"The Young Fart"
Reader comment on item: Lebanon's Liberation Approaches

Submitted by Alex (United States), Feb 22, 2005 at 22:22

The title of these comments is a reference to my father's nickname for Hafiz al-Assad, "the Old Fart." Anyway, I agree with this article and share its hopefulness for Syria and Lebanon. I believe that another sign for hope here is that Syria's behavior after the attack resembled that of Saddam's Iraq after the recent war. More specifically, the previously unheard of Islamist group who claimed responsibility for Hariri's death called itself "The Movement for Victory and Jihad in Bilad al-Shem." "Movement for Victory and Jihad" is the umbrella name for al-Qaida in Iraq, and "Bilad al-Shem" is Syria's name for the territory it views as its manifest destiny (Syria proper, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority). If this claim was authentic (indeed, hard evidence already shows that Syria moved the Islamist attackers from Iraq into Lebanon), could it be a sign that Syria is already exhibiting the level of audacity that Saddam and his son's didn't show until they were engaged in post-war guerrilla fighting (i.e. wearing explosives belts, etc..)? Will this audacity go unpunished, escpecially given Iraqi PM's current pressure on President Bush to attack Syria and save the Allwai regime?

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