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Will Tripoli make Samir Geagea pay?
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May 17, 2012 01:21 AM
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Among the less obvious victims of the fighting in Tripoli this past weekend was Samir Geagea. The head of the Lebanese Forces has made an alliance with the Sunnis a cornerstone of his electoral strategy next year, but suddenly many Christians saw, or thought they saw, that not a few of these...
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Prepare for the long haul in Syria
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May 10, 2012 01:08 AM
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One thing that the Lebanese can usually do with some precision is predict stalemate. Their own conflict between 1975 and 1990 was one long, debilitating lesson in destructive deadlock. So when those in Beirut look toward Syria today and shake their heads, that’s because they can hear echoes of...
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Lebanon’s Sunnis and Shiites must speak
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May 03, 2012 01:35 AM
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It is understandable that Saad Hariri, the former prime minister, has little patience for normalizing relations with Hezbollah. Party members stand accused of having participated in his father’s assassination; Hezbollah abruptly pushed Hariri out of office last year and replaced him with Najib...
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The hollow echo of proportional voting
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April 26, 2012 01:24 AM
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Has there ever been a greater red herring than the debate over proportional representation in Lebanon’s elections? The latest news is that President Michel Sleiman intends to consult with prominent politicians and others over a law that guarantees “the best representation for all...
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Nasrallah, Assange and injustice in Syria
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April 19, 2012 01:13 AM
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Which devotee of the anti-globalization left, enlivened by anti-Americanism, could resist a frisson of pleasure when watching Julian Assange interview Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general? And on the Kremlin-backed Russia Today channel, no less.Getting Nasrallah to chat earlier...
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Syria’s border blackmail may backfire
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April 12, 2012 01:18 AM
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Pity Ali Shaaban for the hypocrisy that surrounded the reactions to his death. From Hezbollah we heard that the cameraman’s killers had to be punished, even though the party has no intention of seeing its Syrian allies disciplined. But Shaaban was a Shiite, so something had to be said. Then...
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Annan’s plan should be regime change
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April 05, 2012 01:46 AM
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What a shock it must have been for Kofi Annan to realize that the Syrian regime and opposition agree over nothing except to largely ignore his splendid little plan for ending the conflict in Syria. Annan, the United Nations-Arab League envoy, is no naïf. He did what all good diplomats do: He...
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The Annan plan will bring more violence
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March 29, 2012 01:43 AM
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There was something nauseating in Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s recent comments that the plan currently being peddled by Kofi Annan, the Arab League-United Nations envoy on Syria, represents the last chance to avert a Syrian civil war. Medvedev knows that Russia has been greatly...
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Aoun-Hezbollah ties hit a glass ceiling
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March 22, 2012 01:23 AM
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You have to wonder what Michel Aoun thought about the incident on Monday at the Maronite Antonine University, in which Shiite Muslim students prayed in front of the facility’s church. The ideals of religious coexistence aside, as a private religious institution the university did have the...
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Bkirki offers us dictatorship on Rai
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March 15, 2012 01:35 AM
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You have to wonder what the Maronite Church and the Vatican were thinking when they replaced the old but smoothly functioning Nasrallah Sfeir with a malfunctioning Beshara Rai. The patriarch took a lashing this week from Samir Geagea, the Lebanese Forces leader. He merited far more. Rai’s...
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Make Vladimir Putin reassess in Syria
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March 08, 2012 01:31 AM
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The Obama administration wants President Bashar Assad to leave office. He massacres his population. Washington refuses to arm Syrian rebels. Iran and Russia send weapons to Assad’s killers. This is the dispiriting equation with which Syrians are living today. What is it about the Syrian...
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For minorities, now is the time to report
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March 01, 2012 01:27 AM
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It is unfortunate that among those most anxiously observing the uprising in Syria (and not only Syria) have been members of the Middle East’s religious and ethnic minorities. Indeed, Syria’s Alawite leadership is perpetrating a butchery partly because it expects its community to be...
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Washington’s Syria policy is imaginary
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February 23, 2012 01:34 AM
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The administration of President Barack Obama has often been ridiculed for what it describes as “leading from behind.” More often than not this has been an excuse for not leading at all, and nowhere has American vacillation been more on display than in Syria. For instance, it is the...
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Russia conspires to salvage Assad rule
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February 09, 2012 02:44 AM
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What strange tea are the Russians brewing in their diplomatic samovar? Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, visited Damascus on Tuesday with the foreign intelligence chief, Mikhail Fradkov, and made a statement afterward that was, at best, ambiguous. That’s not a good sign when...
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From Russia, for Bashar’s eyes only
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February 02, 2012 01:45 AM
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You know something is not right in Russia when the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, sounds increasingly like Andrei Gromyko, his hermetic predecessor under the onetime communist regime. This week, Russia declared that it would oppose a United Nations Security Council draft resolution calling for...
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