Posts
In a bid to contain Hezbollah, the United States is hoping to persuade Arab allies over the next week -- Saudi Arabia in talks today and Egypt and Jordan at an emergency meeting Wednesday in Rome -- to get Syria to stop arming, funding and facilitating Hezbollah's military operations, U.S. officials said. Because Syria is also the physical conduit for all Iranian arms and personnel bound for Lebanon, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad could be pivotal to helping end the current hostilities and ensuring that Hezbollah's options are limited afterward.
The Saudis have their key foreign policy players [Turki Al-Faisal, former head of Saudi Intelligence and now US Amb, his brother Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal, as well as the new head of Saudi Intelligence] in camera with Condoleeza Rice, Steve Hadley, Nick Burns, David Welch, and a Pentagon rep at the Bush ranch in Texas, poring over strategies and modalities. They are trying to solve the conundrum over this problem:
...Israeli, U.S., U.N. and European officials say they do not envision a solution in which Hezbollah is eliminated. Initial U.S., Israeli and U.N. assessments have concluded that Hezbollah's popularity among Lebanese Shiites is likely to remain significant -- and no one but the Shiites will be able to challenge its status, according to U.S. and U.N. officials.
Belling the Hezbollah cat has Saudi and Sunni Arab support all across the board, including the unrepresented Sunni majority in Syria, perhaps. The Hezbollah are reckless, Shi'ite, proxies for the Iranians, and admired by the 'Arab street' who dislikes the passivity of their respective regimes vis-a-vis Israel.
In addition, the Saudis engineered the Treaty of Taif in 1990, which brought a final solution to the decade-and-a-half Lebanese civil war. But the Saudis have always been wary of the Syrian minoritarian Alawite ascendancy, and Saudi King Abdullah has personal ties both to Lebanon and to Syria [one of his wives was Lebanese and his mother was from a tribe which does transhumence in Syrian bedouin territories.] Also, the Saudis have always liked Beirut better than any other Arab capital and many have second homes there.
The Bush-Saudi connection goes back a long way, and the Saudis trust Bush and even admire him, while not enthralled with his democratizing crusade [nor are the Egyptian and Jordanian summiteers in Rome].
Indeed, now that Hamas may be ready to return Cpl Shalit in return for a ceasefire, [perhaps engineered by Egyptian good offices, since Hamas is an offshoot of the Egyptian "outlawed" Muslim Brotherhood, who often do favors for Mubarak to keep themselves from actually being arrested] the door may be slightly ajar to allow the edge of the Sunni triumvirate wedge onto Syrian turf. The Syrians are broke. And, since their huge $300 million/annum crime-bonus from Lebanon had disappeared with 1559 and thousands of impecunious Lebanese flooding their landscape, the oil-rich Saudis and Gulf States could replace Iran as Syria's paymasters-in-chief. However, this probably won't happen unless some Syrian is thrown to the wolves over the Hariri assassination, since the Saudis regarded the murdered Lebanese president one of their own.
Finally, a real military force, meaning a NATO force with teeth in its charter, will have the replace the UNIFIL force now monitoring the carnage in South Lebanon. And the billion-dollar question, what to do with the Russians who want to participate? The Russkies are tight with Iran, not friendly to NATO, and Putin might use the UNSC veto to nix a NATO force---plus they want to be a player in the endless festival of earthly delights in the Levant.
And UN SecGen Kofi ["forget about Rwanda and Darfur"] Annan may want to salvage his battered reputation, or bolster it in the Third World, by attempting to sabotage the grown-ups' game plan.
So the Merry-Go-Round continues while the MSM in the USA takes various potshots at GWB, in their never-ending chorus-chant: "It's all Bush's fault."
No comments :
Post a Comment