Annan To Assad: Get Out
Captain Ed
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a remarkably stern and uncompromising message to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad tonight, joining the White House in calling for a complete withdrawal of Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon. Dismissing Syrian murmurings of returning to the long-dead, phased-withdrawal Taif Accord, Annan demanded that Syria completely retreat by April:
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Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, added his voice yesterday to American calls for Syria to pull out of Lebanon.
He warned the Syrians in an Arabic television interview that they would face "measures" - presumably some form of sanctions - if they did not pull their army out of Lebanon completely by April.
With pressure growing every day, Waleed al-Mualem, the Syrian deputy foreign minister, committed his country to further withdrawals, but failed to make a clear commitment to complete evacuation.
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The new demand by Annan, who almost never operates independent of a consensus, comes as a shock to me and I suspect also to Bashar Assad. The UN hardly stands as a bastion of radical change, but the undeniable momentum of popular revolt in Beirut has grown too large to be ignored any longer. The American alliance with France on the Lebanese question must have emboldened the oft-shy Annan into attempting to get in front of history for the first time in his career.
And that is Assad's problem in a nutshell. While the entire world has decried the American occupation of Iraq, we have shown our clear intention on getting the Iraqi people back on their own feet, and quickly. The Syrians have occupied Lebanon under similar rationales but have obviously meant none of it. They blew off the Taif agreement in favor of a long occupation in order to support their proxy terror network, Hezbollah, in continuing operations against their primary enemy Israel.
When you're a dictator, especially one with a seat on the Secuity Council, having Annan square off against you is almost exactly analogous to Barry Goldwater telling Richard Nixon that no one's buying the burglar story. Assad would do well to listen and retire quietly, and quickly, before the next shoe drops.
Posted by Captain Ed
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