LONDON, August 5 (IranMania) – Lebanese Hizbollah Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrollah in a meeting here Wednesday with Iran’s Secretary of Supreme …

By Michael Young, year after the fall of Baghdad, I asked a senior U.S. official involved in planning the Iraq war whether the whole thing was a Shiite-centered project. He insisted it was not, and that Saddam Hussein had engaged in "equal opportunity repression" against both Sunnis and Shiites. No doubt he meant what he said, but today, among Iraq's Arab communities, it is the Shiites (objectively at least) who are on the Americans' side, and the Sunnis who are leading the insurgency. Though the Sunni-Shiite rivalry seems most acute in Iraq, it is being felt throughout the Middle East where the communities live together, most recently in Lebanon. Following the Syrian military withdrawal last April, Sunnis and Shiites have been locked in an understated, mostly peaceful, yet very real contest to fill the ensuing political vacuum and put their stamp on Lebanon's future. Lebanon is unlikely to go the violent way of Iraq. However, what is taking place is not limited to domestic politics; it reflects concentric, overlapping circles of competition between various actors - not just Shiites and Sunnis - at the local and regional levels, motivated by sometimes different, sometimes parallel interests.Inside Lebanon, Syria's recent departure (though Syrian intelligence agents continue to be active) effectively left two powerful political forces facing one another: the Sunni-dominated Hariri camp, led by Saad Hariri, the son of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, whose assassination set in motion the disintegration of the Syrian order in Lebanon; and the Shiite Hezbollah, which is close to Syria and which Damascus allowed to retain its weapons after the end of the war in 1990, in order to fight Israeli forces occupying south Lebanon.As far back as the early 1980s, but starting even sooner, the Syrians began a strategic relationship with Lebanon's Shiites, partly because the minority Alawite regime in Damascus sought to contain its own majority Sunni community by developing a counterweight to Sunnis in next-door Lebanon. Hariri, who with Saudi backing became prime minister in 1992, always threatened this balance, while Syria also disliked his close relations with France and the United States. Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt has argued that Hariri was killed precisely because the Syrians wanted to avoid facing "the project of a strong Sunni."

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah for its military and political performance as the militant faction's chief held talks in Tehran. "Hezbollah has shown it is skillful and wise in politics as it is powerful and displays initiative in the field of Jihad and resistance," Khamenei told Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah, the student agency ISNA reported.Khamenei said Hezbollah, formed in 1982 by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, was a source of pride for the Islamic world."Today, the United States has really become weak in the region," Khamenei said. "This is proved by its failure in Iraq and defeat of its plans in Lebanon and Iran."Touching on Mahmood Ahmadinejad's upset victory in Iran's June presidential election, Khamenei said the United States had been "shocked and stunned" by the result. "They were forced to retreat a long way."Hezbollah was among the first to hail Ahmadinejad's win, describing it as a slap in the face for the United States.