Victory for Lebanon’s anti-Syrian Opposition Was Predetermined

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20 June: Saad Hariri declared success for his anti-Syrian opposition alliance shortly after the voting booths of northern Lebanon shut down Sunday night, June 19. He knew before the final tally that he had pocketed the necessary majority of the 128-member parliament in the final round of the four-stage general election. His main rival, Maronite Christian Gen. Michel Aoun, admitted defeat. In the third round of voting a week ago in Central Lebanon, Aoun had given him a nasty shock by picking up an unexpected 21 seats. The returned exile, campaigning on an anti-corruption ticket, has become one of the most powerful voices in Lebanon even after his latest defeat.
Both rivals now accuse the other of reviving Lebanon’s sectarian and religious animosities for their political ends. Hariri is also accused of using his vast wealth for wholesale vote-buying. There was a rumor that he paid $100 per vote.
Pro-Syrian Suleiman Franjieh, a former interior minister, said the north had split on sectarian lines. Anti-Syrian Druze leader Walid Jumblatt shot back that Franjiah was stirring up the threat of civil war.
Turnout in the fourth round of poll was fairly low at 49% One voter explained she supported Aoun as “the only honest man in Lebanon.”
Rafiq Hariri’s assassination was the catalyst for the eviction of Syria, the government’s fall and the new election which placed his son in line as next prime minister of Lebanon.
debkafile‘s Lebanese experts wonder how the Sunni Muslim interloper from the south who has a blood reckoning with Damascus managed to sweep the traditionally pro-Syrian north, which is dominated by such Damascus-friendly clans as the Maronite Franjiehs and the Sunni Karamis (Rashid Karami was the pro-Syrian prime minister unseated by the wave of popular protest in Beirut after the Hariri murder.)
The solution lies in the secret event that took place outside the country between rounds three and four of the Lebanese election, as disclosed in DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s exclusive account on June 17.
Thursday, June 16, the ambassadors or the United States, Britain and France and the UN Secretary’s representative Terje Larsen went into a very private conference in Paris to decide how to repair the damage to their master-plan wrought by Aoun’s unforeseen success against the anti-Syrian coalition in the central Lebanon poll. At that point, he posed a real threat to cut into the Hariri bloc’s prospects of a parliamentary majority in the northern vote.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources reveal that the Paris session ended by proposing two top-secret alternatives for salvaging its participants’ pre-planned Lebanon strategy.
One, the three Western governments would deploy undercover agents to boost the number of votes for Hariri’s anti-Syrian list in the pro-Syrian north, working through local vote-getters and laying out money.
Two, a five-point post-election program was drafted for presentation to the election winners and prime movers:
A. Aoun and his supporters would help Saad Hariri get elected by the new lawmakers as prime minister.
B. The same combination of factions would sack incumbent president Emil Lahoud.
C. The new parliament would amend the constitution to curtail the president’s powers. This amendment is necessary to elicit Jumblatt and Hariri’s consent to endorse Aoun’s appointment as president.
D. Aoun would take over as president.
E. These steps would obviate the dependence on Hizballah votes. Steps to disarm the Shiite terrorists could then begin.
This program was designed to fill the gaps left by the democratic process in the execution of the US-UK-French-UN plan to purge the Lebanese government of its last supporters of Syria.

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