 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today I have Prabhi, the founding editor of NewsClick with me. Today we are going to discuss about Saad Hariri, the Lebanese Prime Minister's resignation in Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh and Saudi Arabia meddling with the internal affairs of Lebanon. Saudi Arabian crownspin seems to be quite interested in the Lebanon's internal affairs and it seems something cynical is cooking in his mind. So today we talk about this to Prabir. Prabir, what do you think Saudi Arabia is trying to do in Lebanon? We have to understand that the Lebanese, at least the Hariri family, has been very much a part of also Saudi Arabia in the sense that they are connected to the princely house, they have married into it and they have dual citizenship. So the Hariri financial empire has been really a Saudi Arabian enterprise and that's where the financial power of the Hariri family came from. So it will be wrong to think that the Hariris are not a part of the Saudi Arabian princely family and its internal politics as well. One of the reasons that the Hariris have been successful in Lebanon is the Saudi backing and the fact that they were very rich. So they could de facto take over the oppositional space to Hezbollah and they were backed by both the United States and the Saudi Arabians for that purpose. Having said that, in the last two years some kind of an accommodation was made between what we will call the Sunni leadership and don't forget Lebanon is a confessional state, the Sunnis hold the prime ministership, the presidency is held by Christian and the Shias hold the, in fact out of the three, the most weak position that have been the speaker of the legislative assembly. So given that this is the way it is structured, the prime minister has always been a Sunni and this was led by in this particular case earlier by Rafiq Hariri who was assassinated and then by Saad Hariri his son. So this is how the correlation of forces in Lebanon has been maintained. Once the understanding between the Christian forces led by Awun who is the president currently, the Hezbollah and the Sunni leadership was worked out essentially under Hariri. Then Hariri became the prime minister and this was the uneasy correlation of forces which is ruling Lebanon. Before Hariri left for Saudi Arabia, before his resignation, he actually had set up meetings in different places. So it didn't appear that he had left with any intention of resigning. The charge that he has made that Hezbollah's assassination attempt against him, again this does not seem to have been supported by his party before or even after the event. So it does seem that he was forced to resign under pressure, which is what now the Reuters is also saying, which is what Newsclick had said earlier, that he seems to have come under pressure and then have resigned. There are reports that his cell phone was taken away from him, that he was kept under virtual house arrest. His family has been sort of kept under, shall we say, control environment, if you will, and therefore he is under enormous pressure to fall in line. Apart from the fact that he is a Saudi citizen and his entire money or his fortune is tied up with Saudi, shall we say, Saudi political scenario or the fate of the royal princes in Saudi Arabia. So given that his willingness to go along with Saudi Arabia, how much is squished and how much is not, is an open question, but at the same time he has been declaring that he is free. Reports seem to indicate that he is not completely free, certainly his family has been interdicted and therefore he is put under pressure. It's very unusual for a prime minister to resign from a foreign country and not come back. He's now started saying, realizing that this is becoming embarrassing, he started saying, he will come back to Lebanon to give his formal resignation. The president has said he does not accept resignation, which is taking place from Saudi Arabia. Given that, I think it is increasingly clear that the coalition that has worked out has not ruptured completely. The Sunni forces are not actually going against Hezbollah and the other coalition partners and therefore there is this uneasy coalition which still seems to survive the resignation of Hariri at the moment. It's also interesting that there has been a veiled statement made first by the Tillerson Secretary of State, followed by an Air Force high-ranking official in Lebanon of the United States, that US sees the sovereignty of Lebanon as something which no foreign power should intervene. Now that does not only include Iran, as people might interpret, but seems also to be a warning against Saudi Arabia and Israel getting into a war-like situation in Lebanon or intervening militarily in Lebanon. Anyway, Saudis cannot military intervene in Lebanon unless they get the support of Jordan. It's very unlikely they will get that. So the only force which can physically intervene in Lebanon and Israel, it doesn't look like. So Israel may be reaching for a fight, doesn't look like they would be able to get American backing for such a venture. So at the moment, I would say the wall in Lebanon does not seem immediately on the anvil. The Joker in the pack, of course, is Israel and how much they would be willing to go out on a limb to try and take down Hezbollah with or without United States support. That we have to see. At the moment, it doesn't seem that the United States is really wanting to get into another war in Lebanon. The war in Yemen, which one of the players is Saudi Arabia, has actually really brought a catastrophe in the region. The Yemen is reeling under famine and there had been a largest cholera outbreak in Yemen. Where do you think the Yemen war is going? You know, this is the collective failure of the world, the international opinion, the United Nations, that we have what would be a genocide by any standards being completely wished out of the news. We do not see it in the news. We do not see reports of it except in very peripheral terms. And we do not see the United Nations react to it at all. There is 16 to 18 million people who are 60% of whom are already at the level of starvation. These are basically even figures. There is half a million people who are affected by cholera, likely to increase to 1 million. This is the largest cholera outbreak in the world, completely avoidable, because entire sanitation, water systems have broken down, mainly because of Saudi Arabian bombing and complete embargo that Saudi Arabia and its allies have imposed on Yemen. In spite of that, Saudis are being continuously supplied with munitions, are being supplied with missiles and supplied with all other war armaments that require for this extremely cruel and genocidal war they are carrying out against the population in Yemen. It also seeks the rise of al-Qaeda like forces. In fact, instead of controlling them, ISIS and al-Qaeda have gained ground in Yemen because of the civil war. And this civil war is really a misnomer because it is a war of aggression by Saudi Arabia against Yemenist people. And main reason seems to have been, in this particular case, the Saudis flexing their muscle and particularly the young crown prince who seized power in Saudi Arabia seems to have been trying to get an easy victory in the belief that Yemeni forces would be no deterrent to the Saudi military might. We have seen the opposite. They have not been able to make headway. The Houthis who are leading the opposition are still fighting. They have the ability to even launch missiles against Riyadh. And however might Saudis might scream, that's an Iranian missile which broke the embargo. The fact remains that this is a scud missile which Yemen already had and they have just re-engineered it a bit to be able to reach Riyadh very much within their capabilities. So this whole argument or red herring of Iran is only to divert attention to the fact that they have made militarily no headway and have brought the Yemenis people to the brink of disaster. And I think that is shameful for the world, for all countries in the region and the global powers including countries like India who have kept quiet basically because of Saudi money that they don't really want to get in the way of Saudis. And that I think is extremely unfortunate. It's a criminal war which needs to really be brought to an end and brought to an end speedily. But I don't see people arguing for it who are powerful enough to stop it.