Lebanese Interior Minister Blames Iranian Meddling for Crisis in Arab World

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Beirut - Asharq Al-Awsat -- Lebanese Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq said on Thursday that Iran’s expansion in the region “is one of the reasons for the security and political crisis in the Arab world.” He stressed: “Lebanon is a Lebanese responsibility, but it has been an Arab responsibility for several years and their first line of defense.” He made his remarks during the 35th Arab Interior Ministers Conference that was held in Algeria. “It turns out that Lebanon’s security is an important part of the strategic security of all Arabs. It has not and will not become a thorn in their side,” he continued. “You should not give up and deliver Lebanon to the Iranian project or any other project,” Mashnouq urged. “We are not fans of a free confrontation… and I have previously called for dialogue with Iran over issues of Arab national security,” he added. “Do we really have a partner in Iran? What have we done in the confrontation or dialogue with Iran?” he asked. Mashnouq noted that Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz launched operation Decisive Storm “not out of his love for war, but because it was the only solution to counter Iran’s expansion in Yemen.” The Iranian project has never succeeded in acting as a factor for stability or development in any area that it has reached, he went on to say. Iran has only created crises, he stressed before the gatherers. The extent of Tehran’s presence in crises in Arab countries demands the establishment of a joint strategy as soon as possible because any delay only favors the expansion, he said. “In Lebanon, we are striving to have the state be the only side that monopolizes the use of weapons in war and peace through an understanding on a national defense strategy,” the minister remarked. These efforts will become clearer after the May 6 parliamentary elections, he explained. Mashnouq had held talks in Algeria with Saudi Interior Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz. He expressed to him the Lebanese people’s relief with the visit Prime Minister Saad Hariri paid to the Kingdom last week. The Saudi official extended an invitation for Mashnouq to visit Saudi Arabia at the end of March.

This is an important trip for Mohammad bin Salman

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By catholicherald.co.uk -  It’s fair to say that no Saudi leader has ever attracted as much personal attention as the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS). Hailed as a reformer and moderate, his strategy is to take the economically troubled kingdom to greater things by 2030. Allowing cinemas to open, and women to drive and attend football matches, is given as evidence of change in a conservative kingdom. MbS makes his 3-day visit as a trusted partner in respect to Britain’s interest, even though all those greeting him are disturbed in different ways by the kingdom’s war in Yemen and human rights record. He was met by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, whisked off to lunch with the Queen, and holds two meetings with Theresa May – today at Downing Street and tomorrow at Chequers. One doubts his media advisors thrust a copy of The Guardian under his nose upon arrival, but no doubt he is quite aware not everyone in Britain sees him as reformer or someone to be trusted. The talk of reform is nonsense, wrote Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry. She argues “it is about nothing but filthy lucre” and that rolling out the red carpet is shameless. MbS was also too busy meeting the Queen to watch today’s Sky TV live coverage of Prime Minister’s Questions, where there was the kind of exchange that doesn’t happen in an absolute monarchy. A war of words took place between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. The government position is that Britain needs to engage to influence, and also protect its business interests. Opponents say Britain needs to take a moral lead and scold MbS.

While MbS may have avoided The Guardian and Sky TV, he wouldn’t have missed the protesters in Whitehall, who are taking the opportunity to show directly how they feel. Corbyn asked if the PM would reflect protesters’ concerns about the suppression of women’s rights on International Women’s Day. Noting it takes place tomorrow, and accusing Corbyn of “mansplaining,” May said she will. However, it is a dialogue complicated by the facts that MbS is personally behind the Saudi war effort and Britain has supplied much of the arms. Besides, the agenda will be dominated by commercial matters, such as business contracts worth up to $100bn. The big deal will, however, not be announced – namely, the potential listing on the London Stock Exchange of the state oil company Saudi Aramco, which may or may not happen. This is not a state visit, and we should not forget that MbS is the Crown Prince, not the head of state. He is visiting the UK, America and elsewhere to build a global profile, and there is a lot at stake for him personally. He may not be everyone’s picture of a reformer, but if he fails more conservative forces are likely to prevail in the kingdom. If he cannot succeed in his mission to secure Saudi’s border and its economic future, he may just find the line of succession changes. After all, that’s how he got the job.

France stresses its role in preventing war between Lebanon, Israel

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BEIRUT, March 7 (Xinhua) -- France's Ambassador to Lebanon Bernard Foucher stressed that his country's participation in the United Nation Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFI) aims at preventing a new war between Lebanon and Israel and strengthening security in the region, the National News Agency (NNA) said Wednesday. "We are present in south Lebanon to strengthen security and prevent the outbreak of wars threatening the region and the world," Foucher said during a reception organized by the French embassy in Beirut on Tuesday evening. The diplomat said that in the south of Litani, the goal of the international community remained so that the Lebanese government could progressively exercise full sovereignty over the entire territory. "It is wrong to think that France is not doing enough for Lebanon; France has always supported the Lebanese," he said. "As we approach Rome II conference, our gathering will be a symbol of our commitment to a united and strong Lebanese state," the French diplomat said

WHO IS GEORGE NADER?

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BY MAX KUTNER  - newsweek -- A “shadowy” Lebanese-American businessman spent decades ingratiating himself with people in power in D.C. and across the Middle East before reportedly surfacing in the special counsel’s Russia probe. George Nader, 58, has been questioned by Robert Mueller’s team about his ties to the United Arab Emirates, the New York Times reported Saturday. The special counsel’s team is reportedly looking into Nader’s ties to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, and whether the Emiratis tried to buy influence in the Trump White House. Before he became the latest subject of intrigue relating to Mueller’s probe, Nader ran a magazine on Middle East policy and positioned himself as a go-between in Middle East peace negotiations. Interviews with more than two dozen friends and associates of Nader illustrate a mysterious man who by some accounts has for decades quietly aided people in power, or by other accounts is a huckster always looking for a new way in. “He wanted to be a player,” Judith Kipper, director of the Middle East Program at the Institute of World Affairs, told Newsweek. Nader faded from the public eye in the early 2000s, only resurfacing in the recent reports.

Nader was born and raised in Lebanon before moving to the United States as a teen. He didn’t know any English other than “Hello” and “How are you?” according to a 2000 profile about him in Lebanon’s The Daily Star. Nader went on to attend Cleveland State University. But he didn’t last: Nader dropped out in 1980, according to a 1981 article, to start International Insight Inc. and a magazine of the same name. It was soon renamed Middle East Insight. The journal sought to “provide a spectrum of views on the Middle East, to enlighten public opinion and to promote better understanding between the American people and the peoples of the Middle East,” according to its website. Middle East Insight became well-known in policy circles, though insiders debate its level of influence and its motivations. At its height, the magazine featured original interviews with U.S. lawmakers including Senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Dianne Feinstein and then-Senator Joe Biden. Nader’s writers also interviewed world leaders such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and a who’s who of Middle Eastern leaders, including Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Nader’s conferences appeared on C-SPAN; Then-U.S. Representative Nick Rahall once praised the magazine as “comprehensive, insightful and balanced.”

Nader seemed to have a knack for connections. In 1987, he found himself amid Afghan mujahideen, Egyptian Islamic fundamentalists and Hezbollah leaders in the home of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran. Nader was the only Western journalist, and he knew his presence there was unusual. “We were silent, except for those who wept,” Nader wrote in an article for The Washington Post three months later. “Each was conscious of the powerful presence of a man who had dramatically changed the history of the last quarter of this century and perhaps beyond.” He developed a reputation as a “shadowy” figure, said Shibley Telhami, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at the University of Maryland. “It was hard to know if he had a political agenda, whether this was a political opportunist or whether he was trying to make money,” he said. “He wanted to connect with power and clearly reach out to people he thought were power players.” Other times, he would use those connections to offer services. Nader showed up at Israeli government offices, said Nimrod Novik, then the chief adviser on foreign policy to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, dropping names and offering to connect the Israelis with the Syrians and the Lebanese. The offers “never fully materialized,” Novik told Newsweek. But sometimes they did. During the Clinton administration, Nader had connections to people at high levels of both Israeli and Arab governments, which was unusual at the time because of tensions between Israel and Lebanon. “He wanted to put himself as a useful go-between, as a useful carrier of messages, and he did that successfully between Syrians and Israelis,” said Hisham Melhem, a columnist for the Lebanese daily An-Nahar and a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. Melhem recalled that Nader arranged the first interview between Syria’s former foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa and Israeli television. Multiple efforts to reach Nader for comment by phone and mail were unsuccessful.

In the late 1990s, he helped lead back-channel negotiations between Syria and Israel, Daniel Pipes, a writer and academic known for his controversial views on Islam, wrote in The New Republic in 1999. Nader brought the Syrian views to the table, while Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics company executive and former U.S. ambassador to Austria, brought the Israeli views, according to Pipes. But Nader also had ties to pro-Israel interests: Jonathan Kessler, who worked under Nader as executive editor of Middle East Insight, had come from the lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). (Multiple attempts to reach Kessler, who returned to work at AIPAC, were unsuccessful.) And then, in the early 2000s, Nader and Middle East Insight disappeared. “Poof,” said Melhem, the Lebanese columnist. “He was gone…. He just disappeared completely without saying goodbye to anybody I know.” Associates said they stopped hearing from him or seeing him around Washington. The business license for his company dissolved and his website went offline, its archives with it. There were rumors that he fled the country or moved back to Lebanon. “Last time I heard from him was after the American invasion of Iraq, when he called me from Kurdistan to discuss an article I wrote,” Melhem said. Nader was away for so long that a bank foreclosed on his Washington apartment, according to court records and his lawyer at the time, Carol Blumenthal. A couple bought the apartment through the foreclosure process; Blumenthal said the couple moved in and tossed Nader’s stuff to the curb. (Nader took the couple to court in 2003, and eventually won his apartment back. He still owned the unit as of late February, according to property records.)

When he stepped away from the publishing world, Nader appears to have gone deeper into dealmaking. Nader reportedly tried to leverage his ties to Syrian officials into contacts with the Obama administration, and later became an adviser to bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates, the Times reported. The Emirati prince allegedly also met with former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in the Mueller probe in December 2016. Bin Zayed allegedly helped coordinate another meeting, between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian national, for the purpose of establishing unofficial lines of communication between the Trump operation and Russia. (In testimony before congressional investigators, Prince denied the allegations.) Prince once hired Nader, the bin Zayed’s supposed adviser, as a “business development consultant” in Iraq, the Times reported. Nader introduced bin Zayed to Elliott Broidy, a top Trump fundraiser and the owner of a private security company, according to the Times. Broidy’s security company reportedly later signed contracts with the United Arab Emirates. Last October, Broidy provided Nader with a memorandum about a sit-down he had with Trump, during which they discussed Trump’s possibly meeting privately with bin Zayed, according to the Times. All the while, Nader didn’t reach out to former colleagues in D.C., who told Newsweek they hadn’t heard from him in years. The Times reported that he’d made connections in the George W. Bush and possibly the Obama administrations, but multiple foreign policy advisers from both told Newsweek they had never heard of him. Nader appeared to have escaped the public eye until the news outlet Axios first reported about his White House visits in January. The report described Nader as an “associate” of Bannon who also met with Kushner. But four people close to Bannon told Newsweek they didn’t know about him. A publicist for Bannon did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House. A spokesman for Kushner wouldn’t comment, and his lawyer did not respond to a request. But those who knew Nader said any involvement he might have in the current administration did not surprise them. As Novik, the former Israeli adviser, put it, “That’s the way he does [it]. He found a new angle.”

Lebanese dollar reserves recover from last year's crisis

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BEIRUT, (Reuters) Reporting by Lisa Barrington; editing by Larry King - The Lebanese central bank’s dollar reserves grew in early 2018, recovering from a decline during a political crisis last year that pushed up interest rates, its governor said on Tuesday. Reserves climbed by $1.4 billion in the first two months of the year and total assets in dollars exceeded $43 billion, Governor Riad Salameh said at an economic conference in Beirut. “With the rise of interest rates and the return of political issues to normal, the dollar reserves at the central bank rose,” he said. November’s political crisis was triggered by the sudden resignation of Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri during a trip to Saudi Arabia, before he returned to the country and resumed his role. The crisis raised questions about Lebanon’s economic stability and put pressure on the Lebanese pound’s peg to the dollar. Lebanon has one of the world’s most indebted governments measured against the size of its economy. Growth has been slowed by war in neighbouring Syria and years of internal political disputes. The economy relies on the confidence of millions of expatriate Lebanese who deposit into local banks. The banks buy government debt, which finances the expanding budget deficit and debt.

The International Monetary Fund last month strongly criticised Lebanon’s unsustainable debt trajectory and said there was an “urgent need” for government policy to stabilise and then reduce public debt as a share of gross domestic product. Hoping to stimulate its economy, Lebanon this year is seeking up to $16 billion in infrastructure investment from international donors who hope to ward off more Middle East instability, in a country that hosts more than a million Syrian refugees. “It is no secret that the economic situation in Lebanon today is difficult and that we face big challenges,” Hariri told the conference. “Growth rates are low, unemployment rates have exceeded 30 per cent, poverty rates are increasing, the balance of payments suffers a deficit, public debt is rising at a rapid rate and has exceeded $80 billion and the treasury deficit has reached unsustainable levels,” he added.

During November’s turmoil, some Lebanese rushed for dollars; data shows central bank foreign assets fell by $1.6 billion that month. Salameh told Reuters on the conference’s sidelines that November’s increase in local currency interest rates of around 2 percentage points — a result of the political crisis — had been enough to iron out market imbalances, “therefore we have an outlook of stable interest rates”. The government passed a state budget last year for the first time since 2005 and has pledged to agree a 2018 budget before April 6, when France will host a donor conference to support Lebanon. Tuesday’s conference, organised by Lebanese business magazine Al-Iktissad Wal-Aamal in cooperation with Hariri’s office, was a roadshow for Lebanon’s infrastructure investment plans ahead of April’s Paris conference.

Nizar Zakka to run for parliamentary elections says lawyer

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The Daily Star BEIRUT: Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese citizen detained in Iran, will submit his candidacy for the upcoming parliamentary elections, a statement from his lawyer reported Monday. At 2 p.m. Tuesday, representatives of Zakka including his brother will submit the request for candidacy and the corresponding documents, the statement released by Zakka’s lawyer Antoine Abou Dib said. The statement called on members of the press to be present when the candidacy is submitted, “to be the voice of the oppressed Lebanese, especially those unjustly detained or abducted abroad.” Zakka, a dual Lebanese-American citizen, was arrested after traveling to Iran to attend a state-sponsored conference in Tehran in 2015. At the time of his arrest, he was the secretary-general of IJMA3, an Arab communications organization, and had received an official invitation to visit Iran. Lebanese officials and leaders, including President Michel Aoun and Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, have since highlighted the government’s ongoing efforts to secure Zakka’s release.