Right Wing Nut House

From Syrian President Bashar Assad’s point of view, why use words when bombs are so much louder and more attention getting?

Phalangist MP Antoine Ghanem was assassinated by a powerful blast that ripped through his car in east Beirut’s Sin el-Fil suburb Wednesday in what appears to be bloody scheme to strip the March 14 coalition of its parliamentary majority just six days before a scheduled session to elect a new president.

A 40-kilogram strong car bomb explosion shattered Ghanem’s black Chevrolet Sedan as it drove in the plush suburb, killing him and five other people, including his driver and an unidentified person who was sitting next to the slain MP on the back seat of the vehicle.

Well that’s one way for Assad to express his disapproval at Ghanem’s anti-Syrian politics although he may have gone a bit overboard with 100 pounds of explosives doing his talking for him.

Maybe we can get Jim Baker to negotiate a dignified surrender of the March 14 government to Assad. After all, he’s willing to do it for the United States.

Another assassination of a March 14th MP. Another step in gangster Assad’s plan to control Lebanon any way the world will let him. It is unbelievable to me that civilized nations continue to carry on business as usual with this thuggish tyrant. Despite mountains of evidence assembled by the Hariri Commission that these assassinations are planned and ordered at the highest level of the Syrian government, the US and the rest of the world continue to deal with Syria as if it were a sovereign nation and not a collection of murderous gangsters who brazenly flout international law and human decency in order to fulfill their twisted goals of ruin and domination of a tiny neighbor.

If there was ever a need for the nations of the world to collectively and as one step up and take on the responsibility of grabbing Assad and his henchmen by the scruff of the neck and throwing them on history’s ash heap, it is now.

Walid Phares saw this coming last June:

After the withdrawal of regular Syrian forces from Lebanon in April 2005, Bashar Assad and his allies in Tehran designed a counter offensive (which we described then and later) aiming at crumbling the Cedars Revolution. One of the main components of this strategy was (and remain) to use all intelligence and security assets of Syria and Iran in Lebanon in order to “reduce” the number of deputies who form the anti-Syrian majority in the Parliament. As simple as that: assassinate as many members as needed to flip the quantitative majority in the Legislative Assembly. And when that is done, the Seniora Government collapses and a Hezbollah-led cabinet forms. In addition, if the Terror war kills about 8 legislators, the remnant of the Parliament can elect a new President of the Republic who will move the country under the tutelage of the Assad regime.

As incredibly barbaric as it seems in the West, the genocide of the legislators in Lebanon at the hands of the Syrian regime and its allies is very “normal” by Baathist (and certainly by Jihadist) political culture. During the 1980s, Saddam Hussein executed a large segment of his own Party’s national assembly to maintain his regime intact. In the same decade, Hafez Assad eliminated systematically his political adversaries both inside Syria and across Syrian occupied Lebanon to secure his control over the two “sister” countries. So for Bashar to order the assassination of his opponents in Lebanon as of the fall of 2004 to perpetuate his domination of the little Baathist “empire” is not a stunning development: it is the standing procedure in Damascus since 1970.

The guy is psychic.

Phares points out that for this strategy to succeed, 8 pro-government legislators must be dealt with. To date, due to assassination and death by natural causes, the March 14th majority has shrunk by 6. Two more and Hizbullah will be able to name their own man for the presidency, probably paying off Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun by handing him the office on a silver platter.

Ghanem was no fool. He knew he had a bullseye painted on his back:

A Friend of the victim, speaking on condition of anonymity, quoted Ghanem as telling him Tuesday evening: “I face the threat of assassination. They want to kill me to open the door for by-elections to choose a new MP from (Michel Aoun’s) Free Patriotic Movement.”

I’ll have more on this story and the implications for the presidential elections as well as the future of the Siniora government either later today or tomorrow morning.

UPDATE

Jim Hoft has a huge roundup from both MSM and Lebanese sources as well as some pretty gruesome pictures.