Dancing with Wolves!

Hanibaal

They all changed their minds... The US, Hariri, and March 14. They now support a constitutional amendment to allow Army Chief General Michel Suleiman who is a top-rank civil servant to become the "consensus" candidate for the presidency. The constitution right now stipulates that such a servant must be two years out of office before being eligible for the post of president.

For months, US ambassador Feltman and Saad Hariri rejected any constitutional amendment for such a purpose. Only last Friday Nov. 23, the Hariri Bloc and his March 14 cohort rejected Michel Aoun's last ditch initiative outright because it proposed another constitutional amendment as a means to resolve the stalemate.

What happened? Perhaps one of the outcomes of the Annapolis Conference was for the Americans to give Hariri the green light to agree to Suleiman as President. Suleiman is seen as pro-Syrian and pro-opposition. He is even rumored to be a Maronite of Syrian Alawi (same tribe as the Assads) background himself, three generations removed. Therefore, for the Americans to switch Saad Hariri to support a pro-Syrian candidate is meant as a goodwill gesture, a rapprochement by the Americans towards the Syrians to thank them for providing cover to the Annapolis Conference and for distancing themselves from the Iranians.

Ahmadinejad himself blasted the Syrians for going to Annapolis. Which means that Hezbollah might not necessarily support Suleiman. From cracks in the March 14 alliance to potential cracks in the opposition? No one ever said that Lebanese politics are based on principles. Still, since 2003 the Americans have been promising the Lebanese that they will never make a deal with the Syrians over the Lebanese. Then again, no one ever said that US foreign policy was based on principles either.