Reader DL sends a link to a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110860948586057420,00.html"> Fouad Ajami article describi...
Reader DL sends a link to a
href="http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110860948586057420,00.html">
Fouad Ajami article describing the effect of the Hariri assasination in the
context of the history of Lebanon. Read the whole thing. But here are some
excerpts.
A great, pitiless hoax was played on Lebanon. A country that had known the
crosscurrents of the world, a place of culture -- French culture in east
Beirut and the mountains, American culture on the western seaboard -- was to
pass into the control of the conquering army of a brutal, backward
regime. The
Syrians had usages for Lebanon: There was money there for the Syrian
kleptocracy, opportunities for drug dealings and contraband, a border from
which the Syrians could wage intermittent little wars and deeds of terror
against Israel, while maintaining the most quiet of borders on the
Syrian-Israeli front.
Truth be known, this steady encroachment on Lebanon was aided and abetted
by the silence of the world. In one of those astonishing changes, the Syrian
arsonists had come to be seen as the fire brigade of a volatile Lebanese
polity. A generation ago, the Pax Americana averted its gaze from the Syrian
destruction of the last vestige of Lebanon's independence: In
1990-91, America
had acquiesced when the Syrians put down the rebellion of a
patriotic Lebanese
officer, Michel Aoun, whose cause represented the devotion of the Christian
Maronites to the ancestral independence of their country. That was the price
paid by President George Herbert Walker Bush for enlisting Syria in the
coalition that waged war against Saddam Hussein for his grab of Kuwait. Pity
the Lebanese: They had cedars, Kuwait had oil. We would restore Kuwait's
sovereignty as we consigned the Lebanese to their terrible fate in that big
Syrian prison.
And remember, Assad was Hussein writ small.
COMMENTS