Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Is Georgia Different from Lebanon and Palestine?

By Hasan Afif El-Hasan
Palestine Chronicle

".....Two years before Georgia’s invasion, another friend of the US and the West, the Prime Minister of Lebanon Fouad Siniora was weeping and distraught pleading for help to stop the mass killing of his people and destruction of his country infrastructure by Israel for the abduction of its two soldiers. The release of the soldiers had been all but forgotten and Israel was busy destroying Lebanon. The US response to Siniora had been completely different from its reaction to the Russian attack on Georgia.....

Working together, the Arabs can have real power and recognition by all actors in the international arena, but they have become a fragmented collection of states with conflicting agendas. The separate peace agreements with Israel, the Oslo fiasco, the 1991 US led Gulf war with Egypt and Syria participation to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation and the stationing of the US military in the Gulf region shattered the myth of the Pan-Arab regimes solidarity. And when members of the Arab League provided the US armed forces the necessary bases and logistic support to assemble and launch the attack against Iraq, a member of the League, Arab nationalism and solidarity had been practically dead and local tribal and sectarian/ethnic loyalties emerged. Palestine is not high on the agendas of the Arab states any more and the Arab-Israeli conflict has become a Palestinian-Israeli issue. Arab leaders have no one to blame but themselves for being irrelevant in shaping the destiny of their own nations. Palestine and Lebanon are only exhibits one and two."

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