Lebanese blast Pelosi for making things worse

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When a dilettante takes on Hizbullah

We can thank the US speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for having informed Syrian President Bashar Assad, from Beirut, that "the road to solving Lebanon's problems passes through Damascus." Now, of course, all we need to do is remind Pelosi that the spirit and letter of successive United Nations Security Council resolutions, as well as Saudi and Egyptian efforts in recent weeks, have been destined to ensure precisely the opposite: that Syria end its meddling in Lebanese affairs.

Pelosi embarked on a fool's errand to Damascus this week, and among the issues she said she would raise with Assad - when she wasn't on the Lady Hester Stanhope tour in the capital of imprisoned dissidents Aref Dalila, Michel Kilo, and Anwar Bunni - is "the role of Syria in supporting Hamas and Hizbullah." What the speaker doesn't seem to have realized is that if Syria is made an obligatory passage in American efforts to address the Lebanese crisis, then Hizbullah will only gain. Once Assad is re-anointed gatekeeper in Lebanon, he will have no incentive to concede anything, least of all to dilettantes like Pelosi, on an organization that would be Syria's enforcer in Beirut if it could re-impose its hegemony over its smaller neighbor.

Inasmuch as it is possible to evoke sympathy in such cases, one can sympathize with Hizbullah. In 2000, the party lost much of its reason to exist as a military force when the Israelis withdrew from Southern Lebanon. The manufacturing of the Shebaa Farms pretext, thanks to the diligent efforts of Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, bought Hizbullah an extension, a handy fig leaf allowing it to keep its weapons. Last summer, however, the party's initiation of a war devastating to Lebanon, followed by its efforts to lead a coup against the majority, demolished any lingering cross-sectarian support that Hizbullah had enjoyed.

Hizbullah's weapons are no longer regarded as weapons of resistance by most Lebanese, but as weapons of sectarian discord. The party's effort to torpedo the Hariri tribunal has created a perception that it is siding with Rafik Hariri's murderers - little helped by Hizbullah secretary general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's public statements of solidarity with the Syrian regime. But perhaps most worrying for Hizbullah's leadership is its knowledge that the party cannot return to where it was before July 12, 2006, when the war with Israel began - at least without pushing the Lebanese political system perilously closer to war. For one thing is absolutely clear: Without some sort of Syrian return to Lebanon, and even then, Hizbullah has no future as simultaneously a political and military party.

For years, pundits and analysts have spoken of Hizbullah's "integration into Lebanese society." Their underlying premise was that the party somehow desired this. Optimists pointed to Hizbullah's participation in successive parliamentary elections as an example of its willingness to "assimilate." The naivete deployed was remarkable. It rarely occurred to the experts that Hizbullah did not start as, nor truly is, a social services organization. It is an Iranian-financed military and security enterprise overseeing a vast and competent patronage system designed to win Shiite backing, allowing Hizbullah to retain its weapons. It never occurred to the experts that Hizbullah's objective in participating in the political system was not to jettison its military identity, but rather to safeguard it within the confines of Lebanese institutions it could thereafter influence. And it never occurred to the experts that Hizbullah was not interested in integration at all, at least on terms that would require surrendering its autonomy, even if it readily exploited its stake in the state as an additional means of patronage, much like other Lebanese political actors.

These conditions no longer apply in Lebanon. With the society divided, Hizbullah cannot impose its conditions as it once did. This, Nasrallah knows. At the same time, the party's officials are too astute not to recognize that a return of Syrian domination, while it might buy Hizbullah a new lease on life, is more likely to lead to a Sunni-Shiite war, its end result, in all probability, being the collapse of Assad's regime, which would not be able to resist sectarian discord coming from Lebanon. That leaves a third option: Hizbullah's embrace of the Lebanese system through an agreement to disarm and transform itself from a Leninist political-military party into solely a political one deferring to democratic rules.

None of these choices appeals to Hizbullah. This is why it is trying to avoid a decision by taking over effective control of the government, to better determine who will be elected president once Emile Lahoud's term ends. Hizbullah's demand for 11 ministers out of 30 must be understood in this context, as an instrument to bring the government down, or threaten to, and use this as leverage to choose a friendly president. If the party and Syria can influence the presidency, and given the fact that they already rule over Parliament through Berri, this would allow them to hold Lebanon hostage in the coming years and rebuild the political and military infrastructure that was the basis of their intimidation.

That's why both Syria and Hizbullah were especially alarmed with statements from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's entourage last week, that the UN was working on defining the Shebaa Farms border, whether Syria agreed with this or not. If the international organization sets final boundaries and persuades Israel to withdraw, Hizbullah will have even less of an excuse to hold on to its arms. More worrying for the Syrians, this would sever any remaining linkage between a resolution of Lebanon's territorial dispute with Israel and Syria's. Syria would no longer be able to link the military neutralization of the Lebanese-Syrian border area to an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights.

Perhaps Pelosi and other foreign officials will understand this simple equation one day, after again failing to persuade Assad to sell Hizbullah out. Unfortunately, foreign bigwigs come to town, their domestic calculations in hand; then they leave, and we're left picking up the pieces.

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Bonus editorial cartoon from Cox and Forkum

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The NY Post's take on the trip

ON A FOOL'S ERRAND

PELOSI: MY SYRIA TRIP HELPED BUSH

April 7, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - Embattled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday bizarrely insisted she carried President Bush's diplomatic message to Syrian strongman Bashar Assad - even though she blew off White House demands that she scrub the summit with the "sponsor of terror."

"Our message was President Bush's message," Pelosi told The Associated Press from Portugal, where she stopped en route back to America.

"It became clear to President Assad that even though we have our differences in the United States, there is no division between the president and the Congress and the Democrats on the message we wanted him to receive," she said.

"The funny thing is, I think we may have even had a more powerful impact with our message because of the attention that was called to our trip," she said, deflecting the political uproar her meeting Wednesday with Assad touched off in Washington.

Her statement drew a harsh slap from the White House. "There is nothing funny about the impact her trip to Syria has had," said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

"On the contrary, these visits have convinced the Assad regime that its actions in support of terrorists have no consequences."

Bush took Pelosi to the woodshed in a Rose Garden news conference earlier in the week, fuming that her face-to-face meeting with Assad sent "mixed signals" to a terror thug the administration is trying to isolate.

Vice President Dick Cheney also sniped that her insistence that she deliver her own message to Syria undermined American diplomatic policy and rewarded Assad's "bad behavior."

Despite Pelosi's boasts of a successful summit with Assad, she botched big-time by delivering a peace message to the Syrian leader from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - prompting Israeli officials to issue a statement correcting her.

"You can imagine our surprise to hear from Mr. Olmert that that's not what he wanted at all," said Rochester Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter, who was traveling alongside Pelosi and asserted that Olmert gave Pelosi explicit instructions.

Slaughter blamed right-wing media outlets for fueling the political uproar over the congressional trip to Syria, though the left-leaning Washington Post ran a scathing editorial slamming their "foolish" renegade diplomatic excursion.

"We did not deviate a half an inch from the policy of the United States of America," said Slaughter, who along with Pelosi had ignored White House and State Department requests that they not go to Syria.

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You're just afraid of a woman in a position of power.