Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Huge Beirut rally rejects Syria pullout

via Aljazeera:

Team Bush has pointed to the anti-Syria protests in Beirut as evidence of their "spring is bustin' out all over" view of the domino effect of invading Iraq. So what do they make of this?

Hundreds of thousands of flag-waving Lebanese flooded central Beirut on Tuesday for a pro-Syrian rally called by Hizb Allah.

The protest dwarfed previous protests demanding that Syrian troops quit Lebanon.

Hizb Allah chief Shaikh Hasan Nasr Allah urged the Lebanese opposition to join a national unity government and reject a UN demand for the Syrians to leave and his own militia to disarm.

Nasr Allah said no one in Lebanon feared the United States, whose troops left Beirut in 1984, a few months after a bomber killed 241 Marines at their headquarters in the capital.

"We have defeated them in the past and if they come again we will defeat them again," he said, drawing chants of "Death to America" from the sea of demonstrators.

As the mainly Shia Muslim crowds thronged Riad al-Solh square, Syrian forces began moving eastwards under a phased withdrawal plan announced on Monday, the Lebanese army said.

The huge Hizb Allah rally was the first major show of popular support for Syria in Beirut since the 14 February assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri touched off daily anti-Syrian protests, mainly involving Maronite Christians.


Lebanon is probably even more ethnically complex than Iraq, though it lacks Iraq's strategic significance (i.e., its oil). The local Muslims see Hezbollah (and Syria) very differently than we do.

Hizb Allah, dubbed a terrorist group by Washington, began as an anti-Israel militia but is now also a political party with deputies in parliament and a network of charities.
...
Syrian forces are credited with helping end the civil war that tore Lebanon apart.

Christian, Muslim and Druze militias fought each other and about 150,000 people are thought to have died in that conflict.


If Ringo Bush straps on his six-gun and proposes to get us involved, I pray someone in the inner circle has the guts to ask, "you and what army?"

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