Samir Geagea ...The extent to which his discourse mirrored that of the most extreme elements in the Bush administration surprised me. His talk was full of references to the Global War on Terror, Good versus Evil, Light versus Darkness, and such. After about 20 minutes of somewhat unproductive Q&A.... I ran into Geagea's foreign policy advisor, Elie Khoury, in a cafe. I asked him whether the LF were not placing all their eggs in a very dubious looking basket. He responded that his consultations in Washington convinced him that the next administration would end up pursuing a similarly confrontational policy in the region,....
we travelled to Damascus to meet Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma in the visitors' palace on a mountain overlooking Damascus. Bashar spoke with us for three hours, all Q&A. He impressed the whole group with his willingness to actually answer the questions asked.....He said that the worst case scenario was a US or Israeli attack on Iran, which would have repercussions everywhere. The best case scenario was a US president committed to seeking peace accords with Syria and the Palestinians .....He considers Walid Jumblatt an enemy of the state.....
return to Lebanon we met with Walid Jumblatt, who frankly appeared to be somewhat in pieces.......a generally stoned demeanor, he gave answers which ranged from completely inscrutable to impolitically frank to obviously evasive.......He pushed what I find an implausible conspiracy theory of Syrian involvement in the death of Mughniyeh........He said that Nasrallah and Hezbollah are fascist organizations and drew tired comparisons to 1930s Germany....
.with Siniora, who seemed to be genuinely excited to see us but unfortunately proved to be very boring, lacking charisma or a sense of interactivity and choosing to lecture us about Lebanese history despite our protestations that we were familiar with it.......He admitted that he personally had been against the two decisions that precipitated the crisis of the last few weeks, confirming reports that it had been Jumblatt behind them.....
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Siniora & The Harvard University group.. Friday, May 30, 2008 |
Saad Hariri at his Qoreitem palace,...he said that he did not believe the US would strike Iran, but that there would be a war perhaps 5 years hence, much bloodier than that which could be had now...Saad had the demeanor of the playboy, lacking in finesse and genuine charisma,..
Amin Gemayel was not particularly forthcoming, and seemed badly out of touch..Overall, none of the March 14th figures seemed to think there was any realistic prospect for Hezbollah's peaceful disarmament in the short to medium term. Geagea seemed to be the furthest from admitting this fact, while Jumblatt, Siniora, and Hariri were closest...
We spent two days with Hezbollah ......a tour of the Wa'ad rebuilding projects in the Dahiye. We were shocked by the speed and scale of the project ......We met for several hours with Nawaf Musawi, Hezbollah's 'foreign minister' and a member of the politburo. He was very impressive - fiercely intelligent, an excellent debater, and a flexible thinker....He thought that a US/Israeli attack on Iran was probable in the short term,...he indicated (though not in so many words) that Hezbollah would not initiate hostilities with Israel even in the event of a US/Israeli strike on Iran...He did however believe that an Israeli strike on Hezbollah would be virtually inevitable in the event of a strike on Iran..."
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