What's driving Lebanon's crisis?

Rania Masri is a Lebanese-American writer and antiwar activist currently living in Beirut. She spoke to Lee Sustar on the crisis in Lebanon today. In SocialistWorker.org

...By demanding the dismantling of the communications network, the government would be removing the main defense network for Hezbollah. Even the Israeli government, in its report examining the July 2006 war, declared that if it had not been for the secure communications networks of Hezbollah, it would have been able to infiltrate the communications, and Hezbollah would not have been able to achieve a military victory...

...By demanding the dismantling of the communications network, the government would be opening avenues for the Israelis and for other agents to assassinate the Hezbollah leadership. Clearly, this would not have been acceptable to Hezbollah in any way, shape or form...

...This U.S. government, supported by the New York Times and the Washington Post, continues to look at the Lebanese government as democratic, when according to the Times, literally half the Lebanese population took to the streets to demand the resignation of the government. The U.S. government and the corporate media have lost their legitimacy to condemn any coup d'etat in Lebanon...

WHAT IS Hezbollah's economic program?

The problem is that Hezbollah is aligned in the opposition with the Free Patriotic Movement, a Christian party under the leadership of Gen. Michel Aoun. His economic program is to the right of the government's. He believes in neoliberalism, in privatization. His only positive claim is that he is against corruption.

When I asked Hezbollah members about their economic platform, they told me that they have been working on it for months, but aren't ready to disclose it.

Hezbollah doesn't have a pro-union history. But it does have a history of support for the poor, based on what it has done institutionally in the South. It has been able to build a very effective social network...

...No matter how powerful and how legitimate, Hezbollah is within a national resistance movement. They are not the left, and they are not calling for a secular government--and we have yet to see if they would be working for the kind of economic justice we envision...