An 'Operation Condor' in the Middle East?

Is the Bush regime paying death squads to murder protesters in Lebanon? At least six Lebanese died in the last week in January in rightist gang attacks on students at the Arab University of Beirut and on striking workers.

Is this Washington’s answer to the mass democratic movement that has mobilized millions of Lebanese against the U.S.-backed regime of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora?

On Jan. 10, the British Daily Telegraph revealed that the CIA “has been authorized to take covert action against Hezbollah as part of a secret plan by George Bush to help the Lebanese government.” Bush’s “finding” directs the “CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to fund anti-Hezbollah groups in Lebanon and pay for activists who support the Siniora government.”

The plot was reportedly cooked up in Washington before Christmas after talks between Bush’s deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams and Saudi Arabian prince Bandar Ibn Sultan. That was after 2 million people—nearly half of Lebanon’s population—rallied in Beirut Dec. 10 to demand a greater voice for opposition parties in Lebanon’s government.

Abrams was Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in the 1980s, when U.S.-trained death squads slaughtered tens of thousands in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Abrams also arranged Saudi funding for terrorist operations against Nicaragua after the Boland Amendment cut off direct U.S. aid to the contras.

Details of the Lebanon plan’s “existence” are “known only to a small circle of White House officials, intelligence officials and members of Congress,” the Telegraph reported. So much for democracy in the United States. “The secrecy of the finding means that U.S. involvement in the activities is officially deniable.”

In December the Toronto Globe and Mail reported that the U.S. was secretly building up Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces, a paramilitary force directly controlled by Siniora. Arms acquired in East Europe were being shipped to Lebanon via the United Arab Emirates. The Pentagon is also shipping equipment directly to the ISF.

In his State of the Union speech Jan. 23, Bush accused “Hezbollah terrorists backed by Iran and Syria” of “seeking to undermine Lebanon’s legitimately elected government.” Bush is no more honest about Lebanon than he was about Iraq.

Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization. It is a political party that enjoys broad support not only among Shiites, Lebanon’s largest and poorest group, but among many Christians, Druse and Sunnis as well. It led the freedom struggle that drove Israel’s brutal U.S.-funded occupation forces out of South Lebanon in 2000.

In July 2006 Hezbollah-led forces repelled Israel’s U.S.-backed attempt to reconquer South Lebanon. Over 1,000 Lebanese civilians—women, children and men—were killed and thousands more maimed by U.S.-made munitions in last summer’s Israeli attack.

Lebanese children are still being killed or maimed by the 1.4 million U.S.-made cluster bomblets that litter South Lebanon. On Jan. 29, the Bush regime admitted to Congress that Israel’s use of cluster bombs “may have violated U.S. guidelines.” On the same day the Jerusalem Post reported that Israel plans to purchase thousands of “smart bomb” kits—Joint Direct Attack Munitions--from the Boeing Corp.

In a speech Dec. 7 Hezbollah General Secretary Sayid Hassan Nasrallah revealed evidence that officials in the Siniora government had asked the U.S. to give Israel the go-ahead to attack South Lebanon, where the vast majority of people support the Opposition. In one scandalous episode, the Lebanese ISF served tea to invading Israeli troops.

Hezbollah’s work is not only military. It builds hospitals, clinics, schools and libraries and provides social services for Lebanon’s poorest and most oppressed. It has provided relief funds to hundreds of thousands of Lebanese whose homes were destroyed by Israeli bombs and missiles.

Today Hezbollah is allied with the largely Christian Free Patriotic Movement and Marada parties, the Druse-based Democratic Party and Movement for Unity and leftist forces such as the Movement of the People, the Popular Nasserist Movement, the People’s Democratic Party and the Lebanese Communist Party. Together, they make up a broad movement to demand political reform and early democratic elections.

This movement has united Lebanese across sectarian lines in a protest campaign that recalls the civil rights movement in the United States.

The ruling classes in the U.S., Britain and France, on the other hand, have united with the absolute monarchs of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Egypt’s president-for-life Mubarak and the apartheid regime in Tel Aviv to crush this movement.

In a speech at Israel’s Herzliya Institute Jan. 22, Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards echoed Bush’s war threats against Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.

On the very day of Bush’s State of the Union address, the majority of Lebanon’s workers took part in an opposition-backed general strike that shut the country down. They were protesting Siniora’s Wall Street-backed plan to privatize health care, electricity and telecommunications, impose a huge sales tax and end fuel subsidies.

Gunmen from Samir Geagea’s openly fascist Lebanese Forces, the Future Movement of millionaire real estate speculator Saad Hariri, and Walid Jumblatt’s misnamed Progressive Socialist Party opened fire on strikers blocking roads in Beirut, the Shouf and North Lebanon. Three people died and hundreds were injured, but the strike was not broken. In a press conference, Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun showed photos of masked gunmen attacking strikers in North Lebanon.

On Jan. 25, a conference of “international donors” convened in Paris under U.S. and French auspices raised $7 billion to prop up the debt-ridden Siniora regime. The same day, pro-Siniora gangs invaded the campus of the Arab University of Beirut and murdered two students. A Shiite man bicycling through the neighborhood was also gunned down by goons from Jumblatt’s PSP.

Opposition supporters rushed to the campus and drove off the attackers before the army intervened to clear the streets. Al Manar television, which the Bush regime has banned in the United States, released pictures of snipers on rooftops firing at protesters.

The stakes in Lebanon go beyond Washington’s desire to prop up a banker-friendly regime in a country with a $45 billion debt. For the White House and the Pentagon, Lebanon is a pawn in their plans for wider war in the region.

The Bush regime hopes Iraq’s new hydrocarbon law, drafted by U.S. contractors, will give oil corporations a lock on Iraq’s vast oil reserves. If the U.S. bombs Iran’s oilfields, the value of Iraqi oil could double. But getting that oil to market in the West requires reactivating old pipelines that run to the Mediterranean through Syria and Lebanon.

The Iraqi Resistance is unlikely to allow U.S. firms to ship oil through the southern port of Basra. To loot Iraq, Big Oil needs to impose subservient regimes on Syria and Lebanon. As the mass movement that has arisen in Lebanon shows, that’s not likely to happen.

In a speech Jan. 30 to hundreds of thousands of Muslims gathered in southern Beirut to mark the Shia festival of Ashura, Nasrallah warned that the U.S. aims to instigate sectarian civil war in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq.

“George Bush wants to punish you because you have triumphed and, in the American era, you are not allowed to keep your heads raised.”  But, he added, “We are people who refuse humiliation and disgrace. Lebanon has been and always will be the graveyard of invaders.”

Bill Cecil was in Lebanon in November and December covering the growing people’s movement there.