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COMMENTARY
March 3, 2005
Lebanon; Canada
We will see if the boxcars can remain coupled but for the moment we have a new and thrilling passage in international diplomacy -- if "diplomacy" is the mot juste for a high-stakes game of brinkmanship. France and America are on the same side. (Praise the Lord! hallelujah!) They are staring right into Bashir Assad's eyeballs while telling him with increasing clarity and amplitude that Syria will be withdrawing from the Lebanon. It would be cute to attribute this to the devastating charm of Condoleezza Rice. Even that owes more to timing: for there was no blood left to be shed in the personal relationship between Colin Powell the U.S. ex-secretary of state and Jacques Chirac the French President. But it is anyway not the explanation. The French have I think looked fairly deeply into the new course of Middle Eastern events and decided with their customary fortitude that they must choose the winning side. The French intelligence services are not to be sniffed at; and my information is that their information is "democracy is bursting out all over". Suddenly the people in the streets of Beirut have lost their fear; and the loss of fear is spreading. The French ambassador will of course write in to correct me explaining that France's position is consistent with the ideals it has always upheld. God bless him. The French position has been in recent years to sabotage the American position. There are various reasons why they would want to do this and will still want to do this especially in the Middle East. These have to do not superficially with the huge and quickly growing immigrant Muslim community within France itself and the large number of Middle Eastern despots the French have been in bed with for a long time. They have more grandly to do with France's continuing ambition to lead Europe against her Anglo-American rivals; and to attach the Islamic neighbourhood of North Africa and the Near East to that European sphere. Which means detaching it from the American. But present circumstances cry out for Franco-American cooperation. Demonstrations Monday brought the resignation of the Lebanese cabinet -- a Syrian puppet theatre -- and in the course of the last week every Lebanese faction not directly installed by Damascus has used the cover of the U.S. Mediterranean fleet to demand a Syrian withdrawal. Statements from people like Walid Jumblatt the Druze leader to the effect that if Iraq can have free elections so can Lebanon have resonated through the crowds now encamped in Martyrs Square in the Kiev fashion. Demands for the open investigation of the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri are unprecedented in their cheekiness: for it is perfectly obvious that a blast that big was ordered from Damascus. It was intended to intimidate the Lebanese opposition; instead that opposition was ignited. And Beirut is really about Damascus. The Lebanese daily An-Nahar published last week a letter signed by 140 Syrian intellectuals who suddenly lost their fear of challenging the nearly-totalitarian Assad regime. The next day the same paper published 33 more offering their apology for what has been done to Lebanon in Syria's name. (See the Memri website.) Stuff like this didn't happen in regimes like that -- until last week. Egypt's canny and astute Hosni Mubarak meanwhile decides that in future Egypt's presidential elections will have more than one candidate. Drink this in. The very sight of France and America jointly requesting once-appeased dictators to cease-and-desist themselves provides a goad -- also in Iran where a leaked Revolutionary Guard security report warned the ayatollahs that in the event of fresh serious demonstrations in Tehran their Gestapo could only hold the fort for about six hours. Je chante avec toi Libert?. * I hadn't much to say about Canada's decision to spurn the U.S. offer to include us in their anti-missile programme so will fit it in a footnote. It is hard to imagine a nation so twisted as to refuse to participate in its own defence. The notion that we prevent the "militarization of space" by such a gesture is too na?ve to credit as an argument; that we enhance our sovereignty by losing our voice in Washington is too absurd. For short-term political cover our minority government has smashed what remained of Washington's goodwill just as the Bush administration's controversial policies are being vindicated around the world. Paul Martin -- surely intelligent enough to know better than he has done -- is a gutless disgrace. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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