By: Stephanie Bernhard, Rami Khouri, editor at large of the Lebanese newspaper the Daily Star and longtime journalist, gave a lecture Friday afternoon concerning strategies for creating peace in the Middle East. Students and professors filled the Joukowsky Forum of the Watson Institute for International Studies beyond capacity to hear Khouri speak.

Khouri began by listing problems currently plaguing the Middle East, citing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Iran’s fuel cycle and Turkey’s relation to the European Union as four of the most contentious issues. He pointed out that while Americans view the Middle East as a troubled region, they rarely understand the reasons for the tension."Terrorism is the main problem people tend to look at when they look from far away, but there are many other problems in the Middle East as well," Khouri said.
Khouri went on to explain that he knows there need to be changes in the Middle East – it is the form of change and method of implementation that concern him.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 31 (UPI) — The United Nations has extended investigation of former Lebanon Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination into Syria, demanding full cooperation of Damascus. The Security Council Monday unanimously approved a tough resolution giving the U.N. International Independent Investigation Commission the same rights in Syria it already has in Lebanon. The measure said that if Syria’s cooperation does not meet the resolution’s requirements, "the council, if necessary, could consider further action."

Meeting at the ministerial level, the resolution also said the panel, headed up by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, may determine where and how it interviews Syrians and "insists that Syria not interfere in Lebanese domestic affairs." The measure calls on Syria to "detain those Syrian officials or individuals whom the commission considers as suspected of involvement in the planning, sponsoring, organizing or perpetrating of" the Feb. 14 bomb attack in Beirut on Hariri’s motorcade, killing the billionaire businessman and more than 20 other people.

Lebanon is bracing for another showdown. When Syria’s troops withdrew from the country six months ago, the Lebanese hoped to have seen the last of foreign forces inside their borders but Syrian backed Palestinian guerrillas are emerging as a fresh threat to Lebanon’s stability. They are part of a 350,000-strong Palestinian population who have been in Lebanon since Israel’s war of independence in 1948.

Last week, after a surveyor was shot near the south eastern Lebanese village of Sultan Yacoub, hundreds of Lebanese troops and commandos surrounded mountainous outposts manned by two radical Palestinian factions. They demanded that a suspect be handed over for investigation. Palestinian fighters, who before last week often welcomed visitors with glasses of tea and conversation, went on alert, planting remote-control roadside bombs on tracks around their bases and hunkering down in bunkers dug into the steep terrain in preparation for a possible Lebanese army assault. A statement issued by the one of the factions, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, warned: "We will not sit back handcuffed if we are attacked." At the scene of the tense standoff, a Lebanese army officer told Time, "We are ready for anything."