Lebanon OK's Int'l Court To Try The Hariri Murder; The Syrian Regime Is In Trouble:.

*** Before James Baker's & Lee Hamilton's ISG Recommends That Bush Negotiate With Iran And Syria For A US Exit Strategy From Iraq, VP Dick Cheney Flew To Saudi Last Week & The US President Is Meeting With PM Maliki In Amman On Nov. 29-30

*** Turkey, Egypt & Kuwait Are Also Being Asked To Help Among Iraq's Neighbours; But Iraq's Sunni Arabs & Kurds Now Insist That The Americans Should Stay In Their Country To Prevent The Shi'ite Majority From Annihilating Them In A Civil Strife Which The MNF May Not Be Able To Avoid

BEIRUT - The Lebanese cabinet on Nov. 25 gave its final approval to an international court created by the UN to try suspects in the February 2005 killing of former PM Rafiq Hariri. The suspects appear to be the Ba'thist dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad  in Syria and its clients in Lebanon including the heads of four Lebanese security networks who have been jailed in this case since 2005. The latest implication in this case was the Nov. 21 murder of Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel, 34, who was a key man among the country's Maronite Christian politicians. This was the sixth Lebanese politician to be murdered since February 2005 - there were attempts to kill four others - in which the Syrian regime and its Lebanese clients are implicated.

Over a million of Christian and Muslim mourners on Nov. 23 gathered in the centre of Beirut for the funeral of Gemayel as the occasion turned into a mass demonstration in support of Lebanon's anti-Syria movement. In scenes reminiscent of the aftermath of the Feb. 14, 2005 assassination of Hariri, the demonstrators gathered in Martyrs Square. This was the site of a mass demonstration on March 14, 2005, in which over one million people took part, demanding the withdrawal of Syrian forces from their country. The Syrian forces did leave Lebanon in late April 2005 - following 29 years of occupation, political control and unprecedented corruption.

The implications of a UN-led trial for the Syrian regime and the Lebanese suspects are colossal. But neither the Assads nor their Lebanese clients want to see a UN tribunal formed in the Hariri case. To undermine the protest, Hizbullah and other pro-Syria forces are staging mass demonstrations with the stated aim of getting the Fou'ad Siniora cabinet toppled and replaced by one loyal to Damascus.

Hizbullah, an offshoot of the Shi'ite theocracy of Iran, has many allies and can cause real trouble in Lebanon; but a civil war - which is calls "the red line" - is the worst-case option it wants to avert at any cost, despite the fact that Assad regards this as the best-case scenario for his survival and taking the offensive against a US-led alliance.

Whether or not Hizbullah follows orders from the theocracy of Iran is less important than the fact that the priorities of Assad in Lebanon are different from those of Tehran. To Tehran, Assad must be a client who follows the will of his patron, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose representative in Lebanon is Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah - who already has established the infrastructure of a Shi'ite theocracy in parts of Lebanon.

The priority of the Iranian theocracy is its nuclear development programme, coupled with its being a universal theocracy which means it rules the world (at least in super-structural terms for the time being), whereas the priority of the US-led alliance is to turn Lebanon into a confederation of prosperous cultures, religions and ethnicities - like the American melting pot. The US priority is also to turn Iraq into a federation of prosperous democracies (see ood5-IraqCorrupt&DistantScenariosOilNov27-06).

That Assad regain control over Lebanon through Hisbullah is not what Tehran wants for the time being. To the contrary, any form of Syrian control over Lebanon at this stage would undermine its own programmed sequel of developments; but Iran would not clash with Syria; it would rather have Hizbullah play a subtle game of wits: trying to avert civil war and, in the process, keeping Syria away from the Lebanese political scene.

This leads to the theory that Hizbullah leader Nasrallah himself might become target for murder at the hands of Assad agents. There has also been a rumour that Syria might target Nabih Berri, Lebanon's Shi'ite parliament speaker who is an ally of both Hizbullah and Iran, as well as having been a long-standing friend of the Ba'thist regime of Syria. But there will be no direct Syrian clash in Lebanon with Hizbullah and/or Berri's Amal movement.