Lebanon is at a cross roads of historic armies

Claude Salhani:

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A few miles to the north of Beirut just before the town of Jounieh is the Dog River, or Nahr el-Kalb in Arabic. The 19-mile river thats runs from the famous Jeita Grottos to the Mediterranean Sea served as the demarcation line between Egypt and the Hittites in the 14th century B.C. At the mouth of the river where the coastal highway crosses the tiny river are a number of plaques, steles and monuments erected by past conquerors; they include Ramses II, Nebuchadnezzar and Marcus Aurelius, as well as mementos left by more recent visitors, modern-day armies of France and Great Britain.

Lebanon has been a land of contradictions because of its unique composition — 18 different religious confessions and with Christians holding much of the power in a region of the world overwhelmingly dominated by Islam.

In resorting to violence against their fellow Lebanese, something Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah publicly said he would never do, not only did Hezbollah renege on a promise, but shattered the age-old belief that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Last week's violence served to widen even more the political chasm already separating the various Lebanese parties has sadly proved that the sword, or more precisely in this case the AK47 assault rifle, accompanied by the odd rocket propelled grenade and a wild mob, can be mightier than the pen. At least for now, the final word is far from having been said in this latest dispute.

Indeed, the drastic events in the Lebanese capital last week amount to little more than strong-armed tactics to enforce censorship by the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah and to silence a more liberal press opposed to their way of thinking.

The Shi'ite militias' very first action was to neutralize all media outlets belonging to the Future Movement, the political gathering loyal to Saad Hariri, the son and political heir of assassinated former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

The targets included Future TV, al-Mustaqbal newspaper and other media outlets belonging to the Hariri group. Typical targets in any conventional coup d'etat. And if for the moment neither the Syrians nor the Iranians have left their footprint at the Dog River, Damascus and Tehran are aiming for far greater rewards than a plaque, a stele or an obscure monument to join other relics of the past.

Their aim is to leave their imprint on far more real estate than a stopover for tourists. Let us not be fooled by what is transpiring in Lebanon; the stakes are high, far higher than many people realize. At stake is democracy's only foothold in the Arab world.

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Salhani forgets that Iraq is also a democracy in the Arab world. But, that does not diminish his point about the stakes in Lebanon. As I have noted elsewhere the best way to defeat Hezballah is to destroy the regimes that support it. Hezballah would be bankrupt and impotent without Tehran and Damascus. It is those two weak sisters that need to be toppled. They are the mischief makers in the Middle East and they should be the targets that the rest of the world focuses on. Hezballah is just their proxy.