How the Party of God became Lebanon's most powerful faction.
Slate.com / Christopher Hitchens
18-Oct-2010 (one comment)

Writing from southern Lebanon in the mid-to-late 1970s, during the continuing war of attrition between Israel and the PLO and at a time when the country's long-relegated Shiite minority was just beginning to get itself organized, I noticed the presence of an almost unremarked token force of Iranian troops. These had been dispatched by the Shah of Iran, who (as we tend to forget) was ever-mindful of his title Shadow of God and of his anointed role as protector of the Shiites. Commenting more presciently than I knew, I said that these soldiers would probably be needed back home before too long to safeguard the peacock throne.

 At that time, it would have been entirely impossible to picture any Iranian head of state visiting multicultural Lebanon as a plenipotentiary and being feted all the way to within yelling distance of the Israeli border. Yet last week President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad managed this feat almost without effort. A man who has managed to escape serious inconvenience for his illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons and who has pitilessly repressed and cheated his own people can appear on neutral soil as the patron of the Party of God because his regime shares that party's pitiless attitude toward the state of Israel and its biting contempt for a... >>>

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Sargord Pirouz

How? Middle easterners

by Sargord Pirouz on

How? Ordinary Middle Easterners recognize their attainment of the moral high ground- it's that simple.

If the US were serious about peace in the Middle East, they would be included in the peace negotiations. That they are not exposes the entire process as a sham, in similar manner to the rejection of the 2010 Tehran Declaration.