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Iconoclast
07-24-2006, 11:55 AM
:sl:



The Big Picture

Before u jump to conclude I will appreciate u taking the time to read to see how events are developed, parties given the name of gods army which is actually controlled by various factions for their own benefit.



Iran backs Hezbollah in Lebanon
By Elaine Sciolino The New York Times

Published: July 18, 2006


PARIS Whether or not Iran directly planned or approved the military operations of Hezbollah against Israel, Iran's leaders have decided to support wholeheartedly the Lebanese militia - at least publicly - in its current military assault.

Iran's strategy seems to have a two- fold purpose: to deflect attention from Iran's impasse with the United States and five other world powers over its nuclear program and to position itself as an essential player in the region.

On Tuesday, Iran's rhetorical threats against Israel and its unswerving embrace of Hezbollah continued.

At a government-sanctioned, anti-Israel demonstration in Tehran, Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, Iran's speaker of Parliament, warned that "Israel's northern cities are within the range of Hezbollah's missiles and no part of Israel will be safe."

The crowd of nearly 2,000 demonstrators replied with chants of "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!"

As part of the theater of the day, demonstrators also read a statement asking the Iranian government to help them join Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, Iran's state-run television reported.

The rhetoric is no different from past statements by Iran. But the verbal support this time has fueled the conviction in many quarters that Iran is contributing to the current crisis over Lebanon as a way to project power.

"The Iranians are gambling that there won't be a military attack against them," said one senior European official who deals with Iran. "Iran is trying to say, 'Nothing is possible without me.' And for the moment, everyone's forgotten the nuclear issue."

Indeed, action on a resolution at the United Nations Security Council critical of Iran for failing to suspend its uranium enrichment activities is essentially on hold.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader, meanwhile, in a speech on Sunday praised Hezbollah for its fight against the "evil and cancerous being" that is Israel. Even as world leaders struggle to devise a plan to disarm Hezbollah, Khamenei predicted it would fail.

"The American president says Hezbollah should be disarmed," he said, adding, "But it will not happen."

Even Iran's former president Mohammad Khatami, who used his eight- year presidency to try to moderate Iran's foreign policy, on Sunday likened Hezbollah to "a shining sun that illuminates and warms the hearts of all Muslims and supporters of freedom in the world."

In a letter to Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, Khatami, who heads Iran's Institute for Dialogue among Civilizations and Cultures, also said that the "Zionists' shocking atrocities in Palestine and Lebanon are a sign of their violent nature."

But it was noteworthy that Khatami implicitly also urged restraint, warning of "the spread of catastrophe and scale of destruction in Palestine and Lebanon."

Underscoring the heightened sense of Iran as a dangerous player, on Tuesday, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain accused Iran of supporting Hezbollah with weapons, "very similar if not identical to those used against British troops in Basra" in Iraq. Blair also accused Syria of supporting Iran "in many different ways" and both countries of providing financial support. Israel, the United States, the Europeans and many Arab states have long claimed that Hezbollah receives its weaponry from Iran, a claim that many Iranian officials admit in private is true.

But officially, Iran denies providing Hezbollah with weaponry, denials that contribute to distrust of Iran.

Asked on Sunday about the Israeli claim that Iran supplied Hezbollah with missiles, Hamid-Reza Asefi, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, replied, "The Zionist regime has been caught in the quagmire it created. That is why it attempts to involve others in the case."

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also has intensified the threats by pledging to support Syria if it is attacked. "If Israel commits another act of idiocy and attacks Syria, this will be the same as an aggression against the entire Islamic world and it will receive a stinging response," the state-run media quoted Ahamadinejad as saying Thursday in a telephone conversation with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

But Iran also seems to be positioning itself for a role in resolving the crisis over Lebanon. In Damascus on Monday, Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said that a cease-fire and an exchange of prisoners would be a possible way forward in the Israeli-Lebanese conflict.

Both Iran and Syria have praised Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers, the event that triggered the Israeli offensive in Lebanon.


The Sunday Times July 23, 2006

God's army has plans to run the whole Middle East
Hezbollah, the group at the heart of the Lebanese conflict, is the spearhead of Iran’s ambitions to be a superpower, says Iranian commentator Amir Taheri

‘You are the sun of Islam, shining on the universe!” This is how Muhammad Khatami, the mullah who was president of Iran until last year, described Hezbollah last week. It would be no exaggeration to describe Hezbollah — the Lebanese Shi’ite militia — as Tehran’s regional trump card. Each time Tehran has played it, it has won. As war rages between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Tehran policymakers think that this time, too, they can win.

“I invite the faithful to wait for good news,” Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last Tuesday. “We shall soon witness the elimination of the Zionist stain of shame.”

What are the links between Hezbollah and Iran? In 1982 Iran had almost no influence in Lebanon. The Lebanese Shi’ite bourgeoisie that had had close ties with Iran when it was ruled by the Shah was horrified by the advent of the clerics who created an Islamic republic.

Seeking a bridgehead in Lebanon, Iran asked its ambassador to Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, a radical mullah, to create one. Mohtashamipour decided to open a branch in Lebanon of the Iranian Hezbollah (the party of God).

After many meetings in Lebanon Mohtashamipour succeeded: in its founding statement it committed itself to the “creation of an Islamic republic in Lebanon”. To this end hundreds of Iranian mullahs, political “educators” and Islamic Revolutionary Guards were dispatched to Beirut.

Within two years several radical Shi’ite groups in Lebanon, including some with Marxist backgrounds, had united under the Hezbollah name and became the main force resisting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon after the expulsion of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1983.

Terror has been its principal weapon. Throughout the 1980s Hezbollah kidnapped more than 200 foreign nationals in Lebanon, most of them Americans or western Europeans (including Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy). It organised the hijacking of civilian aircraft and more or less pioneered the idea of suicide bombings against American and French targets, killing almost 1,000 people, including 241 US marines in Beirut and 58 French paratroopers.

The campaign produced results. After Hezbollah’s attacks, France reduced its support for Saddam Hussein. America went further by supplying Iran with TOW anti-tank missiles, shipped via Israel, which helped to tip the Iran-Iraq war in favour of Iran. In exchange Iran ordered Hezbollah to release French and American hostages.

Once the Iran-Iraq war was over, Tehran found other uses for its Lebanese asset. It purged and then reshaped Hezbollah to influence the broader course of regional politics while using it to wage a low-intensity war against Israel.

In 2000, when the Israelis evacuated the strip they controlled in southern Lebanon, Tehran presented the event as the “first victory of Islam over the Zionist crusader camp” and Hezbollah was lauded across the Arab world. Hezbollah taunted the Israelis with billboards on the border reading, “If you return, we return”.

To prop up that myth, Tehran invested in a propaganda campaign that included television “documentaries”, feature films and books and magazine articles. The message was simple: while secular ideologies — from pan-Arabism to Arab socialism — had failed to liberate an inch of Arab territory, Islamism, in its Iranian Khomeinist version working through Hezbollah, had achieved “total victory” over Israel in Lebanon.

Since 1984 Iran has created branches of Hezbollah in more than 20 countries. None has equalled the success of the Lebanese branch, which until recently enjoyed something akin to cult status among Arabs, including non-Muslims, because of the way it stood up to Israel.

It has not even cost Iran very much. Hezbollah was launched with just £13m. After that, according to best estimates, Iran spent £32m to £54m a year on its Lebanese assets. Even if we add the cost of training Hezbollah fighters and equipping them with hardware, Hezbollah (the strongest fighting force in the Middle East after Iran and Israel) has not cost Iran more than £1.3 billion over two decades.

According to Naim Kassem, Hezbollah’s number two, the party has an annual budget of £279m, much of which comes from businesses set up by the movement. These include a bank, a mortgage co-operative, an insurance company, a travel agency specialising in pilgrimages to Muslim holy places, several hotels, a chain of supermarkets and a number of urban bus and taxi companies.

In its power base in southern Lebanon, particularly south Beirut and the Bekaa valley, it is possible for a visitor to spend a whole week without stepping outside a Hezbollah business unit: the hotel he checks into, the restaurant he eats in, the taxi that takes him around, the guide who shows him the sights and the shop where he buys souvenirs all belong to the party.

Hezbollah is a state within the Lebanese state. It controls some 25% of the national territory. Almost 400,000 of Lebanon’s estimated 4m inhabitants live under its control. It collects its own taxes with a 20% levy, known as “khoms”, on all incomes. It runs its own schools, where a syllabus produced in Iran is taught at all levels. It also runs clinics, hospitals, social welfare networks and centres for orphans and widows.

The party controls the elected municipal councils and appoints local officials, who in theory should be selected by the central government in Beirut. To complete its status as a virtual state, the party maintains a number of unofficial “embassies”: the one in Tehran is bigger and has a larger number of staff than that of Lebanon itself.

Hezbollah also has its own media including a satellite television channel, Al-Manar (the lighthouse), which is watched all over the Arab world, four radio stations, newspapers and magazines plus a book publishing venture. The party has its own system of justice based on sharia and operates its own police force, courts and prisons. Hezbollah runs youth clubs, several football teams and a number of matrimonial agencies.

Its relationship with the rest of Lebanon is complex; it occupies 14 seats in the 128-seat national assembly and holds two portfolios in the council of ministers. But it still describes itself as “a people-based movement fighting on behalf of the Muslim world”.

The backbone of all that is Hezbollah’s militia, a fighting force of about 8,000 men, trained and armed with the latest weapons by Iran and Syria. Of these about 2,000 men represent an elite force under the direct command of the party’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, a former pupil of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the man who founded Iran’s Islamic republic. But the party also claims more than 30,000 reservists.

Arab and western experts concur that Hezbollah’s militia is a stronger fighting force than the Lebanese army that is supposed to disarm it under United Nations resolution 1559. Also, most soldiers in the official Lebanese army are Shi’ites who would balk at fighting their own.

Accounts concerning Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons vary. The militia is said to be armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and an Iranian rapid-fire gun initially modelled on the Israeli Uzi. The party’s crown jewels, however, are an estimated 14,000 rockets and missiles shipped in from Iran over the past six years. Most of these are modified versions of the Soviet-designed Katyusha. The party also has some Chinese-made Silkworm missiles for special use in naval warfare.

“The Israelis would be foolish to think they are dealing with nothing but a bunch of mad fanatics,” says a former Iranian diplomat now in exile. “Hezbollah in Lebanon is a state in all but name: it has its territory, army, civil service and economic and educational systems.”

A few minutes’ drive south from central Beirut takes you into what appears to be a different country. Beirut itself has European-style architecture, shops, hotels and cafes with men and women mostly wearing western clothes.

Once you enter Hezbollah land, the scene changes. You feel as if you are in Qom, the Iranian holy city, with men sporting bushy beards and women covered by mandatory hijab, milling around in noisy narrow streets fronted by nondescript shops. Billboards that advertise global bands in Beirut are used in Hezbollah land for pasting giant portraits of Khomeini and the Iranian “supreme guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Not surprisingly Hezbollah describes its territory as “Dar al-Iman” (House of Faith).

When it took over southern Lebanon, Hezbollah found a territory devastated by years of domination by the Palestinian al-Fatah (the area had once been called Fatahland) and the Israeli invasion of 1982. There were almost no schools, no hospitals, few jobs and certainly no security.

Hezbollah provided all that. At the same time the movement imposed a strict religious code that gave the poor Shi’ites a sense of moral superiority over other Lebanese who aspired after western lifestyles. A generation of Shi’ites in southern Lebanon has grown up in a world shaped by Hezbollah’s radical ideology.

Over the years the Lebanese branch has been woven into Iran’s body politic. Many Hezbollah militants and officials have married into Iranian religious families, often connected to influential ayatollahs. Dozens of Lebanese Shi’ites have worked and continue to work in the Iranian administration, especially in the ministries of security, information and culture. Since the mid-1980s, most of the Lebanese Shi’ite clerics have undertaken training in Iran.

In exchange, thousands of Iranian security officers and members of the Revolutionary Guards have lived and worked in Lebanon. As Ali Yunesi, Iran’s former intelligence minister, said: “Iran is Hezbollah and Hezbollah is Iran.”

Support for Hezbollah cuts across the political divides within the Iranian ruling establishment. Whether “reformist” or “hardliner”, Iran’s ruling mullahs and their political associates look to Hezbollah as a reflection of their own revolutionary youth. Last week parliamentary members of the Islamic Majlis in Tehran set aside their disputes to unite in their demand to go and fight alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon if Sheikh Nasrallah called them.

Why has Tehran decided to play its Lebanese card now? Part of the answer lies in Washington’s decision last May to reverse its policy towards Iran by offering large concessions on its nuclear programme. Tehran interpreted that as a sign of weakness. Ahmadinejad believes that his strategy to drive the “infidel” out of the Islamic heartland cannot succeed unless Arabs accept Iran’s leadership.

The problem is that since the Iranian regime is Shi’ite it would not be easy to sell it to most Arabs, who are Sunni. To overcome that hurdle, it is necessary to persuade the Arabs that only Iran is sincere in its desire and capacity to wipe Israel off the map. Once that claim is sold to the Arabs, so Ahmadinejad hopes, they would rally behind his vision of the Middle East instead of the “American vision”.

That strategy pushed Israel to the top of Tehran’s agenda. This is why, in May, Tehran became the first country to grant the Hamas government in the occupied territories an emergency grant of £27m to cope with a freeze imposed by European Union aid and other international donations. As moderate Arab countries have distanced themselves from Hamas, Iran along with Syria has stepped in.

The pincer war launched by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel is also related to domestic politics. In the occupied territories, Hamas needs to marginalise Mahmoud Abbas’s PLO and establish itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In Lebanon, Hezbollah wants to prevent the consolidation of power in the hands of a new pro-American coalition government led by Fouad Siniora, the prime minister, and Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader.

(Shi’ites make up about 40% of the population, Christians 39% and Sunnis, Druze and others the remainder.) If the pincer war against Israel is won, Iran would be able to expand its zone of influence, already taking shape in Iraq and assured in Syria, to take in Lebanon and Gaza. This would be the first time since the 7th century that Persian power has extended so far to the west.

The strategy is high risk. If the Israelis manage to crush Hamas and destroy Hezbollah’s military machine, Iran’s influence will diminish massively. Defeat could revive an internal Hezbollah debate between those who continue to support a total and exclusive alliance with Iran until the infidel, led by America, is driven out of the Middle East and those who want Hezbollah to distance itself from Tehran and emphasise its Lebanese identity. One reason why Hezbollah has found such little support among Arabs in Egypt and Saudi Arabia this time is the perception that it is fighting Israel on behalf of Iran, a Persian Shi’ite power that has been regarded by the majority of Arab Sunnis as an ancestral enemy.

In Lebanon, for the first time in two generations, a consensus is emerging among the country’s different ethnic and religious communities that the only way they can live together in peace is by developing a sense of Lebaneseness.

This means that Arab Sunnis must abandon their pan-Arab aspirations while Christians must stop looking to France as their “original motherland”. In that context Hezbollah’s Iranian ideology cannot but antagonise the Sunnis, the Druze and the Christians, many of whom are angry at the destruction of their country that Hezbollah has brought about by once again antagonising Israel.

The mini war that is taking place between Israel and Hezbollah is, in fact, a proxy war ( as we have seen in iraq vs iran taliban vs Rabani in afganistan) in which Iran’s vision for the Middle East clashes with the administration in Washington. What is at stake is not the exchange of kidnapped Israeli soldiers with Arab prisoners in Israel. Such exchanges have happened routinely over five decades.

The real issue is who will set the agenda for the Middle East: Iran or America?


or for that matter suni arabs with thier financial support to america set an agenda THROUGH AMERICA .


Syria Wants Talks With US Over Lebanon
Syria is willing to engage in dialogue with the United States to solve the confrontation between Hizbollah and Israel, Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Meqdad said on Sunday, July 23, 2006. Meqdad said the immediate solution to the crisis lies in a ceasefire brokered by international powers to be followed by diplomacy to address Hizbollah's demands, including a prisoner exchange. Syria has not been invited to an emergency meeting on the crisis in Rome next week, chaired by The United States and Italy.

So now Syria comes into play and will eventually so called “try and solve the crisis” and again gain the political grip it maintained until recent times till it was accused of Killing Rafiq Harari. Iran in exchange for syria to negotiate will ask for imunity form the west, hezbollah will follow iran again after going underground with making any news, Saudis and other Arab Contries will thank god the war is over lets get drilling underway again...iran will again concentate on a Shiites govt formation in Iraq and elimanate as many sunni muslims as possile . so it all boils down to the advantage of Shiites benift at the cost of a fruitless war . and a sunni state once again with Shiites population will benift to correct its image ( SYRIA)


Now Once Again it will end with a handshake ……what about the innocent people killed


Politics Is a Dirty Game And Sects In Religion Worse.



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