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| Clockwise from right: Miqati, Erdogan, and Obama with Netanyahu, Abbas and King Abdullah |
Is the fall of Lebanon’s “Hezbollah government” headed
by Najib Miqati on the night U.S. President Barack Obama was closing out his visit
to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan another nail in the coffin of Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad’s regime?
Learned opinion suggests it is.
Miqati announced the resignation of his Hezbollah-dominated
cabinet after it blocked approval of a commission to oversee planned
parliamentary elections and procedures to extend the term of Internal Security Forces
chief Ashraf Rifi.
Rifi and the Internal Security Forces have been in
the gunsight of Hezbollah and its allies since the arrest last August of former
government minister and Syria’s playmaker in Lebanon Michel Samaha.
Samaha was caught red-handed by Rifi’s
second-in-command Wissam
al-Hassan while smuggling explosives
into Beirut from the Damascus office of Syrian Security Chief Ali Mamlouk in an
attempt to destabilize Lebanon.
Samaha’s arrest led to Hassan’s
swift assassination in October.
Within two months, the
U.S. Treasury and State Department concurrently named Samaha as a
“Specially Designated Global Terrorist” working on behalf of the Assad regime.
As Miqati was
announcing his resignation in Beirut last night, Obama was telling a joint
press conference with King Abdullah in Amman, “We are going to continue
to closely consult with everybody in the region and do everything we can to
bring an end to the bloodshed and to allow the Syrian people to get out from
under the yoke of a leader who has lost all legitimacy because he is willing to
slaughter his own people. And I'm confident that Assad will go.
It's not a question of if. It’s when.”
While in Israel, Obama
washed away some of the personal tension that existed between him and Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which in turn builds the necessary capital for
coordinating with him on Iran and pressing him on the peace process and the
two-state solution.
Obama said Israel and the
U.S. agreed on the threat Iran posed, and the goal – to prevent Iran from
acquiring a nuclear weapon. He said there was, however, still time to achieve
this diplomatically.
He also succeeded in
prodding Netanyahu to ring Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and
agree to end their three-year rift caused by a deadly Israeli commando raid on
a Turkish ship bound for Gaza.
Following Obama’s visits
to Israel and the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority was
granted access to almost $500 million that was frozen by U.S. Congress for
months.
In Amman, the U.S.
president pledged to Jordan an
extra $200m to help it deal with the growing number of Syrian refugees in the
country.
Editorially, Ibrahim al-Amin, editor-in-chief
of al-Akhbar
daily, which speaks for Hezbollah, Iran and Assad, writes in his front-page leader today, “The
details are many… But what’s certain is that Prime Minister Miqati’s
resignation falls at the heart of the Syrian crisis.”
To his mind, the pointers and
consequences are three each.
The pointers:
One:
Arab and international players hostile to the
Syrian regime have been taking concrete steps, politically and on the ground,
to ratchet up pressure on Damascus. For instance, they (a) frustrated (dialogue)
initiatives by opposition figures such as Moaz al-Khatib (b) challenged
provisions in the U.S.-Russian entente for a political solution in Syria (c)
elected the prime minister of an interim government to take charge of Syria’s
worldwide interests (d) trained and armed fighters with qualitative weapons in
Syria, Turkey and Jordan in anticipation of a decisive battle against the
regime within the coming three months.
Two:
The outcome of Obama’s visit to the region,
where he urged the Palestinian Authority president to keep praying (for a
two-state solution), pressed the king of Jordan to toe the anti-Assad line and
called on Israel to reconcile with Turkey and to refrain from moving against
Iran, Syria or Hezbollah.
Three:
A concerted American-European-Gulfite
mobilization against Hezbollah by (a) invigorating the Special
Tribunal for Lebanon (b) pushing the European Union to designate Hezbollah
a terrorist organization (c) depicting Hezbollah as a threat to the livelihood
of tens of thousands of Lebanese expatriates in the Arab world (d) prevailing
on Miqati to undermine Hezbollah’s presence in the government (e) setting up a
file labeled, “The role of Hezbollah in Syria.”
The three anticipated
consequences of the aforesaid: (1) Security strains in Lebanon and along the
Syrian-Lebanese borders (2) A chance that Hezbollah would take its eyes off the
ball of helping the Assad regime (3) Political chaos in Lebanon and definite deferral
of the parliamentary elections slated for June.
