[Mb-civic] Mob War In the Mideast - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Mob War In the Mideast

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, January 4, 2006; A17

In the gangster movies, you know all hell is about to break loose when 
one of the disgruntled old dons decides to switch sides and rat out the 
young Godfather. Something like that is now happening with Syria -- and 
it provides a new year's bombshell for an already turbulent Middle East.

The turncoat don in this case is Syria's former vice president, Abdul 
Halim Khaddam. From exile in France, he gave an astonishing interview 
Friday that linked the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad to the 
murder last year of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri. He told 
al-Arabiya television that "there were many threats" from Syria against 
Hariri before his death, and that it was "impossible that any apparatus 
in Syria could have taken a unilateral decision to murder Hariri" 
without Assad's approval.

Khaddam offered other devastating details. He said that after Hariri's 
death, he went to Assad and denounced Syria's chief of intelligence in 
Lebanon, Gen. Rustom Ghazali. "I told Bashar that he should bring this 
criminal [Ghazali] and chop his head off because he had created this 
situation in Lebanon." He said he advised Assad "to form an 
investigation committee to punish the officers who committed blunders in 
Lebanon," but that the Syrian president balked.

The revelations instantly made Khaddam the decisive witness in the 
United Nations' investigation of Hariri's death and put a tight new 
squeeze on Assad and his regime. In the movies, Khaddam would now be 
entering a witness protection program, and the warlords would be 
grabbing their submachine guns. And in real life, it may not be all that 
different. But this is a mafia war that could widen to involve real 
armies in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and even distant Iran.

To understand the latest turns of the screw in Syria and Lebanon, I 
spoke by telephone yesterday with Walid Jumblatt, the leader of 
Lebanon's Druze community and something of a warlord himself. He 
described the disclosures by Khaddam, whom he called "one of the main 
architects of Syrian policy for three decades," as "quite a blow" for 
Assad and his key Lebanese ally, the Shiite militia Hezbollah.

But as Assad is backed deeper into a corner, he cautioned, the situation 
will become more dangerous for Lebanon. "The more you squeeze the 
Syrians, the more they get aggressive here," Jumblatt said.

The Druze leader is holed up in his ancestral fortress of Moukhtara, in 
the Chouf Mountains. Like other Lebanese I spoke with this week, he 
fears a deadly new attack by the Syrians that would attempt to trigger 
sectarian conflict in Lebanon -- and take the heat off Damascus. 
Jumblatt argues that the only stable outcome will be regime change in 
Syria -- a "Milosevic solution" that will bring Assad to justice through 
the United Nations.

What makes the Syria-Lebanon situation especially volatile, Jumblatt 
explained, is that it is linked to the radical new Iranian regime of 
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He argued that Iran is using its alliance 
with Assad and Hezbollah in its larger strategic battles against Israel 
and the United States. "It's as if we are defending Iranian nuclear 
facilities from the border of Lebanon," he said.

Jumblatt says he hopes America will stand by the Cedar Revolution. "If 
Bush considers Lebanon one of his major achievements, now is the time to 
protect Lebanon," he told me. When I asked what he wanted from America, 
he answered: "You came to Iraq in the name of majority rule. You can do 
the same thing in Syria."

What can the United States do, realistically, to keep the Syria-Lebanon 
situation from exploding? The answer partly is to stick with the U.N. 
investigation that is slowly wrenching out the truth about Hariri's 
murder. The new Belgian prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, has signaled that 
he wants to interview Assad, and there are rumors he will demand that 
Syria arrest Gen. Ghazali and hold him as a prime suspect. If Assad 
refuses either request, the United States and France may seek targeted 
U.N. sanctions that would seize foreign assets of members of Syria's 
ruling elite.

The challenge for the United States is to help Lebanon become strong 
enough to resist Syrian hegemony. A potential breakthrough would be a 
U.S.-brokered agreement for Israeli withdrawal from the Shebaa Farms 
area along the Lebanon border, under a U.N. agreement that the territory 
belongs to Lebanon. That would give the struggling Lebanese government a 
symbolic victory -- and would undercut Hezbollah's rationale for 
maintaining its militia. That issue should be at the top of Secretary of 
State Condoleezza Rice's in-box as she starts the new year -- perhaps 
along with an old tape of "The Godfather."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/03/AR2006010301277.html?nav=hcmodule
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