Interesting takes on Lebanon

[Oops I thought I’d posted this at 10 p.m. last night but it turns out I failed to hit the vital “Publish” button. Still worth looking at though.]
Two thoughtful and interesting op-eds about Iraq today. One by Flynt Leverett in the NYT, and one by David Ignatious in the WaPo.
Both writers make the excellent point that Hizbullah is a serious, sizeable force in Lebanese politics that is not about to be sidelined, and that its differences with the frothy activists (my words) of the much photographed anti-Syrian demonstrators will have a serious effect on developments.
David had this interesting little note:

    An encouraging sign is that Hezbollah’s leader, Said Hasan Nasrallah, met quietly Monday night in Beirut with Samir Franjieh, one of the leaders of the pro-democracy opposition. They discussed a possible deal whereby Hezbollah would agree to disarm its militia and join a new government, so long as that government wasn’t openly anti-Syrian and Hezbollah was allowed to keep its “resistance” squads. That’s a steep price, but getting Hezbollah inside the tent of political change might be worth it.

Real politics happening there. Excellent.
Thought-provoking but less above-board was something David mentioned further down:

    An interesting idea for squeezing Iran comes from an Iraqi Sunni leader named Mithal Alusi, who’s visiting Washington this week. He suggests inviting dissident Iranian Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri to the holy city of Najaf to explain his view that political rule by mullahs is incompatible with Islam. That would make Tehran think twice about meddling in Iraq.

It might have been more honest for David to tell his readers that this Alusi is a former member of Chalabi’s INC who was canned from the organization after he made a much-publicized visit to Israel. So perhaps Alusi’s credibility back home in Iraq might be just a tiny bit low?

Radical change in Arab world

Nearly all Arab-world political systems have become completely ossified over recent decades. The last time there was a major, region-wide series of shifts was around 1970. That was the year, for example, that Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel-Naser died and– within days of that occurrence– the relatively conservative “corrective movement” wing of the Syrian Baath Party headed by Hafez al-Asad took over from the much more populist and radical wing of the party that had preceded it.
The PLO guerrillas got chased out of Jordan that year, too. Altogether, the shifts of 1970 were toward much more cautious, status-quo-preserving powers taking over. Saddam Hussein, who was consolidating his grip on power in Iraq at that time, was part of that trend.
Anwar as-Sadat, who came in that year, was assassinated in 1981 and was succeeded by his Vice-President Hosni Mubarak, who has made a point of not naming his own VP since then. (I wonder why not?)
Hafez al-Asad died in 2000 and was succeeded by his son Bashar, a.k.a. at the time, “the default option”. Nothing very new there. Of course, the western media which often tends to go gaga over youthfulness, thought that Bashar’s youth itself was sufficient to qualify him for being a visionary innovator. How wrong can you be? (As I noted at the time.)
Arafat, wily old survivor that he was, succumbed to some physical cause last year. In that case, my theory that youthfulness often signifies only increased caution was amply rewarded, since the notably un-youthful Abu Mazen has been considerably bolder and more sure-footed politically than the (other) “Old Man”.
Oops, I forgot Saddam. He got toppled almost two years ago, and has been replaced by…. Who knows what?
Well anyway, a major emerging trope in the so-called “coverage” of the western new media has become that the “implantation of democracy” in Iraq has led to a gathering cascade of democratization throughout the region… Starting with elections in Palestine (everyone conveniently forgetting or downplaying the successful elections there in 1996, which led politically to a resounding success for Arafat and diplomatically to a total dead end. RIP.)… Carrying on with the much-lionized “red and white revolution” in Beirut (western media people conveniently neglecting the extremely large, yellow-flagged Hizbullah demonstrations in Beirut of ten days ago)… And now, there’s even Hosni Mubarak saying (gulp!) he’ll allow competitive elections in Egypt at the end of the year!!!!
How much substance– and what substance, exactly– is there in all this?
Well, it sure is interesting to live in a time when history, the march of which has been stayed by US-backed stasis and conservatism for the past 35 years, suddenly starts galloping into fast-forward.
One thing I really don’t understand, though, is the shallowness and wishful thinking of all the commentators here in the States who look at what’s happening and say something very simplistic like, “Oh, people power! Great! That’s bound to come out in a pro-US way because the people there will all see how much the US has done for them!”
One first thing to note is that, for all the western swooning over the “success” of Iraq’s election on January 30, the winners in that election have thus far not been allowed by the occupation forces to come to power at all!
(And meanwhile, Allawi’s puppet government has been passing decrees to clamp down on civil society, etc. What possible “legitimacy” can such steps have at this point, I wonder?)
As a US citizen, I see my main task as being to continue pushing hard for the ending of the illegitimate US diktat over Iraq, and the implementation there of the Iraqi people’s will. Right now. No excuses.
But I’m also happy to look at the other countries in the region where the US is active….

Continue reading “Radical change in Arab world”

Democracy denied in Iraq

Check out the new element near the top of the sidebar on the JWN front page.
It’s about a week since I started getting very curious as to why the actual implementation of the people’s will , as expressed in the late-January election, was taking so long to get implemented.
Now, I’m even curiouser.
(Regarding that counter on the sidebar, I haven’t figured out how to get it to update itself automatically, so I counted until tomorrow, Thursday. If anyone knows how to get it to update automatically, could you post some suitable HTML code or links to same in the comments? Thanks!)

Hard at work here

I’ve been working hard at making myself get my Africa book finished. Since I also have a life (okay, this may come as a surprise to some blog-readers), this means I need to cut back on blogging a bit.
Who knows, maybe I’ll blog more about Africa or post some other interesting tidbits on JWN along the way? Right now, though, I have nine already drafted chapters of the book to re-wrestle with and then about three more to write. It’s high-order concentration that’s needed here, not lots of distractions like blogging.
Especially not blogging about the Middle East.
I figured there will still be a big story in the ME even after the Africa book gets done.

Oldtimer’s view from Beirut

A friend from Beirut who wishes to be identified simply as “Oldtimer” sent me the following:
Just finished your good piece in CSM. It is good to see that you are somewhat optimistic on what appears to be a remarkable change in Lebanese politics, especially the breaking down of the taboo of criticising Syria. I hope it works and more than that, hope it will
continue. I am not so sure.
We are sorely lacking wise and charismatic leadership on the street and the strain is showing. We have Christian youth who have made the issue one of Geagea or Aoun. We have hardnosed Phalangists who want to open the case of slain president-elect Bashir Gemayel. We have Sunnis divided in themselves now totally rudderless. Anything close to a leader we had Walid who has been mobilizing a large segment of the Druze, but with his sectarian restraints, he has now taken refuge in Mouktara, having “seen the light.” Worse, Shiites have not been brought in and some seem to have decided to coopt them by insults. Very wrong and fool-hardy.
Of course there are vast numbers of truly patriotic, angry, well-meaning Lebanese who are about to be fed up with the unorganized nature of the opposition. If these people give up, then we can forget the sea of change in Lebanese politics.
Did you hear that Patriarch Sfeir threatened to leave the opposition if they persisted with their calls of PEACEFUL INTIFADA? We need more of such a realistic and cool-headed approach.
I suppose the term SNAFU was a Lebanese creation.

Marine’s Girl URL hijacked??

My friend Judy alerted me yesterday to the fact that Marine’s Girl’s blog seemed to be down. Today, there is something there at her customary URL, acrossriver.blogspot.com, but it ain’t her. It certainly looks as though someone has hijacked her URL.
MG had a huge problem back in November 2003, reported here, when some officious Marines gunnery sergeant threatened her and her guy with all kinds of problems if she continued publishing. On that occasion, she got some good support from wellplaced people in the Marines’ officer’s corps that persuaded her it was safe for to resume blogging just along the same lines she had been…
Some of the most poignant, intimate, and revealing posts on her blog have been the records of IM sessions she’s had over the months with her guy, in Iraq. He’s back looking after her in Michigan now. (She has a bad cancer-plus-chemo problem.)
I found a recent version of her blog’s front page by hitting “Cache” on the Google listing for it. But on that cached version, none of her archives were accessible. Seems like someone has really done a job on her URL.
I’m assuming that this time she’s been keeping copies of her own archives (please, MG!), so I hope she and VK (her guy– Valiant Knight) can get it back up in some form, soon. Except that, of course, there’s lots else going on in their lives right now.
How mean does a person have to be to launch an attack like this on a brave, truthful woman with a severe cancer problem and her guy who’s spent maybe 18 months in Iraq already but who has come back to tend to her?
Please, JWN people, let us all know if you get hold of any news about her and/or her blog. (I emailed her an enquiry, but who knows when she’ll be able to reply?)
And send her all the spiritual support you can. She, her guy, and her 10-year-old son Danny need our prayers.

Abu Mazen saves the day?

Pity the poor members of the Fateh bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council, who were elected to their positions at the height of post-Oslo optimism in January 1996 and will face re-election again this summer… If you were a Fateh legislator (as the majority of the PLC members have been), how on earth would you go about defending your movement’s decidedly lack-luster performance since 1996– on practically the whole range of issues, from diplomacy to the economy, to corruption, to the failure to ensure the people even the barest modicum of personal security?
Well, if you were a Fateh legislator you’d probably be working overtime right now to position yourself as a tough defender of the people’s interests, someone who is definitely not about to be duped by yet another Palestinian government made up of Arafat cronies and retreads…
So when PM Abu Alaa’ put together just such another government and presented it to the PLC earlier this week– no dice! (What a tin ear the guy has, eh?)
He tried again, yesterday, after rejigging a few names. Still no dice. It took Abu Mazen swooping in late last night to caucus with the Fateh legislators before they could all finally agree on a list.
Uber-“crony” Saeb Erakat got demoted. Nabil Shaath got shifted sideways. Dahlan did well. Surprisingly, one of the people from the earlier list who made it was Arafat nephew Nasser al-Kidwa, as new Foreign Minister. Actually, not so surprising, since by general agreement Kidwa has done a very competent job representing the PA/PLO at the UN.
Still, to me, the interesting thing was not the details of “who’s up” and “who’s down”, as much as the deft little show of political force that Abu Mazen put on, coming in at the moment of apparent crisis and doing the political work with the legislators that Abu Alaa’ had been unable or unwilling to do.
You’d think that Abu Alaa’ would have been a litttle swifter about seeing the need to meet the legislators at least part-way? After all, they will all be “on trial” together, as the Fateh movement, come the PLC elections in July… and Hamas has already given them some nasty surprises in two small rounds of municipal elections since December.
It’s great to see something like real national politics, with issues of re-electability and being held accountable, taking place among the Palestinians. Still, the whole process will only have real, lasting meaning if they get a truly viable chunk of land in which to conduct it. Does Abu Mazen (unlike his predecessor) have a winning strategy to win that for them? Not clear yet.

Rogue tentacles,now?

You think it’s scary to have the United States occasionally barging around the world starting wars, defying international conventions, and generally acting like a rogue state?
Well, how about this: the idea that within the US administration there are rogue tentacles that go around the world doing exactly the same but almost entirely out of any centralized control system?
To me, that is even scarier.
At least, with a rogue state, you have the general idea that there’s some kind of a centralized “intelligence” at work, assessing risks and trying (perhaps) to minimize the overall damage caused to the global system… Or, at the very least, that there’s a single “address” to which people can go with any queries or complaints about various US actions.
But now, according to this disturbing article in today’s WaPo, the Pentagon is actively promoting a plan that,

    would allow Special Operations forces to enter a foreign country to conduct military operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador there…

The reporters, the estimable Ann Scott Tyson and Dana Priest, cite as their sources, “administration officials familiar with the plan.” They note that,

    The plan would weaken the long-standing “chief of mission” authority under which the U.S. ambassador, as the president’s top representative in a foreign country, decides whether to grant entry to U.S. government personnel based on political and diplomatic considerations.

According to Tyson and Priest, this shift is still only “proposed”. And not surprisingly the proposal has come in for a lot of resistance from the State Department (and also, perhaps a little more suprisingly, from the CIA.)
The reporters attrobute to “current and former administration officials” the news that,

    Over the past two years, the State Department has repeatedly blocked Pentagon efforts to send Special Operations forces into countries surreptitiously and without ambassadors’ formal approval.

And they attribute to recently retired deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage the info that, while he was still on the job,

Continue reading “Rogue tentacles,now?”

Comments working again

I apologize that the blog has not been accepting comments since late Sunday night. But now, it is again!
For the first 36 hours or so, the problem was that the webhosting service was down. Then, while it was down, I started out on a big session of IP banning– a heroic but almost useless campaign to ban the IPs used by the spambots that feed really nasty spam into the blog through the Comments and the Trackbacks.
(Meantime, the tech advisor was installing MT-Blacklist, a much more effective way to combat spam.)
Okay, closing the Comments boards to all users including bona-fide users was my fault. In an excess of zeal and a deficit of careful attention during my ban-athon Monday, I ended up “banning” a completely blank IP box, which apparently had the effect of banning all IPs from Commenting.
Well, I think that was the problem. Because half an hour ago after I discovered that blank line on my register of banned IPs and duly unbanned it, suddenly I was able to post comments onto the blog again.
Yay!

CSM column on post-Hariri Lebanon

Today’s CSM has my column on post-Hariri Lebanon. It’s titled: Can real peace take root in Lebanon?
Let’s hope so! There have been some encouraging signs, as noted in the column.
Today, I see that Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made a statement to reporters promising further “withdrawals” of Syrian forces from central and western Lebanon, back to the eastern part of the country bordering Syria (and very close indeed to downtown Damascus).
In that story I linked to there, by AP’s Albert Aji, the reporter noted that Muallem’s statement use of the term “withdrawal” was the first time that term– rather than “redeployment” has been used by Syria regarding troop movements in Lebanon.
Aji noted, however, that the promised withdrawal would not be complete; and also that Muallem did not specify a timetable for it.
I was somewhat reassured, back at the end of last year, when Syria’s President Asad put Muallem, a wise veteran diplomat, onto the Lebanese “case”. Muallem was Syria’s key diplomatic point-person throughout most of the Israeli-Syrian peace diplomacy that occurred 1991-1996.
Those negotiations were always overshadowed in the media by the much “flashier” (and ultimately also unsuccessful) negotiations on the Israeli-Palestinian track. But everyone in the west who is nowadays so eager to jump on a mindlessly ideological anti-Syrian bandwagon seems to have forgotten that throughout that five-year period in the mid-1990s– and later, right up to Asad Pere’s fated encounter with Prez Clinton, in Geneva, in May 2000– Syria and Israel came literally within a whisker of concluding a final peace accord.
Essentially, the nature of that deal was “full peace and normalization” for “full withdrawal” of Israel’s occupation forces and settlers from the Golan. Rabin and Peres were both prepared to do that. (Read all about the negotiations in my 2000 book on the topic from the U.S. Institute of Peace Press.) But when the swaggeringly over-confident Ehud Barak thought he could get the first half of the “grand bargain” for something significantly less than full withdrawal, the whole deal fell apart.
Syria participated creatively, flexibly, and in good faith in those negotiations (which was more than you could say of Israel under, for example, Netanyahu or Sharon.) And Syria has always, since 2000, expressed its readiness to resume the final-status talks with Israel… Walid Muallem has meanwhile been a quiet, steady voice in the Syrian elite arguing as to why those negotiations have been in the country’s best longterm interest.
… So I was cautiously optimistic when Walid was given (an undefined amount of) responsibility for Syria’s “Lebanon file”, back in November or so. The Syrians had previously made a really disastrous mistake in Lebanon by needlessly ramming the extension of President Lahoud’s term through the Lebanese parliament.
I hope Damascus has figured out how to pursue a wiser course now. Let’s watch and see.