As we and others have argued repeatedly on this blog and elsewhere, the yelps and barks of the March 14 putrid stew (Hariri, Siniora and company) during 18 months, with prodding by the Bush administration, against Hezbollah and Syria and Iran, were ineffective.
It was clear that the US administration was pushing the Hariri scumbags into the pit of civil war with Hezbollah in order to create a situation of instability which would then be used as a casus belli to intervene and extract the cancer of Hezbollah. No teeth, no muscle, no money, and definitely no planning (as has become typical of the Bush administration) was put into a serious effort.
Such an effort would have required the same tools used, for example, in the former Yugoslavia - armed interdictions and monitoring on the Lebanese-Syrian borders to deny Hezbollah its continued arming; forcing the Hariri numbskulls to negotiate directly with Israel, thus pre-empting Hezbollah's and Syria's claims to "liberation" and "resistance"; a UN Resolution under Chapter VII with the threat of war; launch pre-emptive strikes against and inside Syria to force it to stop arming Hezbollah and destabilizing Lebanon, etc.
Instead, what the US was offering its barking dogs in Beirut was talk and no walk, and like the idiots that they are, they fell for it. Especially Samir Geagea, the brute criminal from Bsharre, who was used by Bush Senior in 1990 to drive a wedge in the Christian Camp, then when Bush Senior succeeded in handing the Syrian Baathist regime all of Lebanon thanks to Geagea's treason, Geagea was thrown in jail to live like the dog that he is in an underground cell for 11 years.
In fact, the atrophied response by the US and its Lebanese March 14 airheads to Hezbollah over the past 18 months was so lame that it ended up giving Hezbollah a victory which no one needed to give it. It already has the "liberation" charade of 2000 to brag about; now it will brag about the Doha Capitulation for years more to come.
Denni Ross, the former US envoy to the Middle East, said yesterday that the Doha Agreement is "a disaster" for Washington. The biggest mistake, he said, of the US administration, was big words and no action. Syria was reprimanded and threatened without translating this tone into action on the ground.
It was clear that the US administration was pushing the Hariri scumbags into the pit of civil war with Hezbollah in order to create a situation of instability which would then be used as a casus belli to intervene and extract the cancer of Hezbollah. No teeth, no muscle, no money, and definitely no planning (as has become typical of the Bush administration) was put into a serious effort.
Such an effort would have required the same tools used, for example, in the former Yugoslavia - armed interdictions and monitoring on the Lebanese-Syrian borders to deny Hezbollah its continued arming; forcing the Hariri numbskulls to negotiate directly with Israel, thus pre-empting Hezbollah's and Syria's claims to "liberation" and "resistance"; a UN Resolution under Chapter VII with the threat of war; launch pre-emptive strikes against and inside Syria to force it to stop arming Hezbollah and destabilizing Lebanon, etc.
Instead, what the US was offering its barking dogs in Beirut was talk and no walk, and like the idiots that they are, they fell for it. Especially Samir Geagea, the brute criminal from Bsharre, who was used by Bush Senior in 1990 to drive a wedge in the Christian Camp, then when Bush Senior succeeded in handing the Syrian Baathist regime all of Lebanon thanks to Geagea's treason, Geagea was thrown in jail to live like the dog that he is in an underground cell for 11 years.
In fact, the atrophied response by the US and its Lebanese March 14 airheads to Hezbollah over the past 18 months was so lame that it ended up giving Hezbollah a victory which no one needed to give it. It already has the "liberation" charade of 2000 to brag about; now it will brag about the Doha Capitulation for years more to come.
Denni Ross, the former US envoy to the Middle East, said yesterday that the Doha Agreement is "a disaster" for Washington. The biggest mistake, he said, of the US administration, was big words and no action. Syria was reprimanded and threatened without translating this tone into action on the ground.
Raghida Dergham of al-Hayat called Doha "Hezbollah's second rescue" and argues, strangely, that Hezbollah was about to be defeated in the confrontations with the Sunnis and the Druze, but the Doha agreement came to save it from imminent collapse. The first rescue, according to Dergham, was when Israel bombed Lebanon to shreds in July 2006 and was about to defeat Hezbollah, but then resolution 1701 "saved" Hezbollah from that defeat. Raghida Dergham has long defended Hariri policies no matter what the policies are - she was pro-Syrian and pro-Hezbollah when Hariri was pro-Syrian pro-Hezbollah, and she turned anti-Syrian and anti-Hezbollah when Hariri made the turn. That is how independent and objective the press is in Lebanon; like a sunflower turns with the sun, Raghida turns with the Hariri money. The only to defeat Hezbollah militarily is through an intervention on the scales of Iraq (US coalition), or Afghanistan and Yugoslavia (NATO), and will take years of bloodshed. But no one has any balls left for such an endeavor. At least not in the foreseeable future. Hence, Doha was a capitulation by the US because it could not fight this one. Left unprovoked, Hezbollah would not have transformed this into a victory. But Bush and his March 14 cretins handed Hezbollah a victory on a silver platter.
What Doha has done is to show everyone how ineffectual the US has become, how impoverished is the imagination behind US foreign policy, and how rapidly decomposing are the theories and tenets of the neo-cons. We initially defended and supported the US move into the Middle East because Bush promised to help bring about change in the right direction. Instead, he picked on Iraq, now we know, to finish a war that his father never finished. He adopted a destabilization policy in the Middle East to turn the attention of the terrorists from western targets to local domestic targets. All of this remains tentatively acceptable to the indigenous peoples of the Middle East, if the endpoint is a serious support for reform. But instead, Bush turned - in every Arab or African country that he destabilized - to the corrupt, traditionalist, feudal, dictatorship-prone, anti-reform elites (whom we know are the root cause and the genesis of terrorism in the Middle East) to fight the terrorists and the fundamentalists. This brings the problem back to its start rather than move it away towards a sustainable solution. The solution should have been in supporting genuine reformists - human rights activists, technocrats, modernists, secularists, political parties and politicians who are agents of change and not dull and dumb status quo bastards like the March 14 scumbags of Lebanon.
Hanibaal
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