Decision ‘08

No Holiday In The Middle East

Events in the Middle East continue to boil over, with Beirut and Baghdad taking center stage. First up is Iraq, where the Sunni insurgents upped the ante with a deadly attack on the Shi’a that killed at least 161:

Sunni Muslim insurgents blew up five car bombs and fired mortars into Baghdad’s largest Shiite district Thursday, killing at least 161 people and wounding 257 in a dramatic attack that sent the U.S. ambassador racing to meet with Iraqi leaders in an effort to contain the growing sectarian war.

Shiite mortar teams quickly retaliated, firing 10 shells at Sunni Islam’s most important shrine in Baghdad, badly damaging the Abu Hanifa mosque and killing one person. Eight more rounds slammed down near the offices of the Association of Muslim Scholars, the top Sunni Muslim organization in Iraq, setting nearby houses on fire.

Let’s quit pretending (if anyone still is) that Iraq is not in a civil war…this is bad, bad news.

Meanwhile, in Beirut, anti-Syrian sentiment ruled the day:

With an anti-Syrian fury that recalled the aftermath of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the center of Lebanon today for the funeral of the government minister slain on Tuesday, Pierre Gemayel.

Mourning gave way to calls for unity, defiance and confrontation. Demonstrators in the crowd shouted for the resignation of the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, who is allied with Syria. They cursed the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and spat on pictures of Gen. Michel Aoun, a Christian who has aligned his party with Hezbollah.

It seemed that Lebanon’s struggling pro-Western movement, at least for a day, regained its footing in outrage and fear at yet another political assassination. Mr. Gemayel, 34, was the fifth anti-Syrian leader murdered since Mr. Hariri was killed in February 2005 — and his supporters immediately blamed Syria and its allies in Lebanon, charges Syria strongly denied.

The sheer size of the crowd spoke to the tensions that divide Lebanon, and the prospect those divisions will lead to more conflict and more bloodshed. Politically speaking, this was what the governing coalition was waiting for, a chance to rally its forces in a huge show of force, just as Hezbollah had in a rally last month to celebrate its so-called “Divine victory” in the 34-day war with Israel.

Anything that marginalizes Hezbollah is fine by me…

One Response to “No Holiday In The Middle East”

1 too many steves Says:
November 24th, 2006 at 6:23 am
I can’t really evaluate whether I’m being overly US-centric, but the events in Iraq over the past months (increasing violence and death) indicate to me that the enemy knows they have found a way to defeat us and make us leave and are using it to maximum effect.

We, with Maliki, have a decision to make: stop the violence or get the hell out.