MEMRI

Walid Jumblatt: "Hassan Nasrallah made the decision to go to war without consulting anyone."

[...]

"Today, the Lebanese state has become a kind of Red Cross. If tomorrow a cease-fire is reached – even if the state is represented formally on the issue of the prisoners – the Lebanese state would still be incapable of [fulfilling] all its plans - to spread its sovereignty to South Lebanon and to the refugee camps, and especially with regard to the weapons outside the refugee camps."

[...]

"A cease-fire between who? [Israel] and the Lebanese state? Will Hizbullah recognize the Lebanese state?"

[...]

"Will the weapons of Hizbullah be incorporated into the defensive system of the Lebanese army, and I emphasize the word 'defensive?' Or will there be a cease-fire, and then the first article on the agenda will be that we should liberate the prisoners. Then he will say to you: 'We want to liberate the Shab'a Farms, and I need to keep my weapons in order to liberate Shab'a.' Then he will tell you that we should implement Resolution 194 – the return of the refugees to Palestine. In such a case, Lebanon will become an open battlefield for the Syrian and Iranian regimes."

[...]

Interviewer: "Nasrallah also said he was fighting for the sake of the nation."

[...]

Walid Jumblatt: "No one empowered him to fight from Lebanon for the sake of the nation."

[...]

"If Syrian patronage over Lebanon is restored, we will have a dictatorship, like the Syrian and Iranian regimes."

[...]

"The question should be directed at Hassan [Nasrallah], and at the Syrians and Iranians with their agenda: Do they really want a Lebanese state, or do they want an open battlefield, which would serve Iran's nuclear interests and expansionist goals in the Gulf? As for Syria, it benefits when Lebanon turns into rubble. The poorer the Lebanese people gets, the more it is destroyed, the more the elite emigrate. How does [Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad] manage to rule Syria? Through poverty. He rules it through power and intelligence agencies. He rules a people that is wretched, imprisoned. He wants to do the same to Lebanon, because he envies us. He envies our pluralism, our vitality, our culture, and our free press. What did he do to the Syrian intellectuals? He imprisoned them. Why? Because they had the courage to say: 'Let's make some changes.'"

[...]