Some time in 2002, when the Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun was founded in Paris, I met Issam Abu-Jamra. Along with Edgard Maalouf, Abu-Jamra constituted what was left of the transitional government of Prime Minister Michel Aoun. In 1988, Parliament failed to elect a new president and departing president Amine Gemayel appointed then-Army Chief Aoun to head that government at the last minute of his term. Aoun appointed three Christian ministers and three Muslim ministers to his cabinet with the objective of managing the country until Parliament elects a new president. Obviously, the Muslim asshole ministers immediately resigned from the government
Some background before returning to Abu-Jamra.
The obstruction in Parliament at electing a new president was largely the doing of the Americans, then deep in political fornication with the Saudis and the Syrians. The Americans, who love to kiss oily Arab asses right and left, supported a Syrian puppet candidate by the name of Mikhail Daher who would continue doing the bidding of the Syrian dictator whose army then occupied Lebanon with much human rights abuses, kidnappings, killings, shelling and all manner of Syrian "peacekeeping". The American envoy, a typical US State Department prick by the name of Richard Murphy, had announced to the Lebanese Parliamentarians his infamous, "Either Mikhail Daher or chaos!", by which he meant 'you Lebanese either continue to suffer the Syrian occupation or I will unleash the Syrian artillery and airforce on your already demolished homes, towns and villages'.
Why, you might ask, were the Americans so eager to satisfy the Damascus Butcher Senior, Hafez Assad, by backing a Syrian puppet candidate to the presidency of Lebanon? Simple: Assad and his many proxies in Lebanon - Islamic terrorist organizations of all kinds, including Hezbollah, had kidnapped dozens of western hostages (Americans, British, French, Indians, Irish....) on behalf of Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Throughout the 1980s, these Syrian-Iranian terror organizations had blown up the US Embassy (twice) and the French Embassy in Beirut, blown up the peacekeeping US Marines and French Paratroopers compounds (killing 243 US servicemen and 58 French soldiers), hijacked a TWA plane flight 847 in which Navy diver Dean Stethem was savagely beaten, killed and his body dumped on Beirut Airport tarmac, etc... All of this with the imbecile Ronald Reagan in the White House. Reagan couldn't care less about abandoning Lebanon to Syria and Iran, as long as he could get the hostages released.
And so it was, for every ass-bending concession the Americans made to Iran and Syria, Hezbollah would release one hostage who, instead of being driven 5 minutes to Beirut Airport to be flown out of the country, would be driven 3 hours to Damascus, Syria, to be paraded to the western press under giant portraits of Assad and Khomeini, in a blunt acknowledgement by the Americans that their friends the Syrians and the Iranians were running the terror show in Beirut.
One of these concessions the Americans were willing to make was to secure the election of the Syrian puppet Mikhail Daher to the Lebanese presidency. But the Lebanese resisted America's betrayal of its so-called values and principles, and chaos they got. The following two years 1988-1990 were absolute madness, shelling and killing, leading to the Syrian takeover and occupation of the entire country of Lebanon, the demotion of the Christian President of the country to a figurehead and the transfer of his powers to a Muslim. Thank you America for the Taef Agreement and for transforming the country into the hellhole of corruption and barbarity at the hands of your Muslim and Arab friends.
Thank you, America. Today in 2023, some 40 years later, America is supposedly still fighting the Iranian-Syrian stranglehold over Lebanon by inflicting more pain on the Lebanese people. America could have brought an end to all this mess in the early 1980s when Hezbollah was still in its infancy and did not have 150,000 missiles pointed at Israel from the Lebanese south. But American foreign policy has, since the end of World War II, become a massive failure enterprise built on ignorance and short-term reflexive maneuvering with no clear strategy based on principle. No wonder the US lost Vietnam after murdering 50,000 of its own soldiers, after losing the war in Korea which continues to hound it, losing in Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. It is hard to defend America against the qualifier of "dumb ugly American".
I digressed, but I needed to vent.
In Paris, Abu-Jamra invited me to dinner, seeing in me a wide-eyed rookie Lebanese-American militant. Over dinner, he politely critiqued Michel Aoun's conduct on matters I did not well understand, mostly in the realm of the tactics rather than the fundamentals of the cause.
It is only now that I comprehend some of what Abu-Jamra might have been talking about. Only last week, Abu-Jamra has publicly accused Aoun of pilfering millions of dollars from a donation given in the late 1980s by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein who supported Aoun against Syria's Assad. Although Assad and Hussein were running their dictatorships from the same nauseating Arab nationalist Baathist ideology, they hated each other. So Saddam Hussein's gift to Aoun was to help the latter in his fight against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Instead, Aoun fled the American-backed Syrian invasion of his presidential palace first to the dingy basement of the French embassy, then to exile in France, taking with him those untold millions of dollars which he stashed in his wife's name in some bank somewhere.
Has anyone wondered how come Baathist Saddam Hussein has been "fatally relieved" of his duties as dictator in Iraq by no less than a massive US invasion in 2003 (he was in power between 1979 and 2003 or 24 years total) even though he fought the Iranian theocracy, while his alter ego, the Baathist Assad regime, is still in power since 1969, is a friend and ally of the Iranian theocracy, funds and arms numerous terror organizations, including the terror organization of Hezbollah, has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, has bombed to shreds many of his country's cities and towns, has occupied and brutalized Lebanon for more than 20 years, and remains the only obstacle to peace with Israel...?? What kind of American foreign policy is this?
I still have enormous respect for Issam Abu-Jamra for standing to principle then, and now.
Check this link to a 2003 press release by a Lebanese-American organization based in Boston critiquing Mr. Richard Murphy's mercantile betrayal of Lebanon and his own country:
http://www.10452lccc.com/clao.rpl.colco/NEAL030112_Murphy.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment