U.S. Navy ships move closer to Lebanon

[Guest guest]

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/28/us.lebanon/

U.S. Navy ships move closer to Lebanon

From Mike Mount

CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Navy has moved the guided-missile

destroyer USS Cole and other ships to the eastern Mediterranean Sea

off Lebanon, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

The deployment comes amid a political standoff over Lebanon's

presidency, but the Navy would not say whether the events are linked.

" It's a group of ships that will operate in the vicinity for a while

and as the ships in our Navy do, the presence is important, " Adm.

Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday.

" It isn't meant to send any stronger signal than that, " he said. " But

it does signal that we're engaged and we are going to be in the

vicinity, and that's a very important part of the world. "

The Cole was badly damaged by an al Qaeda bombing during a port call

in Yemen in 2000, killing 17 sailors. It returned to service in 2002.

The destroyer and two support ships are close to Lebanon but out of

visual range of the coast, Pentagon officials said. Another six

vessels, led by the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau, are close to

Italy and steaming toward the other three, the officials said.

Mullen would not say whether the deployment has anything to do with

the upcoming Lebanese parliamentary vote on a new president, which

was postponed for a 15th time earlier this week. But he said the vote

was " important, " and Washington was waiting for it to take place.

And a Bush administration official told CNN the decision to move

ships to the region was a message to neighboringSyria that " the U.S.

is concerned about the situation in Lebanon, and we want to see the

situation resolved. "

" We are sending a clear message for the need for stability, " said the

official, who was not authorized to speak for publication. The

ships " should be there a while, " the official added.

Lebanon's pro-Western majority in parliament and the pro-Syrian

opposition have battled for power over the last three years. The

country has been without a president since November, when pro-Syrian

leader Emile Lahoud's term expired and parliament was unable to agree

on a replacement.

Despite general agreement among the factions to award the post to

army chief Gen. Michel Suleiman, disagreements over how to share

power in a future Cabinet have kept the issue from coming up for a

vote.

Parliament speaker Nabih Berri's office announced Tuesday that the

next planned session has been pushed back to March 11. Berri's office

said the Arab League needed more time to break the deadlock.

Lebanon has been wracked by a sometimes-violent power struggle since

the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, whose

supporters blamed Damascus for his killing. The resulting outcry

eventually drove Syrian forces out of Lebanon, where they had been

stationed since the 1970s.