Planning an invasion of Lebanon?

By Olivier Guitta

I just wrote an article for the Middle East Times looking at the possibility of a Syrian invasion of Lebanon.
You can read the full article here.

Here is an excerpt:
President-elect Obama should be careful in his dealings with the Syrian regime. In fact, quite possibly, Assad might be pondering if he could get away with reoccupying Lebanon.

The whole strategy of finding excuses to re-invade Lebanon is little by little being put in place. The most ominous signs were the deployment of 10,000 Syrian special forces on the northern border followed by the recent deployment of additional troops on the eastern border. Syria explained that it was to prevent Sunni Salafists terrorists from entering Syrian territory.

The third step took place on Thursday when Syrian state television broadcast "confessions" from members of the Islamist terror group Fatah al-Islam (FAI).

Not only did the FAI militants admit being behind a suicide bombing in Damascus in September but also Wafa al-Absi, the daughter of FAI's leader Shaker al-Absi, stated that FAI got money from Saad Hariri's anti-Syrian Future Movement.

By undermining the current Lebanese parliamentary majority, Syria is trying one way or another to regain control of what it still considers part of its territory.

Why is this so obvious?

FAI is first and foremost a creation of the Syrian intelligence service that has been used to destabilize the Lebanese regime that kicked out the Syrian occupation army in 2005.

Numerous experts describe FAI as a Syrian vehicle influenced also by al-Qaida. Indeed, al-Qaida, which uses the Palestinian camps in Lebanon as a transit point, definitely influenced FAI, whose ideology went from the "liberation of Palestine" to a worldwide jihad against the crusaders and the Jews.

In November 2006, Salafist militants of FAI infiltrated Lebanon through Heloua, a remote Lebanese village out of reach for the Lebanese army since it is considered a Syrian enclave. According to a Western military expert, Palestinians have been receiving light weapons from Syria, which is then redistributed to other refugee camps in Lebanon.

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