Beirut, part 4

I’ve been continuing to work on re-encountering Beirut with some wariness.
Lots of reasons for that. Some personal, some political.

If you want to skip the following few “personal” observations
and get straight to what I write about the political situation here and in
the region, click here.

This afternoon, I walked up to Smith’s supermarket on Sadat Street. Boy,
the proliferation of big, modern supermarkets in Lebanon these days is really
something! Yesterday, I went to a large Monoprix near my old apartment
up on Verdun. Incredible: vast; extremely clean expanses of floor and shelving;
with great, mainly Lebanese goods hygienically packaged, beautifully presented,
and not terribly expensive… I’ll definitely go back there.

Smith’s Supermarket, however–an old institution in Ras Beirut–does not
quite compete with that one, on quite a number of grounds. Including
price. But it does have wine, and I wanted to lay in a couple of bottles.
Also, it’s within walking distance of our AUB faculty apartment here.
So I wandered around it a bit, picked up a few things, paid for them, and
was just picking my way over the nasty bit where they’re remaking the sidewalk
outside when I heard a gravelly male voice say, “Um Tarek, keefik?“

I don’t know how high I jumped off the ground. It’s been ages since
anyone called me Um Tarek–Tarek’s mom– the usual Arabic monicker for a
woman whose eldest son is called Tarek. Actually, on later consideration,
not that long: many of the Palestinian friends with whom I caught up in Ramallah
and Jerusalem last February are people who call me Um Tarek. But still,
I definitely wasn’t expecting it there, on the sidewalk outside Smith’s…

So it was a taxi-driver waiting there. I confess I only one-quarter
sort of recognized/remembered him. Look, it’s been 23 years since I
left this place! But he recognized me. Amazing! (He said
I looked a bit thinner and a bit older than back then. No surprise
there, I guess.) Apparently he was the same taxi-driver who always
used to wait for custom just by our apartment there in Verdun… it’s
coming back to me … slowly … there was the juice guy with his oranges
piled high on his cart … and usually, yes, a taxi waiting there. I
probably jumped into his car scores of times when one of our cars wasn’t
working, or I was in a hurry going someplace and didn’t want to bother with
parking.

So, we exchanged some little shards of news. I wish now that I’d asked
what became of the janitors who worked there, Abu Khudr and Abu Hussein,
and especially about Abu Huseein’s wife, Um Hussein and her kids… Maybe
next time I go to Smith’s…

Meantime on the political front things have stayed pretty tense here. Bashar
al-Asad, the hereditary president of “sisterly” Syria (irony alert there),
decided recently to start openly criticizing not just Walid Jumblatt, now
one of the most significant forces resisting Syrian influence here, but also
by clear implication the whole of the Druze community here of which Walid
is (also, it must be said, by heredity) the head. Coming so soon after
the attempt made on October 1 by a car-bomber to kill Walid’s key political
sidekick, Marwan Hamadeh, the threat to Walid could not have been clearer…
So he’s gone and holed himself up in the family home in Mukhtara in
the core of the Lebanese Druzes’ mountain heartland.

I should tell you more about Mukhtara sometime. In the meantime, if
you’ve ever read Mervyn Peake’s excellent Gormenghast trilogy, then you will
have some idea of what life is like up there.

So I’ve talked to a few Lebanese political types since getting here. One
of them, a physician and former MP whom I hadn’t met before, told me to come
round and talk to him at his office. When I got there, it turned out
to be a sexual-dysfunction practice that he runs–oh, and he runs a plastic-surgery
clinic right next door… Snip a bit here, pump up a bit there… I guess
it figures? Anyway, it’s the first time I’ve arrived in someone’s office
and been asked outright, “Are you here for beautification (tajmeel)?”
Heck, I thought, I mean I know I don’t pay overly much attention to
my appearance–certainly not by Lebanese standards!– but I didn’t think
I looked that bad!

Okay, the bottom line is that I need to get around a bit more, talk to a
few more people before I can write much about the politics here.

What I can say, just sitting here with my eyes and
ears open and thinking about this complex region of the world, is that the
regional situation seems fairly dangerous and potentially explosive. One
reason is that all the competing forces are suddenly so deeply intermingled
all the way from here to Afghanistan…

Lebanon, as I’ve noted here before, has for long been a battleground between
its two kmore powerful neighbors, Israel and Syria, both of whom tend to
view what goes on here as pretty much a zero-sum game. Allied to Israel,
of course, you have the US, which has its own extremely schizophrenic relationship
with Syria… So here, you have the whole tense situation over the (Syrian-motivated)
extension of Pres. Lahoud’s mandate for a further three years, plus the Security
Council’s passage of Resolution 1559 which called for a quick withdrawal
of Syria’s remaining forces from here plus the disbanding of Hizbollah. Plus,
the ugly escalation of Syrian or Syrian-inspired moves like the assassination
attempt against Marwan Hamadeh…

Personally, having watched the Syrians’ moves here for 30 years now, I’d
say they’re acting as if they’re feeling extremely spooked and edgy… I
mean, prolonging Lahoud’s term was really unnecessary and stupid. It
was almost bound to provoke a backlash here, and as many Lebanese have said,
the Syrians could have found a dozen other presidential candidates just as
willing as Lahoud to dance to their tune, so why bother with the whole extension
business at all?

Okay, so why might the Syrians be spooked and edgy? Perhaps because
they have the US army sitting along their lengthy eastern border with Iraq,
and many leading US political figures still openly urging “regime change”
in Syria as the next step… Plus, they also have the Mossad undertaking
anti-Hamas assassination actions in the heart of downtown Damascus and thus
majorly spooking the regime. The Israelis killed one Hamas guy there
not so long ago; and yesterday the Syrians said they’d smoked out a second
cell of Mossad-directed agents who were planning to kill the overall Hamas
head Khaled Meshaal… Oh, let’s not forget the admitted presence of
some Mossad people with the Kurds in northern Iraq, and the Syrian regime’s
huge concerns about attempts to mobilize their own Kurdish population against
them…

Lots of reasons for unease, fear, and perhaps a resulting tendency to general
overreaction there, I’d say…

Okay, moving further east we then have Iraq. Do you think the Americans
there are feeling uneasy and fearful, and prone to over-reaction? I’d
say so!

And then, moving further east still, Iran. Reasons for unease, fear,
and a tendency to overreact? Absolutely! (Remember, the Iranians
have the US forces boxing them in from both Iraq and Afghanistan– and also,
from the Gulf.)

And finally we come to Afghanistan.

I’d say this whole line of countries looks poised on the brink of an explosion,
and it could most cerainly set off a really damaging chain reaction.
This kind of geo-strategic intermingling of mutually hostile forces,
plus the failure of the US to really sit down properly with the Syrians anhd
Iranians in an effort to de-escalate and sort everything out, looks most
unstable. (And of course, as always, it’ll be the weakest countries
that get hit the hardest and hurt the most.)

In the IHT today, by the way, I saw a really good article about Iran
by Gareth Evans and Karim Sadjadpour of the International Crisis Group. I
tried to find a digital version of the text on both the IHT website (which
sucks, frankly) and the ICG site. But it wasn’t on either when I looked.
So let me quickly here just type in a couple of the better bits:

The debate in Washington is no longer whether the United States
can help [a democratic and stable] Iraq shape Iran, but whether it can stop
Iran from shaping Iraq…

Among Iranians, diffuse hope that the United States could improve their lot
has gradually given way to widespread skepticism. As a Teheran resident
told one of us: “When we look at what’s going on in Iraq, or Afghanistan,
it seems that the real choice is not one between democracy or authoritarianism,
but between stabuility and unrest. People may not be happy in Iran,
but no one wants unreast.”

… Today, with vital U.S. interests at stake in terms of Iraq, Afghanistan
and global nonproliferation, Iran is playing a central role in each and the
United States isn’t talking to it about any… [T]he United States
will need to put aside its illusory dreams of regime change, overcome its
deep-seated trepidation over a bilateral dialogue and engage Iran in a coherent,
sustained and comprehensive manner.

I almost couldn’t have said it better myself.