Syrian departure- Summary: If the assassins of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri sought to make an example of him for his defiance of Syria, the aftermath of the crime has mocked them. For a generation, Lebanon was an appendage of Syrian power. But now the Lebanese people, in an "independence intifada," are clamoring for a return to normalcy. The old Arab edifice of power has survived many challenges in the past, but something is different this time: the United States is now willing to gamble on freedom.
Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
New season of revolutions —Iqbal Latif
The tyrants are not running away because they have become soft overnight but because their security forces are refusing to fire on their own people and establishments are refusing to support crumbling regimes.Simmerings and the undercurrents for free elections are rampant in the Middle East and the Arab world, who knows why not the Iranian anti-clergy revolution in offing may have colorful name of saffron revolution, although in India that named was hijacked by the Hindu extremists to impose their brand of radicalism, but there should no reason for saffron not to be expressed as color for freedom instead of tyranny. Libyans denied by their leader the oil wealth of their nations should look for Black Gold Revolution.
iranian.com
The Autumn of the Autocrats
Fouad Ajami
It was immensely important that Washington and Paris worked together. In the new effort to push Syria out of Lebanon, the United States was free of the burden, and the taint, of unilateralism. Europe had substantial assets to bring to the fight, if only because the U.S. economic, cultural, and political presence in Syria had been rather limited in comparison.
French diplomacy may have been "pacifist" over Iraq, but Paris still felt the tug of its imperial memory. The Mediterranean coastline and the hill country of Lebanon were once French domains. France's language and culture left their indelible mark on the people of Mount Lebanon. The traffic between France and Lebanon's Maronites goes back centuries. In 1860, Napoleon III dispatched a French expedition to Lebanon to help the Maronites after a communal war broke out between them and the Druze. French power, in 1920, created the modern republic of Lebanon, bequeathed it its favorable borders, annexing to the Maronite Mount Lebanon the coastal cities of the Mediterranean, the Bekaa Valley to the east, and the Shia hinterland to the south. And beyond old memories, personal friendship was no doubt a factor: President Jacques Chirac was a close friend of Hariri's for years. The Syrian rulers, generally given to a healthy dose of paranoia, were convinced that Hariri had played a big role in drafting resolution 1559 and that French diplomacy, in turn, had stiffened U.S. resolve against Syria.
But even before Hariri's tragic death reawakened interest in Lebanon's fate, Syria's occupation was being called into question. In his State of the Union address on February 2, 2005, President Bush announced a departure from the old U.S. reticence: "Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region. You have passed, and we are applying, the Syrian Accountability Act, and we expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror, and open the door to freedom." The Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, a congressional initiative of 2003, had given the president broad authority to impose a range of economic sanctions and restrictions on Syria. The White House had initially treated the initiative with some reserve, and so its embrace by Bush signaled a change in official policy.
In the aftermath of Hariri's assassination, Bush upped the ante: Syrian armed forces had to quit Lebanon and take with them their intelligence operatives. There was no small irony in this twist of history: fifteen years earlier, George H.W. Bush and Hafiz al-Assad had struck a deal that liquidated Lebanon's independence; now their sons were bringing that deal to an end. It was fitting that the edifice of Syrian control secured in the first campaign against Saddam was being undone in the course of the second.
Syria never fully assimilated how different the world had become after September 11. In March 2001, Cardinal Sfeir had journeyed to the United States, where he sought an audience with Bush -- in vain. This was, after all, the time of realism: no one wanted to offend Damascus or stir up the passions of Lebanese nationalism. Four years later, however, a president who had "planted the flag of liberty" in Arab lands had no choice but to take up the cause of Lebanon's independence. The war on terror came to Lebanon's rescue. If the Middle East was to be repaired, then the establishment of a legitimate system of authority in Lebanon was of paramount concern. Damascus held effective power but was not accountable; Beirut retained the trappings of sovereignty but could not deliver public order or maintain peace in its territory.
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