Hezbollah Reject US Ships Off Lebanon

Hezbollah Reject US Ships Off Lebanon
By ZEINA KARAM
Associated Press Writer

8:15 AM PST, February 29, 2008

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hezbollah denounced the deployment of U.S. warships off Lebanon's coast and said Friday it won't be intimidated, while the U.S.-backed Lebanese government distanced itself from the military move.

"We did not request any warships from any party," U.S.-backed Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said, hours after the U.S. announced it was sending ships off Lebanon to promote regional stability.

He insisted the U.S. ships would cruise off the coast, not in Lebanese territorial waters.

Saniora, who has been accused by the opposition of following U.S. policy, spoke in front of Arab diplomats at government headquarters in Beirut after his Hezbollah opponents called the U.S. deployment a threat to Lebanese sovereignty and independence.

The U.S. military said Thursday the Navy was sending at least three ships, including an amphibious assault ship, to the eastern Mediterranean Sea in a show of strength during a period of tensions with Syria and political uncertainty in Lebanon.

In Washington on Friday, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe called the move "a show of support for regional stability."

And State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the warships were an important sign of U.S. commitment to security in the region. "It should provide comfort to our friends" and, for U.S. adversaries, "a reminder that we are there," he told reporters.

But Hezbollah legislator Hassan Fadlallah denounced the move as a threat and called on Saniora's government to reject the Navy deployment.

"We are facing an American threat against Lebanon," Fadlallah said on local television. "It is clear this threat and intimidation will not affect us."

Hezbollah is leading the opposition in seeking to topple the U.S.-backed government in Beirut. The group fought Israel in the 2006 war and is believed linked to Muslim militants who attacked U.S. forces and diplomats in Lebanon in 1983-84 during the Lebanese civil war, killing about 270.

Lebanon's long political crisis is increasingly viewed as taking on a regional scope: a proxy confrontation between the United States and some of its Arab allies against Iran and Syria -- both staunch opponents of America's Mideast policies.

Neighboring Syria had yet to react on Friday, a weekend in that country.

The decision appeared to be a not-too-subtle show of U.S. force as international frustration mounts over a long political deadlock in tiny, weak Lebanon. The United States blames Syria for the impasse, saying it has never given up its ambitions to control its smaller neighbor.

"If the Syrians want to take a message from it, happy to have them do so if what that means is it gets them out of the business of subverting democracy and the will of the Lebanese people," Casey said.

The Lebanese opposition accuses the U.S. of scuttling any attempts to settle a political crisis over the president and government that has dragged on for the last 15 months. The majority has accused the opposition of doing the bidding of Syria and Iran.

A presidential election in Lebanon has been delayed 15 times. Just this week the date was pushed back to March 11.

Tensions in Lebanon have sharpened after the assassination in Syria of top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, who was wanted by the United States for a plane hijacking and was suspected of attacks against American targets in Lebanon as well as Israeli and Jewish interests abroad.

Hezbollah has accused Israel, promising retaliation, and Israel has put its forces along the Lebanese border on alert.

Sheik Afif Naboulsi, a Shiite cleric close to Hezbollah, scoffed at the U.S. Navy deployment.

"We say to the Americans: We will not be afraid of your threats, and we won't hand over the country to you to use it to pressure Syria," he said at a Friday sermon in southern Lebanon.

In 1983, at the height of U.S. intervention in Lebanon, about 17 ships -- two aircraft carrier battle groups and two mammoth battleships -- patrolled the Lebanese coastline with a Marine contingent deployed at Beirut airport.

A suicide bombing destroyed the Marine base in October 1983, killing 241 American service personnel, and a U.S. Embassy building was destroyed by another suicide bomber during that period. U.S. warships also were involved in shelling anti-government Muslim militia positions.

Lebanese territorial waters are now patrolled by Lebanon's navy and a United Nations Naval Task Force that is assisting Lebanese authorities under the U.N. resolution that halted the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

The last time U.S. ships came to Lebanon was during the 34-day conflict in 2006, with warships taking part in the evacuation of Americans.

Bush Sends Warning Meant for Syria: Don’t Meddle in Lebanon

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 — President Bush said Thursday that the United States would freeze the property and assets of anyone trying to undermine Lebanon’s democratically elected government — a move intended as a sharp warning to Syria and its ally Hezbollah.

The announcement, in an executive order and an accompanying letter to Congress, reflects heightened concern in Washington that Syria is trying to reassert control over Lebanon. It comes a little more than a month after the administration announced that it was enacting a travel ban, barring “those who have contributed to the breakdown of the rule of law in Lebanon,” possibly including leading Syrian intelligence officials, from entering the United States.

Taken together, the steps are an effort to ratchet up pressure on Syria at a time when the administration contends that it is helping to fuel the insurgency in Iraq, as well as creating instability in Lebanon. Mr. Bush’s order deems interference in Lebanon’s government to be an “extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” and declares it a “national emergency.”

Administration officials say they are especially concerned that the fragile democratic government in Lebanon, headed by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, could splinter if the Lebanese president, Émile Lahoud, who has close ties to Syria, tries to establish an alternate government. That concern has grown in recent months, said an administration official involved in formulating the executive order.

“We think measures like this visa ban and the executive order not only allow us to target people who are behind this and complicit in it, but they raise the cost of going along with it,” said the official, who did not have authorization to speak on the record. “There are key figures in Lebanon who could go one way or the other, who are sitting on the fence, and this is a way to try to deter them.”

The White House, which has long regarded Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism, is particularly incensed over Syrian support for Hezbollah, the militant group in Lebanon that waged war against Israel last summer. In the months since, Lebanese cabinet members aligned with Syria have resigned from the government, and the United Nations Security Council has voted to form a special tribunal to try Syrians suspected in the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.

Mr. Hariri, who was killed in a car bombing, had opposed Syria’s strong political and military presence in Lebanon. Protests after his death led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops, who had been in Lebanon since the 1970s.

The White House would not identify particular targets of the executive order, but they are likely to include those who were potentially under the travel ban. Among them was Gen. Asef Shawkat, a leading Syrian intelligence official and the brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. General Shawkat has been implicated in the murder of Mr. Hariri.

Experts say it is unclear what effect, if any, freezing property and assets will have. Jon B. Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who visited President Assad about a month ago, said Mr. Assad and his associates were deeply concerned that the Siniora government could threaten his own.

“They are concerned that a hostile government in Lebanon will be a means to undermine the government of Syria, and they’re determined to undermine any government in Lebanon that they see as hostile,” Mr. Alterman said, adding, “I don’t think economic measures can deter people from what they regard as their strategic goals.”

Iranian president visits Syria

Ahmadinejad warns 'enemies of the region,' presumably U.S. and its allies, against military action.
By Ziad Haidar
Special to The Times

July 20, 2007

DAMASCUS, SYRIA — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met with regional allies in the Syrian capital Thursday, pledging a unified defense against any potential military confrontation with the United States and its allies.

The Iranian leader was here to congratulate Syrian President Bashar Assad on his election to a second seven-year term and to shore up an alliance of U.S. opponents that appears to be gaining strength in the Middle East.

"The enemies of this region should drop their plans to strike the interests of this region, for these enemies will burn by the fire of the people," Ahmadinejad said in a joint appearance with Assad. "Both countries are united in a frontier facing common enemies to the region."

Iran and the United States are at odds over Tehran's pursuit of nuclear technology. And both Iran and Syria back armed Islamist groups, such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon, that oppose Israel, a staunch U.S. ally.

In Damascus, Ahmadinejad reportedly also met with Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Meshaal of Hamas and Ramadan Abdullah Shallah of Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian militant group.

Both Syria and Iran and the Islamist organizations they support have been gaining ground in elections and in battle against more moderate pro-Western opponents.

Ahmadinejad and Assad, appearing after a closed-door meeting, said they discussed regional conflicts, including political and military tensions in Lebanon and Palestinian infighting.

"We discussed the issues that are enforced by the conspiracies planned against the Middle East," Assad said at the joint news conference.

Though the two countries largely agree on policies in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and in Lebanon, they diverge on Iraq, which Assad on Thursday called a priority.

Syria sympathizes with the secular Sunnis of the Baath Party that was booted from power in Baghdad, whereas Iran supports the Shiite clerics and politicians now running the country.

Even within Syria's strictly controlled political climate, tensions over Iraq have burst to the surface. Several months ago a group of Syrian scholars scolded a visiting Iranian diplomat, accusing him of promoting a vision of Iraq that excluded large numbers of Iraqis.

Syria would like Iran to push the Iraqi government to review a law excluding former Baathists from government posts as well as to draw more Sunni tribes into the political process.

"Syria has shown interest in the establishment of a strong central government in Baghdad, while Iran is bargaining on a loose state dominated by Shiite clerics," said Marwan Kabalan, an analyst at Damascus University's Center for Strategic Studies. "Iran plans a weak and … friendly Iraq, while Syria seeks a relatively strong secular Iraq with a clear Arabic identity."

Though Syria's secular regime and Iran's Shiite theocracy make odd bedfellows, some analysts see their partnership as a tactical alliance against the U.S. and Israel.

Their ties have deepened since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, when Syria and Libya were the only Arab countries that backed Tehran. Now oil-rich Iran helps bolster Syria's economy, which faces U.S. sanctions.

Iranian investment in Syria exceeds $1 billion, said Mohammad Hassan Akhtari, Iran's ambassador to Syria. Half a million Iranian pilgrims visit holy sites in Syria each year.

"The occasion is a chance to coordinate on recent developments in the Middle East," Akhtari told The Times, referring to Thursday's meeting. "We always consult each other since the Islamic Revolution."

Israeli Offers Direct Talks With Syria

By REUTERS

Filed at 1:49 a.m. ET

DUBAI (Reuters) - Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert in remarks aired on Tuesday offered Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to begin direct negotiations to make peace in the Middle East, and advised him not to wait for American mediation.

"Bashar al-Assad, you know that I am ready for direct talks with you," Olmert told Al-Arabiya television.

"You (Assad) have been saying that you want the negotiations through the Americans. But they do not want to sit with you. I am ready to sit with you and talk about peace not war."

Negotiations between Syria and Israel collapsed in 2000 without resolving the fate of the Golan Heights, a mountainous plateau occupied by Israel in 1967 and annexed in 1981 in a move declared null by the United Nations Security Council.

"I will be happy if I could make peace with Syria. I do no want to wage ware against Syria."

Assad has repeatedly expressed interest in resuming talk with Israel through a third party.

A Syrian foreign ministry official said last week, Damascus was ready for talks without preconditions and said Israel and Syria had solved some 85 percent of the problem in past negotiations.

Syria said last month, if Israel made concessions in peace negotiations, it would cooperate directly with Washington in helping to curb violence in Iraq and change its nature of its relationship with its ally Iran, an enemy of Israel and the U.S.

The West, led by U.S. accuses Syria of backing insurgency in Iraq, and hosting militant Palestinian leaders on its grounds.

Analysts said Syria wants to regain the Golan now more than ever, after it was forced to withdraw its forces from Lebanon two years ago and U.S. led pressure on Damascus for its role in Iraq and Lebanon mounted.

Motivating Iraq's Neighbors to the Table

By Brian Katulis
Special to washingtonpost.com's Think Tank Town
Friday, July 6, 2007; 12:00 AM

Last week, Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio) broke with the Bush administration and called for the United States to begin redeploying troops from Iraq.

Though most observers focused on the senators' call to start bringing U.S. troops home, less attention was paid to the second part of what Lugar and Voinovich said -- that the United States needs to intensify its diplomatic efforts with Iraq's neighbors to get them to play a more constructive role in the region.

This second component -- stepped-up diplomacy to stabilize Iraq -- is easier said than done. In a complicated region fraught with intense conflicts and tensions, Iraq's internal conflicts have in some ways already become proxy wars for regional forces, pitting country versus country, Shi'a Muslims versus Sunni Muslims, and Arabs against Persians against Kurds.

Unraveling these tensions will not be a simple task. In fact, achieving bipartisan consensus among America's warring political factions may actually be easier than getting all of Iraq's leaders and neighboring countries on the same page about the next steps in Iraq. But the United States should not shy away from these diplomatic challenges; international and regional diplomacy are a key to managing the national security threats associated with Iraq.

After much delay, the Bush administration finally began the process of reaching out to Iraq's neighbors by participating in regional security conferences in Baghdad and Egypt earlier this spring. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, held limited bilateral discussions with Iran in late May. These moves represent steps in the right direction, but they are not nearly enough to address the complex set of issues related to Iraq. Two key ingredients are missing from these efforts: providing the right structure for support, and giving the right motivation for all of the countries involved.

How should the United States structure its efforts to forge a new international consensus on what to do about Iraq? President Bush should announce that he is willing to work with other global powers and all of Iraq's neighbors to develop a new U.N. Security Council Resolution to replace the current one, which expires at the end of 2007. The current U.N. mandate legitimized the current U.S. military presence in Iraq, despite Saudi King Abdullah's claims to the contrary when he called the U.S. troops an "illegitimate occupation" at an Arab summit conference this past March.

This new U.N. resolution should ensure that other countries do their share to help stabilize Iraq and the Middle East. It should include transparent, verifiable commitments by Iraq's neighbors not to undermine Iraq's security and territorial integrity, and it could aim to develop collaborative regional security initiatives to contain Iraq's conflicts. A new resolution should also incorporate the International Compact for Iraq, a five-year plan launched earlier this spring with benchmarks for Iraq's national reconciliation and economic reconstruction in return for formal commitments of support from the international community for Iraq.

What's the best way to motivate other countries to act more constructively on Iraq? The United States should tell the world that it plans to redeploy its troops from Iraq within a specified time frame. This announcement will motivate countries to share the burden on Iraq. Leaders around the world and in the Middle East fear that the forthcoming U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq will lead to terrible consequences for their own countries' interests. This fear is one of the few remaining sources of leverage and power that the United States has over these other countries.

It is time for the United States to capitalize on these fears and get others to do their share to advance their own countries' self-interests in containing and managing Iraq's conflicts. As Voinovich said last week, once Iraq's neighbors "know we are genuinely leaving, I think all of a sudden the fear of God will descend upon them and say 'We've got to get involved in this thing.'"

The main goal of this diplomatic shift is to ensure that the costs of intervening to exploit Iraq's internal divisions are much higher than the benefits that could be gained from working collectively to contain, manage, and ultimately resolve Iraq's conflicts.

More than four years of going it nearly alone in Iraq has undermined U.S. national security. With U.S. military readiness declining as U.S. ground troops feel the strain of extended deployments and the so-called "coalition of the willing" in tatters -- only about 12,000 of the 25,000 troops from countries other than the United States remain in Iraq -- the time has come for a strategic shift, rather than minor adjustments in military tactics.

The United States needs to forge a new international consensus on Iraq -- one that recognizes the threats posed by Iraq, structures international action in a new U.N. resolution, and motivates other countries by sending a clear signal that the United States is leaving Iraq and leaving soon.

Brian Katulis is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co -author of the Center's new strategy for Iraq and the Middle East, "Strategic Reset."

Why the Iraq war won't engulf the Mideast

By Steven A. Cook, Ray Takeyh and Suzanne Maloney
Thursday, June 28, 2007
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WASHINGTON:

Long before the Bush administration began selling "the surge" in Iraq as a way to avert a general war in the Middle East, observers both inside and outside the government were growing concerned about the potential for armed conflict among the regional powers.

Underlying this anxiety was a scenario in which Iraq's sectarian and ethnic violence spills over into neighboring countries, producing conflicts between the major Arab states and Iran as well as Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government. These wars then destabilize the entire region well beyond the current conflict zone, involving heavyweights like Egypt.

This is scary stuff indeed, but with the exception of the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds, the scenario is far from an accurate reflection of the way Middle Eastern leaders view the situation in Iraq and calculate their interests there.

It is abundantly clear that major outside powers like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey are heavily involved in Iraq. These countries have so much at stake in the future of Iraq that it is natural they would seek to influence political developments in the country.

Yet, the Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians, Syrians, and others are very unlikely to go to war either to protect their own sect or ethnic group or to prevent one country from gaining the upper hand in Iraq.

The reasons are fairly straightforward. First, Middle Eastern leaders, like politicians everywhere, are primarily interested in one thing: self-preservation. Committing forces to Iraq is an inherently risky proposition, which, if the conflict went badly, could threaten domestic political stability. Moreover, most Arab armies are geared toward regime protection rather than projecting power and thus have little capability for sending troops to Iraq.

Second, there is cause for concern about the so-called blowback scenario in which jihadis returning from Iraq destabilize their home countries, plunging the region into conflict.

Middle Eastern leaders are preparing for this possibility. Unlike in the 1990s, when Arab fighters in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union returned to Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and became a source of instability, Arab security services are being vigilant about who is coming in and going from their countries.

In the last month, the Saudi government has arrested approximately 200 people suspected of ties with militants. Riyadh is also building a 700 kilometer wall along part of its frontier with Iraq in order to keep militants out of the kingdom.

Finally, there is no precedent for Arab leaders to commit forces to conflicts in which they are not directly involved. The Iraqis and the Saudis did send small contingents to fight the Israelis in 1948 and 1967, but they were either ineffective or never made it. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arab countries other than Syria, which had a compelling interest in establishing its hegemony over Lebanon, never committed forces either to protect the Lebanese from the Israelis or from other Lebanese. The civil war in Lebanon was regarded as someone else's fight.

Indeed, this is the way many leaders view the current situation in Iraq. To Cairo, Amman and Riyadh, the situation in Iraq is worrisome, but in the end it is an Iraqi and American fight.

As far as Iranian mullahs are concerned, they have long preferred to press their interests through proxies as opposed to direct engagement. At a time when Tehran has access and influence over powerful Shiite militias, a massive cross-border incursion is both unlikely and unnecessary.

So Iraqis will remain locked in a sectarian and ethnic struggle that outside powers may abet, but will remain within the borders of Iraq.

The Middle East is a region both prone and accustomed to civil wars. But given its experience with ambiguous conflicts, the region has also developed an intuitive ability to contain its civil strife and prevent local conflicts from enveloping the entire Middle East.

Iraq's civil war is the latest tragedy of this hapless region, but still a tragedy whose consequences are likely to be less severe than both supporters and opponents of Bush's war profess.

Steven A. Cook and Ray Takeyh are fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations. Suzanne Maloney is a senior fellow at Saban Center, Brookings Institution.

Foreign Fighters Shifting to Afghanistan from Iraq

International salafist militants are shifting back to Afghanistan. The interesting point seems to be that as the war in Iraq has shifted into a civil war, Iraqi Sunni sectarian extremists have asserted control over the insurgency and only want foreigners as anti-Shiite suicide bomb fodder.

Numbers of foreign fighters flowing to Iraq are decreasing, says the head of France's DST, and they are shifting to Afghanistan.

Although the L.A. Times article says salafists who don't want to die in Iraq as martyrs are now headed to Afghanistan, the article also says that increasing numbers of Arab militants heading to Afghanistan has led to the introduction of suicide bombings, a tactic apparently not preferred by locals. (I have no idea why not.)

The article is also interesting in the role it ascribes to Syria:

in the direction of terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the Muslim world:The movement of fighters to Iraq began to decline last year as insurgent leaders in Syria, who serve as a conduit to the combat zone, began screening volunteers aggressively, turning them back unless they had strong military skills or were eager to carry out suicide attacks, European anti-terrorism officials said.

Some newcomers were redirected to training camps in North Africa. Others were told to launch attacks in Europe, said a senior Italian anti-terrorism official. He described the confessions of Milan-based Tunisian and Moroccan suspects who got to Syria, but then were sent back: "They said the representative of Zarqawi's group really grilled them: 'Do you have military experience? Here's an AK-47; do you know how to use it? Have you ever fired a mortar? If not, we don't want you.' "

Instead, they were directed to bomb a basilica in Bologna because it displays a painting of the prophet Muhammad as depicted in Dante's Inferno, investigators say. Moroccan and Italian police broke up the alleged plot and arrested the group this spring.

There seems to be a distinctly European focus in the article. I'm not sure whether U.S. sources would agree with all of its conclusions about militants' shift in focus, but the information on what happens in Syria is more specific than I have heard before.