Lebanon

Mark Perry strikes again over on Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel:

In a "Red Team" report issued on May 7 and entitled "Managing Hizballah and Hamas," senior CENTCOM intelligence officers question the current U.S. policy of isolating and marginalizing the two movements.

Perry reported in March that Gen. David Petraeus asked to include the West Bank and Gaza in CENTCOM's area of responsibility (some notes from a follow-up conversation I had with Perry are here). Today's report fits in the same vein: Military leaders, if not civilian policymakers, are starting to see the deep structural flaws in US policy in the Middle East.

A group of female activists is preparing a ship full of women, called the Mariam, which is scheduled to leave Lebanon for Gaza in the coming days. Or maybe not.

The Israeli government has already warned the United Nations that it will use "all necessary force" to stop the ship. Israel has also linked the ship to Hizballah, but the group denied any connection to the flotilla in a statement released Friday.

It didn't get a great deal of attention in the English-language media, but Lebanon's parliament held an important debate earlier this week on granting basic rights to Palestinian refugees.

This has long been a controversial issue in Lebanon, where some 400,000 Palestinians are currently denied the freedom to work (except in low-level positions, though few Palestinians qualified for the requisite work permits), own property and travel overseas, and have little access to basic social services from the government.

A new set of draft laws (credit where's it due: Walid Jumblatt is one of the co-sponsors) would extend some of those basic rights to Palestinian refugees.

For basically as long as Lebanon has existed as a modern nation, foreign forces have found the country a useful proxy to assert their regional interests in the Middle East, so it's not exactly breaking from script for the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress to assert an extremely self-interested agenda during Prime Minister Saad Hariri's first visit to Washington since coming to power last summer. (Nor is it strange for America to be self-interested, but I digress.)

Hariri met with Obama on Monday; he spent Tuesday with Vice President Joe Biden and members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Looking at the reporting that has emerged in the past two days, those meetings have been dominated by topics of American concern: the alleged transfer of Scud missiles from Syria to Hizballah, the disarming of Hizballah, and Lebanon's role in the U.S.-led effort to sanction Iran. Shelved, for the most part: Discussion of America's mired attempt to kick-start Israeli-Palestinian peace.

John Brennan, Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser, thinks the U.S. government needs to strengthen what he calls "moderate" elements within Hizballah.

"Hezbollah is a very interesting organization," Brennan told a Washington conference. "There is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us what they're doing. And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements," Brennan said.

The White House denied just last month that it was planning to engage Hizballah, and you might remember the absurd flap earlier this year over Rob Malley (a former U.S. official) holding low-level talks with Hamas.

The Egyptian government's relationship with Hamas and Hizballah -- already frosty -- will probably take a turn for the worse after the last 24 hours.

Egypt's state security court yesterday convicted 26 men of links to Hizballah; four of them are on the run and were tried in absentia. The men received tough sentences -- including life sentences for three of them -- which cannot be appealed (the security court isn't subject to judicial review, pursuant to the emergency laws). Prosecutors had requested the death penalty.

It's been a few days since we checked in on the "Scud crisis" in Lebanon, where prime minister Saad Hariri is now launching a major diplomatic offensive (عربي) to push back against the reports that Hizballah received Scuds from Syria.

Hariri held telephone conversations today with a number of world leaders, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. He also spoke with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Hariri assured all of them that Hizballah hasn't received any Scuds, and warned of the broader consequences of a new Israeli-Lebanese war.

Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri says Hizballah has not received Scud missiles from Syria, and likens that report to the weapons of mass destruction claims that preceded the Iraq war.

Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hizballah's deputy leader, refuses to confirm or deny reports that his organization received Scud missiles from Syria. In an interview with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Qassem said Hizballah is "satisfied" with its current position, and called the Scud reports an Israeli ploy (عربي) to distract attention from their own nuclear program.

His visit tomorrow will be his second trip in two-and-a-half weeks. At this rate he might as well rent a pied-a-terre in Abu Roumaneh...

The Jerusalem Post reports today that Hizballah admitted receiving Scud missiles from Syria, but insists the missiles are "old and unusable."

The sources added, "Our organization has many surface-to-surface missiles spread across all of Lebanon, in case Israel attacks the country again."

The Jerusalem Post's report is sourced to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai. The original report is available here (عربي); it's attributed to unnamed sources in Hizballah's military wing, who say the group only received a few old, decommissioned missiles. The sourcing is vague, though, and it's a Kuwaiti newspaper (often the Arabic media equivalent of supermarket tabloids).

If you follow Lebanon closely, you've already seen this and had a good laugh about it. If not: Lebanon's top politicians met yesterday at the Cite Sportif (عربي) in Beirut for a "national unity" football game to mark the 35th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese civil war.

So Lebanese papers this morning are full of images like this one:

The Hariri-led red team won the match, 2-0, over the white team, led by Hizballah MP Ali Ammar. NOW Lebanon has a bit of video; Sean Lee and Qifa Nabki have some amusing details and more photos of the match; and al-Mustaqbal has a seemingly endless collection of Hariri photos (عربي).

The match was played in an empty stadium, by the way, for security reasons. And it doesn't seem to have impressed many people in Lebanon.

Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a much-anticipated interview last night (عربي) to Al-Manar, Hizballah's television station. Nasrallah confirmed reports that the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon -- the body investigating Rafiq Hariri's 2005 assassination -- summoned 12 members of Hizballah for interviews.

Andrew Exum and Spencer Ackerman were talking about Haifa Wehbe yesterday, so this seems a good time to mention that her new children's album (issued by Rotana) hit stores this week (عربي).

Seriously: A Haifa Wehbe children's album. I plan to pick up a copy once I get to Doha, mostly because I have no idea how she pulled off a children's album (clearly there are no music videos...).

This is the album that caused a stir in November, by the way, because one song referred to Nubians as "monkeys."

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party, had his long-awaited meeting today (عربي) with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. No real word on what they discussed; Syria's state-run SANA news agency says they talked about boosting Syrian-Lebanese ties. The meeting comes two weeks after Jumblatt apologized for calling Assad a "savage" and "an Israeli product."

Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri is expected to make his second trip to Damascus early next month.

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party, says he didn't really mean to call Syrian president Bashar al-Assad a "savage" or "an Israeli product."

Jumblatt made those comments in February 2007, at a memorial service for the assassinated Lebanese leader Rafiq al-Hariri. At the time, Jumblatt was positioning himself as staunchly anti-Syrian; he blamed Assad for Hariri's murder, and fretted publicly that he too would be the victim of a Syrian car bomb.

Can the U.S. stop Israel from attacking its neighbors? Sen. John Kerry thinks the Israeli government wouldn't bomb Iran without American approval.

Kerry's actual remarks are a little more caveated than the Ha'aretz headline suggests, but my interpretation is that he doesn't think Israel will attack Iran unless Obama admits diplomacy has failed and gives Netanyahu the green light.

Not because I'm a huge fan of his or anything. But Nasrallah gave a speech today -- delivered, as usual, via giant video screens in south Beirut -- and much of the reporting on his talk is woefully out of context. Yedioth Ahronoth, for example, headlines its story Nasrallah threatens to attack Ben-Gurion Airport. The Jerusalem Post goes with Nasrallah warns TA will be targeted in next conflict.

These headlines are factually correct -- but they ignore the fact that Nasrallah's speech (عربي) was largely defensive.

Two headlines from Lebanon's Daily Star (which desperately needs a new Web design, by the way).

Conference debates Palestinian refugee population's right to work in Lebanon
Gun battle in Ain al-Hilweh leaves one woman dead

Not implying a causal relationship between the two! Ain al-Hilweh won't suddenly become a paradise if the Palestinian refugees living there get better access to well-paying jobs (though it certainly wouldn't hurt).

Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri's supporters descended on Beirut's Martyrs Square to mark the fifth anniversary of his father's assassination -- even though nobody is quite sure whether the younger Hariri's March 14 alliance has a future.

The rally, in the shadow of the Mohammed al-Amin mosque, has become an annual event in Beirut in the five years since Rafiq Hariri was killed by a massive car bomb. Television news reports say the crowd was smaller than in previous years -- but it still numbered in the tens of thousands.