Word: syrians
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Antoine Ghanem, an anti-Syrian Lebanese lawmaker, was killed Wednesday when a suspected car bomb exploded beside his Chevrolet in a leafy suburb of east Beirut, setting the vehicle ablaze along with at least a dozen others and killing some nine bystanders. His death will complicate the scheduled election of a new President next Tuesday and further polarize the warring anti-Syrian and pro-Syrian factions here whose bitter feuding has stalemated the country for almost a year...
...Rock and freedom - if not necessarily sex and drugs - got a big boost in Lebanon in 2005, during what outsiders called the Cedar Revolution, when huge crowds gathered in central Beirut to demand an end to the Syrian occupation and an end to the country's sectarian divisions. But the creative and intellectual frenzy that accompanied the Syrian withdrawal was cut short after the country's ruling sectarian political class co-opted the Cedar Revolution, and turned Lebanon into battlefield between regional superpowers. Spurred by last summer's war with Israel and by the current struggle between Iran...
...election was held to replace two assassinated legislators from the anti-Syrian ruling coalition of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. And the government comfortably won one of those seats - the one formerly occupied by the late Walid Eido, a Sunni member of parliament who was killed in June by a bomb set next to his favorite beach club. But holding Eido's seat wasn't much of a challenge: He had represented a strong Sunni Muslim district in West Beirut where support for Siniora is strong. The bombshell came in the majority Christian district known as the Metn in the mountains...
...shared animus towards Lebanon's political elite, a handful of families such as the Gemayel, whose progeny resurface in government after government. In fact, many of the supporters of the current government are civil war-era militia leaders, who accommodated themselves rather nicely to the years of Syrian occupation, but who have now emerged wearing business suits and talking U.S.-friendly language about democracy and independence...
...Lebanon is a battlefield, but not in some global religious-ideological war. Instead, its politics reflects an old-fashioned power struggle between the fading regional superpower - the United States - and the rising power of Iran and its Syrian ally. And that's a conflict that is not going to be settled by any Lebanese by-election...