Open Letter to Syrian President Assad: Shake Hands with Olmert and Greet Him with "Shalom"

Let us hope that President Al-Assad is reading the newspapers these days, or at least that his advisors are. A peace with Syria is an essential ingredient to a comprehensive Middle East peace, and if Assad can see that it's worth his country's while to get back with the Turkeys and USs of the world and get away from the hardline Iranians, the better off the world at large will be.

Randy Shiner

In an open letter posted July 8, 2008 on the liberal Arab e-journal Elaph, the prominent liberal Arab intellectual Lafif Lakhdar urges Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to cut his ties with Iran, embrace domestic reforms, and follow in the footsteps of Egyptian president Anwar Al-Sadat in making peace with Israel. Following are excerpts:( 1)

Turkey and France Have Opened the Door to Peace with Israel For You

"To the Honorable President of the Syrian Republic: "The prime minister of Turkey's Islamic government, Mr. Tayyip Recep Erdogan, has opened the door to peace with Israel for you. And the French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, has tried ever since his election, and is continuing to try, with difficulty, to open another door to extract Syria from the regional and international isolation into which [your] poor diplomatic decision-making has brought it.

"[This poor decision-making has ranged] from encouraging the infiltration of terrorists into Iraq to prevent its rebuilding to drowning Lebanon in problems and blood, and en route obstructing [the creation of] Palestinian national unity among Hamas, Fatah and all the Palestinian factions, under one authority and one military command - which is a prerequisite for increasing the possibility of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the emergence of a Palestinian state - this state that everyone has heard about but no one has seen. It is a known fact that no national liberation movement that is divided against itself has ever achieved its objective. "

Obstructing the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not merely a tactic to get the Golan back, but has a strategic component as well. [Syrian] president Hafiz Al-Assad's 1973 speech still rings like a slap to my ears: 'There is no Palestine,' he said; 'Palestine is southern Syria.' "I once said to Mr. Nabil Sha'ath, at the Center for Palestine Studies... 'Palestine is trapped between the mandibles of Greater Israel and Greater Syria... may Allah come to your aid.' "In order not to slam shut the two doors of hope that have opened before you, you must sincerely and responsibly manage to confront four great challenges: 1) correcting the error of [your] strategic alliance with Iran; 2) [arriving at] a final abandonment of [your] attempt to regain control of Lebanon; 3) regaining the Golan; and 4) [achieving] domestic reconciliation."

Your "Greatest Error... Was the Strategic Alliance with Iran's Inflammatory Extreme Right-Wing Religious Government"

Mr. President: The crux of politics today is for the politician to understand exactly in what world we live. We live in a world that changes at the speed of light, and in which the dangers are increasing. The true politician is one who tries to adapt to this world as it is, not as he would like it to be.

"Therefore, perhaps the greatest error in [your] diplomatic decision-making was the strategic alliance with Iran's inflammatory extreme right-wing religious government.

"The contemporary international diplomatic lexicon recognizes only the government of the center: center-right and center-left, alternating peacefully in government. Other governments are shunned and have no future. "...This alliance was accomplished with the Islamic Republic of Iran's most delirious and isolated government, domestically and abroad, to the point that one does not know whether to laugh or cry at [Iranian] President Ahmadinejad's hallucinations of the imminent return of the Hidden Imam, who from this time forth, according to the Iranian president, formulates 'Iran's domestic and foreign policies.'

"The funny thing is that the Majlis ([Iran's] parliament) debates in all seriousness on hallucinations like these. One ayatollah said: 'Far be it from the Hidden Imam that a policy leading to 20% inflation be set!'

"Former French foreign minister Doust-Blasy records in his memoirs that he and the German foreign minister could not believe their ears when President Ahmadinejad told them, at a private meeting in New York, that 'the world is in need of chaos.' He did not add, of course, that the chaos is a sign of the return of the Hidden Imam, who will achieve a 'divine victory' over the enemies of the Islamic Republic of Iran!

"The alliance of Syria - militarily weak and in a state of economic collapse - and Iran is like one drowning man calling on another drowning man for help. Unless the moderate Iranian elite get rid of Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Al-Quds Brigades government, and their policies of aggression, Iran may one day find itself standing alone in a fateful confrontation with the world. And Syria may thus find itself in the same dark tunnel as its ally Iran.

"The Syria-Iran alliance is not a matter of predestination. Syria can find a preferred alternative in the Gulf petrodollars and in the investments of international companies that were, and continue to be, capable of development in Southeast Asia, India and China.

"It seems that Syria intends to emulate Iran in the matter of nuclear weaponry, which your father, president Hafiz Al-Assad, with his far-reaching vision, rejected - aware that [this weaponry] is not usable in the closely adjacent countries of the Middle East, except in the event of collective suicide... This is an extreme case - the case of existential threat - in which Syria is very unlikely one day to find itself.

"Mr. President: The Syrian-Iranian alliance entails [a Syrian] alliance with Hizbullah, the most extreme and delirious of Iranian parties in Lebanon in matters of military decision-making and achieving 'divine victory' - with the blessings of the Hidden Imam.

"You can now transform this disadvantage into an advantage. Particularly if a government formed from the alliance of Mohammad Khatami's reformists and 'Ali Akbar Hashimi Rafsanjani's moderate conservatives replaces Ahmadinejad's government in Iran, [this alliance] can help disarm Hizbullah, whose weapons hinder the Lebanese government from [exercising a] monopoly on the legitimate use of force. This would transform [Hizbullah] into a political party with no claim to controlling Lebanon by force of arms.

"Such a wise decision would require you to convince some in Damascus to put out of their minds the idea of Lebanon as a 'milk cow' - and, beyond that, to encourage them to get used to full recognition of the state of Lebanon, and to draw international Syrian-Lebanese boundaries, and to [establish] mutual diplomatic relations.

And, finally, to put to an end, once and for all, to the chain of assassinations of Lebanese presidents, leaders, intellectuals, and journalists that has been going on since the 1970s. "Such courageous decisions as these are sufficient for Syria to escape its regional and international isolation, and perhaps to find a Lockerbie-type solution to the international tribunal [for the Al-Hariri assassination] that is such a nightmare for your regime."

"You Will... Not Regain the Golan by Waging a Proxy War Via Hizbullah or Hamas" or Via a Syria-Israel War

"Mr. President: You will in all probability not regain the Golan by waging a proxy war via Hizbullah or Hamas, and you are even less likely to do so via a Syria-Israel war, whose only certain outcome would be the overthrow of your regime.

"A realistic regional and international policy may - rather, will - regain it. The means of salvation are before you - mediation between you and [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert, by the Islamic leader of Turkey, Erdogan. Try to transform him from mediator to arbitrator in direct negotiations between the two of you. His friendship with both Syria and Israel qualify him for this task.

"Erdogan, who strives for stability and peace in the Middle East, is a better option for you than Ahmadinejad, who advocates jihad and martyrdom and threatens the region with nuclear convulsions.

"The policy of [the late Egyptian president Anwar Al-]Sadat, of 'breaking down the psychological barrier' between Egypt and Israel, could be a good example for you on the same path leading to Syrian-Israeli reconciliation. The landing of the Egyptian president at Ben Gurion Airport had global media reverberations [as great] as if he had landed on the surface of Mars. [Moshe] Dayan confessed to him during the Camp David negotiations, 'You, sir, are more popular than all of us in Israel.'

"In this way he regained the Sinai, and lightened the burden of arms buildup that had bled the Egyptian economy - as is the case with the Syrian economy today. Try to be the Sadat of Syria - attaching no importance to the taboos that forbid communication with and greeting the enemy, inherited from the customs and religions of primitive tribes and totemism, which were haunted by obsessionive neurosis. Also, initiating peace with the Jews and Christians is proscribed and criminalized by the Islamic jurisprudence of al-wala' wa'l-bara' [the doctrine that Muslims may only associate with and have allegiance and loyalty toward other Muslims].

"Your refusal to shake hands with Olmert, even though both of you were sitting at the same table, is a primitive vestige of this obsessive neurosis. Modernity has established, upon the ruins of these ossified taboos, the principles, laws, and customs of civilized, flexible, and humane behavior that regulate protocol relations among officials - and they do not proscribe an offer on your part to shake hands with Ehud Olmert.

"But the recovery of the Golan will require even more than a handshake. It requires you to say 'Shalom' to him with enthusiasm, and it may be that he will answer... with the same greeting or better, saying 'Salaam.'

"Such an affecting, human scene would be broadcast by the media to every home in the world, and would give you symbolic capital, of which you are in direst need, and perhaps will motivate some of the Israelis who would have voted 'No' on returning the Golan to change their minds.

"There is no place for sticking to insignificant formalities when the signing of a lasting peace is at stake - with all that it symbolizes and all that it promises of peaceful coexistence and cooperation in all fields...

"It is inappropriate that strategic thinking exhaust itself with obsessive formalities. Rather, it must address the basic issues directly, for the day after peace is signed: cooperation on economic, water resource, technological, scientific, petroleum and gas, cultural, and especially educational issues.

"Israel's curricula and teaching methods, and the competence of its teachers, are among the best in the world, whereas education in most of the Arab countries, including Syria, is poor and sterile. Throughout 5,000 years of history, the Middle East has known only wars, interrupted by brief periods of peace that coincided with brief periods of economic prosperity.

"New applied technologies can make economic prosperity permanent, and they can make peace permanent as well - as in the case of the European Union, among its modern, secular, and democratic countries...

Domestic Reform: "Begin by Freeing the Prisoners of Opinion"

"Mr. President: Let us imagine that all of the relevant sides play out their roles in this optimistic scenario perfectly. No doubt you will ask yourself: What good will it do me to gain the world and lose my people?

"One who formulates a realistic foreign policy would do well to complement it with a domestic policy that is no less realistic, with which you can remind your people, who fear raids by the security agencies, of the salad days of the Damascus Spring.

"Begin by freeing the prisoners of opinion, and even the Islamists whose hands are not stained with blood - and don't forget the members of the Damascus Declaration, who have committed no crime except calling for 'the normalization of Syrian-Lebanese relations' - something something that the writer of these lines also demands.

"Let the Kurds exercise their cultural rights freely, and speak, sing, and write in their language. Recognize their full citizenship and nationality under the International Convention for the Protection of Minority Rights.

"Extend compensation to the families of the 17,000 Islamists who have 'disappeared' since the 1970s. Likewise, compensate the families of the Lebanese and Palestinians who met the same fate.

"And this is really astonishing: How does Syrian law pardon or allow for mitigating circumstances to the perpetrators of 'honor crimes' - [a practice] which the Prophet of Islam outlawed and nullified in the third year of the hijra, in surah 24 of the Koran - while at the same time ratcheting up the punishment for democratic intellectuals and defenders of human rights?"
Endnote:(1) www.elaph.com, July 8, 2008.

A Surprise Negotiation

A Surprise Negotiation

By David Ignatius

Wednesday, June 25, 2008; A13

What's going on between Syria and Israel? Are the indirect peace negotiations through Turkish mediators that were announced last month for real? I've been talking with sources on all sides, and they present an upbeat view of a peace process that has taken many people (including top Bush administration officials) by surprise.

As with any secret diplomatic initiative, this one is surrounded by mysteries and riddles. So I'll examine the Syria-Israel dialogue as a series of puzzles and offer my best guesses about what's happening:

(1) How did these negotiations begin?

The channel opened in the fall of 2006, just after the summer war in Lebanon that had made both Damascus and Tel Aviv nervous about the destabilizing role of Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon. Syria proposed indirect "proximity" talks and insisted on Turkey, a rare friend of both countries, as intermediary.

For many months, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wasn't sure he trusted the channel. The Bush administration was skeptical about whether the process would lead anywhere, but it didn't try to stop it. About a year ago, Olmert decided to test the Syrian track. He had strong encouragement from the Israeli defense establishment -- the defense minister, Ehud Barak; the army chief of staff, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi; and Israeli military intelligence.

(2) What's in it for the two sides?

The Israeli military brass favored engagement with Syria because they didn't think the status quo in the region was sustainable. Lebanon had become a surrogate battleground between Israel and Iran, and the Israelis arguably had lost the first round. Meanwhile, the Syrians were increasing their arsenal of missiles and other weapons. The judgment in Tel Aviv was that Israel stood to lose strategically by letting things continue as they were.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad favored an opening to Israel to counter attempts by the United States, France and Saudi Arabia to isolate his country. Syrian confidence in the Turkish negotiating channel increased after Israel indicated informally that it was prepared to accept terms for return of the Golan Heights (and related issues, such as water rights) that had been reached in direct Syrian-Israeli negotiations during the 1990s.

(3) Can Syria be decoupled from Iran?

Israel's overriding goal has been to draw Syria away from its alliance with Iran. So far, the
Israelis see no sign that the peace talks have achieved this goal. Syria-watchers caution that this sort of decisive transfer of loyalties is unlikely. But eventually, Syria may move away from Iran (and toward Turkey) because the Baath regime in Damascus is secular to its core -- and mistrusts the religious fervor of the mullahs. The decoupling would be cultural and political, rather than a matter of security policy.

(4) Who assassinated Imad Mughniyah in Damascus in February?

The car bomb that killed Iran's key covert operative in Hezbollah is still echoing in the Middle East. Suspicion immediately focused on Israel. But on Feb. 27, a London-based newspaper called Al-Quds Al-Arabi, with very good sources in Damascus, alleged that several Arab nations had conspired with Mossad to assassinate Mughniyah.

Adding to the speculation are reports that shortly before his death, Mughniyah was attempting to heal a split within Hezbollah between the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and its former leader, Subhi Tufaily. Tufaily's power base is the Bekaa Valley, which has lost influence in Hezbollah to Shiites from southern Lebanon. According to one Arab source, Mughniyah -- traveling under his longtime pseudonym, "Haj Ismail" -- paid a visit shortly before his death to Tufaily's village of Britel, just south of Baalbek.

Mughniyah usually traveled without bodyguards, believing that his protection was the surgical alteration of his features, which prevented even old friends from recognizing "Haj Ismail." For that reason, the Syrians insisted they weren't at fault. But a sign of tension was Tehran's announcement that a joint commission would investigate the killing, a statement that Damascus promptly denied.

(5) What about Syria's secret nuclear reactor, which was destroyed by the Israelis on Sept. 6, 2007?

Oddly enough, that attack on what CIA analysts called the "Enigma Building" may have helped the peace talks. The Israelis felt that their decisive action helped restore the credibility of their deterrence policy. The Syrians appreciated that Israeli and American silence allowed them time to cover their tracks. Finally, the fact that Assad kept the nuclear effort a secret, and that he managed the post-attack pressures, showed Israelis that he was truly master of his own house, and thus a plausible negotiating partner.
The writer is co-host ofPostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

Who gets the Golan?

Who gets the Golan?
Israel has no reason to trust Syria in talks over that strategic area.

By Yossi Klein Halevi

May 28, 2008

JERUSALEM -- The Israeli mainstream, so the truism here goes, is so desperate for peace that, in the end, it will overcome misgivings over relinquishing territory and mistrust of Arab intentions and endorse any diplomatic initiative aimed at solving the Middle East conflict. After all, the majority of Israelis have supported every withdrawal so far -- from the Sinai desert in 1982 to the pullout from Gaza in 2005. And according to polls, a majority of Israelis are prepared to leave most of the West Bank and create a Palestinian state.

But that willingness to relinquish territory for peace -- or even a respite -- ends with the Golan Heights, which Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War and whose fate Israel and Syria are negotiating. By an overwhelming majority, Israelis oppose ceding the Golan to Syria, even in exchange for a promise of peace from Damascus. So does a majority of the Israeli parliament, along with most Cabinet members from the governing party, Kadima.

One reason is that few here believe that the regime of Bashar Assad will honor an agreement. No Arab state has consistently shown greater hostility to Israel than Syria. The Palestinian terrorist movement Hamas is headquartered in Damascus; Syria is Iran's leading Arab ally. Without a Syrian attempt to convince the Israeli public of its benign intentions, domestic opposition will stymie any attempt by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to cede the Golan to Assad. And the prospects for a convincing Syrian overture are almost nonexistent.

The Middle East conflict has produced two models of Arab peacemakers. The first was former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who realized that the key to resolving the conflict was psychological. The Israeli public needed to be convinced that, in exchange for concrete concessions, it would win legitimacy from the Arab world. And so Sadat flew to Jerusalem, addressed the Israeli parliament and announced that Egypt welcomed Israel into the Middle East. The result was an Israeli pullback from every last inch of Sinai.

The second model was former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, who, rather than prepare his people for peace, assured them that Israel was an illegitimate state destined to disappear. And when Israel offered the Palestinians a state, Arafat's response was a war of suicide bombings. The result was an indefinite deferment of statehood.

Grudging and suspicious, Assad reminds Israelis far more of Arafat than of Sadat. So far, Assad has refused even to hold direct negotiations with Israel, preferring Turkish interlocutors. Give me the Golan, he is in effect saying, and then we'll see what kind of peace develops between us.

But Israelis are hardly in a rush to part with one of the most beloved areas of their country. For Israelis, the Golan Heights, with its empty hills and vineyards, is more Provence than Gaza. Unlike the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, the Golan poses no moral or demographic dilemmas. Here there is no occupation of another people; barely 20,000 Druze, and an equal number of Jews, share the nearly 700-square-mile area.

Under Syrian control before the 1967 war, the Golan was Israel's most volatile border. Many here still recall the years when Syrian soldiers on the Golan routinely shot at Israeli civilians in the Galilee below. After 1967, though, the Golan became Israel's most placid border. Israelis sense that, for the sake of quiet if not formal peace, it is far better to have their soldiers overlooking Syria than for Syrian soldiers to be once again looking down on the Galilee.

Israeli advocates of a Golan withdrawal argue that Syria may be enticed to sever its ties with Iran as part of a peace agreement. Neutralizing a potential Syrian front in a future Middle East war -- with Iran, say -- would be a major gain for Israel, which is why much of the Israeli strategic community supports negotiations. Syria, though, continues to affirm the primacy of its alliance with Iran. And, during a visit this week to Tehran, Syrian Defense Minister Hassan Turkmany reinforced that message by signing a security agreement with Iran.

Two Israeli leaders, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, tried and failed in the 1990s to reach an agreement with Bashar's father, the late Syrian leader Hafez Assad. Though both Rabin and Barak agreed to a full withdrawal from the Golan, the Syrians demanded more: several hundred yards of shorefront on the Sea of Galilee, Israel's main freshwater source, which the Syrians had seized from Israel before 1967. When Rabin and Barak refused to allow Hafez Assad to fulfill his stated dream of again dipping his feet into the Sea of Galilee, negotiations collapsed.

The current negotiations will almost certainly fail too. In fact, possessing the Golan is hardly Assad's top priority. Instead, Assad has two more pressing interests: evading an international tribunal investigating the Syrian government's complicity in the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and deflecting attention from the intensifying domination of Lebanon by the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah alliance. Negotiations with Israel -- regardless of whether they actually succeed -- help Assad achieve both goals, by deflecting world attention from the destruction of Lebanese sovereignty and by transforming him from pariah to peacemaker.

Israel's Olmert hopes that peace negotiations will deflect attention from his own woes -- allegations of corruption dating in part from his days as Jerusalem's mayor. Other Israelis, though, are wondering how helping Assad destroy Lebanon and escape justice can possibly be confused for Israel's national interest, let alone for a peace process.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the Israel correspondent for the New Republic.

Hassan Nasrallah is trapping himself

This is from Lebanon's Beirut Daily Star - an interesting analyis. Comments?

Hassan Nasrallah is trapping himself
By Michael Young Daily Star staff
Thursday, May 29, 2008

Listening to the speeches of President Michel Suleiman and Hizbullah's Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah earlier this week, it is becoming apparent that there are really only two projects in Lebanon today: There is the project of the state, which Suleiman and the parliamentary majority embody, assuming the president abides by his public statements; and there is the project of a non-state, supported by Hizbullah and its allies.

If that wasn't plain enough, then consider what happened on Monday night, after Suleiman had spent his first day at the Baabda Palace. Hizbullah and Amal partisans, as has become their habit lately, fired in the air to celebrate Nasrallah's speech, then took to the streets and began firing at their political adversaries. In the Bekaa Valley much the same thing happened. There was a message there, perhaps more a Syrian than an Iranian one this time around, and it was that the new president should not imagine he will be able to build up a state against Hizbullah.

Thanks to the Israelis, who may soon hand a grand prisoner exchange to Hizbullah, Nasrallah may earn a brief reprieve for his "resistance." It's funny how Hizbullah and Syria, always the loudest in accusing others of being Israeli agents, are the ones who, when under pressure, look toward negotiations with Israel for an exit. Hizbullah has again done so to show that its "defense strategy" works and to deflect growing domestic insistence that the party place its weapons at the disposal of the state.

Nasrallah has started peddling what he thinks Lebanon's defense strategy should be. Hizbullah's model is the summer 2006 war, he explained this week. But if the defense strategy Hizbullah wants us to adopt is one that hands Israel an excuse to kill over 1,200 people, turn almost 1 million civilians out into the streets for weeks on end while their villages are bombed and their fields are saturated with fragmentation bomblets; if Nasrallah's strategy is one that will lead to the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure, the ruin of its economy, the emigration of its youths, the isolation of the Shiites in a society infuriated with Hizbullah's pursuit of lasting conflict; if that's his defense strategy, then Nasrallah needs to get out of his bunker more and see what is really going on in Lebanon.

The only good thing that came out of the 2006 war, the only thing that both a majority of Lebanese and the Shiite community together approved of, was the deployment of the Lebanese Army to the South, the strengthening of UNIFIL, and the pacification of the border area. The Lebanese approved of this because it made less likely a return to Nasrallah's inane defense strategy. Unless of course the Hizbullah leader is now telling us that the neutralization of Hizbullah's military activities along the frontier with Israel was also a part of that strategy, because in practical terms it too was a result of the 2006 war.

Nasrallah's speech only reaffirmed that Hizbullah cannot find an exit to its existential dilemma, other than to coerce its hostile countrymen into accepting its armed mini-state. Very simply, the days of the national resistance are over. The liberation of the Shebaa Farms does not justify Hizbullah's existence as a parallel force to the army, and it does not justify initiating a new war with Israel. After all, the Syrians have a much larger territory under occupation and have preferred negotiations to conflict in order to win it back. As Suleiman implied, the best thing that can happen now is for Hizbullah to share with the state its resistance expertise, which was a gentle way of saying that the party must integrate into the state.

Nasrallah's defensiveness also revealed something else, almost as worrying as his untenable position on Hizbullah's defense strategy. It revealed that the party views Doha as a setback. Nasrallah is right in that respect. The agreement negotiated by the Qataris was several things. It was, above all, a line drawn in the sand by the Sunni Arab world against Iran and Syria, telling them that Lebanon would not fall into their lap. In this the Qataris were part of an Arab consensus, and the Iranians, always pragmatic, backtracked when seeing how resolute the Arabs were.

But the Doha agreement was mainly a failure for Syria. Damascus had planned to use the open-ended political vacuum in Beirut as leverage to bring in a new president and government on its conditions, to negotiate Syria's return to the Arab fold from a position of strength, to torpedo the Hariri tribunal, and to prepare an eventual Syrian military return to Lebanon. The Qataris thwarted this, and in a conversation between Syrian President Bashar Assad and Qatar's Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Assad was pushed into approving Suleiman's election. As a last measure he tried to prevent the granting of 16 ministerial portfolios to the March 14 coalition - a simple majority in the 30-minister government allowing the coalition to have a quorum for regular Cabinet sessions. Sheikh Hamad rejected this and Assad had no choice but to relent, before instructing Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri to accept the Qatari plan.

Hizbullah's plan was little different than that of the Syrians, so the Qataris substantially complicated Nasrallah's calculations as well. Suleiman is still an unknown quantity, but if he sticks to the principles highlighted in his inauguration speech, Hizbullah will be squeezed. Unlike the time when Emile Lahoud was still around and formed, with Berri, an alliance against Siniora, if the next prime minister and Suleiman can craft a joint strategy to strengthen the authority of the state, it is Berri, as the senior opposition figure and Shiite in office, who may find himself out on a limb.

Speaking of Berri, Hizbullah's bloc may have made a grave mistake in choosing yesterday to name no favorite as prime minister. That means that the bloc is ignoring the wishes of the Sunni community to bring back Siniora. Recall that when Berri was elected as Parliament speaker in 2005, those parliamentarians voting for him defended the choice on the grounds that "the Shiites want him." By inference, in not naming Siniora yesterday, mainly because the Syrians oppose him, the opposition has given the future majority in Parliament, if it happens to be a majority opposed to Hizbullah and Amal, an opening to reject Berri's re-election as speaker in 2009, regardless of whether the Shiites want him.

The ink on the Doha agreement is barely dry, but already Hizbullah and Syria are trying to water down its terms. Nasrallah's speech showed that he has no intention of entering into a substantive discussion on his party's weaponry. His promise not to use his guns in the pursuit of domestic political goals was meaningless, as he has already done so. In fact, his reading of what he can do with his weapons is much more advantageous to Hizbullah than what the Doha agreement stipulates. But Nasrallah has a problem. Most Lebanese want a real state and most Shiites don't want another war with Israel. Hizbullah, in contrast, doesn't want a real state but needs permanent war to remain relevant. That's Nasrallah's trap.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.