Petraeus visit, a joke for the Lebanese media

Not a sin­gle Lebanese news­pa­per believes that Petraeus visit is to dis­cuss Amer­i­can aid to the country’s army.

Al-Akhbar con­nects the visit to Lebanon with recent Israel’s night­mare about Hezbollah’s Anti-Aircraft weapons, mak­ing fun of this “sur­prise” visit:

They [the media] described his visit as “sur­prise” and “unan­nounced”, but this “sur­prise unan­nounced” visit did not pre­vent the exis­tence of a for­mal meet­ing pro­gram with top officials.

Assafir makes fun about the rea­son given to this visit saying:

Before Gen­eral Petraeus visit to Beirut, leaked infor­ma­tion indi­cates that the Amer­i­cans told the Lebanese offi­cials to con­tinue the mil­i­tary sup­port program.

A pro­gram does not con­tain any heavy or essen­tial arma­ment for the army, only spare parts, trans­port, cer­tain muni­tions and train­ing of offi­cers. The assis­tance pro­gram remains as it is with­out an increase or decrease.

And Rafiq Khori Chief Edi­tor of Al Anwar goes further:

Before the visit of the Gen­eral, there were other Gen­er­als vis­ited Lebanon, such as Michael Mullen and Eric Edel­man, all of them came under the same title: “Dis­cussing the U.S. mil­i­tary aid for the Lebanese army”.

This aid is restricted with these two points:

First — Armin the army to help “against ter­ror­ism” based on a report pre­pared by the CIA Direc­tor Mike Mcconnell, Direc­tor of Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Michael Hay­den on the ter­ror­ist threat in Lebanon.

Sec­ond — To refrain from pro­vid­ing the army with weapons objected by Israel, such as radars, com­bat heli­copters, anti-tank rock­ets and anti-aircraft.