The Guardians of the Cedars Party issued the following weekly communiqué:

The opposition has succeeded in luring the State into a deadly maze called the “Defense Strategy”, where it’s become costly to stay but even costlier to get out from.

In our opinion, the Defense Strategy is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. On the surface it suggests a goal of building a strong State capable of confronting the dangers coming from Israel, while in its substance it aims for two goals, both of which are a bad omen for the State: The first is that the weapons of Hezbollah stay in case an agreement over this strategy does not materialize, which is what we expect is going to happen; and the second goal is to drag the country into an open and uneven warfare with Israel whose costs this time are likely to be astronomical in comparison to the damages left by the 2006 July war.

There is near unanimous consensus among Lebanese public opinion that the chances of the ongoing dialogue in Ababa on the question of the Defense Strategy are virtually nil for reasons that have become known:

First, the impossibility of combining Hezbollah’s mini-State with the Lebanese State under the present circumstances, and hence the difficulty of their coexistence. Second, the impossibility of reconciling between two divergent projects, one linked to the Syrian-Iranian axis, and the other linked to the Saudi-Egyptian axis backed by the West. Third, the insistence of the first party to hold on to the key to war and peace and to call for an open-ended war with Israel, while the second party insists on keeping that key in the hands of the State and calls for Lebanon’s adherence to the 1949 Armistice Agreement with Israel. This explains the pessimism prevailing among people, particularly in light of the roving security breaches from one region to another, despite the wave of reconciliations we see here and there.

We believe that the dialogue on which the politicians are relying will be no more than a temporary truce that may last more or less depending on regional developments that are open to all possibilities.

Lebanon, at your service

Abu Arz
September 19, 2008