Word: syrians
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...Soliciting a former speaker of the House to write about Nancy Pelosi may have seemed like a good idea, but Newt Gingrich's piece smacked of political grandstanding. The depiction of her Syrian trip was bad enough, but ending with tips for Republicans on how to take back the House of Representatives was even worse. The piece was hardly about Pelosi. It was about Gingrich, who is mulling a presidential run and trying to prove how good a political strategist he is. Stephanie Barnard, Oshkosh, Wisconsin...
...fighting continued, it was common to link Fatah al-Islam to the Syrian regime, and to see the group as a tool in the hands of Damascus to foment chaos in Lebanon and head off a U.N. tribunal that may prosecute Syrian officials for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. But there is a longer-term worry that goes beyond any possible Syrian connections-that Fatah al-Islam is one of a group of armed, extremist factions that have been spawned in the triangle of political instability from Baghdad to Gaza to Tripoli. Those groups include Iraqi...
...Israel's 1948 war of independence, when thousands of Palestinians fled their homes for a dozen refugee camps in Lebanon. The squalid, overcrowded camps became breeding grounds for the Palestine Liberation Organization's guerrilla groups. After Israel's invasion in 1982, designed to evict the P.L.O. from Lebanon, the Syrian regime launched a campaign of its own against Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization, sponsoring a splinter group that called itself Fatah al-Intifada. That faction, backed by Syrian artillery, drove Arafat out of Tripoli...
...Siniora's government believes that Fatah al-Islam is a Syrian proxy, though Syrian officials angrily reject the accusations. But whatever the truth about Fatah al-Islam, its sudden, violent birth amounts to a warning about dangers ahead for a Middle East where political conflicts have for too long remained unsolved. It is conventional wisdom that Lebanon is the stage where Middle East factions act out their disputes. In the eruption of killings in Tripoli, however, Lebanon is just another player in a larger, unfolding drama...
...Lebanon's government would like us to believe Fatah Islam started the fighting there on Sunday on the orders of Damascus. I hope they know better. Whether Syria is providing tactical help or not, at the end of the day Fatah Islam is the Syrian regime's mortal enemy. If the fighting were to somehow lead to an all-out civil war, Syrian stability will be undermined. Lebanon has had a Sunni fundamentalist element in the north for more than 25 years. As I've written before in this column, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood used northern Lebanon as a rear...