The “Cedar Revolution” ran into the complex realities of Lebanese politics Sunday. Hezbollah, the country’s only armed militia and one of its most potent political forces, broke a lengthy silence and declared its full support for Syria. The group’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, called for Lebanese to “express their gratitude” to Syria by attending a demonstration Tuesday against U.N. Resolution 1559, which calls for Syria to withdraw from Lebanon and for Hezbollah to disarm. While expressing support for the Lebanese opposition’s goals, and framing the demonstrations not as pro-Syrian but pro-Lebanese, he accused the opposition of serving American and Israeli interests by tacitly accepting the resolution.
Nasrallah reaffirmed that Hezbollah would not disarm, saying that “Lebanon needs the resistance to defend it.” The Shiite-dominated group, which drove the Israeli army out of Lebanon after a 15-year guerrilla war, has been locked in a low-intensity battle with Israel along Lebanon’s southern border.
Nasrallah’s intervention revealed the deep political fault lines in Lebanon, which were responsible for the nation’s bloody civil war but were covered up by the mass protests against Syria that followed the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Although those protests represented a sea-change in Lebanese politics because they united the previously fractious Sunni, Druze and Christian communities, the Shiites — who make up 40 percent of the country — were largely absent. Now they have spoken, and they cannot be ignored.
“Many [opposition leaders] are following U.S. demands,” Nasrallah said in a meeting with reporters at his headquarters in southern Beirut. “But I ask them to take a minute and contemplate that the U.S. demands are a photocopy of Israeli demands.”
Nasrallah is a famously shrewd political operator, and Hezbollah is a potent force not just militarily but politically and socially. It holds 13 seats in Lebanon’s Parliament, and delivers social services for tens of thousands of mostly-impoverished Shiites. By casting the opposition’s anti-Syria position as opening the door to Israeli and U.S. interference, while not opposing Syria’s announced withdrawal, he played a potent card in a country where any hint of accomodation with Israel evokes bitter memories of the civil war and Israel’s 1982 invasion.
A massive turnout by Hezbollah supporters Tuesday would be a pointed warning to the opposition not to go too far too fast.
The euphoric comparisons by some Western commentators of the “Cedar Revolution” to the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” were exaggerated and reflected wishful thinking more than historical knowledge of Lebanon. Although many Shiites in Beirut have joined the opposition, it remains a movement fueled by two Christian movements that have opposed Syria’s presence since 1990, by a Druze warlord once favored by Syria, and by the Sunni supporters of Hariri, who represent the rich and powerful business establishment.
One face of the opposition is displayed at Lila Brown’s, a dark Beirut nightclub in the elegant, mostly-Christian Achrafiyeh district. On ’80s night, the string of cheesy top-40 hits comes to a halt and the strains of the Lebanese national anthem begin. Immediately the crowd of well-heeled Lebanese patrons raise their glasses and begin to drunkenly sing, “We are all for the country, all for the glory, all for the flag.”
Stuffed into a corner of Monot Street, the famous strip of bars and clubs that fill several blocks less than a half mile from slain former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s grave and the scene of the “Cedar Revolution,” the club reflects the face the world has seen of Lebanon this week: unified in a common goal that has the Syrian-dominated government on the ropes.
But even on a quick trip to the southern Beirut suburb of Ouzai, a squalid neighborhood that feels as distant from Achrafiyeh as Baghdad’s Sadr City, there is a far different feeling. The Lebanese flags and signs that say “Independence 05″ are not flying as in the rest of Beirut, and while a few portraits of Hariri can be seen, far more posters show the bearded and turbaned image of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini.
Other posters celebrate the struggle, not against Syrian oppression, but against Israel. They bear the faces of “martyrs” killed in the struggle against the “Zionist entity” as its enemies here call it, unable to even say the name of the nation they started fighting after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, and with which they remain in a low-intensity conflict to this day over the tiny, disputed Shebaa Farms region. (Israel has sent signals that it may soon withdraw from the Shebaa Farms, which would be a shrewd move because it would end Hezbollah’s ostensible reason for retaining a military capacity.)
Hezbollah, or “the Party of God,” formed in the wake of that invasion as a more radical and militant offshoot of the mainstream Shiite party AMAL. A highly disciplined resistance group, Hezbollah, or some of its supporters who were controlled directly by Iran, used terrorism in support of its political goals. It was responsible for destroying the U.S. embassy, kidnapping dozens of Westerners (including AP bureau chief Terry Anderson and the CIA’s station chief, who was tortured to death) and car-bombing the U.S. Marine barracks at the Beirut airport, which killed more than 240 Americans and forced U.S. troops out of the country.
In order to understand the role both Hezbollah and Syria play in Lebanon, and the centrality of Israel to Lebanese politics, it is essential to have some knowledge of the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The civil war in Lebanon broke out in 1975, pitting the Maronite Christians, who were afraid of losing their traditional powers, against the Palestinians, the Sunni Muslims, and the Druze, a nonorthodox Muslim sect. In danger of being defeated, the Christians appealed to Syria for help. Although it would seem illogical that the hardline, anti-Israeli Syrians would support the largely pro-Israeli Christians, the prospect of a Palestinian victory was anathema to Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, who feared that Palestinian attacks on Israel would lead to Syria’s being drawn into a war with Israel. Syria also viewed Lebanon as part of its historic territory (in 1920 the French carved Lebanon off from various Ottoman Empire provinces that had made up what are now Syria and Lebanon). Accordingly, with U.S. and Israeli consent, Syria sent 40,000 troops across the border to prop up the Maronites and preserve a balance of power. In 1989, again with American consent, the Syrians defeated and exiled a renegade Christian general, Michel Aoun, ending the civil war.
Since then Syrian forces have remained, although the 1989 Taif Accord between the two nations called for their phased withdrawal from Lebanon. Syria has continued to treat Lebanon as a quasi-protectorate. There are currently 14,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon, as well as a pervasive intelligence network.
The Israeli invasion of 1982, masterminded by then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, was intended to eliminate the PLO in Lebanon. “Operation Peace in Galilee” succeeded in driving the PLO fighters out and into exile in Tunis, but it killed thousands of Lebanese and made bitter enemies of the Shiites, who had — because of their resentment of the Palestinians, who had formed a virtual state within a state — originally welcomed the Israelis. Israel formed a de facto alliance with the Lebanese Phalange, a Christian militia, and welcomed the post-invasion election of the pro-Israel Christian Bashir Gemayel. But Gemayel was assassinated by a Syrian agent, wrecking Israel’s long-term political plan. Israeli troops and Israel’s proxy Lebanese army continued to occupy south Lebanon, which Israel dubbed “Free Lebanon.”
Fresh from its victory in driving out the Americans — who were ostensibly a neutral peacekeeping force but were increasingly regarded as pro-Christian and pro-Israel — Hezbollah turned its sights on freeing this territory, waging a 15-year guerrilla war against the Israeli forces while developing a political and humanitarian wing that increased its popularity even outside the Shiite areas. By 2000, the Israelis had suffered enough casualties that it unilaterally quit Lebanon, a victory that put forth Hezbollah as the only Arab army ever to defeat the Israelis.
Through clever political maneuvering, a vast network of social services to the desperately poor Shiite south, and the indisputable professionalism of its operations against the Israelis, Hezbollah went mainstream in Lebanese politics and became widely respected, or feared, for its ability to harness the power of the southern Shiites as a political force.
For all of its power, however, Hezbollah remains heavily funded by and deeply tied to Iran and Syria, which employ it as a key proxy force in their fight against Israel. (Syria is loath to give up this strategic military asset as long as its long-standing demand that Israel return the Golan Heights, seized in the 1967 war, has not been resolved.) The international community does not agree on how to deal with Hezbollah. The United States regards it as a terrorist organization and has demanded that Europe place Hezbollah on the list of terrorist groups, but European nations have resisted doing this, arguing that it is a political player that should be brought into the process. France, with its longstanding historical ties to Lebanon, is walking a delicate tightrope: It joined the United States in supporting 1559, but has broken with Washington over its demand that Hezbollah be called a terrorist group.
The role of Hezbollah, its militia and the larger struggle against Israel pose a huge and complicated problem for the opposition, which has yet to display a coherent policy toward the group and the questions that will have to be answered.
“Look, the opposition after Hariri’s death did one thing no one could do before: It reframed the debate,” according to one political activist, a nonreligious Shiite, who like most people in Lebanon will not talk about Hezbollah on the record. “Before, the argument was that it was either you were for Syria in Lebanon or you were with the Jews. That is over now and it’s why you see the successes,” he adds.
No high-level Hezbollah officials would grant interviews for this story, but opposition leaders recognize that without Hezbollah’s cooperation there are limits to what it can accomplish. And a flat-out conflict with the group could turn deadly — either figuratively or literally — for much of the opposition.
Opposition leaders responded carefully to Nasrallah’s statements, praising him for calling for peaceful demonstrations.
Abdul, a 23-year-old former Hezbollah gunman, has given up dreams of martyrdom for a gig as a bar bouncer and boxer-bodybuilder. He says his former comrades, with whom he remains close, are stunned and torn over the “Cedar Revolution.”
“No Shiite wants to fight the Lebanese people, and they are happy to see Lebanon unified,” he says. “But the fight against the Jews, to the people in the south, it has been their life for 20 years. And Hezbollah is their world.”
The opposition recognizes this, but also finds itself in disagreement about how to handle the Israel/Hezbollah situation as Syria begins to withdraw. The key point of tension concerns the difference between U.N. Resolution 1559, which calls for Hezbollah’s disarmament, and the Taif Accords, which do not. Syria’s gradual withdrawal is in keeping with Taif, not 1559. “We are in talks with them and hope to know something next week,” says one top official in the Free Patriotic Movement. The FPM is a mostly Christian opposition group whose leader, Gen. Michel Aoun, the former prime minister and commander of the Lebanese army, remains in exile in France. “We, as the FPM, want peace with Israel and will not accept anything other than full implementation of 1559, which means disarming Hezbollah. But we recognize how difficult this is and know we cannot force a conflict with them on this issue.”
The Muslim and Druze groups are even less inclined to challenge Hezbollah. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze warlord and a key figure in the opposition since Hariri’s death, has flat-out rejected a peace deal with Israel under present conditions, and his history of leading fighters against their troops in the Chouf Mountains outside Beirut shows his stance is probably not just rhetoric.
Hariri’s people — his sons and wife are known to be funding much of the opposition’s efforts — come from the Sunni upper class of Lebanon. They are now aligned with the Christian groups they fought during Lebanon’s bloody civil war, a war whose scars are still visible in Beirut.
Getting the Sunni of Lebanon to accept a peace deal with Israel, while the Palestinian and Syrian tracks remain unresolved, is a nonstarter. And despite the religious rift between Sunni and Shiite Islam, and the social and political gap between them in Lebanon, Sunnis hold Hezbollah in high esteem for liberating south Lebanon and defeating the Israelis.
Adding to the uncertainty is the failure of Emile Lahoud — current president and perceived Syrian toady — to replace the government that resigned this week. It was thought he might put together a bland technocratic government to hold the country until the elections scheduled for this spring. But as of Friday there has been no announcement, so the opposition doesn’t know what the next step should be.
The local papers call this an intentional maneuver by the government as its remaining members cling to power. “Internal political developments are following the rhythm of foreign contacts, and this has been translated in the delay in announcing a schedule for the special parliamentary consultations to form a new government,” said the As-Safir newspaper.
“The state procrastinates and no consultations before Monday,” read the headline of the top-selling An-Nahar newspaper, which said, “There are no positive indications at the horizons so far.” “It seems that [the authorities] want to exploit the fall of the government — under pressure from the opposition — by causing an open-ended government crisis and holding the opposition responsible for the consequences.” (These translations of local newspapers were taken from wire reports.)
And there remains a dispute over whether Lahoud himself and the heads of the security services should be pressured to resign, or whether street protests should be held off until the elections.
“We want Lahoud to stay — we hate him as a Syrian-backed parasite — but we’d rather finish the job through the elections. If he resigned, the current Parliament remains loyal to Syria and might replace him with someone else for a six-year term. So we want to wait,” a FPM student organizer told me over drinks a few days ago.
But even as that appears to be the opposition position, Jumblatt has called for the entire government to be removed immediately, and small crowds — a presence remains by Hariri’s grave to keep momentum going — often chants “You’re next, you’re next” whenever Lahoud is seen on the giant television screens set up for the protests.
In an ambiguous speech to parliament on Saturday, Syrian President Bashir Assad, who has been under enormous international pressure to withdraw, promised to withdraw Syrian troops to the eastern Bekaa Valley and then across the Syrian border, as called for in the Taif Accords. But his speech contained hints that left open the possibility that Syria’s role in one form or other might continue. “We should not remain in Lebanon one day after there is a Lebanese consensus over our presence,” Assad said. A massive Hezbollah turnout Tuesday would reveal that there is no such consensus.
“Both [the opposition and Hezbollah] are warily eying each other,” one local newspaper editor explains. “The opposition has the power of many Lebanese and the international community, even today we see Egypt, Saudi, the U.N., the U.S., France, all backing the opposition. So Hezbollah is scared. It knows it will probably lose its Syrian support. I think we all know their troops and [intelligence services] will be forced to leave or will have such diminished strength that they cannot support Hezbollah anymore.” But the opposition has no clear policy on this issue either. The FPM and the Lebanese Forces (an opposition group that promotes a very militant Christian stance) want to see Hezbollah weakened or destroyed, but they know their strength cannot compare with Hezbollah’s.
“It’s intriguing and very dangerous,” he sighs. “Thank God the Israelis have had the good sense not to provoke anything here.”
Conservatives who praise President Bush’s policies in the global war on terrorism often say that when it comes to the unprecedented demands of the conflict, the president’s critics just don’t “get it.” But lately, when it comes to the use of torture — and a growing body of evidence that the Bush White House has sanctioned it by proxy in foreign countries (which has been illegal under U.S. law since 1998) — most on the political right just don’t discuss it.
As harrowing stories of detainees abused by U.S. and foreign interrogators keep on emerging, and as evidence mounts that the administration’s secret program of “extraordinary rendition” has dropped scores of detainees into a black hole of inhumane treatment and perhaps permanent legal limbo, why has the political right bound and gagged itself on the issue?
A thorough search of right-wing blogs and Op-Ed pages from the past two months turned up next to nothing on the issue, save the occasional tortured apologia. In early February, following reports of alleged sexual and religious abuse of detainees held in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Opinion Journal editor James Taranto dismissed the news by focusing his attention on an old debate from America’s culture war. “A Washington Post article about allegations of ‘torture’ at Guantanamo Bay contains [a] curious paragraph,” Taranto wrote. Here’s the paragraph from the Feb. 10 Post article to which he referred:
“Detainee lawyers likened the tactics to Nazis shaving the beards of orthodox Jews or artists dunking a crucifix in urine to shock Christians. ‘They’re exploiting religious beliefs to break them down, to destroy them,’ said Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents several dozen detainees. ‘What they’re doing, it reminds me of a pornographic Web site — it’s like the fantasy of all these S&M clubs.’”
“The crucifix in urine is a reference to Andres Serrano’s infamous photograph ‘Piss Christ,’” Taranto said, zeroing in on the lawyer’s analogy. “Which raises the question: Why isn’t the Center for Constitutional Rights demanding that the Gitmo interrogators get the National Endowment for the Arts grants to which they are clearly entitled under the First Amendment?”
Taranto’s obfuscating twist inspired Aussie blogger Arthur Chrenkoff to declare, “One man’s torture is another man’s S&M dungeon.” He wondered whether “detainee lawyers and the Centre for Constitutional Rights think that artists dunking a crucifix in urine constitutes an unacceptable torture for Christians. And if so, who can the Christians sue?”
Chrenkoff suggested that the alleged fondling of genitals and smearing of fake menstrual blood on detainees might be no worse than subjecting them to a few hours of hardcore punditry. “This is all such a tricky area, isn’t it?” he asked. “If exploiting religious beliefs to break down detainees is a no-no (and I’m not arguing that it should or shouldn’t be), are all the other types of beliefs, for example political or ethical beliefs, also off-limits? Would smearing vegetarians with meat be torture? Now, to some people, being locked up in the same room with a Republican, particularly a talkative one who makes fun of your deeply cherished ideals (think Rush Limbaugh or Mark Steyn or James Taranto), would be torture, too. Is this a purely subjective judgment of the torturee or are there some objective components in making the call?”
But at least one or two known figures on the right, if pressed, are willing to warn of the dangers of the current Bush administration policy — though Right Hook had to get off the Internet and pick up the phone to hear from them. (The pajama-clad pundits of the blogging “revolution” might consider this a primer.) In the wake of yet more evidence that the administration has sanctioned torture of detainees at the hands of foreign “allies,” Right Hook spoke with staunch war hawk and Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson.
“If we’re exporting detainees for the express purpose that they be tortured under interrogation by another regime, it’s a terrible idea,” he said. “Any short-term gain that might come out of it won’t be worth the long-term ill impression created by it. We’re promoting democracy across the region, and you can’t have torture by a dictatorial government. You just can’t do it. If you’re an idealist and you believe in democracy, it’s bad policy. It’s hypocritical, and it will blow up in your face.”
Hanson added that a number of conservative colleagues with whom he’s recently spoken think that Bush has “flipped his lid” on foreign policy, that the president is “drunk on Wilsonian idealism.”
Hanson sees a necessary break with the bad players of the region if democracy is going to flourish there. “I think what’s going on right now in Lebanon is amazing, and in Iraq, too,” he says. “I’m not a utopian, but I think as [the region] moves further in this direction you’re going to see the severing of a lot of ties — with military officers and intelligence groups, with autocrats and royalty.
“A lot of the old ways of doing business have to change. You can’t promote torture. You can no longer promote a guy like King Abdullah, or Hosni Mubarak’s son, or any of these people. Saudi Arabia is one of the worst societies in the world. Prince Bandar should be put out of business.”
Hanson has been joined by a few other lonely war hawks in denouncing torture, including Andrew Sullivan, Jeff Jacoby and blogger Sebastian Holsclaw, who weighed in earlier this month: “President Bush must be shown that the Republican Party is not willing to stand for the perversion of our moral standards,” Holsclaw wrote. “The Republican-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House can close the loophole which allows for extraordinary rendition and can loudly reaffirm that torture is not something we do. We are the majority party, and we claim to be a party that cares about the moral health of the nation. We are damning ourselves if we sit back and let it continue.”
But Hanson says that the political right’s overwhelming silence on torture probably results from many continuing to believe that the ends do justify the means, assuming that interrogation by torture is effective for culling useful information (few, if any intelligence experts believe that it is), and that we’re facing a new type of more “insidious” enemy.
National Review Online editor at large Jonah Goldberg is one who subscribes to that view.
“There are a lot of people who support the war who simply understand that these are some of the lesser evils of fighting a war on terrorism,” Goldberg said in a phone interview.
That’s in spite of the fact, he says, that some detainees who have been tortured turn out to be innocent.
“To be brutally honest, I’m torn about it. I don’t mean to be callous about it: I think the U.S. government should do everything it can to see to it that innocent people don’t get treated horribly. I don’t know anybody on the right who would say, ‘I’m in favor of innocent people being tortured.’ But that said, I think a lot of people on the right are skeptical of hype: That the allegations are not nearly as horrendous or as widespread a matter of policy as the media portrays.”
Goldberg adds that many Bush supporters are more “realist” than their detractors say. “For an undertaking of this scale, this war is probably one of the most humanitarian efforts the U.S. has ever conducted, in terms of limiting civilian casualties and all of these things. What you get is an environment in which the U.S. gets punished for only being good, and not being perfect,” he says. “But many people I know don’t buy into the notion that wars which need to be won can be fought as antiseptically as people who are against the war claim they should be.”
For him, that concept extends to the clandestine activities of the U.S. government. “If, because of a legal regime in the U.S. which guarantees the civil liberties of Americans — and I’m all in favor of that — we have to go to other countries in order to successfully interrogate terrorists, then I’m not horrified by that proposition,” Goldberg says. And while he concedes that it fundamentally contradicts what the United States stands for, “what undermines what we stand for,” he says, “is the publication of all this information.”
“We did all sorts of terrible things in World War II, and there was a reason why we had military censors,” he says. “I do think there’s a reason why the CIA does this stuff in secret, and why I think it should do a lot of things in secret. These things have a lot of propaganda value, both negative and positive, so I think we need to separate out what we think are ‘good policies’ from what the consequences are if those policies are publicized.”
“There are lots of things that are ugly and terrible about war,” Goldberg adds. “I think that people on the right are more comfortable allowing for that.”
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Read more of “Right Hook,” Salon’s weekly roundup of conservative commentary and analysis here.
The crowds began forming in the early morning hours Wednesday outside the house of the deceased Rafik Hariri. Two days prior, Hariri, the billionaire former prime minister of Lebanon, had been assassinated on the Beirut waterfront in a massive explosion that knocked windows out of buildings over a mile away.
Lebanon was in its second day of mourning, and in the mostly Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Qoreitem, men and women made their way to his house to pay their final respects. So too did large crowds of young Lebanese men, waving flags, chanting, singing and marching. Some people even brought their children, and I watched as two young boys jousted with their matching Lebanese flags. The boys could hardly have understood the significance of the moment, but nonetheless, their fathers must have felt their sons needed to be there just to be able to say, years down the road, that they had bid the great man farewell.
The red and white Lebanese flag, of course, was everywhere, but so too were makeshift black flags, waved side by side with the national flag. I know the bearers intended their banners to be symbols of mourning, but I couldn’t help thinking they could have just as well been the black flag of anarchy — since that’s what many fear Lebanon is on the verge of slipping into.
When the bomb went off on Monday, I was walking with my girlfriend, Tara, a little less than a mile away. Nonetheless, we could both feel the explosion reverberate in our ribcages, which was the first sign that what we had just heard was not just a demolition charge from a nearby construction site. Still, we had no idea just how big the bomb was until we arrived on the scene 10 minutes later.
I had felt explosions reverberate in my body before, and it’s an eerie feeling, like someone has just shocked you with a heart resuscitator or punched you full force in the solar plexus. Once, as an Army Ranger on a mission in Iraq, I had ordered the use of fragmentary grenades to clear a room in the midst of a firefight. The resulting concussion bounced off the walls and shook those of us in the adjacent rooms; I could imagine what it had done to the people inside before we even entered.
By contrast, the bomb in Beirut had done the same thing from almost a mile away, and unlike the grenade, it wasn’t even in a confined space where it could reverberate off anything. So I shouldn’t have been shocked when I arrived and saw how big the crater caused by the bomb was, but I was.
Later that afternoon, I discussed the blast with a friend, a former United Nations official who lived in Lebanon during the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 (a war that Hariri helped mediate from abroad before he returned to his native Lebanon and became prime minister). We both estimated the explosive charge to have been massive, over 300 kilograms in weight. The crater it left in the middle of the Corniche was at least three meters deep and 20 wide, astonishing given all the asphalt and rock it had to blast through.
The first culprit on everyone’s minds was Syria. Hariri had resigned as prime minister in protest of Syria’s meddling in Lebanese affairs, and those opposed to the current pro-Syrian prime minister, Omar Karami, had been courting him of late. (Syrian troops’ presence in Lebanon was legitimized by the Arab League after Lebanon’s civil war, but U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for the troops’ withdrawal, has emboldened Lebanese opposed to their presence.) Later in the day the groups opposed to Karami would issue a statement placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of Damascus.
For the rest of the day on Monday, Beirut remained in a state of shellshock. Without even being told, shops and restaurants shuttered their businesses midafternoon. People went home to their families, city residents back to their villages in the mountains and the south. Many of those who remained dressed up in their best dark suits and made the drive to Qoreitem to pay their respects to the Hariri family.
Tuesday was much the same. All stores and restaurants remained closed for the duration of the mourning period. Tara, a photographer, sent her pictures back to New York, and then we both headed out of town, up north to the coastal town of Byblos in search of a good restaurant still open.
When we arrived back in town that night, Beirut remained a ghost town — the streets still empty, the stores all still shuttered. The only signs of life were the glossy pictures of Hariri that had suddenly sprouted up everywhere — on apartment buildings, on billboards, on windows and on cars.
An American friend called me once we arrived back in town. A group of resourceful expatriates had gathered up enough groceries and liquor for an “end of the world” dinner before the next day’s funeral, where anything seemed likely to happen. I contributed a fifth of bourbon, and we all crowded around the dinner table, exchanging our best guesses late into the night as to what might happen next. We laughed at one another’s gallows humor and the sad state of affairs in tiny, hapless Lebanon. Halfway through, however, one of our Lebanese friends excused herself, and I quickly realized how callous we had been. For us, as Westerners, everything that happened in Lebanon took place in the third person. For us, a trip out of the country was just a passport away. For her, however, this was the only country she had — and she was smart enough to know in what awful direction it appeared to be heading.
Wednesday morning, as the crowds began to gather around Hariri’s mansion in Qoreitem for the funeral procession into downtown, I ran into my same group of friends standing by a busy intersection not two blocks from my apartment. The Lebanese friend I was worried we had offended had copies of all the day’s newspapers in her hand, and I asked to see them. On the front page of one, I saw a remarkable photograph that filled me with both a sense of hope for the country and at the same time fear.
Hariri’s two sons, Sunni Muslims, stood together in the photograph side by side with the Druze chieftain, Walid Jumblatt, and the Maronite Christian patriarch, Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir. They were all receiving mourners, together, inside the Hariri residence.
To someone with little background knowledge of Lebanon and the Middle East, such a photograph would seem unremarkable. But for anyone with even a passing understanding of the sectarian conflict that engulfed Lebanon from 1975 until 1990, the image of the four men standing united under the headline “Hariris Snub Government Overtures” was nothing short of amazing. For now, the leaders of once bitter rivals have put aside their differences in united contempt toward the current regime, widely dismissed as puppets of the Syrian government.
And as one of the keenest longtime observers of the Middle East, David Hirst, noted in the Guardian, Syria “is on the defensive. So are its Lebanese allies, inside and outside the regime.”
For that reason a friend of mine felt the attack on Hariri was a “message” — meant to remind those calling for Lebanese independence to remember who really remains in charge of the country.
The day of the funeral, however, belonged to Hariri and the opposition. Tara and I followed the procession for a while through the crowded, crazy Beirut streets until we had had enough and took a shortcut to the unfinished mosque that was being built by Hariri downtown, where the funeral was to be held. Already, tens of thousands of people had gathered, and we worked our way down to the VIP seating section just in time to snap pictures of the American ambassador arriving.
I chatted with one of the men on his security detail for a while and asked him if he had ever seen such a mess as far as security was concerned. The crowd had by now grown to hundreds of thousands, and I kept one arm around Tara to keep her from getting swept away in the flood of shouting, chanting men and women. The Boy Scouts of Lebanon, of all people, kept a semblance of order, linking their arms to hold back the crowd. I tried to imagine the Boy Scouts doing the same thing in America, out there in their uniforms with their merit badges, and the ambassador’s security man and I chuckled as — against all odds — the scouts managed to keep people from killing one another outside the mosque.
Tara and I traded her camera back and forth, me holding it high above my head in an effort to get some pictures of the wild crowd as they pushed against one another for space.
The two of us then spent 15 minutes fighting our way through the crowd to get another angle, and we saw several people being led away on stretchers by the Red Cross, most of them casualties of the heat. Once again, the Boy Scouts, together with the Red Cross and a phalanx of Druze clerics, managed to keep some sort of order outside the mosque. We narrowly avoiding being trampled as bearers started unloading the coffins carrying Hariri’s security detail killed in the blast.
We then crept around the corner, where we saw a group of boys climbing over the walls of the unfinished mosque. We followed them in and then followed a smaller group of people to the roof of the mosque, where we looked down on the crowd as the service came to a close.
Forty feet below, in the street, one of the valiant scouts was bleeding from the head as the result of some unseen blow. He would be OK, though, and as his mates helped him to the Red Cross station, I watched his fellow scouts attempt to put his bloody blue beret back on his head as he limped away. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The whole scene was just so awful and beautiful and confusing and hopeful.
And that, I realized, is the city of Beirut and the country of Lebanon in a nutshell. Now perhaps more than ever. In a time of mourning and fear, there is also a sense that this horrible tragedy really might change things for the better, that somehow this will force the last cards left in Syria’s hand, that although the death of a man as financially powerful as Rafik Hariri might mean the start of a long night for Lebanon’s economy, it might also signal the start of something else, perhaps even the long-awaited independence of the Lebanese people.
The majority of the predictions, of course, have been far more negative. Most prognosticators never even bothered to imagine a Lebanon without Hariri because it was just too awful to comprehend. Most people fear Lebanon is about to slip back into the abyss of open warfare. But in a country that has already survived 15 year of brutal civil war, the greatest natural resource left in Lebanon is hope. And maybe, just maybe, that will be enough this time.
The giant mobile-phone company ads that have replaced the grandiose posters of the late president Hafez Assad in Damascus cannot conceal the crumbling behind the country’s newly commercialized façade. Yet in its foreign policy Syria seems to be as assertive as ever. Its ambiguous attitude toward the insurgency in Iraq has angered Washington. Its meddling in Lebanon has drawn criticism even from European sympathizers such as France. And both Europe and the United States are irritated by Syria’s oldest hobby, stoking the fires of Palestinian militancy, at a time when the death of Yasser Arafat and exhaustion with the intifada may mean another chance for a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
Many foreign diplomats and some Syrian analysts say the government of Hafez’s son Bashar can no longer afford those policies. And there are reasons to believe that the Syrian leader himself is trying to move away from his nation’s traditional role as a bastion of Arab militancy. Yet during a recent visit to Damascus, a wide range of observers — including a senior Palestinian leader, Iraqi politicians and local activists — attested that the policies are continuing. Definitive proof is hard to come by here, in one of the most closed and controlling regimes in the world. Lebanon, which Damascus regards as its own private fiefdom, is the only place where Syria makes no attempt to hide its hand. But Syria still seems to be playing the games that under Hafez Assad made it famous for “punching above its weight” in the region.
The problem for Damascus, diplomats say, is that times have changed since 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq — not to mention that the son is just not as adept as the father.
At the same time, however, Damascus is also reaching out to the West and its archenemy Israel. The young Assad is clearly interested in kick-starting negotiations with Israel, and not only through the official channels. Seated in the lobby of a posh Damascus hotel, one highly regarded academic told me, on condition of anonymity, that he was involved in setting up “second track” negotiations with the Israelis, based on the model of the Oslo talks that led to the historic 1993 agreement between the Rabin government and Arafat’s PLO. The man, who is known to be reliable, provided names, dates and places and said the feelers were sanctioned at the very highest level.
Terje Roed-Larsen, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process who was a key player in the Oslo talks, believes that Assad is sincerely interested not only in making peace with Israel but also in bringing Syria closer to the West. In the latest issue of Bitterlemons International, a Middle East round table, he wrote of “a very warm, creative and constructive” meeting with Assad. “I came away convinced that the president is genuinely interested not only in restarting negotiations, but also in seeking to reposition Syria and integrate the country more deeply into the international community,” Roed-Larsen wrote. “All the indications are that Syria has recognized the signs of the times, and is trying to make some progress, both as regards peace with Israel and in terms of a broader redefinition of its role in the region.”
Debate rages about Assad’s motivations. Syria is clearly feeling heat from Washington and Europe, and the academic involved in the second-track talks admitted that Assad’s peace feelers to Israel might be partly a P.R. ploy. But, he said, Assad is genuinely interested in making peace with Israel.
There can be no doubt that the United States, and now the United Nations, are putting pressure on Syria. Neoconservatives in the Bush administration who once boasted of making a “left turn” to Damascus after defeating Iraq and Iran continue to talk ominously about dealing with Syria. Although few expect the United States to actually invade either Syria or Iran now that its Iraq adventure has soured, the presence of American troops next door has clearly gotten Syria’s attention. A few months ago the U.S. adopted the Syria Accountability Act, which imposed sanctions on Syria for allegedly seeking weapons of mass destruction, a charge Syria denies. And the U.N. Security Council in September agreed on Resolution 1559, which called on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon and to stop supporting that country’s Hezbollah movement. To Syria’s horror, France supported the resolution. But Damascus is far more worried about the United States.
Last week President Bush and one of his officials, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, demanded that Syria stop what they said was its support for the insurgency in Iraq. “We have sent messages to the Syrians in the past and will continue to do so. We have tools at our disposal, a variety of tools, ranging from diplomatic tools to economic pressure. Nothing’s taken off the table,” Bush said at a news conference. He is said to be reviewing options that include freezing the assets of high-ranking Syrian government officials. Armitage told the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar that the administration would not let the subject of Resolution 1559 rest, either. “I hope that our relations with Syria do not worsen further, but it’s entirely in the hands of Damascus,” he said. “Syria’s failure to accept U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 is a defiance of the international community.”
On Sunday, Armitage offered guarded praise for Syria’s cooperation after meeting with Assad and his foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa. “Syria has made some real improvements in recent months on border security. But we all need to do more, particularly on the question of former regime elements participating in activities in Iraq, going back and forth from Syria,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying.
Syria has tried to compensate for some of the American pressure by turning toward Europe. After nine years of glacial negotiations, Damascus this year signed an “association agreement” with the European Union. It was held up at the last moment when the EU insisted that its new rules on human rights and weapons of mass destruction be incorporated. But, says Frank Hesske, the EU’s ambassador to Damascus, the agreement “certainly does not” mean that the Syrians can play off the EU against the United States.
The U.S. sanctions by themselves don’t harm Syria’s economy much. Trade between the two countries is relatively minor. But the sanctions do make it a lot harder to attract international investment, including capital from European companies, which is desperately needed to revive Syria’s antiquated economy, says Hesske. Unable to provide jobs for young people entering the labor market and faced with slowing growth, Syria’s economy may grind to a halt in two years’ time. Partly as a result, social unrest — including renewed stirrings of Islamic fundamentalism — is growing. Fundamentalism was stomped out after Assad launched a brutal assault on the city of Hama in 1982, a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, killing up to 20,000 people. Political repression is still heavy, even though the government is now steadily releasing small numbers of political prisoners. There have been no more signs of a thaw after the authorities came down hard on a nascent pro-democracy movement that sprang up after Bashar Assad took over in 2000.
The seemingly logical way to avoid a crisis would be to give in to the international pressure, get out of Lebanon, and stop meddling in Iraq and Palestine. But for several reasons Syria may find it difficult to do that. First of all, the regime survives by the grace of payoffs to clans and factions, according to several analysts who wish to remain anonymous. The money supposedly comes from Syria’s involvement in Lebanon. Then there is the traditional role that Syria has played as a champion of Arab nationalism. It will not be easy for the government to let go of those ambitions and maintain its credibility domestically, among a public that has turned increasingly anti-Western after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And lastly there is a persistent feeling that the good old ways still work.
Part of the riddle is the position of Bashar Assad. The British-educated ophthalmologist inherited the presidency upon his father’s death, but many question the extent to which he is in control. Some observers speak of competing factions within the governing clique, which consists mainly of the extended Assad family, their minority Alawite sect, Christian allies and a sprinkling of outsiders. One of the factions is said to advocate business as usual, despite the 9/11 attacks and the presence of American troops in neighboring Iraq. Business as usual in Syria means that the country will keep up its support for hard-liners and militants wherever it can, in order to remain influential.
The continuing ambiguity about Syria’s role in Iraq may fit this pattern. In Hiri, a desolate village about halfway along the 400-mile-long border, the Syrian security service, the Mukhabarat, seems to be keeping an eye on any suspicious strangers. Journalists who are not on a press tour organized by the country’s Ministry of Information are told to leave and then escorted for more than 45 minutes through the nearby town of Abu Qamal, just to make sure they’re really gone. But the regime’s vigilance against people sneaking across the border to join the Iraqi insurgents, or bring them money or supplies, is said to be less sharp.
Indeed, as Syrian officials keep saying, the border is long and difficult to patrol. Near Hiri, the Syrians have built an earthen ramp to prevent cars from crossing, but everybody agrees that people get through elsewhere. The tribes and families in Syria are the same as on the Iraqi side, and people are used to moving back and forth. A sheik of the large Duleimi clan in Abu Qamal said that he was in Iraq during the war and that he knows that some people have since crossed to join their family members in their fight against the Americans.
The United States appears to be worried less about such individual crossings and much more about the possibility that the Syrian government may either be turning a blind eye to Iraqi insurgents or be actively assisting them. After initially complaining about the porous border, the United States has shifted its attention to the presence in Syria of members of the former Iraqi regime and its Baath party and their alleged role in funding and supporting the insurgency.
The country officially hosts some 45,000 Iraqis, but wildly inflated figures of up to a million refugees also circulate. One Iraqi Baathist who has been in Damascus for some 30 years, a refugee from Saddam Hussein, not an associate, is Mahdi al-Obeidi. “There are many people here from the regime,” said Obeidi, who styles himself a representative of the “original Baath party, from before Saddam.” In his shabby office in Damascus, he claimed to have met with many new arrivals. He does not make a distinction between those who have been “Saddam’s men” and others. Now is Iraq’s hour of need, and everybody should unite to fight the Americans, Obeidi said. “Even if I only have one dime left, I would give it to the resistance,” he declared. Most Iraqis who are in Syria feel that way, he asserted, so it should not come as a surprise that they try to support the “freedom fighters.” It is no secret that the Syrians are in “total sympathy with the resistance,” Obeidi claimed. Sadly, he added, the government has not done much to help.
On the surface, it seems that the claim is correct, at least since the capture of Saddam Hussein about a year ago. Mahmoud Mohammed al Ghasi, also known as Sheik Qa’aqa, was a fiery preacher until the invasion of Iraq. Bearded and dressed as an Afghan veteran in a combination of fatigues and traditional garb, he urged the faithful to oppose American designs in the region. After the invasion he was told to tone it down. Now he looks like a businessman, dressed in a blazer with a cropped beard, and he has given up preaching in the local mosque. “The government does not have a problem with me,” maintained Qa’aqa, seated behind his desk in his office in Aleppo. “I think some officials just became worried because I attracted too many people.”
One disappointed former associate who preferred to remain unnamed said that he and a group of some 300 core supporters left Qa’aqa almost a year ago because the sheik “turned out to be a fraud.” He said that before the war, Qa’aqa had called for a holy war against the Americans if they invaded Iraq. After the fall of Baghdad, Qa’aqa made a U-turn. “A lot of kids came to talk to him about going to Iraq and he swore again and again that there is no jihad in Iraq.” Qa’aqa’s former associate is closely watched by the Mukhabarat, and he has been forbidden to meet with other former followers of the sheik. “They do not want us to organize,” he said. Nevertheless, he claimed that he and others like him had “very good contacts” among the insurgents in Iraq and that it was no problem to cross the border.
There is disagreement in Syria about what the government knows about such supposed ties and what it is doing about it. One advisor to the foreign ministry called it “inconceivable” that the government would allow, let alone condone, support for the Iraqi insurgents. “Those people may go and fight, be trained, learn all kinds of things, and come back to make trouble,” said Riad Daoudi, arguing that the insurgency in Iraq is not in Syria’s interest.
A prominent human rights lawyer, Anwar Al Bounni, agreed — up to a point. He said that the government was arresting fighters who returned from Iraq, but not because it wanted the American vision of a democratic Iraq to succeed. At the beginning of December he was visited in his office in Damascus by one man who had been held for four months after crossing back to Syria. He told Al Bounni that at least 50 former fighters were languishing in the same jail. The lawyer thought that there must be many more elsewhere, and said that the government has indeed clamped down on some of the people who were calling for a jihad in Iraq. In Hama, where fundamentalism is reviving after the elder Assad’s massacre, 16 preachers who had called on their followers to go to Iraq were arrested in September, the lawyer said. This was done, he claimed, not because the authorities wanted to stop the flow of fighters but because they do not want such fighters to be “outside their control.”
Al Bounni said the government has no interest in a stable Iraq. “They worry about Iraq being a really democratic and free country.” This presumably would set a bad example for Syria’s own population. Another analyst who has insight into the working of the government, slightly adjusted that picture. Syria may still play a “passive” role in allowing fighters and financial support to cross into Iraq, he said. But the government would be willing to stop that “in exchange for a role” in the affairs of its neighbor. He called it the Americans’ greatest failure that they have not made such an offer until now.
Syria’s relationship with the Palestinians may face a similar problem. Syria simply does not want to be the last country to make peace with Israel. Its negotiating position over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights would suffer if the Palestinians cut a deal first, which now seems possible, if only faintly. But both the Israeli government and the Bush administration have made clear that they are in no hurry to let Syria in on peace talks and thus evade international pressure over its other actions. In mid-December, Bush said, “Assad needs to wait: first peace between Israel and Palestine, and then we’ll see what to do with Syria.”
So Syria may once again revert to its “spoiler” role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The country hosts some of Palestinian militant groups’ leaders and offices, and senior Palestinian leaders also say Damascus is trying to influence factions in the Palestinian territories. This is shaping up as a concern in the run-up to the elections on Jan. 9 for a new chairman of the Palestinian Authority to replace Yasser Arafat. The new Palestinian leadership is worried about the possibility that renewed fighting could disrupt the elections and scupper their plans to restore a measure of stability and even to restart negotiations with Israel. Over the last couple of weeks, fighting in Gaza between the militants and the army once again escalated after a period of relative calm in the wake of Arafat’s death.
In Damascus, a veteran Palestinian leader, Naif Hawatmeh, earlier this month said that Syria indirectly supports some of the militant factions inside Fatah, the main PLO faction, through the Lebanese Hezbollah movement. “Everybody knows Syria and Iran support Hezbollah. Well, Hezbollah supports some of the groups in the Palestinian territories, not only the Islamic ones but also some inside Fatah such as the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades,” said Hawatmeh, who is the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and has been based in Damascus for decades.
Persistent Israeli claims to the same effect may have been exaggerated, but even Palestinian sources inside the West Bank, from all the important factions, agree that Hezbollah is involved, and Syria is blamed for instructing some factions to serve its own needs.
The Palestinian Islamic groups are also a concern for Mahmoud Abbas, the new PLO leader and the leading candidate in the Palestinian elections. He visited Damascus in December and met with the political leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal. A Hamas source said that the visit yielded little agreement and that the elections for the leadership of the Palestinian Authority were not even discussed. Meshaal rejected a Hamas cease-fire. After the meeting between Abbas and Meshaal, Hamas increased its attacks on Israeli targets in and around the Gaza strip.
At a press conference in Damascus — after a meeting between President Assad and the Palestinian leadership, led by Abbas — Syria’s foreign minister, Farouk Shara’a, indicated where Syria’s interests lay. He said that coordination between the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon over peace moves was a “demand” of all the Arab states. Abbas also said he wanted coordination but did not make any firm commitments.
Syria is trying hard to prove that it is needed in the regional equation, that it cannot be ignored. In Damascus, critics of the government agree that Assad’s government, even though it is reaching out to the rest of the world, is up to its old tricks. Where they differ is on the question of whether the regime will be prepared to abandon its practices at a price, or whether it never will because its very survival is bound up with them.
June appeared to be a very good month for the Bush administration in the Middle East. After almost a year of bad news from Iraq, terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, continued bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians, and unsuccessful efforts to garner support from major U.S. allies in the reconstruction of Iraq, the Bush administration secured four quick victories in the span of three weeks. By the July Fourth weekend, it would have Americans believing that the preceding three weeks had vindicated its strategy in the Middle East.
On June 8, the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved Resolution 1546, which, among other things, endorsed the formation of the interim Iraqi government, welcomed the termination of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and looked forward to the “reassertion of Iraqi sovereignty.” Two days later, at the G-8 summit, President Bush stood with other world leaders who unanimously endorsed a U.S.-sponsored plan to promote democracy in the Middle East. At the end of the month, at the NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey, Washington’s European allies committed themselves to training new Iraqi security forces — but not to deploying the troops Bush wanted. Finally, on June 28, formal sovereignty returned to Iraq, and to cap off that momentous event, the United States transferred custody of Saddam Hussein to the Iraqi government for arraignment in an Iraqi courtroom.
Closer analysis of those achievements, however, reveals a far different picture than one of an administration that is master of its Middle East policy. Instead, what emerges is the image of a White House putting the best spin on a policy that has run into serious difficulties. To be sure, everything in U.N. diplomacy is a compromise, but the final resolution that the Security Council endorsed was hardly the one the White House wanted. Yet, so desperate was the administration to establish a semblance of international legitimacy for its Iraq policy (and simultaneously defuse one of John Kerry’s talking points) that the Bush team at the United Nations bowed even to French pressure for key changes to the text.
On the G-8 summit and the reform plan known as the Partnership for Progress and a Common Future With the Region of the Broader Middle East and North Africa, one has to give credit where credit is due: Placing political liberalization and economic reform high on the U.S.-Middle East agenda is a step in the right direction. However, the reform plan that the administration is touting is little more than a repackaging of largely old ideas that have had a negligible effect on authoritarian leaders in the region. Reportedly, the administration had wanted to be bolder but could not muster the support of its Western allies.
The White House argues that the transatlantic rift over Iraq is something of the past, especially since NATO has agreed to train Iraqi soldiers and policemen. “Retrain” is perhaps a better term. After all, in November 2003, the secretary of defense boasted that U.S. forces had trained and equipped 118,000 Iraqis in five security forces. Yet all the talk of the Iraqis’ taking responsibility for their own security proved to be based more on wishful thinking than on a real assessment of the capability of Iraqi forces. In April, many of Iraq’s new policemen and soldiers refused to fight in Fallujah and either deserted or joined Muqtada al-Sadr’s insurgents in Najaf, and the White House clearly could have used help from NATO troops in putting down the insurgency there.
While some have suggested that the way the Coalition Provisional Authority handed over political authority to the interim Iraqi government — in a brief ceremony held in a small windowless office inside the Green Zone, two days earlier than planned — revealed the administration’s intention to cut and run, this critique is unfair. Given the intensification of insurgent-sponsored violence as June 30 drew near, the decision not to hold an elaborate ceremony on one of Saddam’s former parade grounds seemed prudent.
Nevertheless, the transfer of sovereignty and Saddam’s impending trial raise a number of serious issues. First, and most basic: Has anything changed for average Iraqis? While the United Nations, Arab League, Organization of the Islamic Conference and European Union have all recognized the interim Iraqi government, this means very little for Iraqis who must contend daily with the hazards of the new Iraq. The now defunct CPA and the U.S. military have rehabilitated major portions of the country’s infrastructure, built schools and resupplied hospitals, but Iraqis still do not have reliable access to basic services. And despite the approximately $20 billion invested — which is primarily Iraq’s own money, thanks to the return of Iraqi oil production — most Iraqis are experiencing significant economic hardship.
Of course, much of the Iraqis’ misery can be attributed to the still tenuous security situation. While remnants of the old regime and foreign jihadists press their insurgency, Muqtada al-Sadr is keeping his options open. In one sermon the cleric signals his desire for a political role in the new Iraq, and in the next he calls on Iraqis to resist the continued occupation.
The occupation is, in fact, the crux of the issue. Al-Sadr’s message and that of the other insurgent groups tend to resonate with so many Iraqis because, despite the transfer of political authority, 138,000 U.S. troops remain there. Unfortunately, there are no good options for Washington. Any new administration will be faced with the Catch-22 of the U.S. presence in Iraq: U.S. forces cannot leave because the Iraqis cannot provide security themselves, but the longer the U.S. troops remain, the more likely violence will continue. Average Iraqis are caught in the crossfire, further embittering them toward the United States.
The second issue relates to Saddam. Although the sight of the former tyrant in leg irons and handcuffs as he was arraigned on July 1 riveted the world — and was testimony to the positive use of American power — the trial of Saddam poses significant risks to the United States. Saddam’s performance during his court appearance indicates that he and his lawyers will seek both to undermine the authority of the court and to expose the ties between the United States and his regime during the Iran-Iraq war. While this holds out the potential to embarrass some former and at least one currently serving senior official — that is, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who met with Saddam twice in the 1980s as President Reagan’s special envoy to Baghdad — there are more serious dangers. Saddam’s assertion that the court is mere “political theater,” combined with a tenuous security environment and a fragile political process, could undermine the legitimacy of any new Iraqi government.
An Iraqi government that is considered illegitimate would be more vulnerable to attacks from political entrepreneurs who claim they are not stooges of the United States and are thus the only ones who can establish order. Given the political dynamics in the rest of the Middle East, an Islamist extremist or military strongman would likely emerge to play this role. Such an outcome not only would further unravel the Bush administration’s entire project in Iraq but could also lead to a variety of dire consequences, including civil war and Kurdish secession.
All of these problems are emblematic of the White House’s flawed strategy in the Middle East. In the post-Cold War era, Washington’s primary interests in the region have been to ensure the free flow of oil, to contain rogue regimes, and to preserve Israeli security. Other than its disengagement from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Bush administration during its first nine months pursued a Middle Eastern strategy similar to that of its predecessors. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the administration added combating terrorism and promoting democracy in the Middle East to this agenda.
At the same time, the attacks provided an opportunity for those in the administration determined to topple Saddam to think more systematically about achieving this goal. Two camps emerged, united only in their desire to use Iraq as a means to advance their different goals. The first camp consists of Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld and to some extent Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who apparently believed that the United States needed to establish its credibility after 9/11 and eight years of the Clinton administration’s perceived dithering on Iraq. For this group, only a demonstration of decisive American power would sufficiently intimidate the Arab world, forestalling additional terrorist attacks and altering the behavior of other rogue states in the region. The belief of these officials in their own hypothesis-driven intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction gave the situation in Iraq a sense of urgency and set the United States on the path to war. Democracy and human rights in Iraq were added as a justification for the war only after it became apparent that the United States would not find troves of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
The second camp believed Iraq was the fulcrum for promoting democracy in the Middle East and for ensuring a range of other interests. Simply, these officials within the Pentagon and the White House believed that the construction of a peaceful, democratic, pro-Western Iraq would provide emotional and political encouragement to Arab reformers and liberals and thereby pressure authoritarian leaders in the region to undertake fundamental reforms. This group also assumed that with Saddam gone, the Palestinians would realize they had no military option and would thus become more forthcoming in peace negotiations. Moreover, the security of Saudi Arabia and its neighbors in the Gulf would increase, ensuring the flow of oil, and leaders in Syria and Iran would alter their ways for fear that they too would meet Saddam’s fate.
Needless to say, things have not worked out as either camp within the administration expected.
To the detriment of broader Middle East policy, the administration continues to pursue key aspects of these deeply flawed strategies. The result is significant policy drift. For example, what is the U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia? Riyadh is one of Washington’s most important allies and currently confronts a significant threat to its security. What is the policy toward Iran, another critically important country that seems to be on the cusp of both the development of nuclear weapons and potentially important political change? What is the administration’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, other than following the lead of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon? The administration has yet to provide clear answers to any of those questions.
As a substitute for substance, the president consistently invokes the “war on terror” and his “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East,” but these two catchphrases do not amount to a tangible strategy. This is probably a good thing, since there is a significant amount of tension in the two ideas. To fight terrorism and confront radicalism, the United States seeks close ties with Arab military and security organizations. Yet, the officers that lead these institutions have historically resisted political liberalization. At the same time, Washington is providing rhetorical encouragement to those — predominantly the tiny group of Arab liberals and a variety of Islamists — who seek to undermine the very leaders the United States has identified as partners in the war on terror.
The Bush administration’s strategy in the Middle East has led the United States into a hornet’s nest of competing interests and claims and has compromised U.S. credibility in the region. Whatever Washington does to satisfy one important regional constituency tends to have negative consequences for another equally important constituency. Think of the competing political demands of the Iraqi Shiites and the Kurds.
The next administration, regardless of who is president, will confront similar problems and would do well to develop a strategy that takes into account the nuances of politics in the region, recognizes the value of allies — both governmental and nongovernmental — and understands the collective cultural sensitivity of a region that does not regard American power positively. The task will not be easy.
Three weeks ago in northern Syria, clashes erupted between Arab police and the ethnic Kurds who call that area their home despite being granted a bare minimum of rights by the Syrian government. Kurds account for about 2 million of the 17 million people in Syria, but they are not recognized officially as a minority community, and many of them haven’t been granted citizenship.
The rioting was sparked by a fight at a soccer match, but quickly tapped into deep Kurdish resentment over their status in Syria. Political protest of this nature is almost unheard of in a country known for dealing quickly and brutally with insurgents, and the protesters paid a steep price. About 30 people died, most of them Kurds, and hundreds were imprisoned.
But thanks in part to the Internet, even as Kurds in Syria were experiencing the familiar helplessness of an oppressed minority, their kin throughout the rest of the world were able to fight back — mere hours after the unrest began. Through an increasingly sophisticated network of Kurdish Web sites, news of the clashes spread throughout the Kurdish diaspora to Kurdish population centers in Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland and Canada.
“Kurds everywhere were on the Internet following the situation,” says Nijyar Shemdin, the U.S. representative for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the political party currently governing much of northern Iraq. “Kurdish organizations everywhere began attacking embassies, organizing demonstrations. Before, this would have taken a long time.” [Editor's note: After the original publication of this story, Mr. Shemdin contacted Salon to note that he did not recall using the word "attacking" and to state that "While we believe in civil demonstrations to express our concerns and positions regarding certain political issues, we do not approve of violence nor terrorism."]
The American military presence in nearby Iraq undoubtedly had a deterrent effect on the zealous Syrian military, but did the public attention generated by the Internet also play a role? It’s impossible to say for sure. An active, unified diaspora and the watchful eye of foreign governments could strengthen the position of the millions of Kurds living in Turkey, Syria and Iran — aside from Iraq, the nations with the largest Kurdish populations. But outsiders generally have little direct influence on the day-to-day actions of authoritarian regimes.
This much, however, is certain: In countries like Syria where the media is state controlled and strictly regulated, outsider Web sites like that of the KRG help Kurds there see that life can be better, that they can have more rights and more self-determination, just like the Kurds in Iraq. “They see a live example of democracy working that all of Iraq and the region can follow,” says Shemdin.
And that, in turn, means that the governments of Turkey, Syria and Iran are worried more than ever about the “Kurdish question.”
Cyber-gurus have long speculated that the Internet would lead to the creation of politically and culturally viable communities that defied traditional categories. Instead of being defined by a shared physical space, these communities would be defined by shared interests or common goals, with only Internet connections and computers linking the individuals. Historically disenfranchised groups like the Kurds — a people who have not ruled themselves in hundreds of years, instead living as minorities under other regimes — provide an intriguing test of the virtual-reality theory, a test that has real implications for a people whose tenuous political status demands a real solution.
The Internet has allowed Kurdish communities across the globe to connect in ways never before possible. So much so that new research suggests that these networks of ethnic nationalist Web sites have become “cyber-states” — nations created in cyberspace because of the lack of a nation in real space.
“This form of mass communication allows for the creation of a community without the need for a space, for a territory,” says Kari Neely, a doctoral student in Near Eastern studies at the University of Michigan, who is researching the impact of the Internet on ethnic minorities in the Middle East. “Cyberspace allows people to coalesce in a new kind of territory to maintain cultural traditions that might otherwise be threatened with extinction through assimilation, warfare and population displacement.”
Neely is quick to point out that this “new kind of territory” will never be able to replace the obvious benefits of possessing a shared physical territory. And other scholars caution that, even when used as a tool to affect situations on the ground, “virtual” nations have very real limitations. “Reality is in real space, not cyberspace,” says Amir Hassanpour, a professor at the University of Toronto who has written extensively about the effects of modern media on Kurdish nationalism. “In the case of Iraq, for example, the Internet may give Kurds some ability to promote ideas, but the reality is that the United States is an occupying force, the majority of people are Shiites, and Kurds are a minority.”
The historic minority status of the Kurds is part of what makes the idea of a Kurdish cyber-state so provocative. Although a Kurd, Saladin, is credited with having liberated much of the Arab world from Crusader rule in the Middle Ages, Kurds have long been a persecuted minority in the Middle East. The traditional (but internationally unrecognized) Kurdish homeland, Kurdistan, is on land divided by four nations, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Although Turkey has been carrying out a prominent military campaign against Kurdish nationalists for decades, Americans are probably most familiar with Iraqi crimes against the Kurds. Remember all those times you heard the Bush administration talk about Saddam gassing his own people? Those people were the Kurds.
That kind of persecution aided the creation of a large Kurdish diaspora throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. It also meant that the Bush administration and the American occupation authority have had to handle an emerging Kurdish republic in northern Iraq with kid gloves. Although the Kurds have largely — and democratically — been managing their own affairs in Iraq since soon after the first Gulf War, America had to deny the Kurds’ request that they be allowed to establish their own independent nation following Saddam’s ouster. Turkey, Iran and Syria were terrified that this new Kurdistan would inspire their own Kurdish minorities to revolt, and the last thing the United States needs is more instability in the Middle East. Meaning that Kurds dreaming of a nation of their own can keep dreaming.
According to Neely, this gap between dreams and reality is exactly what Kurdish Web sites are trying to fill. “There’s an abundance of Web sites that have been established for and by these communities that include not only chat rooms and political forums, but minority literature — poems, short stories, novels, calls for original writings by community members — and even dating centers,” she says. “While the quality of the literary work being produced on the sites is certainly open to question, the point is that people use these sites to feel a connection to a larger community, a cyber-nation.”
What’s striking about the wide range of Kurdish Web sites is that so many of them attempt to provide a kind of one-stop shopping for Kurdish culture and nationalism. A Web site that happens to be operated by an American will not necessarily have content devoted to American literature, history and music. But many Kurdish sites link to all of the above — a history of the Kurds, samples of their literature and music, chat rooms, along with Kurdish news from all parts of the diaspora and “Kurdistan.” KurdTeens.com focuses on a younger audience, for example, but still connects people to all things Kurdish, for all ages.
“Other people say it is very nice to have your own country, so we try to create that feeling online,” says Bryar Fattah, a 20-year-old student who founded KurdTeens when he moved to Great Britain from Iraq in 2000. “We sometimes feel like each Web site is like a city from the Kurdish cities. Our virtual Kurdistan is not on the ground. It is in our minds.”
Some sites, including Kurdland.com, Kurdistan Net and KurdistanWeb practically sound like countries in their own right, while others such as Kurdish Media and the Kurdish Information Network have slightly less conspicuous names but perform the same kind of role.
“The site helps bring about a common bond in terms of language and cultural events,” says Dilan Roshani, an Iranian Kurdish engineer living in Great Britain who has operated KurdistanWeb since 1995. “The bond makes it easier for them to overcome a long history of Kurdish oppression and makes them feel a connection that no international border could give them.”
Neely says the “cyber-state” model can also apply to a host of other dispossessed peoples, particularly those with large diasporas — for example, the Druse, a religious minority; the Armenians, who have experienced an extensive diaspora and only recently received a territory of their own; and the Palestinians, who are part of the dominant Arab majority but who lack a state. A Web site such as the Electronic Intifada tries to represent, by definition, an electronic uprising, carrying the Palestinian struggle for a nation — nonviolently, through information, education and communication — to Palestinians beyond the West Bank and Gaza, helping to create a unified Palestinian community that extends from Europe, to America, to the Middle East.
The prototype for the Electronic Intifada was established on the Internet in September 1996, when Nigel Parry, who was in the West Bank, posted photos of a clash between Palestinians and Israelis. The photos reached Ali Abunimah, an ocean away. Parry, Abunimah and two others founded the Electronic Intifada soon afterward — even though the four never met in person until April of last year. “The first Palestinians I came into contact with who actually lived in Palestine were through listservs in the late 1990s,” says Abunimah, a writer who grew up in Great Britain and currently lives in Chicago. “It gave me an incredible, crucial sense of connection and community.”
But for all the feelings of community engendered by Kurdish, Palestinian or Armenian Web sites, can a cyber-Palestine ever rival a real Palestine, or a cyber-Kurdistan a real Kurdistan? The short answer is no, absolutely not.
Even the most popular Kurdish Web sites, which record several thousand unique visitors a day, don’t come close to connecting to the entire Kurdish population, numbering about 25 million, spread across the world. And while it is often a good tool for diaspora communities in Europe or America with easy access to computers, the Internet simply is not available for many of the Kurds living in small towns in ancestral Kurdistan.
And for those who do have Internet connections, a cyber-state may help people connect with each other, but it won’t keep them warm at night. After all, this is reality, not a scene from “The Matrix.” “You cannot take a plane and go to the Internet and live there,” says Shemdin, the Iraqi KRG’s American representative. “You can’t go home and visit relatives there or build a house there.”
But while a cyber-Kurdistan will not alleviate the need for a real Kurdistan, it may help realize one in the future. The disadvantages of a cyber-state — being ungrounded first and foremost — can be distinctly advantageous for ethnic minority communities and their nationalist movements.
“Cyberspace can provide a type of protected space for dangerous political views, minority viewpoints that aren’t legal in other settings,” Neely says. “I think this might be a reason for the numerous sites published in the Kurdish language. When a state bans something — like Turkey has done with the publication of Kurdish — then it can find a place outside the establishment.”
While simply maintaining the Kurdish language itself serves a nationalist goal — it’s difficult to establish a state politically if there’s no distinct culture to define it — many of the Web sites have explicit political content promoting a nationalist agenda. In countries such as Turkey, where Kurdish newspapers are banned, Kurds can learn about the progress of the nascent Kurdish republic in Iraq through the KRG Web site, which features not just news in depth but also descriptions of how the regional government works and biographies of all the elected officials — in other words, the basic building blocks of the democratic process.
“In the past, you couldn’t send a Kurdish paper to Iran or Turkey because of security checks,” says Hassanpour, the University of Toronto professor. “Subscribing to a Kurdish paper published in Holland meant I would go to jail as a secessionist. There can still be state surveillance of the Internet, of course, but in spite of this, Kurdish political parties have their own sites and people are free to propagate their politics.”
Shemdin says the KRG’s Web site has also helped curb the tide of Iraqi Kurds emigrating to Europe and America because they feared the domestic situation was too unstable. The site demonstrated to people that there was a consistent government presence, in addition to spreading news about increasing employment rates and improving health statistics, he says. “It helped create national unity by holding together society and preventing any more people from leaving.”
While access to these sites may be limited by Internet availability, Neely makes the point that even in real space, cultural and political institutions are almost never utilized by the entire population. Political elections in many countries, for example, fail to attract even a majority of the citizens, much less all of them. User statistics, particularly in places with limited access to computers, are vague at best.
“When I was in Syria I would see one person paying for an Internet connection while five of his friends would be standing behind him looking over his shoulder,” Neely says. “How can we get an accurate count of how many people are affected?”
Almost 15 years ago, satellite television first began the modern revolution in the Kurdish national consciousness. The Kurdish Satellite Channel, a station licensed by Britain, started broadcasting in Europe and the Middle East, causing fervent protests from the Turkish and Iranian governments. In Turkey, the army smashed satellite dishes to prevent people from seeing images of the Kurdish flag and map and from hearing the Kurdish national anthem. “I knew a family in Turkey,” Hassanpour says. “They never believed they’d be able to see Kurdish on television, but when they saw the shows, they changed their mind. They believed the Kurdish nation could exist.”
The growing cyber-state is creating a similar effect — with one crucial difference. Now Kurds all over the world aren’t just passively watching content, they’re creating their own, and they’re connecting directly with thousands of others like themselves. The impact of this burgeoning nation in cyberspace on the formation of an actual Kurdistan may one day be very real.
“News on a daily basis, blogs, and especially chat rooms are very popular, and most of the content is nationalistic, of course,” Hassanpour said. “Kurds from Iraq and Iran are communicating with each other in chat rooms — even people from small towns in Iran. I myself am very surprised.”
