{"id":22148,"date":"2017-11-05T00:21:18","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T23:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22148"},"modified":"2017-11-05T00:21:18","modified_gmt":"2017-11-04T23:21:18","slug":"who-would-want-to-be-prime-minister-of-lebanon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22148","title":{"rendered":"Who would want to be Prime Minister of Lebanon?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is disturbing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/world-middle-east-41870406\">news<\/a> that\u00a0Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has resigned, saying in a televised broadcast from Saudi Arabia that he feared for his life.\u00a0Hariri&#8217;s father, former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, was assassinated in 2005.<\/p>\n<p>In 2011, I visited Lebanon (having previously toured Syria). During the trip, I read a fascinating book called &#8220;Beware Of Small States&#8221; and my review of the work is essentially a very brief history of Lebanon. You can read this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/history2.html#ME4\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In my web site account of our time in Lebanon, I wrote an introduction to the country which brings the political history up-to-date. You can read this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Levant.html#Lebanon\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Hariri&#8217;s resignation is a feature of the current profound conflict in the Middle East between the Sunni and Shia strands of Islam, the former led by Saudi Arabia and the latter led by Iran.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is disturbing news that\u00a0Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has resigned, saying in a televised broadcast from Saudi Arabia that he feared for his life.\u00a0Hariri&#8217;s father, former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, was assassinated in 2005. In 2011, I visited Lebanon (having previously toured Syria). During the trip, I read a fascinating book called &#8220;Beware Of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22148"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22155,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22148\/revisions\/22155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}