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What is Lebanon to America?

As the administration deliberates options, analysts warn of potential dangers in confronting Damascus. “If our objective is to free Lebanon from Syria’s grip, then we have to understand that Syria has a vital interest in Lebanon and will act accordingly,” said Martin Indyk, former State Department and National Security Council staff member now at the […]

As the administration deliberates options, analysts warn of potential dangers in confronting Damascus. “If our objective is to free Lebanon from Syria’s grip, then we have to understand that Syria has a vital interest in Lebanon and will act accordingly,” said Martin Indyk, former State Department and National Security Council staff member now at the Brookings Institution.

“The last time we had a vital interest in Lebanon we sent U.S. Marines — and lost 241 of them,” he said, referring to the 1983 bombing in Beirut. “Are we ready to have people die for the sake of Lebanon’s freedom from Syria?”

The dangers, Indyk said, are partly from Hezbollah, an Islamic party whose militant wing was linked to attacks on U.S. diplomatic and military facilities and American hostage-taking in Lebanon in the 1980s. The United States needs to be “clear-headed about the stakes and the risks,” especially the prospect of turmoil pushing Lebanon into chaos again, he added. ~The Washington Post

As Justin Raimondo explained quite well yesterday, the interest in the Hariri assassination, the Syrian “occupation” of Lebanon and Syria more generally expressed by Washington is purely and simply a function of the administration carrying water for Israel…again. There is nothing remotely of value to the United States in getting the Syrians out of Lebanon, just as there are no American interests at stake in who rules in Damascus. I have not yet reached the point where I believe something to be false simply because the government claims it has proof for that thing, but its claims against Syria, or Iran, are so tired, overdone and, what is more important, irrelevant to American interests that even if there is any truth to any part of them it should not make any difference to the sort of policy we adopt.

Though I doubt it very much, not least because it has become conventional wisdom in government and media circles, Syrian intelligence might have had Hariri assassinated. Washington wasted no time in opportunistically calling for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Then again, given the outright lies we have encountered in the Western press regarding the alleged “poisoning” of Viktor Yushchenko (supposedly while he sat down to eat with the head of Ukrainian intelligence!), I have no confidence in this prevailing official opinion. Cui bono? Answering that will tell us much more about who was responsible for the Hariri assassination and who desires Lebanon and Syria to be turned into battlefields once again. Let’s remember that the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, whoever was responsible, created the atmosphere that was so brutally exploited by Ariel Sharon and the Falangist militias in the Palestinian refugee massacres of the same year. We can observe already who wants to exploit this situation to perpetuate more violence and cause greater disorder, and they are predictably the same people who have wanted to expand the war into Syria and who pushed to get us into Iraq in the first place.

Whether or not Syria aids Hizbullah, as well it might in spite of its denials, this is also none of our concern. Thank goodness the British Empire did not view American ‘harbouring’ of Irish and Indian revolutionaries in the light that we now view Syrian harbouring of what were the indigenous Lebanese resistance to the unprovoked invasion of their country–as the former, and continuing, refuge for subversives and resistance groups of all kinds from around the world it is the height of hypocrisy to hold Syria “accountable” for its aid to a group that is no better or worse than the subversives and criminals our government has aided since time out of mind. The Israelis started the war with the modern war with the Lebanese from which they are still suffering the consequences; those consequences are most unfortunate, but if a state invades its neighbour it can reasonably expect the border to be volatile for years and decades to come, especially since it has only been a few years since the final, full Israeli withdrawal. Their ill-planned war created their adversary in Hizbullah, and now they would like Americans to clean up their mess. No doubt, the Israeli government would be technically capable of destroying Syria’s field armies, but it could not absorb the political and probably economic cost of such action, nor could it suppress the resistance that would inevitably arise, as it did in Lebanon. Therefore, it delegates the task to our government, and Washington seems only too eager.

What was the American interest in aiding the Israeli invasion of 1982? Or, for that matter, what had the American interest been in sending soldiers to Lebanon in the 1950s? Establishing some dubious “peace,” changing political control over this mountainous country, or “rolling back” Syria, to borrow a phrase from the neocon manual for Near Eastern chaos, A Clean Break: New Strategy for Securing the Realm, offers no concrete advances in enhancing American security and promises very unpredictable and dangerous results for our people and the region. Add to that the near certainty that American intervention in Syria and Lebanon will lead to a worsening of conditions for the sizeable minority Christian populations of both of these ancient Christian lands, and it is by no means obvious that intervention would be ever be warranted, short of a direct act of war by the Syrian government.

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