By Jonathan Spyer

Israel’s announcement of a willingness for peace talks with Lebanon is one of the early fruits of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent visit to the region and her unexpected visit to Lebanon. French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent visit to Lebanon and upcoming visit to Israel is also crucial here.

In the wake of the recent Doha agreement, the US is keen to bolster the position of Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and the March 14 movement of which he is a part.

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By Barry Rubin

Why is Israel negotiating with Syria and what happened in Lebanon? One of these events may be the Middle East’s most important development for 2008. Hint: it isn’t the first of them.

Let’s consider why the two sides are “negotiating” including the fact that they aren’t negotiating.

There isn’t going to be a deal. Both sides know it, yet have good reason to be seen talking, indirectly that is.

Start with six factors that account for Israeli government policy:

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By Barry Rubin

“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now…
Oh, what a fall was there…
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down.”

–William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar,” Act 3, Scene 1.

May 21, 2008, is a date–like December 7 (1941) and September 11 (2001)–that should now live in infamy. Yet who will notice, mourn, or act the wiser for it?

On that day, the Beirut spring was buried under the reign of Hizballah.

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By Barry Rubin

While America’s secretary of state devotes her time to doomed Israel-Palestinian talks and America goes ga-ga over a candidate whose main foreign policy strategy is to talk to dictators, still another crisis strengthens radical Islamists and endangers Western friends and interests.

William Butler Yeats said it best: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity.”

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by Jonathan Spyer

The recent events in Beirut pose a simple, fundamental question: Who rules in Lebanon?

The answer proposed by Hizbullah last week is that the government of Fuad Saniora and Saad Hariri is to be permitted to hold the formal reins of administration - on condition that they well understand the inherent limits of their position. Most important, any attempt to interfere with the Iranian-created and Iranian- and Syrian-sponsored military infrastructure in the country will result in a swift, disproportionate and bloody response.

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A briefing by David Wurmser, Summary account by Mimi Stillman*

Mr. Wurmser calls Lebanon a “key battleground between the West as a whole and the forces that seek to drag the Middle East down.” The situation in Lebanon must be viewed in the context of the larger conflict in the region, which is becoming far more dangerous. Two years after the Cedar Revolution in March 2005, which was brought on by the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese are still living through a tragedy. The inability to install a new president today is indicative of the situation. It is because of the size and success of the popular demonstrations by the Lebanese, however, that Lebanon has become the focal point of the enemies of the West, namely Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.

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By Barry Rubin

One of the things least understood by people in the West is the framework–or should I say straitjacket?–of the dominant ideology in the Arabic-speaking world in shaping thought, speech, and political alternatives. This shows up in the smallest of exchanges. But atoms, too, are very tiny yet make up all the wide variety of things in the world.

Call it AIDS (Arab Ideological Doctrine Syndrome), a disease that doesn’t just threaten the Middle East, it’s been a plague since the 1950s with few signs of a let-up. Here’s a little example that illustrates the big picture. On February 25, Lebanese cabinet minister Marwan Hamada gave an interview to Press TV. It is a commonplace for supporters of Lebanon’s government to be accused of being Western agents, an implication often repeated in the Western media referring to it as “pro-U.S.”

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By Barry Rubin

A funny thing happened at the funeral of Imad Mugniyah. Those who had for years been denying any connection with him and his international terrorist activities–Iran, Syria, and Hizballah–suddenly admitted that he was one of their favorite people.

At the same time, other critical points came out. Mugniyah’s critical position as the link between those three allies, in their conduct of terrorism and subversion, stood out clearly. In addition, Mugniyah’s career as an international terrorist, who often operated against Western targets, showed how Hizballah–along with its backers in Tehran and Damascus–were second only to al-Qaida in their global operations of violence.

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by Jonathan Spyer

In a speech last week broadcast at the Sayed al-Shohada Mosque in south Beirut, Hizbullah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah promised his supporters that Israel’s ‘disappearance’ was an ‘established fact.’

The Hizbullah leader railed from his unknown hiding place against the ‘robbing and murdering Zionists’, whom he accused of killing prominent Hizbullah official Imad Mughniyeh. Behind the Hizbullah leader’s customary defiant rhetoric, however, his movement currently faces a series of dilemmas.

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by Jonathan Spyer

The Lebanon war of 2006 failed to resolve any of the issues over which it was fought. Ultimately, the  war may be understood as a single campaign within a broader Middle Eastern conflict–between pro-Western and democratic states on the one hand, and an alliance of Islamist and Arab nationalist forces on the other. The latter alignment has as one of its strategic goals the eventual demise of the State of Israel. While such a goal may appear delusional, the inconclusive results of the 2006 war did much to confirm the representatives of the latter camp in their belief that they have discovered a method capable of eventually producing a strategic defeat for Israel.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Imad Mughniyeh, aka “The Fox,” a Hezbollah murderer, may have been “an inspiration to bin Laden,” but he is now a dead one. Thanks most likely go to the Israeli Mossad, although the Jewish state is not commenting. Better to keep twisted, Palestinian terrorist master-minds guessing about their fates. Lest people bemoan the “assassination” of another “freedom fighter,” the National Post today pointed out what kind of an evil man Mughniyeh was:

… Mugniyeh cemented his dark reputation in 1983, when he orchestrated the vehicle bombing of the American embassy in Beirut and, six months later, similar attacks at the barracks of French and American peacekeepers.

He followed up with a spate of kidnappings, the 1985 hijacking of a TWA plane flying from Athens to Rome, the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the bombing two years later of the city’s Jewish community centre. Some 500 died in his attacks in just over a decade. Osama bin Laden has called Mugniyeh’s tactics in Beirut his inspiration for “destroying towers in America.”

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By Jonathan Spyer

The recent killing of Captain Wissam Eid of the Lebanese Internal Security Force, and the shooting deaths of eight Shi’ite rioters - including four Hizbullah supporters - at the Mar Mikhael intersection in southern Beirut last week offered the latest evidence of the potential of the political stalemate in Lebanon to spill over into renewed civil conflict.

Substantive compromise on the issues dividing the country seems impossible. The overriding cause of the crisis is Syria’s determination to prevent political stability in its smaller neighbor on any but its own terms.

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By Gary C. Gambill

The article examines the evolution of three distinct poles of Islamism in Lebanon and how they have adapted to changes in local political and security conditions over the past three decades.

Although Lebanon’s ethno-sectarian demography is manifestly unsuitable for the establishment of an Islamic state, the salience of militant Islamist movements in this tiny Mediterranean country has few parallels. Above and beyond the regional conditions fueling Islamic revivalism, Lebanon’s weak state, acute socioeconomic and political inequities, and experience of pervasive external intervention converged to create an unusually permissive environment for Islamists. Under these circumstances, radical Islamism has become a powerful instrument of communitarian social mobilization and an effective vehicle for drawing resources from the outside world.

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By Barry Rubin

A strange malady has apparently descended on part of Israel’s, much of America’s, and most of Europe’s elite. Let’s call it Syriantoxication, the belief that there is a real chance to make peace with Syria and–in its extreme version–that Lebanon should be sacrificed for that goal.

To call this wishful thinking is understatement. Why is this happening?

Few Israelis believe that negotiations with Palestinians will lead anywhere. Those on the right think it’s dangerous, those in the center believe it can be done without harm and for limited benefit, those on the left doubt it will work but wishful thinking compels them to hope even without conviction.

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by Robert G. Rabil*

The Iranian and Syrian relationship with Hezbollah developed from a combination of ideological, domestic, and regional factors. Both Tehran and Damascus found Hezbollah to be a useful proxy to further regional objectives. Today, however, Hezbollah’s position has changed. Tehran’s growing strength is matched by Damascus’s regional weakness. As overt Syrian suzerainty over Lebanon fades and Hezbollah increases its regional role without regard to the Lebanese government, the nature of Hezbollah’s relations to Syria has changed. The group has outgrown its subservient relationship to Damascus. Hezbollah is no longer the junior partner in the axis.

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