REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Assassins and Diplomacy
Another murder in Beirut for Jim Baker to contemplate.
Former Secretary of State James Baker has been saying that, when it comes to diplomacy, you don't "restrict your conversations to your friends"--shorthand for the view that the U.S. should engage Syria and Iran to find solutions in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. But yesterday's murder of Lebanese Minister Pierre Gemayel might remind even Mr. Baker and his Iraq Study Group what some of those non-friends are all about.
"The hand of Syria is all over" Gemayel's assassination, said Saad Hariri, the leader of the parliamentary bloc that helped evict the Syrian army in the spring of 2005. Mr. Hariri knows whereof he speaks: His father, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was blown up with 22 others in February 2005, and the preliminary U.N. investigation offered a trail of evidence pointing to Damascus as the culprit.
A who's who of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians and journalists have also since been targeted for assassination. In June 2005 journalist Samir Kassir was blown up by a car bomb. Three weeks later, politician George Hawi was killed the same way. The following month, Defense Minister Elias Murr narrowly survived a car bombing; Mr. Murr was considered pro-Syrian but claimed he had been threatened by Rustom Ghazali, the longtime chief of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon.
In September 2005, TV anchorwoman May Chidiac lost her left leg and arm in a car-bombing. Three months later, Gibran Tueni, a former publisher and editor of the An-Nahar newspaper, was also killed by a car bomb. He had been calling publicly for Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon for nearly six years and had recently been elected to parliament. Tueni's murder coincided with the release of the interim U.N. report on Hariri's murder.
Curiously, Gemayel was killed just as the U.N. agreed on the composition of an international tribunal to try the case. It is no secret that Syrian President Bashar Assad has been pulling out all the stops to quash the trial. Six pro-Syrian politicians in the Lebanese cabinet recently resigned en masse in an attempt to cripple the government, and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been threatening huge demonstrations to bring down the anti-Syrian Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, who is also backed by the U.S. and France. Killing Gemayel removes another obstacle to Syrian dominance in Lebanon.
Which brings us back to Mr. Baker and the rest of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment now urging a new entente with Damascus. It's true that every Administration must deal with the world as it is. But when it comes to Syria, do the sages of the Iraq Study Group really want the Bush Administration to seek the benediction of a country that stirs such mayhem in Beirut?
