The New England Americans for Lebanon (NEAL)
Subject : Press Release from NEAL
For Immediate Release
Boston, Massachusetts, Sat. December 13, 2003
President George W. Bush yesterday signed the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 putting Syria on notice that it will face sanctions if it does not, among other things, end its occupation of Lebanon. The New England Americans for Lebanon (NEAL) hails this achievement as a major success of the Lebanese American community led by Mr. Tony Haddad of the Lebanese American Council for Democracy in Washington D.C., who worked hard and long for changing US foreign on Lebanon. NEAL also commends the leadership, vision and principled commitment of Lebanese Prime Minister General Michel Aoun for taking the legitimate case of Lebanon's sovereignty to all international decision-making forums, including most importantly the US Congress. "The signing of the bill by President Bush is a major victory for the American people and for the Lebanese-American lobby", said Joseph Hitti, President of the Boston-based NEAL organization. "It signals the effective shift in US foreign policy in favor of a sovereign and free Lebanon, it aligns that policy with the objectives of the war on terrorism, and it makes US law compliant with UN resolutions calling for Syria to evacuate Lebanon".

For a long time U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East consisted in supporting authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in return for what it perceived as maintaining stability in the region. In the case of Lebanon, and except for the well-meaning intervention by the Reagan administration in the 1980s that sadly ended in catastrophic retreat, the priority of maintaining stable relations with the Syrian Baath dictatorship (with all the hostility it harbored and practiced against the US) was higher than the principle of safeguarding Lebanonšs sovereignty, independence, and democratic model of shared government. As a result, the task was assigned to Syria to "chaperone" Lebanon, a policy that culminated in the complete takeover and occupation of Lebanon by Syria in October of 1990. Syriašs military onslaught against the Lebanese people beginning in 1970 (when Hafez Assad seized power in Syria) was replaced in 1990 with Syriašs political, economic, and social oppression of the country. The shell    shocked Lebanese people saw the reprieve from the brutality of Syriašs military merely replaced with a Stalinist dictatorship that drove the people further into emigration and economic poverty, muzzled the press and violated human rights, and indeed converted life in Lebanon into life in the Gulag.

In signing the bill into law, President Bush and the US Congress have overwhelmingly agreed that Lebanon's sovereignty must be returned to its own people, so that Lebanon becomes again an agent of its own destiny rather than an object of negotiations between Israel and Syria. Lebanon today carries the enormous potential of serving as a platform for social, religious, and political reform across the entire Middle East, in full alignment with the strategic objectives of the United States government in
the aftermath of September 11, 2001. While the Lebanese puppet regime in Beirut and its Syrian Baath master regime in Damascus are in complete denial of the fundamental shift in US policy enshrined in this law, NEAL calls on the Lebanese people to shake off the misinformation of the Syrian intelligence machinery and truly embrace this change as a positive sign that
begins the process of ending the war in their country.

The Lebanese people must seize this moment to change their fatalistic attitude of "there is nothing that we can do". Not only do they have to liberate the land and the institutions (at-tahrir), but first and foremost they have to liberate themselves (at-taharror) from inertia, fatalism, tribalism, and self-interest, and get to work at re-building the human spirit that made Lebanon the great country that it has always been since time immemorial.
Long Live Free Lebanon