From Baghdad to Beirut

[bemildred]

Some interesting bits.

Blame it on Syria. Blame it on al-Qaeda. Better yet, blame it both on Syria and al-Qaeda. Without a shred of evidence - or perhaps profiting from "intelligence" amassed by the Pentagon, the Israeli Mossad, or both - the Bush administration immediately blamed Syria for the bombing that killed "Mr Beirut", former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. And Washington recalled its ambassador to Damascus, Margaret Scobey.

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From the point of view of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the suspicion is a public relations disaster because, if proven guilty, there's no way Damascus could get away with it unpunished. On a more street-level perspective, many Syrians are quick to point out that the preferred method for the assassination would not have been a car bombing. Syria has the best snipers in the world - something even the Israelis admit.

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A few days ago, Syrian Foreign Minister Faruk al-Chareh told Terje Roed-Larsen, the special envoy in charge of applying United Nations resolution 1559 - which calls for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon - that the resolution was "en element of tension" in the Middle East.

The official strategy in Damascus may be of a gradual military pullout from Lebanon. But there is much chatter in diplomatic circles and over the Internet that a serious internal power struggle is going on. Hardline military/security service factions, undermining Assad, might in this case have been responsible for the assassination. Assad would never have authorized a target killing with disastrous consequences for Syrian national interests.
What remains is the evidence of Baghdad in Beirut. Asia Times Online has been repeatedly told by sources in Baghdad close to the Sunni Iraqi resistance, as well as by Shi'ite sources in Najaf, that the paramount response of both Sunni and Shi'ite clerics to the wave of "mysterious" car bombings in Iraq has been to call for no revenge. The iron-clad certainty, on both sides, is that these have been perpetrated not by "terrorists" as the US claims, but rather by Israeli black ops or Central Intelligence Agency-connected American mercenaries, with the intent of fueling sectarian tensions and advancing the prospect of civil war. Now if only someone would come up with a Beirut smoking gun.

Asia Times