THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

March 9, 2005
Another Species of Cedar
A Half Million Lebanese March for Syria

By ROBERT FISK

It was a warning. They came in their tens of thousands, Lebanese Shia Muslim families with babies in arms and children in front, walking past my Beirut home. They reminded me of the tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims who walked with their families to the polls in Iraq, despite the gunfire and the suicide bombers.

And now they came from southern Lebanon and the Bekaa to say they rejected America's plans in Lebanon, and wanted - so they claimed - to know who killed Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister murdered on 14 February, and to reject UN Security Council Resolution 1559 which demands a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarmament of the Hizbollah guerrilla movement, and to express their "thanks" to Syria. This was a tall order in Lebanon.

But only 100 yards from the Lebanese opposition protests, the half-million - for that was an approachable figure, given Hizbollah's extraordinary organisational abilities - stood for an hour with Lebanese flags, and posed a challenge to President George Bush's project in the Middle East. "America is the source of terrorism", one poster proclaimed. "All our disasters come from America".

Many of those tens of thousands were Hizbollah families who had fought the Israelis during their occupation of southern Lebanon, been arrested by the Israelis, imprisoned by the Israelis and feared that American support for Lebanon meant not "democracy" but an imposed Israeli-Lebanese peace treaty.

There were Syrians in the crowds - indeed, I saw buses with Syrian registration plates that had brought families from Damascus - but almost all the half million were Lebanese Shias and they wanted to reject 1559 because it called for Hizbollah to be disarmed. They were perfectly happy to see the Syrians leave (who now remembers the Syrian massacre of Hizbollah members in Beirut in 1987?) but, bearing in mind Syria's transit of weapons from Iran to Lebanon, Hizbollah wanted to be regarded as a resistance movement, not a "militia" to be disarmed. What the Shia were saying was that they were a power, just as they said when they voted in Iraq. In Lebanon, Shia Muslims are the largest religious community.

Syria is run by a clique of Alawis - who are Shia - and Iraq is now dominated by Shia Muslims who voted themselves into power, and Iran is a Shia nation. So when President Bush said "the Lebanese people have the right to determine their future free from domination of a foreign power", the power the Shias were thinking of was not Syria but the United States and Israel.

And 100 yards away, the demonstrators who have bravely protested against the murder of Rafik Hariri have become factionalised, courtesy of the Syrians. At night, the opposition protesters are largely Christian. Yesterday's Hizbollah rally, while it contained the usual pro-Syrian Christians, was essentially Shia. And their message was not one of thanks to President Bush.

"The fleets came in the past and were defeated; and they will be defeated again," Hizbollah's leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, said in reference to the Americans. Ironically, President Bush was to refer within hours to the killing of 241 US Marines in Beirut in October 1982, as if their deaths were the responsibility of al-Qa'ida. To the Israelis, Nasrallah said: "Let go of your dreams for Lebanon. To the enemy entrenched on our border, occupying our country and imprisoning our people, 'There is no place for you here and there is no life for you among us: Death to Israel'."

Nasrallah's take on the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war was predictable. The crowds were meeting on the front lines that had separated the Lebanese during the civil war; indeed, on the very location of the Christian-Muslim trenches of that conflict. "We meet today to remind the world and our partners in the country," Nasrallah said, "that this arena that joins us, or the other one in Martyrs' Square, was destroyed by Israel and civil war and was united by Syria and the blood of its soldiers and officers."

This was an inventive piece of history. Israel certainly killed many thousands of Lebanese - more than the Syrians, although their soldiers took the lives of many hundreds - but the half million roared their approval.

So what did all this prove? That there was another voice in Lebanon. That if the Lebanese "opposition" - pro-Hariri and increasingly Christian - claim to speak for Lebanon and enjoy the support of President Bush, there is a pro-Syrian, nationalist voice which does not go along with their anti-Syrian demands but which has identified what it believes is the true reason for Washington's support for Lebanon: Israel's plans for the Middle East.

The Beirut demonstration yesterday was handled in the usual Hizbollah way: maximum security, lots of young men in black shirts with two-way radios, and frightening discipline. No one was allowed to carry a gun or a Hizbollah flag. There was no violence. When one man brandished a Syrian flag, it was immediately taken from him. Law and order, not "terrorism", was what Hizbollah wished. Syria had spoken. President Bashar Assad's sarcastic remark about the Hariri protesters needing a "zoom lens" to show their numbers had been answered by a demonstration of Shia power which needed no "zoom".

And in the mountains above Beirut, still frozen under their winter snows, few Syrians moved. There were Syrian military trucks on the international highway to Damascus but no withdrawal, no retreat, no redeployment. The Taif agreement of 1989 stipulated that the Syrians should withdraw to the Mdeirej heights above Beirut, which they have now agreed to do, 14 years later than they should have done.

The official document released by the Lebanese-Syrian military delegation in Damascus suggests this is a new redeployment and that in April the Syrian forces, along with their military intelligence personnel, will withdraw to the Lebanese-Syrian border.

But the question remains: will they retreat to the Syrian side of the frontier, or sit in the Lebanese-Armenian town of Aanjar, on the Lebanese side, where Brigadier General Rustum Gazale, the head of Syrian military intelligence, still maintains his white-painted villa?

Either way, Lebanon can no longer be taken for granted. The "cedar" revolution now has a larger dimension, one that does not necessarily favour America's plans. If the Shia of Iraq can be painted as defenders of democracy, the Shias of Lebanon cannot be portrayed as the defenders of "terrorism". So what does Washington make of yesterday's extraordinary events in Beirut?

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

Brand X wrote:

All that is moot any way as they did something to draw fire, hopefully we'll find out exactly what that something was. In the mean time her story gets a lot of credence eventhough she contradicts herself over and over.

I sounds like they got caught up in the thrill and joy of her escape and in that... failed to yield to the rules of the checkpoint.

Previous vehicles that day passed through without gun fire.

Hey, Brandy, do you have a clue what you are talking about, or not?


"In the mean time her story gets a lot of credence"

Quote:

Fini said the hypothesis that the shooting was the result of an ambush, as suggested by Sgrena, is "groundless."

Quote:

Maurizio Gasparri urged her to to show restraint: "I understand the emotion of these hours, but those who have been under stress in the past few weeks should pull themselves together and avoid talking nonsense."

Uh, Gasparri and Fini are Italian ministers, btw.
"lot of credence"
sure


"I sounds like they got caught up in the thrill and joy of her escape and in that... failed to yield to the rules of the checkpoint."

Guess what? She wasn't driving. And the Italian officers? Yeah, thrilled as hell, I'd say!


" they did something to draw fire"

See, that's still the question. ' have proof for that?

OE writes

Quote:

Fox, you could probably find out more details... I admit I haven't followed this one that close...
But then, remember, "major combat operations in Iraq have ended"...

And again: supposed this was the other way round, wouldn't you at least be concerned?

Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

Walter you are a star

Seriously

Don't be put off your researches because "no one reads my sources"

Your tag carries weight.

People here dismiss what you say at their peril.

They read Walter.... but with an eye trained on what they want to find ...... an opinionated eye, so to speak.
Off to the mines. :wink:

[When a U.S. soldier is injured or killed I grieve. When the injury or death is caused by a murderous terrorist, a deep anger is mixed with the grief, but if the death is caused by accident or friendly fire (from our people or others) the grief is the same.

I think if a U.S. soldier is killed by friendly fire from Bulgarians or Italians or the Brits or any other, my first thought is not that somebody acted intentionally or recklessly. And that is the difference. Whenever there is a tragedy like this, the first response, shrill and judgmental, from the anti-war people both here and abroad is that the U.S. intentionally did something wrong. I take strong exception to that. You can count on it every time.

Is that the only source re the Bulgarian soldier? Wouldn't you think the press would have taken that and run with it? I have to think this story and its 'anonymous source' are not credible unless substantiated elsewhere.

I didn't and don't post them, because no-one of you reads them, understands them or cares about them.

U.S. Quits Pact Used in Capital Cases
Foes of Death Penalty Cite Access to Envoys

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 10, 2005; Page A01

The Bush administration has decided to pull out of an international agreement that opponents of the death penalty have used to fight the sentences of foreigners on death row in the United States, officials said yesterday.

In a two-paragraph letter dated March 7, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice informed U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that the United States "hereby withdraws" from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The United States proposed the protocol in 1963 and ratified it -- along with the rest of the Vienna Convention -- in 1969.

The protocol requires signatories to let the International Court of Justice (ICJ) make the final decision when their citizens say they have been illegally denied the right to see a home-country diplomat when jailed abroad.

The United States initially backed the measure as a means to protect its citizens abroad. It was also the first country to invoke the protocol before the ICJ, also known as the World Court, successfully suing Iran for the taking of 52 U.S. hostages in Tehran in 1979.

But in recent years, other countries, with the support of U.S. opponents of capital punishment, successfully complained before the World Court that their citizens were sentenced to death by U.S. states without receiving access to diplomats from their home countries.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments March 28 in the case of a Mexican death row inmate in Texas who is asking the justices to enforce an ICJ decision in favor of Mexico last year. That case has attracted wide attention in Mexico and caused a diplomatic rift between the Bush administration and the government of Mexican President Vicente Fox.

Rice is scheduled to meet with Fox today in Mexico in preparation for a summit meeting at President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex., later this month.

The administration's decision does not affect the rest of the Vienna Convention, which requires its 166 signatories to inform foreigners of their right to see a home-country diplomat when detained overseas. But it shows that Washington's desire to counteract international pressure on the death penalty now weighs against a long-standing policy of ensuring the United States a forum in which to enforce its citizens' allegations of abuse.

"The International Court of Justice has interpreted the Vienna Consular Convention in ways that we had not anticipated that involved state criminal prosecutions and the death penalty, effectively asking the court to supervise our domestic criminal system," State Department spokeswoman Darla Jordan said yesterday.

Withdrawal from the protocol is a way of "protecting against future International Court of Justice judgments that might similarly interpret the consular convention or disrupt our domestic criminal system in ways we did not anticipate when we joined the convention," Jordan added.

The administration's action comes after its Feb. 28 decision to grant 51 Mexicans on death row in Texas and elsewhere new state court hearings, as the ICJ had ordered.

But withdrawal from the protocol means that the United States will not have to bow to the ICJ again, legal analysts said.

Some said the decision would weaken both protections for U.S. citizens abroad and the idea of reciprocal obligation that the protocol embodied.

"It's encouraging that the president wants to comply with the ICJ judgment" in the Mexicans' case, said Frederic L. Kirgis, a professor of international law at Washington and Lee University. "But it's discouraging that it's now saying we're taking our marbles and going home."

The State Department, however, notes that fewer than 30 percent of the signatories to the Vienna Convention had agreed to the protocol. Among those that had not done so are Spain, Brazil and Canada, officials said.

Bush's decision to enforce the ICJ judgment in the case of the Mexicans "should ensure that our withdrawal is not interpreted as an indication that we will not fulfill our international obligations," said Jordan of the State Department.

Meanwhile, the president's decision has thrown the Supreme Court case regarding the Mexicans into limbo. Some legal analysts suggest the case may now be moot.

Attorneys for Jose Ernesto Medellin, a convicted murderer on death row in Texas who is seeking review of his assertion that a lack of consular access harmed his case at trial, have asked the justices to put the case on hold until after Medellin has had his hearing in Texas state court.

The Texas attorney general's office, meanwhile, issued a statement Tuesday saying, "We respectfully believe" that the president's decision "exceeds constitutional bounds for federal authority."

Peter Spiro, a law professor at the University of Georgia, said the withdrawal was unbecoming: "It's a sore-loser kind of move," he said. "If we can't win, we're not going to play."
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