Libya's Election - And Egypt's

As if to confirm what I wrote in my previous blog about a multi-faceted MuslimSpring, early results of yesterday’s parliamentary election in Libya indicate the liberal slate may win, in contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood’s win in the recent Egyptian elections. RT pointed out that the Islamist party’s promises of Sharia law caused voters to back the liberals.  What RT doesn’t say is that under Muammar Ghaddafi's Libya was - at least officially - the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Republic.

Western, i.e., NATO backing of the revolutionaries who overthrew Ghaddafi was certainly meant to ensure his regime would be followed by a liberal one, reliably friendly to the West and its oil companies, with no more talk of socialism.  The same is true with respect to the crisis in Syria: the West is doing all it can to change the regime in Damascus from an - at least nominally - socialist one to one which will be an obedient player in the globalization of capitalism.

I've always maintained that one of the primary reasons for Western support of Syrian rebels has to do with Israel, without presenting a clear picture of why.  But yesterday an American whose name I did not catch affirmed on RT that America’s insistence on regime change in Damascus - rather than signing on to Russia’s suggestion of a transitional government to include Assad - is all about Iran.  In order to be able to go after Shi’ite Iran on the Persian Gulf without a Mediterranean blowback,  the United States and Israel have to neutralize Shi’te Hezbollah that sits in its backyard.

At first I thought this sounded far-fetched, but a moment’s reflection told me otherwise: what good would it do Israel to eliminate Iran’s missiles if it were to be attacked from behind?  Syria occupied Lebanon from 1976 to 2005, in conjunction with Lebanon’s Civil War and the presence of the Palestine Liberation Front in that country. And Hezbollah is a militant organization that defeated Israel when it invaded Lebanon in 2006 and subsequently gained significant representation in the Lebanese Parliament.

The media never fails to mention the Iran-Hezbollah alliance - or the Iran-Syria alliance. But it rarely connects the dots that link the two Arab Mediterranean countries to the Persian nation on the Black Sea, because that would shine a spotlight on Israel’s weakness. The solution ]would be to remove Assad, who rules Syria and is allied with Lebanon’s strongest Muslim faction. But it’s a throw of the dice as to whether his successors will be on the Egyptian model or the Libyan one, which is why there is so much dithering whenever the Friends of  Syria meet.

As for Russia and China 'paying a price' for not falling in line, one has to wonder what planet Hillary Clinton lives on. The news today is that Egypt's new President, the Muslim Brotherhood's Morsi has annuled the military council's dissolution of parliament and called the members back into session, further scrambling the Middle East chess board.