The Times they are-a-Changing!
By: Joseph Hitti
28/8/04
For once there is an international agreement on Lebanon. That alone is a major development for positive change in the Land of the Cedars. But equally importantly is the fact that this agreement is between what may be considered bitter enemies on Middle East policy, namely France and the US. What more do the post-traumatic syndrome sufferers, the jaded, and the cynics among the Lebanese expect as proof that the tide has finally turned in their favor? They in fact should expect the coming months to unravel more installments in the Western confrontation with the Syrian Baath regime of Bashar Assad.

If they had any sense, meanwhile, they should take to the streets of Beirut and show the West that they, the Lebanese people, before anyone else, want to take back the night of the Syrian occupation. They should tell their story and demand their rights and their thousands of prisoners released from Syria’s prisons. They should seize control of their lives and the future of their children from the forces of backwardness and reaction and totalitarian government, and into the broad daylight and the fresh air of freedom and unhampered liberties. They should demand a government of national salvation and not another 3 years of the Syrian maid Emile Lahoud and the poodles Hariri, Berri and Jumblatt. They should demand new parliamentary elections to give them, the people, a government that works for the individual Lebanese citizen and not for the feudal families, the clerics of the religious establishment, and all the cohorts of Saudi cronies and Syrian drug dealers who are in the government today. They, in fact, should declare their own revolution against the feudal families – all of them, Christian, Druze, Shiite and Sunni – the lords, the beyks and the sheikhs, the Fakhamtak ((?????? this and Ghobtatt ((???? that, the Maali ( (?????this and the Samahat (????? (that…. They should have the sense to finally understand that their life can only begin after the agents of their death of the past 30 years are gone.

Indeed, for once it is sweet to watch the Europeans, especially the French, towing the line behind the US on political positions long held and put forth by former Prime Minister General Michel Aoun, now living in exile in Paris since his Beirut government was toppled by a US-backed Syrian military intervention. Nothing can be sweeter than seeing these fumbling “pragmatists” finally get the message and turn their sails into the wind, for only a few months ago they were still calling the Syrian dictatorship a “factor of stability”, a “trustworthy foe”, or its brutal tyrant a “cunning dictator” who “keeps his promises” in the backroom deals they made with him over the blood of the Lebanese people.

Nothing can be sweeter than listening to these Western bureaucrats sing the praises of a “democratic” Lebanon, when not long ago they declared Lebanon an ungovernable mess, a bunch of unruly tribes who could not agree on anything, simply because they – the bureaucrats - had made a deal with the Syrian tyrant. Now that the Syrian knife is on their own throats, they have found that the Syrian is their enemy, and Lebanon is suddenly gaining weight in their eyes, and they want it back on their side of the fence. They have come to realize that Lebanon was once, and now could serve again, as a platform for rebuilding democracy and spreading it across the Arab world.

But enough bitterness. We, the Lebanese, must look forward. We must realize and accept that the West loves us or hates us depending on where its interests are. And in this, the West is no better than the Arabs who love us when they must (and call us Arabs), but will kill us when they can (and call us Crusaders). So, in the end, we, the Lebanese people must understand that no one will do our laundry for us because they love us as our mothers did. They will do our laundry only when its suits them. Our interests as a Lebanese people are only ours, and only we know them and must work to get them.

Consequently, if the West has turned a page in its relationship with Syria and Lebanon, it does not help us to remain bitter about the fact that the US sold us to Syria 15 years ago. Nor should we be bitter with Syria once it packs and leaves and ends its occupation. Our focus should be to seize this opportunity and moment of change and leverage them to our benefit and interests, and never again be naïve enough to believe that anyone will help us. They need us and we need them. Period.

The EU and the US have realized that Lebanon is a more fertile ground than Iraq in creating a focus of democracy, freedoms, and economic growth, given the history of Lebanon and the immense economic power of the Lebanese Diaspora, which, if conditions become friendlier to a free market and to civil freedoms, will pump blood back into the Lebanese system. Naturally, none of this will happen as long as one Syrian soldier remains standing on the Lebanese side of the border. Everyone knows that Syria holds Lebanon as a hostage, and so now the new enemies of Syria – France and the US – want to weaken Syria by rescuing the hostage from the claws of Assad. And so Syrian power must begin declining, and it will do so in Lebanon first.

Informed sources in the US government say that the US has chosen Lebanon as the next battleground in the war on terrorism. The US wants to deal a deadly blow to Syria, at least politically, and perhaps militarily, and it must topple the Baath regime of Bashar Assad in order to unwind the terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon and Syria and remove the leverages Syria has created with this infrastructure. The handover of the US diplomatic pouch to the new US ambassador to Beirut this past month is timed with the decision to begin implementing the Bush doctrine on the Lebanese-Syrian front.

The statement last week by the Syrian maid Emile Lahoud of his desire (actually, his instructions from Damascus) to stay in power after an amendment of the Constitution, was timed immediately after the Syrian poodles Hariri and Berri returned from Damascus with their directives to promote the Syrian position. This move by Syria and its lackeys was an opening salvo in the confrontation between the West and Assad of Syria, and it was instantaneously rebutted by several European governments and the US in statements re-affirming their opposition to a Syrian push to amend the Lebanese Constitution and re-impose the maid Lahoud as president one more time on Lebanon.

Unlike in 1988 when the scum-throttle US envoy Richard Murphy told the free Lebanese to either agree to the Syrian choice for president (Michael Daher) or suffer chaos (i.e. Syrian shelling, mayhem and brutality), this time the US has dispatched a brand new ambassador with the specific mission to rid Lebanon of the Syrian occupation. Sweet revenge, Mr. Murphy, and we are glad it is happening in your lifetime.

So the US-Syrian confrontation is afoot, and Lebanon is once again the arena. But this time, unlike the Taef fiasco of Bush-father that created the current anomaly and allowed the pro-terrorist forces of Syria to transform Lebanon into a giant terrorist camp, Bush-son is on the right track. A confrontation is the only way out of the 30-year old stalemate that Syria created with its invasion and destruction of Lebanon. Bashar Assad has now had 15 months since May 2003 to study the Powell demands and make the right decision, but he has refused and cornered himself in his own hole because he lacks the courage and the audacity to be an agent for positive change in Syria, and by extension in Lebanon. Now he has to be plucked out of his own rat hole, like Saddam!

Assad knows – and with him the decaying Baathist thieves of his father – that his end is near and that he has no way out except down. Their position is untenable and go they must. Down the dustbins of history, and into one of the darkest annals of Arab and Middle Eastern history. Since it took power in the 1960s, the Syrian Baath Party has destroyed the very fiber of Syrian economic power by decimating the once-prosperous merchant middle class and creating a dictatorship run by the peasant Alawite minority sect at the exorbitant price of a 40-year old state of emergency. It used the latter to institute an educational system that is one of the most backwards in the world (no matter what Buthaina Shaaban thinks), and transform the country into an underdeveloped country with one of the lowest per-capita incomes in the world. The Baathists thugs who rule Syria today have thrived on terrorizing their own people, silencing its free thinkers and its press, and running a profitable drug-smuggling empire.

Not only has the Baath Party destroyed Syria, but its occupation of Lebanon has done the same to a once-prosperous and vibrant Lebanon, which is today equal to Syria in underdevelopment, educational and economic decline, absence of civil freedoms and human rights. And as if all that was not enough, the Syria of the Baath Party twice lost wars against Israel (1967 and 1973), and each time Israel got closer to Damascus. Today Israeli soldiers stand on the Golan Heights at a distance of only 40 miles from the Syrian capital. Which explains why Syria never dared to open a third war on the Golan Heights, because another war would take the Israeli army into downtown Damascus, the heart of the “beating heart” of the Arab world.

So, the Baathist cowards in 1974 chose to fight Israel via Lebanon. They first rode the PLO as their Trojan horse into Beirut, and when the PLO was evicted in 1982, the Baathists recruited the Shiite Lebanese militias (Amal and Hezbollah) who were – and still are – dumb enough to serve as gun fodder for the Syrians. Consider that between 1974 and today, hundred of thousands of Lebanese have died and hundreds of Christian and Shiite villages in the South have been destroyed – by Syria and its proxy terrorist organizations and, in retaliation, by Israel – under the pretense of liberating Palestine or some other nebulous Arab causes. In contrast, Syria signed a ceasefire with Israel in 1974 and not one bullet was ever fired since across the Golan Heights, which Israel not only occupies, but has annexed. The Lebanese people, and especially the Shiite community, are largely responsible for the destruction of their country because they agreed to make Lebanon the only Arab war front against Israel.

So what now? Now that the times are changing. Those among the Lebanese who stood firm and rejected the Faustian deal for over 3 decades are now vindicated. Beyond the presidential election in Lebanon, the US-Syrian confrontation must inevitably end with the toppling of the Assad’s Baath regime in Damascus, the evacuation of Syrian forces and intelligence services from Lebanese soil, the dismantling of Hezbollah, a return of free governments and democratic rule to Lebanon, the return of all the Lebanese displaced, refugees, and exiles to their towns, villages, and country, and the release of those Lebanese prisoners who are lucky enough to have survived the ordeal of decades in Syrian jails.

Now the accounting must begin. The traitors who have sold their country, the thieves, highway robbers, and other cronies and Mafiosi who are in the Lebanese government today should prepare themselves to either pack their bags for a long exile in the remote Syrian desert, or prepare their defense for the crimes they have committed against their people and country in front of a rehabilitated Lebanese justice system.

Edgartown, Massachusetts
28 August 2004