After having made a Lebanon out of Iraq, the United States, duly assisted by France and other West European powers, has embarked on a policy that is likely to make an Iraq out of Lebanon.
The ultimate outcome of the ill-advised psychological warfare (psywar) it has mounted against Syria by exploiting the recent assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, is likely to be the revival and the exacerbation of the inter-religious, inter-sectarian and inter-ethnic tensions that kept Lebanon bleeding for more than 15 years and brought into vogue suicide terrorism by jihadi elements and the culture of martyrdom through the car bomb.
The United States' ill-advised demonization of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and its Ba'ath Party, the cynical exploitation of its psywar resources for this purpose and the sowing and fueling of suspicions between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites and between the Sunni Arabs and the Sunni Kurds paved the way for the Lebanonization of Iraq and for the ascendency of mullahs and tribal sheikhs of various persuasions in the only model of a modern secular state in the West Asian region known until March 2003.
The US-led coalition and the international community as a whole are now paying a heavy price for this. Iraq has become the scene of suicide terrorism and devastating car-bomb explosions almost every day. Fallujah, which has reportedly almost been reduced to rubble by the US Marine Corps and Air Force, will go down in history as the Dresden of the the United States' so-called "war against terrorism".
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC08Ak04.html