Libano IV

"(...) He was talking about the great betrayal at the end of World War I.The Arabs had been promised an independent country if they fought the Turks. It was a lie. The British and French negotiated a secret agreement that divided up the Middle East between them. France got Syria and, by chopping off the mountainous, coastal region, created Lebanon, just as the British created Jordan by severing Palestine east of the Jordan River.

Saladin was a Kurd, born in Tikrit, where Saddam Hussein was born. Saladin whipped the Crusaders and drove them out of Jerusalem.

The point of this story is that nothing is as simple in the Middle East as it appears to be to the president and his neoconservative ideologues. Lebanon remains part of Syria in the minds of many Syrians and, indeed, in the minds of some Lebanese. It's no big deal for France to join the United States in calling for a Syrian withdrawal. France is not popular in either Syria or Lebanon. The president of Syria has taken no public notice of the president's demands. He is not, as it has been erroneously reported in some outlets at this writing, withdrawing the troops from Lebanon. He is redeploying them along the border – on the Lebanese side.(...)

But even if Syria decides to withdraw, that won't end Syrian influence. Lebanon has many factions. There are the Druze, the Maronite Christians, the Eastern Orthodox Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Palestinian refugees. They were embroiled in a terrible civil war in the 1970s, and it was the Syrians, invited in, who finally brought it to a halt.

(...) The latest administration talking point that is worming its way into what is fondly called the news media is that democracy is breaking out all over the Middle East. The people in the Middle East have been having elections for decades. The president conveniently forgot that Yasser Arafat was elected in a free and fair election. The trouble is, the results of elections don't last very long. There is no reason to believe the Iraqi elections will be any different. The Middle East is full of ruins left by past superpowers. As a Palestinian friend of mine likes to say, pointing to those ruins: "They are all gone. We are still here." Charley Reese