ConservativeINC

My reactions are based on an article titled Israel-Syria Peace Deal Could Threaten Iran, Hezbollah. When you only read the title you think that things are improving (snicker, snicker) in the Middle East. That is what the article is about - right?

Wrong. First off, if you actually believe that things can dramatically improve in the Middle East just through talks then, well, you’re stupid and naive. Secondly, here is some stuff from the article that tells why this new “peace” deal has no chance:

Negotiations between two nations that have officially been at war for 60 years face significant hurdles on a long road that could lead nowhere.

Assistant Secretary of State David Welch told reporters on Wednesday that the Bush administration remains skeptical of Syria because it continues to back Hezbollah , allows top Hamas leaders to operate openly in Damascus and retains close ties to Iran .

“That said, Israel lives in a difficult neighborhood,” said Welch. “It’s in its national interest to find ways to expand the circle of peace if other people are serious about doing it, and I see that they’re undertaking that experiment now.”

The news was met with deep skepticism in Israel , where Olmert’s political future is in jeopardy because of a deepening political corruption investigation that could bring down his fragile coalition government before he can ever approve direct talks with Syria .

Israel and Syria announced the new peace initiative hours before an Israeli judge eased a gag order and allowed Israeli journalists to report more details of the Olmert investigation.

Israeli police and prosecutors are looking into allegations that Olmert accepted cash bribes from an American businessman, Morris Talanksy. Both Olmert and Talansky have denied the charges, but the prime minister has vowed to step down if he is indicted.

“This is very dangerous for Israel that a Prime Minster is trying to negotiate because of his personal interest and out of weakness,” said Yuval Steinitz , a lawmaker with Israel’s opposition Likud party.

To summarize, Olmert is talking with Syria to take attention away from his bribery scandal.

But this wasn’t what really caught my attention. At the end of the article there was a little portion that the editors said could be cut for space considerations. Here it is, uncut:

News of the peace talks came on the same day that Lebanon’s warring factions reached an agreement to end an 18-month political impasse that spilled into street fighting earlier this month with deadly clashes between opposition forces led by Hezbollah’s Sunni Muslim fighters and pro-government Sunni Muslim fighters.

The breakthrough gives the Iranian-backed Hezbollah camp its two main demands: veto power over all government decisions and a revised electoral law that’s designed to better represent Lebanon’s disparate sects.

The agreement is an important political victory for Hezbollah, whose allies seized large swaths of Beirut this month in a show of military superiority that left the fragile, Western-allied government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Saniora with few cards to play.

This is exactly what is meant by “one step forward, two steps back.” More accurately, these developments can be characterized as one small step for protecting Olmert’s ass and one giant leap for advancing Iran’s stranglehold on the region.

The only thing that will ever help the Middle East is if someone can spread the ideals of personal liberty to that region. Bush tried and there have been some successes in Iraq. But Iran is the key player there. They want power and are willing to push the limits to increase their power. I hate saying this, but I think Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was better at limiting Iran’s overreaching foreign “policy” than we are. The main difference is that while Hussein did something we fall over ourselves to prove that we will do nothing.

No, I’m not saying “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” (technically) but I am saying that now is the time to prevent the virus that is Iran from spreading. We should have helped Lebanon protect itself from Iranian-backed Hezbollah. We need to do whatever it takes to make sure Iran’s influence isn’t allowed to spread further to places like Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, South America, and other places throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia.

The world is quickly changing and we’re standing back as not-so-friendly countries like Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, and the like are spreading their influence to countries that greedily accept “aide” in exchange for support against America and the West.

Over the last generation a greater portion of the world has come to live in free countries than at any other time in history. If we relent and give up our leadership position in the world in exchange for some BS talks with crazed regimes this trend will be reversed.

The quintessential question Americans need to answer is this: do we want to talk or do we want to lead? BigT

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Here’s a piece from the NY Times:

C.I.A. Official in Inquiry Called a ‘Hero’

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 — At a conference in El Paso in mid-August, Representative Silvestre Reyes of Texas, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, heaped praise on a man whose exploits, he joked, had been the inspiration for the television show “24.”

From fast cars to fine wines, Mr. Reyes said, the appetites of the man, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., are the stuff of legend. Then turning serious, Mr. Reyes hailed Mr. Rodriguez’s three decades of undercover work for the Central Intelligence Agency, where he recently stepped down as head of its clandestine service, and called Mr. Rodriguez an “American hero.”

Four months later, Mr. Rodriguez’s role in the destruction of hundreds of hours of videotape of harsh interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda is at the center of an inquiry by Mr. Reyes’s committee on Capitol Hill. With a separate Justice Department inquiry that could lead to a full criminal investigation into the matter, the man who spent a career in the shadows has been thrust uneasily into the spotlight.

Mr. Rodriguez is hardly the only current or former agency official under scrutiny. In the months ahead, investigators will try to reconstruct the chain of events leading up to the decision in November 2005 to destroy the interrogation tapes, and to determine who else inside the agency may have approved the decision.

According to a former top intelligence official who has spoken to Mr. Rodriguez in recent days, Mr. Rodriguez remains confident that he acted lawfully and had the authority to destroy the tapes. He could not be reached for comment.

[Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.]

Whether C.I.A. lawyers in fact approved the destruction will be a question for investigators in Congress, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. inspector general’s office. Some Congressional officials said that they want to know why Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director at the time the tapes were destroyed, appears never to have notified Congressional committees about the destruction.

Mr. Rodriguez, who was born in Puerto Rico, spent much of his C.I.A. career working in Latin America, including in Mexico, and ascended in the 1990s to lead the agency’s Latin America division.

He is regarded both by admirers and detractors as blunt, effusive and fiercely loyal to his staff and friends. In 1997 he was removed from his position after he interceded on behalf of a friend who was arrested in the Dominican Republic, trying to get the Dominican government to drop the charges. A report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general criticized Mr. Rodriguez for a “remarkable lack of judgment.”

Despite the reprimand, Mr. Rodriguez continued to ascend through the agency. Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, he was appointed chief of staff of the Counterterrorist Center, which nearly overnight had ballooned to a staff of nearly 1,700 from 400.

Some at the agency were surprised when soon afterward Mr. Rodriguez was tapped to take over the counterterrorist center. Many at the C.I.A. said they believed that Mr. Rodriguez, who had no experience in the Middle East nor Arabic language skills, was a poor choice at a time when the agency’s biggest task was dismantling Al Qaeda’s worldwide network.

But he won praise while in the job for an aggressive strategy to capture, detain and interrogate leaders of Al Qaeda, a program that since 2004 has come under intense Congressional and legal scrutiny.

New details emerged Sunday about when members of Congress were first told specifics about the program. The Washington Post reported that top lawmakers had raised no objections during a September 2002 briefing about some of the techniques C.I.A. operatives were using to get information from Al Qaeda detainees — including waterboarding, a procedure that causes a feeling of suffocation and drowning.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among the lawmakers who attended the briefing, issued a statement on Sunday saying that she eventually did protest the techniques and that she concurred with objections raised by a Democratic colleague in a letter to the C.I.A. in early 2003.

Soon after Mr. Goss became C.I.A. director in 2004, Mr. Rodriguez was put in charge of the Directorate of Operations, the agency’s covert branch that was renamed the National Clandestine Service in 2005.

After he announced his retirement from the C.I.A., he was asked to take over the National Counterterrorist Center after the departure of retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd. He turned down the position.

Representative Reyes declined a request on Sunday for an interview about Mr. Rodriguez, but issued a statement saying his committee is planning not just to examine the circumstances of the destruction of the videotapes, but to conduct a “broad review” of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.

“I’m not looking for scapegoats,” his statement said.

Oddly enough, I believe Representative Reyes when he says “I’m not looking for scapegoats.” He’s aiming for the total destruction of America’s clandestine services. The democrats want to eliminate all the hard tools (military and Intelligence, with diplomacy being “soft”) of America’s foreign policy repertoire. If a democrat becomes president and they retain control of the House and Senate they will enact changes that will make the Church Committee’s damage to America’s intelligence apparatus look like peanuts and they will completely decimate the military.

During all of this, however, a man who has dedicated his life to serving his country will be dragged through the mud. There’s no doubt in my mind that he had mine and your best interests at heart but he is going to be dragged through the mud and will be treated worse then a common criminal. All because he destroyed some documents. Documents that Representative Reyes and his ilk would have doubtlessly used to destroy this man’s life.

Before I go, I have to take one last shot at Representative Reyes. He is the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; you know this because you read the article. But he is also the person who, as said Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had no clue which Islamic sect makes up al Qaeda or Hezbollah. But I’m sure he is just the person who should determine the future of America’s clandestine services. BigT

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A couple of years ago things looked like they were improving in the Middle Eastern Country. But since then Lebanon has been the scene of multiple political assassinations, car bombings, and the return to power of Iranian backed Syria through its puppet terror group Hezbollah. November 24th may be the day that goes down as the end of the Cedar Revolution because this was the day that the pro-Syrian President Emil Lahoud and friendly groups threw the country into a constitutional crises as he left office at midnight local time.

From AP:

Hezbollah and other opposition groups have blocked legislators from electing a new president by boycotting ballot sessions, leaving parliament without the required quorum.

The fight has put Lebanon into dangerous, unknown territory: Both sides are locked in bitter recriminations, accusing the other of breaking the constitution, and they are nowhere near a compromise on a candidate to become head of state.

The army command refused to comment on the developments. The military, under its widely respected chief, Gen. Michel Suleiman, has sought to remain neutral in the political chaos, and Lahoud’s statement did not give it political powers.

Basically the pro-Syrian factions have decided that if they can’t have a victory then no one can. Furthermore, the president has decided to unilaterally declare a state of emergency in Lebanon. The pro-Western faction had this to say, from AP:

“It has no value and is unconstitutional and consequently it is considered as if it was not issued,” said a government spokesman, who asked not to be identified because an official announcement has not yet been made by the prime minister.

The spokesman said the constitution stipulates that the Cabinet—not the president—has the authority to declare a state or emergency and to give the army the authority to take over security.

“Any decision not issued by the Cabinet has no constitutional value,” the spokesman told The Associated Press.

This hasn’t stopped the people from spontaneously having a rally to celebrate the end of pro-Syrian control over the presidency. From AHN:

Anti-Syrian demonstrators celebrated on the streets of Beirut as Lebanese President Emil Lahoud left the palace without naming a successor as his term expired at midnight Friday.

Right after this news source said this they decided to bring us all back down by pointing out that this will create a power vacuum. Well, yeah, of course it will. That’s what the puppets of Iran want. Without a nation on fire there’s not even a slim chance they would hold power. But bring in some political shenanigans and then maybe they have a shot. Probably a couple shots if we want to be serious.

Out of all this turmoil does come one crystallizing fact however. “Peace keepers” are the equivalent of the military’s welfare queens. Throughout all this time the European Union had some “peace keepers” in Lebanon. But not for long. Why? Because there is no peace to be found. From the World Tribune:

Officials said EU states have concluded that Lebanon would become much more dangerous amid the resurgence of Hizbullah and the collapse of the government of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora. They said the Lebanese Army, particularly in the south, was increasingly regarded as aligned with Hizbullah and could no longer be relied upon to protect the 13,500 UN Interim Force in Lebanon.

My heart goes out to the people of Lebanon because there is so little hope for them. They’re being torn apart by outside forces and there’s no one who’s really helping them right the ship. Maybe they’ll figure something out but time is running out. BigT

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