Answering Zelensky's Question to Israel

"Why aren't we getting weapons from you?" is the question that the beleaguered Ukrainian President Zelenskiy addressed to Israel, adding "It's fine to be a mediator, but not between Good and Evil".

Comparing the Russian offensive against his country to the German Nazis' "final solution" of exterminating the Jews, Zelenskiy wondered why is Israel reluctant to sell the Iron Dome defense system to Ukraine. Zelenskiy is himself a Jew. "Everybody knows that your missile defense systems ... can definitely help our people, save the lives of Ukrainians, of Ukrainian Jews," he said.

"We can ask why we can’t receive weapons from you, why Israel has not imposed powerful sanctions on Russia or is not putting pressure on Russian business."

The answers to these questions have been obvious for many decades, even though no one would admit them. Israel loves the Assad regime in Syria, and Syria is Russia's protégé. Despite the decades of a so-called enmity between Syria and Israel, the two countries have worked together in close cooperation over a range of issues. They cooperated over Lebanon, each one of them occupying parts of the country without ever confronting one another. They cooperated over the Golan Heights which was occupied and annexed by Israel without Syria ever trying to recuperate them. They cooperated by destroying Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization during the 1970s and 1980s. Nowadays, Israel mounts daily attacks against the Iranian organization Hezbollah's supply lines across Syria into Lebanon, without the Syrians fighting back or complaining at the UN. Syria and Israel never fought each other directly after the 1973 war, yet they had agreement after agreement over waging war via proxies in their small neighbor Lebanon while maintaining a quiet border on the Golan for 50 years. In Syria itself, the 12-year old civil war has seen Russian forces establish themselves in Syria and defend the Assad regime by driving millions of refugees, bombing and destroying entire cities, and causing massive loss of civilian life.

Israel does not want to help Ukraine because it needs Vladimir Putin's continued cooperation over Syria. If Israel helps Ukraine, Putin might retaliate by denying Israel's freedom of operation over Syria, by entering into a direct confrontation with Israel across Syrian territory, and perhaps even stirring up and escalating tensions across the Israeli-Syrian border.

In sum, the Assad regime is the dear friend of both Israel and Russia, and Israel does not want to jeopardize its love affair with Assad by alienating Putin in Ukraine.

 

Racism Aside, Putin's Savagery no Surprise

Comments by Western reporters and pundits describing the plight of Ukrainian refugees show a latent, cryptic, casual racism that they are not even aware of. 

"These people are like us", "they have blond hair and blue eyes", "these are not Syrian or Iraqi refugees", etc. are some of the comments. In other words, Syrian refugees are "foreign- or other-looking", they are "not like us", they have dark eyes and black hair (even though many northern Syrians and Kurdish people are in fact ethnically Indo-European and have light hair and eye color). But somehow the insidious message is that greater sympathy is owed the Ukrainian refugees because they look more like us than their Syrian or Iraqi partners in misery.

What is forgotten in the ongoing Russian crime against Ukraine is the fact that the monster in Moscow is himself blond and blue-eyed, and not a member of some "lesser" ethnic group daring to mistreat people who look like us. We've seen on occasion "mid-eastern-looking" members of terror groups like Daesh (or ISIS, or the Islamic State) slaughter westerners with light colored hair and eyes. I can't even believe that we have to point out this stupid ignorant attitude by "liberal-minded" journalists. But casual racism aside, we are forgetting something else that is even more important and that is barely mentioned in today's reporting.

It is Vladimir Putin himself, in cooperation with his Syrian alter ego, the dictator Bashar Assad, who for the past 11 years has been finessing the art of mass-killing from the air in his own Syria. For more than a decade, the Russian Air Force has been decimating large urban populations huddled in Syrian cities (Aleppo for example) reduced to rubble, incinerating schools and hospitals, attacking ambulances, driving millions of people out of their country into neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Syrian "technology" assisted the superior Mig and Sukhoi fighter jets by manufacturing "barrel bombs" and dropping them from helicopters over buildings and fleeing refugees. A "barrel bomb" consists of an empty oil barrel filled with ammonium nitrate and such incendiary chemicals, in addition to nails and scarps of sharp metals, that are ignited upon impact. Not to mention the chemical "chlorine" bombs.

Just like Russian soldiers are conducting their war against Ukraine, Syrian soldiers rarely engage in fighting. They "fight" from the safety of long distance artillery pounding rebel positions to a pulp, and only then do they dare advance. That is exactly what the Syrian army did during its long and brutal occupation of Lebanon between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. I personally lived through two sieges of East Beirut, one in the summer of 1978 and then again in the spring of 1981. They would never target Lebanese Resistance positions; instead they would subject civilian areas for days and weeks with incessant shelling, destroying everything, and in fact they never advanced inside these areas because they did not dare engage in street fighting with their opponents. 

In the summer of 1978, I had just gone to my graduation in West Beirut, dragging my reluctant parents to attend, and no sooner had we arrived back home that the shelling began. We lived in the basement shelter of our building, running up and down the stairs during lulls to get food and bread, check on our apartments and cars and the neighborhood. I recall we'd walk over rubble made of glass, cement, metal and wood of which apartments are made. In one instance, we were up in the apartment on the 3d floor when Israeli fighter jets flew so low that my mother was seized by panic convulsions. I had to slap her back to reality so we could continue our downward escape. The Israelis and the Syrians had an gentleman's arrangement that Israel would let Syria do what it wants, including bombing civilians, only on condition that the Syrians never fly their air force over Lebanon. How civilized of the Syrians and Israelis, while we the Lebanese - western newspapers kept saying - were killing each other. Why did the Israeli jets fly so low on that day, one can only assume they were sending a message to the Syrians to reduce the violence they were inflicting. On another day, a Syrian shell hit the outer perimeter of our building, knocking down a pillar of a balcony. 

A couple of months later, when that first round ended, I drove to the campus on the other side of the city to register from my courses for the next academic year. Again, the shelling started all of a sudden and I was trapped unable to make it home. There were three of us graduate students from the other side who ended up living in the department, sleeping on laboratory benches, until we were given a windowless room in the basement between the diving club and the museum storage room. We lived there and taught as Teaching Assistants for the next 3-4 years. I remember making it back to East Beirut in a German Embassy van, since I had met people while taking German language courses at the nearby Goethe Institute.

In the spring of 1981, I had just about completed my written thesis which I delivered to my advisor, when the shelling began. This time I wasn't about to spend another few years in a basement. So I decided to take my chances. I drove with a female fellow student through a gigantic traffic jam on the western side of the city, only to arrive to East Beirut under a deluge of fire. I drove my colleague up the Ashrafiyeh hill where she recuperated her younger sister, shells crashing all around us. Again, we drove on glass, aluminum and wooden debris, we saw cars that had been hit and that plowed into electric poles. I hurtled down from Ashrafiyeh and headed to Daoura with the shells falling like rain all around. I have no idea why I was lucky to make it home that day. I spent the next couple of months finishing my thesis and graduated in July 1981.

I can easily imagine what these Ukrainian families must be going through, carrying their lives in a few bags and running for dear life, while cowardly Russian soldiers fire their shells indiscriminately while puffing a cigarette and exchanging jokes. That is how the Syrian soldiers did it back then in Lebanon, then again after 2011 in Syria. Russia is actually recruiting Syrian mercenaries to go "fight" in Ukraine. 

How come the West is only now discovering Putin's savagery after all that he did in Syria? I guess the West assumes that blond-haired, blue-eyed children do not deserve what Putin and Assad have unleashed for decades on black-haired, dark-eyed children in Lebanon and Syria. Shame.

How Iran Rules Lebanon

At the Beirut Book Exposition over the weekend, the Hezbollah stand featured Iranian books and publications, and displayed a giant poster of Qassem Sulaymani, the Iranian Quds Corps Chief assassinated in Baghdad by a US drone attack.

Not far from the Hezbollah-Iranian stand, a choir was signing to entertain the visitors. When the choir began singing “Beirut, Lady of the World” by a famous Lebanese female singer, a group of men approached the singers and rudely cut their singing off. As other visitors approached to see what was going on, the electric power feeding the choir was cut off.

Yesterday, Monday March 7, as the exposition resumed, a young activist by the name of Shafiq Bader, who apparently was dismayed at what happened to the choir the previous day, approached the Iranian stand and began chanting, “Free free Beirut, out out Iran.” Out of nowhere, thugs affiliated with Hezbollah attacked him and began beating him violently on the head, on the back and the chest. The thugs yelled back, “there is no Beirut, there is only Tehran. There is no Lebanon, only Iran” within eyesight and earshot of the Lebanese Security Forces who have become either agents or puppets of Hezbollah. In effect, the activist Bader was arrested and interrogated while his attackers went about their business.

This is but a sample of the big chasm inside Lebanon between those who believe in Lebanon as their final identity, and those who are only Lebanese in name but with an Iranian identity. Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shiites in general indeed have no consideration for Lebanon as their ultimate identity, but are rather Iranians disguised as Lebanese. Just like the Lebanese Sunni Muslims who, since independence in 1921 and through the 1970s and 1980s, deemed Lebanon a part of the wider Muslim Umma or even Greater Syria, and whose identity was Arab, not Lebanese.

Some say that the Sunnis have learned their lessons and have become Lebanese patriots at heart, but I have my doubts. The Sunnis may be posturing as Lebanese patriots simply because they are threatened by the Shiites, and so have made an (temporary?) alliance with the Christians who have no other identity than that of Lebanon. Lebanon’s Christians, like all Christians around the world, have managed to keep their religious and national identities separate, unlike the Muslims who see themselves as Muslims first or the Jews who see themselves first as Jews.

There are many lessons to be learned from this incident. Just as they have done for the past half a century, the Lebanese never confront a problem upfront. They avoid, make detours, temper, and hope the for the best when everything around them is falling apart, such that problems accumulate, persist, fester, and then explode in an orgy of violence. Lebanon faced this problem back in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of the Palestinian liberation movements, the sequels of which have yet to fade. And now, Hezbollah has been wreaking havoc in the Lebanese body politic since the 1980s, and no amount of compromises, deals and temporary band-aids has yielded any result. Because Lebanon is gradually being crushed under the Iranian occupation, the Lebanese population, the Christians in particular, will at some point explode, arm themselves and begin a new civil war to rid themselves of the Iranian occupation.

The West chided and criticized the Christians in the 1970s and 1980s as fanatic right-wingers because they opposed Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian takeover of their country, while Israel was genociding the Palestinians and getting patted on the back by the Europeans and the Americans.

What will the West do this time around? The Lebanese government and institutions are cowering in the face of Hezbollah. The government of traitor Michel Aoun and his army will not confront Hezbollah, arguing that they don't want to start a civil war. Will the West demonize the Christian population at some point for arming itself and trying to lift the Iranian yoke from Lebanon? Will it still call them fanatic right-wingers? I think not. Why? Because the West has had its share of violence inflicted on it by militant Islam, be it Sunni or Shiite. This time around, perhaps, the West has learned its lessons.

Irony or Stupidity: Amine Gemayel's Treasonous Failure in 1983

From very reliable sources inside the Lebanese Front, a coalition of resistance against the Syrian-Palestinian insurrection during the 1970s-1980s, we now learn why then-President Amine Gemayel failed to end the Lebanon War by signing a treaty that was offered to him on a silver platter.

The May 1983 Accord was negotiated between Lebanon and Israel, after the latter had invaded the former and chased Yasser Arafat's terrorists out of Lebanon. Arafat was trying at the time to take control of Lebanon in order to wage his "Palestine liberation" from the south of the country. Of all the coward Arab states, only Lebanon was forced to concede parts of its territory by the 22 member states of the Arab League to the Palestinian terrorists. Not Syria, not Jordan, not Egypt, nor any other Arab country wanted the Palestinians as a guerilla fighting Israel from their border. In fact, Jordan's King Hussein had massacred his own Palestinians in September 1970, forcing them to transfer their activities to Beirut. Kuwait, the Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf and Arab barbarians were sending money and weapons to Arafat to wreak havoc and destroy the Lebanese State, which at the time represented the only Western-oriented, democratic and liberal Arab country. The Arabs hated Lebanon because it had a Christian at the helm.

In the aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion, negotiations mediated by the US led to an agreement between Israel and Lebanon. That May 1983 Accord was voted unanimously by the Lebanese Parliament, including by MPs who had actually joined the insurrection against the Lebanese government of Amine Gemayel. It was that same Parliament, which repeatedly renewed its own mandate since 1972 because no elections could be held, that signed the infamous Taef Agreement in Saudi Arabia 6 years later in 1989.

Gemayel had the US, the West, his own Parliament and the entire Lebanese people behind him, urging him to sign the Accord that his own government had negotiated. But Hafez Assad, the brutal dictator of neighboring Syria, occupied large swaths of Lebanese territory and threatened Gemayel of dire consequences if he were to sign the Accord. Peace between Lebanon and Israel would have been a death blow to the Assad regime since it would have been forced to fight Israel from its own territory, rather than from Lebanon.

Indeed, Syria has always been a "hypothetical" enemy of Israel. For example, Syria's troops in Lebanon never fired a shot against the invading Israelis. Assad had built his aura as a ferocious enemy of Israel after the latter occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in the 1967 and 1973 wars. Yet, to this day, the Assad regime never really "directly" challenged any Israeli aggression against it; it does so only via proxy terrorist organizations (like Hezbollah, Hamas, and others), and then never from Syrian territory but always from Lebanese territory. On a daily basis, Israeli jets fly into Syria, bomb various sites suspected of manufacturing or forwarding weapons from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, then return unharmed to Israel. Against these Israeli "aggressions", there are never any Syrian retaliatory responses against  targets inside Israeli territory, although Syrian propaganda always issues fallacious statements to the effect that the "valiant Syrian army responded and downed Israeli jets or missiles". Neither is there ever a question for Syria to mount its own "liberation" of the occupied-and-annexed Golan Heights, just as the one the Syrian regime has coerced Lebanon into fighting. There is no Hezbollah fighting Israel from Syria proper to recover the Israeli-occupied - and now -annexed - Golan Heights. This has been the bravery of the cowards of the Syrian regime: To fight Israel only from Lebanon, not from Syria.

After he balked, hesitated and wavered, Gemayel finally gave in to the Syrian threats against him. He refused to sign, and the May 1983 Accord fell through. Syria would the very next year expand its occupation by entering Beirut, after Hezbollah waged a terror campaign against all Western targets - US and French peacekeeping forces were bombed in October 1983, academics, journalists, clergymen and others were kidnapped, US planes were hijacked.

Let us recall that prior to the May 1983 Accord, Hezbollah was not yet organized and was beginning to emerge out of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and posed no threat yet to either Lebanon, Israel or the West in general. The PLO of Yasser Arafat was banished to Tunis late 1982, and so the May 1983 Accord presented a golden opportunity for Lebanon to exit the role forced on it as a scapegoat between all the belligerents in the Middle East conflict.

Why did Amnie Gemayel fail to seize that opportunity? Sources tell us that Gemayel was afraid that the 22 member States of the Arab League would boycott Lebanon. The Arabs at the time were virtually ALL anti-Israel, so Lebanon would be seen as aiding the Israeli enemy if it were to make peace with Israel. Even treacherous Egypt, which had itself signed a peace accord with Israel in 1979, was ambiguous about the May 1983 Accord between Lebanon and Israel.

Gemayel kept repeating that by signing the Accord, he would, and I quote, "open one door  [i.e. Israel]  and close 22 doors [i.e. the Arab countries]" [Direct quote from Etienne Sacre, a.k.a. Abu Arz, a founding member of the Lebanese Front representing the Lebanese resistance against the Syrian-Iranian-Palestinian occupation]. In other words, Gemayel feared for the economic repercussions on Lebanon since the Lebanese economy depends on trade with the Arab hinterland. But most importantly, he feared for his life, because his own brother Bashir, who was elected to the presidency in 1982, was assassinated by the Syrians.

Fast forward to our time. Those Arab countries whom Gemayel feared would boycott Lebanon have today made peace with Israel, normalized their relations with it, and are engaged in massive economic and technological cooperation, while Lebanon has regressed into a failed state that is begging the Arabs for help and is forbidden from normalizing with Israel. I am not surprised at the lack of vision and courage that Gemayel exhibited. After all, he is the child of a feudal family that continues to this day to oppress its local herd of Maronite peasants into a client-boss relationship. Had he signed the Accord in May 1983, he would be seen today as a courageous and visionary pioneer. Lebanon would have been, like Egypt after its 1979 agreement with Israel, a prosperous and strong country, free of Hezbollah and the Iranian occupation, free of all the Syrian agents like Aoun and Bassil in power today. The failure of Amine Gemayel smacks of treason.

Amine Gemayel became a member of parliament after the death of his uncle Maurice Gemayel. He became a leader of his party, the Kataeb, after his father Pierre's death. And he became President of Lebanon after his brother Bashir, the elect-President of Lebanon, was killed by the Syrians in a bomb in Beirut in 1982. As you can see, Amine was never a smart, let alone a courageous, politician to make it on his own, always inheriting - never earning - his positions of power from dead members of his political feudal family farm. I happen to have met him in the US in the early 2000s when he was hiding his mediocrity as a visiting fellow at a prestigious university in the US. Harvard University has a knack for inviting former warlords and dictators as visiting fellows. As I asked him a question on the future of the Lebanese political system, Gemayel fumbled an incoherent answer in very poor English before an audience of Harvard University academics and researchers who expected more of a former president of a country at war. Amine Gemayel is the prototype of how the feudal inheritance of political power, with its accessories of cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and clientelism, leads to failed states. Lebanon is rife with primitive, sectarian-based, modes of governance. 

Unlike Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and his courageous stance against the Russian invasion, Lebanon's leaders are fundamentally cowards, full of bravado but devoid of guts and brains. Amine Gemayel is an old man today, but he is alive. He saved his skin, but delivered Lebanon to Syria and Iran. After him, Michel Aoun bombed his own Christian East Beirut and fought his own allies, but when the Syrians were about to complete their takeover of the entire country, he fled like a coward to the basement of the French Embassy, leaving hundreds of his soldiers to die defending him. Aoun is an old man, but he too is alive. Like Gemayel, he saved his skin, but delivered Lebanon to Syria and Iran.

Gemayel's children today want to be in Parliament, pretending to be reformers, but they hail from a putrid family farm of feudal lords. I urge the Lebanese to vote, at the very least, for unknown faces and unknown names, and to break the vicious cycle of giving tribal feudal corrupt idiots like Aoun and Gemayel the reins of the country. They have run Lebanon to the ground and pretend today to want to lift it out of the cesspool in which they themselves have plunged it.

Who killed More Americans after Bin Laden?

 

This man.

He always wags his finger or his fist in the air.

He does not believe in peaceful resolutions to conflicts.

He is an agent of the Iranian theocracy.

Like all religious dinosaurs, he has a beard and wears a robe and a strange hat. For some reason, stupid people equate robes, strange hats and beards with wisdom.

He has spent most of his life hidden somewhere in the southern suburbs of Beirut, his predecessors having been assassinated.

He is responsible for the death of up to 1,000 US citizens, including diplomats, teachers, clergymen, journalists, and US servicemen.

He is also responsible for the death of about 3,000 Lebanese citizens, including politicians, journalists, social media activists and others.

In wars he has waged against the Palestinian refugee camps in the Lebanon of the 1980s, he is responsible for the death of close to 5,000 Palestinian refugees and militants. 

He claims to be fighting for the recovery of Palestine from the hands of the Israelis whom he wants annihilated. But he's not doing this for the dark eyes of the Palestinians. Oh no. Hq wants to install a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy in Israel, as well as Lebanon and other places in the Middle East.

As a Shiite Muslim, he holds a 1,300 year-old grudge against other (Sunni) Muslims who defeated his guy (Ali) and gave the leadership of Islam to their guy (Abu Bakr) after the death of the Prophet Mohammad. Can you imagine holding such an old and archaic grudge for such a long time that you are willing to kill tens of thousands of people because of it in the 21st century?

The pictured barbarian is the leader of the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah. 

Putin in Ukraine = Assad in Lebanon Pt 2

... Continues Pt 1

What Vladimir Putin is doing to Ukraine today is exactly what Syria did to Lebanon between the early 1970s and 2005. There already were tensions between the Lebanese and the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat who had moved his headquarters from Amman to Beirut after King Hussein of Jordan had massacred the Palestinians in September 1970. Arab pressure had also forced the Lebanese to concede south Lebanon to the Palestinians so they could conduct their resistance against Israel, which obviously brought retaliation by Israel against Lebanese villages along the border. Beginning those early years of the 1970s, a couple of years after the coup that brought the Assads to power, Syria began sending its mercenaries across the border to carry out terrorist attacks against Lebanese Army positions and massacres against civilian villages. A convergence of interests between the Syrians and the Palestinians was a lead-up to the war that erupted in 1975, pitting the Lebanese government and Lebanese nationalist groups against the Syrian-Palestinian-Communist coalition.

During the 1975 - 2005, Syrian troops gradually conquered Lebanese territory, stepping in after each ceasefire as a "peacekeeping" force to separate the Lebanese Resistance from Syria's own proxy militias. At one point, Syrian forces were called the Arab Deterrence Force. In essence, the Assad regime would create a problem via its proxies, claim deniability, then be tasked by a colluding or stupid West to resolve the problem. The arsonist-fireman. In 1977, Syrian troops went in officially for the first time, but did not deploy everywhere. Then in 1984, after Syria's proxy Hezbollah began bombing embassies and western peacekeeping forces, assassinating western diplomats, clergymen, teachers, and journalists, Lebanon was voided of any Western presence and the Syrian army took complete control of the capital Beirut. Finally, in 1988 and again with Western collusion or stupidity, the Syrians wanted to impose a puppet president (just like Putin is doing today in Ukraine), but the Lebanese refused. The US envoy to Beirut, Richard Murphy, whose 243 Marines had been blown to shreds by Syria a mere five years ago in 1983, made a deal with Assad to impose a puppet president, Mikhail Daher, which the Lebanese were to either accept "or else you'll get chaos". The George Bush Sr. Administration back then was licking Assad's behind because his proxies in Beirut were holding dozens of US hostages. The Lebanese refused and chose chaos rather be cowered by the Syrian-American collusion. It all climaxed in 1990, when the Syrian Air Force was allowed to fly its jets over Lebanon (in a temporary suspension of a Syrian-Israeli agreement that only Israeli jets but no Syrian fighter jets could), bomb the Lebanese presidential palace and dislodge the last resistor to Syria's hegemony. Lebanon fell under a complete Syrian occupation of 90% of its territory, while Israel controlled 10% along the southern border. Lebanon fell under a Syrian Gulag, not unlike the Soviet Gulags of Putin, thanks no less to a US Republican administration willing to cozy up to a dictator killer of Americans. 

From the early 1970s through 2005 during the long Syrian occupation, tens of thousands of Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian dissidents, journalists, politicians, and ordinary citizens were killed or taken to prisons inside Syria where they were never heard from. After 1990, when all resistance to Syria was crushed, a Lebanese puppet regime was installed to the satisfaction of the US and the West. Syria began a program of Syrianizing the Lebanese administration by creating several security agencies, forcing Lebanon to sign several treaties with titles like "Brotherhood and Cooperation" in which Lebanon surrendered much of its decision-making, and implementing corrupt practices with which pro-Syrian politicians enriched themselves via kickbacks and grand theft. For instance, Syrian ally Nabih Berri became Speaker of Parliament and was entrusted with the Fund of the Displaced, which he promptly stole and built up his personal fortune. Pro-Syrian Walid Jumblatt was entrusted with a fund to assist the return of the Christians whom his militia had massacred and evicted from their villages in the Shouf Mountains. We learn today that Jumblatt has absconded with some of those monies which he promptly wired outside the country once the Lebanese currency collapsed a couple of years ago. Rafik Kariri, who is made today to be a "martyr" after he was assassinated by the Syrians and Hezbollah, was propped up as a Prime Minister under the Syrian occupation beginning in 1991. Like a fool, he splurged his fortune on refurbishing a few downtown buildings, thinking he could re-launch the country's economy under the Syrian boots. He endorsed Hezbollah's existence as the only militia not to disarm after the war and accepted to be treated like a puppet by the Syrians.

Change happened after September 11, 2001. The dumb Americans realized that catering to despots and tyrants was not protecting them. Somehow the murder of 243 US marines in October 1983 and the bombing of the US Embassy were not enough of a wake-up call. And so, the Americans instructed Hariri to turn against Syria and Hezbollah, which he promptly did in 2004, only to be blown to shreds by a Syrian-Hezbollah bomb in downtown Beirut in February 2005. By April of that year the Syrian army was evicted from the country. Unfortunately its nefarious influence persists to this day.

In conclusion, Putin is doing to Ukraine what Syria has done, and continues to do, to Lebanon. Undermining it with puppet regimes has not worked, as the Ukrainians shrugged them off in their Orange Revolution of 2004-2005. Putin cannot accept a Ukraine that is not subservient to his autocratic regime, just as Assad cannot accept a Lebanon free of the Baath regime's diktat. Just as Ukraine is a source of resources to be pilfered by Moscow, Lebanon is a fountain of resources for the criminals in Damascus. I fear, though, for the Ukrainians from Western duplicity. Think about it. Unless the West invades Russia and takes Moscow to install a friendly government there, or unless the Russian regime implodes from within, there is no way to stop the Russian butchery in Ukraine except by a nuclear conflict or by making a deal with Putin. Does anyone ask why the Assad regime has managed to survive 53 years when it scuttled every peace opportunity; was listed on the US list of State-Sponsors of terrorism while US Secretaries of State year after year met with Assad himself in Geneva; bombed and massacred hundreds of thousands in Lebanon and Syria; committed the gravest crimes against humanity and war crimes; and yet, the West is today talking about reengaging with Assad, rehabilitating him, and giving him free rein over Lebanon, again, if a nuclear deal with Iran is achieved?

If pathetic and weak Assad has managed to f...k the Middle East and the West for more than 50 decades and remains a valid "cunning", "savvy" interlocutor who "kept his part of a deal" as many US pundits used to say about the tyrant butcher, just as imbecile Donald Trump is saying about Putin, what is the West to do with Putin other than make a deal him over a destroyed annihilated Ukraine, given the stakes? Especially if the American people, in their Republican ignorance, decided to bring Donald Trump back to the White House in 2024.

Putin in Ukraine = Assad in Lebanon - Pt1

Some will argue from the title of this opinion that I am ignoring what the dictator Bashar Assad has done to Syria over the past 11 years, but the fact is that Assad's butchery in Syria since 2011 was carried out jointly by Putin's Russian army (in a country not bordering Russia) and Assad's Syrian army (in its own country).

In Ukraine, only Russian soldiers with a few Chechen mercenaries are leading the carnage of a much smaller and weaker neighboring country. Just as Hafez Assad did between 1973 and 2000 (when he died), then his son Bashar continued from 2000 through 2005 when his army was chased out by the people of Lebanon.

There is an uncanny resemblance between the two pairs of countries. Russia and Ukraine, and Syria and Lebanon.

An ideological dimension based on false historical narratives. For Putin, Ukraine has always been part of Russia, even before the Soviet Bolshevik ideology forcibly glued together a large number of countries around it (from the Central Asian nations like Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Kazakstan... through the Caucasus nations like Armenia and Georgia...and the Baltic States of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia...to the East European countries of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and others). 

For the Assad regime and for many Fascist Baathist Arab nationalists, Lebanon has always been part of Greater Syria, just as Kuwait, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and (for some nebulous reason) even the Greek-Turkish Cyprus are. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990-1991 for the same ideological imperialist reason of Arab ultra-nationalism that Putin is today invading Ukraine. Saddam Hussein wanted to force Kuwait "back" from its past as a British colony to its Arab present. Assad still wants to force Lebanon "back" from its 1921-1943 French mandate tutelage (which ironically Syria too was subjected to) to its glorious Arab present represented by how the Assads have ruled Syria, i.e. barbarity, brutality, repression, destruction and mayhem. According to the Baathist ideology of the Syrian regime, all those countries are not separate nations and do not deserve a life of independence and sovereignty. 

For the coward Russian regime of Putin and his oligarchs, ruling Russia, stealing its wealth, and depriving its people of their basic freedoms are not enough. They must assassinate, repress and jail all dissidents to maintain their grip on power. They must reconquer what the Soviets lost in 1989. They claim that the relatedness of the Ukrainian and Russian languages, and the fact that both countries are for the most part Orthodox Christian are proof that Ukraine cannot be a separate nation. They ignore that the Russian Federation is itself composed of a number of ethnicities and languages, each of which is likely deserving to be a separate sovereign nation were it not for the brutal rule from Moscow that keeps them herded together.  

For the coward Syrian regime of the Assads (in power since 1969), it is not enough to rule over the miserable lives of the Syrian people whom they pilfer to grow their own individual and sectarian power and wealth, they must assassinate, repress and jail all dissidents. They must reconquer the long lost mirage of an Arab empire that is defunct since the late 10th century, and just as the Russians do, the Baathists in Syria ground that ideology on two tenuous criteria : all the countries around Syria speak one form or another form of Arabic, and their populations are majority Muslim. Yet, Syria itself is a mosaic of ethnic and religious groups and does not deserve to be a nation. 

Syria is a vast desert punctuated by cities, each with a different historical reference, religious identity and language. In fact, the Assad regime is merely the minority (10%) Alawite sect ruling by sheer brutality over the rest. The Alawites occupy the Mediterranean coast of Syria from the Lebanese border to the Turkish border. According to Wikipedia, Syrians have three identities: "Arab, Syriac, and Syrian. Many Muslims and some Arabic-speaking Christians describe themselves as Arabs, while many Aramaic-speaking Christians and some Muslims prefer to describe themselves as Syriacs or Arameans. Also some people from Syria, mainly Syrian nationalists describe themselves only as Syrians or ethnic Syrians. Most of the divisions in ethnic nomenclature are actually due to religious backgrounds".

Just as Putin and his regime never accepted a sovereign, independent, and prosperous Ukraine free of Russian hegemony, the Assad regime never accepted a sovereign, independent and prosperous Lebanon that emerged free from the Ottoman occupation as early as 1842 when Lebanon, just as Greece and Egypt had done, shook off Turkish rule and became an autonomous self-ruling entity that became  independent in 1921. For the twenty years between the two world wars, both Lebanon and Syria were under a League of Nations (the ancestor of the UN) mandate managed by France. By 1943, Lebanon had evicted the French to become fully independent, while it took Syria another 3 years to obtain independence in 1946. 

From that point in their respective histories, the two countries diverged enormously. Lebanon adopted a liberal and neutral posture in its economy and international relations. It prospered and became a shining example of coexistence, freedom and political stability found nowhere else in the Middle East. Throughout its modern history, even during the war waged against it by Israel, Syria and the Palestinian movements beginning in 1970, Lebanon saw peaceful transfers of power, with 22 presidents since 1926, of whom 15 since 1943. Meanwhile, Syria saw on average one military coup d'etat per year since its 1946 independence, with one dictator toppling and assassinating the previous dictator, until it all climaxed with one Hafez Assad who mounted the most brutal coup d'etat in 1969 which ensured the permanence of his regime until his death in 2000 when his son Bashar took over. In other words, Syria has had one dictatorship for 53 years, not unlike North Korea. 

For the decades since their respective independence from France, Syria has never recognized Lebanon's right to exist, it refused to exchange embassies and diplomatic relations with it, it adopted the "one people, two states" mantra, it staged failed coups and closed its borders to pressure the Lebanese, it sent Palestinian terrorist groups (Yarmuk Brigade, Al-Saiqa, the Arab Liberation Army, etc.) to commit massacres in border villages, it engaged in smuggling of goods, weapons and mercenaries. The current territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel is about the Shebaa Farms territory, a bald hilltop at the tri-border juncture between Lebanon, Israel and Syria. It is currently under Israeli rule, giving the terrorist Hezbollah organization a pretext to justify its existence and its warmongering "resistance". Yet, Shebaa's history is an interesting telltale of Syria's constant undermining of Lebanon. The Shebaa Farms were initially within Lebanon when the borders were delineated in the 1940s. In 1956, the Syrians dispatched a military force that killed the two Lebanese soldiers manning the hilltop and took it over. The Lebanese, unfortunately,  did not bother to file a grievance with the UN, and Shebaa remained under Syrian custody until the 1967 and 1973 wars when Israel seized Shebaa from the Syrians. So technically, in any settlement, Israel must return the Shebaa Farms to Syria, even though legally it is Lebanese. But the Syrians refuse, despite repeated demands from the Lebanese, to officially return the territory to Lebanon, because that would compel Israel to withdraw from it. The reason? Syria and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah need the so-called Israeli occupation of Shebaa to maintain the justification of an occupied land in need of resistance and liberation.

.... continued in Pt 2