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Threat
Rises of New Middle East War
by Gerry Foley /
March 2005 issue of Socialist Action
The assassination of Rafik al-Hariri, former
premier of Lebanon and leader of the anti-Syrian opposition in that
country, touched off a major political crisis, with mass demonstrations
against Syria. It led finally, on Feb. 28, to the fall of the pro-Syrian
government. However, the crime remains
mysterious.
Al-Hariri was killed by a huge car bomb in Beirut
on Feb. 14. It is not even clear as we go to press whether the explosives
were remotely detonated or set off by a suicide bomber.
In a tape sent to Al Jazeera, the assassination
was claimed by an unknown group that identified itself as the "Group
for Advocacy and Holy War in the Levant," a jihadist name. It said
that al-Hariri had been assassinated because of his ties with the Saudi
"infidel" regime.
If the explosion was a suicide bombing, that
would in fact point to a jihadist operation. But a statement attributed to
Al Qaeda that was posted on an internet site used by the Islamist
organization denied that any jihadist organization had been involved. This statement
was quoted and supported with analysis on Feb. 14 on the Islamist on-line
site, edited in Cairo, Egypt.
It is, of course, unusual for Al Qaeda to
dissociate itself from terrorist actions, and even more for it to assure
that no jihadist organization was involved.
It is evident that the main effect of the
assassination of al-Hariri has been to increase tensions between the United
States and the Syrian and Iranian governments.
The U.S. withdrew its ambassador from Damascus in
response to the murder and stepped up its demands that Syrian troops quit
Lebanon. That provoked Syria and
Iran to form an defensive alliance against the
U.S. Iran, moreover, has started
staging military maneuvers that it proclaims are preparations for meeting
an American attack.
A U.S. assault on Iran and Syria would of course
be a massive, almost unimaginable escalation of the Bush administration’s war in the Middle East. But the war
that the U.S. is waging in Iraq is fundamentally a war against the
anti-imperialist movement in the Middle East in general—that is, a
counterrevolutionary war. And such
wars have a tendency to spread, as the example of the Vietnam War shows.
The U.S. rulers decided then that it was necessary to extend the war to
North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in order to cut off support for the
rebels it was fighting in South Vietnam. They were impelled to up the ante
and lost their entire bet.
The assassination of al-Hariri led to mass anti-Syrian
demonstrations, supported apparently mainly by the religious
minorities—Christians, Druses, and Sunni Muslims. The Shiite guerrilla
movement, the Hezbullah, warned the protesters against any actions that
might re-ignite the Lebanese civil war, which lasted up until 1991 and was
actually halted by the deployment of Syrian troops.
Of all the militias, only the Hezbullah retained
their arms. They fought a successful guerrilla war against Israeli
occupation of southern Lebanon and continue to pose an important military
threat to Israel’s northern border.
The Hezbullah have become a state within a state
tolerated by both Syria and the Lebanese government; they are dominated by
Syria and financed and armed by
the Islamic Republic of Iran. Recently, the
Iranian regime gave the Hezbullah drone airplanes capable of doing
reconnaissance over Israel.
The Israeli Zionist press, both liberal and
conservative, maintains that the Palestinian insurgency is being financed
by the Hezbullah. The United States has been pressing the European Union,
so far unsuccessfully, to get the EU to declare Hezbullah a terrorist
organization.
Obviously, the Hezbullah is a strategic target of
Washington, especially in the light of the argument by some experts that it
was Saddam Hussein’s support for the Palestinian resistance that tipped the
scales in U.S. ruling circles toward an assault on Iraq. It seems certain
that a major objective of the U.S. campaign to get Syria out of Lebanon is
to move toward isolating the Hezbullah.
Hezbullah has both the material and human
capacity for carrying out the sort of action that eliminated al-Hariri.
Moreover, as a Shiite group, it belongs to a different world from Al Qaeda,
which is violently hostile to Shiites. It also had an interest in combating
the campaign to force the ouster of Syrian forces.
Yet, regardless of who the authors of this action
were and what their motives were, the political effect of this car bombing
points up the growing dangers of wider war in the Middle East. It is an
ominous indication that the U.S. rulers may be drawn into yet unimagined
adventures by the entanglements of their war against anti-imperialist
forces in the region.
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