THE US through its secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who has been in the Middle East for a week, is working hard to raise tensions and prepare new wars throughout the region.
Yesterday the US blamed Syria for the assassination of the Lebanese ex-Communist Party leader, George Hawi.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said of the assassinations in the Lebanon: ‘These are not random killings, these are targeted assassinations of political figures. . . Syria’s long and continued presence inside Lebanon has created an environment of intimidation and political repression and must end immediately’.
Condoleezza Rice, added of Syria: ‘Their military forces, their visible forces are gone but they are clearly still acting in Lebanon and are still a force that is not a stabilising force there.’
She said this despite the fact that all Syrian troops and intelligence officials have long been withdrawn from the Lebanon. She believes in invisible Syrian forces.
It is well known that Syria is feverishly working to try to prevent a US invasion of its territory, and is acutely aware that the last thing it needs is to be involved in Lebanese assassinations.
However, not all Lebanese movements are following the lead of Rice and the US. Hawi’s party, the Lebanese Communist Party, issued a statement through its secretary, Khaled Hdeydi, blaming Israel for the assassination of Hawi.
He said: ‘We accuse the Israeli intelligence services for these attacks against our party.’ Israel, in fact has a history of organising terrorist attacks inside the Lebanese capital and it is not lost on the Lebanese that the assassination of Hawi harms Syria and does not strengthen it in any way.
The truth is that the US is putting the screws on Syria in every conceivable fashion.
President Assad was recently visited by the US’ Iraqi stooge, Allawi, the ex ‘interim Premier’. He told Assad that he must understand that the same thing that is happening to Iraq could happen to Syria, and then urged him that he must agree to a UN policed buffer zone all along the entire Syrian frontier with Iraq.
Meanwhile Sharon, who is in closest contact with Rice, broke up Tuesday’s summit with the Palestinian President Abbas, after setting the scene for this action by arresting 61 members of the Islamic Jihad on the night before the summit!
At the summit Sharon rounded on Abbas and told him that there could be no progress unless he disarmed all of the Palestinian movements.
Palestinian officials at the meeting said Sharon began the two-hour summit with a 20-minute lecture to Abbas about his failure to halt militant attacks, linking any progress to the Palestinians’ ability to ‘dismantle the terrorist infrastructure’.
Israel’s Ma’ariv daily newspaper said of Sharon’s conduct at the talks: ‘He pounded on the table, reprimanded, explained matters to Abu Mazen like a division commander talking to a young company commander at the conclusion of a failed battalion exercise.’
A humiliated Abbas refused to even attend a post-summit news conference on Tuesday.
Rice’s speeches in the area in support of ‘democracy’ are just a cynical smoke-screen for her real activity, organising counter-revolution throughout the region.
Central to this are the ever more menacing threats to Syria, and demands on the Palestinian leadership that it must destroy the Palestinian resistance to the Israeli army’s illegal occupation. This could only be achieved through a Palestinian civil war.
It is becoming crystal clear that there is only one road to peace in the Middle East. This road requires the united action of the Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian people, to drive US imperialism and its Zionist allies out of the region, in order to establish a Middle Eastern Federation of Socialist States, in which the state of Palestine will play a principle role.