Obama-Kerry making nookie nookie with Hezbullah?
A gutten zummer - a good summer to all of you, and a reminder that here in Israel, the holiday is only one day for those of us who live here permanently and that's why I'm back online tonight.
US Secretary of State John FN Kerry, fresh from cozying up to the Hamas-Fatah unity government, is on a surprise trip to Lebanon where he may be
making nookie nookie with Hezbullah.
A senior US official traveling with Kerry said
that in addition to discussing the refugee issue with Lebanese
officials, including Prime Minister Tammam Salam and Parliament Speaker
Nabih Berri, the secretary would also press them to deal with the
political crisis that has left the country without a president since
last month.
Lebanon requires a “fully functioning”
presidency in order to cope with tremendous challenges it faces, the
official said, adding that although Washington has no favored candidate,
the US would like to see a new president in office as soon as possible.
...
Michel Suleiman’s six-year term ended last
month but Lebanese politicians have not been able to agree on a
successor. Five parliament sessions over several weeks have failed to
elect a president because lawmakers allied with the militant Hezbollah
group boycotted the meetings.
Lebanon is accustomed to political crisis. It
went for months without a president before Suleiman, a former army
commander, was elected in 2008.
The absence of a president is chiefly a
setback for Lebanon’s Christian community, whose influence has
significantly waned since the country’s 1975-90 war. It also erodes
fragile institutions that keep the country of several Christian and
Muslim sects together.
Under Lebanon’s power-sharing system, the
president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni
Muslim and the parliament speaker a Shiite Muslim.
For a parliament to elect the president, a
two-thirds quorum — or 85 of the legislature’s 128 members — is needed,
but none of the sessions to choose Suleiman’s successor met that
requirement.
Consensus has been near impossible. The Shiite
group Hezbollah has been fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar
Assad’s forces, while most Lebanese Sunnis broadly support the armed
uprising to overturn his rule.
Although he was elected six years ago as a
consensus president, Suleiman became a harsh critic of Hezbollah’s
involvement in Syria and has called on the group’s fighters to withdraw
from the neighboring country.
Oh well, I guess he'll have to talk to Hezbullah to resolve this.... Maybe he'll visit Assad next.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Hezbullah, John Kerry, Lebanon
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