From The Seattle PI
By Amotz Asa-El

Israel’s retreats from Lebanon and Gaza may have been welcomed in Western capitals as the beginning of the end of the Mideast conflict, but across the Islamist universe they were celebrated as what they clearly were not: surrender.

Within Israel, few expected the pullbacks to generate immediate harmony, but the hope was that with Israel gone, civic priorities would take root, if even imperfectly. They didn’t. Now, the West had better understand that the deeper issue at stake in Lebanon is not the Arab-Israeli conflict but the clash between progressives and reactionaries that is gripping the broader Middle East.

Israel followed closely, and happily, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s devotion to a reconstruction drive that restored much of Beirut’s colonial-era architectural grandeur, multicultural charm and entrepreneurial vitality.

As it were, this endeavor disproportionately focused on the Lebanese capital, and altogether omitted the region that straddles Israel. That area was abandoned to the devices of foreign powers — Syria and Iran — and to the whims of Hezbollah, an organization that is part of the fundamentalist international that has been attacking the free world since the end of the Cold War. And so, even while Hariri was alive, but particularly since his assassination, south Lebanon emerged as a state-within-a-state, brazenly defying Beirut’s mercantilism, liberalism and sovereignty.

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