Lebanese Political Journal
SSNP guys sit on many corners in Hamra and are patrolling on motor scooters. Their flags are everywhere, and they are gloating. I was regularly mistaken for being an SSNP guy while out walking, because I am the right age, wearing the right clothes, and fitting the right physique to be one of their guys. The SSNP security guys gave me nods, the Army diverted their eyes, and the neighborhood residents gave me looks of absolute hatred.

Across the Bay
Aside from assaulting the Hariri Foundation — a foundation that has paid for the education of thousands upon thousands of Lebanese college students — Hezbollah and its goons have focused their venom, hatred and destruction on the media. The very first thing they attacked, burned and destroyed were newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations that support March 14th political line.

NOW! Lebanon
At least 16 people were killed in clashes in Lebanon on Saturday between supporters of the government and the opposition, security and hospital officials said. Fierce clashes in the Akkar region of north Lebanon killed 14 people, including civilians, when members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party battled supporters of the Future Movement, a security official said. “The headquarters of the Syrian Social National Party (SSNP) in Halba fell to the Future Movement forces,” said the official, adding that seven people were found dead inside.

Blacksmiths of Lebanon
News sources in Lebanon are reporting a statement issued by Army Command calling for the withdrawal of all armed elements from the street. The Army’s statement also declared the establishment of an internal probe into the airport security affair, without the removal [as yet] of Brigadier General Wafik Shoukair as head of airport security; and the establishment of its own study into the Hizballah communication network, along lines that “would not harm the resistance’s integrity and security”.

The final update sums matters up nicely.

Blogging Beirut
SHIT HAS HIT THE FAN

Why do we seem so ill-prepared for events that are clearly inevitable?

The United States is conferring with the U.N. Security Council and others in the Middle East about possible measures against those responsible for the recent violence in Beirut, the White House said on Friday.

The White House has accused the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah of inciting the violence in the Lebanese capital and routing forces loyal to the U.S.-backed government.

Because nothing frightens the enemies of peace and freedom like a diplomatically crafted expression of concern.

A troubling confrontation in the Persian Gulf:

The U.S. military reported Monday on a “significant” confrontation involving five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats that “harrassed and provoked” three U.S. naval ships in international waters over the weekend.

U.S. military officials said the incident occurred Saturday night in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping channel leading in and out of the Persian Gulf.

The five Iranian ships made “threatening” moves — in one case coming within 200 yards of a U.S. ship, the U.S. officials said.
Don’t Miss

In one radio transmission, the Iranians told the U.S. Navy: “I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes,” the U.S. military officials told CNN.

When the U.S. ships heard that radio transmission, they manned their gun positions and officers were “in the process” of giving the order to fire when the Iranians abruptly turned away, the U.S. officials said.

No shots were fired and no one was injured in the confrontation.

I’d say that they were probing our defenses. The Iranians are not going to attack us directly, they’re not that stupid, but the information gathered in this exercise could be passed on to Iranian state sponsored terrorists or used in retaliatory strikes if we launch an air campaign. It’s the radio transmission that I find really odd here. We’ve had problems with these boats before but I’ve never heard of a case where the Iranians verbally threatened to attack.

Update 1/9/2007:
Mike Nizza of The Lede links to Navy video of the event and a transcript. While it’s helpful to see supporting evidence I should make it clear that I wasn’t expressing doubts about the Navy’s report in my initial post. I’m just really surprised by the hostile radio exchange.

More fallout, so to speak, resulting from our schizophrenic positions on Iran’s nuclear ambitions:

The United States, which believes Tehran harbours ambitions to acquire a nuclear weapon, had urged Moscow not to send the fuel.

However, Russia said that it received assurances from Iran that the shipped fuel will not be used for any other purpose. It said there was no evidence to prove that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and that the Bushehr project could not be used in a weapons programme in any case.

And they only have to wave our own National Intelligence Estimate in our faces when we object.

DefSec Gates, speaking at the Manama Dialogue, reminds everyone that Iran presents a problem on many fronts:

Gates pointed to Iran’s activities that defense officials report have left many of its neighbors feeling threatened. “Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or the cost in the blood of innocents,” Gates said.

Navy Adm. William J. Fallon, commander of U.S. Central Command and part of the U.S. delegation here, told reporters yesterday Iran’s meddling – from supplying weapons to insurgents in Iran and Afghanistan to its seizure in March of 15 British sailors – is destabilizing to the United States as well as the Persian Gulf region

“Their behavior has really been a problem, and to the extent that it destabilizes the region, which it does, then it becomes a problem for us,” he said. “Everything they’ve done publicly has been a problem.”

Gates said during a question-and-answer session following his address he’s “not confident” high-level dialogue between the United States and Iran would do any good in light of Iran’s inflammatory foreign policy. “Iran has to take some steps” for such a dialogue to be meaningful, he said.

Iran had been scheduled to send a delegation to the Manama Dialogue, but cancelled at the last minute.

In the meantime, Gates pointed to the international community as the only barrier to Iran re-starting its nuclear weapons program.

He urged Gulf-region leaders to pull together to demand that Iran “come clean” about past activities, suspend enrichment and openly affirm it has no plans to develop nuclear weapons. He also argued for them to demand inspections to make sure Iran lives up to its commitments and can’t restart its nuclear weapons program at a moment’s notice, or “at the whim of its most militant leaders.”

Gates pressed for the international community to “continue – and intensify – our economic, financial and diplomatic pressures on Iran to suspend enrichment.” He urged leaders to take the “peaceful but effective measures necessary to bring a long-term change of policies in Tehran.”

Asked if the United States is planning a military confrontation with Iran, Gates emphasized that the U.S. focus is “100 percent diplomatic and economic.”

Getting Syria to the table was a bit of a coup but it’s nearly impossible to believe that we’ll see see any substantive results from this event. If there is consensus it’s only on that very point - nothing much will come of this. Peace will come when Arab leaders and anti-Zionist forces worldwide (mostly on the far-left) no longer view the Palestinians as mere canon fodder. Arab leaders have spent decades manufacturing this crisis. They’re not walking away from it any time soon. Doing so would bring all of the ugly truths about their own societies, and their leadership, into focus. True peace will only be possible after the Arab world is transformed.

Anyway, there is an official site for those who are interested. Wikipedia has more information including a pretty comprehensive rundown on the participants.

National security advisor Steve Hadley recently laid out some goals, if you can call them that, for the event:

…the focus of these discussions are the Israelis and the Palestinians launching a negotiating process, supporting them in their efforts to implement the road map, which we still think is the critical path for achieving peace, and, in parallel, building Palestinian institutions and making sure there’s international support for that. That’s what really this meeting is all about and that’s what we hope will come out of it.

In other words, they’re not hoping for much. Or as Rick Richman puts it:

So the conference will “launch negotiations” — since the last few months of actual negotiations over a “document” have failed. Since failure is not an option, this will be called a success.

Frank Viviano is bit more optimistic:

The atmosphere is marked by weakness, uncertainty and pessimism. Yet that may prove to be the Annapolis conference’s greatest strength, an unexpected prelude to breakthrough on the 60-year road to an Arab-Israeli-settlement. It is between the lines of bleak editorials, op-ed columns and analyses in the press of the Middle East itself that this hope, however slim, can be read. From Riyadh and Beirut to Cairo and Jerusalem, pre-conference media coverage has been a strange mosaic of dark foreboding and unusual glimmers of light. No less unusual is the fact that Annapolis will bring together all of the governments and mainstream players in this unending conflict for the first time – precisely because because all of them are reeling in crisis. In a sense, there could be no more potent chemistry for success at the negotiating table. The closest equivalent is the “Nixon shock” of 35 years ago, when a fiercely anti-Communist U.S. president, faced with riots in the American streets and a war about to be lost in Southeast Asia, suddenly found common ground with a marxist China gravely enfeebled by cultural revolution.

John Bolton is cranky, pessimistic, and right (as usual):

“If there is a conference and it fails, we are not simply in the status quo that we had before,” Bolton said during a Web-based question-and-answer session. “We are in a worse position, because it will show a decline in American influence, a failure in a very visible way. I wish we weren’t doing this at all.”

And The Washington Post falls somewhere in the middle:

If there are causes for optimism, they lie in the hopeful public rhetoric of Mr. Olmert and Mr. Abbas — and the fears that lie behind it. Mr. Olmert has publicly pledged several times that Israel will negotiate seriously, and he said last week that he believed there was a chance to complete a peace deal by the end of next year. His government, like many in the Middle East, is deeply worried by Iran’s attempt to expand its influence throughout the region and believes a failure of the talks would play into Tehran’s hands. That prospect may be enough to produce some progress at the Annapolis meeting and in the months to come. But the breakthrough that Ms. Rice thought was possible still looks remote.

While, Henry Siegman hits all of the Arab talking points on the way to this ridiculously one-sided conclusion:

If the international community has been largely indifferent to—or impotent to do anything about—what some have tried to portray as a quarrel between Israel and Palestinians over where to draw the border between the two, it is far less likely to remain indifferent to an Israel intent on permanently denying its majority Arab population the rights and privileges it accords to its minority of Jewish citizens. It would be an apartheid regime that, one hopes, a majority of Israelis would themselves not abide.

Some people will do anything for money:

According to the prosecution, during his IDF reserve duty, the psychiatrist was exposed to classified material including emergency plans of the IDF Medical Corps, detailed plans for the deployment of medical units and control centers, procedures for providing psychiatric services to the home front during a war and tactics for evacuating civilians in the event of rocket attacks, as well as IDF intelligence and operations assessments.

The November 22 indictment served in the Petah Tikva Magistrate’s Court asserts that “in April 2007, Shamir decided to provide information to hostile entities in exchange for money and he contacted the Iranian Foreign Ministry by electronic mail.”

Stupid - but it gets worse:

In addition, it is alleged that in August 2007, Shamir sent faxes from his home to the Iranian consulates in London and Turkey and, about a month ago, after receiving no responses, he faxed them again. Police said that after sending the faxes he destroyed them and saved the fax numbers to his cellular phone memory in order lessen the chances of detection.

If only all spies were this stupid.

I think Saddam promised the same thing.You have to wonder if they actually believe this stuff - I doubt it:

Iran’s Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi here on Wednesday warned against any possible military attack against Iran, promising that Iran’s response would be crushing.

“Any country or power which invades Iran will face a crushing response. We will defend our security and our country in the strongest way in case of any possible military attack,” he added.

Message for Iran:

The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

I don’t doubt the accuracy of this story but versions of it have been floating about for a couple of years now. I don’t think the Iranians are particularly worried about it. They’ve heard it before and they appear to be pretty confident that we’re bogged down in Iraq. However, at some point the empty rhetoric stops and the message, while it may be the same, takes on new meaning. The survival of the Iranian regime likely hinges on their ability to see this point and shift course. I don’t see any signs of that happening.

I think Bush’s speech this afternoon signaled a significant turning point. Things really seem to be heating up:

U.S. soldiers arrested members of an Iranian government delegation Tuesday at a hotel in Baghdad and took them to an unidentified location, Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported.

Associated Press Television caught blindfolded men being escorted from a Baghdad hotel.

The Iranians, who work for Tehran’s power ministry, were in the capital at the invitation of Iraqi government officials to sign an electricity supply contract, the news agency said.

The number of people arrested was not immediately clear, though Associated Press Television showed U.S. soldiers escorting 10 blindfolded people — their hands bound in front of them — from the hotel into military vehicles and driving off.

The Iranian’s aren’t happy but this story will take a while to fully unfold:

A spokesman for the Iranian Embassy says the seven men who were arrested were part of a delegation from the Iranian Electricity Ministry.

He says they were guests of the Iraqi Government and had come to Baghdad to help rebuild power stations.

He says the Iranian embassy will be sending a formal letter of protest to the Iraqi Foreign Affairs Ministry.

The arrest of the Iranians came almost immediately after US President George W Bush said he had told commanders in Iraq to confront Iranians engaged in what he called “murderous activities” in Iraq.

I think we’ll be hearing more about what these men were really up to soon.

Update:
Some details are emerging but I wouldn’t necessarily take these initial reports at face value. This doesn’t tell us much anyway:

American forces said that a group of Iranians was detained after coalition forces searched them and their Iraqi escorts at a checkpoint, found unauthorized weapons in their vehicles and confiscated them.

The American statement did not mention the hotel, but it is near the checkpoint on the east bank of the Tigris where United States forces said the group was stopped and searched.

After the delegation proceeded to the Sheraton Ishtar hotel and was eating dinner in the ground floor restaurant, American solders arrested them, hotel employees said Wednesday. They said that six Iranians were led away blindfolded and handcuffed shortly after 10 p.m. Hotel officials said the delegation checked into the hotel on Monday bearing a letter of invitation from the Electricity Ministry.

I still think there’s more to this story than we’re hearing yet.

Update II:
The Iranians have been released. It looks like, in addition to sending a message, we got what we wanted anyway:

The military said that after initially allowing the Iranians and Iraqis to move on, U.S. forces went to their hotel and confiscated a laptop computer, mobile telephones and Iranian and U.S. currency during a search of their rooms. They then took the group to a military base for questioning. Two of the Iranians had “diplomatic credentials,'’ the military said.

It will be interesting to see if any of the laptop or cell phone data gathered during all of this resurfaces later.