Shalom, speaking at a joint news conference Saturday with Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani al-Mulqi, dismissed Assad's speech as failing to meet a U.N. resolution calling for a "a complete withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon."
Because as we all know, Israel has always adhered to whatever resolutions the UN has passed. Let's sidestep the usual brouhaha over Israelis and Palestinians, and the obvious ramifications of an intractable 5000-year squabble between cousins over a bunch of sacred rocks. The bottom line here is the UN itself -- without the legitimacy handed it by its member states, it is a toothless tiger.
And all countries are going to exercise their rational self-interest over what the UN delegate from Dahomey thinks is best. Israel looks after itself first, so does the US, so do Russia and China. Whether or not those rational self-interests converge with this or that UN resolution is incidental. The only thing that makes those resolutions work is force, generally spearheaded by the US. Syria is certainly a rogue nation, but it too is looking after its self-interest here.
For Israel to use the UN resolution as its basis for threatening forcible action seems, to say the least, a bit hypocritical -- especially considering its own long and nasty occupation of southern Lebanon. Unless General Sharon wants to discuss Sabra and Chatilla in this context; perhaps the Syrians have committed similar atrocities in Lebanese refugee camps, but the liberal media has yet to illuminate us about it.
Israel withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon in 2000 after an 18-year occupation, and officials now believe that Syrian pressure is the only thing preventing Lebanon from joining Egypt and Jordan in making peace with Israel.
Maybe, maybe not. Lebanon, which used to be the jewel of the Levant, is now a fractious, nasty place dominated by warring religious sects. Gotta love that religion; they're all doing God's (or Allah's) work. At any rate, just as Israel had to step in during the '80s to keep a lid on a boiling kettle, perhaps Syria is doing the same to a certain extent. Yes, they are doing it mostly to plunder the Lebanese economy, because like most Middle East governments, it's more of a mob family than an actual government. Still, have we learned nothing of post-bellum planning from our current debacle? It appears not.
Furthermore, that Egypt and Jordan are being held up as some sort of democratic beacons just attests to the ugly nature of the entire region. Egypt, along with Jordan and Syria itself, has been one of our primary subcontractors of torture, via the nasty practice of "extraordinary rendition", where we kidnap and drug a suspect, without charge, without lawyers, without even the kangaroo-court joke of due process your average Iranian gets, and ship the poor bastard off to one of these beacons of democracy where he can get beaten daily, sexually humiliated, maybe get his fingernails ripped out with pliers, or a power drill run into his shin. This apparently lets us maintain the fiction that our hands are clean.
Ask yourself a question -- if you were dropping off teenage boys at Jeffrey Dahmer's or John Wayne Gacy's house, you'd feel responsible even if you had been unaware of what happened to them, right? Now change the hypothetical so that you did know what was going on, but you did it anyway on the false premise that at least it kept them at home so they wouldn't attack the kids in your neighborhood. Does the word even exist for such craven, gutless moral obfuscation?
More ironic democracy lecture points here, this time from us, rather than the Israelis.
"The world is watching the situation in Lebanon, particularly in Beirut, very closely," the department's statement said. "The Syrian and Lebanese governments need to respect the will of the Lebanese people and the Lebanese must be able to express themselves, free from intimidation and the threat of violence."
A U.N. resolution drafted by the United States and France in September called on Syria to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, stop influencing politics in the country and allow Lebanon to hold presidential elections as scheduled.
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The State Department also said the elections in Lebanon in May "must be free, fair and credible" and allow for monitoring by international observers.
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"The world will hold the governments of Lebanon and Syria directly accountable for any intimidation, confrontation or violence directed against the people of Lebanon, and we have made this clear to both of those governments," the State Department statement said.
We have no illusions as to the nasty nature of the Syrian government, by all accounts a brutal thugocracy with an internal security apparatus that reputedly rivals (and frequently worked in cahoots with) that of Saddam Hussein. And Bashar Assad seems to have sorely misunderestimated his cred with most fellow Arab leaders, even as he has overestimated his own craftiness. Only Iran has consistently stood with Syria as of late, and they're a little preoccupied right now.
Still, you look at the pronunciamentos from the State Department, presumably given with straight faces, and wonder just what color the sky is in that world. Did we not just exult triumphantly over an election conducted under martial law by an occupying force, where people lined up to vote for anonymous candidates? Did that occupying force not just raze a very large city in a futile hunt for insurgents, and are they not now forcing that city's civilians to rebuild what was destroyed with forced labor? Is that city not still cordoned off with razor wire and biometric scanners? And is not the violence throughout Iraq still occurring apace, with nary a break?
Are we missing something here? Do we really just believe simplistically that only we Americans are God's children, and everyone else has automatically corrupt designs? Or is this just more of the "studied hypocrisy" historically used to do unto others while leaving ourselves exempt from our own stated principles?
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