Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2005, pages 10-15

Five Views

The Hariri Assassination

Rafiq Hariri, From Rags To Riches to a Symbol of Lebanon’s Rebirth

By Linda Dahdah

	A disfigured corpse lies on the ground amid blazing cars at the scene of a huge blast in Beirut Feb. 14, 2005. Killed in the explosion which ripped through the Lebanese capital were former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, six of his bodyguards, and several bystanders (AFP Photo Joseph Barrak).

RAFIQ HARIRI, Lebanon’s former prime minister killed in Monday’s massive car bombing, had a vision when he took power in 1992 of building a prosperous country from the ruins of civil war.

As the symbol of both Lebanon’s political and economic rebirth his untimely death leaves a huge vacuum in the country’s political process.

Born on Nov. 1, 1944, Rafiq Hariri was the son of poor farm workers from the southern city of Sidon, and was brother to Shafik and to Bahiya—also an MP in the Lebanese Parliament.

His is a true story of rags to riches, and Hariri was reported to have gone into politics because he believed he had made so much money that he wished to give some of it back to his country.

Hariri attended elementary and secondary school in Sidon, and pursued his university studies at the Arab University of Beirut, majoring in commerce.

After training as a teacher, he went to Saudi Arabia in 1965 to seek his fortune, following a path well-trodden by many of his fellow countrymen.

He then spent some 20 years in Saudi Arabia, where construction deals made him a fortune that Forbes estimated at $3.8 billion on its 2003 World’s Richest People list.

After years of working various jobs in the Kingdom—first as a school teacher and then as an accountant before starting his business as an entrepreneur—Hariri founded his first construction company in the early 1970s.

He struck gold in 1977, when he took up the challenge of building, in just six months, a palace for the late Saudi King Khaled in the resort of Taif before an Islamic summit, as a sub-contractor for Oger, an affiliate of a French group.

He won the confidence of then-Crown Prince Fahd, now Saudi Arabia’s king, and was awarded the rare privilege of Saudi nationality.

Hariri then went on to become Saudi Arabia’s leading entrepreneur, acquiring Oger in 1979 and founding Oger International, based in Paris.

His interests extended across banking, real estate, oil, industry and telecommunications.

In 1979, he founded the Hariri Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides educational, health, social and cultural services to the needy in Lebanon.

Hariri also founded a television station, Future TV, in Beirut and purchased stakes in several Lebanese newspapers. He founded his own newspaper, al-Mustaqbal, five years ago.

The former prime minister was also the biggest shareholder in Solidère, the joint-stock company that almost single-handedly transformed and revived central Beirut following Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.

In 1982, he donated $12 million to Lebanese victims of Israel’s devastating invasion and helped clean up Beirut streets with his own money.

He also used his personal wealth to finance the Taif Accord in 1989, which put an end to the civil war.

Hariri returned from Saudi Arabia in 1992 as prime minister, seen as a breath of fresh air in a country dominated by former militia leaders.

The Lebanese pinned their hopes on the dynamic tycoon to restore Beirut’s pre-war reputation as a leading financial center.

Hariri put the country back on the financial map through the issuing of Eurobonds and won plaudits from the World Bank for his plan to borrow reconstruction money.

But his economic record was mixed: his ambitious borrow-and-build schemes left massive public debt and budget deficit, which pushed up interest rates and slowed growth.

The former premier was also accused of ignoring the poor, despite his long record of funding charitable causes.

Citizens began to judge him by the same standards of cynicism applied to other politicians, many of whom had made their fortunes in civil war activities.

When Hariri left power in 1998, it came about partly because he was reluctant to play second fiddle to President Emile Lahoud, a former army chief.

Hariri’s legacy was further tainted by accusations that his government had sucked the country dry; a number of his government ministers were investigated for corruption.

But it would only be two years until a return to power. Hariri was back in October 2000, taking his old job back off the political veteran Salim Hoss.

He presided over a revival in Lebanon’s tourism industry, largely thanks to hundreds of thousands of visiting Gulf Arabs, but he again fell out with his pro-Syrian government colleagues during the crisis over the extension of Lahoud’s term in office.

Hariri never spoke out publicly against Syria in the dispute, but his resignation in September 2004 was taken as a clear protest against the Syrian pressure to keep Lahoud in office and the country’s interference in Lebanon’s political affairs.

Hariri was well regarded among international leaders, counting French President Jacques Chirac as a close friend, enjoying the envied record of being the political figure most often received by the French president.

Even after he left the premiership and joined the opposition, Hariri continued to receive high-powered international guests.

His marriage to Nazek Audi Hariri was his second, and he is survived by seven children. The late minister was no stranger to tragedy in his life, as his eldest son, Houssam al-Dine Hariri, died in a car accident in the early ‘90s.

Linda Dahdah is a staff writer for The Daily Star of Lebanon. This article first appeared in the Feb. 15, 2005 edition.

The Killing of Mr. Lebanon

By Robert Fisk   

I saw the blast wave coming down the Corniche. My home was only a few hundred meters from the detonation and my first instinct was to look up, to search for the high-altitude Israeli planes that regularly break the sound barrier over Beirut. There were customers coming bloodied from their broken-windowed restaurants and the great cancerous stain of smoke rising from the road outside the St. George Hotel.

Beirut is my home-away-from-home, home from the dangers of Baghdad, and now here was Baghdad in Lebanon, a St. Valentine’s Day massacre in the streets of one of the Middle East’s safest cities. I ran down the Corniche, everyone else fleeing in the opposite direction, and walked into a mass of rubble and flaming cars. There was a man, a big, plump man lying on the pavement opposite the still-derelict, war-damaged hotel, a sack, it seemed, except for the skull, the top missing. And there was a woman’s hand in the road, still in a glove. There were bodies burning in a car, flaming away, a terrible hand hanging outside a motorist’s window.

There were still no policemen, no ambulances, no fire brigade. The petrol tanks of the cars were starting to explode, spraying fire across the street. No one could take in the extent of the damage because of the heat and the smoke. Then I recognized one of Rafiq Hariri’s bodyguards, standing in terror. “The big man has gone,” he said. The Big Man? Hariri? At first I thought that Lebanon’s former prime minister, “Mr. Lebanon,” the man who more than anyone else rebuilt this city from the ashes of civil war, must have left, “gone” away, escaped.

But how could he have escaped this funeral pyre? A group of cops ran into the devastation, and a man, another bodyguard, ran shrieking toward a set of burning Mercedes limousines crying “Ya-allah,” calling upon God to be his witness. Hariri traveled only in a convoy of heavily armored Mercedes. No wonder the explosion was so massive. It would have to be to rip open the armored doors. I followed a plainclothes detective past a still-burning car—there was another body inside, cowled in flames—to the edge of a pit. It was at least 15 feet deep. This was the crater. I slowly clambered down the edge. All that was left of the car bomb were a few pieces of metal an inch long. The blast had sent another car, perhaps one of Hariri’s, soaring through the air into the third floor of the empty hotels annex, where it was still burning fiercely.

Hariri, I kept repeating. I had sat with him many times, for interviews, at press conferences, at lunches and dinners. He once spoke most movingly about the son he lost in a driving accident in America. He had said he believed in the afterlife. He had many enemies. Political enemies in Lebanon, Syrians who suspected—correctly—that he wanted them out of Lebanon, real estate enemies—for he had personally purchased large areas of Beirut—and media enemies because he owned a newspaper and a television station.

But he could be a good and kind man, even if he was a ruthless businessman; I once compared him to the cat which eats the canary then cheerfully admits that it tasted good. He sent the quotation off to his friends. His hand was one of the mightiest I had ever shaken.

I could not see his body. But amid the smoke and fire, I looked beyond to the new Beirut centre ville, the reconstructed center of this fine city which Hariri’s own company—he owned 10 percent of the shares in Solidère—was building from its Dresden-like ruins. He had died within meters of his own creation.

This was a bomb that took a long time to construct, a long time to plan. Parked outside the wall of an empty hotel, few would have looked at the car or noticed that it was weighed down on its axles by the weight of explosives, as it must have been.

The perpetrators were ruthless men, heedless of the innocent. They wanted to kill Rafiq Hariri. Nothing else mattered. In the surrounding streets, men and women were emerging with blood all over their clothes. Thousands of windows had smashed into them and they stood there, dribbling blood onto their shoes and trousers and skirts as the first ambulancemen screamed at the firemen to clear their hoses from the pavements.

The length of the street was slippery with water and blood. I counted 22 cars exploding and burning. The Saudi billionaire who dined with kings and princes—whose personal friendship with Jacques Chirac helped Lebanon ride its $41 billion public debt—had ended his life in this inferno.

In private, he did not hide his animosity toward the Hezbollah, whose attacks on Israeli occupation troops before their 2000 retreat would set back his plans for Lebanon’s economic recovery. And while he tolerated the Syrians, he had his own plans for their military departure. Was it true, as they said in Beirut, that Hariri was the secret leader of the political opposition to the Syrian presence? Or were his enemies even more sinister people?

Lebanon is built on institutions that enshrine sectarianism as a creed, in which the president must always be a Christian Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim—like Hariri—and the speaker of parliament a Shi’i Muslim. Anyone setting out to murder Hariri would know how this could re-open all the fissures of the civil war from 1975 to 1990.

Thousands of weeping followers of Hariri gathered outside his palace at Koreitem last night, demanding to know who had killed their leader. Hariri men toured the streets, ordering shopkeepers to pull down their shutters. Were the ghosts of the civil war to be reawoken from their 15 years of slumber? I do not know the answer. But that black cloud that drifted for more than an hour over Beirut yesterday afternoon darkened the people beneath with more than its shadow.

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for the London-based Independent. This article first appeared Feb. 15, 2005. ©2005, The Independent. Reprinted with permission.

Hariri Killing Sure to Bolster U.S. Hawks

By Jim Lobe      

Whether or not Syrian President Bashar Assad was behind Monday’s assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the car bombing is sure to strengthen forces inside the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush who have long argued for “regime change” in Damascus.

Before the bombing that killed Hariri, half a dozen of his bodyguards and at least five bystanders, the balance of power between anti-Assad hard-liners and more flexible forces within the administration was roughly even.

Earlier this month, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who is considered a hawk on Damascus, even insisted to a congressional panel that “it is not our policy to destabilize Syria.”

But, as suggested by Washington’s abrupt withdrawal of its ambassador in Damascus Tuesday morning, that position may well be in the process of changing, if it hasn’t changed already.

“The regime changers will be strengthened by this,” predicted Michael Hudson, who teaches at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He said Washington’s precipitous recalling of its ambassador signals a “decision to really put the screws to the Syrians.”

“Assuming they did it, this was very stupid,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a specialist on Lebanon at Boston University, who agreed that the balance of power within the administration will definitely shift in favor of the hard-liners.

Hariri, a businessman who made a fortune in Saudi Arabia and then ruled Lebanon for 10 of the last 15 years, enjoyed close personal ties with French President Jacques Chirac and cultivated friendly relations with Washington, where he owned one large house and was in the process of building a colossal mansion.

Given Syrian influence in Lebanon—in the form of anywhere from 12,000 to 30,000 troops and an active intelligence service in Lebanon for most of the past 30 years—Hariri also cultivated close relations with Damascus, including business ties with influential officials.

But he broke with Syria last summer when he resigned as prime minister after Damascus insisted on suspending the constitutional limit on presidential terms so that Emile Lahoud could continue in office.

While Hariri did not actively oppose the move, he reportedly encouraged the U.S. and France to push through a remarkably tough U.N. Security Council resolution that demanded that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

The subsequent passage of UNSCR 1559 was not only a major blow to Damascus, but also served to unify and embolden the Lebanese opposition, which has been mobilizing for parliamentary elections scheduled for May on a common anti-Syrian platform.

While Hariri had not publicly embraced the opposition position, hard-liners in Damascus, who some analysts believe exert more control over Lebanon than Assad, saw Hariri’s role as a betrayal.

“Uncomfortable though it may be for Syria in international opinion, in certain quarters of Syria the stakes in Lebanon are existential, and existential challenges may be deemed to justify existential solutions,” said Norton, who believes that Syria, or at least some elements within the Syrian government, were behind the assassination.

At the same time that Syria was defending itself against Resolution 1559, hawks and realists within the Bush administration were fighting over how far Washington should push Damascus to cooperate. Their main concerns were preventing the infiltration of “foreign fighters” across the border from Syria into Iraq and in arresting Iraqis living in Syria who were suspected by Washington to be financing and helping to organize a rapidly expanding insurgency, or at least freezing their bank accounts.

The hawks, centered primarily in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, have long favored a “regime change” policy for Damascus anyway.

One of Cheney’s top Middle East advisers, David Wurmser, and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith—both with strong ties to Israel’s settler movement—contributed to papers in the 1990s that urged Israel and the United States to arm and finance groups in both Lebanon and Syria to force Damascus’ withdrawal from Lebanon and destabilize the Ba’athist regime.

Since Washington’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003, they have argued Damascus’ alleged failure to fully cooperate with the occupation justified a more aggressive policy, including military strikes. More pragmatic factions, centered in the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and among military commanders on the ground, countered that Assad had in fact steadily increased his cooperation and that U.S. measures to actively destabilize his regime could backfire.

In December, the hawks launched a more public campaign with a series of opinion pieces in their favored press organs, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal, accusing Damascus of active support for the insurgency and calling for a major escalation.

“We could bomb Syrian military facilities,” wrote William Kristol, the Standard’s neoconservative editor. “We could go across the border in force to stop infiltration; we could occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, a few miles from the border, which seems to be the planning and organizing center for Syrian activities; we could covertly help or overtly support the Syrian opposition....”

The campaign coincided, according to a Journal account, with the presentation to Bush of a list of options that included imposing tougher economic sanctions, downgrading diplomatic relations, more active U.S. support for anti-Syrian factions in Lebanon, and possible military strikes against alleged terrorist training camps in Syria.

None of these was approved at the time, however, although all of them—and now possibly more, in the wake of Hariri’s assassination—remain on the table.

While many Middle East specialists here appear to believe that the Syrian regime, or possibly a rogue element within it, was responsible for the blast, that view is by no means universal, particularly given the likelihood that Washington would blame Damascus in any event.

Indeed, one “senior State Department official” told The New York Times: “Even though there’s no evidence to link [the assassination] to Syria, Syria has, by negligence or design, allowed Lebanon to become destabilized.”

Noting that Hariri had not identified himself completely with the opposition to Syria’s presence in Lebanon, Hudson told IPS that he considered that Islamist extremists trying to harm the Saudi royal family, which has been Hariri’s strongest supporter, was “a more plausible scenario.” Al-Qaeda has said it was not responsible.

Others have suggested that Israel or their erstwhile allies in Lebanon, the Phalangist militia, may have been responsible, given the certainty that Syria would be blamed for the killing.

“It is certainly possible that the Syrian military leadership was sufficiently stupid and arrogant to decide to assassinate Hariri,” according to C.S. Smith, a regional specialist at the University of Arizona. “But many others stood to benefit from such an act, including right-wing Phalangist Christian elements closely tied to neocons in the Bush administration.”

Indeed, Walid Phares, a right-wing Lebanese-born Christian and fellow of the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), issued a statement immediately after the killing that appeared designed to cast suspicion on Syria and one of its allies in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

Another hard-line neoconservative, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, writing Tuesday in the far-right National Review Online, fingered Assad as the party that “had the greatest motive” for the killing, even if he admitted that it may “seem incredible that young Bashar Assad…would choose the path of confrontation with the United States.”

If he was indeed responsible, noted Frum, “he has taken another huge step toward open war on the United States and its interests in the region.”

“I would be very shocked if Syria has a hand in it because it’s not in the position to rock the boat at this point,” said Bassam Haddad, a Levant expert at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, who said he would not hazard an opinion until more evidence was forthcoming.

“It is obvious that any kind of rocking the boat is going to empower the opposition that will call for an immediate ouster of Syria from Lebanon.”

Jim Lobe is Washington, DC correspondent for the Inter Press Service. This article first appeared Feb. 16, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

When in Doubt, Blame Syria

By Linda Heard 

Those who want to get with the latest U.S. program must put the blame on Syria. What for? Doesn’t matter in the least. Whether it is for the two world wars, the demise of Elvis or sinking the Titanic, Syria makes a handy and eminently fashionable punching bag. Even if Syria’s accusers get it wrong, no matter. Syria’s friends are one by one deserting an apparently sinking ship.

The U.S. clearly blames Syria for the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in downtown Beirut. It hasn’t said so in so many words. Instead, it has pulled out its ambassador and has engaged in the quest of isolating Syria from Lebanon.

Never mind that given the current climate, Hariri’s death was not in Syria’s interests. It didn’t need a clairvoyant to anticipate the passing of “Mr. Lebanon” would destabilize the region, sharpen the anti-Syrian knives, and perhaps pit Lebanese against Lebanese. So what did Syria have to gain?

When a suicide bomb recently exploded on the Tel Aviv waterfront, the Israeli government, in a marked departure, immediately went for Syria’s jugular. Syria is behind those deaths, it said, while putting its dialogue with the Palestinians on ice, just for good measure.

When it comes to Iraq, Syria is once again America’s bad boy. Foreign insurgents and their weapons flow through Syria’s porous borders, it contends, while conveniently overlooking those who arrive via its allies Jordan and Turkey.

Then, just a few days ago, Syria goes and spoils it all by handing over one of America’s most wanted: Saddam Hussain’s half-brother Sabawi Ibrahim Al-Hassan Al Tikriti. You see, when states are being fingered as renegade it doesn’t do for them to show voluntary cooperation. It spoils the profile.

It is truly unfortunate for those powers just itching for an excuse to drop bombs on Damascus that the Syrian President Bashar Assad can hardly be painted as the personification of evil in the way Saddam Hussain was, no matter how good their spinmeisters weave the tale.

Bashar is generally seen as a soft-spoken intellectual, who after the accidental death of his wildly popular swashbuckling brother Basil was pulled from his medical studies in Britain and reluctantly groomed to take over from his authoritarian father.

In the early days, Bashar, placed in charge of an anti-corruption campaign, was keen to modernize his country, introduce reforms and get Syria wired to the Internet. At first, there was speculation within over whether he was tough enough to lead and worries he would be constrained by his father’s old guard.

Over time he proved his detractors wrong and showed he had the courage and tenacity to stick to his principles. Despite opposition, he released hundreds of political prisoners from Syrian jails and facilitated the establishment of independent newspapers. He has further offered to engage in unconditional talks with Israel and been rebuffed.

When the chips were down, the Syrian president stood up for his Iraqi neighbor, risking American ire. But even though the anti-war movement was proved right over Iraq’s mythical WMD and the country’s post-occupation descent into bloodshed and chaos, Bashar’s loyal stance has proved to be one of the reasons for Syria’s current pariah status.

Others include Syria’s unfailing support for the Palestinian cause, its refusal to close the offices of Palestinian militants in its capital, as well as its backing of Hezbollah, which played such a large part in Israel’s exit from southern Lebanon.

Now a large section of the Lebanese public—too close to the issue, perhaps, to see the big picture or too personally affected to care—has chosen to sign up to the U.S.-orchestrated Syria blame game.

There is no doubt the Lebanese have a genuine grudge. Syria has overstayed its welcome since it was invited in to Lebanon in 1976 to help quell the civil war. Over time, its brotherly presence has morphed into occupation, and here I take the opportunity to dispel the false illusions of some of my Lebanese readers, who somehow believe I support that occupation. The idea that one nation should control another by force and subjugate its citizens is vile. That, for me, is an absolute.

Syria has made grave mistakes in Lebanon. It reneged on its commitments to withdraw contained in the 1991 Taif agreement and, until Bashar came to power, it increasingly treated its tiny neighbor as part of Greater Syria.

Throughout the Syrian occupation, the Lebanese have paid dearly in terms of personal freedoms and have had to put up with a flood of Syrian workers, along with horrendous tax burdens, which go toward filling the coffers of Damascus.

Under pressure, Syria recently agreed to abide by Taif, under which Lebanon has obligations too, although an Italian newspaper published yesterday quotes Bashar as saying “it will only happen if we receive serious guarantees.” Article 2 of Taif acknowledges that the two countries share a common destiny and common interests, while Article 3 demands that each country “coordinate their stands on regional and international issues.”

On the latter point, the Lebanese are divided. While anti-Syrian groups have held demonstrations to demand Syria’s exit, pro-Syrian Lebanese are planning their own protests in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square. Thus far, these have remained peaceful.

The problem is, even if Syria takes every last soldier out of Lebanon, it may still be a marked entity in the way Iraq was even after Saddam submitted to the return of weapons inspectors. George W. Bush has already warned that Syrian intelligence officers must also pull out. In light of the covert nature of intelligence gathering, how on earth can Syria prove that?

In response to my last week’s column “Lebanon, Syria and the U.S.,” I received the following e-mail from a Christian Lebanese:

“I submit to you that the Americans or the Israelis would not have been any worse for Lebanon. At least the Americans rebuild after they invade...”

Conversely, one of his compatriots, a Syrian Druze, wrote: “While I agree that the Syrian-Lebanese relationship needs to be corrected, I fully support your contention that the recent events are orchestrated from the outside... à la Ukraine, perhaps.”

If sectarian violence in Lebanon once again rears its ugly head—and what an excruciatingly sad day that would be—Syria will remain as the convenient fall guy for all and sundry with one important exception: Iran, a country which finds itself in a similar rocky boat.

From a Syrian standpoint, since its traditional allies have begun abandoning it in droves out of self-interest or fear, it may be forced to cast around for new ones with all that could ensue.

Call me old-fashioned, but wouldn’t the region profit if the U.S., Israel and those Lebanese in their joint camp used a few more carrots and a lot less stick? Let’s quit this transparent blame game and turn to the more grown-up pursuits of dialogue, mutual respect and compromise.

Linda Heard is a writers specializing in Middle East affairs. This column first appeared in the Arab News (Jeddah) of March 1, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

Hariri’s Death Yet Another Distraction From the Palestinian Problem

By Richard H. Curtiss

A Lebanese woman displays a poster of Rafiq Hariri as people gather outside his Beirut mansion Feb. 15 to mourn his death (AFP Photo/Patrick Baz).

This writer was in Saudi Arabia with colleagues when an historic series of events took place which began with a tragic and horrendous explosion in Beirut on Feb. 14. Just days earlier we had predicted that something violent would occur, because it looked like President George W. Bush was about to make a series of historic moves to try to end the Arab-Israeli dispute along lines already worked out several years ago.

Whenever a possible moment of truth has arisen in the past, something unexpected has happened—like the assassination of then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—and peace has been drastically set back. We had even discussed what might happen this time.

It had become clear with the Iraqi elections that things were going to change in Iraq forever. It also had become clear that Bush and his new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, were determined to make an historic decision to solve the Arab-Israeli dispute along the lines of the Middle East “road map” to create a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been working desperately to forestall this solution. But it appeared that Bush and Rice had made their decision and already seemed prepared to implement it, much to the joy of the European allies and all of the Middle Eastern states. Then, boom. Someone murdered Rafiq Hariri, the self-made Lebanese man from Sidon who had made his fortune in Saudi Arabia and then gone on to become the man of the hour in trying to put together the broken pieces of his nearly defunct country.

For more than 30 years, Lebanon had been controlled by the late Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad and his Ba’ath party. Upon his death five years ago, Assad’s mild-mannered son, Bashar, who originally had been studying in London to be an ophthalmologist, had become the heir apparent when his brother, Basil, who was being groomed to succeed their father, was killed in an auto accident six years before the father’s death.

The Assad family, members of Syria’s secretive Allowite minority, control all key Syrian military and political positions. The explosion in Beirut, which occurred very close to Hariri’s home in Beirut’s seaside corniche area, stopped everything in its tracks.

Some people, including this writer, and such an astute observer as the prominent British author and journalist Robert Fisk, concluded that Hariri’s murder was planned and executed by Israel’s dreaded Mossad. The Israelis have been deeply involved in such assassinations at key moments in Middle Eastern history for many years.

Later, as my colleagues and I passed through the United Arab Emirates to Dubai, we asked industrialist and writer  Khalaf Al-Habtoor, as well as prominent Palestinian editor Ghassan Tahboub, who has lived in the Emiratesfor more than 20 years, for their conclusions about Hariri’s killing. Both declared that it was too early to name a suspect before a thorough investigation has been concluded.

Now that an investigation has commenced, it would be wonderful if the mystery can be solved. My guess, however, is that the evidence will not be conclusive, because the assassination was so carefully planned and the scene was so thoroughly obliterated by the giant amount of explosives expended.

Some put the blame on the Syrian government, which has a sinister reputation—almost rivaling that of the Israelis. Other speculation centered on Iran and its control of the Hezbollah, and that cannot be ruled out. It seems unlikely, however, that the Syrians or the Iranians would do something so counter-productive to their own interests, because their guilt could only hurt either of those two countries.

This writer, who by then had moved on to Qatar, found that there, too, most people were hesitant to nameeither of the two principal suspects, Syria or Israel.

There really was no reason for Damascus to commit this horrendous murder and cause all this human tragedy. The Syrians angrily refuted the accusation, and continue to deny it. On the other hand, Israel has every reason to distract all of the Middle East, because the Israelis have no intention of letting the Israeli-Palestinian problem be solved with a two-state solution. 

Events moved very rapidly starting on Tuesday, March 1. Condoleezza Rice and representatives from France and other European nations attending a Middle East conference in London called on Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. Russia, an important Syrian ally, flatly told it to leave Lebanon. On Thursday, Bashar Al-Assad traveled to Saudi Arabia to try to secure support. According to Western news accounts, however, the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, is said to have told him directly to get out of Lebanon, and quickly.

Political analysts and Lebanese opposition leaders have expected Assad to repeat Syria’s pledge under the 1989 Taif accord, reached in Saudi Arabia, that ended Lebanon’s 15-year civil war. That accord, then as now, calls for a redeployment of Syrian troops out of Lebanon. Once again the Syrians have been reluctant to carry out the pledged withdrawal. They say the withdrawal must be gradual, in order not to set off another Lebanese civil war. That is a reasonable request, but the Lebanese insist that this time there be a time limit for the Syrians to leave the country.

Meanwhile, Damascus is very concerned that the Israelis, who took a large swath of territory from Syria during the 1967 war, will take advantage of the situation. The Syrians believe they will never get the Golan Heights back, although they have been demanding its return for 38 years. Some Israelis have implied that the land will be returned in a final peace settlement. A larger number of Israelis have made it clear that they have no intention of returning that key strategic area. In fact, they hope that Lebanon’s Litani River may eventually be seized in some opportunistic manner to benefit Israel.

If Washington would make it clear that the Israelis must return the Golan Heights to Syria, everything else would begin to fall into place. The Israelis, of course, continue to ignore their own obligations in this regard. It would be much better to heed President Ronald Reagan’s advice—“trust but verify”—rather than put all the onus on the Syrians and make no demands on Israel. As usual, the United States seems to be afraid of the Israelis. Therefore it is vitally important that the European Community and the Arab League hold to their principles and insist that Israel must pay a price as well.

The world may never know who killed Rafiq Hariri. It is certain that the goal of the assassination was to shuffle the deck in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Israel. But if the Syrians withdraw from Lebanon and some stabilization measures are taken to keep Lebanon from returning to civil war, the international community may be able to pick up the pieces very rapidly.

The key to stability in the region is settling the Arab-Israeli dispute and restoring the two-state solution, which is the only way to end this problem once and for all. Both the Arab states and the European Union understand this perfectly. It is only the United States that appears to be so uncertain and unpredictable. If this problem is ever to be solved, however, it is time to start now, during President Bush’s second term, and without further delay.

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.