Lebanese Conflict in May 2008

Vision

These visions are not limited to a time schedule. They are not in a time order. Their order is by topic or region. My vision for FEMME MAGAZINE Will there be a civil war in Lebanon? There is no civil war to be expected for the next future. An armed conflict will be coming up with an other country, invading or attacking Lebanon. This will be similar to the situation of the war in 2006. There will be an other clash between Hezbollah and Israel. But I don’t see this conflict as too bad for Lebanon itself. This conflict will not lead to an open or extended war inside Lebanon. Then, most probably after that there will be a breakthrough between Israel and the Hezbollah. A kind of agreement or political acceptance will be reached. The economical the situation in Lebanon does not look bad. Of course there won’t be a progressive shift from one day to the other but at least there will be a kind of progressive stability. Not a bad moment to invest money in this country as the economy is moving forward and getting better step by step. There will be movement happening on the political stage. One main actor on the political stage will “betray” his side; shift to the “enemy” and by that creating a new situation. This new situation will bring movement and changes in the now so stocked political situation. This will be happening because the West will influence in this political actor. There will be a new president. He is not directly from a political background or from a political family. Unfortunately there will be an attack against a person who holds and important post. He will be someone working for the high court or the ministry of justice. An armed conflict will come up at the Golf. This will not be a US lead aggression against Iran. The war I am talking about is on the Gulf and involves at least one of the oil rich states. There will be images on the TV screen we know from the first Golf war in 1991. Burning oilfields, fears on the oil market and instability in the Golf area. This war will be a surprise because it does not involve a country everybody is talking all the time right now. This war will be a surprise like it was the 1991 Iraq invasion in Kuwait.

Outcome

At the end of April, first intelligence information about a possible occupation of the International Airport in Beirut by Hezbollah came up. On 7 May the Unions and Hezbollah called for a general strike. Hezbollah took advantage of the chaos and occupied the Airport. In several districts, Militias started an armed conflict and immediately the fear of a new civil war came up in the press. I knew this will not happen, because the conflict I saw was not too big. I saw that the conflict was in connection with foreign countries. Mistakenly, I analyzed this as a direct foreign aggression of Israel. If I had stayed in the vision the way I saw it, I would have been fully right: a brief conflict, not a civil war. The violence is monitored and controlled from abroad. In the last days of May something else occurred: Israel and Hezbollah had negotiations and agreed about exchanging of prisoners and corpses of fallen soldiers. June 1st the world saw on TV how the two archenemies exchanged what they agreed on. Without doubt this was the agreement or negotiations I saw between Israel and Lebanon. The situation in Lebanon calmed down and on May 25 Lebanon had a new President, General Suleiman. After more than a year without a President, Lebanon had a new leader. Exactly the way I did describe it. On 10 December was an accident in the local headlines. The Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar and his wife had on the Middle al-Kalb Highway a serious car accident. One of the bodyguards got killed. I was in shock when I saw the picture of the car in the newspaper L'Orient le Jour. It was the picture of my vision! In Lebanon, the risk for a politician to get injured in a car accident is much lower than by a bomb. When I had the vision of the destroyed car, I wrongly interpreted it as a bomb explosion. I would have been fully right if I would have given the picture the way I saw it: The destroyed car of a politician from the Ministry of Justice. Since Lebanon has a new president, the country grew economically. Real Estate is booming. While other countries in the Middle East where suffering the recession, in Lebanon business was booming. Also this prediction hit the mark! The main actor on the political stage I saw “betray” his side turned out to be Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader who became Nasrallah’s best friend and fully Anti- American. This happened around July/August 2009.