What A Relief

Security

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Michael Totten: Will Lebanon fall into civil war again?

City Journal:

The Iranian- and Syrian-backed militia Hezbollah just took down Lebanon’s government. It did so without firing a shot—which, so far as I know, is unprecedented for a terrorist army—yet its action could be just the nonviolent prologue to a deadly serious, possibly region-wide crisis. Eleven ministers from Hezbollah and its aligned parties resigned from the Lebanese cabinet, leaving the government short of the number it needed to continue.

At issue was the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which is expected to indict Hezbollah in March for assassinating former prime minister Rafik Hariri with a car bomb in 2005. Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, had been pressing the current prime minister, Hariri’s son Saad, to condemn the tribunal and preemptively discredit the looming indictment, but Hariri refused. He and his allies in the “March 14” coalition—named after the date when a million or more people demonstrated in central Beirut against the Syrian occupation in 2005—have surrendered to Hezbollah on several points of contention, not the least of which was the number of ministers that Hezbollah would get in the cabinet. But the son of the slain former prime minister would not surrender on this. He’d rather lose his government and his job than give even tacit approval to Hezbollah’s ridiculous story that the Israelis were behind the attack that killed his father, one of the most liberal prime ministers in the Arab world’s history.

At the time of the bombing, most observers, including me, assumed that the culprit was the Syrian military regime then occupying Lebanon. Hezbollah, while certainly capable, had less motive. In hindsight, however, it’s obvious that Hezbollah should have been on a short list of suspects. It is, after all, a terrorist organization. The Party of God has expressed its loathing of the UN tribunal ever since the investigation was authorized in 2005, long before anyone talked seriously about accusing Nasrallah or any of his lieutenants.

Since the Lebanese government refused to discredit the tribunal, Hezbollah and its partners—their own coalition is called “March 8,” after the date of a pro-Syrian rally in 2005—simply upended the chessboard, hoping to hold more power in a new, reshuffled cabinet with a different prime minister. You might give Nasrallah a little credit for dissolving the government without violence, but don’t expect Hezbollah’s restraint to last forever if the country remains deadlocked. “The Syrians will now try to influence the formation of the new government,” Lebanese scholar and political analyst Tony Badran says, “in the hope of excluding Hariri’s allies, such as the Lebanese Forces, and impose other conditions aimed at neutering Hariri’s power and increasing its own grip on the various levers of power in the country.” But what if the Lebanese Forces—a Christian party that was once itself a militia—and Hariri refuse to surrender to Syria’s and Hezbollah’s demands? There is no good reason to believe Nasrallah won’t resort to violence, as he has in the past, if Hariri and his partners remain defiant…

Read it all.

Couldn’t Do it

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Time To Reevaluate

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.