English LCCC Newsbulletin For Le

English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For August 11/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Bible Quotations For today
Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions
“You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.’”
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 12/13-21/:”Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.’But he said to him, ‘Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?’ And he said to them, ‘Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.’Then he told them a parable: ‘The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?” Then he said, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.’”

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on August 10-11/2020
UN chief calls for independent inquiry into Beirut explosion
Diab Announces Govt. Resignation, Slams Corruption, Political Class
Aoun Asks Diab, Ministers to Act in Caretaker Capacity
IMF Willing to Redouble Lebanon Efforts, Subject to Reform Commitment
Govt. Refers Port Blast Case to Judicial Council
Investigating Committee into Beirut Blast Concludes Probe
Politicians bolt from Lebanon’s cabinet & Parliament in aftershocks of Beirut mega-blast/DebkaFike/August 10/2020
Tripoli Port Prepares to Assume Role of Destroyed Beirut Harbor
U.N. Food Chief: Lebanon Could Run Out of Bread in 2 1/2 Weeks
Using Technology to Serve Those Suffering in Beirut
Lebanon Questions Security Chief over Beirut Blast
Dire Economy Prompts Lebanese Journalists to Find Jobs Abroad
Iran: Beirut Bombing Should Not Be Politicized
Geagea Promises 'Major Stance', Says Govt. Resignation Useless
Lebanon: 10 Months of Crisi
Blast Destroyed Landmark 19th Century Palace in Beirut
UK Pledges More Aid for Beirut Crisis at Global Summit
UK Official from Beirut: UK Stands by Lebanon and Its People in Time of Need
France, the disintegration of Lebanon and the Second Implosion of the Middle East/Charles Elias Chartouni/August 10/2020
Israel TV: Hezbollah apparently wanted Beirut’s ammonium nitrate for Israel war/The Times Of Israel/August 10/2020
UN chief calls for independent inquiry into Beirut explosion
Lebanese need world’s help to weed out corruption/Chris Doyle/Arab News/August 10, 2020
‘Balance of terror’ drives Israel’s approach to Lebanon/Ramzy Baroud/Arab News/August 10/2020
Lebanon must disband Hezbollah to survive/Hussain Abdul-Hussain//Al Arabiya/August 10/2020
Beirut’s apocalyptic blast needs an international probe for justice/Makram Rabah/Al Arabiya/August 10/2020
No more impunity!/Raghida Dergham/August 10/2020
An Emergency Meeting at The Remote Hotel/Ghassan Charbel/Asharq Al-Awsat/August 10/2020
Four Comments in the Wake of the Lebanese Disaster/Hazem Saghiehl/Asharq Al-Awsat/August 10/2020

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on August 10-11/2020

Israeli Chief of Staff Accuses Iran of Planting Explosives in Golan Heights
Rouhani: Virus Emergency Could Last Through January
Iranians Anticipate Rouhani’s ‘Economic Breakthrough’ Mystery
Iran Says European Insurers Should Pay Compensation for Downed Ukrainian Plane
Twitter Should be Legal in Iran, Minister of Information
Baghdad, Erbil Coordinate Intelligence, Military Operations
Turkey Sets Up Military Post Near Latakia
Tribes, Syrian Regime Accused of Inciting Chaos East of Euphrates
Aguila Saleh in Cairo to Discuss International Solution to Libya Crisis
Hamas Sends ‘Message’ to Israel by Firing Rockets into Sea
Iraqi Factions Set Conditions ahead of PM’s Washington Visit

Titles For The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on August 10-11/2020

Trump, US face pivotal UN vote on Iran/Rebecca Kheel and Laura Kelly/The Hill/August 10/2020
How the Middle East Can Hedge Against a Biden Presidency/Richard Goldberg/Newsweek/August 10/2020
The State Department has a Turkey problem/Michael Rubin/Washington Examinar/August 10/2020
TikTok: China's Trojan Horse to Indoctrinate America/Gordon G. Chang/Gatestone Institute/August 10, 2020
Beijing May Score its Biggest 5G Win at Home/Anjani TrivediNiall Ferguson/Bloomberg /August 10/2020

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on August 10-11/2020

Govt. Refers Port Blast Case to Judicial Council
Naharnet/August 10/2020
Cabinet on Monday referred the case of the catastrophic blast that devastated swathes of Beirut and killed at least 158 people to the Judicial Council -- the country’s highest court that deals with national security cases. The National News Agency said the move came at the request of President Michel Aoun. “He informed Prime Minister Hassan Diab of the issue during their phone talks in the morning,” NNA added. The country's top officials have promised a swift and thorough investigation -- but they have stopped short of agreeing to an independent probe led by foreign experts.

Investigating Committee into Beirut Blast Concludes Probe
Naharnet/August 10/2020
At the end of a five-day government-led investigation deadline in the Beirut port blast, the investigative committee tasked with the probe reportedly submitted its findings to the Secretary General of the Council of Ministers, al-Joumhouria daily reported on Monday. Authorities will look at the report during a meeting at Baabda Palace, it said. The report determined the administrative responsibilities for the devastating port bombing starting from the entry of the ship that was carrying ammonium nitrate until the moment it exploded, said the daily.
The provisional death toll from the massive blast stood at 158 Sunday, wounded some 6,000 and left an estimated 300,000 homeless.

Politicians bolt from Lebanon’s cabinet & Parliament in aftershocks of Beirut mega-blast
DebkaFike/August 10/2020
With its discredited ruling institutions breaking up five days after massive explosions obliterated Beirut port – on the heels of a crippling economic crisis – Lebanon sinks further into chaos. On Monday, Aug. 10, the Hassan Diyab cabinet fell after several ministers quit. Seven parliamentarians resigned in the face of enraged protesters who blamed the country’s run of misfortune on the ruling elite’s gross mismanagement and corruption. Resignations of half the lawmakers would force a new election. Behind the political turmoil, a prominent non-political figure offered a solution to the tangled crisis. The authoritative Christian Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon, Bechara Boutros Al-Rai, said last week from his seat in Bkerke north of Beirut, “The cabinet should resign if it cannot change.”He also has a plan: Lebanon should declare itself a neutral state and withdraw from any role in regional strife. Th patriarch’s plan counters the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah’s mission as the executor of Iran’s machinations across the region and leader of its “resistance axis.”President Michel Aoun, 84, is in an uncomfortable quandary. While his alliance with Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah props up his presidency, as a faithful Maronite, he cannot defy the patriarch.
Furthermore, formerly pro-Hizballah Shiite communities living in Arab countries, are attracted by the notion of neutrality, which could restore Lebanon to the Arab fold, an historic place forfeited when Iran deepened its footprint in Beirut.
Although Nasrallah controls the largest and best-armed military force in Lebanon, he is picking his way carefully through the popular minefield. He and President Aoun were singled out by angry protesters as primarily responsible for the country’s mess. Hangman’s nooses were placed around the necks of their effigies in major demonstrations on Saturday, in protest against the calamitous explosion of 2,750 tons of volatile ammonium nitrate that obliterated Beirut port and ravaged the city. At least 160 people died, 6,000 were injured and 300,000 lost their homes. Many Beirut dwellers are still missing as rescuers dig through the rubble. Lining up behind the protesters were a coalition of Sunni Muslims, who traditionally fill the slot of premier, while the presidency is the preserve of Christian sects.
With its governing system falling apart and a hungry population in revolt, Lebanon is a long way from recovery and lacks even a competent authority able to make use of incoming aid. Although French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday hailed world leaders for pledging a total of $298 million in “emergency aid” for Lebanon, the key to its recovery is held by the oil-rich Sunni rulers of the Gulf. They view with favor the neutrality plan proposed by the Maronite Patriarch, but first they are waiting to see if the Lebanese people is capable of reshaping the Beirut government on different lines. It will take time before the Gulf Arab rulers who used to patronize the once cosmopolitan and fun-loving Lebanese capital are willing to return.

Tripoli Port Prepares to Assume Role of Destroyed Beirut Harbor
Beirut- Paula Astih/Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Concerned ministries and apparatuses engaged Sunday in trying to comprehend the shutdown of Beirut’s port, following Tuesday's massive explosion that killed at least 154 people, injured 5,000 and smashed a swathe of the city. In a meeting held one day after the explosion, the Supreme Defense Council decided to declare Beirut as a disaster city and to provide the Port of Tripoli to secure commercial operations from import and export. The Port of Beirut is the largest shipping and clearing point in Lebanon, through which approximately 70% of the incoming and outgoing trade traffic to and from the country passes. The port receives about 6 million tons of goods per year and welcomes around 3000 ships.“The port needs three years to return to its previous state,” Mohammad Chamseddine, Policy and Research Specialist at Information International, told Asharq Al-Awsat. He said the initial scan of damages puts the cost of the damage over $3 billion. “Imports will be transferred to the Tripoli port in the north of Lebanon and later to Sidon and Tyre in the south,” Chamseddine said, adding that transit trade with and through Syria would be greatly affected. For his part, Tripoli Port's Director General Ahmad Tamer told Asharq Al-Awsat that the port is “ready to cover the shutdown of Beirut’s port.”He said the government has spent $300 million on the port in the past 18 years, making it ready to handle urgent cases similar to the one Lebanon in currently passing through. “The Tripoli port can handle the trade of 5 million tons of wheat and 300,000 containers,” Tamer said. He explained that the port already receives 100,000 tons of wheat year pear while the Beirut port receives 800,000 tons, assuring the Lebanese that they will not suffer a wheat crisis.

U.N. Food Chief: Lebanon Could Run Out of Bread in 2 1/2 Weeks
Associated Press/Naharnet/August 10/2020
The head of the U.N. food agency said Monday he's "very, very concerned" Lebanon could run out of bread in about 2 ½ weeks because 85% of the country's grain comes through Beirut's devastated port -- but he believes an area of the port can be made operational this month. David Beasley, who is in Beirut assessing damage and recovery prospects, told a virtual U.N. briefing on the humanitarian situation following last week's explosion in the Lebanese capital that "at the devastated site, we found a footprint that we can operate on a temporary basis." "Working with the Lebanese army, we believe that we can clear part of that site," Beasley said. "We'll be airlifting in a lot of equipment, doing everything we can."Beasley said he had met with Cabinet ministers - who all resigned later Monday - and told them the U.N. needs "absolute cooperation now, no obstacles" because people on the streets are angry and said they need international help but "please make certain that the aid comes directly to the people."For the first time since last week's blast, two ships docked at Beirut's port on Monday including one carrying grain, according to state media. The head of the workers union at the port, Beshara Asmar told Al-Jadeed TV that since the grain silos were destroyed by the explosion, the material will be pumped directly to trucks or bags after being sanitized." "This is a glimmer of hope," Asmar said about the first arrivals adding that the port's 5th basin where the ships docked remains intact despite the blast. Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, said a ship with 17,500 metric tons of wheat flour should arrive in Beirut "within two weeks, and that's to put bread on the table of all the people of Lebanon and that will give us a bread supply for 20 days.""While we're doing that, we've got a 30-day supply of about 30,000 metric tons of wheat that we're bringing in, and then another 100,000 metric tons over the next 60 days after that," Beasley said. Najat Rochdi, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, told a press conference after briefing U.N. members that Beasley went to the port with engineers to assess what can be done. "They are very optimistic to start actually this rehabilitation as soon as this week to increase the capacity of the port of Beirut," she said.Rochdi said she understands a ship will be arriving Thursday with some construction material, followed by a ship with wheat and grain, "to address the issue of food security and to hopefully make sure Beirut is not going to be short of bread." U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock told diplomats the "swift and wide-ranging" humanitarian response is just the first of a three-phased response to the tragedy. "The second -- recovery and reconstruction -- will cost billions of dollars and require a mix of public and private finance," he said. "The third element is responding to the Lebanon's pre-existing socioeconomic crisis which is already exacerbated by COVID-19." Lowcock, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, stressed the Beirut explosion last Tuesday "will have repercussions far beyond those we see in front of us now."He urged donors, international financial institutions and the wider international community to "come together and put their shoulder to the wheel," stressing that the Lebanese people will be served best by a collective response.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told U.N. member nations the voices of Lebanon's angry people "must be heard." "It is important that a credible and transparent investigation determine the cause of the explosion and bring about the accountability demanded by the Lebanese people," he said. "It is also important that reforms be implemented so as to address the needs of the Lebanese people for the longer term."Guterres also pledged that "the United Nations will stand with Lebanon to help alleviate the immediate suffering and support its recovery."

Using Technology to Serve Those Suffering in Beirut
Jeddah: Khaldoun Ghssan Saeed/Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Many of Beirut’s residents continue to suffer from last Tuesday’s explosion. In response, a group from Google volunteered to develop a comprehensive directory of all hotels, guesthouses, monasteries, and schools that are ready to receive displaced families. After double checking the provided information, the locations were posted on Google Maps so that anyone can access them. Upon accessing this map, a list of shelters and their locations will appear. When users click on one of the shelters, details such as contact information and directions appear, along with pictures of some of the places. This map is named "Lebanon Crisis Shelters" . The interactive map can be accessed at bit.ly/30FV21P. At the time of writing, the list included 40 shelters, hotels, homes, schools, monasteries, boarding houses, and non-governmental organizations. These places are distributed throughout Lebanon, with shelters in places including Baskinta, Baabda, Roumieh, Zahle, Baalak, Hammana, Ehden, Zouk Mosbeh, Kesrouan, Adama, Sin El Fil, Bashri, Al Arz, Mansouriya, Jezzine, Balat, Alita Jbeil, Freydis El Chouf, Al Mukhles, Al Salimah, Majdal Al Moouch, Kiffan, Al Mashmousha, Khenchara, Haret Al Balan, Deek Al Mahdi, Al Salahia and Ain Dara Al Barouk. The group will add more shelter and after validating the information presented about them. Talking about the role of technology in crises, Google offers the "SOS Alerts" feature, which aims to provide easy and quick access to essential information in times of crisis. This feature gathers information from webpages, social networks, and Google applications. It highlights them in search results pages and maps. Additional information is provided from local or international authorities, according to the type of crisis. Emergency phone numbers, maps, official pages, translations, the places where users can make blood and in-kind donations, and other essential information is provided. Google takes several aspects into consideration, such as the state of Internet connection in the affected area, the availability of instructions from governments and various authorities, and other factors. This information is usually provided in the predominant language of the affected area, along with English. The data is displayed to users on the map of the affected area. If the user is in an area far from the affected area, only relevant information will appear when searching for information related to the crisis. As an example, users who live far from the crisis will not see emergency phone numbers, but rather links to donate. To verify the information presented, Google assigns field teams to gather information from local authorities, eyewitnesses, trusted media, and non-governmental agencies.

Lebanon Questions Security Chief over Beirut Blast
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
A Lebanese judge on Monday began questioning the heads of the country’s security agencies over last week’s devastating blast in Beirut. Judge Ghassan El Khoury began questioning Maj. Gen. Tony Saliba, the head of State Security, according to state-run National News Agency. It gave no further details, but other generals are scheduled to be questioned. The Aug. 4, blast killed 160 people and wounded about 6,000, in addition to destroying the country’s main port and damaging large parts of the capital. Losses from the blast are estimated to be between $10 billion to $15 billion, and nearly 300,000 people were left homeless in the immediate aftermath. The explosion is believed to have been caused by a fire that ignited a stockpile of explosive material that had been stored at the port since 2013. The disaster has been widely blamed on years of corruption and neglect by the entrenched political leadership that has governed Lebanon since its 1975-1990 civil war. About 20 people have been detained over the blast, including the head of Lebanon’s customs department and his predecessor, as well as the head of the port. Dozens of people have been questioned, including two former Cabinet ministers, according to government officials.
The investigation is focused on how 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive chemical used in fertilizers, came to be stored at a warehouse in Beirut’s port for six years, and why nothing was done about it. State Security had compiled a report about the dangers of storing the material at the port and sent a copy to the offices of the president and prime minister on July 20. On Sunday, world leaders and international organizations pledged nearly $300 million in emergency humanitarian aid to Beirut in the wake of the devastating explosion, but warned that no money for rebuilding the capital would be made available until Lebanese authorities commit themselves to the political and economic reforms demanded by the people. Protesters have clashed with security forces over the past two days in Beirut. The demonstrators blame the explosion and a severe economic crisis on the ruling elite and are calling for sweeping political change. Similar demonstrations last autumn fizzled out after several weeks.

Dire Economy Prompts Lebanese Journalists to Find Jobs Abroad
Beirut - Vivianne Haddad/Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Lebanese people often get preoccupied with news of prominent local journalists moving from one media institution to another. They often seek out the reasons from such a move, which usually makes headlines in the small country.
Now, as the country endures a crippling economic crisis, such job changes rarely make a blip on people’s radars. The latest trend, however, is seeing prominent journalists, whether news anchors, reporters or analysts, move abroad for better job opportunities. They include Giselle Khoury, Rima Maktabi and Antoine Aoun to name a few. Others who have made the move from a rival local station to another include Marcel Ghanem, whose shift to MTV after 25 years at LBCI created shockwaves in the country. The same goes to Carla Haddad, who moved from MTV to LBCI, and Joe Maalouf, who made the move to MTV from LBCI. Other notable names that made such transitions are Tony Khalife, Neshan Der Haroutiounian, Dima Sadek, Maguy Farah and more. Giselle Khoury recently joined Sky News Arabic, leaving her position at BBC Arabic. Nadim Koteich, who worked for years for Lebanon’s Future TV, recently made a move to Sky News Arabic as well. Khoury began her career at LBCI before shifting to Al Arabiya television where she hosted two programs. She then moved to BBC Arabic before landing her new job at Sky News Arabic, which is based in the United Arabic Emirates. “My choices have always been based on looking for new experiences to gain,” she told Asharq Al-Awsat. “At Al Arabiya, I learned about Arab media. At BBC Arabic, I learned about international media even though it is an Arabic-speaking channel.”“A journalist with a lot of experience and a long history of work becomes an institution himself,” she remarked. At Sky News Arabic, she said she was looking forward to entering the digital world and resuming political programs. She said her new job offers her a complete experience whereby she will appear on the television screen, while also communication through social media and other platforms. “My move from one outlet to another is not linked to a lucrative salary, but rather the quality of the experience that I will gain,” Khoury said. LBCI CEO Pierre El Daher said that it was natural for journalists today to seek new opportunities in wake of the severe economic crisis in Lebanon. “We are now welcoming journalists’ departure given the dire situation in the country,” he told Asharq Al-Awsat. “There is not a single media institution in Lebanon that is not suffering from financial problems that are pushing employees to seek better opportunities.” “I believe that material gain is behind any journalist’s move from one station to another,” he added. “This covers all fields of work.”

Iran: Beirut Bombing Should Not Be Politicized
Naharnet/August 10/2020
Iran on Monday said the massive explosion in Beirut last week “must not be exploited for political purposes,” adding that the United States “should lift sanctions against Lebanon.”“The explosion should not be used as an excuse for political goals ... the cause of the explosion should be carefully investigated,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said in a televised press conference. He added: “If America was honest about its assistance to Lebanon, they should lift the sanctions.” French President Emmanuel Macron visited Beirut’s shattered streets two days after the chemical explosion in the port dock area, as tearful crowds demanded an end to decades of corruption and Lebanon's discredited government. An international donor teleconference hosted by Macron on Sunday raised a total of 252.7 million euro ($298 million) in emergency aid, organizers said.

Geagea Promises 'Major Stance', Says Govt. Resignation Useless
Naharnet/August 10/2020
Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea on Monday announced that the country is “hours away from a major stance.”Geagea also considered that the government’s looming resignation would be “useless” because “those who formed this government will form the next government and consequently we will stay in our place.”“That’s why our objective is to resolve the core of the problem, which is in parliament,” the LF leader added, calling for “early parliamentary elections under the current (electoral) law.”Geagea voiced his stances following a meeting with a delegation from the Progressive Socialist Party.
On Sunday, he said his party was trying to secure enough resignations in order to force early polls.

Lebanon: 10 Months of Crisi
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/August 10/2020
Prime Minister Hassan Diab resigned on Monday in the wake of a massive explosion that devastated the capital Beirut and reignited angry anti-government protests over a spiraling economic crisis.
Here is a recap of key developments since mass protests broke out in October 2019:
- Anti-regime unrest -
October 17: protests break out, sparked by a government announcement of a planned tax on messaging applications, including WhatsApp.
With the economy already in crisis, many see the tax as the last straw and thousands flood the streets in Beirut and other cities, some chanting "the people demand the fall of the regime". The government of Saad Hariri scraps the tax, but the unrest turns into a nationwide revolt involving hundreds of thousands of people, cutting across sectarian lines, against the perceived ineptitude and corruption of the ruling class.
October 29: Hariri's government resigns, prompting celebrations in the streets.
- Foreign aid appeal rebuffed -
December 11: at a Paris conference, France, the United States and other countries rebuff an urgent aid appeal from Lebanon, making assistance conditional on the formation of a new reform-minded government. The economic crisis worsens with mass layoffs, drastic banking restrictions and a strong depreciation of the Lebanese pound.
- New premier -
December 19: President Michel Aoun names little-known academic Hassan Diab, who is backed by Hizbullah, as premier. Protesters regroup to condemn the appointment and turn violent in January with clashes between demonstrators and security forces leaving hundreds wounded. January 21: the Diab government is unveiled, made up of a single political camp, the pro-Iranian Hizbullah and its allies, who have a parliamentary majority. Demonstrators respond by torching tires and blocking several roads in mainly Sunni towns across the country.
February 11: parliament votes its confidence in the new line-up. Hundreds of protesters try to block the session. Clashes leave more than 370 injured.
- Default -
March 7: Lebanon, whose debt burden is equivalent to nearly 170 percent of its gross domestic product, says it will default on a $1.2-billion Eurobond.
Later that month it says it will discontinue payments on all dollar-denominated Eurobonds. April 30: after three nights of violent clashes in second city Tripoli, Diab says Lebanon will seek help from the International Monetary Fund.
Talks start on May 13.
- Currency plunges -
On June 11, new protests erupt after the Lebanese pound hits a new low on the black market. The currency plunge goes alongside the closure of shops and massive layoffs due to measures to contain the novel coronavirus.
- IMF talks stall -
June 29: the director general of the finance ministry involved in the negotiations with the IMF resigns, citing deep disagreements over the management of the crisis.
In July, the IMF warns of the high cost of holding up reforms.
August 3: the government begins to unravel with foreign minister Nassif Hitti resigning.
- Deadly explosion -
August 4: a massive explosion at Beirut's port devastates entire city neighborhoods, killing at least 160 people, injuring 6,000 and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. The government says the blast appears to have been caused by a fire igniting 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate left unsecured in a warehouse for six years.
- Fresh protests -
The blast reignites calls to oust the political elite, accused of gross negligence that led to the explosion. New protests are held under the slogan "Hang them by the gallows".Thousands of furious protesters fill central Beirut on Saturday, clashing with security forces deployed in force who lobbed tear gas and fired rubber bullets at demonstrators. A group of protesters led by retired army officers briefly take over the foreign ministry, declaring it the "headquarters of the revolution".
- Government resigns -
Protests and clashes between demonstrators and security forces continue in the following days. A string of ministers and MPs resign. August 10: Diab announces the government's resignation after just over seven months in power.

Blast Destroyed Landmark 19th Century Palace in Beirut
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
The 160-year-old palace withstood two world wars, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the French mandate and Lebanese independence. After the country's 1975-1990 civil war, it took 20 years of careful restoration for the family to bring the palace back to its former glory. "In a split second, everything was destroyed again," says Roderick Sursock, owner of Beirut's landmark Sursock Palace, one of the most storied buildings in the Lebanese capital. He steps carefully over the collapsed ceilings, walking through rooms covered in dust, broken marble and crooked portraits of his ancestors hanging on the cracked walls. The ceilings of the top floor are all gone, and some of the walls have collapsed. The level of destruction from the massive explosion at Beirut's port last week is 10 times worse than what 15 years of civil war did, he says. More than 160 people were killed in the blast, around 6,000 were injured and thousands of residential buildings and offices were damaged. Several heritage buildings, traditional Lebanese homes, museums and art galleries have also sustained various degrees of damage. The Sursock palace, built in 1860 in the heart of historical Beirut on a hill overlooking the now-obliterated port, is home to beautiful works of arts, Ottoman-era furniture, marble and paintings from Italy - collected by three long-lasting generations of the Sursock family. The Greek Orthodox family, originally from the Byzantine capital, Constantinople - now Istanbul - settled in Beirut in 1714. The three-story mansion has been a landmark in Beirut. With its spacious garden, it's been the venue for countless weddings, cocktail parties and receptions over the years, and has been admired by tourists who visit the nearby Sursock museum. The house in Beirut´s Christian quarter of Achrafieh is listed as a cultural heritage site, but Sursock said only the army has come to assess the damage in the neighborhood. So far, he´s had no luck reaching the Culture Ministry. The palace is so damaged that it will require a long, expensive and delicate restoration, "as if rebuilding the house from scratch," Sursock says. Sursock has moved to a nearby pavilion in the palace gardens, but this has been his home for many years alongside his American wife, his 18-year-old daughter and his mother, Yvonne. He says the 98-year-old Lady Cochrane (born Sursock) had courageously stayed in Beirut during the 15 years of the civil war to defend the palace. His wife was just dismissed from hospital, as the blast was so powerful that the wave affected her lungs. Sursock says there is no point in restoring the house now - at least not until the country fixes its political problems. "We need a total change, the country is run by a gang of corrupt people," he said angrily. Despite his pain and the damage from last week's blast, Sursock, who was born in Ireland, says he will stay in Lebanon, where he has lived his whole life and which he calls home. But he desperately hopes for change."I hope there is going to be violence and revolution because something needs to break, we need to move on, we cannot stay as we are."

UK Pledges More Aid for Beirut Crisis at Global Summit
Naharnet/August 10/2020
The UK will step up its commitment to helping Lebanon’s most vulnerable today, by pledging a further £20m in urgent humanitarian support, the UK embassy said in a press release. 1. UK package of £20 million will help provide food for the most vulnerable in Lebanon, including those affected by the Beirut explosion and its aftermath.
2. As one of the biggest donors to crisis so far, UK commits to “stand by the Lebanese people”
3. This is on top of £5 million already made available to the response by the UK, including support for the British Red Cross for the emergency relief effort
The UK will step up its commitment to helping Lebanon’s most vulnerable today, by pledging a further package of £20m in urgent humanitarian support at a virtual summit of world leaders (Sunday, 9 August).
The UK is one of the biggest donors to the crisis, and at the ‘International conference on assistance and support to Beirut and the Lebanese people’, convened by French President Emmanuel Macron and UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, International Development Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan will pledge £20 million on behalf of the UK to the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP).
This support will help the country’s most vulnerable through the existing economic uncertainty and additional suffering caused by the explosion by going directly to those families most at risk to cover essential survival needs, including access to food and medicine. At today’s conference, world leaders will gather virtually to support Lebanon after the explosion put the country’s already-strained economy and food security under extra pressure. Speaking ahead of the global conference International Development Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan said:
"The devastation we have seen in Lebanon this week has left people without homes, medical care and wondering how long it will be until the country’s food supplies run out. Today the world is coming together to stand by the Lebanese people, and as one of the biggest donors to this crisis so far, the UK is pledging more urgent support to help all those affected by this terrible disaster.
The UK has already made £5 million available to the response, £3 million of which will go to the British Red Cross for the emergency relief effort following Tuesday’s devastating explosion, which has left over 250,000 people homeless".
A British team of specialist medics funded by UK aid flew to Lebanon on Friday to assess health needs on the ground and identify what more the UK can do to help following the devastating explosion. Humanitarian experts from the UK are also on the ground and the Royal Navy survey ship HMS Enterprise will deploy to Beirut.
Since the start of the Syria Crisis, the UK has provided over £740 million to help promote stability and support for refugees and vulnerable people in Lebanon. Since 2011, DFID has supported sustainable water and sanitation facilities to over 1.1 million refugees, provided education to 300,000 children, helped create 1,400 new jobs for both Lebanese and Syrian communities, and improved infrastructure and services in over 200 municipalities.

UK Official from Beirut: UK Stands by Lebanon and Its People in Time of Need
Naharnet/August 10/2020
The UK remains “a long-standing friend of Lebanon and its people including in times of need,” said Lieutenant General Sir John Lorimer, the UK’s Defense Senior Adviser to the Middle East and North Africa, during a visit to Beirut on Monday. As the UK’s most senior military officer for the Middle East, he met Lebanese Army Commander General Joseph Aoun and stressed that the UK stands in full solidarity with the people of Lebanon after the explosion in Beirut port last week. British Ambassador Chris Rampling and Defense Attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Alex Hilton, accompanied him. General Lorimer visited the port of Beirut coinciding with the arrival of Royal Navy survey ship HMS Enterprise to the shores of Beirut as part of a wide-ranging package of military support, which had been announced by Defense Secretary Ben Wallace on August 6. He was accompanied by Royal Navy experts who had been working with the British Embassy, ahead of HMS Enterprise’s deployment. The UK pledged a further £20 million in urgent humanitarian support during Sunday’s virtual summit of world leaders, bringing the total amount of UK funding in the wake of the crisis to £25 million. The UK has been one of the biggest donors to the crisis according to a British embassy statement. At the end of his visit, General Lorimer said: “I offer my deepest condolences to the people of Lebanon following the enormous explosion that rocked the whole country causing immense suffering and damage. “The deployment of HMS Enterprise complements an immediate package of military and civilian support. As part of the strong relationship between both our armies, the UK has offered enhanced support to the Lebanese Armed Forces, who are central to the Government of Lebanon’s response, including tailored medical help, strategic air transport assistance, and engineering and communications support.”He added that “the UK is a proud partner and friend of Lebanon and will continue to stand by its people including in times of need.”For his part, Ambassador Rampling said: “The explosion at the Port of Beirut was an unspeakable tragedy, that killed and injured so many, and has caused so much further pain for Lebanon and its people. I know that Lebanese remain at the forefront of the thoughts of the British people.”“The immediate £5m package of humanitarian and medical support – and the further £20m announced by the Secretary of State for International Development on Sunday, as well as the technical experts who are already on the ground – will help to address some of the most critical needs of the most vulnerable in Lebanon,” he added. “And our military support to the LAF in their effort to rebuild the port is also critical. These are two of the key pillars to helping Lebanon to pass through this terrible time. The UK has stood with Lebanon for many years, and continues to do so in its time of most urgent need,” Rampling added.

France, the disintegration of Lebanon and the Second Implosion of the Middle East
Charles Elias Chartouni/August 10/2020
شارل الياس شرتوني: فرنسا، تفكك لبنان والانفجار الثاني للشرق الأوسط

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The reversal of tide operated by President Emmanuel Macron in 48 hours likens a miracle at a time when Lebanon seems doomed. The political acumen, the boldness of the Statesman, and the empathetic personality have proven salvational in a country vowed to exponential entropy, structural disintegration and unraveling of its humane and societal textures.
The ineptitude of the late government made the Lebanese lose six precious months of aimless negotiations with the IMF, since the government failed to present reliable financial statistics, evolve a consensus around the odious debt contracted by the kleptocratic oligarchy, which failed to oversee an integrated post war reconstruction plan, relaunch the economy, address the manifold challenges of a post-war fractured polity, a destroyed economy, and the dislocations caused by a protracted social conflict.
Rather than building an integrated economic scheme, they instrumentalized the banking system to cater to the needs of a rent-based economy which serves their interests, at the very expense of the real economy, the broadening of investment realms and the diversification of professional spectrums.
While partaking in the oligarchic scheme, Hezbollah and Shiite power politics have used the umbrella provided by the Syrian occupation to launch an internal colonization strategy, spread the tentacles of a vampire State, transform Lebanon into a platform of regional and international political subversion and organized criminality.
The political coalitions built with Michel Aoun and Saad al Hariri, were mere political expedients which served their insidious and progressive control of political institutions, transformed into appendages and platforms of a domination strategy.
In parallel, it has created a vast international criminal network ( South America, Africa, Shiite communities across different continents ), and built a professional army financed and trained by Iran, and engaged a wide arc of conflicts extending between Yemen and Turkey, with Lebanon as an epicenter.
This exponential dynamic has destroyed the very foundation of Lebanese Statehood, political and economic sustainability, and set the dynamics of the second wave of regional disintegration. The alarmed intervention of President Macron is based on the careful assessment of a meteoric degradation.
His impressive improvised international humanitarian conference ( 40 States and international organizations ) to preempt the tidal entropy, and create the lifelines of a sustainable survival strategy is a redemptive undertaking at this critical juncture.
Otherwise, he was emphatic about the need for an internal political accommodation which puts an end to the destructive political course initiated by Shiite power politics, and gives back a chance to consensual political arrangements and reformist policies to preempt their inevitable destructive outcomes, be it internally or at the regional level.
Hopefully, Hezbollah is going to dampen its delusions before dragging us unto its everlasting quagmires and conflict cycles ( the perpetuated conflict cycles, تناسل الازمات , W. Sharara ), and annihilate the chances of a steady recovery and an urgent reformist era.

Israel TV: Hezbollah apparently wanted Beirut’s ammonium nitrate for Israel war
The Times Of Israel/August 10/2020
TV cites assessment Nasrallah may have intended to use stockpile that caused port blast in ‘Third Lebanon War’, notes cases in Germany, UK where Hezbollah caught with same material.
Hezbollah apparently planned to use the ammonium nitrate stockpile that caused a massive bast at Beirut’s port this week against Israel in a “Third Lebanon War,” according to an unsourced assessment publicized on Israel’s Channel 13 Friday night.
The report was broadcast hours after Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, gave a speech “categorically” denying that his group had stored any weapons or explosives at Beirut’s port, following the massive explosion there Tuesday that has claimed over 157 lives and wounded thousands. “I would like to absolutely, categorically rule out anything belonging to us at the port. No weapons, no missiles, or bombs or rifles or even a bullet or ammonium nitrate,” Nasrallah said. “No cache, no nothing. Not now, not ever.”
Israel has not formally alleged that Hezbollah was connected to the Tuesday blast.
Ammonium nitrate is used in the manufacture of explosives and is also an ingredient in making fertilizer. It has been blamed for massive industrial accidents in the past, and was also a main ingredient in a bomb that destroyed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Last year, reports in Israel claimed that the Mossad had tipped off European intelligence agencies about Hezbollah storing caches of ammonium nitrate for use in bombs in London, Cyprus and elsewhere.
The Channel 13 report noted that “the material that exploded in the port is not new to Nasrallah and Hezbollah.”
It detailed Hezbollah’s previous connections to ammonium nitrate, including incidents in Germany and the UK, both widely reported at the time, in which its agents were reportedly found with substantial quantities of the material. In London in 2015, following a Mossad tip off, British intelligence found four Hezbollah operatives with 3 tons of ammonium nitrate held in flour sacks, the TV report said, citing foreign reports. A similar process led to the discovery in Germany of Hezbollah operatives with enough ammonium nitrate “to blow up a city,” the report said. Germany subsequently banned Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
“That’s what Nasrallah intended to do in Europe,” the TV report said. “Regarding what was stored in Beirut port, the assessment is Nasrallah intended to use it in the Third Lebanon War.” (Israel has fought two wars with Lebanon — in 1982, and, following a cross-border raid by Hezbollah in which Israeli soldiers were killed and abducted, in 2006.)
Meanwhile former Israeli army chief and ex-defense minister Moshe Ya’alon told a Saudi news site that a blast in a large Hezbollah weapons depot at the port preceded the explosion of ammonium nitrate.
Ya’alon, of the Yesh Atid-Telem party, was quoted by the Elaph Arabic website as saying Hezbollah had been aware of the material’s presence there and had control over the port. He said Israel had warned Lebanon about Hezbollah’s weapons stores and stockpiling of dangerous materials in Beirut and elsewhere in the country. He added that it was up to the Lebanese people to choose independence or continued servitude to Iran through Hezbollah.The Channel 13 report also noted that Nasrallah, in a 2016 speech, threatened to fire missiles at an Israeli ammonia storage tank in the northern port city of Haifa. “Lebanon has a ‘nuclear bomb’ today,” Nasrallah said in the speech. “The idea is that some of our missiles, combined with the ammonia in Haifa, will create the effect of an atom bomb.” (The tank has since been emptied out.) . And it also cited a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the UN General Assembly in 2018, in which Netanyahu accused Hezbollah of storing missiles and other weapons in civilian areas. The prime minister alleged that one such site was “on the water’s edge” in Beirut.
Preliminary evidence released by Lebanese officials indicates that the explosion was connected to 2,750 metric tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate which was left unsupervised in the port for almost six years. Documents allege that customs officials asked to move the vast trove numerous times but never received a reply
They had 2750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse after they confiscated it from a cargo ship a while back, they were welding near a door where the fertilizer was located, it caused an explosion.
In May, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the Jewish state carried out a months-long delicate operation to assess Hezbollah’s operations in Germany and presented its findings to German intelligence and law agencies. Mossad reportedly gave Germany information about warehouses in the south of the country where Hezbollah stashed hundreds of kilograms of ammonium nitrate. Israeli intelligence was also said to have handed over details of key individuals in Hezbollah’s operations in Germany.
The Friday Channel 13 report speculated that Nasrallah is fearful of an international probe of this week’s blast, possibly out of concern that Hezbollah might be implicated.
Amid rising tensions with Israel in recent weeks, Nasrallah had originally intended to address the country on Wednesday, but postponed his speech after Tuesday night’s port explosion sent the country reeling. So far 157 people have been confirmed dead and over 5,000 wounded. Around 300,000 Beirut residents were rendered homeless as the blast tore apart homes miles from the port.
Israel firmly denied initial speculation that it had anything to do with the explosion, has sent condolences, and offered medical aid. Senior Hezbollah officials speaking on condition of anonymity to Lebanese media have been equally insistent that neither Hezbollah nor Israel were involved.

UN chief calls for independent inquiry into Beirut explosion
Agencies/Arab News/August 10/2020
NEW YORK: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for a “credible and transparent” investigation into the causes of the explosion at Beirut’s port last week that killed dozens of people and left thousands injured.
His comments echoed the demands of protesters who took to the streets throughout the weekend and on Monday. They blame years of government corruption and incompetence for the blast.
Amal Mudallali, Lebanon’s ambassador to the UN, likened the blast to “15 years of war in 15 seconds, the darkest 15 seconds we have ever seen.”
In an emotional keynote speech during a UN virtual briefing on the humanitarian situation in Lebanon, she added: “People are demanding, and deserve, justice — and rightly so.”As he opened the international gathering on Monday, Guterres saluted the spirit of the Lebanese people in the aftermath of the massive explosion, giving the example of “neighbors helping neighbors, people clearing their streets of broken glass and opening their homes to those who have lost theirs.”
He urged international donors to provide aid “speedily and generously” to help the devastated country, but also stressed the importance of implementing longer-term political and economic reforms in the country that address the needs of the Lebanese people. The UN has sent search-and-rescue experts to assist first responders in Beirut, along with desperately needed medical supplies to treat the injured. In addition, the organization has provided $15 million to help fund urgent needs such as temporary shelters for families whose homes were damaged, and the import of wheat flour and grain for bakeries to help address food shortages across the country after grain silos at the port were destroyed.

Lebanese need world’s help to weed out corruption
Chris Doyle/Arab News/August 10, 2020
Sept. 1 will mark 100 years since France carved Greater Lebanon out of Syria. Of all the many highs and lows this coastal Mediterranean gem has faced, this anniversary may be the gloomiest in that century, amid serious doubts over the country’s political, social and economic viability. As brilliant and capable as Lebanese are, their ossified system has failed them. The triple whammy of last week’s Beirut explosion, a failing economy, and the coronavirus disease pandemic means the Lebanese can only look to the outside to salvage what they have left.
No doubt driven by frustration, bitterness and anger, nearly 60,000 people last week signed a petition calling for the reintroduction of the French mandate. Everything seems brighter in the distant past, but not one of those post-First World War mandates in the Near East furthered the interests of the peoples the colonial powers of Britain and France were granted responsibility for. France has always viewed Lebanon as its fiefdom, even before the mandate, intervening as it did in 1860 and maintaining a close involvement in Levantine affairs.
Everyone wants to help the Lebanese in the wake of the Beirut blast. Everyone has declared their solidarity. Everyone has made all the right noises and offered platitudes. An impressive $300 million was pledged at a donor conference on Sunday. The question is can aid be delivered without entrenching the very system of corruption, self-interest and criminality that caused all these crises? Shoveling funds into official circles to help rebuild Beirut and the shattered Lebanese economy would be akin to taking a paracetamol for smallpox. You have to pull the weeds out by their roots if you do not wish to see them flourish again. Let us be in no doubt. Whatever ignited the fire that led to the explosion, the root cause was criminal negligence on a gargantuan scale. Such is the secrecy and obfuscation surrounding official comments, conspiracy theories are running amok as to what else was in those port warehouses and why. How come 30 to 40 nylon bags of fireworks were stored next to nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate? How could this substance have been allowed to languish in what looked like a dilapidated warehouse in the heart of the Lebanese capital for more than six years? How come all the warnings from port and customs officials, as well as judicial figures, simply vanished into the city’s quagmire? How was it that explosives deemed too dangerous for a ship to carry were safe enough to be stored in this urban center? Moreover, why did Lebanese leaders not plan for a strategic reserve of wheat, instead of leaving the country dependent on one major grain silo, which is now in ruins?
The Lebanese elite has deployed a whole school of red herrings to defend itself. But the warlords and mafia bosses who run the country have to be held accountable in a way they never were at the end of the civil war. President Michel Aoun claims he only found out about the stash of ammonium nitrate last month — a barely credible statement. His son-in-law, Gebran Bassil, claims that what really matters is not why the materials were there but how they were ignited. No surprise then that both Aoun and Bassil reject any international probe, as of course does Hezbollah.
Bassil, the leader of the largest parliamentary bloc, claims his party is “anti-corruption” — a lie that will stick in the throats of the people of Beirut. Hezbollah’s standing will also be eroded even further. Everyone knows that it has considerable control over the port area and that the head of customs, clearly a designated scapegoat, was an Aoun appointee.
Enter President Emmanuel Macron of France, who landed in Beirut with the fires still smoldering. Macron did something that none of the main warlords and mafia bosses, who remain hunkered down in their strongholds, dared to do — he went on a walkabout and spoke to the Lebanese people. Will Aoun leave Baabda Palace to visit the scene of the crime? Will Bassil? Hassan Nasrallah cannot even leave his bunkered lair. Many Lebanese noticed the stark contrast between the Hezbollah leader’s relaxed speech after the Beirut explosion that killed at least 220 people and his quasi-hysterical performance of grief after the US killed the Iranian Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani in January.
Hezbollah will either hide behind force against the Lebanese public or feel compelled to inch toward a compromise to safeguard its dominant position. Many Lebanese and others will be demanding the militia be dismantled.
What should the international community do and, just as importantly, not do? Credit to Macron. He did not fall into the obvious trap of showering Beirut with promises of bounteous aid. His message was crystal clear: No reform, no aid. This was delivered to all the Lebanese party leaders inside the magisterial French Embassy. Other international leaders must stick to this line.
In the first stage of search and rescue, all aid must be directed to nongovernmental outfits, with cast-iron guarantees of how the funds are to be spent. The costly rebuilding of this ancient port city, which will require billions of dollars, must not be funded through the rotten core of the existing government system. Richer countries must also start shouldering some of the burden of the more than 1 million Syrian refugees that Lebanon has hosted at great cost over the last eight years.
The warlords and mafia bosses who run the country have to be held accountable in a way they never were at the end of the civil war.
Accountability is key. No official Lebanese inquiry will hold water with the Lebanese public. Just as there was an international tribunal into the assassination of Rafik Hariri — which is now due to give its verdict later this month — an international inquiry with teeth and full access has to be a condition of support for Lebanon. But the international community may not be able to do the essential weeding on its own. The Lebanese people, tired and fed up, will have to dig deep into their reserves of resilience. Many went out into the streets to protest against the system last October. They know a new constitutional order is vital to initiating a cleansing of the Augean stables. They are back on the streets again now, even before finishing sweeping up the smashed glass and burying the bodies. The international community must not just watch from the sidelines. Already, the security forces have used violence. The true measure of international solidarity will be how much backing we give the people, or else we will have to watch what is left of Lebanon being flushed away down the freshly created 150-meter-wide crater in Beirut port.
*Chris Doyle is director of the London-based Council for Arab-British Understanding. Twitter: @Doylech

‘Balance of terror’ drives Israel’s approach to Lebanon
Ramzy Baroud/Arab News/August 10/2020
Last Tuesday, hours before a massive explosion rocked Beirut, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an ominous warning to Lebanon. “We hit a cell and now we hit the dispatchers… I suggest to all of them, including Hezbollah, to consider this,” Netanyahu said during an official tour of a military facility in central Israel.
Netanyahu’s warning did not bode well for Israel when, hours later, a Hiroshima-like blast devastated entire sectors of Beirut. Those who suspected Israeli involvement in the deadly explosion had one more reason to point fingers at Tel Aviv.
In politics and in war, truth is the first casualty. We may never know precisely what transpired in the moments preceding the Beirut blast. Somehow, it may not even matter, because the narrative regarding Lebanon’s many tragedies is as splintered as the country’s political landscape.
Judging by the statements made and positions adopted by the country’s various parties and factions, many seem to be more concerned with exploiting the tragedy for trivial political gain than in the tragedy itself. Even if the explosion was the unfortunate outcome of an accident resulting from bureaucratic negligence, sadly, it is still inconsequential. In Lebanon, as in much of the Middle East, everything is political.
What is almost certain about the future, however, is that the political discourse will eventually lead back to Israel versus Hezbollah. The former is keen to undermine the group’s influence in Lebanon, while the latter is insistent on thwarting Israel.
But what is Israel’s plan? After decades of trying to destroy the Lebanese group, the Israeli government is keenly aware that eradicating Hezbollah militarily is no longer feasible, at least not in the foreseeable future. Hezbollah proved its prowess on the battlefield when it played a major role in ending the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in May 2000. Subsequent Israeli attempts to reassert its dominance over Lebanon’s southern border have, thus far, proven futile. The failed war of 2006 and the more recent conflagration of September 2019 are two cases in point.
Hezbollah is uninterested in inviting another Israeli war on Lebanon. The country is on the verge of economic collapse. And, while Lebanon has always been in the throes of political division and factionalism, the current political mood in the country is more destructive than it has ever been. Losing hope in all political actors, the Lebanese people have taken to the streets to demand basic rights and services, an end to endemic corruption, and a whole new social and political contract.
While stalemates in politics are somewhat ordinary occurrences, political deadlocks can be calamitous in a country on the brink of starvation. Last week’s explosion that shocked the world was a perfect metaphor for Lebanon’s seemingly endless woes.
Former Israeli Knesset member Moshe Feiglin was jubilant as he celebrated the near-demise of the Arab city. Feiglin described the horrendous explosion as a “day of joy,” adding that, “If it was us” — meaning Israel being behind the blast — “then we should be proud of it, and with that we will create a balance of terror.”
Regardless of whether or not Feiglin is speaking from a position of knowledge, his reference to a “balance of terror” remains the basic premise in all of Israel’s dealings with Lebanon generally and Hezbollah in particular. The convoluted conflict in Syria has expanded Israel’s war of attrition, but has also given it the opportunity to target Hezbollah’s interests without registering yet another aggression on Lebanese territory. It is much easier to target war-torn Syria and escape unscathed than to target Lebanon and pay a price.
For years, Israel has bombed targets in Syria. Initially, it was not forthcoming about its role. Only in the last year or so has it begun to openly brag about its military conquests. This is because the embattled Netanyahu is desperate to gain political credits while he is dogged by multiple corruption charges, which have tarnished his image. By bombing Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria, the Israeli leader hopes to garner the approval of the military elite — a critical constituency in Israeli politics.
Netanyahu’s comments before the Beirut explosion were in reference to a series of incidents that began on July 21, when Israel bombed an area adjacent to Damascus International Airport, killing, among others, senior Hezbollah member Ali Kamel Mohsen. A subsequent state of emergency on Israel’s northern border was coupled with massive political and media hype, which helped Netanyahu distract ordinary Israelis from his ongoing trial.
Last week’s explosion was a perfect metaphor for Lebanon’s seemingly endless woes.
But Israel’s strategic interests in the Syria conflict go beyond Netanyahu’s need for a cheap victory. The conflict has the potential to yield a nightmare outcome for Israel. For decades, Tel Aviv has argued that an “axis of terror” — Iran, Syria and Hezbollah — had to be dismantled, for it represented the country’s greatest security threat. That started long before pro-Iran forces and militias began operating overtly in Syria as a result of the ongoing war.
While Israel argues that its regular bombardments of Syria are aimed largely at Hezbollah targets — such as the group’s military caches and Iranian missiles on their way to Lebanon — its involvement is largely political. As per Israeli logic, the more bombs it drops over Syria, the more relevant a player it will be when the conflicting parties engage in future negotiations to decide the fate of the country. However, by doing so, Israel also risks igniting a costly military conflict with Lebanon: One that neither Tel Aviv nor Hezbollah can afford at the moment.
*Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Twitter: @RamzyBaroud

Lebanon must disband Hezbollah to survive
Hussain Abdul-Hussain//Al Arabiya/August 10/2020
From time to time, Lebanese authorities try to enforce traffic laws by fining drivers not wearing their seat belts. Those who get busted often complain: “Hezbollah is free to stock missiles, but the state comes after me for a traffic violation.”
Articles written in the wake of the August 4 Beirut explosion have focused on corrupt politicians and have avoided the big elephant in the room: Hezbollah and its role as ruler of Lebanon. But while a corrupt oligarchy has been the mainstay of Lebanon’s politics since inception in 1920, Hezbollah is a relatively new phenomenon on whose watch the country has sunk to unprecedented levels. Since massive protests in 2005 forced Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon in 2005, Hezbollah has taken over as the chaperone of the Lebanese state. In fact, Hezbollah has transformed Lebanon from a traditional sovereign state into one modeled after Iran, which the party calls the resistance state. In Hezbollah’s model, two organizations rule the country – Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah, and a subordinate state.
In Iran, the resistance state model is enshrined in the constitution. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his paramilitary group the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hold most of the power and leave day-to-day management to the state, headed by a much weaker, elected president Hassan Rouhani and his toothless army and security forces. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has forced the Iranian model onto the country without constitutional cover. If anything, the constitution, as amended in the Taif agreement in 1989, stipulates that all militias be disbanded.
The Iranian-backed group has ensured that subsequent governments have adopted the tripartite formula when a new Cabinet is presented to Parliament for a vote of confidence. The formula – consisting of the people, the army, and the resistance – is Hezbollah’s nod at legitimacy.
By receiving recognition that its formidable paramilitary force be called “resistance” instead of militia, Hezbollah maintains its place in the formal government. If Hezbollah were to hold the title militia, it would be subject to UN Security Council Resolutions 1559, 1680, and 1701 that demand all militias in Lebanon be disarmed.
Hezbollah needs the structure of a state to carry out its plans. It has employed a system of carrots and sticks it uses with subordinate politicians. Defiant ones are assassinated. Loyalists are rewarded with senior state positions and allowed to rule with unprecedented nepotism and corruption. Hezbollah needs the state, but not a strong one that can stand up to the party and potentially regain sovereignty, just a lousy, corrupt and minimally functioning one.
Corruption is as old as Lebanon, which celebrates the centennial anniversary of the French-proclaimed State of Greater Lebanon next month. But Hezbollah has flouted sovereignty and allowed the state to erode and corruption to spread like never before.
Lebanon has fallen apart.
And with Hezbollah copying Iran’s choice of engaging in regional conflicts at the expense of maintaining international friendships and relations, both countries are sinking, both their economies are in free fall, and both their populations are suffering increasing homelessness and hunger. Other factors, like US and international sanctions on Iran and the banking sector and liquidity crisis in Lebanon have also contributed to the countries’ downfall.
If Lebanon is to be saved, disbanding and disarming Hezbollah is key to restoring a sovereign and accountable state, or as the patriarch of the Maronite Church Bechara Al-Raii puts it: Lebanon must become a neutral state and steer clear of regional conflicts.
Corruption exists in almost every state. In some countries, it is more manageable than others. The Lebanese oligarchy, perceived as being corrupt, is as old as Lebanon itself. Sectarian chiefs, like the Jumblatts, the Gemayels, the Salams, the Franjiehs, the Khazens and the Arslans, among others, have been in government since the country was founded. But throughout their past, Lebanon and its corrupt oligarchy have never witnessed a situation as miserable and as desperate as the one Lebanon lives in today. Even the civil war years now compare favorably to Lebanon under Hezbollah.
The Lebanese oligarchy has watched the country’s golden years from 1949 to 1969 and benefitted from its neutrality on regional conflicts. In the post-civil war era that began in 1990, the Lebanese oligarchy watched the country fall under Syrian tutelage until 2005. The same oligarchs who watched Hafez al-Assad’s troops leave Lebanon have watch Hezbollah grow and take over. But this last epoch has proven to be the worst.
The key to solving Lebanon’s problem is to restore its regional neutrality, a demand that patriarch al-Raii has raised since June. If Hezbollah’s militia is disbanded and state sovereignty restored, some institutional reforms can take place, and the future of Lebanon will brighten. It will still not be ideal, but it will be much better.
Once the statelet and its “resistance state” model are replaced by a “normal state,” even with an oligarchy, the Lebanese can start focusing on further improving their polity by chipping away at the oligarchy until it vanishes. But going after the oligarchs while ignoring Hezbollah’s militia will prove to be the antithesis of change and a mere distraction from the real problem.

Beirut’s apocalyptic blast needs an international probe for justice
Makram Rabah/Al Arabiya/August 10/2020
Lebanon must have an international probe into the deadly Beirut explosion – it is the only way justice will be achieved.
The people of Beirut are no strangers to turmoil and violence, but the events that transpired on August 4 are no short of an apocalyptic movie – hundreds were killed, thousands injured and made homeless, and an ancient city was left in utter shambles.
The explosion that occurred in the heart of the city in the Beirut Port was heard all the way in Cyprus, as 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that is commonly used in manufacturing explosives, was detonated causing a mushroom cloud and a terrifying blast that looked similar to the Hiroshima nuclear blast.
The true cause of the tragedy has yet to be explained, and the majority of the Lebanese are convinced that the explosion was related in one way or another to Hezbollah – the Iran-backed organization that allegedly uses the Beirut port as a hub to smuggle weapons and other merchandise on which they pay little or no tax. The fertilizer had reportedly been confiscated in 2013 but had not been stored properly or disposed.
The Lebanese state's main narrative to explain the blast centers around mismanagement of the port and negligence from key officials that oversaw the port and failed to take proper measures. Both Lebanese President Michael Aoun and Prime Minister Hassan Diab have vowed to bring whoever is involved to justice, which in their book might only mean locking up a few senior bureaucrats, many of which should already be incarcerated for corruption and abuse of power.
The death of hundreds and the destruction of Beirut is a real tragedy, but having the ruling establishment that is responsible for the calamity to handle the investigation makes it worse, allowing the ruling establishment to redirect blame and ultimately escape retribution. There are many factors that render the Lebanese state and its various security agencies and the judiciary as suspects, as both are subservient to the political establishment as well as afraid of Hezbollah which was days away from being named as the perpetrator in the killing of former PM Rafik al-Hariri in 2005.
The main principles of justice and accountability dictate that all those who were in leading posts within the government at the time of the explosion be curbed and disallowed to view or meddle in the investigation as this simply would corrupt and derail the course for the truth.
Perhaps above all, the Lebanese state and its agencies have a proven track-record of incompetence not to say malicious intent in many previous crimes whose culprits were never brought to justice. The many local investigative bodies are central to the Lebanese clientlist system, and their heads do not report to the government but rather to their feudal lord or to Hezbollah.
Even discarding these alarming factors, the colossal obstacle remains the Lebanese state’s lack of proper resources to probe the scene of the crime and to collect and scientifically reconstruct the event and track down whoever is involved, either directly or by association. All these factors make the Lebanese people’s demand for an international investigation led by an independent and credible body more pressing and mandatory.
President Aoun and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah have spoken against an international investigation, claiming that it infringes on Lebanon’s sovereignty. However, Lebanon and its state already has no sovereignty as the Lebanese are victims and hostages of an evil alliance of a corrupt class that uses Hezbollah to stay in power.
It is not just the Lebanese people demanding international oversight into the investigation, but also the international community, which has said that its willingness to come to the aid of Lebanon is contingent on the Lebanese authorities carrying out radical reform, made clear in the Paris
donor conference held on Sunday to aid in the reconstruction of Lebanon. From within the rubble and carnage of the explosion, French President Emmanuel Macron affirmed his own and the international community’s commitment to help the Lebanese people and made a clear distinction – this aid is not a “blank cheque” to the Lebanese government nor the politicians.
Macron went as far as to warn the irresponsible Lebanese political class that what is needed to overcome the cataclysm was a new social contract a, giving the political class an ultimatum that expires when he is scheduled to return to Lebanon on the anniversary of the centennial of Greater Lebanon, which was proclaimed by the French Mandate on September 1, 1920.
August 4 will go down in history as the day that Lebanon experienced its near-death experience.
However, the real light at the end of this very bleak tunnel starts with the Lebanese themselves rising up –
not just to rebuild and nurse their wounds, but to uproot those who are responsible for the death of their children and loved ones. Only then can Lebanon and its people can look for their friends across the globe who would rush to remedy years of lack of clear policy and complicity with the region’s demonic forces.

No more impunity!
Raghida Dergham/August 10/2020
If the Lebanese government and the rest of the political establishment pulling the strings of Lebanon continue to rebuff any international investigation and to hinder the involvement of a mere international technical team in the investigation, the European Union, spearheaded by France, must convene a group of world-renowned legal experts in order to explore the accountability mechanisms in the case of the three heads of power – President of the Lebanese Republic Michel Aoun, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, and Hezbollah-backed Prime Minister Hassan Diab along with his ministers – for resisting and impeding an international investigation into a crime against humanity.
These three presidents, and every person previously involved in allowing the storage of explosive materials in Beirut Port amidst a civilian population, in leaving this port under Hezbollah’s control and for its own uses beyond State control, must be met with accountability and punitive measures. The same shall apply to Hezbollah and the Iranian leaders instructing it and benefiting from manufacturing missiles and planting explosives in the corpses of innocent Lebanese. Perhaps was it Israel that orchestrated yet another shady covert operation – along the lines of its undeclared operations inside Iran – targeting a certain hangar in Beirut Port which it had previously accused Hezbollah of using to manufacture Iranian missiles and concealing explosives. Then, it was taken aback by that substance rapidly turning the "limited" operation behind the first explosion into a disaster and a war crime in the second. If the investigation proves that Israel is indeed involved in Beirut’s disaster, then Israel too shall not go unpunished, no matter how hard it tries to deny, along with Hezbollah and Lebanon, its involvement in the incident of August 4, in a questionable scheme tying between these enemies.
Humanitarian aid for the afflicted population is essential, it is even direly needed, however, it should never dilute the urgency of ending impunity, otherwise, such crimes against humanity, acts of terrorism and crimes of war will become normalized recurrence in Lebanon.
Ethical responsibility requires that the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, daringly requests the immediate dispatch of a fact-finding team before it is too late, and evidence is destroyed. The Security Council will be crippled by procrastination as some of its Member States will hinder calls for an international investigation or the dispatch of a fact-finding team. The International Criminal Court does not have the mandate to intervene as Lebanon, Israel and Syria refused to join it.
Yet, when there is a will there is always a way. The UN General Assembly will not convene under “United for Peace,” which would grant it a mandate similar to that of the Security Council. But it could demand that the Lebanese State complies with calls for international participation in the investigation in crimes against humanity. It could also appeal to the Secretary-General to promptly call the Security Council to dispatch a fact-finding commission.
At the same time, influential States must unite under international law and mobilize legal experts to explore relevant mechanisms for ending any impunity for those who rejected transparency and deliberately concealed evidence, whether they be ministers or presidents, senior or junior officials in all State institutions, or leaders of forces operating outside state the parameters of the state.
Impunity must end now, as failing in doing so in the past has organically contributed to criminal resurgence, as perpetrators exploited such lack of impunity given that the world’s memory is rather weak and accountability inexistent, and that political bargains have always ended or hindered the course of justice.
French President Emmanuel Macron might have taken one of his most historical stands by visiting Lebanon on day one of the disaster that swept through Beirut. Not only did he sympathetically hug a distraught woman amidst the Coronavirus epidemic, but also rebuked and reprimanded all political leaders when he spoke of the “missing funds” from international donations to Lebanon and insisted on channeling aid through NGOs. He stated that he called upon Aoun, Diab and Berri to assume their responsibilities and re-establish confidence, speaking of a new political charter for the Lebanese. Marcon added that there will be no more blank checks given to a regime that no longer enjoys the confidence of its people. He promised to mobilize support through an international conference, stressing that it will not be unconditional and uncontrolled, but support that is governed by transparency and accountability.
Rumor has it that Lebanon’s ruling junta will most likely make use of the aid and donations to float its ranks and turn the situation to its advantage, while it keeps dodging reform and doing patchwork to advance its own interests. Here again, accountability must be ensured internationally, because the cartel pulling the strings of Lebanon has become accustomed to political and financial debauchery, to looting and preying on people’s misery.
The Lebanese themselves must turn against their own sectarianism, their leaders, and the political system governing the country. Let the Lebanese army take charge of the country to save it from what has befallen Beirut. Let there be an international custody to help the Lebanese army salvage the remains of Lebanon, torn apart by its own leaders. ‘All of them, means all of them’. And, let the Lebanese legal practitioners now focus on mobilizing international legislators in an organized and pragmatic fashion to explore options and means of trial and accountability. Impunity ends now!
The biggest bomb since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, detonated the beautiful capital of the East leading to a real disaster. This is not a natural disaster. It is a crime against humanity. Period.
Accountability shall spare no one. Israel, if found implicated, must be held accountable. Let Iran be told, enough is enough. Let there be international action against the Islamic Republic of Iran if it is responsible for storing explosives at Beirut Civil Port, because this would amount to a crime against humanity. The same shall apply to Hezbollah.
Shame on Hassan Diab and his ministers for not resigning. Who brought this wolfman dressed in sheep's clothing? Once a friend, I never imagined him so unscrupulous, as he proved to be in the aftermath of the Beirut tragedy. He has become a clerk answering to Hezbollah at the expense of the Lebanese people. He must leave. But he will not resign because he lacks courage. He must be ousted either through punishment and accountability or by the people who will drag him out of the Serail.
Nabih Berri boasts about being the most seasoned of politicians. However, wisdom is not about being savvy and shrewd. After seeing what happened to Beirut, he, too, must leave unless he stops providing cover to Hezbollah through the “Shiite Duo” and truly dismantles it. Lebanon's Shiites do not deserve to bear the stigma of destroying Beirut because their leaders either participated in or turned a blind eye to storing massive explosives in a civilian port.
Michel Aoun is not the “Father of All”, otherwise he would not have wandered in Beirut Port, an alien from another planet. His reign is not the “powerful reign”, but rather a “reign of failure”. It is in his interest to willingly resign before he is dismissed by force. In people’s minds, his name rhymes with “jinx”. Clear your name, Michel Aoun. Resign. Let the people say farewell with any respect that might be left for you.
This government, clearly oblivious to mass panic, must be dismantled, as it reeks the unbearable stench of the regime. Volunteers were the ones who took to the streets in Mar Mikhael, Gemmayzeh, and Ashrafieh to help people. These young men and women were the ones who carried brooms and put on masks while searching for bodies or removing glass and debris. God bless you, our wonderful children. God bless you.
One last observation – a personal one. My same floor neighbor, in a 60-apartment building, presently all hollowed with dislodged dwellers, a beautiful woman, was killed in front of her daughter and son, barely fifteen and ten years of age. Our other next-door neighbor was rushing to the ground floor after the explosion only to find these two children crying for help, before their severely injured mother. He took the pulse of the dead body, then insisted that the two children accompany him, as they were screaming, refusing to leave their mother's body behind. Sultan was forced to make one of the most difficult decisions in his life, to forcibly draw them away from their dead mother to save their lives. The horrific scene of the two children should be enough to haunt each and every person responsible for what happened.
However, those people know no shame for they are criminals, par excellence. They have always enjoyed impunity, despite their terrorism, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.
Most of the residents of the Skyline Tower, iconic landmark of the port, are young men and women in their forties, graduates of international universities, who work, day and night, to lead a life of normalcy they deserve. Most of the older residents from the diaspora came back home, longing to Beirut, with the earnings of a lifetime of hard work, to invest in this landmark of the port where criminals had hidden explosives in its silos. They killed the dreams of an entire generation without blinking. For they knew what they were doing, they deliberately chose this location to destroy this normalcy, this lifestyle of hard-earned luxury.
Whether they were envious, greedy, ideologues, employees, decision makers or implementers, they shall not go unpunished. They have committed crimes against humanity. Israel too shall not go unpunished if it had any involvement in the Beirut Port crime, whether intentionally or accidentally.
On a personal level, it was God, only God, who protected me, my daughter, and the Beirut Institute team. It is from there, from the tenth floor, in front of Yehia al-Warraq's painting that rejects silencing, that I broadcasted the 13th and final episode of the first season of the e-Policy Circles of Beirut Institute Summit in Abu Dhabi. It was on Wednesday July 29, with the idea of taking a break during August. It was only God’s will that guided me to suspend broadcasting in August, otherwise we would all have been killed. Only God's will had it that I would be in Batroun and not in Beirut on Tuesday, 4th of August.
Nevertheless, the Beirut Institute team and I will not be deterred by displacement and incapacitation. We will find any place, even if it were a deserted street or among the rubble, to resume the Beirut Institute Summit e-Policy Circles on September 9th, only without that painting. We will remain the voice of moderation and modernity. We shall prevail, no matter how insolent extremism, corruption and bankruptcy get.
Our outcry today to the world shall remain: They must not go unpunished. No more impunity!
We will be waiting for you. Join us!

An Emergency Meeting at The Remote Hotel
Ghassan Charbel/Asharq Al-Awsat/August 10/2020
Suddenly, the atmosphere became very tense at the remote hotel. Features of growing turmoil and the smell of fresh sorrow invaded the place. The scenes are horrific. An explosion of the size of an earthquake hit the city.
It killed people and destroyed walls, balconies and windows. Never before had the city been struck by a killer of this kind. As if a series of wars folded in one stab. As if mountains of hatred have attacked the living. A season of death, lethality and destruction.
The hotel residents feared for the country, in which and for which they were martyred. They were afraid that their last identity papers would be lost, the papers that prove their belonging to that place, which fell in the custody of men the size of balconies.
As sailors try to hold together to avoid drowning, they called for a meeting before the official invitation arrived. They all flocked to the hall. Maarouf Saad, Kamal Jumblatt, Tony Franjieh, Bashir Gemayel, Nazem Al-Qadri, Rashid Karami, Dany Chamoun and Elie Hobeika. They were followed by Rafik Hariri, Bassil Fleihan, Antoine Ghanem, Pierre Gemayel, Gebran Tueni, Samir Kassir, George Hawi, Mohammad Shatah, Francois Hajj, Wissam Eid and Wissam Al-Hassan.
Before the opening of the session, Karami asked President Rene Mouawad for the name of the Lebanese Prime Minister, and he replied that it was Hassan Diab.
He commented that he was never against expanding the membership of the Prime Minister’s Club and injecting new blood in it, but he did not believe that this position should be given to an amateur or a trainee.
He said that Lebanon paid a heavy price for an equation that secures the right to share powers and decisions, and that returning to breeding presidents without a history and no future is a return to the time of monopoly.
Mouawad asked the attendees to stand for a minute of silence to mourn those killed in the port explosion, and they responded. The session opened with a discussion on the disaster that struck the Lebanese capital and initial estimates of the high casualties and the enormous property losses. He referred to President Emmanuel Macron’s visit, acknowledging the embarrassment he felt when he heard the visiting president repeat his appeal to Lebanese officials to fight corruption and help themselves so that the world can help them.
Mouawad stopped at the statement of President Michel Aoun, who considered the demand for an international investigation a waste of time. The late president said that the probe into his assassination did not make a single step forward, and that the case remained cold despite the passing of three decades.
Gebran Tueni intervened. He said that Aoun’s position was a continuation of the ambiguous approach he took regarding the wave of assassinations that struck Lebanon in 2005. Back then, he argued that the assassinations should not be politicized, as if they were caused by a dispute over a parking lot. Tueni explained that Aoun’s position was part of his strategy to reach the presidency.
Here, Dany Chamoun interfered, congratulating his daughter Tracy on resigning from her post as Lebanon’s ambassador to Jordan and joining the revolution. He admitted making a big mistake the day he was drawn in by the general’s storm.
Kamal Jumblatt, for his part, expressed relief that his son Walid was opposed to transforming the Baabda Palace into a retirement home for Yarze generals. He acknowledged that he did not regret the circumstances that led to the decision to assassinate him, considering that it was better to sleep dear in a grave than to sleep accused in a palace.
Then Bashir Gemayel spoke with some anger. He said that he did not know the current Lebanese president, stressing there was nothing in common between this president and the officer with the same namesake.
He pointed out that he had long avoided attacking the presidency, but was now aware of the terrible disinformation process that led to the current situation.
Gemayel’s voice rose: “When the official does not dare to wander in the afflicted Ashrafieh area, fearing the anger of its residents, how can he claim to continue to represent them and express their aspirations and interests? Which mandate did the president use to undermine Lebanon’s traditional Arab and international friendships, in exchange for inflating a parliamentary bloc or a ministerial share?
How is a president entitled to waste years of the lives of the Lebanese, while boasting of non-existent power and achievements that lie only in his imagination? How can a president accept that the name of the country under his tenure becomes synonymous with corruption, isolation and failure to the point that the world fears to entrust with blankets for the displaced and infant formula?
Gemayel turned to Hobeika and asked him: “Is it true that General Aoun was your partner in the tripartite agreement that Syria sponsored between the three militias, as you mentioned in your memoirs?” Hobeika replied: “The fact is that secret meetings were held at night between me and General Aoun, once in the town of Halat and other times in his house, and we were close to each other. The military aspect of the tripartite agreement was prepared by Aoun and received through Officer Fouad Al-Ashkar, who was in charge of Aoun’s security.”
“We also agreed to raise problems when Amin Gemayel went to Damascus... Then I sent him that I would attack Samir Geagea in Ashrafieh, so he suggested entering from a place where the Lebanese army is not stationed,” he added.
During the session, Samir Kassir was turning the pages of a book entitled: “Bouteflika ... The Secret Story.” George Hawi noticed that Kassir was highlighting phrases that talk about the damage caused to the president by his brother Said, as well as Bouteflika’s own insistence “not to leave the palace except to the grave.”Rafik Hariri’s intervention was concise. He said he had no grudge against his killers, but he was angry at their insistence on assassinating the nation. He said that he regretted General Aoun’s policy that jeopardized the country, the state, and the Maronites in particular. He called for joining efforts to rebuild what was destroyed. As interventions continued, the news from Beirut got darker. Mouawad suspended the session and announced that the master of the palace had been summoned to appear before the court of old and new martyrs.

Four Comments in the Wake of the Lebanese Disaster
Hazem Saghiehl/Asharq Al-Awsat/August 10/2020
Suddenly, the atmosphere became very tense at the remote ho
1- The Lebanese regime is no longer merely one of “plunder”, “cronyism”, “sectarianism”, or the other familiar descriptions. After the latest disaster, it has become a regime hostile to nature itself. It has become an unrestrained monster.
In addition to those who were killed or went missing, those who were displaced after their homes were destroyed and those who lost their livelihood, the calamity was able to produce geological activity referred to using terms such as "dispersion", "obliteration", or "deracination."
The “Lebanese Hiroshima”, the “Lebanese Chernobyl”, these are phrases used by some of the international media.
We know that "dispersion" is not new to this country, as we’ve seen precedents of it in the quarries in the mountains and in the process of stealing sand from beaches. This time, we went from the sporadic massacres of nature, from pogroms, to a genocidal massacre, to Holocaustization.
Entire neighborhoods are in ruins. The country is now without a capital. A commercial capital by the sea is now without a port.
We know that when nature goes insane, it can destroy itself. Beirut’s ancient history tells of a huge earthquake destroyed, in the middle of the sixth century, the city’s Roman Law School.
We also know that vicious wars chew cities up, or parts of them. World War II is especially notorious for this mission. Recently, we saw Bashar al-Assad and his Russian masters make an art out of the eradication of Aleppo...
The regime in Lebanon combined the madness that can come from nature and the absolute viciousness of war. When it faces its citizens, armed with these two characteristics, it declares only its hatred and contempt for them. They are redundant human beings who are dispensable, them and their world.
What is astonishing about all of this is that these criminals are not an imperial state a totalitarian power or rulers described as charismatic or heroic, who are experts at doing such things. They are frivolity at its most absolute and banality at its purest. With that, they had already survived a revolution that brought hundreds of thousands down to the streets, and they may survive today, despite the last terrible disaster. This calls for much contemplation and even more historical pessimism.
2- It was humiliating to the rulers of Lebanon for the French President Emmanuel Macron to deal with them the way he did. Distinguishing, more than once, between the people and the regime. Between the pain of the governed and the corruption of the rulers. He said that he only met with officials because "decency" required it, and stressed that his country's aid to Lebanon would not get to the hands of the corrupt.
These corrupt officials did nothing but justify his statements, as they all abstained from resigning, and some of them were even preoccupied with clamping down on insults that “encroach” on their detestable names and symbols. Then, they responded by rejecting French medical aid!
The fact is, this schism between those governing and the governed is known to the Lebanese, or many of them. But when a state like France behaves on this basis diplomatically, through its president, this multiplies the affront. However, an affront is incomplete so long as its subject is not offended. This is what happens in Lebanon. 3- Many Lebanese, especially those who welcomed Macron on the streets, expressed their longing for reestablishment of the French mandate. This declaration, coupled with insults to the rulers, came a century after the emergence of "Greater Lebanon" and 77 years after its independence.
This longing is unrealistic, at least because the era of mandates and colonies has ended. However, the experience of the Lebanese, and many peoples in the "Third World," allow for adding the word "unfortunately" after "has ended." Independence and liberation, as countless experiences demonstrate, are not in themselves sufficient to justify themselves and their virtue. They need something else. In Lebanon in particular, some of us believed that, after the small war of 1958 was concluded with a happy ending, Chehabism, then that the 1975-1989 war also had a happy end, reconstruction. Both were not happy endings. Bringing happiness appears to be beyond our capacity, just as fighting corruption and establishing a respected judiciary is beyond us... and to change our rulers on our own.
4- Hassan Nasrallah addressed us again. However, his Eminence the Secretary-General presented the state as innocent thus far. It now faces a first test, one that it may fail and may pass. Thus, we remembered our experience in the October Revolution once again, that his party is, in the end, is the regime’s protector. As for the victimization that he said his party had been subjected, he denounced and condemned it, without stopping to address the reasons behind it. For fighters are those who have doubts when there is an explosion, be it small or large, and before its causes are known. Arms are always accused of destruction. This is how the majority of people think, and this is what they feel. A very small minority may be inclined to accuse the "National Bloc Party" or the "Tashnag Party".

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on August 10-11/2020

Israeli Chief of Staff Accuses Iran of Planting Explosives in Golan Heights
Tel Aviv- Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
The four members of the Syrian cell who died while planting several explosives in Golan Heights earlier this week were operating on Iranian orders, Israel Forces Chief of General Staff Aviv Kochavi said on Friday. Kochavi said Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and al-Quds Brigade were directly responsible for this cell. The General was speaking during a meeting with soldiers from the Maglan reconnaissance unit, who foiled last week's attack. He said that the cell operated on direct Iranian orders, contrary to early assumptions that claimed it belonged to the Lebanese Hezbollah and was trying to avenge the killing of one of its members in Damascus last month. Kochavi stated that the goals of the “war between wars” were to foil the establishment of a radical axis on the northern front, and prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. The General stressed that Israel would continue to work to prevent its enemies from acquiring dangerous weaponry.“We are going to continue this process of striking our enemies and depriving them of these abilities 360 degrees, from the northern arena to Judea and Samaria, in the southern arena and in other various circles that we will not discuss here,” he said.
Kochavi called on his officers to be vigilant, analyze the current situation in the various fields, and propose the best solutions that preserve the Israeli "superiority". Another military official indicated that Tehran’s envoys to the Golan Heights were trying to recruit young Syrians for their military purposes, and a Syrian militia affiliated with Iran was leading its members. He explained that Iran was taking advantage of the dire economic situations in southern Syria, and offered a salary equivalent to $20 a month to each new recruit. The official explained how that was not limited to the cell, but a widely spread phenomenon where hundreds of young Syrians joined the Iranian units. He indicated that Iran’s expansion activities continued despite an Israeli-Russian-Iranian understanding to keep forces 80 kilometers from the frontier on the Golan Heights.

Rouhani: Virus Emergency Could Last Through January
London - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Iran will remain in a state of emergency due to the novel coronavirus until at least January, President Hassan Rouhani said on Sunday. "We have been in this situation for six months and we must prepare ourselves for another six months at least," Rouhani said, adding that this meant any complete easing of safety measures was not in the cards for now. "We must find a middle way between normality and sticking to the virus restrictions," he said in remarks published on his website that appeared to justify those measures he has taken to date to ease the country's response to the virus. The easing of restrictions during the past two months has led people in Iran to pay less attention to the pandemic and the health regulations, dpa reported. It has also led to criticism of the president, as there has been a surge in case numbers, with some 200 deaths a day. Overall, Iran has reported a death toll of more than 18,000 and more than 320,000 infections. The number of deaths has fallen slightly in recent days, however. Experts attribute this to people wearing masks and maintaining social-distancing. The Health Ministry has said this is no reason for complacency. "Our minimum goal in the short term should continue to be to bring the death toll down to the double digits, said Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi in remarks to Isna news agency on Sunday. The police are now able to fine people for failing to follow health rules, mainly those refusing to wear masks.

Iranians Anticipate Rouhani’s ‘Economic Breakthrough’ Mystery
London- Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Iranians currently anticipate the “economic breakthrough” that President Hassan Rouhani promised to announce next week while Iranian officials rejected hints about the possible approval of the bills that allow Tehran to join the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Iranian sources said Sunday that the government could pre-sale oil on the Energy Exchange market to provide liquidity that it needs to ease the load of the US sanctions imposed on the country. In a cabinet meeting last Wednesday, Rouhani said important decisions had been made and would be announced "after the approval of the Supreme Leader" to bring about an "economic breakthrough.” Iran’s Iktisad news website uncovered details of an economic plan, expected to be launched next week. “It looks like the government plans to sell around 200 million barrels of oil in the exchange market to provide liquidity,” the website wrote.
In this regard, Fars agency said that if the price of oil at the time of delivery is higher than it was at the time of the prior purchase then its profits will go to the buyers. “But, if the bond papers are less than the time of prior purchase, then the government would pay buyers the difference at the price of interest rate on long-term deposits,” the agency said. Rouhani’s announcement led some Iranian media outlets to say that the good news is connected with the stock exchange market and the FATF laws. FATF is a multilateral organization overseeing compliance with anti-money laundering and transparency banking rules and regulations. The organization had asked Iran in 2017 to adopt legislation in support of financial transparency and against money-laundering and financing of terrorism. For his part, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said parliament has put a people-oriented economy on its agenda for improving the country's economy through a bill that supports the lower and middle classes of the society. MP Elias Naderan wrote on his twitter account Sunday that the government promised financial breakthroughs in the next week, however, “experience shows that promises have not affected the middle and poor classes.”
Commenting on the speculations that linked Iran with FATF, Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani said on Sunday that Western pressures cannot dissuade Iran from pursuing its main policies. He said Tehran will resolve problems through active resistance and national solidarity."Preventing Iran's strategic cooperation with the East and continued dependence of its national economy on oil [revenues] set the West's core policy towards Iran," Shamkhani wrote on his twitter page. He underlined his country's decision to pursue both policies of close ties with the Eastern block and independence from oil revenues, and vowed that his nation "will go past the existing challenges with active resistance and national solidarity".

Iran Says European Insurers Should Pay Compensation for Downed Ukrainian Plane
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Iran will not compensate Ukraine International Airlines for its plane Tehran accidentally downed in January because the passenger jet was insured by European firms, the head of Iran's Central Insurance Organization said on Monday.
"The Ukrainian plane is insured by European companies in Ukraine and not by Iranian (insurance) companies," said Gholamreza Soleimani, according to the Young Journalists Club news website affiliated with state TV. "Therefore, compensation should be paid by those European companies."
Iran's Revolutionary Guards shot down the Ukraine International Airlines flight with a ground-to-air missile on Jan. 8 just after the plane took off from Tehran, in what Tehran later acknowledged as a “disastrous mistake” by forces who were on high alert during a confrontation with the United States.
Soleimani's comments concerned the aircraft and did not address potential compensation for victims' families. There was no immediate comment from European aviation insurers. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in February that Ukraine was not satisfied with the size of compensation Iran had offered to families of Ukrainians killed in the incident. Ukrainian officials have said that Ukraine would make every effort to maximize the amount of restitution. Last month, Iranian and Ukrainian officials held talks on the compensation, with another round set for October. In a July report, Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization blamed a chain of mistakes - such as a misalignment of a radar system and lack of communication between the air defense operator and his commanders - for the plane crash that killed 176 aboard, including 57 Canadians. The downing occurred at a time of high tension between longtime foes Iran and the United States. Iran was on alert for attacks after it fired missiles at Iraqi bases housing US forces in retaliation for the killing on Jan. 3 of its most powerful military commander, Qassem Soleimani, in a US missile strike at Baghdad airport.

Twitter Should be Legal in Iran, Minister of Information
London - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Iran’s Minister of Information and Communications Technology Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi announced that the ban imposed on Twitter since the “Green Movement” protests in 2009 should be lifted.Twitter should be legal in Iran, said Jahromi in statements carried by the state news agency, adding that the social media platform is banned because it is blacklisted by the judicial and security authorities, but this is due to a review process.
The minister, and many other people in Iran, described the ban as ridiculous, especially that many high-ranking officials and members of the government use the site, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Hassan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and a large number lawmakers and ministers.Jahromi, 37, is the youngest minister in Rouhani's government, and he assumed his position in August 2017 after serving as supervisor of social media content at the Ministry of Intelligence. Reports over the past two years suggested that Jahromi is among the candidates to succeed Rouhani in the 2021 presidential elections, especially after Khamenei affirmed the desire for a "young" government. This is not the first time that the Minister has made strong calls to ease the ban on social media, even though he is accused of being behind the block on Telegram messaging application. Observers also blame him for the internet cut-off during the protests in Iran last November. The Iranian authorities block thousands of websites in the country, but most people overcome the ban by using software and phone applications. A study showed that more than half of Iranians use at least one of the banned social media networks in the country, namely Facebook.

Baghdad, Erbil Coordinate Intelligence, Military Operations
Baghdad- Fadhel al-Nashmi/Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Iraq's military spokesman Yehya Rasool unveiled a joint military cooperation between the federal government and Kurdistan to exchange intelligence information and track down ISIS terrorist cells in addition to filling the military gap in some Iraqi cities and provinces. Rasool highlighted joint security meetings and understandings between Iraqi Joint Forces Command and Kurdistan border guards. The meetings focused on discussing cooperation and coordination with regard to conducting joint military operations in some areas where intelligence information indicates the presence of ISIS terrorist cells, as well as exchanging intelligence information. Rasool pointed out that "the areas in which joint cooperation takes place start from Diyala, Khanaqin, Kirkuk, and other regions and other areas witnessing terrorist ISIS activities. Earlier, the Iraqi joint forces conducted security operations to secure several regions within “Heroes of Iraq 4”. Moreover, the Military Intelligence Directorate stated Sunday that two ISIS terrorists were arrested in Kirkuk governorate. In a statement, the directorate said: "The arrest took place in an operation carried out according to accurate intelligence information", adding that the terrorists used to provide logistical support to ISIS, including food and communication devices. Besides, they participated in the clashes with the Iraqi security forces. "Terrorists are wanted by the judiciary under an arrest warrant," the statement indicated. In another context, Anbar Criminal Court, in its first instance, issued a death sentence by hanging for the criminal who killed soldier Mustafa al-Athari in Falluja in May 2015. Athatri's body was hung on the Fallujah Bridge, sparking a wave of popular anger. The Media Center of the Supreme Judicial Council stated that “the convicted person confessed to having committed the crime, and the court issued the verdict in accordance with Article 4/1 of the Anti-Terrorism Law."

Turkey Sets Up Military Post Near Latakia
Ankara - Saeed Abdulrazek/Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Turkish forces have set up a new military post up on the hill of Al-Raqim in the northern countryside of Syria’s Latakia as Jabal al-Akrad witnessed intense airstrikes and shelling. With the new Turkish move on Sunday, its military posts in the de-escalation zone in northwestern Syria reached 67. A Turkish column also entered via Kafr Losin crossing, north of Idlib, carrying tanks, armored vehicles, and logistical materials. The column, which consists of about 40 vehicles, headed towards positions of Turkish troops. Further, Syrian regime forces renewed rocket attacks and shelling, targeting sites in Al-Bara, Kansafra and Al-Mawzarah in Jabal Al-Zawiyah in the southern countryside of Idlib along with intensive Russian overflights. On the other hand, regime forces targeted a civilian car with a guided missile in Tadil village in the western countryside of Aleppo, which burned it down, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Tribes, Syrian Regime Accused of Inciting Chaos East of Euphrates
Qamishli - Kamal Sheikho/Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Joint chairman of the Syrian Democratic Forces Riad Darrar accused on Sunday three sides of standing behind the assassination of prominent Arab tribal elders and dignitaries in the East Euphrates region. “The Ankara-backed Syrian Tribal Council, the Syrian regime and ISIS cells are responsible for inciting wars and ethnic conflicts between the people of the region,” Darrar said. His statement came as the international coalition and SDF members met with tribal elders and dignitaries in Al-Mohassan village in Hajin town in the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor to discuss the deteriorating political and security situation, and strategies on appropriate solutions. The tribal elders demanded the international coalition to provide intelligence support to SDF so that they could eliminate all terrorist cells in the area. Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said unidentified gunmen targeted with an RPG a “Self-Defense” post in the village of Jadidat Ekaydat in the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor, injuring many members.“An SDF military force arrested nine smugglers near the village of Al-Fatsa, east of Raqqa, as smugglers tried to traffic some 25 men and women from regime-controlled areas into SDF-held areas,” it said. Several dignitaries and elders of Raqqa tribes issued a statement expressing their full rejection to the policy of the Syrian regime and Iranian forces. They stressed their full support to Al-Ekaydat tribe, demanding the SDF to open a comprehensive investigation into the murder of a prominent elder.

Aguila Saleh in Cairo to Discuss International Solution to Libya Crisis
Cairo – Khaled Mahmoud/Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Speaker of the east-based Libyan parliament Aguila Saleh kicked off on Sunday an official visit to Cairo where he held talks with Egyptian, American and western officials as part of international and regional efforts aimed at reaching a political solution that prevents the eruption of a war over the strategic city of Sirte.Informed Libyan sources told Asharq Al-Awsat that negotiations discussed the possibility of the formation of a new government to replace the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord, which is headed by Fayez al-Sarraj.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said Saleh’s talks will focus on the American proposal to set up an arms-free zone in Sirte and resume oil production. Negotiations had stressed the need to form a new government in Libya in line with Saleh’s previous suggestion to form a new Presidential Council, which would be comprised of a president and two deputies. Saleh also discussed American and international pledges that GNA forces would not advance on Sirte and al-Jufra should the Libyan National Army (LNA) withdraw from them. Such a pledge depends on the fair distribution of oil revenues and ensuring that they do not go to GNA militias or mercenaries that Turkey had flown in from Syria, added the sources. The Libyan delegation held virtual talks in Cairo with US National Security Council Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa Major General Miguel Correa and Ambassador to Libya Richard Norland. Head of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee Youssef al-Akoury, who was present at the talks, stressed the need to put an end to foreign meddling in Libyan affairs. He also underlined the importance of resuming oil production and that its revenues be fairly and transparently distributed. The American delegation, for its part, stressed the important role played by the Libyan parliament in resolving the crisis seeing as it is the legitimate party in the political dialogue. It underscored the need for Libyans to work together to eliminate foreign presence in their country.

Hamas Sends ‘Message’ to Israel by Firing Rockets into Sea
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
The Gaza Strip's rulers Hamas fired rockets into the sea on Monday after repeated exchanges of fire with Israel in recent days, Palestinian security sources and eyewitnesses said. At least eight rockets were seen in the sky, heading toward the Mediterranean Sea, said AFP journalists in the coastal strip, which has been under Israeli blockade for more than a decade. The interior ministry of the Palestinian enclave under Hamas control since 2007 referred to "an act of resistance". The rockets were a "message" to Israel to let it know that armed groups in Gaza will not "remain silent" in the face of an Israeli blockade and "aggression", a source close to Hamas told AFP. The source noted that Monday's rocket fire coincided with the recent launch of incendiary balloons into Israel. In the past week, such balloons have flown three times from Gaza into Israel, each time triggering retaliatory strikes against Hamas positions. The latest came Sunday night when the Israeli military announced that one of its aircraft had struck at a Hamas observation post in northern Gaza.

Iraqi Factions Set Conditions ahead of PM’s Washington Visit
Baghdad – Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 10 August, 2020
Iraqi political forces and blocs have started to make demands and lay out conditions ahead of Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s anticipated visit to the United States on August 20.Armed factions have expressed their skepticism over the motives of the trip, while politicians have said that it was aimed at establishing some form of “international balance.”Spokesman of the “Kataib Sayyed al-Shuhada” faction, Kazem al-Fartousi said Sunday the visit is aimed at “offering guarantees over the dismantling of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF).”If he cannot dismantle the PMF, then he will exert efforts to limit its role, he revealed. The PM will also offer “guarantees to loosen Iraqi-Iranian relations,” he claimed. “Kadhimi had declared his allegiance to the US before his appointment as PM and he is now beginning to act according to American interests. He will also work on combating the resistance factions.”
Member of the parliamentary foreign relations committee, Rami al- Sukaini countered these allegations, saying the premier’s visit is aimed at achieving “some form of balance and supporting and bolstering Iraq’s interests.”
He told the official Iraqi news agency that the trip will tackle numerous economic, political and security affairs. “The Iraqi prime minister must change his approach and this can only be achieved by striking a balance within the government and avoiding leaning towards one camp at the expense of the other,” he explained.International powers are at play in Iraq and that should persuade forces to establish some form of “balance and calm on the internal and external fronts,” he added. MP Habib Karim told Asharq Al-Awsat that Kadhimi’s declared agenda of the trip reveals that it carries a “clear roadmap for the nature of bilateral cooperation” that can be implemented on the ground. Energy, health, economic and investment files alone can return bilateral relations between nations back on the right path, he continued.
Political science professor of at the University of Kufa, Ayad al-Anbar noted to Asharq Al-Awsat: “Kadhimi had paid a visit to Iran before his trip to the US. He was first supposed to travel to Saudi Arabia, but the trip was postponed by mutual agreement.” “The Washington visit, therefore, comes at an important time and will primarily serve Iraq’s interest,” he added. He stressed that the visit must address a roadmap that the Iraqi government must follow in tackling important files, especially security and economic ones, that require American support. Failure to tackle these important issues will render the visit a failure, he added, noting that Iraq can act as a meeting point for regional rivals, not an open ground for their disputes.

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on August 10-11/2020

Trump, US face pivotal UN vote on Iran
Rebecca Kheel and Laura Kelly/The Hill/August 10/2020
The Trump administration’s Iran strategy will face a key test this week as the United States calls for a vote at the United Nations on its resolution to extend an arms embargo against the Islamic Republic.
If the resolution fails — which experts say is the most likely scenario — the Trump administration has threatened to invoke snapback sanctions, which supporters of the Iran nuclear deal fear will be the agreement’s death knell.
The gambit also risks further alienating the United States from its allies, which continue to support the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal and have rebuffed the Trump administration’s so-called maximum pressure campaign against Tehran.
“The Trump administration knows that the arms embargo isn’t going to get renewed and, more than anything, this is a driver for them to try to invoke snapback and destroy what's left of the JCPOA,” said Ilan Goldenberg, senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security.
At issue is a U.N. Security Council resolution that was passed in 2015 in support of the nuclear deal between Iran and several world powers that President Trump withdrew the United States from in 2018. Under the resolution, a ban on imports and exports of conventional weapons to and from Iran is set to lift Oct. 18. This past week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Security Council would vote in the coming week on the U.S. resolution to extend the embargo.
“The proposal we put forward is eminently reasonable,” Pompeo said at a press briefing. “One way or another, we will do the right thing. We will ensure that the arms embargo is extended.”
But Russia and China, which wield veto power in the U.N. Security Council, have already rejected the U.S. bid.
In the face of likely defeat, Pompeo has threatened another tactic: argue the United States remains a participant in the nuclear deal as defined by the Security Council resolution despite Trump having withdrawn from the agreement. Doing so could allow the United States to invoke a snapback of all U.N. sanctions that were in place before the nuclear deal, thereby extending the arms embargo.
“We’re deeply aware that snapback is an option that’s available to the United States, and we’re going to do everything within America’s power to ensure that that arms embargo is extended,” Pompeo said. “I’m confident that we will be successful.”
The United States would have to trigger snapback sanctions by Sept. 17 at the latest to have them in place by the time the arms embargo expires.
In an additional wrinkle, the State Department’s top Iran envoy, Brian Hook, announced Thursday his departure from the administration. He will be replaced by Elliott Abrams, who has been the administration’s top Venezuela envoy since 2019.
Over the last several months, Hook has traveled the world seeking to build support for the U.S. resolution to extend the arms embargo, with little apparent success. In a virtual appearance at the Aspen Security Forum the day before his resignation, Hook stressed support for extending the embargo among Gulf nations and Israel, adding that “no one thinks that what is missing from the Middle East are more Iranian weapons.”
Abrams, an Iran hard-liner, is perhaps most known for pleading guilty to withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra affair. He was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.
“Hook’s departure and replacement by Abrams — a hardline, veteran Middle East and Latin America hand — raises the risks surrounding the final few months of Trump’s first term,” the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group said in a note to clients and the media this past week.
The firm previously said last month that the United States invoking snapback sanctions “will raise overall tension with Iran and introduce new uncertainty into the calculations of the Iranian leadership” and “could induce Iran to take more risky action in the nuclear realm, or retaliate for JCPOA snapback in Iraq or the region.”The arms embargo itself has bipartisan support among U.S. lawmakers as well as support among the United States’s European allies.
But the Trump administration’s approach as it seeks to rally international support for renewing the embargo has rankled those same allies.
“Other JCPOA signatories do not necessarily like to see the arms embargo be lifted, but they view Trump's actions as dishonest and aimed at simply killing the JCPOA,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
A European diplomat echoed that position to The Hill.
“In general we would support the arms embargo, but we don’t like some of the unilateral sanctions that the U.S. are imposing on Iran,” the diplomat said.
In a phone call Friday with French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump discussed “the importance of extending the U.N. arms embargo on Iran,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement.
When Pompeo took his argument for extending the sanctions directly to the Security Council in a June speech, representatives of Britain, France and Germany expressed angst at both the expiration of the embargo and the United States’s threat to invoke snapback sanctions.
“It is very unfortunate that the United States left the JCPOA and by doing this actually violated international law,” Germany’s U.N. ambassador, Christoph Heusgen, said at the June virtual meeting.
Whether the United States snapping back sanctions ultimately kills the nuclear deal depends on how Iran responds, said Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
“Everything will depend on what the Iranian response will be, and it's a little hard to predict,” she said. “I still think they'll just scream and yell and say it's illegitimate and that they still intend to return to the deal if a future U.S. administration does, especially if they have really strong support from the Russians and the Chinese.”It’s also possible, she said, that even if the Trump administration claims victory in reimposing sanctions, other countries will ignore the sanctions, particularly Russia and China, which are the countries most likely to sell Iran weapons.
“Other members of the Security Council will reject the U.S. standing to do that since the U.S. announced that it was no longer a participant to the JCPOA, even if it wants to pretend otherwise now for this purpose,” she said. “So it’s going to be a colossal mess.”
A U.N. Security Council diplomat similarly raised the possibility that member countries wouldn’t reimpose sanctions regardless of the U.S. efforts.
Trump vows 'deal with Iran within four weeks' if reelected
Trump, Biden tactical battle intensifies
“They could try to get the U.N. to impose additional sanctions, as the snapback mechanism calls for, but if member states don’t want to do that, they wouldn’t impose those sanctions,” the diplomat told The Hill.
Still, the Center for a New American Security’s Goldenberg argued the 2015 Security Council resolution is a “key piece of the architecture that keeps what’s left of the JCPOA alive.”
“If you break it, you might just collapse the entire deal. Nobody really knows what will happen,” he said. “The administration’s position is that lifting the arms embargo is absolutely unacceptable. But their real position is, we want to break the JCPOA, and we think we can use this to do it.”

How the Middle East Can Hedge Against a Biden Presidency
Richard Goldberg/Newsweek/August 10/2020
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are in for a rude awakening if former Vice President Joe Biden defeats President Donald Trump in November and Democrats take control of the U.S. Senate in addition to the House. The only thing that might save them: normalizing relations with Israel.
For now, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi seem preoccupied with whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will declare sovereignty over roughly 30 percent of the West Bank, consistent with the Trump peace plan proposal. The UAE ambassador to Washington, Yousef al Otaiba, even penned a column for a leading Israeli newspaper warning that a sovereignty declaration would be a setback for Israeli-Gulf ties. Somehow, while President Trump’s decisions to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, move the American embassy there and defund the UN agency for Palestinian refugees merited little more than pro forma foreign ministry press releases, the Emiratis are waging a full (royal) court press to stop Israel from asserting sovereignty over a slice of the West Bank.
With only a few months left until the November presidential election, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and Emirati Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) might need to readjust their priorities. Without peace treaties with Israel, their support in Washington could soon collapse. Wasting time and energy fighting an Israeli sovereignty declaration in the West Bank—which may not even happen—will not insulate them from a Democratic takeover next January.
A Biden administration will be tempted to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, returning to the Obama-era strategy of seeking a balance of power between the Islamic Republic and its Sunni Arab neighbors. The revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (i.e., Iran nuclear deal) would be compounded by congressional efforts to cut off arms sales to the Gulf—or condition them on Saudi Arabia and the UAE ending all operations in Yemen and ending their embargo on Qatar. A renewed push for sanctions on Saudi leaders in response to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi is also likely. Biden and his advisors would face enormous political pressure to acquiesce from the more radically pro-Iran, anti-Gulf faction of the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, with Iran once again flush with cash from U.S. sanctions relief and importing advanced conventional arms from Russia and China, MBS and MBZ will have only one true ally in the Middle East: the State of Israel. Sovereignty questions in a strip of land more than 1,000 miles away will seem irrelevant when compared to an existential struggle for survival in a region where the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism seeks hegemony.
But what if MBS and MBZ had an ace in the hole—a political backstop to lock in American security guarantees for another half-century and give a would-be Biden administration some ammunition to push back on the most radical proposals in Congress? To make their case for continued U.S. arms sales and political support, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi should demonstrate their ability to advance the U.S. vision of Arab-Israeli peace and regional integration.
In effect, the Saudis and Emiratis should borrow a winning strategy from Jordan and Egypt, both of which have peace treaties with Israel. Jordanian officials claim that Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley would jeopardize Jordan’s treaty with Israel, but King Abdullah knows that his influence in the House and Senate Appropriations Committees would wash away if the treaty were ever abandoned. Even in the rockiest of times for Cairo—the election of the Muslim Brotherhood to power and an ensuing military coup—U.S. military assistance to Egypt survived, albeit with conditions, because of the Camp David Accords. The move would come with other potential benefits, too. Announcing a peace agreement with Israel would hand President Trump a timely and historic foreign policy victory—facilitating Middle East peace—a transformational accomplishment of such magnitude that voters otherwise distracted by the novel coronavirus will take note. Should Trump win in November, the Gulf would gain important new chits with an unencumbered second-term president.
Conventional wisdom of the pre-Iran deal era posited that the Arab world could not normalize relations with Israel until all Palestinian-related issues were resolved. But the last four years should have dispelled any lingering fears in Gulf capitals that normalization with Israel would spark an “Arab street revolt.”
The Palestinians already point fingers at Saudi Arabia for undermining their cause—most recently criticizing a television series that promotes ties with Israel. Iran already declares that the Gulf states “betray Palestine by helping Israel.” And yet—even with the United States recognizing the holy city of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State of Israel—the momentum toward normalization continues to pick up steam.
If there is a cost to Sunni Arab regimes for publicly associating with Israel, those costs are largely sunk. The secret relationship is no longer secret. The question is whether Gulf leaders have the vision and political will to reap the untapped strategic benefits by formalizing a relationship that everyone already knows exists. If MBS and MBZ want to establish a politically impenetrable course for U.S.-Gulf relations, now is the time for them to make peace with Israel.
*Richard Goldberg, a former National Security Council official and U.S. House and Senate aide, is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @rich_goldberg.

The State Department has a Turkey problem
Michael Rubin/Washington Examinar/August 10/2020
By any reasonable metric, Turkey is a rogue regime. Put aside the 46-year occupation of northern Cyprus with its ethnic cleansing and open theft of resources. Ignore also the ethnic cleansing of Turkey’s own Kurdish population. The world rightly condemned Syrian President Bashar Assad for his deliberate targeting of civilian neighborhoods in Aleppo, but the Turkish army did the same in Nusaybin, Cizre, and Sur.
Turkey’s track record of terror support
Instead, consider President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s broader record:
Turkey apparently supplied weaponry to Boko Haram in Nigeria.
He brushed aside the International Criminal Court indictment against Sudanese President Omar al Bashir and hundreds of thousands of dead in Darfur because “no Muslim could perpetrate a genocide,” a sentiment which also makes a mockery of the Armenian genocide.
When al Qaeda briefly took over northern Mali, Ahmet Kavas, an Erdogan-appointee, defended al Qaeda.
Erdogan not only embraced Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group fighting not only Israel but also the Palestinian Authority, but SADAT (a private Islamist paramilitary group run by one of his top former advisers) also allegedly helped the terrorist group launder money.
Erdogan masterminded a scheme to allow Iran to bypass sanctions, exposed spies monitoring Iran’s nuclear program, and according to a Hamas representative, even met the late Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani in Ankara.
Turkey’s behavior vis-a-vis the Islamic State crossed the line into terror sponsorship. Erdogan not only enabled the group with logistical support, weaponry, and providing a safe haven, but leaked emails show his family also profited from it. For Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi to be found within 3 miles of the Turkish border in an area dominated by Turkish forces is as much evidence of Turkey’s double-game as discovering Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad was of Pakistan’s duplicity.
Since the defeat of the Islamic State, Turkey’s complicity has only become more obvious. Offered a green light by U.S. Special Envoy James Jeffery, a former ambassador to Turkey, Turkish forces and their proxies invaded Kurdish-controlled areas of Syria and almost immediately began ethnically cleansing them. The U.S. military has concluded that Turkey “actively supports several hardline Islamist militias and groups ‘engaged in violent criminal activities.’” While the world laments and pays lip service to Yezidi women and children enslaved, raped, and otherwise victimized by the Islamic State, Yezidi slaves remain in bondage in both Turkey and areas of Syria controlled by Turkish proxies. Turkish-backed forces kidnap and rape women with impunity in areas of Syria they now occupy. A fatwa governing the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army allows them to seize property from their opponents, that is, the U.S.-allied Syrian Defense Forces. In effect, it provides religious cover for the ethnic cleansing in which the Turkish-backed groups engage.
Erdogan’s insincerity about the Islamic State is evidenced by the numbers of Islamic State veterans now fighting with Turkish-backed proxy forces in Syria and elsewhere. One year ago, the Rojava Information Center (a research institution whose careful research Turkey has never been able to dispute) released a database of 40 Islamic State veterans; they and other members of Turkish-backed groups are essentially agents of Turkey and are on the payrolls of either Turkey’s Ministry of Defense or its intelligence service.
Consider, for example, Saed al Shahed al Antare. Today, he works as a translator for Turkish forces in Tel Abyad. When the Islamic State controlled the area, he worked in its intelligence service. Abdullah Ahmed al Abdullah likewise worked for Islamic State intelligence but today is working for Turkish forces at the looted grain silos at Sere Kaniye. Faiz al Aqal, the Islamic State’s governor of Raqqa, was present for meetings with Turkish officials in Tel Abyad where he reportedly sought to negotiate a deal to put his family in charge of a local militia with Turkish support. Turkey could have arrested al Aqal but did not do so; a U.S. drone strike two months ago, however, permanently removed him from the battlefield.
The list goes on. Khosayi Said al Aziz fought in the Damascus countryside and Homs for the Islamic State; he subsequently participated in Afrin’s ethnic cleansing on behalf of Turkey. Nor are Islamic State veterans only fighting for Turkey in Syria; Erdogan has transferred other al Qaeda and Islamic State loyalists to Libya to fight for his proxies there.
Not only do these cases (and these are just a few of the dozens which have emerged) expose Turkey’s counter-terror justification for the invasion of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria as a lie, but it also shows where Erdogan’s ideological sympathies lie. When the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army went into Kurdish-controlled areas of Syria, they did so under a fatwa declaring their reason not to be counterterrorism, but rather “jihad for the sake of Allah” against “separatists … [and] atheists who mock religion.”
Within the United States, Turkey has activated a plan to conduct espionage through what appears to be a network of undeclared foreign agents, such as the Turkish Heritage Organization and the SETA Foundation. Its efforts to subvert U.S. law with regard to the Halkbank case are an affront to Congress and the U.S. judiciary. And the attack on peaceful protesters in the heart of Washington, D.C., is a tactic undertaken previously only by regimes such as the Islamic Republic of Iran and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.
The State Department’s soft spot for Turkey
This brings us back to the State Department. While the Pentagon, the vast majority of congressmen from both parties, the Treasury Department, and the intelligence community recognize the reality of Turkey’s transformation under Erdogan, a core group of U.S. diplomats and State Department appointees continue to apologize for and rationalize Turkish behavior and dilute measures to hold Turkey to account.
According to U.S. officials, longtime State Department employees, as well as foreign diplomats and leaders, Special Envoy James Jeffrey (and behind the scenes, his deputy Richard Outzen) regularly raised eyebrows with his advocacy for Turkey’s positions, defense of Erdogan’s narratives, and denial of evidence about Turkey’s regional malfeasance. The end result was not simply a robust policy debate but that it hemorrhaged U.S. credibility among other states in the region. Rather than strengthen American diplomacy, Jeffrey and Outzen weakened it to the benefit not only of Turkey, but also Russia and Assad’s Syria.
Syria, however, is not the only file where the State Department’s Turkey lobby has undercut policy implementation. During three crises (the Evros crisis in which Turkey sought to weaponize migrants to overwhelm Greek borders, Turkey’s incursions in Cyprus’ exclusive economic zone, and the recent Turkish military challenge to Greece’s exclusive economic zone and sovereignty over Kastelorizo island), a small cadre of Turkey-centered diplomats appears to have watered down the initial State Department reaction so that subsequent statements were noticeably weaker than even European Union statements. Whereas European diplomats are not afraid to assign responsibility, too often, the State Department infuses its statements with moral equivalence when, in reality, Turkey is the aggressor or the only party to dispute territory. This was clearly seen recently when the State Department called on Turkey to refrain from conducting a seismic survey in “disputed waters” when referring to Greek waters disputed alone and without any legal basis by Turkey.
The Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership Act, signed into law last December, requires the State Department to deliver three unclassified reports to Congress that would highlight Turkish violations in the Aegean Sea, incursions into Cypriot waters and exclusive economic zone, and other malign influences in the region. The due date for these reports has passed, but the State Department’s pro-Turkey diplomats appear to be dragging their feet finalizing them and obstructing their delivery in violation of U.S. law. This obfuscation appears par for the course since former Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell returned to the think-tank world last year and left career State Department official Philip Reeker, the principal deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs, in charge of the broader portfolio.
Matt Palmer, deputy assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, has reportedly sought to compel the Cypriot government to strike an energy bargain with Turkish Cyprus even without resolving the underlying problem of Turkey’s occupation and control of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. In effect, this undermines longstanding U.S. policy, runs contrary to international law, and sets back peace by convincing Turkey that with enough patience, the State Department will support a solution that justifies its past and current aggression.
The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, passed overwhelmingly by both the House of Representatives and Senate, imposed sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Turkey fell afoul of the sanction when it purchased the S-400 from Russia and allegedly tested the S-400 radar by tracking American-built F-16s previously provided to Turkey. Despite such clear violations, the State Department continues to undermine the law's implementation out of deference to Turkey.
Conclusion
There is no dispute that Turkey has become a source of instability in the Eastern Mediterranean. Evidence is not overwhelming that Turkey has become a terror sponsor on a global scale. It occupies chunks of three countries and covets even more as Erdogan openly questions the Lausanne Treaty. Perhaps some U.S. diplomats, charmed by their time in Ankara and Istanbul, imagine that by acquiescing to Turkish grievances, no matter how outlandish and unjustified they may be, they can restore the U.S.-Turkey partnership.
Jeffrey may sincerely think that by bending to almost every Erdogan demand or betraying the Kurds who fought side-by-side with the U.S. to defeat Turkish-backed Islamic State fighters, he can somehow check Russia’s influence in Syria. In reality, however, Jeffrey’s actions were a gift not only to Erdogan but to Russian President Vladimir Putin as well.
Rather than bolster security in the Eastern Mediterranean, State Department equivocation has undermined it. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo may slow-roll Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act implementation out of deference to President Trump, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. The State Department has a huge Turkey problem, and until it begins operating in conformity to U.S. law and congressional intent, for a single purpose and as part of a coherent national strategy, and in conformity to U.S. interests, the national security of the U.S. will suffer.

TikTok: China's Trojan Horse to Indoctrinate America
Gordon G. Chang/Gatestone Institute/August 10, 2020
At the moment, ByteDance is in negotiations with Microsoft and Twitter to sell TikTok. Yet a sale will not by itself end the threat. Any new owner will have to go over line after line of code to insulate TikTok from Chinese interference.
Even an exhaustive review may not be sufficient, because Beijing will still know the general architecture of the software, thereby facilitating further manipulation of the app. As Dabrowa told Gatestone, "My team discovered that a foreign actor may come in the backdoor and change the feed."
In the meantime, Trump's 45-day period, plus the time needed to review software, give China plenty of opportunity to interfere in the upcoming American elections.
That means Trump last week with his executive order may have saved American democracy but maybe not his own presidency.
President Donald Trump has issued an executive order that just might save America's democracy. The order will prohibit Americans from any transaction with ByteDance Ltd., a Chinese company that owns the TikTok video-sharing mobile app. Pictured: The entrance to the headquarters of ByteDance in Beijing. (Photo by Noel Celis / AFP via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump on Thursday issued an executive order that just might save America's democracy.
Using emergency powers, he prohibited, after the expiration of a 45-day period, Americans from any transaction with ByteDance Ltd., a privately owned Chinese company, or any of its subsidiaries. Prohibited transactions, the order states, will be those "identified" by the Secretary of Commerce.
The order effectively bans ByteDance's TikTok, a video-sharing mobile application, from the United States at the end of 45 days.
TikTok has been accused of surveilling users, censoring content, and mishandling information of minors. There are also concerns the app has vulnerabilities, allowing the surreptitious downloading of malicious software on devices. The most important allegation involves manipulation of users.
The app, which the New York Times called "China's first truly global internet success story," is wildly popular, especially among teenagers and tweens. Available in 39 languages in more than 150 markets, last year TikTok was the world's second-most downloaded non-gaming app.
There are, according to Trump's executive order, more than a billion downloads of TikTok worldwide and more than 175 million in the United States alone. There are, analysts estimate, in excess of 800 million active monthly users.
TikTok is addictive, but that should come as no surprise. It was designed to be such, powered by perhaps the world's most sophisticated artificial intelligence for this purpose. TikTok delivers, perhaps better than any other app, customized content.
"If you want to know a person, all you have to do is look at their TikTok feed," Jonathan Bass, who as CEO of PTM Images is a buyer of social-media advertising, told Gatestone.
"The feed reveals, in detail, the sum of a person's preferences."
"Unlike Facebook, TikTok, because it uses artificial intelligence to populate a newsfeed before you even add a single friend to the platform, creates a profile of who you are, including your fears and vulnerabilities," Paul Dabrowa, an Australian national security expert, said to this site.
Bass told me about his friend's nerdy son, who was never was able to attract more than a hundred Instagram followers. On TikTok, however, he garnered 26,000 of them in just two weeks.
Why is this nerd so popular? TikTok's algorithm, able to identify thousands of data points, sent his videos to people it knew shared his nerdy likes and dislikes.
Data is power. Artificial intelligence permits Beijing to profile a user and then to figure out what will motivate him or her. Specifically, TikTok uses data to curate content. Curated content, in turn, motivates people to act in certain ways. This is thought to be especially easy to do with the impressionable young, nerdy and otherwise.
TikTok, therefore, is a powerful selling platform. There is obviously no damage to U.S. national security if you were to use the app to sell, as does Bass, framed pictures, coffee table knick-knacks, and other accent pieces for the home.
But what if you are trying to bring down the American government? TikTok would be extraordinarily useful. As Dabrowa told Gatestone, "My team discovered that TikTok can be used to trigger desired responses and behaviors."
As he wrote in a private note, "weaponized propaganda," especially when powered by AI, "can trigger wars, economic collapse, riots, and protests of all kinds." "It can, Dabrowa states, "also destroy the credibility of government institutions and turn a population against itself."
Some believe Beijing changed TikTok's algorithm to inflame the George Floyd protests, which flared across the country in hours. Bass thinks the app convinced college-attending white women to identify with poor black males because it promoted the narrative that both groups had been denied opportunities.
China has the ability to do that. Engineers working for Douyin, TikTok's sister site in China, manage TikTok's algorithms, including the algorithms determining which videos are shown to users. That access gives Beijing the ability to "boost the signal" — curate content with powerful AI to motivate people to act in ways that China desires.
Did Beijing boost the signal in June? Many teens at that time, by reserving seats with no intention of showing up, used TikTok to substantially reduce attendance at President Trump's Tulsa rally. "Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/fake ticket reservations," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, bragged in a Twitter reply to then Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
At the moment, ByteDance is in negotiations with Microsoft and Twitter to sell TikTok. Yet a sale will not by itself end the threat. Any new owner will have to go over line after line of code to insulate TikTok from Chinese interference.
Even an exhaustive review may not be sufficient, because Beijing will still know the general architecture of the software, thereby facilitating further manipulation of the app. As Dabrowa told Gatestone, "My team discovered that a foreign actor may come in the backdoor and change the feed."
TikTok certainly poses a long-term threat. "If I can over time change your mindset, I can program you," Bass says. TikTok, with videos every day, is programming America's impressionable young.
In the meantime, Trump's 45-day period, plus the time needed to review software, give China plenty of opportunity to interfere in the upcoming American elections.
That means Trump last week with his executive order may have saved American democracy but maybe not his own presidency.
*Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow, and member of its Advisory Board.
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TikTok Is Inane. China’s Imperial Ambition is Not.
Niall Ferguson/Bloomberg /August 10/2020
It’s hard to get past the initial sheer inanity of TikTok.
I spent half an hour trying to make sense of the endless feed of video snippets of ordinary people doing daft things with their dogs or in their kitchens or in the gym. I figured out the viral memes of the moment: animals dancing to Tono Rosario’s “Kulikitaka,” the suspenseful unveiling of hunks or hounds to the repeated words, “Please don’t be ugly.” I asked my eight-year-old son what I should look out for. He recommended the dancing ferret. I never found it.
Thirty minutes of TikTok left me with just one burning question: How can this thing be a threat to US national security?
And then I had the epiphany. TikTok is not just China’s revenge for the century of humiliation between the Opium Wars and Mao’s revolution. It is the opium — a digital fentanyl, to get our kids stoked for the coming Chinese imperium.
First, the back story — which you’ll need if you, like me, never got hooked on Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, and still use the Internet like a very fast version of your university library, and begin emails with “Dear …”
The year is 2012, and Zhang Yiming, a Chinese tech entrepreneur who briefly worked at Microsoft, founds ByteDance Ltd. as a smartphone-focused content provider. His AI-powered news aggregator Toutiao is a hit. In November 2017, he pays $1 billion for a lip-synching app called Musical.ly, which already has a growing user community that tilts young (12 to 24) and female and is established in the US Zhang then merges Musical.ly with his own short-video app TikTok, known in China as Douyin. The thing spreads faster than Covid-19: TikTok now has 800 million monthly active users around the globe. And it’s far more contagious: Just under half of US teenage internet users have used TikTok. If it were a pathogen, it would be the Black Death. But it’s an app, so ByteDance is now worth $100 billion.
So what’s the secret of TikTok’s success? The best answers I’ve seen come from Ben Thompson, whose Stratechery newsletter has become essential reading on all the things tech. First, Thompson wrote last month, the history of analog media already told us that “humans like pictures more than text, and moving pictures most of all.” Second, TikTok’s video creation tools are really “accessible and inspiring for nonprofessional videographers.” Translation: Idiots can use them.
Third, unlike Facebook, TikTok is not a social network. It’s an AI-based algorithmic feed that uses all the data it can get about each user to personalize content. “By expanding the library of available video from those made by your network to any video made by anyone on the service,” Thompson argues, “Douyin/TikTok leverages the sheer scale of user-generated content … and relies on its algorithms to ensure that users are only seeing the cream of the crop.”
In other words, “think of TikTok as being a mobile-first YouTube,” not Facebook with cool video. It’s “an entertainment entity predicated on internet assumptions about abundance, not Hollywood assumptions about scarcity.”
So what’s not to like? The answer would seem to be quite a lot.
In February, TikTok was fined $5.7 million by the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it illegally collected personal information from children under the age of 13. In April, the app was temporarily banned in India by the High Court in Madras for carrying child pornographic content and failing to prevent cyberbullying. (The ban was swiftly reversed.)
But Zhang’s real headache was elsewhere. Last November, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (known as CFIUS) began a probe into ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly on the ground that it potentially affected US national security. Seriously? A teenage video app is a threat to the most powerful nation-state on the planet? Well, these days CFIUS regards just about any Chinese investment as a threat — in 2010, it forced the Chinese gaming firm Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. to sell the gay dating app Grindr.
I’ve written before in this space about Cold War II. Well, TikTok has become the Sino-American conflict’s latest casualty.
Unlike everything else in America, including Covid-19, Cold War II is bipartisan. Last October, the Senate minority leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, and Republican Senator Tom Cotton jointly called for a national-security investigation into ByteDance. The issue, they said, is that as a Chinese entity, ByteDance is subject to China's cybersecurity rules, which stipulate that it has to share data with the Chinese government. TikTok admits as much in its privacy policy: “We may share your information with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group.”
Zhang Yiming is a great entrepreneur. Though he is personally no authoritarian, he is also a political conformist. ByteDance’s first app, Neihan Duanzi (“inside jokes”), was shut down in 2018 by the National Radio and Television Administration. Zhang had to apologize that its content had been “incommensurate with socialist core values.” He solemnly promised that ByteDance would henceforth “further deepen cooperation” with the Chinese Communist Party.
Until last month, Zhang’s game plan was voluntary separation of ByteDance from China. Like other Chinese tech giants, ByteDance is a “variable interest entity” incorporated in the Cayman Islands, positioning it for an offshore initial public offering in Hong Kong or New York.
ByteDance claims that all American data from TikTok are stored in US data centers and backed up in Singapore. The appointment in May of Kevin Mayer, a former Disney executive, as TikTok’s new chief executive and ByteDance’s chief operating officer, was the clearest signal yet of where Zhang was headed.
Then, President Donald Trump blew Zhang’s game plan apart.
On June 31, he threatened to ban TikTok in the US. On Monday, when Microsoft appeared set to buy TikTok’s US operations, Trump made the characteristically unorthodox and probably illegal suggestion that the US government should get some kind of arrangement fee. “It’s a little bit like the landlord-tenant,” explained the former real-estate developer from Queens. “Without a lease, the tenant has nothing. So they pay what is called ‘key money’ or they pay something.”
Then on Friday, he issued an executive order banning TikTok in the US in 45 days unless it is sold to a non-Chinese entity. (Tencent Holdings Ltd’s even more popular messaging app WeChat will also be banned.)
Trump is wrong to ask for a piece of the action. But he’s right that TikTok needs more than an American chief executive to continue operating in the US. Vacuous though its content may seem, TikTok poses three distinct threats.
The first is a good threat: the one it poses to over-mighty, under-regulated Facebook Inc., which the Department of Justice should never have allowed to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. TikTok has eaten Facebook’s lunch as a platform for video, prompting Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg to try to rip it off with Reels — launched on Wednesday — in the same way that Instagram’s Stories ripped off Snapchat. Whatever else happens, Reels must not succeed. Nor should Facebook become the owner of TikTok. Facebook’s enormous and malignant influence in the American public sphere is a threat not to national security but to American democracy itself. Its efforts to regulate itself since 2016 have largely been a sham.
The second threat TikTok poses is to children. Like Facebook, like YouTube, like Twitter, TikTok is optimized for user engagement, algorithmically steering users to content that will hook them via its “For You” page. In essence, the AI learns what you like and then gives you more of it. And more. Future historians will marvel that we didn’t give our kids crack cocaine, but did give them TikTok.
Like crack, TikTok is dangerous. For example, TikTok’s users, who are still mostly young and female, love lip-sync videos. These have become a magnet for pedophiles, who can use the app to send girls sexually explicit messages and even remix videos and dance along with them using a feature called Duet. Cases of sexual harassment of minors are easy to find: In February, a 35-year-old Los Angeles man was arrested on suspicion of initiating “sexual and vulgar” conversations with at least 21 girls, some as young as nine.
TikTok’s third threat is geopolitical. For Ben Thompson, who is based in Taiwan, the past year has been revelatory. Having previously played down the political and ideological motivations of the Chinese government, he has now come out as New Cold Warrior. China’s vision of the role of technology is fundamentally different from the West’s, he argues, and it fully intends to export its anti-liberal vision to the rest of the world. “If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only within its borders but within ours,” he asks, “it is in liberalism’s interest to cut off a vector that has taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans exactly what they want.”If you need an update on how the Communist Party is using AI to build a surveillance state that makes Orwell’s Big Brother seem primeval — it’s actually more akin to the dystopia imagined in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel “We” — read Ross Andersen’s recent essay in the Atlantic, “The Panopticon Is Already Here.”
As Andersen puts it, “In the near future, every person who enters a public space [in China] could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources — travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases — to predict political resistance before it happens.”
Many of China’s prominent AI startups are the Communist Party’s “willing commercial partners” in this, which is bad enough. But the greater concern, as Andersen says, is that all this technology is for export. Among the countries importing it are Bolivia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Venezuela, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The Chinese response to the American attack on TikTok gives the game away. On Twitter, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the government-controlled Global Times, called the move “open robbery,” accused Trump of “turning the once great America into a rogue country,” and warned that “when similar things happen time and again, the U.S. will take steps closer to its decline.”
Ah yes, our old friend the decline and fall of American imperialism. And its corollary? In a revealing essay published last April, the Chinese political theorist Jiang Shigong, a professor at Peking University Law School, spelled out the imperial nature of China’s ambition. World history, he argued, is the history of empires, not nation-states, which are a relatively recent phenomenon. (By the way, this has long been my own view.) “The history of humanity is surely the history of competition for imperial hegemony,” Jiang writes, “which has gradually propelled the form of empires from their original local nature toward the current tendency toward global empires, and finally toward a single world empire.”
The globalization of our time, according to Jiang, is the “single world empire 1.0, the model of world empire established by England and the United States.” But that Anglo-American empire is “unravelling” internally because of “three great unsolvable problems: the ever-increasing inequality created by the liberal economy … ineffective governance caused by political liberalism, and decadence and nihilism created by cultural liberalism.” (Come to think of it, I agree with this, too.)
Moreover, the Western empire is under external attack from “Russian resistance and Chinese competition.” This is not a bid to create an alternative Eurasian empire but “a struggle to become the heart of the world empire.”
If you doubt that China is seeking to take over empire 1.0 and turn it into empire 2.0, based on China’s illiberal civilization, then you are not paying attention to all the ways this strategy is being executed.
China has successfully become the workshop of the world, as we used to be. It now has a Weltpolitik known as One Belt One Road, a vast infrastructure project that looks a lot like Western imperialism as described by J.A. Hobson in 1902. China uses the prize of access to its market to exert pressure on U.S. companies to toe Beijing’s line. It conducts “influence operations” across the West, including the US.
One of the many ways America sought to undermine the Soviet Union in Cold War I was by waging a “Cultural Cold War.” This was partly about being seen to beat the Soviets at their own games — chess (Fischer v Spassky); ballet (Rudolf Nureyev’s defection); ice hockey (the “Miracle on Ice” of 1980). But it was mainly about corrupting the Soviet people with the irresistible temptations of American popular culture. In 1986, the French leftist philosopher and comrade-in-arms of Che Guevara, Jules Régis Debray, lamented, “There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army.” The French Left sneered at “Coca-colonization.” But Parisians, too, drank Coke.
Now, however, the tables have been turned. In a debate I hosted at Stanford in 2018, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel used a memorable aphorism: “AI is Communist, crypto is libertarian.” TikTok validates the first half of that. In the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese children denounced their parents for rightist deviance. In 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests, American teenagers posted videos of themselves berating their parents for racism. And they did it on TikTok.
Those inane-seeming words are now lodged in my brain: “Please don’t be ugly.” But TikTok is ugly, very ugly. And severing its hotline to Xi Jinping’s imperial panopticon is the least we can do about it.

Beijing May Score its Biggest 5G Win at Home
Anjani TrivediNiall Ferguson/Bloomberg /August 10/2020
An hour west of Shanghai, in Nanjing, now one of China’s largest industrial centers for advanced manufacturing, an automated assembly line in a retooled factory churns out 5G radio technology every day of the year but one: Chinese New Year. Self-piloting carts whir racks of components across the factory floor. Artificial intelligence spots faults quicker than humans, using cellular technology to monitor, among other things, about 1,000 high-precision smart screwdrivers and squads of robotic arms that twirl in formation.
Enabling this 21st-century ballet are hundreds of base stations — radio equipment that provides wireless connectivity — around Nanjing, where smart streetlights surround the local temple, and one of the metro lines boasts full 5G coverage. Indeed, as Sweden’s Ericsson AB has said, it modernized its Nanjing factory “in preparation for the introduction and rapid deployments of 5G in China.”
Beijing is attempting this upward shift across China by emplacing a vast network of fifth generation infrastructure. When it is fully operational, Chinese netizens will have faster internet connections to stream yet more videos or to download high-definition movies in under 10 seconds. Internet penetration will rise rapidly. Connected self-driving vehicles could ply the streets of urban centers like Shanghai and Hangzhou. Heaps more information will be transmitted over clouds.
Although the quest to build such fifth generation networks is global, in the case of China and the US, it has set off a technological arms race, sharpening a strategic competition that threatens a replay of Cold War era tensions. The administration of President Donald Trump has tried to stymie China’s attempt to become the global 5G standard-setter by blocking the commercial inroads of Huawei Technologies Co., which is now the world’s largest manufacturer of smartphones and largest supplier of telecom equipment. It has tapped fears of Chinese cyberespionage, surveillance and dominance of a high-tech supply chain to win over reluctant allies. The UK recently said it would strip Huawei of its role in networks there. France may deter operators from using the Chinese telecom giant’s equipment. India is mulling shutting China out of efforts to build its 5G architecture.
Yet even if this US-led campaign blunts Huawei’s global commercial advances, a successful domestic 5G build-out would still amount to China’s most ambitious industrial policy, laying the groundwork for factories of the future and cementing the country’s status as a global tech-enabled manufacturing center. Telecommunication companies may have touted 5G’s thrills for the consumer, but manufacturing is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of 5G-enabled industrial output over the next decade and a half.
Tapping that potential will enable China to retool supply chains ripped up by Trump’s trade war, and to add more value to its manufacturing. But first, China will have to surmount some steepening economic challenges, avoid the big-ticket mistakes that have blighted past industrial policies and solve a 21st-century riddle: How to build the leaner and more automated factories of the future without adding legions to the ranks of the unemployed.
State planners are staring at their gravest challenges yet. Gone are the days — and the easy returns — when a shot in the arm of credit helped to build tens of thousands of miles of highways and rail lines, putting millions to work. Beijing now faces a rising unemployment rate and the threat of social unrest. A record number of graduates will tap the job market this year, with too few opportunities awaiting them. Covid-19 has put millions of Chinese export-related jobs at risk. As China’s population grows older, the labor force shrinks and unemployment ticks up, the state’s social safety net is falling short. Public spending on social insurance is just over 5% as a portion of its gross domestic product and unemployment coverage is low, with only about a fifth of the jobless population receiving benefits.
In China’s industrial hinterland, confidence was crumbling even before the viral outbreak. The number of loss-making enterprises rose sharply throughout 2018 (on average, 24% every month), and it continued to rise the following year. As a crisis of confidence brewed, manufacturers weren’t investing in their businesses even as Beijing was drip-feeding stimulus measures. Instead, they parked their cash in industrial land, and capital expenditure growth slowed to 2% to 3% a month. State loans and forbearance haven’t helped lift sentiment; the issuance of trillions of yuan of special municipal bonds ended up driving only some construction activity.
China’s labor-intensive manufacturing sector has waned as the production of lower-value goods like textiles has shifted out of China. Unit labor costs doubled over the two decades to 2017; inward foreign direct investment fell from 4% of gross domestic product in 2010 to 1% in 2018. China’s share of global exports in sectors that were labor intensive fell by up to four percentage points between 2019 and 2015, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Almost 20 million jobs have been lost in China’s secondary industries that include manufacturing and assembly processes since 2012.
Yet Beijing is intent on keeping intact its central role in global supply chains, despite the turmoil that China’s ascent along the value chain and shift toward automation is bound to cause in its labor market.
Mindful of potential unrest, it turned its attention to supporting the labor market: “Employment” was one of the most mentioned words in the 2020 Government Work Report, compared with the precedence given to “investment” and “construct” in previous years. State planners have promised subsidies for hiring in research and development departments, boosted tax incentives for employers and encouraged graduates to work in national projects among other such measures. At the same time, they are encouraging reskilling through vocational training programs, designating 16 new professions such as intelligent manufacturing engineering technician, virtual-reality engineer and artificial-intelligence trainer as priorities in its recent employment policy.
Building out 5G infrastructure is critical to realizing its factory-of-the-future vision. Fifth generation networks will enable greater connectivity — almost 100 times faster than the existing 4G — and data transfer, boosting the efficiency of machines and altering the way factory floors churn out goods. The advantages will come from the integration of production lines, data platforms, factories and suppliers — the embodiment of the so-called Industrial Internet of Things, along with the reams of information that will be collected and analyzed.
Chinese manufacturers constrained by their balance sheets will be able to make more with the same fixed costs. The commercial use of this wireless technology is expected to draw in 10.6 trillion yuan ($1.5 trillion) in terms of economic output over the next five years, while adding 8 million jobs and 6% to gross domestic product over the next decade, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
The benefits are already apparent at factories like Ericsson’s Nanjing venture, where maintenance work costs have been slashed in half. The company says that it has seen savings on capital expenditures, and that the first year showed a 50% return on investment.
Once bedeviled by workers’ frequent repetitive strain injuries that can end up sidelining them for weeks, factories will instead rely on sensors that monitor robotic arms for wear and tear. When impaired, joints are replaced right away. Supplies and the arrival of inventory and components on trucks are tracked to the second, which speeds the production process. The application of such technologies and methods to semiconductor production could make a huge difference: According to Alexious Lee, an analyst at Jefferies LLC, a 1% change in productivity and efficiency or decrease in waste could increase profitability by up to 10% in some precision-dependent industrial applications.
No wonder, then, that Beijing wants more than 100 factories that operate like the Ericsson venture in Nanjing, a partnership with the Chinese government through Nanjing Panda Electronics Co. and its parent company. Over the next two years, China wants the biggest of industrial parks to be fully covered by 5G networks so that companies can showcase how they’re using 5G. The city of Guangzhou already has more 5G base stations than all of Europe.
To augment this bold plan, Beijing is nurturing an ecosystem of companies that make parts for base stations, transistors, sensors and the like. It hopes to have the underlying architecture ready as manufacturing companies increasingly get on board.
Ambition, though, has never been Beijing’s weakness. Such big-ticket technology plans have come and gone, or been relabeled, over the years. Plans for dominating the memory storage industry — led by companies like South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. — haven’t had much luck, facing manufacturing hurdles because the processes are complicated. Beijing has long had its eyes on semiconductors and chips, but companies have struggled to gain market share.
The controversial Made in China 2025 plan released in early 2015 to boost domestic content of materials and parts across key industries shows that these national goals often have created more hype than results. Billions of dollars were pledged for innovation and for research and development. Yet, here we are halfway there and the results are hard to see. Part of the problem with previous plans has been the top-down goal-setting when the underlying infrastructure just didn’t exist — in effect, pushing factories and people to produce and innovate when they didn’t have the right tools. It wasn’t just about the capital commitments and subsidies that created misaligned incentives.
Beijing is learning from its mistakes, trying to anticipate the shortcomings it could face as it takes on 5G technology and its application. This year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Reform and Development Council laid out steps for local governments to set up area networks to boost production, expedite research and development in chips and other telecom equipment and industrial systems — the nuts and bolts for next-generation networks.
It is also trying to disperse the financial risk. True, as it did through previous industrial policies, Beijing is making it easier for China Inc. by providing some unconditional subsidies, tax relief and grants to make up for a big stumbling block: Companies tend to hold back when defined returns are largely unknown. But this time it has roped in big private players like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which has said it will invest 200 billion yuan over the next three years in research and development in areas like chips and networks that can ultimately be used in industrial applications. That could also help stave off overinvestment by provincial governments. In addition, pilot projects are in places like Shanghai and Guangzhou, developed urban centers with an infrastructure to handle the next step.
China also has another advantage gleaned from past stumbles in introducing its 3G and 4G networks: It is no stranger to developing supply chains as technology evolves. Almost a decade on, when the world was beginning to evolve from third generation cellular technology and data to the LTE and the 4G era that would ultimately kick off the rise of iPhones, China started building out base stations to support its ambitions. The rapid rollout led to the rise of telecom equipment manufacturers like ZTE and Huawei and smartphone parts suppliers like Sunny Optical Technology Group Co. Capturing that opportunity well before the world did, Chinese companies were well positioned to leverage the rise of Apple’s iPhones and products. Companies that were able to master the manufacturing of the tiniest of parts came out on top.
Much as it did when taking over the world’s manufacturing, China is setting itself up for the next wave. If it can build a vibrant 5G-enabled domestic manufacturing base before anyone else, that’s one more big reason for multinational companies like Ericsson to stay in China and reap the technological and commercial benefits of a vast network of suppliers and a huge market, rather than pulling up stakes and going home. Because here’s the thing: Beijing isn’t just looking to create its own national champions; it is looking to build and foster companies that will prop up global leaders in future technologies. All while the world isn’t paying full attention.