Ahmadinejad’s scheduled visit to Lebanon next week signifies for many an attempt to officially subdue this country and recruit it into the camp of “defiance” led by Iran and Syria, after it had resisted throughout the five years since the assassination of Rafic Hariri. To others it signifies the natural conclusion of the journey of political, military and demographic changes which the Land of the Cedars has witnessed since Syria first entered it in 1976.

The “Doha Accord” earned the consensus of the Lebanese sides which had been fighting and had gathered in the Qatari capital following military actions witnessed in the capital Beirut and the areas surrounding it on May 7, 2008. This consensus was due to the fact that the accord featured an article excluding violence from political work.

Some of the Lebanese and their regional allies are demanding that Prime Minister Saad Hariri abolish the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and its impending indictment, and for him to persuade the international parties concerned of the need to bury the truth. In other words, what is being demanded is for the earthquake that shattered Lebanon in the aftermath of the assassination of its Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and his companions, and all the assassinations that ensued, to be forgotten.

One day in the mid-nineties, when the peace process was active and promising, we missed an important scoop. I contacted colleague Rafik Maalouf, who was at the time Al-Hayat's bureau chief in Washington, and reproached him for missing the news story. He gave me details that I did not read in the American newspapers, so I asked him why he did not send the news when he has all this information. Rafik said that he could not verify the news from two different sources, independently of each other.

What is odd at the level of the arrest warrants issued by the Syrian judiciary against Lebanese political, media and security figures is that these warrants are achieving the opposite of their actual purpose. Indeed, they were issued under the slogan of reaching justice and securing disengagement between the judiciary and politics, but also to fight “politicization” which is being claimed by those opposing the international tribunal for Lebanon as affecting its investigations, and which has cast doubts over the indictment it is expected to put forth.

The politician said that the turmoil the Middle East is going through is no strange thing. He predicted a rise in the tensions among, and sometimes within, its countries. He considered that countries sometimes commit what individuals commit, i.e. they refuse to deal with new realities and adapt to them, and gamble on turning back the clock. He predicted that the region will witness a heated race to armament, as well as proxy confrontations, if direct confrontations were to be avoided.

Last week, I wrote about the Israeli peace activist Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan (I spelled it wrong in the previous article). The responses of the readers were mostly positive, and so I have succeeded in achieving what I wanted, which is introducing the Arab readers to Israeli and Jewish peace advocates, because the majority of the news, if not all of the news, is limited to the Israeli government and the Israel lobby in Washington.

Mid last month, I received an invitation to attend the “Souk Okaz” cultural festival in the city of Taif. I was reluctant at first, but then accepted the invitation because I wanted to observe – up-close - the historic activities of a Souk which was revived based on the principle that “those who have attended an event are not like those who have heard about it.”

The Iraqi National Alliance’s selection of the candidate for the premiership does not signify that the long-awaited new government will see the light at any moment now, although Nouri al-Maliki’s time has come. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Fadila Party both boycotted the session to select the Alliance’s candidate.

Is this the first time in which matters become complicated and obstacles are erected on the path to negotiations between the Arabs or the Palestinians and Israel? Of course not. Indeed, everything is peaceful about the peace process except the negotiation process, in which one side imposes its approval on the other and those sponsoring the negotiations can never make it comply with what it has pledged.