COR) supervised by the Lebanese army, the daily As-Safir said Thursday. Citing a reliable source at the COR, As-Safir said "significant progress" has been made in terms of locating the wreckage of the plane. The source said the next step would be pulling the victims out of the water. Meanwhile, Lebanese troops and civil defense workers were deployed along the seashore extending from Ouzai to Naameh south of Beirut in hopes of finding debris washed ashore by strong waves. Wednesday's storm, which is expected to last for three days, brought to a standstill diving operations. Local media said the civilian vessel, Ocean Alert, which has been scanning Lebanese waters since after the crash, returned to Beirut port due to the storm. Last week, a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Ramage, detected signals from the black box at a depth of 1,500 meters. But officials described the operation as "difficult and complicated." The Lebanese government has formally asked the U.S.-based Odyssey Marine Explorations to send a submarine to help in retrieving the victims, more parts of the plane and the black box. The Boeing 737 crashed into the Mediterranean Sea on Jan. 25 just minutes after takeoff from Beirut in a fierce thunderstorm. All 90 people on board were presumed dead. Beirut, 04 Feb 10, 10:33

Sison to Geagea: Palestinian Bases Outside Camps are Source of Concern
Naharnet/U.S. Ambassador Michele Sison has reportedly told Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea that armed Palestinian bases outside refugee camps are a source of concern and hinder efforts for security to prevail in Lebanon. Sison held more than two hours of talks with Geagea in Maarab, the LF leader's media office said in a statement.
The ambassador also told Geagea that U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell's visit to the region was useful particularly for Lebanon, the statement added.
Sison has reiterated her country's full support for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and stressed that Washington would continue to back the Lebanese judiciary's transparency.
Sison told pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat in remarks published Thursday that U.S. assistance to several Lebanese sectors is ongoing despite the boycott of Hizbullah ministers in the government. Last week, Sison hinted that the U.S. won't provide assistance to the agriculture ministry, which is headed by Hizbullah representative Hussein Hajj Hassan.
The diplomat stressed that U.S. assistance to a water project that has direct influence on Lebanon's agriculture sector is ongoing. The ambassador visited Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar and Labor Minister Boutros Harb on Wednesday. She discussed with Najjar continuous cooperation between Washington and the ministry to strengthen the judiciary's independence. Sison unveiled that USAID is funding an $8.1 million project that includes the renovation of the judicial training institute at the justice ministry. She lauded the ministry's efforts to increase transparency in the Lebanese judicial system. Sison and Harb discussed shared efforts by the U.S. and Lebanon to combat trafficking in persons and child labor. Beirut, 04 Feb 10, 08:10

Berri Opposes Lebanon's Participation in Libya's Arab Summit
Naharnet/Speaker Nabih Berri on Wednesday said that only President Michel Suleiman can decide on Lebanon's participation in Libya's Arab League Summit, but stressed that he "personally" favors that Lebanon boycotts the summit. Berri defended his proposal for the establishment of a committee to abolish political sectarianism.
He said Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir "is right by saying that abolishing political sectarianism could fuel sectarian strife."
"But most of the people who are committed to sectarianism are very distant from religion," Berri added after his weekly one-on-one meeting with Suleiman at Baabda Palace.
Answering a question about Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun's proposal to establish a civil state in Lebanon and his invitation for political leaders to debate the issue, Berri said that Aoun's statement was not addressed against him. On the other hand, Berri urged the Lebanese media outlets not to approach the issue of the Ethiopian crashed plane "with such manipulation," in order to respect the feelings of the "relatives, parents, and mothers" of the victims. Beirut, 03 Feb 10, 20:15

FM: Syria must withdraw Golan Heights demand
02.04.10, 10:09 / Israel News /Daily Star
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told a Bar-Ilan University conference that Syria must give up on its demand that Israel cede the Golan Heights.
"The Syrian foreign minister has blatantly threatened Israel. Our message to Syria is that if a war breaks out not only will they lose, but Assad's regime will collapse," he said

Netanyahu cool to calls for fresh Syria talks
Last update -  04/02/2010
By Amos Harel, Avi Issacharoff and Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondents and Reuters
The defense establishment is pushing for a peace deal with Syria, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is cool to the idea - and Syrian leaders responded Wednesday to Defense Minister Ehud Barak's call for renewed peace talks by threatening total war.
Two days ago, addressing a group of senior Israeli officers, Barak said it was vital to resume peace talks with Syria because otherwise war was likely to break out. Then, "immediately after such a war, we'll sit down to negotiate and discuss exactly the same things we've been discussing with the Syrians for 15 years already." Barak's statement was not meant to threaten Syria, but to persuade Israelis of the urgency of resuming peace talks. However, based on their response, it is not clear that Syrian leaders interpreted it that way.
During a meeting with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos in Damascus Wednesday, Syrian President Bashar Assad said that Israel was pushing the Middle East toward a new war. "All the facts point that Israel is driving the region toward war, not peace," the official Syrian news agency quoted him as saying. "Israel is not serious about wanting peace."
At a news conference with Moratinos, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said Israel "was planting the seeds of the war atmosphere" by threatening attacks on Iran, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
"I tell them [Israel], stop acting like thugs," Moallem said. "Do not test the resolve of Syria. You Israelis, you know that war at this time will reach your cities. If such a war breaks out ... it will indeed be total war, whether it begins in south Lebanon or Syria. And it is inconceivable that afterward, the younger generation will see peace talks .... Return to your senses and seek the road of peace." Despite his call for peace, Moallem's remarks further escalated tensions in the north. They were also noteworthy for the implication - rarely heard from Syrian officials - that a conflict in south Lebanon could lead to war with Syria as well.
A few hours before he headed to Damascus, Moratinos was in Israel, where he raised the Syrian issue with Netanyahu at a meeting Tuesday night. The Spanish minister said he believed Assad was serious about wanting peace and was willing to disengage his country from Iran and Hezbollah. Therefore, it was vital to resume Israeli-Syrian peace talks.
He also offered to mediate between Israel and Turkey so that the latter could resume the role of mediator in talks. Ankara mediated the indirect talks with Damascus conducted by Netanyahu's predecessor, Ehud Olmert. Netanyahu, however, said he did not share Moratinos' belief that Syria was ready to leave Iran's orbit. "I've seen no evidence whatsoever of what you're saying," the prime minister said. "I understood Assad Sr., with whom I conducted negotiations very well," Netanyahu continued, referring to Bashar's father, former Syrian president Hafez Assad. "But unfortunately, I simply don't understand Assad Jr. I don't know what he wants." The defense establishment, however, does not share Netanyahu's skepticism. There, the consensus is that peace with Syria would drive a wedge between Tehran and Damascus, and that the benefits of an Israeli-Syrian deal are therefore worth the price of giving up the Golan Heights. Barak is the leading public exponent of this view; he also believes that the chances Israel and Syria could reach a peace deal are fairly high. Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi also agrees with this assessment, as does most of the General Staff. A month ago, for instance, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, the head of Military Intelligence, said in a lecture at Tel Aviv University that peace with Syria "has the potential for a positive change - removing Syria from the circle of violence, distancing it from the radical axis and ending its support for terror."
And Moratinos clearly heard this message: At the press conference, he rejected his hosts' accusations against Israel, saying that during his trip to Jerusalem, he did not "hear the drums of war," but rather, "a yearning for peace."

Peace will be found in Damascus, not Ramallah
By Ari Shavit/Haaretz
Last update 04/02/2010
Some positive murmurings could be heard in Jerusalem this week. While the media is taking potshots at Sara Netanyahu without letup, her husband believes that he's approaching something of a breakthrough. People close to the prime minister predict that negotiations with the Palestinians will resume soon; the time has not yet been set, but it may be March or April.
The format has also not been decided on, with both indirect talks and shuttle trips possible. But according to the prevailing thinking, the pressure that the Americans, Europeans and Arabs are applying on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is beginning to bear fruit. The chances are good that, one year late, a diplomatic dialogue between him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will finally begin.
It's not clear whether this Israeli optimism has a leg to stand on. But it's clear that even if the process gets underway, it will soon reach a dead end. It will be good if the two sides start talking and prevent an outbreak of violence, but it's very unlikely that they can reach a peace agreement. An Israeli prime minister committed to the integrity of Jerusalem and a Palestinian president committed to the sanctity of the right of return cannot get very far. Even if they begin, there's no way they will be able to make a deal.
When the Oslo process was at its height, a right-wing intellectual irked his left-wing friends by comparing Israel's peace movement to a girl trying to seduce a gay man. It caught the Palestinians' eye, but they never responded, they received a phone number but never called, they were invited to the bedroom but never showed up. They're simply not interested. Peace just doesn't do it for them. The two-state solution doesn't turn them on. But the peaceniks still don't get what their non-partner has made clear in a thousand and one ways. They go on stalking someone who has no interest in them. They want to be loved by someone who has no love to give.
A lot of water has flowed down the Yarkon River since our right-winger came up with his metaphor. The peace movement has melted away, several peace-making experiments have failed. But the one-sided-courtship syndrome has endured. Israelis, Europeans and Americans continue to waste precious time trying to get the Palestinians into the bridal bed, even though they don't want to go there. They put on their powder, makeup and perfume to try to arouse the Palestinians' peace-process libido, but there is no such thing. Although this unrequited love is already 20 years old, it won't die down. Paradoxically, it helps perpetuate the occupation.
After 20 years, there is a clear conclusion: To really partition the country, a new diplomatic strategy is called for. Coordinated unilateral processes must be launched that will constrict the occupation while building a new Palestinian society. It must be understood that only after most Palestinians are living in a free space of their own that offers them a sane existence will the conditions ripen to enable them to choose true peace.
But there is also another clear conclusion: There will be no dramatic breakthrough on the Palestinian track in the near future, so a breakthrough on the Syrian track must be initiated. Because of the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the only chance for generating change lies in the north. There is no certainty at all that peace is in the offing. But if it is, it is to be found not in Ramallah but in Damascus.
The problem is basically political. Peace with Syria has no party and no leader. And it has no libido. Oddly, the remnants of the Israeli left relate to peace with Syria like some kind of stepchild. Their passion is for the Palestinians, not the Syrians. The ardent courting is all aimed at the disinterested Palestinians. Even today, Israel is expending most of its peace-seeking energy on a useless effort to cajole the wrong neighbor.
The time has come to reset the system and change course. To forestall the evil rising in the east, every effort must be made to enter a dialogue with Syrian President Bashar Assad. To avert a horrendous war, not a stone on the road to Damascus should be left unturned. To offer hope to the Middle East, the prospects held out by the secular regime in Syria must be exhausted. It may be that at the end of the day, the Syrians, too, will turn their backs on us, but every day that goes by without an effort to reach peace with Syria is a day marked by criminal negligence.

Plane Victims' Families Accuse US of Spying
03/02/2010
By Sawsan al-Abtah
Beirut, Asharq Al-Awsat-
A tense atmosphere prevailed in Lebanon yesterday after a US warship and the "Ocean Alert" ship failed to locate the black box on the eighth day of the ill-fated Ethiopian plane which crashed in a storm, with all 90 people on board presumed dead.
Anger flared up after a body and some limbs floated off Al-Naimah coast yesterday with many observers claiming that the foreign ships were wasting time or were not doing their work as required but instead were waiting for the bodies to float ashore by themselves. Some even considered the Western ships to be exploiting this chance to photograph the coast and depths which Hezbollah overlooks, especially as this sea area could be a possible site in any future battle between the party and Israel, and this is a golden opportunity for the Americans.
A commentator in the south says: "Even if they found the plane, they would not announce it and would continue their search. They will not leave anything but photograph it. They will not have a second chance to photograph this coast from where the Hezbollah missile was fired at the Israeli gunboat in 2006. They are operating alone without the presence of any Lebanese officer with them aboard the ship."
The failure of the foreign ships to yield any results after eight days of searching has raised questions and did not impress the local population, some of whom are saying: "We would have found our sons if they had let us take the boats and search for them." Muhammad al-Sariji, doyen of Lebanese divers, does not hide his anger and says "the dismal failure of foreign ships is not coincidental. They are searching the area where the plane did not sink in the first place. I am following up their work daily, here, from this coast and can say their work is not systematical. There are suspicions." As to their technological capabilities or their haphazard way of operation, they searched in Khaldah and then we saw them sail north to Al-Manarah, Beirut, and then return to Khaldah. This means that the operation is to a large extent haphazard."
Al-Sariji adds: "It is not a complicated case and pinpointing the location of the plane is not as difficult as they want us to think. The plane crashed and there was a storm coming from the southwest, that is, from the direction of Sidon. It threw the bodies that were found almost one hour after the crash near Khaldah. This means that the source of the bodies is south of Khaldah area. Why are they searching north of Khaldah and reaching Beirut? It would be enough to follow the line of the bodies where they were found and move southward to find the plane's debris. The bodies drew almost a route to the plane's location and this is what the searchers are ignoring today." He went on to say: "A body was found today in Al-Naimah area, four km from the coast, where the depth is 38 meters. We are asking why do they not let us, as an association of divers, scan this area from the coast, from San Simon to Al-Naimah with 10 to 15 boats. We might not find anything and might find dozens of bodies in this spot. But to find 15 bodies out of 90 despite all the technological capabilities that were brought in and they were the ones which floated to the surface on their own, is perplexing."
Lebanese officials said yesterday that a male body presumed to be one of the 90 people on board the Ethiopian airliner had been recovered. The male corpse, which has been transferred to the Rafik Hariri state hospital in Beirut, would bring to 15 the number of bodies recovered from the Boeing 737-800 that crashed into the sea soon after takeoff during a raging thunderstorm early on January 25.
No survivors from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 have been found.

Iran…Sweet Talk!
By: Tariq Alhomayed/Editor-in-Chief of Asharq Al-Awsat
03/02/2010
As soon as news broke that the US was deploying an anti-missile weapons system off the coast of Iran and in a number of Arab Gulf States, some Arabs came out saying that this step represents a provocation and straining to Iran, and the entire region, and it calls to attention the fact that the option of war remains open.
What is strange is that those who repeat this analysis forget – or perhaps they are trying to turn everything inside out – that on 28 September 2009 Iran carried out the "Payember-e Azam IV War Games", during which the Iranians test-fired the Qadr-1 missile, which is an amended version of the Shahab-3 missile and which has a range of 1800 km. The Iranians also test-fired the Sajil missile, which is a two-stage solid fuel system missile with a range of 2000 km, and which has exceptional capabilities, according to officials in Tehran, and the Iranian Fars News Agency which reported that "for the first time the Revolutionary Guards have tested a two-stage missile that utilizes a solid fuel system during military maneuvers." On the same day, Commander of the Revolutionary Guard Air Forces General Hossein Salami announced that "all the targets in the region, regardless of their location, will be within the range of these missiles."
Whilst on 29 August 2009, Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Major General Mohammed Ali Jafari, said that his forces would step up their presence in the Gulf of Aden due to defense needs, confirming that "Iran's missiles are very accurate and can hit targets anywhere." All of the above, of course, is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg and there are other Iranian statements made publicly in which the Revolutionary Guards threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which almost 40 percent of international oil trade passes through.
The question is; who is disturbing the atmosphere in the region, increasing fears, and reminding the people of the Arab Gulf and the region that the option of war remains open?
Of course the answer is quite simply Iran. The Gulf finds itself held hostage by Iran, which is compromising the security and stability of the region in order to reach its nuclear objective, and this would mean that the Arab Gulf as a whole will remain at the mercy of Revolutionary Iran. Therefore those concerned about tension with Iran, or tensions in the region, forget that the region has been experiencing ongoing tension since the Iranian Revolution which was clear and direct with regards to its threat to the security of the Arab Gulf after Tehran began to export its revolution – in all its forms – throughout the region. Therefore it is difficult to accept today that the deployment of the US anti-missile system in order to protect the Gulf States represents an act of provocation to Iran, whose leadership itself – as we said previously – threatened that the entire region is in within range of its missiles.
Should the Gulf States stand idly by and do nothing?
Of course not, therefore it is good that Iran is experiencing this tension, and perhaps the wise in Iran will learn a lesson from this, and appreciate things as they are, before it is too late and their country and the entire region becomes engaged in pointless war and destruction. Iran must know this, and must be informed of this, for anything else is merely sweet talk.

Asharq Al-Awsat Talks to US Ambassador to Lebanon, Michelle Sison
28/01/2010
Interview by Thair Abbas
Beirut, Asharq Al-Awsat- US Ambassador to Lebanon, Michelle Sison, is a career member of the United States Senior Foreign Service. She has a BA in Political Science from Wellesley College and also studied at the London School of Economics. She previously served as US Ambassador to the UAE, before becoming Ambassador to Lebanon in June 2008. In this interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, Ambassador Sison discusses a number of issues including the current political situation in Lebanon, US economic and military aid, Hezbollah, and the ongoing political tensions with Israel.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Lebanon is currently witnessing an extremely positive situation with regards to the relationship between its political leaders. To what extent was the US involved in helping reach this state?
[Ambassador Sison] President [Michel] Suleiman has described the new government as being "produced by Lebanon" and this unique regime in Lebanon which has reached the seat of power is a national consensus government. We look forward to cooperating with the new Prime Minister and government, and seek to support this government in implementing policies and procedures that contribute to economic progress and creating new job opportunities for the Lebanese people across a range of programs.
There is a lot of legislation that is being studied by the Lebanese parliament, as well as those being studied by the government, and we see a real opportunity for the government to launch many initiatives in this area.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Many are saying that the current political breakthrough in Lebanon is as a result of the détente between Syria and Saudi Arabia, in addition to a similar breakthrough in relations between Lebanon and the US. What do you think?
[Ambassador Sison] Let us look at this question from a different angle. I would like to point out that this current [positive] situation allows us to move forward on a number of sensitive regional issues. As you have seen, US Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, was recently in the region, and he expressed the commitment of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to a comprehensive peace in the region. And comprehensive means all the countries [in the region], and this includes a Palestinian – Israeli peace, a Syrian – Israeli peace, and a Lebanese – Israeli peace. I am looking at the picture in the region from a different angle, and I see an opportunity to reach a comprehensive peace in the region, and Lebanon will play a key role in this, as well the rest of the countries in the region.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] There is an ongoing fear in Lebanon that the United States will surrender the country to Syrian administration once again. What do you have to say about this?
[Ambassador Sison] A number of Lebanese ministers spoke with US officials and statements were issued from officials in Washington during President Suleiman's visit to Washington confirming that there will not be any kind of agreement or settlement that comes at the expense of Lebanon, its sovereignty, stability, or security. This is something that we have said many times [before], and the Lebanese people should have confidence in this.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] There has been talk about a new US policy with regards to Lebanon. What can you tell us about this?
[Ambassador Sison] There is an ongoing US policy to support Lebanon and its sovereignty and prosperity; this is a permanent policy. There were fears in the US last December over the issue of arms smuggling to non-official groups, however at the same time the policy of strengthening and supporting the legitimate and official institutions of the Lebanese state, and the military and security organizations, like the Lebanese army and the internal security forces, is ongoing until they are in control of the entire Lebanese territory. There is another part of our policy that is linked to strengthening the education system in Lebanon and developing the judicial system.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Why is the Lebanese army not being equipped with weaponry sufficient to allow it to control all Lebanon's territory and stand up to Israeli threats? Did the US veto this?
[Ambassador Sison] We have a strong program of support for the Lebanese armed forces which began in 2006, and since then almost $456 million has been spent on training and equipment, and this program is ongoing and will be expanded even further in 2010. There will be further bilateral discussions on this issue next month in Washington [during Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr's visit]. This package [of training and equipment] reflects the agreed vision on the development of the Lebanese army and its needs over 5 years, which were identified during talks between the Lebanese army and US military officials. We started out on this path in 2008 with the first bilateral military talks, and the needs of the army were identified with regards to border security, internal security, and combating terrorism. These are three paths that reflect the development of the Lebanese army. During US Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Lebanon last May we saw [the conclusion of] a large deal for US weapons and equipment, which included sensitive equipment like Cessna airplanes, M-60 tanks, and Hummer vehicles. All of this reflects the vision of the past five years and beyond. You asked a lot of questions about military and security aid, but there are a lot of other projects to talk about.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What about these projects?
[Ambassador Sison] I think it is very important that we talk about the economic support that we are providing to Lebanon, for in addition to confirming the rehabilitation of official schools, we are also offering many educational grants. We [also] continue to support [clean] water management projects, because our studies show that almost 50 percent of [clean] water sources may be lost if they are not managed in a good manner, and we are working on a number of sites to ensure this. In cooperation with state institutions and municipalities, we have contributed to providing clean water to around 27,000 people in the al-Shouf and Bekka regions. Over the past 6 months, we have contributed to launching many projects tied to the economy and the municipalities. This is our daily work, despite the fact that the [media] headlines may concentrate more on political and security issues when we look back at what we have done over the past months we see that we have accomplished a lot of useful projects for economic development and job creation in Lebanon. I believe that these policies are long-term and demonstrate the US's commitment to Lebanon and its development.
By building these institutions that enable the State to provide social services to its citizens, and establishing institutions that provide safety to citizens, we hope that the Lebanese people will no longer have to move towards non-state groups in order to secure their protection and services, for by strengthening the state we are building and investing in Lebanon and we are making it more prosperous and secure for the future.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What can you tell us about the new US security measures with regards to air travel?
[Ambassador Sison] When this event took place on 25 December [Christmas day bombing attempt of a US commercial aircraft] it could have resulted in the deaths of many citizens of different nationalities. For this reason, the US authorities quickly put in place [security] measures to protect the security of all travelers coming from certain countries, and this includes American citizens. This is an effort to ensure our collective safety in the air regardless of nationality.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Lebanon is one of the 14 countries whose citizens, in addition to passengers on flights originating in this country, will be subject to more stringent US security checks. What is the reason for this?
[Ambassador Sison] These are measures that aim to ensure our collective safety when traveling.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Do these security measures have any connection to the reports on the increased Al Qaeda movements in Lebanon?
[Ambassador Sison] These measures are related to the incident which took place in December. Their aim is to ensure the safety of passengers.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] However these measures only apply to specific states, why is Lebanon included on this list?
[Ambassador Sison] I will refer to the previous answer about the objective of issuing these measures, and that is to protect passengers. It is very clear that terrorists in the air will target everybody, regardless of nationality.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] However Lebanon objects to these [security] measures and considers this to be unacceptable.
[Ambassador Sison] This position has been expressed, and the Lebanese officials expressed this to a number of US officials who visited Lebanon, and we have also expressed this to Washington. But let me say once again that these measures are to protect us all, and everybody is subject to these measures, including passengers and diplomats.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Do you fear Al Qaeda's growth in Lebanon?
[Ambassador Sison] Lebanon, like many other countries, has suffered a lot from terrorism, and there is what happened in 2007 in Nahr al-Bared, and we recall the sacrifices made by the Lebanese army in this area. It is clear that there are risks and challenges in this field.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What about Hezbollah, do you believe they pose a threat to the US in Lebanon or outside?
[Ambassador Sison] There is no change in our policy towards Hezbollah which is still included on the list of foreign terrorist organizations, and there has not been any change in this policy.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] You will not cooperate with the Hezbollah ministers included in the government's new cabinet?
[Ambassador Sison] This is a reflection of this policy which in fact is a US law.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] How will this reflect upon US – Lebanese cooperation in the agricultural field considering that the Lebanese Minister of Agriculture is a Hezbollah member?
[Ambassador Sison] According to this law, we cannot directly deal with any member of Hezbollah. There are ongoing programs of cooperation with the Lebanese government including water, education, economy, and civilian programs, and these programs will continue.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] But no agricultural programs?
[Ambassador Sison] The programs that are present will continue.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The Lebanese government says that the issue of Hezbollah's arms is an internal one that can be solved through dialogue. What do you think of this?
[Ambassador Sison] There are two points; firstly the US and other UN Security Council member states deal with this by looking at the UN resolutions on Lebanon, and these say that the arms of any militia must be laid down so that Lebanon is under the [sole] control of the state. As for the dialogue launched by President Suleiman [with Hezbollah], this is something that should be encouraged, and if this dialogue assists in bringing the weaponry which are outside of government control under its control, then this is a good thing.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Tensions are increasing in the region, and Israel has issued threats against Lebanon; do you fear Israel will launch military operations against Lebanon?
[Ambassador Sison] As I noted previously, there is the issue of arms smuggling which we consider to be a threat to Lebanon, its security, and sovereignty. In July we also saw [the discovery of] Hezbollah weapons caches, while in September 3 missiles were fired into Israel [from Lebanon]. These types of activities are a clear threat to [Lebanese] security and stability. Therefore we go back to emphasizing UN Resolution 1701 that calls for the removal of all illegal weapons from the region south of the Litani River.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] There are reports that Saudi Arabia has put pressure on the US to urge Israel not to attack Lebanon. Is there any truth to this?
[Ambassador Sison] I have not received any reports of this.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Can we expect an Israeli attack on Lebanon?
[Ambassador Sison] What we must focus on is the necessity of adhering to international resolutions, and to UN Resolution 1701.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Israel has threatened Lebanon saying that if there is another war, it will target official Lebanese institutions and infrastructure. What is your view on this?
[Ambassador Sison] I return to the discovery of [Hezbollah] weapons caches and the firing of rockets [into Israel]; these types of incidents threaten security and stability, and what is important now is to focus on preventing arms smuggling and applying Resolution 1701, making the region south of the Litani River free of illegal weapons.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The Lebanese Foreign Minister announced that Resolution 1559 – which supports Lebanese sovereignty and calls for all "foreign forces" to cease interfering in Lebanese internal affairs – has died. What is your view on this?
[Ambassador Sison] The US, like other UN Security Council member states, continues to adhere to this resolution; the full implementation of UN resolutions is very important.

Medical Report Confirms Assassination by Strangulation- Al-Mabhouh's Brother
31/01/2010
by Kifah Zaboun
Ramallah, Gaza, Asharq Al-Awsat- Fayek al-Mabhouh, the brother of senior al-Qassam Brigade figure, Mahmoud a-Mabhouh who was assassinated in Dubai more than ten days ago, told Asharq Al-Awsat that Hamas has given the al-Mabhouh family a medical report confirming that his brother was killed by strangulation after being stunned by being tasered to the back of his head.
Senior Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Zahar told a news conference yesterday that Israel wishes to change the rules of the game by opening the international arena to attacks, saying that if this is the case then Tel Aviv is responsible for any retaliation.
According to Fayek al-Mabhouh, investigations, reports and pictures confirm the presence of bruises on his brother's face whose death was first announced last Wednesday as being the result of a long illness. Hamas had previously attributed al-Mabhouh's death to "a medical issue" however Fayek al-Mabhouh confirmed to Asharq Al-Awsat that this excuse did not fool the family, and Hamas asked them to remain silent until the end of the investigations into Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's death.
Fayek al-Mabhouh added "When his body reached Syria early Friday morning they called us and told us that he was assassinated by Israel."
Fayek al-Mabhouh said that his brother did not suffer from any illnesses and that without a doubt he was in Dubai on a mission, although he told Asharq Al-Awsat that he did not have any information about this, and in fact that he knew little about his brothers work since he left the Gaza Strip in 1989.
Al-Mabhouh told Asharq Al-Awsat that his brother had been subject to a number of assassination attempts in Syria, Beirut, and Dubai, and that "five months ago in Dubai he lost consciousness for 36 hours, they said that this was the result of a stroke, but tests later showed the remnants of poison [in his blood]; and this was an assassination attempt by poison." The al-Mabhouh family is certain that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated, and they believe is Israel is responsible for this.
Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh was born in the Gaza Strip but he lived in Syria since 1989 after he fled from the Gaza Strip after Israel discovered that he was responsible for the kidnap and death of two Israeli soldiers. Hamas denied having any knowledge of what al-Mabhouh was doing in Dubai, and senior Hamas official Yahya Moussa told Asharq Al-Awsat that "the martyr [al-Mabhouh] had many obligation…and we do not know exactly what he was doing in Dubai."
Moussa also confirmed that nobody is safe anywhere in the world "because we are confronting a rogue state that does not commit to any political agreements, and does not respect the sovereignty of other countries." He added "This is not the first crime; Israel has committed hundreds of crimes abroad against the PLO leadership."
Moussa told Asharq Al-Awsat that Hamas was examining the changes in the rules of the game, saying "Hamas was careful not to carry out operations abroad in order not to put the security of any country at risk, and it respects the sovereignty of countries, but now institutions of the movement will study the possibility of reversing this decision."
In a press conference held yesterday, Hamas senior figure Mahmoud al-Zahar said "We kept the arena of confrontation between us and the Israeli enemy within the occupied territories, and if Israeli wants – as it wants now to change the rules of the game –to open the international arena to attacks, then in this case Israel will be responsible for the repercussions of this."
He added "Israel has experienced this, and was burned by this in its conflict with the PLO, and it knows that Hamas is no less able to reach its targets in any place." He also said "we are capable of hurting the Zionist enemy, and this is something that is known by the occupation forces, whether on this arena or elsewhere."
Al-Zahar also praised the role played by Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in the Hamas war effort, confirming that he was one of the founding members of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigade.
In an article published on Friday by the Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, senior military commentator Ron Ben Yishai claimed that al-Mabhouh was responsible for coordinating relations between Hamas and Iran.
A memorial service was held for Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at the family home in the Gaza Strip for the second time in two weeks, and his brother Fayek al-Mabhouh told Asharq Al-Awsat that "this is the second time that we accept condolences [for his death] following the announcement of his martyrdom."
An Israeli website claimed yesterday that "four members of the hit squad affiliated to Mossad arrived in Dubai equipped with accurate information concerning the whereabouts of the unguarded victim who arrived in Dubai under a false name. They carried out their mission and then disappeared without a trace."
The Hebrew "Central Issues" website also claimed that al-Mabhouh was subject to a cruel and violent interrogation in the hotel room where his body was later found. The website said that this interrogation focused on obtaining information regarding the procurement of arms from Iran, as well as methods on how such arms are smuggled into Gaza and the West Bank. The site claimed that the killers obtained very valuable intelligence information from al-Mabhouh. Israeli has yet to officially comment on accusations that it is responsible for Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's death, but Israeli media outlets have issued reports claiming that al-Mabhouh was responsible for smuggling rockets and other arms from Iran into the Gaza Strip via Sudan.
Hamas vowed to retaliate to the assassination of al-Mabhouh, and the al-Qassam Brigade said that it would respond to this "crime" at the appropriate time and place, and that Israel will not go unpunished. The leader of the Hamas political bureau, Khalid Mishal, also paid his respects to al-Mabhouh during an impassioned speech, and warned Israel "I say to you Zionists, do not rejoice. You killed him but his sons will fight you." He added "You hurt us but we hurt you…this is an open war, we will not stop until you leave our lands, we are confident and firm that we will defeat you, the war is long, but we are confident of its result."
Mishal said "If you thought that putting pressure on us and assassination and arrests would force us to leave the option of resistance then you are dreaming…our children and our grand-children will continue the resistance."
Palestinian institutions and civilian organizations at home and abroad called on the UAE to work hard to bring Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's murdered to trial in the UAE where this crime took place. Almost 500 Palestinian organizations sent a joint-letter to UAE President Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed and Dubai Governor Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid to discover the truth of what happened with regards to this assassination, and "in order for the UAE not to be a safe haven for Mossad agents." The Palestinian organizations called on Arab and Islamic countries to work to investigate those who enter their country, especially on foreign passports, as well as to prevent any Israeli official or person visiting their country due to the potential that they could be working for Mossad.

A short essay on the failure of Secularism in the Middle East
By Hanna Samir Kassab
In today’s Lebanese political environment, many leaders are debating the future political structure of Lebanon. For example, Michel Aoun and Hassan Nasrallah are pursuing the idea of a Secular Lebanon, the erasure of the current political establishment based on an appreciation for religious diversity and a creation of a new Lebanese identity outside of religion. So far, their plans to do so remain pre-maturely undefined.
In this essay, I would like to remind readers about the failures of Secularism to take root. For example, the failure of Pan-Arabism, a politically organized entity that embodied a single Arab nation from Morocco in the West to Iraq in the East; Syria to the North; and Sudan to the South promoted by Christian intellectual Jurji Zaydan. By analyzing these issues, we will be able to further understand the undeveloped idea of a Secular Lebanon.
Jurji Zaydan saw the end of the Ottoman Empire years before its actual collapse sought to create an Arab identity to usher in an Arab nation. He was the first to lay the foundations of Arab Nationalism by informing Arab readers of European political philosophy and concepts such as Secularism. He argued that Islam was just one facet of Arab identity and that Arabs should focus on their larger history. Thus, he began to incorporate Babylonian, Assyrian, Phoenician and other peoples into an Arab family. For example, Hammurabi and his Code of Laws were adopted by Zaydan as Arab even though it belongs to the Babylonian civilization. More important to Zaydan was the establishment of a common language. Arabic has many diverse dialects from East to West and so, to incorporate all peoples, the Arabic language had to be manipulated to achieve universality. Thus, in order to achieve universality, Arab language must become Secular. Zaydan was the first to forward this theory of Arab Nationalism and a homogeneous Arab people.
This conception of Nationalism was advocated by a Christian who saw that Secularism was the only way the Christian was to be included in the wider Political Discourse. Some Muslim and Arab leaders reacted poorly to these ideas and there are two reasons for this. First, Zaydan was seen as a threat to Islam, simply because as he was a Christian. Leaders did not accept his ideas because they were written with a “Christian pen”. His desire was to Secularize Arabic, the Holy Language of Islam. This is seen as apostasy and rejected by Muslim leadership.
Thus, when arguing for Secularism, one must first address the failures of Arab Nationalism and Secularism. It is irresponsible to work toward something when one is unaware of past failures and its repercussions. As British statesman Edmund Burke said “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”. Aoun and his allies want to promote unity through the common thread of Lebanese Nationalism. However, Lebanese Nationalism is not yet fully formed. Some have different ideas for Lebanon, others don’t even want to see it on a map. How then would one expect to establish a Secular Lebanese state based on Lebanese Nationalism? I understand that Imperial European powers had a role to play in dividing the Middle East, that is a given. However, this does not erase the facts presented in this essay; they cannot be neglected, but must be confronted with energy.
The self-titled Father of a Secular Lebanon, Michel Aoun, states that Lebanon is unprepared for Secularism, but will be in the future. What does this mean? Is he serious about Secularism or is he is simply an opportunist who is trying to get into power by towing the line of his allies? This is of course dangerous to the stability and existence of Lebanon. I would like to challenge Aoun to further develop this discussion of Secularism before there are any future political alterations.


A Defensive Buildup in the Gulf
February 1, 2010
By George Friedman
This weekend’s newspapers were filled with stories about how the United States is providing ballistic missile defense (BMD) to four countries on the Arabian Peninsula. The New York Times carried a front-page story on the United States providing anti-missile defenses to Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman, as well as stationing BMD-capable, Aegis-equipped warships in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, the front page of The Washington Post carried a story saying that “the Obama administration is quietly working with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies to speed up arms sales and rapidly upgrade defenses for oil terminals and other key infrastructure in a bid to thwart future attacks by Iran, according to former and current U.S. and Middle Eastern government officials.”
Obviously, the work is no longer “quiet.” In fact, Washington has been publicly engaged in upgrading defensive systems in the area for some time. Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus recently said the four countries named by the Times were receiving BMD-capable Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) batteries, and at the end of October the United States carried out its largest-ever military exercises with Israel, known as Juniper Cobra.
More interesting than the stories themselves was the Obama administration’s decision to launch a major public relations campaign this weekend regarding these moves. And the most intriguing question out of all this is why the administration decided to call everyone’s attention to these defensive measures while not mentioning any offensive options.
The Iranian Nuclear Question
U.S. President Barack Obama spent little time on foreign policy in his Jan. 27 State of the Union message, though he did make a short, sharp reference to Iran. He promised a strong response to Tehran if it continued its present course; though this could have been pro forma, it seemed quite pointed. Early in his administration, Obama had said he would give the Iranians until the end of 2009 to change their policy on nuclear weapons development. But the end of 2009 came, and the Iranians continued their policy.
All along, Obama has focused on diplomacy on the Iran question. To be more precise, he has focused on bringing together a coalition prepared to impose “crippling sanctions” on the Iranians. The most crippling sanction would be stopping Iran’s gasoline imports, as Tehran imports about 35 percent of its gasoline. Such sanctions are now unlikely, as China has made clear that it is not prepared to participate — and that was before the most recent round of U.S. weapon sales to Taiwan. Similarly, while the Russians have indicated that their participation in sanctions is not completely out of the question, they also have made clear that time for sanctions is not near. We suspect that the Russian time frame for sanctions will keep getting pushed back.
Therefore, the diplomatic option appears to have dissolved. The Israelis have said they regard February as the decisive month for sanctions, which they have indicated is based on an agreement with the United States. While previous deadlines of various sorts regarding Iran have come and gone, there is really no room after February. If no progress is made on sanctions and no action follows, then the decision has been made by default that a nuclear-armed Iran is acceptable.
The Americans and the Israelis have somewhat different views of this based on different geopolitical realities. The Americans have seen a number of apparently extreme and dangerous countries develop nuclear weapons. The most important example was Maoist China. Mao Zedong had argued that a nuclear war was not particularly dangerous to China, as it could lose several hundred million people and still win the war. But once China developed nuclear weapons, the wild talk subsided and China behaved quite cautiously. From this experience, the United States developed a two-stage strategy.
First, the United States believed that while the spread of nuclear weapons is a danger, countries tend to be circumspect after acquiring nuclear weapons. Therefore, overreaction by United States to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by other countries is unnecessary and unwise.
Second, since the United States is a big country with widely dispersed population and a massive nuclear arsenal, a reckless country that launched some weapons at the United States would do minimal harm to the United States while the other country would face annihilation. And the United States has emphasized BMD to further mitigate — if not eliminate — the threat of such a limited strike to the United States.
Israel’s geography forces it to see things differently. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth while simultaneously working to attain nuclear weapons. While the Americans take comfort in the view that the acquisition of nuclear weapons has a sobering effect on a new nuclear power, the Israelis don’t think the Chinese case necessarily can be generalized. Moreover, the United States is outside the range of the Iranians’ current ballistic missile arsenal while Israel is not. And a nuclear strike would have a particularly devastating effect on Israel. Unlike the United States, Israel is small country with a highly concentrated population. A strike with just one or two weapons could destroy Israel.
Therefore, Israel has a very different threshold for risk as far as Iran is concerned. For Israel, a nuclear strike from Iran is improbable, but would be catastrophic if it happened. For the United States, the risk of an Iranian strike is far more remote, and would be painful but not catastrophic if it happened. The two countries thus approach the situation very differently.
How close the Iranians are to having a deliverable nuclear weapon is, of course, a significant consideration in all this. Iran has not yet achieved a testable nuclear device. Logic tells us they are quite far from a deliverable nuclear weapon. But the ability to trust logic varies as the risk grows. The United States (and this is true for both the Bush and Obama administrations) has been much more willing to play for time than Israel can afford to be. For Israel, all intelligence must be read in the context of worst-case scenarios.
Diverging Interests and Grand Strategy
It is also important to remember that Israel is much less dependent on the United States than it was in 1973. Though U.S. aid to Israel continues, it is now a much smaller percentage of Israeli gross domestic product. Moreover, the threat of sudden conventional attack by Israel’s immediate neighbors has disappeared. Egypt is at peace with Israel, and in any case, its military is too weak to mount an attack. Jordan is effectively an Israeli ally. Only Syria is hostile, but it presents no conventional military threat. Israel previously has relied on guarantees that the United States would rush aid to Israel in the event of war. But it has been a generation since this has been a major consideration for Israel. In the minds of many, the Israeli-U.S. relationship is stuck in the past. Israel is not critical to American interests the way it was during the Cold War. And Israel does not need the United States the way it did during the Cold War. While there is intelligence cooperation in the struggle against jihadists, even here American and Israeli interests diverge.
And this means that the United States no longer has Israeli national security as an overriding consideration — and that the United States cannot compel Israel to pursue policies Israel regards as dangerous.
Given all of this, the Obama administration’s decision to launch a public relations campaign on defensive measures just before February makes perfect sense. If Iran develops a nuclear capability, a defensive capability might shift Iran’s calculus of the risks and rewards of the military option.
Assume, for example, that the Iranians decided to launch a nuclear missile at Israel or Iran’s Arab neighbors with which its relations are not the best. Iran would have only a handful of missiles, and perhaps just one. Launching that one missile only to have it shot down would represent the worst-case scenario for Iran. Tehran would have lost a valuable military asset, it would not have achieved its goal and it would have invited a devastating counterstrike. Anything the United States can do to increase the likelihood of an Iranian failure therefore decreases the likelihood that Iran would strike until they have more delivery systems and more fissile material for manufacturing more weapons.
The U.S. announcement of the defensive measures therefore has three audiences: Iran, Israel and the American public. Israel and Iran obviously know all about American efforts, meaning the key audience is the American public. The administration is trying to deflect American concerns about Iran generated both by reality and Israel by showing that effective steps are being taken.
There are two key weapon systems being deployed, the PAC-3 and the Aegis/Standard Missile-3 (SM-3). The original Patriot, primarily an anti-aircraft system, had a poor record — especially as a BMD system — during the first Gulf War. But that was almost 20 years ago. The new system is regarded as much more effective as a terminal-phase BMD system, such as the medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) developed by Iran, and performed much more impressively in this role during the opening of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. In addition, Juniper Cobra served to further integrate a series of American and Israeli BMD interceptors and sensors, building a more redundant and layered system. This operation also included the SM-3, which is deployed aboard specially modified Aegis-equipped guided missile cruisers and destroyers. The SM-3 is one of the most successful BMD technologies currently in the field and successfully brought down a wayward U.S. spy satellite in 2008.
Nevertheless, a series of Iranian Shahab-3s is a different threat than a few Iraqi Scuds, and the PAC-3 and SM-3 have yet to be proven in combat against such MRBMs — something the Israelis are no doubt aware of. War planners must calculate the incalculable; that is what makes good generals pessimists.
The Obama administration does not want to mount an offensive action against Iran. Such an operation would not be a single strike like the 1981 Osirak attack in Iraq. Iran has multiple nuclear sites buried deep and surrounded by air defenses. And assessing the effectiveness of airstrikes would be a nightmare. Many days of combat at a minimum probably would be required, and like the effectiveness of defensive weapons systems, the quality of intelligence about which locations to hit cannot be known until after the battle.
A defensive posture therefore makes perfect sense for the United States. Washington can simply defend its allies, letting them absorb the risk and then the first strike before the United States counterstrikes rather than rely on its intelligence and offensive forces in a pre-emptive strike. This defensive posture on Iran fits American grand strategy, which is always to shift such risk to partners in exchange for technology and long-term guarantees.
The Arabian states can live with this, albeit nervously, since they are not the likely targets. But Israel finds its assigned role in U.S. grand strategy far more difficult to stomach. In the unlikely event that Iran actually does develop a weapon and does strike, Israel is the likely target. If the defensive measures do not convince Iran to abandon its program and if the Patriots allow a missile to leak through, Israel has a national catastrophe. It faces an unlikely event with unacceptable consequences.
Israel’s Options
It has options, although a long-range conventional airstrike against Iran is really not one of them. Carrying out a multiday or even multiweek air campaign with Israel’s available force is too likely to be insufficient and too likely to fail. Israel’s most effective option for taking out Iran’s nuclear activities is itself nuclear. Israel could strike Iran from submarines if it genuinely intended to stop Iran’s program.
The problem with this is that much of the Iranian nuclear program is sited near large cities, including Tehran. Depending on the nuclear weapons used and their precision, any Israeli strikes could thus turn into city-killers. Israel is not able to live in a region where nuclear weapons are used in counterpopulation strikes (regardless of the actual intent behind launching). Mounting such a strike could unravel the careful balance of power Israel has created and threaten relationships it needs. And while Israel may not be as dependent on the United States as it once was, it does not want the United States completely distancing itself from Israel, as Washington doubtless would after an Israeli nuclear strike.
The Israelis want Iran’s nuclear program destroyed, but they do not want to be the ones to try to do it. Only the United States has the force needed to carry out the strike conventionally. But like the Bush administration, the Obama administration is not confident in its ability to remove the Iranian program surgically. Washington is concerned that any air campaign would have an indeterminate outcome and would require extremely difficult ground operations to determine the strikes’ success or failure. Perhaps even more complicated is the U.S. ability to manage the consequences, such as a potential attempt by Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian meddling in already extremely delicate situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Iran does not threaten the United States, the United States therefore is in no hurry to initiate combat. And so the United States has launched a public relations campaign about defensive measures, hoping to affect Iranian calculations while remaining content to let the game play itself out.
Israel’s option is to respond to the United States with its intent to go nuclear, something Washington does not want in a region where U.S. troops are fighting in countries on either side of Iran. Israel might calculate that its announcement would force the United States to pre-empt an Israeli nuclear strike with conventional strikes. But the American response to Israel cannot be predicted. It is therefore dangerous for a small regional power to try to corner a global power.
With the adoption of a defensive posture, we have now seen the U.S. response to the February deadline. This response closes off no U.S. options (the United States can always shift its strategy when intelligence indicates), it increases the Arabian Peninsula’s dependence on the United States, and it possibly causes Iran to recalculate its position. Israel, meanwhile, finds itself in a box, because the United States calculates that Israel will not chance a conventional strike and fears a nuclear strike on Iran as much as the United States does.
In the end, Obama has followed the Bush strategy on Iran — make vague threats, try to build a coalition, hold Israel off with vague promises, protect the Arabian Peninsula, and wait — to the letter. But along with this announcement, we would expect to begin to see a series of articles on the offensive deployment of U.S. forces, as good defensive posture requires a strong offensive option.

Follow the money
Last Updated: February 04. 2010
UAE / February 4. 2010

When Salah Ezzedine’s alleged pyramid scheme collapsed, it left thousands of Lebanese Shia with empty bank accounts – and presented Hizbollah with a crisis of authenticity. Joshua Hersh reports from Beirut.

In retrospect, there were plenty of signs that Salah Ezzedine’s investment operation did not entirely make sense. The promised rates of return – 40 per cent, 60 per cent, 80 per cent – would later get the most attention, but surely the paperwork ought to have set off alarm bells as well. By nearly all accounts, the sole record that Ezzedine provided to his many clients in Lebanon’s mainly Shia south was a cheque for exactly the amount they had invested with him. No quarterly statements, no balance sheets with pie charts and annuities and APRs. So long as they enjoyed collecting regular payments on their investment, all Ezzedine’s clients had to do was keep that cheque safely tucked away in their wallets. If they ever wanted out, they could take it down to the bank, and the money was theirs.

Of course, that was assuming there even was paperwork. Ezzedine, who was arrested in August for allegedly defrauding thousands of individuals, was so trusted in South Lebanon that, especially towards the end, few of his customers bothered to ask for anything like a receipt, or, for that matter, where the money was being invested.

When they did, the answers he is said to have offered were as varied as they were suspect: steel, diamonds, titanium, zirconium, gold mines and petrol in Iran, oil in Eastern Europe, oil in Africa, iron in the Gambia, shoes and leather in China, defective clothing (for resale as fabric), old ships (for resale as scrap metal), construction in the Gulf, poultry in Brazil.

Then again, the dividends had always arrived on time. “When he said the money would be in your hands in 200 days, it would be there,” one investor told me. “Not 201 days, not 202.” Among a certain portion of Shia society, Ezzedine earned renown as a patron, a father figure; he was “Haj Salah” – “an angel” in the words of one investor, “close to perfection,” according to another. The whole South, it seemed, was benefiting from Ezzedine’s largesse, and not just through the donations he frequently made to local charities or the medical supplies he provided for the ill. As the mayor of Maaroub, the southern village where Ezzedine was born, told me last autumn, it seemed for a time like everyone in town was trading in their beat-up sedans for brand-new BMW X-5s or Cadillac Escalades.

The Shia of South Lebanon have long been defined by their poverty and squalor, and so the great wealth that Ezzedine brought to his corner of the country may have seemed like another sign that something was amiss. But the riches that Ezzedine showered on his investors were only one part of a prevailing trend: the South was changing, and Lebanon’s formerly-poor Shia had been rising steadily toward prosperity. Once the poorest sect in the country, their ranks now included some of the richest individuals in Lebanon, Ezzedine, evidently, among them.

This being South Lebanon, no entity was more closely tied to this shifting economic reality – as both catalyst and beneficiary – than Hizbollah. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that when Ezzedine’s business dealings suddenly went sour all eyes turned to the party. According to residents of the South, and several people affiliated with Hizbollah, Ezzedine went missing in August. In a fit of desperation, he had called up a wealthy Lebanese friend and asked to borrow several million dollars, promising to pay it back in 10 days, and then disappeared. His friends and family worried that he had been kidnapped. Around the same time, a Hizbollah member of parliament named Hussein Hajj Hassan decided to cash out his investment with Ezzedine. He took his cheque, for $200,000, to the bank, and received an unwelcome surprise: the account was empty. Ezzedine was broke.

Hizbollah then took the lead in the search for Ezzedine. According to party and legal sources, Ezzedine tried to throw off his pursuers by placing mobile phone calls from his hiding place in Beirut using foreign SIM cards. Finally, Ezzedine’s driver gave him up to Hizbollah, and the party videotaped the capture and held Ezzedine for several days, hoping to learn what he had done with the money, before turning him, and the videotape, over to the police.

When the dust settled, some 10,000 Lebanese Shia had been bilked, collectively, out of approximately $300 million. (Initial news reports put the figure as high as $1 billion, but that calculation included the loss of non-existent “earnings”.) In many cases, the sums amounted to an entire life’s savings, and more. I met one southern merchant who told me he had sold two apartments he owned in Beirut and ploughed the profits – plus his other savings – into an account with Ezzedine; he lost $500,000. “I’m willing to die,” he said. “But just give me back the money, so I can give it to my children.”

In the press, Ezzedine became “the Lebanese Bernie Madoff” – a reference to the New York financier who defrauded an array of high-profile investors out of $50 billion – but it was his apparent links to Hizbollah that proved irresistible to the media. In addition to the news that MP Hassan had been one of his investors, there were reports that Ezzedine had a close relationship with party leaders. It was said that he could arrange a meeting with Hizbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, “within a few minutes” (although this was something that, if true, would not be unique among major businessmen in the South). Meanwhile, investor after investor told reporters they decided to entrust Ezzedine with their money because they believed him, correctly or not, to be backed by Hizbollah.

The implication, savoured in the Western media and certain portions of the Lebanese press, was that Hizbollah may have played a role in facilitating Ezzedine’s business – and could thus be considered complicit in whatever corrupt dealings he had. As the Financial Times wrote, the saga “threatened to embarrass Hizbollah,” which “prides itself on its austere religious image.” NOW Lebanon, a news website backed by figures close to the governing March 14 alliance, put it more succinctly: “Ezzedine Shows Hizbollah’s Moral Bankruptcy.”

Hizbollah vigorously denied the reports of an official relationship with Ezzedine, and in the months that have passed since the scandal broke, no convincing evidence of one has emerged. (In fact, very little about Ezzedine’s operation has been determined – it is still not known, even to prosecutors, whether Ezzedine was corrupt from the outset or, as he claims, merely the victim of bearish markets and business dealings gone bad.) But the party was clearly concerned about the fallout from the episode. Early news reports from the South indicated that, no matter who turned out to be at fault, victims of Ezzedine’s scheme were determined to hold Hizbollah accountable for their losses.

The party formed a “crisis network” to help investors who had lost their savings and started a fund to get people back on their feet, although they limited their aid in an attempt to avoid the appearance of accepting responsibility for the losses. Hizbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who is typically more comfortable above the fray, addressed the controversy twice in the weeks after Ezzedine was arrested, taking pains to argue that Hizbollah was as much a victim as anyone else.

If Hizbollah seemed to be on the defensive, it was not without cause. The Ezzedine scandal may not have reflected directly on Hizbollah, but it had clearly revealed both a fissure in the party’s carefully cultivated image and a threat to its unity – one that was directly related to the South’s growing prosperity and the party’s concomitant move toward the political mainstream.

an investor who pooled money from poor villagers together to buy into Ezzedine’s scheme shows cheques that were written by Ezzedine as guarantees, none of which are valid today Photograph by Brian Denton
Since 1992, when Hizbollah decided to enter electoral politics in Lebanon, the party had undergone a subtle transformation from within. As the country’s civil war came to an end, Hizbollah was the only major combatant to retain its weapons, doing so in the name of resistance against Israel, which still occupied portions of South Lebanon. But the party also needed to retain its claim as the voice of the voiceless – another key to the legitimacy of a party whose roots lay in the political mobilisation of poor Shia in the 1970s.

But while normalisation and immersion into mainstream politics has not led to Hizbollah’s disarming – a point of great contention in Lebanon and beyond – it did mean that top officials in the party increasingly encountered the trappings of political power, and a new class of elite Shia emerged. For Hizbollah’s supporters, this has raised a fundamental question, which the Ezzedine scandal cast in a new light: As Hizbollah transitioned toward the centre of political and economic power, and away from its origins as a radical militant organisation, could it be assured of maintaining the loyalty of its supporters – particularly those, like Ezzedine’s victims, who have been left behind?

In 1999, a Lebanese-American academic named Lara Deeb met a prominent Hizbollah figure for an interview. “He was thin and young,” she recalled recently. “He didn’t seem to care much about his appearance.” She described him as having “that Revolutionary look” – meaning the Iranian Revolution – with a trimmed beard and nondescript clothes. When Deeb, who wrote a book on Lebanon’s Shia, met the same official seven or eight years later, he had risen in the party establishment – and it showed. “He looked totally different,” Deeb said. “He wore Diesel jeans and a designer watch and was smoking a big Cohiba. The transformation was amazing.”

In the aftermath of the Ezzedine scandal, transformations like this were the subject of a lot of discussion in Beirut. People would point out that the party’s MPs (of which there are now 10) drive around town in BMWs and Range Rovers, and dine at fancy restaurants. More than one concerned Hizbollah supporter told me that in the Dahiyeh – the southern suburbs of Beirut mostly inhabited by Hizbollah backers – many Shia women had taken to wearing designer-label headscarves worth $300.

In early October, Ibrahim al Amin, the CEO of the generally pro-“resistance” newspaper al Akhbar, suggested that the scandal was “a warning” for Hizbollah: “It is extremely odd that this society”, al Amin wrote, referring to Hizbollah’s supporters, “which had for generations followed an ascetic lifestyle, suddenly decided to switch to one that entails living beyond its means … [one] that is incompatible with the principles of asceticism and self-sacrifice for a cause that calls for sacrifice in human life and human blood.”

Soon others piled on. In the pages of al Akhbar, a series of op-eds debated whether, in acceding to the capitalist impulses of modern society, the movement was losing sight of first principles. In its most extreme formulation, as the al Akhbar reporter Amal Khalil, a resident of South Lebanon, expressed it to me this autumn, “There is a worry that if [some members] live this luxury life, they won’t be anymore willing to fight or struggle or die.”

A few weeks after the Salah Ezzedine news broke, I drove into South Lebanon to survey the damage. My first stop was the village of Sh’hur, just below a bend in the Litani River, where I met Ali Zain, the town’s ebullient mayor, who I had been told knew Ezzedine personally. Zain works out of a spacious office in Sh’hur’s municipal building, which he had decorated himself in what might be called upscale bachelor pad chic: black leather couches, copious communications equipment (mobile phones, landlines, radios), a variety of samurai swords. Since arriving in town, I been struck by the place’s surprising affluence. Sh’hur is not your ordinary southern village, or at least, it’s not what you’d ordinarily expect to find in Lebanon’s mainly agricultural South. The streets are wide and neatly paved, with high curbs and evenly spaced trash bins and public benches, all outfitted with a certain civic uniformity. “You don’t see this in the southern villages,” my translator, a Lebanese journalist named Moe Ali Nayel, remarked as we drove through town. “This is totally new to me.”

It was evident that the economic condition of Lebanon’s Shia had changed substantially. For decades, they were considered “the garbage collectors of Lebanon,” the nation’s “despised stepchildren”, and cursed as mitweleh – a derogatory racial slur. As Lebanon’s most dispossessed caste, they were also primed for political mobilisation, which is what Hizbollah did in the early 1980s, when it introduced itself as not merely as an Islamic resistance movement against Israeli occupation, but as a voice for “the downtrodden in Lebanon and the world.” Part of the long-standing promise, and appeal, of Hizbollah was that it would help the Shia fight a system that had chronically neglected them.

But by 2008, when the UNDP and the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs looked at the economic situation across Lebanon, the Shia were no longer the poorest sect. Instead, the report determined that the country’s largely Sunni North now had even higher rates of poverty.

A large mosque built by Salah Ezzedine in the village of Maaroub, allegedly constructed with funds from a fraudulent investment scheme. “His style was everything had to be the newest, the best,” one village resident said. Photograph by Brian Denton
What had happened was not the end of Shia poverty, but the arrival of the Shia millionaire. (That same UNDP study found 42 per cent of the South living in poverty.) Lebanon’s Shia had been moving abroad in search of economic opportunities for almost a century to places like Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Chile and Australia – a migration whose pace quickened beginning in the 1970s as Lebanon’s civil war exploded. Although some took part in unsavory businesses like oil or diamonds, many found untapped potential to make a living in mundane businesses: generator sales, plastic chair manufacturing, supermarkets. In fact, in many cases, they made not just a living, but a killing. One banker told me that a young person from the South with the right connections could go to Africa today and become a millionaire within a couple of years. “And not just one or two million,” he said. “We’re talking many millions.”

Salah Ezzedine’s life, as various acquaintances and news accounts have sketched it, appears to mirror this rise. Ezzedine was born in 1962 in Maaroub, a village a few kilometres from Sh’hur, to an upwardly mobile family. His father owned property and a business – a fabrics shop – in downtown Beirut, and the family spent much of their time away from the South. When he was a teenager, residents in Maaroub recall, Ezzedine was as ambitious as he was industrious, and he would often spend his free time working at his father’s shop. When his father travelled abroad to buy wholesale, Ezzedine would run the shop himself.

Ezzedine’s family is thought to have made some of its money in Latin America – people in Maaroub told me they believe members of his family had fled to Santiago, Chile, after the arrest. Ezzedine’s own international connections are harder to pinpoint, but his ambitions have always laid outside Lebanon. His first commercial enterprise, which he started in the 1980s, was a travel agency that led haj expeditions to Mecca. He had a partner in that initial business, and sometime later split off to form his own haj initiative, which he called Bab Salaam – the Door to Peace. Bab Salaam hajjs were five-star affairs, famous around the South for their extravagance. “Ezzeddine’s style was everything had to be the newest, the best,” a Maaroub resident named Abu Islam told me. “For transportation, he’d have a brand new bus, with zero mileage. The hotel they are staying in, he would book it for the whole year.” It was also, apparently, a money-losing venture, but the haj business served a second purpose: it helped Ezzedine establish close ties with both the Hizbollah political establishment and the local villagers, who would become his future clientele. He became, in the words of one Lebanese Shia, “Not just haj himself, but master of the haj.”

In the aftermath of Ezzedine’s fall, the word “greed” could be heard across the south, in a widespread fit of self-recrimination, but a surer truth was that stories like Ezzedine’s had helped create the impression that only a bit of good fortune separated poor and rich Shia – though in actuality the gulf was larger than ever. Near-instant wealth seemed not just possible but probable, and the South was ripe for a get-rich-quick scheme.

“Being a successful businessman, and religious, that played into this image that we can trust him,” Ali Zain told me when we met in his office. “His haj business helped a lot in creating this. That was one of the best in Lebanon. Maybe a bit more expensive, a bit of luxury – people felt good, they came back and said good things, and it played well to his image.”

“There’s a saying in the South: ‘Your money is your soul,’” Zain told me. “When people handed [Ezzedine] their money, it was handing him a piece of their soul. It’s logical – whatever you achieve in life, it equals your life. For people to give up everything they earned and worked for, it means they had no hesitation.”

And when the people lost their money with Ezzedine, “It was as though they had lost their souls.”

The obvious question is whether the party is at risk of losing its own “soul” – in this case, the staunch and unwavering support of its Shia constituents in the south – in the process of moving from the armed periphery to the governing centre. Analysts have waged fierce debates about whether Hizbollah’s recent governing responsibilities will move its agenda in a more moderate direction. Whether the financial perquisites of power might precipitate a similar shift – and, in turn, separate the party’s leaders from its supporters – is anyone’s guess.

Critics and allies alike note a certain cognitive dissonance that exists between the ascetic image the party prefers to project, and the practical realities of its proximity to power. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Lebanese academic who is close to Hizbollah’s political element, calls this “the Nasrallah effect”. “People look at Hizbollah through the prism of [Nasrallah], and he represents austerity. This is a guy who lives underground, he doesn’t see the light of day, he’s a Sheikh, he doesn’t wear fashionable clothes, he sacrificed his son to martyrdom. You expect everybody to be like him, and when you see a discrepancy, you feel there is something wrong going on.” The result is what Khaled Saghieh, the editor of al Akhbar calls “a problem of identity”. That is, a party member might find himself saying, “I identify with Nasrallah, but so does Salah Ezzedine. How can that be?”

But does this sense of alienation exist among the party rank-and-file? Thanassis Cambanis, a journalist whose book about the Shia allegiance to Hizbollah, A Privilege to Die, comes out this fall, told me he has never encountered this sentiment in the South, although he acknowledges that it would not be inconceivable. “If you start to see party members all driving great big SUVs while everyone else has normal cars – or if Hassan Nasrallah started living in luxury,” he says, “that would start to compromise Hizbollah’s appeal.”

One Hezbollah supporter told me in dismay that he had heard reports that the daughter of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hizbollah military commander assassinated by Israel in 2008, had been spotted dining at an upscale restaurant in Verdun, a trendy Beirut neighbourhood. “I was horrified!” he said.

Hizbollah figures, for their part, contend that there is no contradiction. When I spoke to Ibrahim Moussawi, the party’s spokesman, he told me that wealth was not a concern for Hizbollah. “There’s no problem with enriching yourself as long as it does not involve anything haram,” he said. “Even during the Prophet’s time there has been rich people and poor people. Khadijah” – the Prophet Mohammad’s first wife – “was a rich woman actually, a merchant. In fact it’s said that had it not been for Khadijah’s money, a lot of the work of the Prophet never would have happened.” This, of course, is true for Hizbollah as well – were it not for the wealthy members, and wealthy patrons, Hizbollah would have a hard time carrying out social-services projects, let alone arming its militias. Considerable sums also flow to Hizbollah from Iran – some say up to $100 million a year – but Nasrallah himself, in a 2006 speech, felt the need to assert the piety of these funds, referring to Iran’s contributions as “pure money”.

Ali Fayyad, a newly elected Hezbollah MP, also defended the righteousness of wealth accumulation. “We hate poverty,” Fayyad told me. “Imam Ali, he said, ‘If poverty were a man, I would kill him.’” But, Fayyad continued, “Hizbollah, it is not a small party anymore, a minority, it is a whole society. It is the party of the poor people, yes, but at the same time there are a lot of businessmen in the party, we have a lot of rich people, some elite class. This is normal, because Hizbollah has become one of the biggest parties in Lebanon.”

Internally, however, there is evidence that party figures have grown concerned about the appearance of great disparities in wealth among their ranks. Describing the aftermath of the Ezzedine scandal, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb noted, “there was a lot of – not soul searching, per se – but I would say they’re more conscious of the image they project.” After Ezzedine was arrested, according to a rumor that made the rounds in Beirut last year, Hassan Nasrallah was so concerned about the effects of conspicuous wealth on party unity that he called in the wives of the party’s MPs and demanded to know how much their headscarves cost.

When I asked Fayyad about this rumor, he dismissed it with a laugh. “Our party,” he then said, “took some procedures after Ezzedine’s problem to prevent any similar phenomenon, and to prevent any bad side effects.” He declined to specify what precisely those procedures had been.

Cambanis thinks that the Ezzedine scandal, far from revealing some weakness within Hizbollah, may actually demonstrate the party’s resilience. “If all those revelations came out, and that doesn’t shake public support,” he said, “it argues for the case that Hizbollah has succeeded in building a big tent party.”
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For now, much remains unknown about Ezzedine’s story, and it seems doomed to remain that way. Since his arrest, Ezzedine has been in Roumieh prison, while the government undertakes the slow process of investigating his actions. For a while, prosecutors appeared to have set aside the criminal case to focus on determining whether Ezzedine has any assets that could be liquidated in order to repay his investors. This week, however, the judge investigating the Hizbollah MP Hussein Hajj Hassan’s claims against Ezzedine found cause to bring the case to trial, and recommended that Ezzedine be sentenced to three years in prison.

Ezzedine has yet to speak publicly about the case, and has apparently discouraged his supporters from doing so as well. (His lawyer, Ali Achi, declined to speak to me for this article, or make Ezzedine available to answer questions.) Kamal Haidar, an attorney who is suing Ezzedine on behalf of a dozen investors, told me that he does not expect to recoup any of his clients’ losses. “There is no hope,” he said. “Maybe I will get back five or 10 per cent for my clients. But not now – not for three or four years. There is no money.”

Meanwhile, Ezzedine’s investors in the South are left to sift through the rubble of yet another catastrophe, and wonder whether they were duped, or just unlucky. Hassan Fneish, the mayor of Maaroub, told me in the fall that he has a hard time believing that Ezzedine was a fraud, but he doesn’t discount the possibility. He knew Ezzedine as a generous, and anonymous, donor who helped Maaroub rebuild its sports stadium and mosque after the 2006 war. “In different circumstances, you might think the guy is playing a role, just acting this way,” Fneish told me. “But he didn’t even ask people to invest. They wanted to get rich off him. And for a while, they did.”

**Joshua Hersh is a journalist living in Beirut whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and the New Republic.