Lebanon: beach or bunker 138

There isn’t really a choice. Iran, with the active help of the UN and the passive help of the decaying West, will win. Lebanon will be a bunker. 

 From the Investor’s Business Daily:

The Feb. 14, 2005, assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in a car bombing also killed 22 others and sparked a nationwide protest that became known as the Cedar Revolution.

It soon forced the withdrawal of Syria’s army after decades of de facto occupation of a neighbor it had refused to formally recognize, a sovereign nation it viewed as a lost province of a Greater Syria.

In the aftermath of the assassination, a U.N. commission was formed to determine who killed Hariri and to bring them to justice. Most fingers pointed at Lebanon’s former occupier, Syria, which not surprisingly failed to cooperate in the investigation.

The initial report by Detlev Mehlis, the chief U.N. investigator into Hariri’s assassination, said the decision to kill Hariri, who Damascus feared would rally Lebanese opposition to Syrian influence, "could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials" and their Lebanese operatives.

On Wednesday, it became clear that Hariri’s assassins might never be brought to justice and that the U.N. isn’t serious about dealing with that assault on Lebanese democracy — part of a long series of assassinations of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians and journalists.

Judge Daniel Franzen ordered four Lebanese generals suspected of involvement in Hariri’s murder freed on the grounds there was insufficient evidence for keeping them jailed. In fact, it was not so much a lack of evidence as it was a lack of will by the international community, which refused to press Syria on the issue.

After Hariri’s assassination, the formation of the international tribunal into his death and the withdrawal of Syrian forces gave a boost to those hoping Syrian influence and control were at an end and Lebanese democracy was safe. But much has changed in the last four years.

In 2006, the terrorist group Hezbollah, heavily armed and financed by Damascus and Tehran, provoked a war with Israel using Lebanon and its people as a human shield.

Despite U.N. Resolution 1559, which demanded all militia groups disarm, Hezbollah kept its weapons and added more while it began a two-year campaign marked by additional violence and assassinations to destabilize the government of Lebanon.

The campaign culminated in early 2008 with Hezbollah laying siege to government buildings and storming pro-government militia headquarters in West Beirut. The violence subsided after talks in Doha, Qatar, gave Hezbollah (the Party of Allah) its long sought veto power over government decisions in a new Cabinet of national unity. But Hezbollah wants more and in the upcoming June 7 parliamentary elections, may win it all.

Sources in Lebanon say that in recent months Iran has smuggled upward of a billion dollars into Lebanon to help its puppet creation, Hezbollah, buy the election. "Hezbollah intends to win these elections at all costs," says Toni Nissi, secretary-general of the National Council for the Cedar Revolution. "This election victory will allow them to transform their illegal institutions into legal ones." …

Many fear this election could be as disastrous for Middle East peace as the 2006 election that brought Hamas to power in Gaza.

"The choice is between Lebanon as a beach and Lebanon as a bunker," Middle East expert Amir Taheri recently quoted a Lebanese businessman as saying. "Lebanon could either become an extension of Europe in the Middle East or a bridgehead for Iran in the Mediterranean."

All that will be needed for Iran to triumph will be for the West to continue to do virtually nothing.

Posted under Christianity, Commentary by Jillian Becker on Friday, May 1, 2009

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