Well the UN investigator Detlev Mehlis has just released a preliminary report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister on February 14 of this year. It's an interesting document and it can be read in its entirety
here.
I've written about Rafik al-Hariri's assassination before but it's worth a look at the facts. First, Rafik al-Hariri was not anywhere close to being a saint. He was a political crony, long-time ally of Syria (esp under its brutal dictator Hafez al-Assad, father of the current Syrian president) and a corrupt businessman of the highest order. Rafik al-Hariri and his family helped drive Lebanon into bankruptcy and debt in order to become extraordinarily rich - Hariri's personal wealth was estimated at 3.8 billion dollars in 2003.
Secondly, 23 other people died in the event which killed Hariri, including the former Economic Minister. And last but not least, there have been many other deaths by explosion both before the one which killed Hariri and afterwards, including after Syria completely withdrew from Lebanon.
I've never worked a major terrorist incident but I've investigated murders before and the UN report is extraordinarily incomplete. All it can say with certainty is that the incident of February 14 took a lot of planning and therefore Lebanese and Syrian intelligence/police forces
had to have known about it or participated in it. That's it. Don't believe any other hype about it from media articles.
I'll quote Justin Raimondo from February 25, 2005 (just 9 days after the incident):
What gets me about this "blame Syria" campaign is that it is premised on an absurdity: the conspiracy theorists reason that, since Syria is in complete control of everything that goes on in Lebanon, such an event as the Hariri assassination could not have occurred without the active assistance of the Syrian secret police. This is demonstrably false, however, given that Syria has only 14,000 troops in Lebanon, and especially since these same supposedly super-efficient secret police failed to prevent a mysterious terrorist attack in Syria last year - where their control is even more pervasive. Did the Syrians, then, bomb themselves?
I'm sure Mr. Mehlis is a decent and honorable person but the report he issued can be summed up in one word: incomplete. Not even half complete, not even a quarter. His team is not even sure what type of explosives were used, much less anything else. All his team could establish was that a group of people were actively monitoring Hariri's movements. And from Mehlis report itself:
It would not have been difficult for individuals outside of Hariri's "inner circle" to predict the route that his convoy would follow on 14 February 2005.
About the only thing they have established for sure is that a Mitsubishi Canter model truck (which the report calls a "van") was stolen in Japan a few months earlier and was the delivery method for the explosives. As Raimondo accurately states, that's hardly the method used by state security forces and is much more the style of either a criminal or terrorist organization.
Furthermore the report indicates that it is most definitely like that the bomb-laden truck was exploded by hand - in other words, by a suicide bomber. Syrian (and Lebanese) intelligence officials are quite ruthless and cruel but hiring (or persuading) suicide bombers is not their normal modus operandi. And in case you think the bomber might've been "tricked", the UN report states the "van" was packed to the gills with explosives, including under the driver's seat. Furthermore the "van" was parked at the time of the explosion, meaning it wasn't jostled by a bump in the road or something. Plus, Hariri's convoy had special electronic jamming equipment (working and functioning) which would've made remote-control demolition very improbable.
I'm not saying I know who blew up a massive bomb (between 300-1000 kilos of TNT or 650-1200 lbs) on February 14, but neither does Mr. Mehlis' team of investigators. The reason this incident was given all this attention was entirely for political reasons.
At the time of Hariri's death, he was opposed to Syrian President Assad's desire that Lebanese President Emile Lahoud's mandate be extended. Hariri was just one prominent Lebanese man who opposed it, or at least were not enthusiastic about it, and was pressured to fall in line. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, was also opposed and similarly "warned" by Damascus and yet he is still alive and well.
Syria and Lebanon's history is long and entertwined and throughout the last thousand years, the people living in what are now these two countries were under the same rulers. The only reason a separate Lebanon was created was because of how the French and British divvied up the Ottoman Empire after World War 1. The French wanted to protect the Maronite Christian community in Lebanon and so managed to get Lebanon as a separate jurisdiction of their empire. The inequality of political power between the various groups led to a bitter civil war from 1975-1991. Lebanon during that time was also unable to keep out foreign occupiers, from the PLO to the Israeli Army.
I should mention here that the vast majority of people in Syria are ethnic Arab and Muslim. A large percentage of Lebanon is too, but it is also populated by ethnic Arabs who are Christians (Maronites) as well as ethnic Druze who are Muslims. The legacy of French rule is that these minorities get a proportionally stronger slice of governing the tiny country, which has led to numerous factional fights and wars. Furthermore, the Arab Muslim community is split between Shi'ite and Sunni, and it's one big giant mess. If what today is known as Lebanon had been left as part of the Syrian colony (and therefore modern day Syria), the Druze and Maronite minorities would be like the Kurds in Iran, independent cultures but politically weak.
By the end of the war in 1991, the country was heavily dependent on Syrian management, reinforced by some 16,000 troops. UN Security Resolution 1559, passed earlier this year, makes it seem like the Syrians were strictly "occupiers" but the truth is much closer to that of a bigger, stronger brother looking after a weaker sister - and neither member of the family is very nice.
So Hariri managed to anger President Assad of Syria as well as a multitude of other groups, inside Syria and Lebanon, and so in February 2005 someone contrived to blow him up. There's an outside chance that this was done for purely criminal/mafia motives, but I say outside chance because his death became a political rallying point.
The Americans pulled out their ambassador and did everything short of blaming Syria directly, all within days of the event. The French, who had been the powerbrokers in the area (and still prop up various factions in still-corrupt Lebanon) then backed Resolution 1559, which led to Syria's complete withdrawal from Lebanon a few months later. The Russians and Chinese didn't say much of anything but didn't block the UN from both 1559 and the resolution authorizing the international investigation into Hariri's death.
And so now the Mehlis Report is being used to bang the drums again. Bush's official statements are fairly concise but the LA Times captures the flavor:
President Bush called on the U.N. Security Council on Friday to act quickly in response to a report that senior Syrian and Lebanese officials probably plotted the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
I picked up a report from the Chinese media which helps underline why Syria is such a priority. After all, Syria has next to no petroleum deposits and is hardly a military threat to its neighbors (Lebanon aside). It is a state-controlled country, repressive of human rights, but hardly a major obstacle to the United States and west's interests. Except for this:
Israeli Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres on Friday called for changes in the Syrian leadership, following a UN report implicated Damascus' involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, Israel Radio reported.
Israel believes Bashar Assad is weak - and they want him toppled any way possible. The linked article shows many other Israeli leaders, including the former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, openly calling for "regime change". But why?
The answer is fairly obvious. Israel has several neighbors, including Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and in the neighborhood are Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Egypt and Jordan have stable, peaceful relationships with Israel and are firm American allies. Iraq is... well Iraq is a chaotic mess and hellhole, but occupied by hundreds of thousands of American troops. Turkey is also on good relations and a valued trading partner with Israel.
That leaves Syria/Lebanon and Iran. I've written about Iran several times, including this past week, but that's a tougher nut to crack. Bashar Assad is not nearly as strong as his dictator father was and his grip on the cronies in the government not nearly so well-cemented.
The Hariri assassination, and the political outcry over it, led to two things - a further push to make Syria a "pariah" state, and the necessary international pressure to get UN Resolution 1559, which divorced Syria and Lebanon. Anti-Syrian sentiment was whipped up and there is a large block of the Lebanese population now keen to have nothing further to do with Damascus. The Lebanese government is not yet firmly under the influence of France (and the west) but it's markedly more so than it has been in decades.
The Hariri assassination plus vague and unsubstantiated reports of Iraqi "insurgents" basing or operating out of the Syrian border are have knocked Syria's peg on the world stage just about as low as it can go. Even if Assad isn't overthrown, he has been boxed in for now. And Israel has a further reason to want to weaken and isolate Syria beyond just a lack of friendly relations - the Golan Heights.
In 1967, Israel fought a brief but vicious war with several of its neighbors and ended up doubling its territory. Most of that gained territory was never formally annexed to Israel and is legally considered as "territory militarily administered by Israel". These territories include the more well-known Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The Golan Heights were/are Syrian territory and are strategically important for two reasons. The first is militarily, as it is a small plateau region that ends in cliffs overlooking the Sea of Galilee (which is inside Israel proper). During the 1967 war, artillery rained down shells on Israel from the Golan Heights.
The second reason why the Heights are important is because it is part of the path of Israel's water source (which ends up being the River Jordan). In this area of the country, water is scarce and control over its delivery to Israel is vitally important. Israel and Syria have been squabbling since 1967 over who will control the Golan Heights without success. Technically speaking, the area legally belongs to Syria yet Israel considers it absolutely vital for its security.
So most of the hooplah over the Mehlis Report is just being used as a familiar axe to grind against the "evilness" of the Syrian government and has little to do with any factual evidence or proof of Syria's involvement with Hariri's assassination. In fact, the Mehlis Report specifically states that most of their hard evidence came from Lebanese government-controlled institutional records, which seems counter-productive for a government-sponsored assassination.
Further muddying the waters is that Mehlis deleted a number of names from his report just hours before presenting it. And just like the British government did a few years ago, they used a major company's software to remove the names and the deletions were easily recovered. The Syrians are of course pushing this angle for all it is worth.
In short, Lebanon and Syria have been run, and continue to be run, by a bunch of corrupt businessmen (plunderers) and vicious state security agencies. In February, someone used a massive bomb to kill another corrupt thug, ex-PM Rafik Hariri. The investigation into his death was sloppy and incomplete - both the Lebanese one as well as the UN's own. The only reason this is even a story is because of the west's using the incident as a political weapon against Assad.
Here's the final kicker from the British Foreign Secretary. I haven't seen the videoclip of this but I cannot imagine how he could say it with a straight face:
"This report is very disturbing," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said during a visit to Alabama with Rice. "It is further evidence of the extraordinary view that the Syrian elite have held that the Lebanon is a kind of fiefdom.... It is an unpleasant story which the international community will take very seriously indeed."
Considering that the entire Middle East was the European powers' private fiefdom just 50 years ago and largely the source of so much of the region's troubles is beyond Mr. Straw's ability to grasp I guess...
The BBC's fairly even-handed (and much briefer) analysis of the report can be found here.
Update: Today, Lebanese officials have arrested a key Sunni cleric named in the report without any specific charges. Looks like the heat is on...
This is cross-posted from Flogging the Simian, where you are humbly invited to visit
Peace