Syria — Cui Bono?

Gebran Tueni, a Lebanese legislator and newspaper tycoon, was killed yesterday in a bombing. Before a shred of evidence has been evaluated, the Syrians are already being blamed. This story requires the context of Rafik Hariri's assassination last February.

If you Google News "Syria" today (December 13, 2005), you’ll get more than 1,400 stories. The overwhelming majority of these stories suggest that Syria was behind the murder of Rafik Hariri -- the ex-Prime Minister of Lebanon, a multi-billlionaire, and the fourth richest politician who ever lived. Hariri was killed with a 1,000 kilogram TNT bomb-ambush against his motorcade on Febrary 14, this year.

The US, of course, already attempting to deflect blame for its serial politico-military failures in Iraq on to Syria, and seeing Syria as the last vestige of secular Arab nationalism to be expunged from the region (a goal shared by local US ally, Israel), rushed to implicate the Syrian government as the architect of the assassination.

A whole script was written -- as is the wont of the US government’s PR contractors -- transforming the complexity of the situation between Syria and Lebanon into a TV docu-drama, with Harari as the good-guy and the Syrians the bad guys. A compliant investigator was hired by the UN, in accordance with that body's general subservience to the US, to find supporting evidence for the Syrian assassination hypothesis, innuendos were liberally deployed, and the whole script was eagerly lapped up by the capitalist press and regurgitated to the somnabulent consumer as "news."

Before the slightest bit of evidence had been collected or assessed in the assassination, the US withdrew its diplomats from Syria, an obvious grandstand play designed to focus suspision on Syria.

Exceptions included Patrick Seale, of "The Guardian," who made the unwelcome point in a February 23 article, "If Syria killed Rafik Hariri, Lebanon's former prime minister and mastermind of its revival after the civil war, it must be judged an act of political suicide. Syria is already under great international pressure from the US, France and Israel. To kill Hariri at this critical moment would be to destroy Syria's reputation once and for all and hand its enemies a weapon with which to deliver the blow that could finally destabilise the Damascus regime, and even possibly bring it down."

Syria's President Bashar Assad has been called many things, but "stupid" is not one of them.

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