Cathy Sultan's Blog, page 13

A FALSE FLAG OPERATION

The contemporary term ‘false flag’ describes covert operations that are designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by entities, groups, or nations other than those who actually planned and executed them. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own.

Example of false flag operations abound. In 1953, the CIA launched Operation Ajax in order to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mosaddiq, and replace him with the Shah. The aim was to depose of Iran’s nationalized Anglo-Persian Oil Company and install five U.S. oil companies to take over Iran’s oil fields.  “Operation Ajax was intended to teach tyrants and aspiring tyrants that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies.”

In 1954 Israeli agents planted bombs in several Egyptian, American and British-owned cinemas, libraries and educational centers including a US diplomatic facility, and framed eight Egyptian Muslims as the perpetrators. A public trial exposed the Israeli spy ring and the covert operation.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, never actually occurred. The government essentially staged—or at the very least, utilized a patently false report—in order to manufacture a geopolitical narrative with a ready-made enemy, the North Vietnamese. The original incident—also sometimes referred to as the U.S.S. Maddox Incident— involved the destroyer supposedly engaging three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats as part of an intelligence patrol. President Lyndon Johnson promptly drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became his administration’s legal justification for a major military build-up that prolonged the war another eleven years.

A Mossad agent admitted in 1984 that Israel planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound d in Tripoli, Libya that broadcast fake terrorist transmissions in order to frame him as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter killing one of Gaddaffi’s children.

High-level American intelligence sources now admit that the Turkish government—fellow NATO country and US ally—carried out the chemical weapons attack blamed on the Syrian government in 2013. A high-ranking Turkish government official recently confirmed this to be true.

In The Syrian, I treat the assassination of Lebanon’s Prime Minister Rafic Hariri as a false flag operation. I contend that Israel along with the CIA killed Hariri to frame Syria. I believe that truth is often times best told through fiction and so in the story I have Sonia Rizk, an investigative reporter, investigate the assassination. What follows are the details of her investigation.

On February 14, 2005, Rafic Hariri, along with twenty-one others, was killed in a massive explosion when his motorcade passed by the St. George Hotel along the Corniche. Lebanese officials claimed a Mitsubishi truck laden with TNT, parked near the site of the crime, was detonated as Hariri’s motorcade passed. However, French investigators were quick to point out that a surface explosion could not have left a crater some 40 feet by 12 feet deep.

French military experts further argued that the explosion was caused by a new weapon combining nuclear and nanotechnology that triggered the explosion. The blast that killed Hariri generated a blast of extreme heat and of brief duration. This would explain why the flesh exposed to the blast was instantly carbonized, and why the part of the body facing the ground did not burn. High density objects like Hariri’s gold watch absorbed the heat and were destroyed but low density things like his shirt collar, which didn’t have time to absorb the heat, were unaffected.

One of the passengers who survived was flown to a French military hospital where it was discovered that he’d come in contact with enriched uranium, clearly pointing to some kind of penetrating weapon with a delayed fusing system that allowed it to penetrate a surface before it exploded. Because the explosion occurred within a small area, the energy from the blast caused the huge crater and was likely launched from a plane, or a small missile fired from a drone.

Since Hariri’s car was equipped with a sophisticated jamming device it would have been impossible to trigger the explosion by remote control without first deactivating the interference system built into the car. The system was made by Netline Communications, an Israeli-owned company.

There is evidence that an Israeli drone was monitoring Hariri’s route the day he was killed, and that the U.S. was flying AWACS over Lebanon that day. Their live feeds would have helped to establish the presence of a drone and its flight pattern, but the U.S. refused to hand over the footage to Lebanese authorities.

While Sonia’s facts are speculative, they, nevertheless, raise questions about a possible false flag operation since both the US and Israel wanted Syria to remove its 35,000 troops from Lebanon. What better way to accomplish this than to carry out such an operation and then blame Syria for the Prime Minister’s death.

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AN ISRAELI AND A PALESTINIAN, EACH WORKING FOR PEACE

Olof Palme was a Swedish politician, statesman and prime minister from 1969 until his assassination in 1986. The Olof Palme International Center, which works to promote democracy and peace, has just awarded its annual prize to Dr. Mitri Raheb, Pastor of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem and to Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, “for their courageous and indefatigable fight against occupation and violence, and for a future Middle East characterized by peaceful coexistence and equality for all. By their work they both bring a ray of hope to a conflict that has plagued and continues to plague millions of people and that endangers world peace.”

A pastor in the Lutheran church, Dr. Raheb’s message to the young generation of Palestinians is a simple one: “We want you to live, not die, for Palestine.” The author of several books, he is also founder of Dar al Kalima University College of Arts and Culture and is co-founder and President of Bright Stars of Bethlehem. “Our hope,” he says, “is that our people, who admire the stars, will dare to look up and dream, that they will believe in goals to strive for, and develop a new sense of hope, community, beauty and faith.”

Gideon Levy is a rare voice of courage in an Israeli media environment generally supine toward the political establishment. Since 1988, he has written the “Twilight Zone” column for the Israeli daily Haaretz, documenting the myriad cruelties inflicted on the Palestinian people under occupation. In his latest book The Punishment of Gaza, Levy utters phrases that by his own admission are considered “insane” by most of his compatriots. He likens Israel to an addict who lives off the financial aid from the USA in order to feed its ‘occupation’ addiction.

CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), a pro-Israeli watchdog group, lambasts Levy for many of his remarks especially when he promotes the economic boycott against Israel. “Boycott was very effective in South Africa…the regime of the West Bank and Gaza is an apartheid regime. What is it if not apartheid when one people does not possess anything, not resources or rights. And I ask you, why is it legitimate to boycott South Africa and it’s not legitimate to do it against Israel? For me, as an Israeli, a call for boycott is problematic but I can tell you that you have to shake Israel because it needs someone to save it from its own hands.”

Each of these men represents what is best about the majority of courageous Palestinians and Israelis who work nonviolently against the Israeli occupation. I met many of them on my first trip there in March 2002 and I compiled their voices in Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides.

And like Gideon Levy, my criticism of Israel was a slow process. In fact, long before I visited Jerusalem and the West Bank for the first time, my opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shifted several times. I attribute this metamorphosis in large part to the fourteen years I lived in Beirut. Between 1969—when I moved there as a self-absorbed young American—to 1983, when I was forced to leave because of civil war—I went from de facto supporter of Israel to having sympathy for the Palestinians. I became embarrassed at the extent of my own ignorance and set out on a life-long journey—which remains very much a work in progress to understand one thing properly—and the Middle East was the obvious choice. From my studies it became clear that the most stable times in this region had occurred when the inhabitants adhered most closely to the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.’ However, whenever extremism, fanaticism or fundamentalism raises its obdurate head, the Golden Rule is quickly set aside, the bloodshed begins and human rights and dignity are pushed aside.

I think Olof Palm said it best: “Democracy is a question of human dignity and human dignity is political freedom. It is the right to freely express opinion and the right to be allowed to criticize and form opinions. Human dignity is the right to health, work, education and social welfare. Human dignity is the right and the practical possibility to shape the future with others. These rights are not reserved for a select group within a society. They are the rights of all people.”

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WE NEED MORE DANIEL ELLSBERG’S AND HONEST JOURNALISM

I recently saw the film The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, the name given to a secret Department of Defense study of US political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The Papers implicated the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, forcing the latter to resign in disgrace. This study, officially titled “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, was commissioned in 1967 by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

When Daniel Ellsberg, a military strategist employed at the time by the RAND Corporation, decided to make these papers public in 1971, he first approached the New York Times. After consulting with its legal staff and ignoring charges by government officials of a national security breech, the Times agreed to publish parts of the Pentagon Papers because it felt strongly that the public needed to know what its government was doing in Vietnam. Some twenty-seven other newspapers followed suit, each publishing portions of the seven thousand page document.

Sadly, the mass media news outlets of today serve the power brokers and the Washington Establishment, not the American public. As a result they, for the most part, are left in the dark about the neocons’ undue influence over our foreign policy, about our intimate involvement in the coup d’état in Ukraine and the war in Yemen, about the CIA’s training of jihadists in Jordan since the early 2000’s in order to carry out “regime change” in Syria, the odd-couple relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia and their attempts to scuttle the Iran deal, our ally Turkey’s involvement with ISIS and its staging of a lethal sarin gas attack on civilians and then blaming it on President Assad, Obama’s unwillingness to condemn Saudi Arabia’s beheading of a prominent Shiite leader whose only crime was to criticize the monarch or to object to the Saudi’s plan to crucify the cleric’s teenage nephew because he participated in the Arab Spring protests.

In this age of pervasive media, there is an obsession among the power elites to control as much of the messaging as possible. According to Robert Parry in his article The Power of False Narrative in Consortium News, “Strategic communications,” or Stratcom, a propaganda/psy-op technique that treats information as a “soft power” weapon to wield against adversaries, is the new catch phrase in an Official Washington obsessed with the clout that comes from spinning false narratives.”

As though this were not enough, we also have the State Department, the White House, the Pentagon and NATO pushing various narratives to sell the American public on how they should view US foreign policies, rivals and allies, painting black hats on adversaries and white hats on so-called allies, regardless of what the truth really is. It is the 1980’s all over again when the Reagan Administration sought to override “the Vietnam Syndrome,” the public’s aversion to foreign military interventions that followed the Vietnam War. To get Americans to “kick” this syndrome, Reagan’s team developed “themes” about foreign events that would push American “hot buttons.” Putin is the newest “hot button,” followed by President Assad and Hezbollah.

It is a dangerous game our media minders are playing and for that reason it is more important than ever that we have access to honest reporting. Thankfully the internet allows us to seek out such reporters as Robert Parry, Alexander Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Naom Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Bill Moyers, Glen Greenwald, Pepe Escobar, Max Blumenthal and Ramzy Baroud, to name but a few. In writing The Syrian, a political thriller that takes place between Syria and Lebanon, I use fiction to convey the truth about US and Israeli atrocities which I lived through and know to be true.

So, what can we do to counter the false narratives and endless wars? First and foremost, we must overcome our complacency and become better informed on the issues affecting our foreign policy so as to better differentiate fact from fallacy. And we can also hope that more Daniel Ellsberg’s will come forward to lead the way.

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CHRISTMAS IN BETHLEHEM

During my first visit to Israel/Palestine in 2002, which I write about in Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides,  Bethlehem was still a relatively robust place. Even Christmas was special. A large Christmas tree stood in Martyr’s Square with lights and ornaments gleaning. Today, with the occupation ever more repressive, the scene has completely changed.

Tradition holds that the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was built over the manager in the stable where Jesus was laid by his mother because there was no room for them at local inns. The church itself is an imposing rectangular stone-built basilica built in 333AD by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine. The location of the manger, marked by a silver star, is a grotto beneath the church reached by narrow stairways on either side of the main hall.

I recall the first time I entered the church through the “Door of Humility,” bowing my head and stepping over the worn lintel into the chill, dim, colonnaded open interior of the church devoid of long wooden pews or seating of any kind. The door was not made to instill a proper sense of reverence and humility but to prevent armed men on horseback from charging into the church, long a place of refuge from the wars and conflicts that have afflicted Palestine for millennia.

In the spring of 2002, shortly after my visit to this city, the church became a refuge again, this time against Israeli troops who drove Palestinian fighters into the sanctum and laid siege to the basilica for thirty days.

While the ‘kings from the east’ were able to travel from afar bearing gifts to honor the newborn child, one can only imagine the difficulties they would encounter today had they to deal with Israeli soldiers at the Allenby Bridge, a crossing from Jordan into the West Bank, arriving from the east. The kings would have been forced to stand in long lines for hours and then interrogated.  “Where are you from?”, “Who are your parents, grandparents?”, “Why have you come?”,  “Who do you intend to visit?” In the end, these hapless ‘kings from the east’ would probably have been refused entry.

Likewise, the residents of Bethlehem face a similar dilemma. They, too, are not allowed to move about freely. They face multiple checkpoints to reach other towns and cities in the West Bank, that is if their occupiers give them permission to travel at all. Even to gain entrance to Jerusalem, where Jesus met his death by crucifixion at the hands of Roman occupiers, Palestinians need a permit.

Two thousand years ago, while Palestine was subject to another harsh occupation, much as it is today, conditions then at least allowed the residents greater mobility than that given to current inhabitants. Traditions says that Joseph had to take his expectant wife from Nazareth where they were living, to Bethlehem in order to fulfill a requirement, imposed by the authorities, to register in their ancestral village as part of a nationwide census. Today, given the necessity of a travel permit to leave one’s village to travel to another village, this would have been impossible.

Today, no Palestinian from Bethlehem can move to Nazareth. The occupation and closure across the West Bank makes that sort of move impossible. Israeli law even forbids an Arab from Nazareth which is located in Israel proper, from marrying a Bethlehemite and bringing that spouse across the Green Line to reside in Israel. Thousands of Palestinians in Bethlehem can see Jerusalem from their homes but they cannot go to the Holy City to pray without a permit from Israeli authorities. Likewise, Christians from Jerusalem cannot go to Christmas service in Bethlehem at the Church of the Nativity to pray alongside their European and American co-religionists.

There is a traditional Christmas carol which asks “What child is this?” The answer, of course, is “Jesus, the son of Mary.” As we enter our places of worship this Christmas, and recall this helpless child, born as an outcast in a lowly manger, we should also remember that all vulnerable children, whether Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi or Afghani, whether living under occupation or fleeing conflict, are collectively our children to acknowledge and protect, as the shepherds and ‘kings of the east’ did when they came to honor and safeguard their newborn king.

WHO KILLED RAFIC HARIRI?

 

In this scene from The Syrian, Sonia Rizk, a former war correspondent, turned investigative journalist, is going over her notes with her assistant Ali. They are trying to determine who killed Rafic Hariri. Neither of them believes it was the Syrians who killed him.

On February 14, 2005, Rafic Hariri, along with twenty-one others, was killed in a massive explosion when his motorcade passed by the St. George Hotel along the Corniche.”

Ali interrupted the monologue. “The explosion ruptured water pipelines and threw sand and debris along with cars and bodies onto the Corniche and into the sea.”

“Good details.”

After making a notation on that page, Sonia closed the file and picked up another one labeled ‘How as Hariri killed.’

Again she read aloud.

“Lebanese officials claimed a Mitsubishi truck laden with TNT, parked near the site of the crime, was detonated as Hariri’s motorcade passed. However, French investigators were quick to point out that a surface explosion could not have left a crater some 40 feet by 12 feet deep.

“French military experts argued instead that the explosion was caused by a new weapon combining nuclear and nanotechnology that could trigger the explosion and regulate its strength. The explosion that killed Hariri generated a blast of extreme heat and of brief duration. This would explain why the flesh exposed to the blast was instantly carbonized, and why the part of the body facing the ground was not burned.

“High density objects like Hariri’s gold watch absorbed the heat and were destroyed but low density things like his shirt collar, which didn’t have time to absorb the heat, were unaffected.”

“One of the passengers who survived was flown to a French military hospital where it was discovered that he’d come in contact with enriched uranium,” Ali said. “This clearly points to some kind of penetrating weapon.”

“Yes,” said Sonia, “one that has a delayed fusing system that allowed it to penetrate a surface before it exploded. And because the explosion occurred within a small area, the energy from the blast caused a huge crater.”

Ali nodded. “Like a guided missile launched from a plane, or a small missile fired from a drone.

“And since all the evidence was removed from the crime scene immediately following the assassination, we may never know for sure. And we still don’t know if the evidence was destroyed, or if it was taken out of the country, as some suspect.”

Ali cocked his head. “Didn’t you discover that Hariri’s car was equipped with a sophisticated jamming device?”

“Yes,” said Sonia, “and it would have been impossible to trigger the explosion by remote control without first deactivating the interference system built into the car. The system was made by Netline Communications, an Israeli-owned company.”

“Unfortunately, all circumstantial evidence…not hard facts,” Ali said.

“I know,” Sonia replied, “but there is evidence that an Israeli drone was monitoring Hariri’s route the day he was killed, and that the U.S. was flying AWACS over Lebanon that day. Their live feeds would have helped to establish the presence of a drone and its flight pattern, but the U.S. refused to hand over the footage to Lebanese authorities.”

Ali stood up. “This story is extremely sensitive, Sonia. We need to tread very carefully. It’s going to be a challenge to write it with incriminating but not irrefutable evidence and still sound objective.

“Maybe the best way to approach it is to present the evidence like a criminal lawyer would—in other words, look at who had he most to gain from Hariri’s assassination.”

Sonia thumbed through the file and pulled out a page. “In one of our articles we should include this quote from Patrick Seale’s article ‘Who Killed Rafic Hariri?’ in The Guardian dated February 22, 2005. That was one week after the assassination. Here’s what he wrote:

‘If Syria killed Hariri it must be judged as an act of political suicide. Syria is already under great international pressure from the U.S., France and Israel…To kill Hariri would be to destroy Syria’s reputation and hand its enemies a weapon with which to deliver a blow that could finally destabilize the Damascus regime…If Syria did not kill Hariri, who could have? There is no shortage of potential candidates including far-right Christians anxious to rouse opinion against Syria, Islamic extremists and, of course, Israel, whose ambition has long been to weaken Syria and sever its strategic alliance with Iran and Hezbollah. Israel has great experience at targeted assassinations across the Middle East…Syria, Hezbollah and Iran have stood up against U.S. and Israeli hegemony over the region.’”

“Good idea to use that,” Ali said. “It’s a solid piece of journalism. We may never prove categorically who killed Hariri, but we can keep working on it.”

“Look, we already know certain things to be facts,” said Sonia. “Within days of the assassination, the U.S. blamed Syria for Hariri’s death. They demanded that the Syrian Army immediately withdraw its 30,000 troops from Lebanon. Syria bowed to international pressure and by the second week of March 2005 pulled its troops out of the country. Six months ago the U.S. went before the U.N. and demanded the formation of a Special Tribunal for Lebanon to investigate the assassination.”

“And the intent of the Special Tribunal was to prove Syria’s guilt,” Ali said. “Witnesses confessed that Syria was behind the murder. The testimonies, it turn s out, were produced by false witnesses.”

“Hezbollah then became the default suspect when the Syrian ‘false witness’ story came to light. Both Israel and the U.S. have sought a way to discredit and destroy Hezbollah ever since it forced Israeli out of south Lebanon in 2000. They’ll now use the Special Tribunal to accomplish this. And an indictment against a Shiite leader for the assassination of a Sunni leader would spark a Shiite-Sunni civil war in Lebanon and across the region.”

“It’s impressive theorizing, but still not enough to prove anything.”

He was right, thought Sonia. Solid, iron clad evidence was difficult to come by, unless, of course, someone got careless. Sonia hoped her Israeli spy/now lover would be that person. She knew it was up to her to get him to talk. And she knew how to do it.

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YOU PEOPLE KNOW NOTHING

In this scene from The Syrian Andrew recognizes that he knows very little about regional politics. Camille, an elderly statesman and former judge who lives close to the Israeli border, has taken him under his wings and is patiently explaining the intricacies of Israeli-Lebanese politics.

“Forgive me, but you people know nothing of what goes on outside America. And when it comes to the Middle East, it’s even worse. What gets reported in the States as truthful narrative isn’t anything of the kind.”

“I wouldn’t go that far…”

“Never mind—I’ll do my best while you’re with me to explain the realities here. The trouble began in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s when Yasser Arafat and his PLO began cross-border attacks into northern Israel. As was their right, the Israelis retaliated, but each time with more and more force until they finally created a permanent military presence here. It was out of resistance to that occupation that Hezbollah was born.”

Andrew looked around. “It’s a strange and humbling feeling to vaguely understand some of this from the news at home, and then come here and find it all alive, flesh and blood, real conflict—not just news.” Andrew wondered what kind of a naïve idiot he must seem to this old man. “The US says that Hezbollah are terrorists. Is that true?”

“It depends on who you ask. Israel calls them terrorists because it wants a reason to destroy them. Remember George Bush’s war on terrorism—‘you’re either with us or against us?’ He declared that any group the US didn’t like was a terrorist organization. Well, Israel got in on the act. They demanded the US declare Hezbollah a terrorist group and insisted it give up its arms. If you ask the vast majority of Lebanese about Hezbollah, they will tell you that they’re a home-grown resistance movement born out of a twenty-two-year illegal Israeli occupation. They argue that Hezbollah should never give up its arms because they’re Lebanon’s only deterrent against another Israeli attack.”

“And where does the Lebanese Army fit into all this?”

“Our army isn’t capable of defending Lebanon against an Israeli attack. The leadership is weak and divided. Aid packages from the US are laughable. They are like pennies and toy guns compared to the military aid Israel receives. That’s why there’s popular support for a non-state resistance movement like Hezbollah, which is capable of facing off with Israel.”

“What a complicated mess,” said Andrew. “Why does Israel want to attack Hezbollah?”

“It was Hezbollah who threw Israel out of south Lebanon in May 2000 after their twenty-two year occupation. No Arab force before had ever dealt Israel such a humiliating blow, but that’s just part of the equation. Geopolitically, there’s a much bigger issue at play—the proxy war between the US and Iran. Using Israel to attack Hezbollah is an indirect attack on Iran, since they are the ones who back Hezbollah. But the real target is Syria.”

“What’s Syria got to do with all of this?”

“Syria is the conduit between Iran and Hezbollah. In order to weaken both Iran and Hezbollah, Israel and the US must destroy Syria. There’s also a religious component here. Syria is ruled by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Iran and Hezbollah are also Shiites.”

“Ah, yes, religion again—messing everything up.”

“In this case, it’s an inter-Islam war, which is even more worrisome. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf nations, mostly Sunni, support the US and Israel’s attempt to destroy the three Shiite entities. They fear a Shiite revival and want to maintain their Sunni dominance over the Islamic world.”

“So if a war begins, I’ll be caught right smack in the middle of it.”

Camille glanced at Andrew. “And since you’re in Marjeyoun and in Hezbollah territory, the bombs will drop near here and maybe kill you. It’s pretty straightforward.”

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The Conflict in Syria, its Origins

There is a scene in The Syrian when Andrew is in south Lebanon and the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel has just begun. His friend Camille attempts to explain the relationship between the two enemies and how it all ties into a broader regional conflict. This essay attempts to explain the origins of that conflict.

A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Security the Realm was a policy document prepared in 1996 by a study group led by Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith, and intended as a political blueprint for the incoming government of Benjamin Netanyahu, then about to begin his first term as Prime Minister of Israel. The document advocated a new approach to solving Israel’s security problems that included the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, abandoning the land for peace formula to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Ironically, A Clean Break became, instead, the game plan for the George W. Bush presidency and its authors became top national security advisors in his administration.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the removal of Saddam Hussein changed the overall balance of power in the region, inadvertently giving rise to Shiite-Iran. This, in turn, stirred up a decades-old conflict with Iran’s traditional enemy-Saudi Arabia and its fellow Sunni nations. Sunnis represent approximately 85-88% of all Muslims. However, between the Mediterranean and the Gulf the ratio is approximately 50% Sunni, 50% Shiite with Iran being the largest Shiite Muslim nation with a population of 70 million, 90% of whom are Shia. This ratio represents a threat to the Sunni dominance across the Middle East.

Iran’s natural allies are Syria, ruled by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and Lebanon where Shiites represent approximately 40% of the population. Further exasperating the Saudi-Iran—Sunni-Shiite divide was Syrian President Hafez al Assad’s brutal crackdown in 1982 on the Muslim Brotherhood which advocates Wahhabism, the puritanical version of Islam that prevails in Saudi Arabia.

If Saudi Arabia saw Iran as a threat to its regional hegemony, so did Israel. Its war with Hezbollah in 2006 was an attempt to destroy Hezbollah but it was also an attempt to redefine its military deterrence. Hezbollah forced them out of south Lebanon in 2000 after a twenty-two year illegal occupation. The United States, seen in the region as an extension of Israel, also saw Iran as a threat to its regional interests, and thus supported Israel in its proxy war with Iran. Jonathan Cook in his December 19, 2006 article “Do America and Israel Want the Middle East Engulfed in Civil War,” quoted Meyrav Wurmser, David Wurmser’s wife who said that the Bush administration dragged its feet, waiting for Israel to expand its attack on Syria during the war with Hezbollah. “The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space,” she said. “They believed that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hezbollah. It was obvious that it was impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that Iran’s strategic and important ally, Syria, should be hit.”

In an article which appeared in The Telegraph on October 5, 2007 David Wurmser said “we need to do everything possible to destabilize the Syrian regime …that would include the willingness to escalate as far as we need to go to topple the regime.” And with that, the idea of regime change once again took center stage.

According to a April 18, 2011 Washington Post article: “Newly released WikiLeaks cables reveal that the State Department has been secretly financing Syrian opposition groups and other opposition projects for at last five years.” This is nothing new. In 1979 when Russia invaded Afghanistan, the CIA with the help of Pakistani intelligence, trained and armed what became known as the mujahedeen (extremist Sunni fighters). When the Russians were defeated and left Afghanistan, Washington turned its back on these fighters assuming they would disappear. This didn’t happen. The Sunni fundamentalists who are fighting today in Syria are the second, third, and even the fourth generation of these original mujahedeen fighters whom the US trained in Afghanistan.

In the early years of the Obama’s presidency, there was some attempt at diplomatic engagement with Syria but shortly after the civil conflict broke out in 2011, the legacy of official hostility toward Syria set in motion Washington’s disastrous confrontation with Bashar Assad.

The West’s mainstream media initially presented the Syrian civil war as a simple case of good-guy protesters vs. bad-guy government but the conflict was more complicated and the one-sided version only made matters worse.

According to Jonathan Marshall writing for Consortium News in an article entitled Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War, nearly a quarter million people have perished and fully half of the country’s inhabitants have been forced from their homes, creating the worse refugee crisis in the past quarter century. Many parties are to blame but certainly among them are the interventionists in the US who rationalized supporting the Islamist opposition on the grounds that Bachar Assad was an evil dictator.

The city of Dara’a near the Jordanian border was the epicenter of protests that triggered Syria’s civil war. In early March 2011, police arrested and severely beat several high school students. Protests broke out. Syrian police responded with water cannons, batons and gunfire, killing three protesters. Matters went from bad to worse when demonstrators fought back. In an effort to ease tensions the government offered to release the detained students. Instead, seven police officers were killed and the courthouse torched and gunmen set an ambush killing two dozen government troops. According to a journalist on the scene, “The ‘Daraa protest movement’ on March 17-18, 2011 had all the appearance of a staged event involving covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence. Roof top snipers were targeting both police and demonstrators.”

President Assad tried to calm the situation by sending senior government officials to the city to emphasize his personal commitment to prosecute those responsible for shooting protesters. He ordered the release of the students arrested. Assad also announced national reforms that included the formation of a new government, the lifting of the state of emergency, the abolition of the Supreme State Security Court, the granting of general amnesties and new regulations on the right of citizens to participate in peaceful demonstrations.

Assad’s response failed to satisfy protesters who took to the streets and declared the city a “liberated zone.” The Assad government reacted ruthlessly, laying siege to the town with tanks and soldiers. Meanwhile, unknown gunmen killed 19 Syrian soldiers. In another incident 140 members of the police and security forces were slaughtered.

Western media refused to recognize that armed elements were becoming active. They preferred the simple story of good people fighting bad people. One has to ask why the story could not have been told without also covering up the reality—that armed elements whose agenda was not peaceful were also playing a role.

What should one make of these facts? First, there can be no reason to doubt the many reports by United Nations and private human rights organizations that government forces committed war crimes and gross violations of international human rights. However, as Jonathan Marshall noted in his article “the deadly provocations against Syrian government forces put an entirely different cast on the origins of the conflict. In March 2012 Human Rights Watch sent an “open letter” to leaders of Syrian opposition, decrying crimes and other abuses committed by armed opposition elements.”

A classified Defense Intelligence Agency report in the summer of 2012 concluded: “The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq), and later the Islamic State are now the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”

Vice President Joe Biden said: “The fact of the matter is that there was no moderate middle. Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis.”

What the West should have learned from Iraq and Libya was that “regime change” in Syria may well bring about either a fanatical Islamist state or a failed state, but with no end to the violence.

Jonathan Marshall concludes:  “In Syria as in Libya and Iraq, human rights became a convenient bludgeon for supporting the longstanding ambition of US neoconservatives to topple critical Arab regimes as part of their grand plan for redrawing the map of the Middle East.”

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ARE YOU SPY, FOREIGN CONTRACTOR OR ARMS DEALER?

 

In this scene from The Syrian Sonia has taken on an Israeli lover who also heads a spy network inside Lebanon.

Breakfast was still being served when they walked into the dining room.

“Let’s sit on the terrace,” suggested Sonia. “We’ll have it to ourselves and…”

“Good,” interrupted Kamal, “because I intend to tease out the truth about a mysterious lady who abandons her lover without a trace and then suddenly reappears the following morning.”

She laughed and squeezed his arm against her ribs.

“So, Aida…” he began after being seated.

“Sonia’s my name, Sonia Rizk. I use Aida when I’m not sure I want to give out my real name.”

“The lady’s even more mysterious than I thought. I’m listening.”

“This game is only interesting if two people play. I begin, but you follow. Agreed?”

“Okay, fair enough but only if I can continue calling you Aida. It suits you, oh lady who casts spells over men.”

She smiled, pleased.

“Silly man, I’ve already told you. I’m Lebanese. I’ve lived in the States for the last twenty years or so, between D.C. and New York. I was a foreign journalist for many years, covering war zones mostly, but I gave up that job three years ago. Now, I freelance occasionally for magazines like The New Yorker and Harper’s. It’s much safer and comes with regular hours. I’m in Lebanon to write an article about two women, and hopefully, interview them.”

“What’s the article about?”

 

“Two Lebanese, both Christian, and both from Marjeyoun in south Lebanon, one supported the Israelis during their occupation, and still does; the other killed an Israeli agent.”

When she detected no reaction on his part, she continued, “Most Lebanese adopted a form of collective amnesia after the war, but these two women chose strikingly different paths. I want to explore when these divergences took place and why, and learn more about their political ideologies. My editor at The New Yorker loved the idea. It seems people would rather read this stuff than learn about a world going to hell.”

“What are your politics, Aida—about Israel and the war?”

“I understand why Israel invaded in ’82. We all wanted the Palestinians out of Lebanon. We had Yasser Arafat proclaiming that the road to Jerusalem went through Beirut. He was an arrogant son of a bitch, and too willing to destroy a country that wasn’t his. Did we associate all Palestinians with Arafat? Yes, and that was wrong. Nonetheless, I welcomed the Israelis. Did they overstay their welcome? Yes, and am I glad they withdrew? Yes, but I’m relieved the Syrians finally withdrew, too. As for the civil war—all wars are senseless. We destroyed a beautiful country and created divisions within Lebanese society. Why? To what end?”

“What about Hezbollah? How do you feel about the powerful role they now play?”

“You sound like an intelligence operative. Are you sure you don’t work for the Mossad or the CIA?”

He smiled.

“Hezbollah is a natural outgrowth of an illegal twenty-two year Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. Half of all Lebanese think of them as a national liberation movement, me included. The Sunnis see them as a threat to their dominance in Lebanon. Anyway, the Israelis should have been more careful about how they treated the people in the south. When they invaded in ’78, the villagers greeted Israeli soldiers with flowers and rice because they thought they were coming to rid them of Arafat and his PLO. Instead, the Israelis treated them with brutality and became their enemy.”

Kamal didn’t appear to be offended or disturbed by anything she said. She had, after all, carefully chosen her words, trying to maintain balance and credibility.

“One last question, who are these women you plan to write about?”

“The first is Zina Melki. She runs a right-wing NGO in Europe. The other lady, Leila Chakar, killed a Shin Bet officer and got thrown into Khiam prison for eight years. Have any other questions?”

Kamal shook his head.

“Good, now it’s my turn.”

He frowned as I putting himself on guard. “If you insist,” he replied.

“Well then, I’ll try to make them easy. When we met yesterday, I asked if you were a spy, foreign contractor or arms dealer. You are which of the above?”

“None, I’m a telecommunications expert. I represent a cellular network. I’m here to make sure the system is working properly.”

“What’s the name of the company you work for?”

“It’s Alpha Telecommunications.”

“Apparently the system isn’t working very well. Didn’t several of Alpha’s employees just get arrested for spying for Israel? It was in the newspapers here a few days ago.”

“That’s why I’m here—to correct the problem so security breaches like that won’t happen again.”

“You must be a computer genius. It’ll take one to figure out how Israel tapped into their system.”

“Yes, it’ll be a challenge.”

“Well, given the crisis you have on your hands, I should feel guilty. I’ve consumed much too much of your time.”

“Not at all, I’ve enjoyed every minute.”

“Me too, but I have some work to finish this afternoon and so do you, apparently. Shall we meet for dinner this evening?”

“Yes, I’d like that.”

“I’ll see you around 8:30. I have a driver. I’ll ring your room when I arrive.”

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YET SO PHYSICALLY ATTRACTIVE

In this scene from The Syrian, Nadia encounters Hassan Jaafar for the first time in fifteen years. As head of Syrian Intelligence, he ordered her husband disappeared.

Nadia asked Samir to stop the car alongside the highway. They were just outside Chtaura. She needed a few minutes to compose herself before she arrived at the Park Hotel where she would sit face to face with the man responsible for her husband’s disappearance. She took comfort in Samir’s calm presence. He had been a part of her life since childhood. He was her father’s chauffeur and confidant, and oftentimes hers, always conversing in his most comfortable language, Arabic. Samir’s physical stance was a measure of comfort in her anxiety about what would happen next. He was close to six feet and looked like a body builder, although Nadia knew he had never lifted a weight in his life.

A thick hedge of pine trees obscured the entrance to the hotel. Only a small placard gave away its name, making it an otherwise ideal romantic hideaway. As Samir steered the car in the parking lot, Nadia saw Hassan Jaafar on the veranda talking to another man. Jaafar stood when he saw her car approach. Towering over the other man, he shook hands and said goodbye.

He was still as Nadia remembered—an imposing presence, the ubiquitous sunglasses, the perfect manners, the well-tailored suit and silk tie, the crisp dress shirt. A man so frightfully powerful yet…Yet what, Nadia? Yet so physically attractive that, on several occasions, you overlooked his unscrupulous behavior and allowed him to take you in his arms? Yes, I remember.

Nadia walked across the gravel driveway, concentrating on her gait, in open-toed high heels she attempted to appear sure-footed and confident rather than the jittery, heart-pounding wimp who cringed inside her. Panting and dry mouthed, she climbed the three stone steps to the wide, open terrace. She tried to control her breathing before she reached the round metal table where Hassan Jaafar insolently watched her approach.

“What a pleasure, Nadia,” he said as he stood, removing his sunglasses. “Please, have a seat.” He pulled out her chair.

He’s still wearing the same cologne, she thought. Givenchy pour Hommes. Yes, I remember that, too.

“I’ve ordered pastry and tea.”

“Thank you.” Nadia studied her one-time suitor whom she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. Still strikingly handsome with olive skin and Semitic nose, Nadia guessed he must now be in his mid-fifties. His once-dark moustache now matched his full head of fading salt-and-pepper hair. His brows and coal-black eyes, once inquisitive and lively, were now more penetrating at least that was how it felt to Nadia as she endured his inspection and waited for him to speak.

“Where shall I begin after so many years? First, allow me to congratulate you on your new position at the U.N.”

“How did you know?”

Eyebrows raised, he stared incredulously, “Nadia…”

“Yes, yes, of course.” For a moment she had forgotten that he was the Mokhabarat.

The waiter arrived with the tray. “I’ll serve Madame,” said Jaafar. “That will be all. Thank you.”

She recognized the pastry and looked up. Her eyes met his “Yes, I remembered,” he said, “Chocolate-filled croissants, your favorite.”

She watched as he poured the tea, careful not to fill the cups to the brim, then skillfully placed hers beside her right hand. He took a knife and fork and cut into the pastry. This time, as he placed the plate in front of her, he ran his finger down her hand. She looked up, surprised that she hadn’t flinched, and amazed at the unexpected thrill his touch gave her.

They stared at each other a long time until finally Jaafar spoke.

“You’re as beautiful as I remembered, Nadia. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve thought of you. I tried to contact you after…”

“After you disappeared my husband? Yes, I know. That’s the reason I left Lebanon.”

This book is available for purchase here.

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MY OWN LITTLE MASSACRE

This scene from A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War, we are finally returning to our apartment after an absence of almost four months. Bachir Gemeyal was just elected Lebanon’s new president and optimism filled the air.

With Bachir’s election behind us, I made final preparations to return to our apartment. This would mark the eleventh time we had fled our apartment only to return months later. Leila and I scheduled a day for the final cleaning. I was eager to resettle as quickly as possible, because I needed major knee surgery as soon as I could get our lives back in order. Leila had already done a preliminary cleaning, the most important part: she rid our belongings of rat droppings while I washed the sheets, bedspreads and towels. Miraculously, the dry cleaner was able to restore my daughter’s stuffed animals to their clean, pre-rat condition.

I arrived before Leila. Even the outside of our apartment looked inviting: the landing was clean; the walls bright, the front door a glossy white with forest green panels. I turned the key and went in. After so many repairs, I had finally discarded the tattered sheer curtains and made new ones for the living and dining rooms. Now everything in those rooms—the marble floors, the sparkling newly replaced  ceiling to floor windows, the rich walnut and cherry furniture, the rebuilt bookshelf, Papa’s artifacts, the vibrant Persian carpets, the polished silver pieces on display, the china in its cabinet—welcomed me back.

I went into the kitchen to put some fruit and cheese in the refrigerator. I felt dizzy from climbing the stairs to the eighth floor in the heat, so I rested on one of the kitchen chairs. I heard a sound and stayed very still. My heart began to pound. I knew in an instant they were there, they had not left. Leila had said they would.

“When we clean an apartment, the rats leave.”

She was wrong.

I associated vermin with filth. I rubbed my arms; they felt creepy, as if something was crawling up them. I heard traffic from the street below. I even heard the wind whistling across the balcony. Then I heard what sounded like words being whispered in muffled voices. I sat up straight. It was obvious where they were—in the opening behind the oven, a perfect place to nest all warm and cozy. Anger replaced fear.

“How dare they!” I hissed. They heard my voice and fell silent.

I knew what needed to be done but I could not bring myself to commit the violent act. Leila might have been able to dispose of them, but instead I enlisted Mr. Eid, my neighbor, to carry out their execution. He brought along his wife, who carried a sack and a small metal shovel. Standing in the doorway of the living room, I watched Mr. and Mrs. Eid walk into the kitchen. Before he closed the door behind him he urged me to go for a walk, or to at least wait downstairs. I declined.

I heard a clank and realized it was the metal shovel striking the side of the stove.

Then I heard him speaking Arabic to his wife, “Well, there’s the first one, maybe it’s going to be easier than I thought.”

Then Mrs. Eid said, “Oh just wait till you find the mother. She’ll fight for her young ones.”

There was another clank, and then a squeal.

Mrs. Eid yelled, “There she is, hit her harder!” She screamed a second time, “Hit her again. She’s still not dead.”

I almost fainted when I heard the sound of the metal shovel crushing the mother rat on the kitchen floor.

Then Mrs. Eid said, “Curious, look at that white spot between her eyes.”

I had met this very rat some days earlier. It came into the light in the stairwell as I climbed the stairs, and its odd white face shown out at me. Our eyes met brrefly, just long enough for some exchange of recognition, before it vanished into the darkness.

The kitchen table collapsed, and then there were several more clanks against the tile wall. Jesus, was he actually chasing the little ones up the wall? I heard a bang against the door then Mr. Eid said, “There, that must be all of them.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Eid. “I think so.”

She cracked open the door just enough to ask for a bucket and some Tide detergent. When they finally walked out, Mr. Eid held the burlap sack of dead rats securely in his hand. I entered the kitchen and saw traces of blood everywhere— on the white tile walls, the gray marble floor. I thought. “I’ll paint it all again as many times as it takes to erase this terrible deed from my house.”

I didn’t know why my behavior toward the rats disturbed me so much. A few days later, sitting on the balcony with a cup of tea, I realized I had created my own little Sabra-Chatilla. But rats were rats, not people, and I was not trying to delude myself they were people. Rats were pretty dangerous to have in your house. What unsettled me so much was the similarity in my mind between rats and Arafat’s PLO. If I found rats deadly, and wanted them exterminated, was it not also perfectly human of me to view a horde of fighters trying to take over a city that was not theirs with similar malice, and wish them dead in the same manner?

The way in which that rat, with her unique white spot, stepped into the light and identified herself, made me realize some things I had never considered in my war-warped mind. At first I thought the rat was a ‘he,’ but Mrs. Eid knew instinctively she was the mother.

“Look at that peculiar white spot on her,” she had said.

Looking in the direction of the Sabra-Chatilla Palestinian camps I realized with great clarity for the first time that each person in those camps was a ‘he’ or a ‘she,’ that most of them were innocent Palestinian civilians who through no fault of their own lived in squalid refugee camps and wished no one harm.

This book may be purchased here.

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