The Vice-Predator!

The Arabic Satellite News Channel Al-Arabiyah has just aired an interview with the former Syrian Vice-President, Abdul Haleem Khaddam, currently living in Paris ostensibly to work on his memoirs in the quiet peace of the Parisian suburbs (the BBC also covered this in English).

In truth, of course, Mr. Khaddam, who resigned his post back in May 2005, is actually living in exile in Paris, his growing disenchantment with the current regime and its President having reaching a certain climax with the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafic al-Hariri, his longtime friend and business partner. Continue reading “The Vice-Predator!” →

Real Polidick!

Once again I have to disagree with Joshua Landis’s analysis of things Lebanese and Syrians. His take on Tueni assassination is ludicrous. The suggestion that Tueni was the victim of continued pressures on Syria disregards the recent history of assassination and attempted assassinations that have been taken place all along. In fact, it confuses cause and effect. The problem with the current regime in Syria is that it has gotten out of control long before any pressures were put on it. Through its adventurist policies and miscalculations, through its insistence on ruling Lebanon according to the same old formula first introduced by Assad Sr. and without taking any note of the regional developments and changes, it courted disaster and created the context for the current crisis. Resort to tough policies in Lebanon predated the attempt on Hariri with the attempt on Marwan Hammadi. Continue reading →

Mehlis & Tweini!

The Second Report by Detlev Mehlis is out and it is damning enough in its insistence that its erstwhile conclusions and lines of enquiry are correct and that they have been corroborated by new evidence and testimonies (item 46: “…the Commission has not found any significant evidence that alters the conclusion of probable cause which is set out in the previous report concerning the involvement of top-ranked Syrian and Lebanese officials”. The operation is simply too complex and Lebanon too controlled by its security apparatuses acting in cahoots with their Syrian counterparts to allow for that, as item 47 explains). Continue reading →

Euphoria Turns to Panic!

For all the blows that the Mehlis investigation has supposedly received and for all those commentators so willing to declare that the French and Americans have backed off for now, leaving the door open for a potential deal with the regime, the popular mood in Syria has grown grim once again.

The stories propagated by the “recantant witness” seem like distant memories now. Their chief protagonist seems to have already sunk back into oblivion. The euphoria he inspired seems to have dissipated all too quickly, somehow. But then, it was never really a genuine expression of anything other than despair. Continue reading “Euphoria Turns to Panic!” →