Friday, September 23, 2005

I can't believe that Robin Right, who I knew and liked very much during my days in Washington, DC in the 1980s, and who knew Lebanon well during those years, would describe Rafiq Hariri as "the country's leading reformer." The Lebanese people (of different sects and political persuasions) would have a different story to tell. We never had more corruption and embezzlements at the scale that we now have before Hariri, and you call him reformer?. Hariri is a reformer if Bush is a visionary, if Rumsfeld is humane, if Cheney is a socialist, if Abbas is independent and if Mubarak is legitimate. Hariri is the same man who accumulated Lebanon's suffocating foreign debt. And in this interview, Prime Minister, Fu'ad Sanyurah, said: "President Emile Lahoud had been imposed on Lebanon by Syria." Now Mr. Sanyurah, or Sanyurah or Ghraybah (a Lebanonese joke here) your statement is true, but Syria (which indeed imposed Lahhud) had also imposed Rafiq Hariri (and by extension YOU) on the Lebanese people. We never knew you before you were imposed as part of the Hariri entourage in 1992 which helped establish the Syrian-Lebanese security state which oppressed and impoverished the Lebanese people. You only became in conflict with Lahhud rather late, and NOT on principles.