January 31, 2008 6:40
Fayrouz in Damascus
Her cascading voice has been compared to flowing rivers; her luminous and impassive face to the moon; her graceful bearing a message of peace in a war-torn world. The Lebanese singer Fayrouz is not only a legend, the most beloved living Arab performer, but a symbol of Lebanon itself.
So why, oh why, many Lebanese lament, is she singing in Syria? This week Fayrouz launched a nine-day series of performances in Damascus at the National Opera House, in the heart of the very country that some Lebanese accuse of waging a campaign of terror to overthrow the Lebanese state.
Born Nouhad Haddad in 1935 in the mountains of Lebanon, and raised on a cobblestone street in Beirut, Fayrouz – whose stage name means turquoise in Arabic, had always stayed above politics. She refused to give interviews, refused to give private concerts to princes, plutocrats and presidents, and refused to perform in Lebanon during most of that country’s sectarian civil war, out of disgust for the killers on all sides. That and her work – which mined and modernized traditional Levantine music – made her a national institution revered by Lebanese of all religious and backgrounds.
Fayrouz billed her Syrian concerts – for which she has come out of retirement – as a message of friendship from the people of Lebanon to the people of Syria. But her tour is undoubtedly a feather in the cap for the Ba’athist regime of President Bashar al Assad, which has sought to reassert itself in the face of international isolation. One of the founding ideas of Ba’athism is that the modern map of the Middle East is illegitimate, an artificial creation of European imperial powers which carved pseudo-states – Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel– out of the larger Arab nation, greater Syria. To this day, Syria has never wholly accepted the independence of Lebanon – refusing to send an ambassador or officially delineate the borders – and Syria soldiers occupied Lebanon from 1975 until forced out by the United States and France in 2005. Now with the most famous Lebanese singer performing in Damascus to coincide with city’s designation by UNESCO as the Arab Cultural Capital of 2008, Syria is again staking its claim to be, as the slogan goes, “the beating heart of Arabism.”
But that’s not the only message. Fayrouz’s choice of material, a musical play called Sah al-Nom or “Did You Sleep Well?” is decidedly subversive. The play is a fable set in an archetypical Levantine village, where nothing can happen without the official stamp of the governor, who wakes from sleep just once a month at the full moon to stamp two or three petitions among the many presented by the villagers. When a girl, Qurnfil, played by Fayrouz, steals the stamp and stamps all the petitions – to mend a roof, to free a prisoner, to build a nightclub with pretty women -- the village flourishes, until the governor wakes and finds the symbol of his authority missing. He orders his soldiers to arrest and execute Qurnfil, but they refuse to do so without the official stamp.
It’s a mystery how or why the Syrian authorities allowed Fayruz to perform a play that satirizes authoritarianism and bureaucracy, when Syria itself is an authoritarian state struggling with a centralized economy and moribund reforms. Perhaps the choice was a compromise between a government eager for a hit show, and an artist struggling to maintain her credibility at home. Or perhaps, the Syrian government isn’t really concerned, such is its firm control over the country. Certainly the audience – filled with government officials and members of Damascene society on the night I attended -- seemed immune to its anti-establishment message. When the village governor in the play declared onstage that “the people have a right to complain, but the authorities have a right to close their ears,” the audience applauded.
What is clear is that Faryouz the performer can no longer bear the burdens of Fayruz the icon. The show was anti-climatic. The lavish orchestras of yesteryear were gone, as was the famous voice – both the music and the singing were pre-recorded. For an audience member not raised in the mythology of Fayruz, the sight of a 72 year-old woman playing a village girl was less than thrilling. And the story of Sah al-Nom itself is simplistic – conjuring up an idyllic past with no sectarian or ethnic strife, no foreign occupations, and no social divides except that between the people and the government.
The reality of Lebanon couldn’t be more different. For all the Lebanese dismayed by Fayrouz’s performing in Syria, there are others who look towards Syria as a bulwark for support against Israel, the United States and the imperial powers of this era. The coming battle for Lebanon isn’t merely one of freedom versus authoritarianism– as some might cast it – but a nastier struggle that will pit neighbor against neighbor, Shia against Sunni, Christian against Christian – and no one who will be above the fray. The lesson of Fayrouz in Damascus is that even she can no longer be all things to all Lebanese.
--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus
January 31, 2008 3:59
White House: No Shoulder-Rubbing with Iranians!
I had to smile when I read Helen Cooper's NY Times story about Zalmay Khalilzad, America's ambassador to the U.N., and former envoy to Kabul and Baghdad.
For years, I've watched when Iranians who favor opening a dialogue with the U.S., including some friends of mine, get vilified by hard-liners back home when they go abroad and rub shoulders with some Americans somewhere.
So now the same thing has happened--in reverse; White House officials, anonymously, are letting it be known that they are "angry" that Khalilzad appeared at a panel in Davos last Saturday sitting beside Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki. No matter that Khalilzad reiterated the Bush administration's policy on Iran's nukes, etc. What next? The White House denouncing Iran as "the Great Satan"?
This is wild speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if Khalilzad may have been engaging in some personal diplomacy here. He apparently did not follow guidelines requiring U.S. diplomats to get prior approval before putting themselves in close proximity to Iranian counterparts. But Khalilzad is used to being a take-charge guy, as our former ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq. He also took part in quiet yet approved discussions with Iranian diplomats before the U.S. broke them off in 2003. If Khalilzad was trying to send a signal to Iran that the U.S. is not interested in raising the stakes right now, that would not have been a bad thing. As the "Filipino Monkey" episode in the Gulf earlier this month showed, misunderstandings have the potential to escalate into armed conflict between the U.S. and Iran. Perhaps somebody in the White House didn't want Khalilzad sending that message?
It won't help Khalilzad to get out of any doghouse he's found himself in, but he is an American official who commands a great deal of respect in high circles in Iran. With his experience in the region, and his direct line of communication with Bush--not typical for an ambassador, who normally would deal only with the secretary of state--some Iranians have viewed Khalilzad as the one U.S. official who might be able to engineer a breakthrough in the diplomatic stalemate dating back to the '79 hostage crisis.
Any such hopes are receding, for the moment at least. Last week, Nicholas Burns, the State Department official handling Iranian diplomacy, decided to quit and retire at age 52. Burns, undersecretary for political affairs, the No. 3 position in the department, has done an excellent job of trying to keep diplomatic channels open even while leading U.S. sanctions efforts. That has not been an easy task, with hard-liners running the show in Tehran and powerful figures in the Bush administration like Dick Cheney pressing for the military option. No surprise: when Burns walks out the door, he'll probably take with him any chance that the U.S. will launch a serious dialogue with Iran during Bush's remaining 11 months in office. If Burns thought there was the slightest possibility of a breakthrough, presumably he would have stuck around to help make some diplomatic history. Fortunately, though, Burns is being replaced by an equally solid career diplomat, Ambassador to Moscow William Burns (no relation).
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Burns has to say as a private citizen about how the Bush administration made Iran policy these last seven years. When neo-con John Bolton quit the administration last year, he said one of the reasons was his disagreement with Bush's preference for diplomacy and sanctions--Burns's portfolio--over military force. "The current approach of the Europeans and the Americans is not just doomed to failure, but dangerous," Bolton told the Jerusalem Post. "Dealing with [the Iranians] just gives them what they want, which is more time...We have fiddled away four years."
--By Scott MacLeod/Dubai
January 30, 2008 2:00
America's Future Middle East Policy: Obama Edition
With violence somewhat down in Iraq and the media paying less attention to the war there, the Middle East hasn't become the prominent issue in the U.S. presidential election thus far that many people expected. Nevertheless, of course, Middle East watchers are still paying a lot of attention. It is worth looking at who is advising the candidates, considering that this year none of them has any experience in dealing with the region. (Unless you count Rudy Giuliani's move to throw Yasser Arafat, an invited dignitary for a U.N. concert, out of the Metropolitan Opera when he was New York City mayor; and Hillary's cheek-kissing with Arafat's wife in Gaza.)
The folks over at Commentary magazine (intellectual base of neo-con thinker Norman Podhoretz, who is a Giuliani advisor) have been scrutinizing Barack Obama's Middle East advisors and policies. Noah Pollak has zeroed in on Samantha Power, a human rights advocate, Harvard University professor and TIME columnist. Pollack goes so far as to suggest that if Obama was elected, Power would be advising him to repudiate Israel and appease Iran--"America's greatest ally in the Middle East," and its "greatest enemy," respectively, in Pollak's view.
Similar pieces (hat tip to Pollak) on Obama's advisors by Ed Lasky appear in the American Thinker (read them here and here). Lasky is critical of people Obama aligned himself with, such as Chicago's Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and financier George Soros, as well as Obama's actual policy advisors. He singles out Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security advisor; Brzezinski's son, Mark; and Robert Malley, one of Bill Clinton Middle East advisors. Lasky suggests that the advisors favor pressuring Israel and weakening the U.S.-Israel alliance; are sympathetic to Palestinians; and advocate appeasing anti-Israel forces such as Iran and Hamas. Lasky goes so far as to suggest that Obama himself made anti-Semitic comments (when he says he singled out Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz for the Iraq invasion "to serve the interests of Israel").
Lasky says Obama's choices suggest that a President Obama "would likely have an approach towards Israel radically at odds with those of previous Presidents (both Republican and Democrat)... For all supporters of the America-Israel relationship there is enough information beyond the glare of the klieg lights to give one pause. In contrast to his canned speeches filled with 'poetry' and uplifting aphorisms and delivered in a commanding way, behind the campaign facade lies a disquieting pattern of behavior... One seemingly consistent theme running throughout Barack Obama's career is his comfort with aligning himself with people who are anti-Israel advocates. His electoral success will send a message to all future politicians that they can willingly ignore the views of those Americans who value a close relationship with the sole democracy and our only true ally in the Middle East."
Obama can't be held accountable for all the views of every advisor. In fact, another of the people reportedly giving him advice is former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, who disagrees with many of the things the other Obama advisors argue. It does seem fair to suggest that Obama would take a different approach to the Middle East compared to Bush-- and perhaps even compared to the last Democrat in the White House as well.
-- By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
January 29, 2008 7:17
Re: Rafah's Angry Tunnel Men
Thanks to sharp-eyed reader P Lukasiak for spotting a wild inaccuracy in the story about tunnel diggers at Rafah. The cost for a tunnel shuttle has been corrected!
January 29, 2008 6:00
America's Future Middle East Policy: Liz Cheney Edition
For Middle East watchers interested in what the next American president will do in the region:
Liz Cheney, the VP's daughter and senior State Department official making Middle East policy, has signed up with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign now that the effort of her preferred candidate, Fred Thompson, has collapsed without a trace. Romney praised Cheney's "years of experience helping to formulate America's foreign policy and to advance democracy and reform in the Middle East."
Cheney is a good match for the candidate who perhaps has spoken the most, unless it's Rudy Giuliani, about America's battle against jihad. He calls it "this century's nightmare: jihadhism, violent, radcial, Islamic fundamentalism." Jihadism's goal, Romney believes, is to "unite the world under a single jihadist caliphate" and "collapse freedom-loving nations, like us." He doesn't threaten to bomb the fundamentalists, but he does say he'll make sure to monitor their phone calls.
Not all people are impressed, especially not the funny ones; Romney's television ad promising to fight jihad quickly became fodder for parodies (see below, thanks to mattyohe and ebaofvn.
Giuliani's foreign policy advisor, Norman Podhoretz, continues to push his "bomb Iran" project, as seen in this blog last week. He wants Bush to do it before he leaves office next year; but Podhoretz says it might be up to the next president--Giuliani, he hopes-- to have the "clarity and courage" to wipe out Iran's nukes with U.S. military force. Note that Romney's jihad ad, not to be outdone, tacks on a promise to "stop Iran," too, but doesn't promise to bomb it. We don't know what Liz thinks about bombing Iran, but we do know her dad has been pushing that option, unsuccessfully, quite alot.
Anybody know how to say "warmonger" in Arabic? OK, Farsi will do.
--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
January 28, 2008 10:41
Rafah's Angry Tunnel Men
Pity the tunnel men of Gaza. For years now, they had their own subterranean river of gold at Rafah, on the border between Gaza and Egypt. Anything that you wanted brought into Gaza --guns, explosives, hashish, rare medicines, a bride trapped on the other side--came courtesy of these burrows in the sandy soil. It was a set price of $30 a kilo, no matter if it was merchandise or a man.
Each militant gang had a string of tunnels, and some Rafah families worked free-lance, for cash. Every so often the Israelis would drop a bomb near the fence, cratering a tunnel, but the enterprising mole-men would dust themselves off and dig a new one.
But then Hamas tore down the border wall, and the tunnel-makers found their product to be obsolete. The rivers of gold dried up. All that hard work digging, and now Gazans are passing freely carrying anything they like across the border from Egypt.You can imagine the tunnel men popping their heads out of the ground like angry gophers. This disturbs Hamas –one drug squad member told me that 1 1/2 tons of hashish was carted across on the first day the fence went down—and it certainly rattles the Israelis, too.
The Israelis are justifiably worried that Hamas and other militant gangs are taking advantage of the free border to bring more diabolical and bigger weapons into Gaza along with militants fresh from Hezballah’s training camps. Over the last couple of days, Israeli warplanes have targeted a few choice militant commanders with their rockets, out of the blue, just to keep Hamas from getting too uppity.
There’s no telling how long the border will stay open. Gazans naturally want it open permanently. The Israelis want it closed, and the Egyptians are being told to slam it shut by Washington, but they don’t want to risk Arab outrage by shooting down hungry Palestinians who just wanted to do a bit of shopping.
---by Tim McGirk/Rafah
January 28, 2008 4:42
Street Skirmishes in Beirut
Seven people died yesterday in the southern suburbs of Beirut after a demonstration over electricity shortages turned into a clash between Shia muslim opposition supporters and the Lebanese army. It's not clear who started the shooting. One rumor is that the Army started firing in the air when protestors refused to leave, and then outside agitators began firing on the protestors. (At least one grenade was also thrown into the mele.)
But what's disturbing about the confrontation isn't just its potential to spark a cycle of revenge or provide an opportunity for those who'd like to see things spiral out of control. What's disturbing is that these relatively minor demonstrations appear to be part of a pattern. For the past month, there have been regular protests over bread shortages, electricity shortages, and other relatively small things by people taking over streets and cutting off roads. While it's possible that these could be spontaneous outbursts of popular anger against the government, it's hard not to see them in the context of the opposition's promise to restart its campaign of mass protests.
Seen in that light, these small demonstrations could be dry runs, exercises to test the will of the government and the reactions of the security services. It's especially worrying that the Army -- seen by most Lebanese as one of the country's few neutral institutions -- has been forced to confront these demonstrations. If these clashes continue, will the army rank-and-file -- many of whom are Shia Muslims -- refuse to deploy against their own countrymen? Is that part of the opposition's plan, to demoralize the Army, so that when the opposition takes the streets again in force -- shutting down roads and perhaps taking over government buildings -- the Army does nothing to stop them? If that happens, expect pro-government parties to take matters into their own hands, and real street fights to follow.
In the short term, watch out for demonstrations on Shia mourning days, the 3rd, 7th and 40th days from when victims were killed. When the big demonstrations start, there will be plenty of warning.
--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus
January 28, 2008 10:25
Meeting George Habash
You might pause to think of George Habash every time you check in for a flight. Since his PFLP hijacked an El Al plane in 1968, going to the airport has never been the same. 9/11 just made the security checks worse, but the metal detectors and body frisks started because of Habash's exploits 40 long years ago.
Hence, the life of Habash, who died at age 82 in Amman on Saturday, bears some reflection on the roots of terrorism and the seemingly unstoppable whirlwind of violence that continues in the Middle East. (See my Habash obituary on time.com.) He and his PFLP group have long been out of the headlines, surpassed in importance by newcomers like the Islamist group Hamas, not to mention overshadowed in terms of international exploits by the likes of al-Qaeda. But as the pioneer of airplane hijacking, Habash became a godfather of Middle East terrorism in his day. Given the obsession with "Islamic" terrorism, thanks to Osama, it's interesting that Habash, and his partner in crime Wadia Haddad, were Orthodox Christians. There goes the theory that Islam equals terrorism.
I had the opportunity to meet Habash many times over the years, first in Damascus, then later in Algeria and Tunisia. Already in the '80s he had been partially paralyzed by a stroke. Yet he could work up quite a passion and anger giving a speech or a press conference. When I saw him, he was always rather grandfatherly. Once I had been taken to some rendezvous point where he would arrive after me for security reasons--for much of his life, the Israelis sought to capture or kill him. He walked in, greeted me, and sitting down at a table he motioned that he'd like to take off his tweed sports jacket. "May I?" he asked politely.
But make no mistake, Habash was a revolutionary ideologue who could justify violence in the name of his cause. He damaged that cause immeasurably with all the killing and law-breaking--many of the hijacks were gambits to extort money to pay the PFLP's bills--and by connecting it to world revolution backed by the Soviet Union. For many years the PFLP's offices, camps and hideouts were frequented by folks like Carlos the Jackal, even Che Guevara, as well as terrorists from the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baeder-Meinhof gang and the Japanese Red Army. Many Palestinians themselves asked, What has this got to do with liberating Palestine?
Habash was a fierce opponent of the late Yasser Arafat, whose Fatah group at the time commanded the support of the vast majority of Palestinians. Habash believed in links with revolutionary forces throughout the Arab countries and the world, judging that only such solidarity could muster enough power to overthrow a regional political order dominated by the U.S. and Israel. Arafat, by contrast, believed the Palestinians' strength and indeed only hope for survival let alone independence was dependence on themselves alone. Habash's minority view never had a chance of succeeding, but it did help restrict Arafat's political flexibility. What nobody ever disputed, however, was Habash's patriotism. That is why Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared a three-day period of mourning in the Palestinian territories.
As history moves on, Habash's PFLP has all but disappeared, and Arafat's Fatah, now led by Abbas, may be in the midst of splintering beyond recognition. At the moment, the field is open to the new Palestinian ideologues, the Islamists. You get the feeling this conflict may last a long time, don't you?
--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
January 26, 2008 11:14
Registration Now Required For Comments
As part of some kind of system upgrade, readers will soon have to register themselves in order to comment on the Middle East blog. You'll only have to do this once, and it will help screen out all those spam comments for Nigerian banking schemes that are filling the site and gumming up the works.
We apologize for the inconvenience, but hopefully this will help foster a better forum for all of us.
Thanks, Andrew, Scott, Tim
January 25, 2008 11:28
Syria: Who Needs Annapolis?
Thought I would point out my article about the anti-Annapolis Palestinian conference held in Syria this past week, since it seems to have gotten lost in the mix stories coming out of the Middle East.
One thing that puzzled me as I sat uneasily in the smokey room filled with wanted men: why does Israel not bomb these gatherings? Not that I have a death wish, but clearly Israel has no problem violating Syrian airspace -- remember the strikes in September against what Israel claims was a nuclear development site. So what's holding them back?
--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus
January 25, 2008 7:18
Showdown at Rafah
Egypt and Hamas, the Islamic masters of Gaza, are playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship. On Friday, when Egyptian police with riot shields began shooting in the air to stop mobs of Palestinians from surging across from Gaza, all it took was for Hamas gunmen to appear silhouetted along the collapsed security wall, and the rows of Egyptian police faded away.
Next Hamas cranked up bulldozers and knocked down large swaths of the concrete and metal wall dividing the Palestinian enclave from Egypt. One Hamas commander in Rafah explained that: “As long as Israel keeps us locked in a siege, we will keep this border open with Egypt.” Before dawn on Wednesday, Palestinian militants blew nearly 20 holes in the border fence, allowing Gazans to dash into Egypt to buy food and supplies denied under Israel’s blockade. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak imposed the siege on Gaza’s 1.5 million people as punishment for militants firing rockets into southern Israel.
It was flawed logic. Even with the siege, Palestinian rockets kept falling on Israeli communities near the Gaza fence. And now that Hamas has forcibly broken through the blockade, Israel is in a quandary over how to deal with Hamas. As a first option, Israeli warplanes on Thursday carried out two air strikes, killing several senior Hamas militants near the destroyed fence with Egypt. But Israeli officials expressed worries that with the Egyptian border wide open, militants will start bringing in large quantities of weapons and men into Gaza. And, Israelis also said that Gaza militants and suicide bombers might now be free to sneak into southern Israel through Sina desert, which is not fenced off. Israel has warned its tourists to leave Sinai’s Red Sea resorts.
Most likely, Israel will tighten restrictions on fuel and other essential supplies –-items that Gazans couldn’t care across on their Egyptian shopping spree. If so, it won’t be long before Gazan’s again feel the squeeze of Israel’s sanctions.
Egypt’s stand-off with Hamas on Friday was all the more embarrassing because hours earlier, President Hosni Mubarak was reprimanded by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who urged Egypt to secure the border with Gaza. Israel and the U.S. both consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization since it has vowed to destroy the Jewish state. But it is doubtful that Egypt can close the Gaza border and scoop back the tens of thousands of Gazans who swarmed into Egypt without help from Hamas, and this has certainly raised the Islamic militant’s stature. Once again, Hamas has shown that when it comes to Gaza, they are the force to be reckoned with, not Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas –the weak favorite of Israel and the U.S.
by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem
January 25, 2008 5:48
I Have a Dream
Uploading some music to my iPod this week I came across the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech from 1963, which I had downloaded from the Web for my daughter's social studies class a couple years ago. I should have written this blog on Martin Luther King Day. I only thought of it yesterday, after seeing the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip emancipating themselves for a shopping trip to Egypt.
Of course, the analogy isn't perfect. Yet, everyone involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can learn something by studying what King had to say about the freedom struggle of African-Americans--a fight that had a relatively peaceful and successful outcome, certainly compared to the last 100 years of bloodbaths in the Holy Land. Whether you are supporting Obama or not, Americans can be proud that despite a long legacy of slavery, discrimination and racism, the nation could well elect a man of color 44th President of the United States this year.
Israel and its supporters, including the U.S. government, need to stop viewing Palestinians only as terrorists and recognize the legitimate quest for basic freedom and dignity that underpins their struggle. Even if you accept the myth that the nearly 1 million Palestinians displaced in Israel's 1948 War of Independence fled voluntarily, it should be impossible not to feel empathy for people sitting in refugee camps with keys to their former homes or stateless under occupation for the last 60 years. Indeed, a great many Israelis do feel empathy and have worked to support Palestinians in their hopes for self-determination, but that has not been enough yet.
Here's how King defined his struggle:
The life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land...But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
For their part, Palestinians should have learned a long time ago that the disgraceful use of violence and terrorism is an ignoble means that corrupts rather than enriches their humanity as well as their struggle.
King on the method of struggle:
There is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.
We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.
We cannot turn back.
As the superpower taking the responsibility for mediating the conflict, another thing that the Bush administration can learn from one of history's greatest Americans is the need to resolve injustice decisively and quickly.
As King put it 45 years ago:
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
January 25, 2008 12:18
The Wall Falls
You could call it a fall of the Berlin Wall moment in the Middle East. Or at least an echo of one. Effectively caged inside the dense Gaza Strip by Egyptian as well as Israeli security forces along the borders, tens of thousands of Palestinians broke through a security wall and streamed into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula on Wednesday. They were joyful to have the chance to breathe again. Most of them jammed into the markets for a shopping frenzy, loading up on canned food, goats, chickens, cigarettes, chocolate, mattresses and television sets. A few headed for the Mediterranean beaches, even though it's the dead of winter. Their message: We just want to live.
That's as far as the Berlin Wall analogy goes. Back in 1989, the East Germans had been suffocated by a Communist state that walled itself off from the free world for nearly a half century. Gaza has been shut in longer than that, by a more complex set of forces. For decades, its inhabitants suffered under Israel's occupation of the territory. For the past two years, they have struggled under an international embargo that seeks to punish the Islamist Hamas group that won Palestinian legislative elections yet refused to end its war against Israel. Some Gazans blame their Hamas rulers for their predicament, but many of those breaking through the wall on Wednesday cursed external rather than internal hands for their plight: principally Israel, but also the U.S. and Arab governments such as Egypt's.
The fall of this particular wall, which will be temporary, will not cause the collapse of Hamas's control of Gaza. Rather, it is forcing everyone else to reconsider their roles in effectively putting 1.5 million Palestinians into a prison with appalling humanitarian conditions. Israel has participated in the siege of Gaza, seeking to punish Hamas for its rocket attacks on Israeli towns and kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit in 2006. Some Israeli officials are hoping that the border opening with Egypt will enable it to sever links to the troublesome territory it occupied for nearly 40 years. But the lack of a political understanding with the Hamas masters of Gaza could mean the existence of a hostile neighbor on Israel's southern border for the indefinite future.
Gaza's breakout handed a more immediate challenge to Egypt, which had led the effort by some Arab parties to squeeze Gaza, and did so for two reasons. The first was to bolster Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, who continues to engage in peace negotiations with Israel despite the fact that his Fatah group lost the parliamentary elections to Hamas. The second reason is related to Egypt's desperate effort to block the rise of the Hamas-aligned Muslim Brotherhood party in Egypt. If Hamas succeeds in Palestine, the Brotherhood can better hold itself up as a realistic alternative to President Hosni Mubarak's regime. The Hamas-engineered crack in the wall dealt Mubarak an embarrassing blow, further exposing his weakness domestically and as a regional player. Although it might be prudent for Mubarak to work out border arrangements with Hamas and accommodate his domestic Islamist opponents, he will be inclined to do neither.
The fact that the Gazans stampeded out of their confines scarcely a week after President Bush toured the Middle East also underlines the shaky condition of the U.S.-sponsored Annapolis peace process. Bush and Abbas reject any role for Hamas in the negotiations, the former because the group refuses to reject violence and accept Israel, the latter because his political survival is increasingly threatened by Hamas's successes. But the exodus into Egypt demonstrated that the campaign to crush Hamas with political and economic pressure has failed. Even assuming that Annapolis gets anywhere, Hamas is standing by to be the spoiler.
Ezzedine Choukri-Fishere, director, Arab-Israeli Project, International Crisis Group, saw some analogies with the fall of the Berlin Wall as he watched Palestinians pouring into Egypt this week. "There was a quest for freedom, for fresh air," he told me Thursday afternoon in Cairo. "In the pictures of these ordinary people who live in difficult circumstances, you see happiness, almost like a carnival. The wall came down and they went shopping." And the Middle East became an even more complicated place.
--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
January 23, 2008 11:39
Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran?
Leading neoconservative thinker Norman Podhoretz is back, and so is the campaign to bomb Iran.
Podhoretz has a followup to his 2007 Commentary article, The Case for Bombing Iran, in a lengthy new piece arguing that his case is still valid despite the recent adjustment in U.S. intelligence's assessment of the threat posed by Iran. Podhoretz remains thoroughly convinced of the need to bomb Iran to prevent the Islamic Republic from gaining a nuclear weapon. He seems to maintain his faith in President Bush's determination to do the right thing. But he now believes that it may be up to Bush's successor to have the "clarity and courage" to discharge the "responsibility" for bombing Iran. If somebody doesn't do it, he believes, the outbreak of a future nuclear war will become "inescapable."
No doubt about it, this guy--a Giuliani campaign advisor, by the way-- is talking scary stuff. Podhoretz is accustomed to being labeled, as he puts it, "as a warmonger for contending that bombing was the only way to stop the mullahs from getting the bomb." He wears like a badge of honor the fact that he has been "excoriated by more than one member of the foreign policy elites" for rejecting a carrot-and-stick approach to Iran. It goes to his credit that Podhoretz does not pretend that bombing Iran would be free of dire consequences. "Iran would retaliate by increasing the trouble it is already making for us in Iraq and by attacking Israel with missiles armed with non-nuclear warheads but possibly containing biological and/or chemical weapons," he writes. "There would also be a vast increase in the price of oil, with catastrophic consequences for every economy in the world, very much including our own. And there would be a deafening outcry from one end of the earth to the other against the inescapable civilian casualties."
The reason for Podhoretz's update is his concern that the recent National Intelligence Estimate downplaying the Iran threat has now placed formidable political obstacles in the way of Bush's military option. The NIE, the consensus view of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies released in December, stated that Iran had shelved its nuclear weapons plans in 2003. The NIE said Iran probably acted due to international pressure, using a cost-benefit approach, and seemed to be less determined to acquire nukes "than we have been judging since 2005."
Podhoretz recounts the familiar litany of concerns about Iran's nuclear program. Tehran refuses to suspend its uranium-enrichment activities, which can be diverted from civil to military use. Iran is a state-sponsor of terrorism. Iran's quest for the bomb will trigger a cataclysmic nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
In trying to discredit the NIE, Podhoretz chronicles the history of CIA foul-ups, like failing to anticipate crises from the Korean War to 9/11, and cites the inability of the International Atomic Energy Agency to detect all of Iran's enrichment activities prior to 2003. Podhoretz then takes direct aim, disparaging the NIE's authors as "bureaucrats" out to "blow up the near-universal consensus" about the threat Iran posed. Moreover, Podhoretz insists, the halting of the weapons program in 2003 "was much less significant than a layman would inevitably be led to think." That's mainly because the civilian uranium enrichment that continues can easily be diverted to a re-started weapons program someday. Podhoretz is concerned that the NIE's conclusions also undermine the argument for tighter sanctions against Iran, given that Bush had been arguing that compelling Iran to stop enrichment through sanctions was the only alternative to doing it through force. The most disastrous development, in Podhoretz's view, is the forming of a "new consensus within the American foreign-policy establishment... that the only thing worse than letting Iran get the bomb was bombing Iran." Podhoretz is worried that the foreign policy establishment is ready to adopt "the complacent idea that we could learn to live with an Iranian bomb."
Podhoretz's reasoning until this point is not altogether unreasonable. Iran's behavior and ambitions do pose serious strategic challenges; U.S. intelligence does have an uneven record of assessing threats; the NIE does change the calculus in dealings with Iran. The problem as before is that Podhoretz's case for bombing Iran rests on something more: a simplistic, vastly overblown depiction of the Iranian regime and the threat that it poses--as if the long, troubled history of the Middle East were a Marvel comic book story of super-heroes and super-villains.
In Podhoretz's assessment, Iran is "ruled by Islamo-fascist revolutionaries who not only [are] ready to die for their beliefs but [care less] about protecting their people than about the spread of their ideology and their power." He equates the Islamic regime with Hitler's Nazi empire, arguing that failing to "stop" Iran is equivalent to European appeasement of Hitler in 1938. Quoting the work of Bernard Lewis, Podhoretz argues that "Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already that [the mullahs ruling Iran] do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights."
In practice, Podhoretz contends, Iran would transfer nuclear technology to terrorists, who would use it to attack the U.S. They would seek "to realize their evil dream of (in the words of Mr. Ahmadinejad) 'wiping Israel off the map.'" Iran would use nuclear "intimidation and blackmail" to transform Europe "into a continent where Muslim law and practice would more and more prevail." He goes so far as to state that "nuclear weapons would even serve the purposes of a far more ambitious aim: the creation of what Mr. Ahmadinejad called 'a world without America.'" Stopping Iran, Podhoretz concludes, is necessary so "millions of lives can be saved."
Islamic revolutionaries do indeed play a role in Iran's regime. But as anyone who has spent an hour in Tehran knows, this is a complex regime and political system that can hardly be described so glibly. As the powerful reformist forces that elected moderate President Khatami in 1997 demonstrated, there are strongly competing influences within the Iranian system. Iranian experts estimate Supreme Leader Khamenei's popular following at little more than 15% of 65 million people, hardly the profile of an unstoppable "Islamo-fascist." President Ahmadinejad is bitterly opposed by many, including some of his fellow hard-liners and conservatives. Compared to people throughout much of the Arab world, citizens in Iran are largely tired of Islamic rule. There's little appetite for goose-stepping military parades in Tehran. The regime's die-hards are ready to sacrifice for their beliefs, but so are America's fine soldiers in Iraq--that doesn't make them evil. Khomeini did seek to spread Iran's revolutionary ideology throughout the Islamic world. It didn't succeed very well, and for a decade Iran has been busy working to improve relations with rather than overthrow autocratic Arab regimes. Podhoretz-Lewis's claim that Iranian rulers actually seek the deaths of millions of their countrymen as a religious experience is at best a bizarre and at worst an Islamophobic assertion. Iran did send hundreds of thousands to die at the war front with Iraq--after Saddam invaded Iran and proceeded to use weapons of mass destruction on the battlefield. Comparing Ahmadinejad to Hitler suggests an intolerable if unintended trivialization of the Nazi Holocaust; in the three decades since the '79 revolution, no Iranian army has invaded another country. Iranian Jews may not be living in paradise, but they are represented in the Iranian parliament and have managed to emigrate safely to Israel.
Regarding Iran's potential behavior, there is little evidence to justify Podhoretz's sweeping claims that Iran seeks to destroy the U.S., turn Europe into a province of a Shi'ite Muslim empire and kill all the Jews living in Israel--perhaps by providing terrorists with nuclear weapons, and with an overall global death toll reaching into the millions. To the contrary, rhetoric aside, Iran has proved to be a pragmatic actor in international affairs, and increasingly so since the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 and the death of Ayatullah Khomeini a year later. Iran has made a major effort to develop better relations with every part of the world, except for the U.S. and Israel. In the crisis over Iran's nuclear program, it is often overlooked that unlike some countries, Israel for example, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Despite the international focus on Iran's foreign policy, the Iranian regime itself is mostly preoccupied with domestic issues like political struggles, including crackdowns on dissent, and economic welfare.
Iran clearly does seek to become a regional superpower. That may be very worrying but it is not very surprising. No other country in the Gulf has even half the size of Iran's population. But having strategic ambitions is hardly the same as having genocidal ones. Podhoretz's characterization of Iran and its motivations completely ignores various factors that Political Science 101 would tell you about some of Iran's behavior. Might Iran's aggressive posture toward the U.S. be related to certain U.S. policies toward Iran, such as the CIA overthrow of Iran's prime minister in 1953, support for the Shah's repressive regime for a quarter century, backing for Saddam Hussein's war against Iran from 1980-88 and efforts to undermine the current government? Could Iran's support for Hizballah be related at all to Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and military occupation of the Shi'ite third of the country until 2000?
It's easy to demonize Iran, and Podhoretz's selective description lays out an extreme problem to justify his extreme solution--if Iran is threatening the lives of millions of people, it seems reasonable to prevent that by bombing Iran. But Podhoretz's concern may be less over Iran's theoretical nuclear threat than its actual political threat. A struggle for hearts and minds is underway in the Middle East, and Iran's outlook is winning more of them than America's is. Iran's real threat--with or without a nuclear weapon--is how it gives Islamic and political sustenance to those who oppose the policies of America and its allies in the region. If Iran poses the massive threat to humanity that Podhoretz claims it does, it seems like it would be a good idea to do something that the U.S. has not done and Podhoretz has not bothered to recommend: send a U.S. Secretary of State to Tehran to get a first-hand look, not to appease but to judge whether diplomacy has a chance to avert Bush's feared World War III (Podhoretz feels we are already fighting WW IV). If Podhoretz is worried about a nuclear arms race, perhaps its time to invite all the countries in the region, including Israel and Iran, to sign a pact destroying nuclear arsenals or pledging not to acquire them.
Iran's nuclear ambitions do not pose a clear and imminent danger, according to the NIE. But perhaps bombing Iran would mainly deal a good blow to a center of Islamic power in the Middle East, just as the toppling of Saddam Hussein dealt a setback for Arab power in the region. In both cases, false or trumped up fears about nuclear threats would have provided the convenient excuse to act.
--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
January 23, 2008 4:16
Snow Falls in Damascus
Vicious snowball fights break out all over Damascus, where snow fell yesterday for the first time since about 1995
Yesterday evening when I crossed the mountains above Beirut, the highest point on the road to Damascus, I thought I'd passed through the worst of a gathering snowstorm. Boy was I wrong -- the next six hours (of what normally is a two hour journey) was one of the more dangerous road trips I've ever done.
The tire tread on my ancient Chevy Caprice Classic taxi must have been as smooth as a baby's bottom, because we began fishtailing on the stretch of no-man's highway between the Lebanese border and the Syrian border below, and I had a bad moment at Syrian immigration when they couldn't find my journalist visa and making it back to Lebanon was physically impossible. By the time I'd cleared customs, enough snow had piled up that the entire highway was like an amusement park bumper car course, with bonus obstacles created by abandoned cars immobilized by black ice. (Ours got stuck twice.) The Syrian rescue crews consisted of a few unlucky police officers who would run alongside sliding cars throwing rubber mats under the wheels when they lost traction. I kept thinking that the farther we dropped down towards Damascus, the better the conditions would get, but the last hillside descent turned out to be the most dangerous, with overturned trucks crushing passenger cars, and one hatchback spinning out in front of us like a giant frisbee. With great drifts of snow -- the heaviest in Syria for over a decade -- obscuring the normally semi-desert vista, it could have been a scene straight out of New England, albeit with drivers clearly less used to winter road conditions, palm trees instead of maples, and of course, portraits of President Bashar al-Assad appearing suddenly out of the darkness.
--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus
January 23, 2008 12:37
Go Egypt!
With superstar forward Mido injured and captain Ahmed Hassan suspended, it didn't look so good for Egypt's opening African Nations Cup match tonight in Ghana. But within 20 minutes, Hosni Abd Rabou and Mohamed Zidan put the defending champions nicely ahead of Cameroon by two. The amazing Zidan scored another goal at the end of the half, and Abd Rabou found the net again in the second, giving Egypt a convincing 4-2 victory. The boys at my gym in Cairo were letting off roaring cheers with every Egyptian goal.
Finally, some good news in Egypt. The country has seemed unusually adrift lately. On the international front, where Egypt is a longtime leader in the Arab world, relations with the U.S. have nosedived. Already smarting from the Bush administration's democracy demands, President Mubarak's government is now annoyed that Congress is trying to block $100 million in aid claiming that he is not doing enough to stop gun smuggling into the Palestinian territories. Egypt's relations with Europe are normally smoother, but the government this week angrily postponed a meeting with senior E.U. officials after the European parliament condemnned Egypt's human rights record.
As the condemnation suggests, the domestic scene is not looking good. Labor strikes are multiplying. The poorest Egyptians--most of the population--are simmering over higher prices for water and electricity and a shortage of cheap bread in the market. The regime has been enforcing a new crackdown on dissent, arresting editors, bloggers and especially activists from the Muslim Brotherhood. This week 29 Brotherhood leaders were rounded up after the group went ahead with demonstrations in Alexandria in protest against Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.
There were disturbing scenes at Egypt's Rafah border crossing with Gaza today. Palestinian protesters managed to break through the border fence, as Egyptian police fired in to the air to prevent the Palestinians from pouring into Egypt to escape the blockade. AP quoted the demonstrators chanting, "Mubarak, you are a coward!" The incident reflects Egypt's worst nightmare about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that worsening conditions in Gaza--now controlled by Hamas, which invited the blockade by launching attacks against Israel--will cause a spillover into Egypt. Not only a spillover of refugees, which would be a humiliating indication that Egypt's 1979 peace treaty with Israel has not benefitted the Palestinians very much. But also in terms of politics, giving Mubarak's Islamist, Nasserist and liberal opponents a legitimate and passionate cause to take into the streets to agitate against the regime.
After the Egyptian football heroes scored their goals tonight, the squad members prostrated themselves on the field for a nanosecond in the Muslim prayer position. (No need to alert Homeland Security: it was the Muslim players' equivalent of crossing themselves like Christian athletes do in thanks to God for their good luck!) Back home, the rest of Egypt is going to need a few more, longer prayers than that. Egyptians are in a pessimistic mood. At halftime, I texted an Egyptian friend, "Go Egypt!" to congratulate him on the stunning 3-0 lead thus far. His response: "Unbelievable, but it's not over yet."
UPDATE: The news Wednesday morning is that thousands of Gazans crossed into Egypt on Wednesday after militants blew holes in the border wall.
--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
January 20, 2008 1:17
Memo to U.S. Presidential Candidates
If you're running for president in the U.S. this year, take note: your predecessor has come and gone on a Middle East visit, and the region may be the worse for it. Learn these lessons from President Bush’s handling of the Middle East, or else you too may find your presidency mired in military and diplomatic quagmires that you will pass to your own eventual successor:
--Recognize that the 60-year-old Arab-Israeli dispute is a core factor in many of the region’s conflicts, that it still constitutes a rising danger to international peace and stability as well as to U.S. national interests. Nonetheless, it is also well within the reach of being settled through serious negotiations.
--Make a vigorous, immediate effort to even-handedly negotiate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the key to a wider Arab-Israeli agreement, in a manner that ends the occupation of the West Bank, establishes a genuine Palestinian state and ensures the security of Israel and all her neighbors. Bill Clinton went a very long way and Israelis and Palestinians actually came close to agreement on most details, but Bush ignored negotiations for six years.
--Strive to end the decades-old cycle of conflict throughout the Middle East, to which the U.S. has too often been a direct or indirect party, by emphasizing America’s tremendous potential for effective diplomacy, recognizing the national interests of all the region’s states including Iran, and working cooperatively with the international community. War has only multiplied the region's problems, while the U.S. has been too hesitant to lead diplomacy.
--Consistently and effectively advocate and respect human rights in support of forces in the Middle East promoting democratic values, in what may inevitably be a lengthy, possibly turbulent transition from authoritarianism to pluralism. Thanks to religion, tradition and the legacy of the Arab-Israeli conflict, democratic transformation in the Arab world will take time; it will be accomplished with perseverance and consistency in pushing basic human rights, not with military operations or slogans.
It’s not often that an American leader visits this region, as central as it is to global security. On his past brief trips, Bush has had a very special mission with a narrow focus—like his visits to Iraq to assess the situation and raise morale of U.S. forces there. But this was Bush’s first tour per se as a two-term president, and the result of his eight days of traveling is disappointing, if not tragic. Not surprisingly, many Arabs I spoke to after Bush’s departure were already looking toward what Hillary, or Obama or McCain might do for the Middle East. The next U.S. president takes the oath of office a year from Sunday.
Bush’s first stop was Israel and Palestine. He became almost breezy in estimating that a peace deal, elusive for nearly a century now, might be achieved during his final year in office. The strong impression he left behind, certainly with bitter Arab officials and cynical public opinion, is that in reality he will exert little decisive presidential leadership toward creating a Palestinian state. Bush explained his role in the Annapolis process as being to encourage the opposing forces to keep their eyes on the goal of a final deal. Yet, he didn’t manage to get the two main leaders in the same room together, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Bush’s failure to produce the slightest bit of progress that would justify hope and sustain momentum in the peace negotiations was itself an indication that little may come once he left the region. Bush of all people needed to demonstrate something more than photo ops and optimistic words. He is the President who for six years effectively disengaged the U.S. from the Middle East peace process, thereby disregarding the country’s international and moral commitment (as a co-sponsor of Middle East negotiations) and probably making it more difficult, with the increase in Jewish settlements and killing, and hardened views on both sides, to achieve an eventual compromise. While Bush was still a few hundred miles away in Saudi Arabia, the country that authored the 2002 Arab peace plan, Israeli forces mounted a military operation that killed 19 Palestinian militants in Gaza. Abbas, who Bush had just described as a man of peace, felt compelled to condemn the Israeli “massacre.” Any way you look at it, Bush hadn’t done very much to keep his extremely fragile peace process glued together.
If Bush couldn’t deliver substantive progress, he might at least have articulated a statesmanlike vision of a peace settlement. A JFK or a Ronald Reagan might have used the historical moment to bolster the moderates and genuine peace advocates on both sides. Bush rightly called for an end to Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank, and he properly paid homage to the evil of Jewish persecution by visiting Yad Vashem. But he might also have given Israelis an eloquent speech about showing their defeated Palestinian enemy magnanimity by facilitating a truly independent Palestinian state without delay. He might have given Palestinians a similar speech, recognizing the injustice they feel, paying tribute to their suffering and sacrifices and pledging unwavering commitment to Palestinian independence, yet calling on them as well to recognize Israeli and Jewish suffering and to halt physical and verbal violence.
Instead, what little Bush had to say about the parameters of a future peace agreement was uninspired legalese delivered with the coldness of a divorce lawyer. The specifics he mentioned concerning the three toughest issues clearly favored Israel’s hand in the negotiations and were thus destined to make Palestinians nervous rather than relaxed as negotiations get underway in earnest. On borders, Bush said a deal would require allowing Israel to actually keep some of the territory it occupied, in recognition of “current realities”—namely the large Jewish settlements that Israel has constructed there in what is generally seen as a violation of international law since 1967. Palestinians do understand this reality very well, yet Bush failed to mention what would be the expected quid pro quo, Israel giving the Palestinian state an equal parcel of land in return for keeping the settlements. Bush also used diplomatic talk to rule out the return of Palestinian refugees to homes they left during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Again, Palestinian negotiators do know any return will be severely restricted by political realities. By definition, no Israeli negotiator is going to sign a deal that allows Palestinians to tip the demographic balance inside the Jewish state. Yet the rights of refugees enshrined in U.N. Resolution 194 is a major Palestinian bargaining chip that Bush effectively took away. On control of Jerusalem, Bush simply called it a “tough issue,” though pointedly not endorsing Palestinian claims to part the city and its Islamic holy sites. Bush and the U.S. government are certainly entitled to pronounce their vision of a final settlement—indeed, it is important that they do. Yet by promoting a vision that squeezes one party in the negotiations to the benefit of the other, Bush may well have sabotaged his own prophecy of peace in the Holy Land.
Nothing much was to be gained in the other purpose of Bush’s tour, his effort to encourage Arab states to join the effort to pressure Iran diplomatically, ostensibly as punishment for its refusal to abandon its uranium-enrichment activities but essentially as part of Bush's struggle for regional influence with Iran. Of course, no Arab state is very comfortable with Iran, essentially a regional superpower. But they see little reason to stick their necks out when Washington has done little to open a diplomatic dialogue that could help defuse the crisis with Iran, and when there is fear that Bush may wind up starting another war with another neighbor. “Bush comes and goes, but I have to live with that neighbor,” an Emirati woman complained to me afterwards. “It was like we invited somebody as a guest in our house, then he started throwing stones at our neighbor’s house while he was here.” I never expected the slap that Bush received from Mohammed Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah, foreign minister of Kuwait, the country whose liberation in Operation Desert Storm was led by Bush’s father in 1991. Standing beside Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Tehran while Bush was still in the Middle East, Sheikh Mohammed declared: "My country knows who is our friend and who is our enemy, and Iran is our friend." Bush is justified in having concerns, yet his simplistic approach to complex international issues did nothing to advance his own policy much less meaningfully tackle the Iran problem.
Bush also cited promoting democracy as a goal of his visit. Here, too, his clumsiness turned off autocrat and democrat alike. By pushing his democracy agenda, Bush hugely annoyed major allies like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has given substantial support to the Arab-Israeli peace process and battled against Islamic extremism. But by continuing to praise Mubarak’s importance as a strategic ally of the U.S., Bush embittered Arab democrats who see him selling them out. Bush’s tour put the contradictions of his policy in sharp focus, when he called for “democratic freedom in the Middle East” when he was in Dubai, a city of one of the smallest Arab states, and then said nothing about Mubarak’s ongoing crackdown on dissent when he visited Egypt, the mother of the Arab world. Egypt would have been the place for Bush to do a lot of talking on the big issues, security as well as democracy, but his visit seemed like an afterthought, or even a pit stop, as CNN called it.
What Bush still does not seem to get is that persistent instability in the Middle East—related to Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, etc.—is a major factor favoring authoritarian and extremist forces against the Arab democrats he professes to support. The next president should understand that the cycle of instability will continue to plague the region and threaten the world until an unrelenting effort is undertaken to achieve peace and justice through diplomacy, dialogue and cooperation. Since 1982, the U.S. government has led, supported or acquiesced in five wars in the Middle East, an average of one every five years: Iraq war against Iran ’80-’88; Israel war in Lebanon in ’82; Desert Storm liberation of Kuwait in ’91; U.S. invasion of Iraq in ’03; Israel war in Lebanon in ’06. None of the wars left the Middle East or the world a safer place.
--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
January 18, 2008 9:38
Rebuilding Beirut
I've spent the last several days working in the southern suburbs of Beirut, known collectively as the Dahieh, which just means suburbs in Arabic. Though unimaginative, the name is evocative: to many Lebanese it conjures up the image of a sprawling semi-lawless, Shia Muslim ghetto where the government fears to tread, where parking tickets are never paid, electricity bills never delivered, and where the streets are ruled by Hizballah traffic police wearing brown and Hizballah security men in black. This state-within-a-state of mind is expressed by a t-shirt popular in the 'hood which reads: Republic of Dahieh.
Some of this is no doubt exaggeration. The area was once predominately Christian, and not only are there a few churches still around, but because of Lebanon's bizarre electoral laws whereby citizens vote in the towns where their families once lived the last time the country had a national census (sometime in the 20's or 30's) several municipalities in the Dahieh are actually controlled by Christian politicians not by Hizballah. Even Haret Hreik, the center of Hizballah power in Lebanon, isn't the seething slum it's often depicted to be: it's a dense, urban, middle class neighborhood. Albeit one where that had a warren of offices and weapons dumps belonging to one of the world's most formidable militias.
Haret Hreik got pummeled by the Israelis during the 2006 war, and its now the center of an ambitious Hizballah reconstruction program called Waad, or Promise. Its supposed to be the fulfillment of a promise by Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah to rebuild the homes of those people displaced by Israeli bombs within a year after the beginning of construction, if the former residents hire Waad as their contractor and turn over their government compensation checks to the program.
Waad gathered some of Lebanon's best urban planners and architects and gave them a mandate to return everyone to their homes as quickly as possible and to return the fabric of the neighborhood to what it once was. Yet within the same basic framework, Waad wants to make what improvements are possible -- increase light and open space, reduce traffic, update the buildings to the latest safety and seismic codes, give the streets and buildings a greater sense of place and character rather than the undifferentiated maze it once was. One also assumes that because no one is allowed to photograph the area without Hizballah permission, and since some locations are off limits to photographers, at least a few of those deep, bunker-like basements being dug will be used for more than just parking spaces.
Though Hizballah has complained that the government has delayed delivering the proper share of compensation funds earmarked for Waad, the program is moving at breakneck speed. Private contracting companies are working for Waad at a discount and running crews on double shifts, and the centralized nature of the design process is also saving time. Once all the residents of a building are on board, Waad can start the initial construction, even as it continues to work on designing the interior.
Still, Hizballah knows that a lot is riding on the success of the Waad program. If it can't fully fund the project, finish on time and up to standard, it risks the reputation for organizational flair and constituent services that has earned the respect of many Lebanese, even some of those opposed to Hizballah's existence as an armed group. It also risks alienating all those made homeless by a war that Hizballah started.
But perhaps most mind-boggling of all, even a successful Waad program and all the effort expended here could be for nothing. In three month, this neighborhood might be gleaming and new, or if war breaks out, it could be rubble once again. This is perhaps the converse of the eat, drink, and be merry fatalism displayed by many in this war-weary country. How do you live if you tomorrow you might die? Brick by brick.
--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut
January 18, 2008 12:56
Failing to Impress
I'll wrap up the Bush tour of the Middle East with a final post on the subject on Friday--with a twist. Meanwhile, for those who are interested, here's my time.com analysis that's been up on the site today. As I'd been writing in the blog, the President failed to impress.
--By Scott Ma