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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

UN to send cartographer to the Shebaa Farms


The last major territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel is the Shebaa Farms. Israel considers the land to be part of the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied after the 1967 war, taking the land from Syria. However, both Syria and Lebanon consider the land to be Lebanese, and this is one of Hizbollah's rationales for maintaining a militia. The is convenient for Damascus, which is afraid of the Lebanese signing a bilateral peace accord with Israel, leaving Syria to be the last remaining neighbor of Israel to not have signed an accord. As things stand, the Israelis -- and the UN, which includes the land under the UNDOF mandate (monitoring the disengagement of Israel and Syria) instead of under the UNIFIL mandate (monitoring the border between Israel and Lebanon) -- have assured that the Israel policies of both Beirut and Damascus are inextricably linked.

The Daily Star reports that the UN is sending a Balkan cartographer to "demarcate the precise location and area of the Shebaa Farms."

The confusion stems from poor French mandate maps, but reasearch by Israeli historian Asher Kaufman (see "Who owns the Shebaa Farms? Chronicle of a territorial dispute" in The Middle East Journal; Autumn 2002; 56, 4 - unfortunately not available online) shows that there is strong evidence for Lebanon's claims based on land ownership, which was registered in Lebanon, not in Syria.

It will be interesting to see what the cartographer comes up with, but it seems strange to me that concurrent official declarations by the two countries involved in the border dispute, Lebanon and Syria, would not be enough to settle the issue once and for all. We'll see if this leads to a Lebanese agreement with Israel, which may or may not be a good thing in the long run. While it seems obvious to me that a comprehensive peace agreement, which is what Damascus is pulling for, that involves Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinians is ideal, perhaps baby steps are in order.

Cole on partitioning Iraq


Juan Cole chimes in giving us his view of partitioning Iraq:

[A]side from the selfish interests of all the political actors inside and outside Iraq, as a practical policy, partitioning Iraq is too risky. It would probably not reduce ethnic infighting. It might produce more. The mini-states that emerge from a partition will have plenty of reason to fight wars with one another, as India did with Pakistan in the 1940s and has done virtually ever since. Worse, it is likely that if the Sunni Arab mini-state commits an atrocity against the Shiites, it might well bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They in turn would be targeted by Saudi and Jordanian jihadi volunteers.

A break-up of Iraq might not stop at Iraq?s borders. The Sunni Arabs could be picked up by Syria, thus greatly increasing Syria?s fighting power. Or they could become a revolutionary force in Jordan. A wholesale renegotiation of national borders may ensue, according to some thinkers. Such profound changes in such a volatile part of the world cannot be depended on to occur without bloodshed. The region is already racked by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the struggle between secular and religious politics.

To my mind, the first problem with partition, which Cole doesn't mention at all, would be the status of highly mixed cities, and especially Baghdad. My second misgiving would be how the Turks, Saudis and Iranians would react to these news states in their backyard.

The end of Iraq?


Zaid Al-Ali, an Iraqi lawyer, reviews Peter Galbraith's book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. The review focuses on Galbraith's idea that a federal division of Iraq (or even a confederation) is the only option that remains. But Al-Ali also take a look at Galbraith's role in advising the Kurds on the issue of the constitution:

"I realized that the Kurdish leaders had a conceptual problem in planning for a federal Iraq. They were thinking in terms of devolution of power - meaning that Baghdad grants them rights. I urged that the equation be reversed. In a memo I sent Barham (Salih) and Nechirvan (Barzani) in August (2003), I drew a distinction between the previous autonomy proposals and federalism: 'Federalism is a "bottom up" system. The basic organizing unit of the country is the province or state. [...] In a federal system residual power lies with the federal unit (i.e. state or province); under an autonomy system it rests with the central government. The central government has no ability to revoke a federal status or power: it can revoke an autonomy arrangement. [...] The Constitution should state that the Constitution of Kurdistan, and laws made pursuant to the Constitution, is the supreme law of Kurdistan. Any conflict between laws of Kurdistan and the laws of or Constitution of Iraq shall be decided in favor of the former.' These ideas eventually became the basis of Kurdistan's proposals for an Iraq constitution."

The question of what such a breakup of Iraq would mean for the country, not to speak of the region, is one that I'm fairly uncertain and ambivalent about, although Al-Ali argues that not only would it be a disaster, but that only the Kurds want such a weakening or even disolution of the state:

It is true that many western policymakers and commentators agree with his characterisation that Iraqis are being made to live together "against their will", but Galbraith, whose ties to Iraq run deeper than most, should know better than to make such a vague and inaccurate assertion.

By way of example, a survey was conducted a few months ago in Karbala, one of Shi'a Islam's most holy cities and main intellectual centres, on the issue of whether the city's residents support the territorial division of the state. Only around 5% of respondents supported the formation of regions, or states, based on ethnicity or religious identity, whereas 91.6% of respondents said that they either favored a centralised form of government or a decentralised system based on administrative divisions that were independent of factors such as religion and ethnicity. Even if Galbraith is right that a majority of Iraqi Kurds are in favour of independence, he fails to mention that their wish is not shared by a large majority of the remaining 82% of the Iraqi population.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Assad: "only America ... can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East"


The Times has reprinted and translated an excellent interview with Syrian president, Bashar Assad, by Der Spiegel. Assad has interesting things to say about the future of Iraq and the consequences of American foreign policy in the region:

SPIEGEL: You are very pessimistic when it comes to Iraq. What can the countries of the Middle East do for Iraq?

Assad: I was already very pessimistic before the war. I told the Americans: There is no doubt that you will win this war, but then you will sink into a quagmire. What has now happened is worse than I expected. The two main problems are, first, the constitution and the issue of federalism, which is at the center of the great dispute between Sunnis and Shiites and, second, Kirkuk and the civil war that is developing between Kurds and Arabs. These problems must be addressed. It doesn't help for the Americans to point to the elections they brought about or to the higher standard of living. Those are cosmetic issues.

SPIEGEL: What would be the consequences of partition into a Kurdish north, a Shiite south and a Sunni region in central Iraq?

Assad: It would be harmful, not just for Iraq, but for the entire region, from Syria across the Gulf and into Central Asia. Imagine snapping a necklace and all the pearls fall to the ground. Almost all countries have natural dividing lines, and when ethnic and religious partition occurs in one country, it'll soon happen elsewhere. It would be like the end of the Soviet Union -- only far worse. Major wars, minor wars, no one will be capable of keeping the consequences under control.

SPIEGEL: So you would be in favor of a strong man who could hold Iraq together?

Assad: Not necessarily one man, but certainly a strong central authority. It has to be left to the Iraqis to determine exactly what this would look like. A secular authority is certainly best-equipped for maintaining stability in this ethnic and religious mosaic -- but it should also be of a strong national character. Those who arrived on America's tanks are not credible in Iraq.

I've often wondered what would be so bad about splitting up Iraq, which since its inception after the First World War. Bashar's pearl necklace metaphor is not unconvincing. It's hard to say how the sectarian division of such a split would be felt in countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Bahrain.

Suprisingly enough, he thinks that the US has a unique role to play in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict:

SPIEGEL: After the cease-fire between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, you gave a much-noted speech on the situation in the Middle East. In your speech, you mentioned a "critical stage of the history of Syria and the region." Wherein lies the opportunity?

Assad: First of all, it's clear to everyone that the status quo of war and conflict and instability is no longer acceptable. Now America enters the picture, because only America, because of its weight, can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East. But the Bush administration is under pressure. It's being accused of not having managed to bring about peace in six years. This pressure is good. Europe's foreign policy role is also growing. We specifically do not want a special role for the Europeans. We expect them to work together with America to achieve peace, and to do so on the basis of a vision America must develop.

SPIEGEL: What is Syria's role?

Assad: There can be no peace in the Middle East without Syria. The Lebanon and the Palestinian conflicts are inextricably linked with Syria. I have already mentioned the 500,000 Palestinian refugees. Were we to resolve our territorial dispute with Israel over the Golan Heights alone, we wouldn't achieve stability. We would only be taking away the Palestinians' hope and would be turning them from refugees into resistance fighters. This is why Syria is so determined to achieve a comprehensive peaceful solution.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading, not only because it is important for the US to hear what its enemies in the region have to say (instead of just talking to its friends), but because Asad has a very reasonable analysis about some of the most important issues facing the Middle East.


The Times also has an op-ed by Fromkin, whose excellent book A Peace to end all Peace I've just finished, on the anniversary of the Suez Canal fiasco.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Syria


I'm back in Beirut from Damascus, and all in all, it was a really interesting trip. I got to see the last days of Ramadan and the first days of al-Eid. I wasn't able to go to the Golan Heights, because the Ministry of the Interior was closed for the holidays, and I think it might be closed anyway because of the heightened tensions between Syria and Israel.

Everyone was extremely nice to me in Damascus, and poor families who ran shops in the old city insisted on sharing their meager rations with me while they broke their fast. Without asking who I was or where I was from or whether or not I was Muslim, one family stopped me in the street and refused to let me leave until I had eaten some of their food. They told me that I was welcome and thanked God that I was there to break the fast with them.

Otherwise, I noticed that the country that has been notorious for not having Coca-Cola has finally joined the Coca club. I was atop a mountain overlooking Damascus when I noticed that instead of Syrian Master Cola, I could actually buy a can of Coca-Cola. Apparently, a month and a half ago the Turkish distributor of Coke, who provides for the rest of the Middle East, finally managed to clear the importation of Coke with the Syrian government.

Here in Beirut, there was another explosion yesterday, but no one seems very concerned, despite the visible increase in Security Forces all over town.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Damascus


I arrived in Damascus last night at around 10 after spending almost 6 hours at the border. Officially, Americans have to get their visa in Washignton, but it's usually possible to get it at the Lebanese border, provied that you're willing to wait a while.

The only other time I've ever been here was on my way out of Lebanon to Jordan during the war this summer. The city seemed lively and teeming with energy, and I was disappointed that I wasn't able to look around. (I spent the night in a UNRWA Palestinian training camp then left the next morning for Amman.)

Damascus reminds me of a cross between Cairo and Beirut, which is a very good combination. These are the last days of Ramadan, so everyone is pretty lethargic during the day. I'm looking forward to celebrating Eid, although it would be nice to do it in a family setting rather than as a tourist. I've spent most of the day in the Souks looking at Iranian manuscripts, which may or may not be fakes, and key chains for my collection.

The last time I was in Syria, I was struck by Assad's cult of personality, with portraits of him all over the place, including in people's car windows. This time though, I've seen more pictures of Nasrallah than anyone else. The support for Hizbollah seems ubiquitous. There are posters, banners, glass etchings, t-shirts, and yes, key chains.

I'm going to try to get permission to take the Syrian tour of a village in the Golan Heights that was abandoned after the Israeli occupation. It should be interesting to see the place that could be the key to enflaming or defusing current tensions in the region.

I'll take pictures, but I won't be able to upload any until I get back to Beirut.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Former Janjaweed fighter tells his story


The BBC has exerpts of an account of a former Janjaweed fighter, who explains how things work in Darfur:

I tell you one fact. The Janjaweed don't make decisions. The orders come from the government...

One very well-known and regular visitor was Interior Minister Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hussein.

We will be split into two groups, one on horses, one on camels...

The aircraft went ahead of the Janjaweed. We saw the smoke, we saw the fire, then we went in...

Whenever we go into a village and find resistance we kill everyone. Sometimes they said wipe out an entire village...

We hear kill! Kill! Kill! And we shoot to kill...

Most were civilians - most were women...

Innocent people running out and being killed including children. And those who escape will die of thirst.

There are many rapes. But they don't do it in front of others. They take the victim away and rape them.

Eric Reeves, has gives us his two cents in the Guardian.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Update on grenade attacks


The Daily Star has a write up of the grenade attack downtown. According to the Minister of the Interior, the two recent attacks were aimed at the Internal Security Forces (ISF) and not the UN.

"The grenades launched were similar to the ones launched on the police barracks last week," acting Interior Minister Ahmad Fatfat told The Daily Star.

Fatfat was referring to two bombs thrown at two police stations last week that caused minor damage but no injuries.

It is suspected the recent attacks on the Internal Security Forces (ISF) have come in retaliation for a deadly clash earlier this month along the airport road outside the southern suburbs that left two boys dead during an ISF operation to clamp down on illegal construction in the area. ...

"While it is still under investigation and nothing is certain yet, the attack seems to be a political one targeting Lebanon's stability, with a special focus on unsettling the Lebanese security apparatus," Fatfat said, dismissing earlier reports the attack had targeted the United Nations building.

"The attackers could have easily hit the UN building with that kind of weapon if that was their intention," he added. ...

"It is the first time that civilian buildings were hit in downtown Beirut, perhaps as an attempt at destabilizing the country and causing security fears to spread," Fatfat said.

Fatfat will convene on Monday an exceptional meeting of the Central Security Council to discuss security.

Meanwhile, local daily newspaper As-Safir quoted security sources on Sunday as saying that the ISF was "punishing" some of its members involved in the deadly riot incident earlier this month.

Fatfat told Reuters in an interview on Saturday that he had recently received a message from someone "close to the Syrians," telling him and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to "take care."

The message had said the Syrians are "more angry than they were before February 14, 2005," the date of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's assassination, Fatfat said.

Regardless of what the source of these attacks is, I'm a little uneasy about recent events.

Conventional wisdom here has it that another civil war is brewing. I really hope that prediction proves to be wrong.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Unsettling explosions


The other night, I heard a noise at about 1:30 a.m. It wasn't clear what the noise was, but it startled me and might have sounded like a loud motorcycle going down the street in front of my friend's apartment. Then it came again, except this time it sounded like someone might have been knocking at the door at the same time.

As it turns out, it was either two bombs or two concussion grenades or two regular grenades thrown at the police station in a neighborhood called Verdun, which is a nice quarter not too far from here.

Last night, I went out with some friends of mine. After a couple of drinks, one of my friends decided that she wanted to go dancing near downtown, so we went to a dance club. Since my other friend is a guy, and a guy who was wearing a t-shirt and jeans at that, they didn't let us in. So we went back to my friend's place to smoke a narguile and then I went home.

I didn't hear any explosions last night or early this morning. But it seems that the building next to the UN building downtown (I think it was Buddha Bar) was attacked with two RPGs. Four people were hurt, but no one was killed. It seems most likely that the UN was being targeted, but I suppose it's also possible that the club was hit on purpose.

I'm going to go downtown and take a look for myself, despite the Beiruti rain.

I don't like the direction things are starting to take.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Borat and Nursultan Nazarbayev


Silverstein and Sosman over at Harper's have a little piece about Nazarbayev's visit to the White House. They wonder if Sacha Baron Cohen's (of Ali G fame) Khazak chararcter Borat might be better:

Since the 2003 Tulyakev Reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to eight years old. Please, captains of industry, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard working labor, and some of the cleanest prostitutes in whole of central Asia.

Cohen's new movie featuring Borat, Cultural Learning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is already gaining lots of press, including an article by the Khazak ambasssador to the UK.

As it happens, I have been (albeit very briefly) to Kazakhstan. While on a trip to Uzbekistan, we stopped briefly in Kazakhstan while driving from Tashkent to Samarkand - the roads, being built during the Stalinist era, pay little attention to the national borders of the Central Asian republics. Also, while I was in Uzbekistan, I met many Tajiks and Kazakhs, as well as Uzbeks. And while the governments of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are reprehensible, the people are hospitable, friendly and open.

Borat does not represent the actual Kazakh people. But that doesn't change the fact that his act is really funny.

A peace to end all peace


While reading David Fromkin's 1989 A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, I came across a passage (pp. 307-8) that seemed awfully familiar:

It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces [Baghdad and Basra]. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi'ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces ... made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.

[Sir Percy] Cox raised other immediate and practical issues that obviously had not been thought through in London. ...

The Mesopotamian Administration Committee had no ready replies, for the Ottoman administration of Mesopotamia had been driven out, and no body of experienced officials ... existed in the provinces to replace it. The war continued, and orders had to be given and administrative decisions taken daily. Public facilities and utilities had to be managed. Who was to do it?

...General Maude ... was put in the position of preaching self-rule while discouraging its practice. The compromise formula at which the British had arrived might have been expressly designed to arouse dissatisfaction and unrest: having volunteered what sounded like a pledge of independence to an area that had not asked for it, the military and civil authorities of the occupying power then proceeded to withhold it.

The Mesopotamian provinces were the first to be captured from the Ottoman Empire by Britain during the war. Whitehall?s failure to think through in practical detail how to fulfill the promises gratuitously made to a section of the local inhabitants was revealing, and boded ill for the provinces that were the next to be invaded...

You would think that someone would have done their homework before invading Iraq, instead of repeating the same mistakes as the British nearly 100 years ago.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Sorry


I'm currently staying at a friend's place and doing through various job interviews, so I haven't had the time or the internet connection to post on a regular basis.

I should have things sorted out next week, though, which will mean that I'll be back to posting regularly...

Monday, October 02, 2006

Fukuyama's new book


The London Review has an interesting review of Fukuyama's new book.

In administration rhetoric, terrorism (a method for waging asymmetrical war) is routinely opposed to liberty (a principle for organising a modern society). The antithesis of liberty, however, is not terrorism but tyranny. So when the administration tries to place jihadism in the space vacated by Communism, turning it into the new global enemy of liberty, it confuses both itself and others.

Tacitly, the neo-con advocates of Middle Eastern democracy are siding with the young men who might be tempted to join terrorist conspiracies against their clientalistic, kleptocratic and non-democratic governments, which are officially allied with the US. Al-Qaida is less like the KGB than the KGB?s implacable foe, the Afghan mujahidin, ?freedom fighters? supported by Ronald Reagan, among others. Today?s neo-cons no longer want to imitate Reagan by helping resentful young Muslim men regain their dignity through violent insurgency. Instead, they want to give them an alternative path to dignity: namely, liberal democracy. But the basic reason for supporting frustrated Muslim youth, that they deserve American support in their noble search for liberation, is the same.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on this massive contradiction. Although obvious in a way, it is seldom discussed; Fukuyama doesn?t seem to notice it. The neo-cons defend two diametrically opposed propositions: that the jihadists hate freedom at the same time as hating their own lack of it. On the one hand, neo-cons assert that Islamic radicals hate American values, not American policies, and deny that America?s past behaviour has in any way provoked anti-American violence. On the other hand, they imply that the 9/11 plot was inspired and implemented by terrorists radicalised by Arab autocracies allied with or sponsored by the US. This suggests that 9/11-style terrorists hate American policies, not American values. They hate not the principles of American liberty but, rather, America?s unprincipled support for tyranny. To promote democracy in the Middle East is to imply that such hatred is in part justified.

The review goes over this and other contradictions inherent in the Bush administration's strategy in the "War on Terror" and in their rationale for invading Iraq. It is worth reading in its entirety.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

UN to send cartographer to the Shebaa Farms


The last major territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel is the Shebaa Farms. Israel considers the land to be part of the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied after the 1967 war, taking the land from Syria. However, both Syria and Lebanon consider the land to be Lebanese, and this is one of Hizbollah's rationales for maintaining a militia. The is convenient for Damascus, which is afraid of the Lebanese signing a bilateral peace accord with Israel, leaving Syria to be the last remaining neighbor of Israel to not have signed an accord. As things stand, the Israelis -- and the UN, which includes the land under the UNDOF mandate (monitoring the disengagement of Israel and Syria) instead of under the UNIFIL mandate (monitoring the border between Israel and Lebanon) -- have assured that the Israel policies of both Beirut and Damascus are inextricably linked.

The Daily Star reports that the UN is sending a Balkan cartographer to "demarcate the precise location and area of the Shebaa Farms."

The confusion stems from poor French mandate maps, but reasearch by Israeli historian Asher Kaufman (see "Who owns the Shebaa Farms? Chronicle of a territorial dispute" in The Middle East Journal; Autumn 2002; 56, 4 - unfortunately not available online) shows that there is strong evidence for Lebanon's claims based on land ownership, which was registered in Lebanon, not in Syria.

It will be interesting to see what the cartographer comes up with, but it seems strange to me that concurrent official declarations by the two countries involved in the border dispute, Lebanon and Syria, would not be enough to settle the issue once and for all. We'll see if this leads to a Lebanese agreement with Israel, which may or may not be a good thing in the long run. While it seems obvious to me that a comprehensive peace agreement, which is what Damascus is pulling for, that involves Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinians is ideal, perhaps baby steps are in order.

Cole on partitioning Iraq


Juan Cole chimes in giving us his view of partitioning Iraq:

[A]side from the selfish interests of all the political actors inside and outside Iraq, as a practical policy, partitioning Iraq is too risky. It would probably not reduce ethnic infighting. It might produce more. The mini-states that emerge from a partition will have plenty of reason to fight wars with one another, as India did with Pakistan in the 1940s and has done virtually ever since. Worse, it is likely that if the Sunni Arab mini-state commits an atrocity against the Shiites, it might well bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They in turn would be targeted by Saudi and Jordanian jihadi volunteers.

A break-up of Iraq might not stop at Iraq?s borders. The Sunni Arabs could be picked up by Syria, thus greatly increasing Syria?s fighting power. Or they could become a revolutionary force in Jordan. A wholesale renegotiation of national borders may ensue, according to some thinkers. Such profound changes in such a volatile part of the world cannot be depended on to occur without bloodshed. The region is already racked by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the struggle between secular and religious politics.

To my mind, the first problem with partition, which Cole doesn't mention at all, would be the status of highly mixed cities, and especially Baghdad. My second misgiving would be how the Turks, Saudis and Iranians would react to these news states in their backyard.

The end of Iraq?


Zaid Al-Ali, an Iraqi lawyer, reviews Peter Galbraith's book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. The review focuses on Galbraith's idea that a federal division of Iraq (or even a confederation) is the only option that remains. But Al-Ali also take a look at Galbraith's role in advising the Kurds on the issue of the constitution:

"I realized that the Kurdish leaders had a conceptual problem in planning for a federal Iraq. They were thinking in terms of devolution of power - meaning that Baghdad grants them rights. I urged that the equation be reversed. In a memo I sent Barham (Salih) and Nechirvan (Barzani) in August (2003), I drew a distinction between the previous autonomy proposals and federalism: 'Federalism is a "bottom up" system. The basic organizing unit of the country is the province or state. [...] In a federal system residual power lies with the federal unit (i.e. state or province); under an autonomy system it rests with the central government. The central government has no ability to revoke a federal status or power: it can revoke an autonomy arrangement. [...] The Constitution should state that the Constitution of Kurdistan, and laws made pursuant to the Constitution, is the supreme law of Kurdistan. Any conflict between laws of Kurdistan and the laws of or Constitution of Iraq shall be decided in favor of the former.' These ideas eventually became the basis of Kurdistan's proposals for an Iraq constitution."

The question of what such a breakup of Iraq would mean for the country, not to speak of the region, is one that I'm fairly uncertain and ambivalent about, although Al-Ali argues that not only would it be a disaster, but that only the Kurds want such a weakening or even disolution of the state:

It is true that many western policymakers and commentators agree with his characterisation that Iraqis are being made to live together "against their will", but Galbraith, whose ties to Iraq run deeper than most, should know better than to make such a vague and inaccurate assertion.

By way of example, a survey was conducted a few months ago in Karbala, one of Shi'a Islam's most holy cities and main intellectual centres, on the issue of whether the city's residents support the territorial division of the state. Only around 5% of respondents supported the formation of regions, or states, based on ethnicity or religious identity, whereas 91.6% of respondents said that they either favored a centralised form of government or a decentralised system based on administrative divisions that were independent of factors such as religion and ethnicity. Even if Galbraith is right that a majority of Iraqi Kurds are in favour of independence, he fails to mention that their wish is not shared by a large majority of the remaining 82% of the Iraqi population.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Assad: "only America ... can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East"


The Times has reprinted and translated an excellent interview with Syrian president, Bashar Assad, by Der Spiegel. Assad has interesting things to say about the future of Iraq and the consequences of American foreign policy in the region:

SPIEGEL: You are very pessimistic when it comes to Iraq. What can the countries of the Middle East do for Iraq?

Assad: I was already very pessimistic before the war. I told the Americans: There is no doubt that you will win this war, but then you will sink into a quagmire. What has now happened is worse than I expected. The two main problems are, first, the constitution and the issue of federalism, which is at the center of the great dispute between Sunnis and Shiites and, second, Kirkuk and the civil war that is developing between Kurds and Arabs. These problems must be addressed. It doesn't help for the Americans to point to the elections they brought about or to the higher standard of living. Those are cosmetic issues.

SPIEGEL: What would be the consequences of partition into a Kurdish north, a Shiite south and a Sunni region in central Iraq?

Assad: It would be harmful, not just for Iraq, but for the entire region, from Syria across the Gulf and into Central Asia. Imagine snapping a necklace and all the pearls fall to the ground. Almost all countries have natural dividing lines, and when ethnic and religious partition occurs in one country, it'll soon happen elsewhere. It would be like the end of the Soviet Union -- only far worse. Major wars, minor wars, no one will be capable of keeping the consequences under control.

SPIEGEL: So you would be in favor of a strong man who could hold Iraq together?

Assad: Not necessarily one man, but certainly a strong central authority. It has to be left to the Iraqis to determine exactly what this would look like. A secular authority is certainly best-equipped for maintaining stability in this ethnic and religious mosaic -- but it should also be of a strong national character. Those who arrived on America's tanks are not credible in Iraq.

I've often wondered what would be so bad about splitting up Iraq, which since its inception after the First World War. Bashar's pearl necklace metaphor is not unconvincing. It's hard to say how the sectarian division of such a split would be felt in countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Bahrain.

Suprisingly enough, he thinks that the US has a unique role to play in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict:

SPIEGEL: After the cease-fire between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, you gave a much-noted speech on the situation in the Middle East. In your speech, you mentioned a "critical stage of the history of Syria and the region." Wherein lies the opportunity?

Assad: First of all, it's clear to everyone that the status quo of war and conflict and instability is no longer acceptable. Now America enters the picture, because only America, because of its weight, can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East. But the Bush administration is under pressure. It's being accused of not having managed to bring about peace in six years. This pressure is good. Europe's foreign policy role is also growing. We specifically do not want a special role for the Europeans. We expect them to work together with America to achieve peace, and to do so on the basis of a vision America must develop.

SPIEGEL: What is Syria's role?

Assad: There can be no peace in the Middle East without Syria. The Lebanon and the Palestinian conflicts are inextricably linked with Syria. I have already mentioned the 500,000 Palestinian refugees. Were we to resolve our territorial dispute with Israel over the Golan Heights alone, we wouldn't achieve stability. We would only be taking away the Palestinians' hope and would be turning them from refugees into resistance fighters. This is why Syria is so determined to achieve a comprehensive peaceful solution.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading, not only because it is important for the US to hear what its enemies in the region have to say (instead of just talking to its friends), but because Asad has a very reasonable analysis about some of the most important issues facing the Middle East.


The Times also has an op-ed by Fromkin, whose excellent book A Peace to end all Peace I've just finished, on the anniversary of the Suez Canal fiasco.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Syria


I'm back in Beirut from Damascus, and all in all, it was a really interesting trip. I got to see the last days of Ramadan and the first days of al-Eid. I wasn't able to go to the Golan Heights, because the Ministry of the Interior was closed for the holidays, and I think it might be closed anyway because of the heightened tensions between Syria and Israel.

Everyone was extremely nice to me in Damascus, and poor families who ran shops in the old city insisted on sharing their meager rations with me while they broke their fast. Without asking who I was or where I was from or whether or not I was Muslim, one family stopped me in the street and refused to let me leave until I had eaten some of their food. They told me that I was welcome and thanked God that I was there to break the fast with them.

Otherwise, I noticed that the country that has been notorious for not having Coca-Cola has finally joined the Coca club. I was atop a mountain overlooking Damascus when I noticed that instead of Syrian Master Cola, I could actually buy a can of Coca-Cola. Apparently, a month and a half ago the Turkish distributor of Coke, who provides for the rest of the Middle East, finally managed to clear the importation of Coke with the Syrian government.

Here in Beirut, there was another explosion yesterday, but no one seems very concerned, despite the visible increase in Security Forces all over town.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Damascus


I arrived in Damascus last night at around 10 after spending almost 6 hours at the border. Officially, Americans have to get their visa in Washignton, but it's usually possible to get it at the Lebanese border, provied that you're willing to wait a while.

The only other time I've ever been here was on my way out of Lebanon to Jordan during the war this summer. The city seemed lively and teeming with energy, and I was disappointed that I wasn't able to look around. (I spent the night in a UNRWA Palestinian training camp then left the next morning for Amman.)

Damascus reminds me of a cross between Cairo and Beirut, which is a very good combination. These are the last days of Ramadan, so everyone is pretty lethargic during the day. I'm looking forward to celebrating Eid, although it would be nice to do it in a family setting rather than as a tourist. I've spent most of the day in the Souks looking at Iranian manuscripts, which may or may not be fakes, and key chains for my collection.

The last time I was in Syria, I was struck by Assad's cult of personality, with portraits of him all over the place, including in people's car windows. This time though, I've seen more pictures of Nasrallah than anyone else. The support for Hizbollah seems ubiquitous. There are posters, banners, glass etchings, t-shirts, and yes, key chains.

I'm going to try to get permission to take the Syrian tour of a village in the Golan Heights that was abandoned after the Israeli occupation. It should be interesting to see the place that could be the key to enflaming or defusing current tensions in the region.

I'll take pictures, but I won't be able to upload any until I get back to Beirut.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Former Janjaweed fighter tells his story


The BBC has exerpts of an account of a former Janjaweed fighter, who explains how things work in Darfur:

I tell you one fact. The Janjaweed don't make decisions. The orders come from the government...

One very well-known and regular visitor was Interior Minister Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hussein.

We will be split into two groups, one on horses, one on camels...

The aircraft went ahead of the Janjaweed. We saw the smoke, we saw the fire, then we went in...

Whenever we go into a village and find resistance we kill everyone. Sometimes they said wipe out an entire village...

We hear kill! Kill! Kill! And we shoot to kill...

Most were civilians - most were women...

Innocent people running out and being killed including children. And those who escape will die of thirst.

There are many rapes. But they don't do it in front of others. They take the victim away and rape them.

Eric Reeves, has gives us his two cents in the Guardian.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Update on grenade attacks


The Daily Star has a write up of the grenade attack downtown. According to the Minister of the Interior, the two recent attacks were aimed at the Internal Security Forces (ISF) and not the UN.

"The grenades launched were similar to the ones launched on the police barracks last week," acting Interior Minister Ahmad Fatfat told The Daily Star.

Fatfat was referring to two bombs thrown at two police stations last week that caused minor damage but no injuries.

It is suspected the recent attacks on the Internal Security Forces (ISF) have come in retaliation for a deadly clash earlier this month along the airport road outside the southern suburbs that left two boys dead during an ISF operation to clamp down on illegal construction in the area. ...

"While it is still under investigation and nothing is certain yet, the attack seems to be a political one targeting Lebanon's stability, with a special focus on unsettling the Lebanese security apparatus," Fatfat said, dismissing earlier reports the attack had targeted the United Nations building.

"The attackers could have easily hit the UN building with that kind of weapon if that was their intention," he added. ...

"It is the first time that civilian buildings were hit in downtown Beirut, perhaps as an attempt at destabilizing the country and causing security fears to spread," Fatfat said.

Fatfat will convene on Monday an exceptional meeting of the Central Security Council to discuss security.

Meanwhile, local daily newspaper As-Safir quoted security sources on Sunday as saying that the ISF was "punishing" some of its members involved in the deadly riot incident earlier this month.

Fatfat told Reuters in an interview on Saturday that he had recently received a message from someone "close to the Syrians," telling him and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to "take care."

The message had said the Syrians are "more angry than they were before February 14, 2005," the date of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's assassination, Fatfat said.

Regardless of what the source of these attacks is, I'm a little uneasy about recent events.

Conventional wisdom here has it that another civil war is brewing. I really hope that prediction proves to be wrong.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Unsettling explosions


The other night, I heard a noise at about 1:30 a.m. It wasn't clear what the noise was, but it startled me and might have sounded like a loud motorcycle going down the street in front of my friend's apartment. Then it came again, except this time it sounded like someone might have been knocking at the door at the same time.

As it turns out, it was either two bombs or two concussion grenades or two regular grenades thrown at the police station in a neighborhood called Verdun, which is a nice quarter not too far from here.

Last night, I went out with some friends of mine. After a couple of drinks, one of my friends decided that she wanted to go dancing near downtown, so we went to a dance club. Since my other friend is a guy, and a guy who was wearing a t-shirt and jeans at that, they didn't let us in. So we went back to my friend's place to smoke a narguile and then I went home.

I didn't hear any explosions last night or early this morning. But it seems that the building next to the UN building downtown (I think it was Buddha Bar) was attacked with two RPGs. Four people were hurt, but no one was killed. It seems most likely that the UN was being targeted, but I suppose it's also possible that the club was hit on purpose.

I'm going to go downtown and take a look for myself, despite the Beiruti rain.

I don't like the direction things are starting to take.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Borat and Nursultan Nazarbayev


Silverstein and Sosman over at Harper's have a little piece about Nazarbayev's visit to the White House. They wonder if Sacha Baron Cohen's (of Ali G fame) Khazak chararcter Borat might be better:

Since the 2003 Tulyakev Reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to eight years old. Please, captains of industry, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard working labor, and some of the cleanest prostitutes in whole of central Asia.

Cohen's new movie featuring Borat, Cultural Learning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is already gaining lots of press, including an article by the Khazak ambasssador to the UK.

As it happens, I have been (albeit very briefly) to Kazakhstan. While on a trip to Uzbekistan, we stopped briefly in Kazakhstan while driving from Tashkent to Samarkand - the roads, being built during the Stalinist era, pay little attention to the national borders of the Central Asian republics. Also, while I was in Uzbekistan, I met many Tajiks and Kazakhs, as well as Uzbeks. And while the governments of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are reprehensible, the people are hospitable, friendly and open.

Borat does not represent the actual Kazakh people. But that doesn't change the fact that his act is really funny.

A peace to end all peace


While reading David Fromkin's 1989 A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, I came across a passage (pp. 307-8) that seemed awfully familiar:

It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces [Baghdad and Basra]. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi'ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces ... made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.

[Sir Percy] Cox raised other immediate and practical issues that obviously had not been thought through in London. ...

The Mesopotamian Administration Committee had no ready replies, for the Ottoman administration of Mesopotamia had been driven out, and no body of experienced officials ... existed in the provinces to replace it. The war continued, and orders had to be given and administrative decisions taken daily. Public facilities and utilities had to be managed. Who was to do it?

...General Maude ... was put in the position of preaching self-rule while discouraging its practice. The compromise formula at which the British had arrived might have been expressly designed to arouse dissatisfaction and unrest: having volunteered what sounded like a pledge of independence to an area that had not asked for it, the military and civil authorities of the occupying power then proceeded to withhold it.

The Mesopotamian provinces were the first to be captured from the Ottoman Empire by Britain during the war. Whitehall?s failure to think through in practical detail how to fulfill the promises gratuitously made to a section of the local inhabitants was revealing, and boded ill for the provinces that were the next to be invaded...

You would think that someone would have done their homework before invading Iraq, instead of repeating the same mistakes as the British nearly 100 years ago.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Sorry


I'm currently staying at a friend's place and doing through various job interviews, so I haven't had the time or the internet connection to post on a regular basis.

I should have things sorted out next week, though, which will mean that I'll be back to posting regularly...

Monday, October 02, 2006

Fukuyama's new book


The London Review has an interesting review of Fukuyama's new book.

In administration rhetoric, terrorism (a method for waging asymmetrical war) is routinely opposed to liberty (a principle for organising a modern society). The antithesis of liberty, however, is not terrorism but tyranny. So when the administration tries to place jihadism in the space vacated by Communism, turning it into the new global enemy of liberty, it confuses both itself and others.

Tacitly, the neo-con advocates of Middle Eastern democracy are siding with the young men who might be tempted to join terrorist conspiracies against their clientalistic, kleptocratic and non-democratic governments, which are officially allied with the US. Al-Qaida is less like the KGB than the KGB?s implacable foe, the Afghan mujahidin, ?freedom fighters? supported by Ronald Reagan, among others. Today?s neo-cons no longer want to imitate Reagan by helping resentful young Muslim men regain their dignity through violent insurgency. Instead, they want to give them an alternative path to dignity: namely, liberal democracy. But the basic reason for supporting frustrated Muslim youth, that they deserve American support in their noble search for liberation, is the same.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on this massive contradiction. Although obvious in a way, it is seldom discussed; Fukuyama doesn?t seem to notice it. The neo-cons defend two diametrically opposed propositions: that the jihadists hate freedom at the same time as hating their own lack of it. On the one hand, neo-cons assert that Islamic radicals hate American values, not American policies, and deny that America?s past behaviour has in any way provoked anti-American violence. On the other hand, they imply that the 9/11 plot was inspired and implemented by terrorists radicalised by Arab autocracies allied with or sponsored by the US. This suggests that 9/11-style terrorists hate American policies, not American values. They hate not the principles of American liberty but, rather, America?s unprincipled support for tyranny. To promote democracy in the Middle East is to imply that such hatred is in part justified.

The review goes over this and other contradictions inherent in the Bush administration's strategy in the "War on Terror" and in their rationale for invading Iraq. It is worth reading in its entirety.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

UN to send cartographer to the Shebaa Farms


The last major territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel is the Shebaa Farms. Israel considers the land to be part of the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied after the 1967 war, taking the land from Syria. However, both Syria and Lebanon consider the land to be Lebanese, and this is one of Hizbollah's rationales for maintaining a militia. The is convenient for Damascus, which is afraid of the Lebanese signing a bilateral peace accord with Israel, leaving Syria to be the last remaining neighbor of Israel to not have signed an accord. As things stand, the Israelis -- and the UN, which includes the land under the UNDOF mandate (monitoring the disengagement of Israel and Syria) instead of under the UNIFIL mandate (monitoring the border between Israel and Lebanon) -- have assured that the Israel policies of both Beirut and Damascus are inextricably linked.

The Daily Star reports that the UN is sending a Balkan cartographer to "demarcate the precise location and area of the Shebaa Farms."

The confusion stems from poor French mandate maps, but reasearch by Israeli historian Asher Kaufman (see "Who owns the Shebaa Farms? Chronicle of a territorial dispute" in The Middle East Journal; Autumn 2002; 56, 4 - unfortunately not available online) shows that there is strong evidence for Lebanon's claims based on land ownership, which was registered in Lebanon, not in Syria.

It will be interesting to see what the cartographer comes up with, but it seems strange to me that concurrent official declarations by the two countries involved in the border dispute, Lebanon and Syria, would not be enough to settle the issue once and for all. We'll see if this leads to a Lebanese agreement with Israel, which may or may not be a good thing in the long run. While it seems obvious to me that a comprehensive peace agreement, which is what Damascus is pulling for, that involves Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinians is ideal, perhaps baby steps are in order.

Cole on partitioning Iraq


Juan Cole chimes in giving us his view of partitioning Iraq:

[A]side from the selfish interests of all the political actors inside and outside Iraq, as a practical policy, partitioning Iraq is too risky. It would probably not reduce ethnic infighting. It might produce more. The mini-states that emerge from a partition will have plenty of reason to fight wars with one another, as India did with Pakistan in the 1940s and has done virtually ever since. Worse, it is likely that if the Sunni Arab mini-state commits an atrocity against the Shiites, it might well bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They in turn would be targeted by Saudi and Jordanian jihadi volunteers.

A break-up of Iraq might not stop at Iraq?s borders. The Sunni Arabs could be picked up by Syria, thus greatly increasing Syria?s fighting power. Or they could become a revolutionary force in Jordan. A wholesale renegotiation of national borders may ensue, according to some thinkers. Such profound changes in such a volatile part of the world cannot be depended on to occur without bloodshed. The region is already racked by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the struggle between secular and religious politics.

To my mind, the first problem with partition, which Cole doesn't mention at all, would be the status of highly mixed cities, and especially Baghdad. My second misgiving would be how the Turks, Saudis and Iranians would react to these news states in their backyard.

The end of Iraq?


Zaid Al-Ali, an Iraqi lawyer, reviews Peter Galbraith's book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. The review focuses on Galbraith's idea that a federal division of Iraq (or even a confederation) is the only option that remains. But Al-Ali also take a look at Galbraith's role in advising the Kurds on the issue of the constitution:

"I realized that the Kurdish leaders had a conceptual problem in planning for a federal Iraq. They were thinking in terms of devolution of power - meaning that Baghdad grants them rights. I urged that the equation be reversed. In a memo I sent Barham (Salih) and Nechirvan (Barzani) in August (2003), I drew a distinction between the previous autonomy proposals and federalism: 'Federalism is a "bottom up" system. The basic organizing unit of the country is the province or state. [...] In a federal system residual power lies with the federal unit (i.e. state or province); under an autonomy system it rests with the central government. The central government has no ability to revoke a federal status or power: it can revoke an autonomy arrangement. [...] The Constitution should state that the Constitution of Kurdistan, and laws made pursuant to the Constitution, is the supreme law of Kurdistan. Any conflict between laws of Kurdistan and the laws of or Constitution of Iraq shall be decided in favor of the former.' These ideas eventually became the basis of Kurdistan's proposals for an Iraq constitution."

The question of what such a breakup of Iraq would mean for the country, not to speak of the region, is one that I'm fairly uncertain and ambivalent about, although Al-Ali argues that not only would it be a disaster, but that only the Kurds want such a weakening or even disolution of the state:

It is true that many western policymakers and commentators agree with his characterisation that Iraqis are being made to live together "against their will", but Galbraith, whose ties to Iraq run deeper than most, should know better than to make such a vague and inaccurate assertion.

By way of example, a survey was conducted a few months ago in Karbala, one of Shi'a Islam's most holy cities and main intellectual centres, on the issue of whether the city's residents support the territorial division of the state. Only around 5% of respondents supported the formation of regions, or states, based on ethnicity or religious identity, whereas 91.6% of respondents said that they either favored a centralised form of government or a decentralised system based on administrative divisions that were independent of factors such as religion and ethnicity. Even if Galbraith is right that a majority of Iraqi Kurds are in favour of independence, he fails to mention that their wish is not shared by a large majority of the remaining 82% of the Iraqi population.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Assad: "only America ... can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East"


The Times has reprinted and translated an excellent interview with Syrian president, Bashar Assad, by Der Spiegel. Assad has interesting things to say about the future of Iraq and the consequences of American foreign policy in the region:

SPIEGEL: You are very pessimistic when it comes to Iraq. What can the countries of the Middle East do for Iraq?

Assad: I was already very pessimistic before the war. I told the Americans: There is no doubt that you will win this war, but then you will sink into a quagmire. What has now happened is worse than I expected. The two main problems are, first, the constitution and the issue of federalism, which is at the center of the great dispute between Sunnis and Shiites and, second, Kirkuk and the civil war that is developing between Kurds and Arabs. These problems must be addressed. It doesn't help for the Americans to point to the elections they brought about or to the higher standard of living. Those are cosmetic issues.

SPIEGEL: What would be the consequences of partition into a Kurdish north, a Shiite south and a Sunni region in central Iraq?

Assad: It would be harmful, not just for Iraq, but for the entire region, from Syria across the Gulf and into Central Asia. Imagine snapping a necklace and all the pearls fall to the ground. Almost all countries have natural dividing lines, and when ethnic and religious partition occurs in one country, it'll soon happen elsewhere. It would be like the end of the Soviet Union -- only far worse. Major wars, minor wars, no one will be capable of keeping the consequences under control.

SPIEGEL: So you would be in favor of a strong man who could hold Iraq together?

Assad: Not necessarily one man, but certainly a strong central authority. It has to be left to the Iraqis to determine exactly what this would look like. A secular authority is certainly best-equipped for maintaining stability in this ethnic and religious mosaic -- but it should also be of a strong national character. Those who arrived on America's tanks are not credible in Iraq.

I've often wondered what would be so bad about splitting up Iraq, which since its inception after the First World War. Bashar's pearl necklace metaphor is not unconvincing. It's hard to say how the sectarian division of such a split would be felt in countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Bahrain.

Suprisingly enough, he thinks that the US has a unique role to play in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict:

SPIEGEL: After the cease-fire between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, you gave a much-noted speech on the situation in the Middle East. In your speech, you mentioned a "critical stage of the history of Syria and the region." Wherein lies the opportunity?

Assad: First of all, it's clear to everyone that the status quo of war and conflict and instability is no longer acceptable. Now America enters the picture, because only America, because of its weight, can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East. But the Bush administration is under pressure. It's being accused of not having managed to bring about peace in six years. This pressure is good. Europe's foreign policy role is also growing. We specifically do not want a special role for the Europeans. We expect them to work together with America to achieve peace, and to do so on the basis of a vision America must develop.

SPIEGEL: What is Syria's role?

Assad: There can be no peace in the Middle East without Syria. The Lebanon and the Palestinian conflicts are inextricably linked with Syria. I have already mentioned the 500,000 Palestinian refugees. Were we to resolve our territorial dispute with Israel over the Golan Heights alone, we wouldn't achieve stability. We would only be taking away the Palestinians' hope and would be turning them from refugees into resistance fighters. This is why Syria is so determined to achieve a comprehensive peaceful solution.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading, not only because it is important for the US to hear what its enemies in the region have to say (instead of just talking to its friends), but because Asad has a very reasonable analysis about some of the most important issues facing the Middle East.


The Times also has an op-ed by Fromkin, whose excellent book A Peace to end all Peace I've just finished, on the anniversary of the Suez Canal fiasco.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Syria


I'm back in Beirut from Damascus, and all in all, it was a really interesting trip. I got to see the last days of Ramadan and the first days of al-Eid. I wasn't able to go to the Golan Heights, because the Ministry of the Interior was closed for the holidays, and I think it might be closed anyway because of the heightened tensions between Syria and Israel.

Everyone was extremely nice to me in Damascus, and poor families who ran shops in the old city insisted on sharing their meager rations with me while they broke their fast. Without asking who I was or where I was from or whether or not I was Muslim, one family stopped me in the street and refused to let me leave until I had eaten some of their food. They told me that I was welcome and thanked God that I was there to break the fast with them.

Otherwise, I noticed that the country that has been notorious for not having Coca-Cola has finally joined the Coca club. I was atop a mountain overlooking Damascus when I noticed that instead of Syrian Master Cola, I could actually buy a can of Coca-Cola. Apparently, a month and a half ago the Turkish distributor of Coke, who provides for the rest of the Middle East, finally managed to clear the importation of Coke with the Syrian government.

Here in Beirut, there was another explosion yesterday, but no one seems very concerned, despite the visible increase in Security Forces all over town.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Damascus


I arrived in Damascus last night at around 10 after spending almost 6 hours at the border. Officially, Americans have to get their visa in Washignton, but it's usually possible to get it at the Lebanese border, provied that you're willing to wait a while.

The only other time I've ever been here was on my way out of Lebanon to Jordan during the war this summer. The city seemed lively and teeming with energy, and I was disappointed that I wasn't able to look around. (I spent the night in a UNRWA Palestinian training camp then left the next morning for Amman.)

Damascus reminds me of a cross between Cairo and Beirut, which is a very good combination. These are the last days of Ramadan, so everyone is pretty lethargic during the day. I'm looking forward to celebrating Eid, although it would be nice to do it in a family setting rather than as a tourist. I've spent most of the day in the Souks looking at Iranian manuscripts, which may or may not be fakes, and key chains for my collection.

The last time I was in Syria, I was struck by Assad's cult of personality, with portraits of him all over the place, including in people's car windows. This time though, I've seen more pictures of Nasrallah than anyone else. The support for Hizbollah seems ubiquitous. There are posters, banners, glass etchings, t-shirts, and yes, key chains.

I'm going to try to get permission to take the Syrian tour of a village in the Golan Heights that was abandoned after the Israeli occupation. It should be interesting to see the place that could be the key to enflaming or defusing current tensions in the region.

I'll take pictures, but I won't be able to upload any until I get back to Beirut.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Former Janjaweed fighter tells his story


The BBC has exerpts of an account of a former Janjaweed fighter, who explains how things work in Darfur:

I tell you one fact. The Janjaweed don't make decisions. The orders come from the government...

One very well-known and regular visitor was Interior Minister Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hussein.

We will be split into two groups, one on horses, one on camels...

The aircraft went ahead of the Janjaweed. We saw the smoke, we saw the fire, then we went in...

Whenever we go into a village and find resistance we kill everyone. Sometimes they said wipe out an entire village...

We hear kill! Kill! Kill! And we shoot to kill...

Most were civilians - most were women...

Innocent people running out and being killed including children. And those who escape will die of thirst.

There are many rapes. But they don't do it in front of others. They take the victim away and rape them.

Eric Reeves, has gives us his two cents in the Guardian.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Update on grenade attacks


The Daily Star has a write up of the grenade attack downtown. According to the Minister of the Interior, the two recent attacks were aimed at the Internal Security Forces (ISF) and not the UN.

"The grenades launched were similar to the ones launched on the police barracks last week," acting Interior Minister Ahmad Fatfat told The Daily Star.

Fatfat was referring to two bombs thrown at two police stations last week that caused minor damage but no injuries.

It is suspected the recent attacks on the Internal Security Forces (ISF) have come in retaliation for a deadly clash earlier this month along the airport road outside the southern suburbs that left two boys dead during an ISF operation to clamp down on illegal construction in the area. ...

"While it is still under investigation and nothing is certain yet, the attack seems to be a political one targeting Lebanon's stability, with a special focus on unsettling the Lebanese security apparatus," Fatfat said, dismissing earlier reports the attack had targeted the United Nations building.

"The attackers could have easily hit the UN building with that kind of weapon if that was their intention," he added. ...

"It is the first time that civilian buildings were hit in downtown Beirut, perhaps as an attempt at destabilizing the country and causing security fears to spread," Fatfat said.

Fatfat will convene on Monday an exceptional meeting of the Central Security Council to discuss security.

Meanwhile, local daily newspaper As-Safir quoted security sources on Sunday as saying that the ISF was "punishing" some of its members involved in the deadly riot incident earlier this month.

Fatfat told Reuters in an interview on Saturday that he had recently received a message from someone "close to the Syrians," telling him and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to "take care."

The message had said the Syrians are "more angry than they were before February 14, 2005," the date of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's assassination, Fatfat said.

Regardless of what the source of these attacks is, I'm a little uneasy about recent events.

Conventional wisdom here has it that another civil war is brewing. I really hope that prediction proves to be wrong.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Unsettling explosions


The other night, I heard a noise at about 1:30 a.m. It wasn't clear what the noise was, but it startled me and might have sounded like a loud motorcycle going down the street in front of my friend's apartment. Then it came again, except this time it sounded like someone might have been knocking at the door at the same time.

As it turns out, it was either two bombs or two concussion grenades or two regular grenades thrown at the police station in a neighborhood called Verdun, which is a nice quarter not too far from here.

Last night, I went out with some friends of mine. After a couple of drinks, one of my friends decided that she wanted to go dancing near downtown, so we went to a dance club. Since my other friend is a guy, and a guy who was wearing a t-shirt and jeans at that, they didn't let us in. So we went back to my friend's place to smoke a narguile and then I went home.

I didn't hear any explosions last night or early this morning. But it seems that the building next to the UN building downtown (I think it was Buddha Bar) was attacked with two RPGs. Four people were hurt, but no one was killed. It seems most likely that the UN was being targeted, but I suppose it's also possible that the club was hit on purpose.

I'm going to go downtown and take a look for myself, despite the Beiruti rain.

I don't like the direction things are starting to take.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Borat and Nursultan Nazarbayev


Silverstein and Sosman over at Harper's have a little piece about Nazarbayev's visit to the White House. They wonder if Sacha Baron Cohen's (of Ali G fame) Khazak chararcter Borat might be better:

Since the 2003 Tulyakev Reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to eight years old. Please, captains of industry, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard working labor, and some of the cleanest prostitutes in whole of central Asia.

Cohen's new movie featuring Borat, Cultural Learning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is already gaining lots of press, including an article by the Khazak ambasssador to the UK.

As it happens, I have been (albeit very briefly) to Kazakhstan. While on a trip to Uzbekistan, we stopped briefly in Kazakhstan while driving from Tashkent to Samarkand - the roads, being built during the Stalinist era, pay little attention to the national borders of the Central Asian republics. Also, while I was in Uzbekistan, I met many Tajiks and Kazakhs, as well as Uzbeks. And while the governments of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are reprehensible, the people are hospitable, friendly and open.

Borat does not represent the actual Kazakh people. But that doesn't change the fact that his act is really funny.

A peace to end all peace


While reading David Fromkin's 1989 A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, I came across a passage (pp. 307-8) that seemed awfully familiar:

It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces [Baghdad and Basra]. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi'ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces ... made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.

[Sir Percy] Cox raised other immediate and practical issues that obviously had not been thought through in London. ...

The Mesopotamian Administration Committee had no ready replies, for the Ottoman administration of Mesopotamia had been driven out, and no body of experienced officials ... existed in the provinces to replace it. The war continued, and orders had to be given and administrative decisions taken daily. Public facilities and utilities had to be managed. Who was to do it?

...General Maude ... was put in the position of preaching self-rule while discouraging its practice. The compromise formula at which the British had arrived might have been expressly designed to arouse dissatisfaction and unrest: having volunteered what sounded like a pledge of independence to an area that had not asked for it, the military and civil authorities of the occupying power then proceeded to withhold it.

The Mesopotamian provinces were the first to be captured from the Ottoman Empire by Britain during the war. Whitehall?s failure to think through in practical detail how to fulfill the promises gratuitously made to a section of the local inhabitants was revealing, and boded ill for the provinces that were the next to be invaded...

You would think that someone would have done their homework before invading Iraq, instead of repeating the same mistakes as the British nearly 100 years ago.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Sorry


I'm currently staying at a friend's place and doing through various job interviews, so I haven't had the time or the internet connection to post on a regular basis.

I should have things sorted out next week, though, which will mean that I'll be back to posting regularly...

Monday, October 02, 2006

Fukuyama's new book


The London Review has an interesting review of Fukuyama's new book.

In administration rhetoric, terrorism (a method for waging asymmetrical war) is routinely opposed to liberty (a principle for organising a modern society). The antithesis of liberty, however, is not terrorism but tyranny. So when the administration tries to place jihadism in the space vacated by Communism, turning it into the new global enemy of liberty, it confuses both itself and others.

Tacitly, the neo-con advocates of Middle Eastern democracy are siding with the young men who might be tempted to join terrorist conspiracies against their clientalistic, kleptocratic and non-democratic governments, which are officially allied with the US. Al-Qaida is less like the KGB than the KGB?s implacable foe, the Afghan mujahidin, ?freedom fighters? supported by Ronald Reagan, among others. Today?s neo-cons no longer want to imitate Reagan by helping resentful young Muslim men regain their dignity through violent insurgency. Instead, they want to give them an alternative path to dignity: namely, liberal democracy. But the basic reason for supporting frustrated Muslim youth, that they deserve American support in their noble search for liberation, is the same.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on this massive contradiction. Although obvious in a way, it is seldom discussed; Fukuyama doesn?t seem to notice it. The neo-cons defend two diametrically opposed propositions: that the jihadists hate freedom at the same time as hating their own lack of it. On the one hand, neo-cons assert that Islamic radicals hate American values, not American policies, and deny that America?s past behaviour has in any way provoked anti-American violence. On the other hand, they imply that the 9/11 plot was inspired and implemented by terrorists radicalised by Arab autocracies allied with or sponsored by the US. This suggests that 9/11-style terrorists hate American policies, not American values. They hate not the principles of American liberty but, rather, America?s unprincipled support for tyranny. To promote democracy in the Middle East is to imply that such hatred is in part justified.

The review goes over this and other contradictions inherent in the Bush administration's strategy in the "War on Terror" and in their rationale for invading Iraq. It is worth reading in its entirety.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

UN to send cartographer to the Shebaa Farms


The last major territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel is the Shebaa Farms. Israel considers the land to be part of the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied after the 1967 war, taking the land from Syria. However, both Syria and Lebanon consider the land to be Lebanese, and this is one of Hizbollah's rationales for maintaining a militia. The is convenient for Damascus, which is afraid of the Lebanese signing a bilateral peace accord with Israel, leaving Syria to be the last remaining neighbor of Israel to not have signed an accord. As things stand, the Israelis -- and the UN, which includes the land under the UNDOF mandate (monitoring the disengagement of Israel and Syria) instead of under the UNIFIL mandate (monitoring the border between Israel and Lebanon) -- have assured that the Israel policies of both Beirut and Damascus are inextricably linked.

The Daily Star reports that the UN is sending a Balkan cartographer to "demarcate the precise location and area of the Shebaa Farms."

The confusion stems from poor French mandate maps, but reasearch by Israeli historian Asher Kaufman (see "Who owns the Shebaa Farms? Chronicle of a territorial dispute" in The Middle East Journal; Autumn 2002; 56, 4 - unfortunately not available online) shows that there is strong evidence for Lebanon's claims based on land ownership, which was registered in Lebanon, not in Syria.

It will be interesting to see what the cartographer comes up with, but it seems strange to me that concurrent official declarations by the two countries involved in the border dispute, Lebanon and Syria, would not be enough to settle the issue once and for all. We'll see if this leads to a Lebanese agreement with Israel, which may or may not be a good thing in the long run. While it seems obvious to me that a comprehensive peace agreement, which is what Damascus is pulling for, that involves Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinians is ideal, perhaps baby steps are in order.

Cole on partitioning Iraq


Juan Cole chimes in giving us his view of partitioning Iraq:

[A]side from the selfish interests of all the political actors inside and outside Iraq, as a practical policy, partitioning Iraq is too risky. It would probably not reduce ethnic infighting. It might produce more. The mini-states that emerge from a partition will have plenty of reason to fight wars with one another, as India did with Pakistan in the 1940s and has done virtually ever since. Worse, it is likely that if the Sunni Arab mini-state commits an atrocity against the Shiites, it might well bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They in turn would be targeted by Saudi and Jordanian jihadi volunteers.

A break-up of Iraq might not stop at Iraq?s borders. The Sunni Arabs could be picked up by Syria, thus greatly increasing Syria?s fighting power. Or they could become a revolutionary force in Jordan. A wholesale renegotiation of national borders may ensue, according to some thinkers. Such profound changes in such a volatile part of the world cannot be depended on to occur without bloodshed. The region is already racked by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the struggle between secular and religious politics.

To my mind, the first problem with partition, which Cole doesn't mention at all, would be the status of highly mixed cities, and especially Baghdad. My second misgiving would be how the Turks, Saudis and Iranians would react to these news states in their backyard.

The end of Iraq?


Zaid Al-Ali, an Iraqi lawyer, reviews Peter Galbraith's book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. The review focuses on Galbraith's idea that a federal division of Iraq (or even a confederation) is the only option that remains. But Al-Ali also take a look at Galbraith's role in advising the Kurds on the issue of the constitution:

"I realized that the Kurdish leaders had a conceptual problem in planning for a federal Iraq. They were thinking in terms of devolution of power - meaning that Baghdad grants them rights. I urged that the equation be reversed. In a memo I sent Barham (Salih) and Nechirvan (Barzani) in August (2003), I drew a distinction between the previous autonomy proposals and federalism: 'Federalism is a "bottom up" system. The basic organizing unit of the country is the province or state. [...] In a federal system residual power lies with the federal unit (i.e. state or province); under an autonomy system it rests with the central government. The central government has no ability to revoke a federal status or power: it can revoke an autonomy arrangement. [...] The Constitution should state that the Constitution of Kurdistan, and laws made pursuant to the Constitution, is the supreme law of Kurdistan. Any conflict between laws of Kurdistan and the laws of or Constitution of Iraq shall be decided in favor of the former.' These ideas eventually became the basis of Kurdistan's proposals for an Iraq constitution."

The question of what such a breakup of Iraq would mean for the country, not to speak of the region, is one that I'm fairly uncertain and ambivalent about, although Al-Ali argues that not only would it be a disaster, but that only the Kurds want such a weakening or even disolution of the state:

It is true that many western policymakers and commentators agree with his characterisation that Iraqis are being made to live together "against their will", but Galbraith, whose ties to Iraq run deeper than most, should know better than to make such a vague and inaccurate assertion.

By way of example, a survey was conducted a few months ago in Karbala, one of Shi'a Islam's most holy cities and main intellectual centres, on the issue of whether the city's residents support the territorial division of the state. Only around 5% of respondents supported the formation of regions, or states, based on ethnicity or religious identity, whereas 91.6% of respondents said that they either favored a centralised form of government or a decentralised system based on administrative divisions that were independent of factors such as religion and ethnicity. Even if Galbraith is right that a majority of Iraqi Kurds are in favour of independence, he fails to mention that their wish is not shared by a large majority of the remaining 82% of the Iraqi population.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Assad: "only America ... can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East"


The Times has reprinted and translated an excellent interview with Syrian president, Bashar Assad, by Der Spiegel. Assad has interesting things to say about the future of Iraq and the consequences of American foreign policy in the region:

SPIEGEL: You are very pessimistic when it comes to Iraq. What can the countries of the Middle East do for Iraq?

Assad: I was already very pessimistic before the war. I told the Americans: There is no doubt that you will win this war, but then you will sink into a quagmire. What has now happened is worse than I expected. The two main problems are, first, the constitution and the issue of federalism, which is at the center of the great dispute between Sunnis and Shiites and, second, Kirkuk and the civil war that is developing between Kurds and Arabs. These problems must be addressed. It doesn't help for the Americans to point to the elections they brought about or to the higher standard of living. Those are cosmetic issues.

SPIEGEL: What would be the consequences of partition into a Kurdish north, a Shiite south and a Sunni region in central Iraq?

Assad: It would be harmful, not just for Iraq, but for the entire region, from Syria across the Gulf and into Central Asia. Imagine snapping a necklace and all the pearls fall to the ground. Almost all countries have natural dividing lines, and when ethnic and religious partition occurs in one country, it'll soon happen elsewhere. It would be like the end of the Soviet Union -- only far worse. Major wars, minor wars, no one will be capable of keeping the consequences under control.

SPIEGEL: So you would be in favor of a strong man who could hold Iraq together?

Assad: Not necessarily one man, but certainly a strong central authority. It has to be left to the Iraqis to determine exactly what this would look like. A secular authority is certainly best-equipped for maintaining stability in this ethnic and religious mosaic -- but it should also be of a strong national character. Those who arrived on America's tanks are not credible in Iraq.

I've often wondered what would be so bad about splitting up Iraq, which since its inception after the First World War. Bashar's pearl necklace metaphor is not unconvincing. It's hard to say how the sectarian division of such a split would be felt in countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Bahrain.

Suprisingly enough, he thinks that the US has a unique role to play in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict:

SPIEGEL: After the cease-fire between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, you gave a much-noted speech on the situation in the Middle East. In your speech, you mentioned a "critical stage of the history of Syria and the region." Wherein lies the opportunity?

Assad: First of all, it's clear to everyone that the status quo of war and conflict and instability is no longer acceptable. Now America enters the picture, because only America, because of its weight, can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East. But the Bush administration is under pressure. It's being accused of not having managed to bring about peace in six years. This pressure is good. Europe's foreign policy role is also growing. We specifically do not want a special role for the Europeans. We expect them to work together with America to achieve peace, and to do so on the basis of a vision America must develop.

SPIEGEL: What is Syria's role?

Assad: There can be no peace in the Middle East without Syria. The Lebanon and the Palestinian conflicts are inextricably linked with Syria. I have already mentioned the 500,000 Palestinian refugees. Were we to resolve our territorial dispute with Israel over the Golan Heights alone, we wouldn't achieve stability. We would only be taking away the Palestinians' hope and would be turning them from refugees into resistance fighters. This is why Syria is so determined to achieve a comprehensive peaceful solution.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading, not only because it is important for the US to hear what its enemies in the region have to say (instead of just talking to its friends), but because Asad has a very reasonable analysis about some of the most important issues facing the Middle East.


The Times also has an op-ed by Fromkin, whose excellent book A Peace to end all Peace I've just finished, on the anniversary of the Suez Canal fiasco.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Syria


I'm back in Beirut from Damascus, and all in all, it was a really interesting trip. I got to see the last days of Ramadan and the first days of al-Eid. I wasn't able to go to the Golan Heights, because the Ministry of the Interior was closed for the holidays, and I think it might be closed anyway because of the heightened tensions between Syria and Israel.

Everyone was extremely nice to me in Damascus, and poor families who ran shops in the old city insisted on sharing their meager rations with me while they broke their fast. Without asking who I was or where I was from or whether or not I was Muslim, one family stopped me in the street and refused to let me leave until I had eaten some of their food. They told me that I was welcome and thanked God that I was there to break the fast with them.

Otherwise, I noticed that the country that has been notorious for not having Coca-Cola has finally joined the Coca club. I was atop a mountain overlooking Damascus when I noticed that instead of Syrian Master Cola, I could actually buy a can of Coca-Cola. Apparently, a month and a half ago the Turkish distributor of Coke, who provides for the rest of the Middle East, finally managed to clear the importation of Coke with the Syrian government.

Here in Beirut, there was another explosion yesterday, but no one seems very concerned, despite the visible increase in Security Forces all over town.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Damascus


I arrived in Damascus last night at around 10 after spending almost 6 hours at the border. Officially, Americans have to get their visa in Washignton, but it's usually possible to get it at the Lebanese border, provied that you're willing to wait a while.

The only other time I've ever been here was on my way out of Lebanon to Jordan during the war this summer. The city seemed lively and teeming with energy, and I was disappointed that I wasn't able to look around. (I spent the night in a UNRWA Palestinian training camp then left the next morning for Amman.)

Damascus reminds me of a cross between Cairo and Beirut, which is a very good combination. These are the last days of Ramadan, so everyone is pretty lethargic during the day. I'm looking forward to celebrating Eid, although it would be nice to do it in a family setting rather than as a tourist. I've spent most of the day in the Souks looking at Iranian manuscripts, which may or may not be fakes, and key chains for my collection.

The last time I was in Syria, I was struck by Assad's cult of personality, with portraits of him all over the place, including in people's car windows. This time though, I've seen more pictures of Nasrallah than anyone else. The support for Hizbollah seems ubiquitous. There are posters, banners, glass etchings, t-shirts, and yes, key chains.

I'm going to try to get permission to take the Syrian tour of a village in the Golan Heights that was abandoned after the Israeli occupation. It should be interesting to see the place that could be the key to enflaming or defusing current tensions in the region.

I'll take pictures, but I won't be able to upload any until I get back to Beirut.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Former Janjaweed fighter tells his story


The BBC has exerpts of an account of a former Janjaweed fighter, who explains how things work in Darfur:

I tell you one fact. The Janjaweed don't make decisions. The orders come from the government...

One very well-known and regular visitor was Interior Minister Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hussein.

We will be split into two groups, one on horses, one on camels...

The aircraft went ahead of the Janjaweed. We saw the smoke, we saw the fire, then we went in...

Whenever we go into a village and find resistance we kill everyone. Sometimes they said wipe out an entire village...

We hear kill! Kill! Kill! And we shoot to kill...

Most were civilians - most were women...

Innocent people running out and being killed including children. And those who escape will die of thirst.

There are many rapes. But they don't do it in front of others. They take the victim away and rape them.

Eric Reeves, has gives us his two cents in the Guardian.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Update on grenade attacks


The Daily Star has a write up of the grenade attack downtown. According to the Minister of the Interior, the two recent attacks were aimed at the Internal Security Forces (ISF) and not the UN.

"The grenades launched were similar to the ones launched on the police barracks last week," acting Interior Minister Ahmad Fatfat told The Daily Star.

Fatfat was referring to two bombs thrown at two police stations last week that caused minor damage but no injuries.

It is suspected the recent attacks on the Internal Security Forces (ISF) have come in retaliation for a deadly clash earlier this month along the airport road outside the southern suburbs that left two boys dead during an ISF operation to clamp down on illegal construction in the area. ...

"While it is still under investigation and nothing is certain yet, the attack seems to be a political one targeting Lebanon's stability, with a special focus on unsettling the Lebanese security apparatus," Fatfat said, dismissing earlier reports the attack had targeted the United Nations building.

"The attackers could have easily hit the UN building with that kind of weapon if that was their intention," he added. ...

"It is the first time that civilian buildings were hit in downtown Beirut, perhaps as an attempt at destabilizing the country and causing security fears to spread," Fatfat said.

Fatfat will convene on Monday an exceptional meeting of the Central Security Council to discuss security.

Meanwhile, local daily newspaper As-Safir quoted security sources on Sunday as saying that the ISF was "punishing" some of its members involved in the deadly riot incident earlier this month.

Fatfat told Reuters in an interview on Saturday that he had recently received a message from someone "close to the Syrians," telling him and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to "take care."

The message had said the Syrians are "more angry than they were before February 14, 2005," the date of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's assassination, Fatfat said.

Regardless of what the source of these attacks is, I'm a little uneasy about recent events.

Conventional wisdom here has it that another civil war is brewing. I really hope that prediction proves to be wrong.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Unsettling explosions


The other night, I heard a noise at about 1:30 a.m. It wasn't clear what the noise was, but it startled me and might have sounded like a loud motorcycle going down the street in front of my friend's apartment. Then it came again, except this time it sounded like someone might have been knocking at the door at the same time.

As it turns out, it was either two bombs or two concussion grenades or two regular grenades thrown at the police station in a neighborhood called Verdun, which is a nice quarter not too far from here.

Last night, I went out with some friends of mine. After a couple of drinks, one of my friends decided that she wanted to go dancing near downtown, so we went to a dance club. Since my other friend is a guy, and a guy who was wearing a t-shirt and jeans at that, they didn't let us in. So we went back to my friend's place to smoke a narguile and then I went home.

I didn't hear any explosions last night or early this morning. But it seems that the building next to the UN building downtown (I think it was Buddha Bar) was attacked with two RPGs. Four people were hurt, but no one was killed. It seems most likely that the UN was being targeted, but I suppose it's also possible that the club was hit on purpose.

I'm going to go downtown and take a look for myself, despite the Beiruti rain.

I don't like the direction things are starting to take.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Borat and Nursultan Nazarbayev


Silverstein and Sosman over at Harper's have a little piece about Nazarbayev's visit to the White House. They wonder if Sacha Baron Cohen's (of Ali G fame) Khazak chararcter Borat might be better:

Since the 2003 Tulyakev Reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to eight years old. Please, captains of industry, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard working labor, and some of the cleanest prostitutes in whole of central Asia.

Cohen's new movie featuring Borat, Cultural Learning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is already gaining lots of press, including an article by the Khazak ambasssador to the UK.

As it happens, I have been (albeit very briefly) to Kazakhstan. While on a trip to Uzbekistan, we stopped briefly in Kazakhstan while driving from Tashkent to Samarkand - the roads, being built during the Stalinist era, pay little attention to the national borders of the Central Asian republics. Also, while I was in Uzbekistan, I met many Tajiks and Kazakhs, as well as Uzbeks. And while the governments of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are reprehensible, the people are hospitable, friendly and open.

Borat does not represent the actual Kazakh people. But that doesn't change the fact that his act is really funny.

A peace to end all peace


While reading David Fromkin's 1989 A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, I came across a passage (pp. 307-8) that seemed awfully familiar:

It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces [Baghdad and Basra]. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi'ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces ... made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.

[Sir Percy] Cox raised other immediate and practical issues that obviously had not been thought through in London. ...

The Mesopotamian Administration Committee had no ready replies, for the Ottoman administration of Mesopotamia had been driven out, and no body of experienced officials ... existed in the provinces to replace it. The war continued, and orders had to be given and administrative decisions taken daily. Public facilities and utilities had to be managed. Who was to do it?

...General Maude ... was put in the position of preaching self-rule while discouraging its practice. The compromise formula at which the British had arrived might have been expressly designed to arouse dissatisfaction and unrest: having volunteered what sounded like a pledge of independence to an area that had not asked for it, the military and civil authorities of the occupying power then proceeded to withhold it.

The Mesopotamian provinces were the first to be captured from the Ottoman Empire by Britain during the war. Whitehall?s failure to think through in practical detail how to fulfill the promises gratuitously made to a section of the local inhabitants was revealing, and boded ill for the provinces that were the next to be invaded...

You would think that someone would have done their homework before invading Iraq, instead of repeating the same mistakes as the British nearly 100 years ago.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Sorry


I'm currently staying at a friend's place and doing through various job interviews, so I haven't had the time or the internet connection to post on a regular basis.

I should have things sorted out next week, though, which will mean that I'll be back to posting regularly...

Monday, October 02, 2006

Fukuyama's new book


The London Review has an interesting review of Fukuyama's new book.

In administration rhetoric, terrorism (a method for waging asymmetrical war) is routinely opposed to liberty (a principle for organising a modern society). The antithesis of liberty, however, is not terrorism but tyranny. So when the administration tries to place jihadism in the space vacated by Communism, turning it into the new global enemy of liberty, it confuses both itself and others.

Tacitly, the neo-con advocates of Middle Eastern democracy are siding with the young men who might be tempted to join terrorist conspiracies against their clientalistic, kleptocratic and non-democratic governments, which are officially allied with the US. Al-Qaida is less like the KGB than the KGB?s implacable foe, the Afghan mujahidin, ?freedom fighters? supported by Ronald Reagan, among others. Today?s neo-cons no longer want to imitate Reagan by helping resentful young Muslim men regain their dignity through violent insurgency. Instead, they want to give them an alternative path to dignity: namely, liberal democracy. But the basic reason for supporting frustrated Muslim youth, that they deserve American support in their noble search for liberation, is the same.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on this massive contradiction. Although obvious in a way, it is seldom discussed; Fukuyama doesn?t seem to notice it. The neo-cons defend two diametrically opposed propositions: that the jihadists hate freedom at the same time as hating their own lack of it. On the one hand, neo-cons assert that Islamic radicals hate American values, not American policies, and deny that America?s past behaviour has in any way provoked anti-American violence. On the other hand, they imply that the 9/11 plot was inspired and implemented by terrorists radicalised by Arab autocracies allied with or sponsored by the US. This suggests that 9/11-style terrorists hate American policies, not American values. They hate not the principles of American liberty but, rather, America?s unprincipled support for tyranny. To promote democracy in the Middle East is to imply that such hatred is in part justified.

The review goes over this and other contradictions inherent in the Bush administration's strategy in the "War on Terror" and in their rationale for invading Iraq. It is worth reading in its entirety.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

UN to send cartographer to the Shebaa Farms


The last major territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel is the Shebaa Farms. Israel considers the land to be part of the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied after the 1967 war, taking the land from Syria. However, both Syria and Lebanon consider the land to be Lebanese, and this is one of Hizbollah's rationales for maintaining a militia. The is convenient for Damascus, which is afraid of the Lebanese signing a bilateral peace accord with Israel, leaving Syria to be the last remaining neighbor of Israel to not have signed an accord. As things stand, the Israelis -- and the UN, which includes the land under the UNDOF mandate (monitoring the disengagement of Israel and Syria) instead of under the UNIFIL mandate (monitoring the border between Israel and Lebanon) -- have assured that the Israel policies of both Beirut and Damascus are inextricably linked.

The Daily Star reports that the UN is sending a Balkan cartographer to "demarcate the precise location and area of the Shebaa Farms."

The confusion stems from poor French mandate maps, but reasearch by Israeli historian Asher Kaufman (see "Who owns the Shebaa Farms? Chronicle of a territorial dispute" in The Middle East Journal; Autumn 2002; 56, 4 - unfortunately not available online) shows that there is strong evidence for Lebanon's claims based on land ownership, which was registered in Lebanon, not in Syria.

It will be interesting to see what the cartographer comes up with, but it seems strange to me that concurrent official declarations by the two countries involved in the border dispute, Lebanon and Syria, would not be enough to settle the issue once and for all. We'll see if this leads to a Lebanese agreement with Israel, which may or may not be a good thing in the long run. While it seems obvious to me that a comprehensive peace agreement, which is what Damascus is pulling for, that involves Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinians is ideal, perhaps baby steps are in order.

Cole on partitioning Iraq


Juan Cole chimes in giving us his view of partitioning Iraq:

[A]side from the selfish interests of all the political actors inside and outside Iraq, as a practical policy, partitioning Iraq is too risky. It would probably not reduce ethnic infighting. It might produce more. The mini-states that emerge from a partition will have plenty of reason to fight wars with one another, as India did with Pakistan in the 1940s and has done virtually ever since. Worse, it is likely that if the Sunni Arab mini-state commits an atrocity against the Shiites, it might well bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They in turn would be targeted by Saudi and Jordanian jihadi volunteers.

A break-up of Iraq might not stop at Iraq?s borders. The Sunni Arabs could be picked up by Syria, thus greatly increasing Syria?s fighting power. Or they could become a revolutionary force in Jordan. A wholesale renegotiation of national borders may ensue, according to some thinkers. Such profound changes in such a volatile part of the world cannot be depended on to occur without bloodshed. The region is already racked by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the struggle between secular and religious politics.

To my mind, the first problem with partition, which Cole doesn't mention at all, would be the status of highly mixed cities, and especially Baghdad. My second misgiving would be how the Turks, Saudis and Iranians would react to these news states in their backyard.

The end of Iraq?


Zaid Al-Ali, an Iraqi lawyer, reviews Peter Galbraith's book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. The review focuses on Galbraith's idea that a federal division of Iraq (or even a confederation) is the only option that remains. But Al-Ali also take a look at Galbraith's role in advising the Kurds on the issue of the constitution:

"I realized that the Kurdish leaders had a conceptual problem in planning for a federal Iraq. They were thinking in terms of devolution of power - meaning that Baghdad grants them rights. I urged that the equation be reversed. In a memo I sent Barham (Salih) and Nechirvan (Barzani) in August (2003), I drew a distinction between the previous autonomy proposals and federalism: 'Federalism is a "bottom up" system. The basic organizing unit of the country is the province or state. [...] In a federal system residual power lies with the federal unit (i.e. state or province); under an autonomy system it rests with the central government. The central government has no ability to revoke a federal status or power: it can revoke an autonomy arrangement. [...] The Constitution should state that the Constitution of Kurdistan, and laws made pursuant to the Constitution, is the supreme law of Kurdistan. Any conflict between laws of Kurdistan and the laws of or Constitution of Iraq shall be decided in favor of the former.' These ideas eventually became the basis of Kurdistan's proposals for an Iraq constitution."

The question of what such a breakup of Iraq would mean for the country, not to speak of the region, is one that I'm fairly uncertain and ambivalent about, although Al-Ali argues that not only would it be a disaster, but that only the Kurds want such a weakening or even disolution of the state:

It is true that many western policymakers and commentators agree with his characterisation that Iraqis are being made to live together "against their will", but Galbraith, whose ties to Iraq run deeper than most, should know better than to make such a vague and inaccurate assertion.

By way of example, a survey was conducted a few months ago in Karbala, one of Shi'a Islam's most holy cities and main intellectual centres, on the issue of whether the city's residents support the territorial division of the state. Only around 5% of respondents supported the formation of regions, or states, based on ethnicity or religious identity, whereas 91.6% of respondents said that they either favored a centralised form of government or a decentralised system based on administrative divisions that were independent of factors such as religion and ethnicity. Even if Galbraith is right that a majority of Iraqi Kurds are in favour of independence, he fails to mention that their wish is not shared by a large majority of the remaining 82% of the Iraqi population.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Assad: "only America ... can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East"


The Times has reprinted and translated an excellent interview with Syrian president, Bashar Assad, by Der Spiegel. Assad has interesting things to say about the future of Iraq and the consequences of American foreign policy in the region:

SPIEGEL: You are very pessimistic when it comes to Iraq. What can the countries of the Middle East do for Iraq?

Assad: I was already very pessimistic before the war. I told the Americans: There is no doubt that you will win this war, but then you will sink into a quagmire. What has now happened is worse than I expected. The two main problems are, first, the constitution and the issue of federalism, which is at the center of the great dispute between Sunnis and Shiites and, second, Kirkuk and the civil war that is developing between Kurds and Arabs. These problems must be addressed. It doesn't help for the Americans to point to the elections they brought about or to the higher standard of living. Those are cosmetic issues.

SPIEGEL: What would be the consequences of partition into a Kurdish north, a Shiite south and a Sunni region in central Iraq?

Assad: It would be harmful, not just for Iraq, but for the entire region, from Syria across the Gulf and into Central Asia. Imagine snapping a necklace and all the pearls fall to the ground. Almost all countries have natural dividing lines, and when ethnic and religious partition occurs in one country, it'll soon happen elsewhere. It would be like the end of the Soviet Union -- only far worse. Major wars, minor wars, no one will be capable of keeping the consequences under control.

SPIEGEL: So you would be in favor of a strong man who could hold Iraq together?

Assad: Not necessarily one man, but certainly a strong central authority. It has to be left to the Iraqis to determine exactly what this would look like. A secular authority is certainly best-equipped for maintaining stability in this ethnic and religious mosaic -- but it should also be of a strong national character. Those who arrived on America's tanks are not credible in Iraq.

I've often wondered what would be so bad about splitting up Iraq, which since its inception after the First World War. Bashar's pearl necklace metaphor is not unconvincing. It's hard to say how the sectarian division of such a split would be felt in countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Bahrain.

Suprisingly enough, he thinks that the US has a unique role to play in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict:

SPIEGEL: After the cease-fire between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, you gave a much-noted speech on the situation in the Middle East. In your speech, you mentioned a "critical stage of the history of Syria and the region." Wherein lies the opportunity?

Assad: First of all, it's clear to everyone that the status quo of war and conflict and instability is no longer acceptable. Now America enters the picture, because only America, because of its weight, can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East. But the Bush administration is under pressure. It's being accused of not having managed to bring about peace in six years. This pressure is good. Europe's foreign policy role is also growing. We specifically do not want a special role for the Europeans. We expect them to work together with America to achieve peace, and to do so on the basis of a vision America must develop.

SPIEGEL: What is Syria's role?

Assad: There can be no peace in the Middle East without Syria. The Lebanon and the Palestinian conflicts are inextricably linked with Syria. I have already mentioned the 500,000 Palestinian refugees. Were we to resolve our territorial dispute with Israel over the Golan Heights alone, we wouldn't achieve stability. We would only be taking away the Palestinians' hope and would be turning them from refugees into resistance fighters. This is why Syria is so determined to achieve a comprehensive peaceful solution.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading, not only because it is important for the US to hear what its enemies in the region have to say (instead of just talking to its friends), but because Asad has a very reasonable analysis about some of the most important issues facing the Middle East.


The Times also has an op-ed by Fromkin, whose excellent book A Peace to end all Peace I've just finished, on the anniversary of the Suez Canal fiasco.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Syria


I'm back in Beirut from Damascus, and all in all, it was a really interesting trip. I got to see the last days of Ramadan and the first days of al-Eid. I wasn't able to go to the Golan Heights, because the Ministry of the Interior was closed for the holidays, and I think it might be closed anyway because of the heightened tensions between Syria and Israel.

Everyone was extremely nice to me in Damascus, and poor families who ran shops in the old city insisted on sharing their meager rations with me while they broke their fast. Without asking who I was or where I was from or whether or not I was Muslim, one family stopped me in the street and refused to let me leave until I had eaten some of their food. They told me that I was welcome and thanked God that I was there to break the fast with them.

Otherwise, I noticed that the country that has been notorious for not having Coca-Cola has finally joined the Coca club. I was atop a mountain overlooking Damascus when I noticed that instead of Syrian Master Cola, I could actually buy a can of Coca-Cola. Apparently, a month and a half ago the Turkish distributor of Coke, who provides for the rest of the Middle East, finally managed to clear the importation of Coke with the Syrian government.

Here in Beirut, there was another explosion yesterday, but no one seems very concerned, despite the visible increase in Security Forces all over town.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Damascus


I arrived in Damascus last night at around 10 after spending almost 6 hours at the border. Officially, Americans have to get their visa in Washignton, but it's usually possible to get it at the Lebanese border, provied that you're willing to wait a while.

The only other time I've ever been here was on my way out of Lebanon to Jordan during the war this summer. The city seemed lively and teeming with energy, and I was disappointed that I wasn't able to look around. (I spent the night in a UNRWA Palestinian training camp then left the next morning for Amman.)

Damascus reminds me of a cross between Cairo and Beirut, which is a very good combination. These are the last days of Ramadan, so everyone is pretty lethargic during the day. I'm looking forward to celebrating Eid, although it would be nice to do it in a family setting rather than as a tourist. I've spent most of the day in the Souks looking at Iranian manuscripts, which may or may not be fakes, and key chains for my collection.

The last time I was in Syria, I was struck by Assad's cult of personality, with portraits of him all over the place, including in people's car windows. This time though, I've seen more pictures of Nasrallah than anyone else. The support for Hizbollah seems ubiquitous. There are posters, banners, glass etchings, t-shirts, and yes, key chains.

I'm going to try to get permission to take the Syrian tour of a village in the Golan Heights that was abandoned after the Israeli occupation. It should be interesting to see the place that could be the key to enflaming or defusing current tensions in the region.

I'll take pictures, but I won't be able to upload any until I get back to Beirut.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Former Janjaweed fighter tells his story


The BBC has exerpts of an account of a former Janjaweed fighter, who explains how things work in Darfur:

I tell you one fact. The Janjaweed don't make decisions. The orders come from the government...

One very well-known and regular visitor was Interior Minister Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hussein.

We will be split into two groups, one on horses, one on camels...

The aircraft went ahead of the Janjaweed. We saw the smoke, we saw the fire, then we went in...

Whenever we go into a village and find resistance we kill everyone. Sometimes they said wipe out an entire village...

We hear kill! Kill! Kill! And we shoot to kill...

Most were civilians - most were women...

Innocent people running out and being killed including children. And those who escape will die of thirst.

There are many rapes. But they don't do it in front of others. They take the victim away and rape them.

Eric Reeves, has gives us his two cents in the Guardian.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Update on grenade attacks


The Daily Star has a write up of the grenade attack downtown. According to the Minister of the Interior, the two recent attacks were aimed at the Internal Security Forces (ISF) and not the UN.

"The grenades launched were similar to the ones launched on the police barracks last week," acting Interior Minister Ahmad Fatfat told The Daily Star.

Fatfat was referring to two bombs thrown at two police stations last week that caused minor damage but no injuries.

It is suspected the recent attacks on the Internal Security Forces (ISF) have come in retaliation for a deadly clash earlier this month along the airport road outside the southern suburbs that left two boys dead during an ISF operation to clamp down on illegal construction in the area. ...

"While it is still under investigation and nothing is certain yet, the attack seems to be a political one targeting Lebanon's stability, with a special focus on unsettling the Lebanese security apparatus," Fatfat said, dismissing earlier reports the attack had targeted the United Nations building.

"The attackers could have easily hit the UN building with that kind of weapon if that was their intention," he added. ...

"It is the first time that civilian buildings were hit in downtown Beirut, perhaps as an attempt at destabilizing the country and causing security fears to spread," Fatfat said.

Fatfat will convene on Monday an exceptional meeting of the Central Security Council to discuss security.

Meanwhile, local daily newspaper As-Safir quoted security sources on Sunday as saying that the ISF was "punishing" some of its members involved in the deadly riot incident earlier this month.

Fatfat told Reuters in an interview on Saturday that he had recently received a message from someone "close to the Syrians," telling him and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to "take care."

The message had said the Syrians are "more angry than they were before February 14, 2005," the date of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's assassination, Fatfat said.

Regardless of what the source of these attacks is, I'm a little uneasy about recent events.

Conventional wisdom here has it that another civil war is brewing. I really hope that prediction proves to be wrong.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Unsettling explosions


The other night, I heard a noise at about 1:30 a.m. It wasn't clear what the noise was, but it startled me and might have sounded like a loud motorcycle going down the street in front of my friend's apartment. Then it came again, except this time it sounded like someone might have been knocking at the door at the same time.

As it turns out, it was either two bombs or two concussion grenades or two regular grenades thrown at the police station in a neighborhood called Verdun, which is a nice quarter not too far from here.

Last night, I went out with some friends of mine. After a couple of drinks, one of my friends decided that she wanted to go dancing near downtown, so we went to a dance club. Since my other friend is a guy, and a guy who was wearing a t-shirt and jeans at that, they didn't let us in. So we went back to my friend's place to smoke a narguile and then I went home.

I didn't hear any explosions last night or early this morning. But it seems that the building next to the UN building downtown (I think it was Buddha Bar) was attacked with two RPGs. Four people were hurt, but no one was killed. It seems most likely that the UN was being targeted, but I suppose it's also possible that the club was hit on purpose.

I'm going to go downtown and take a look for myself, despite the Beiruti rain.

I don't like the direction things are starting to take.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Borat and Nursultan Nazarbayev


Silverstein and Sosman over at Harper's have a little piece about Nazarbayev's visit to the White House. They wonder if Sacha Baron Cohen's (of Ali G fame) Khazak chararcter Borat might be better:

Since the 2003 Tulyakev Reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to eight years old. Please, captains of industry, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard working labor, and some of the cleanest prostitutes in whole of central Asia.

Cohen's new movie featuring Borat, Cultural Learning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is already gaining lots of press, including an article by the Khazak ambasssador to the UK.

As it happens, I have been (albeit very briefly) to Kazakhstan. While on a trip to Uzbekistan, we stopped briefly in Kazakhstan while driving from Tashkent to Samarkand - the roads, being built during the Stalinist era, pay little attention to the national borders of the Central Asian republics. Also, while I was in Uzbekistan, I met many Tajiks and Kazakhs, as well as Uzbeks. And while the governments of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are reprehensible, the people are hospitable, friendly and open.

Borat does not represent the actual Kazakh people. But that doesn't change the fact that his act is really funny.

A peace to end all peace


While reading David Fromkin's 1989 A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, I came across a passage (pp. 307-8) that seemed awfully familiar:

It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces [Baghdad and Basra]. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi'ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces ... made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.

[Sir Percy] Cox raised other immediate and practical issues that obviously had not been thought through in London. ...

The Mesopotamian Administration Committee had no ready replies, for the Ottoman administration of Mesopotamia had been driven out, and no body of experienced officials ... existed in the provinces to replace it. The war continued, and orders had to be given and administrative decisions taken daily. Public facilities and utilities had to be managed. Who was to do it?

...General Maude ... was put in the position of preaching self-rule while discouraging its practice. The compromise formula at which the British had arrived might have been expressly designed to arouse dissatisfaction and unrest: having volunteered what sounded like a pledge of independence to an area that had not asked for it, the military and civil authorities of the occupying power then proceeded to withhold it.

The Mesopotamian provinces were the first to be captured from the Ottoman Empire by Britain during the war. Whitehall?s failure to think through in practical detail how to fulfill the promises gratuitously made to a section of the local inhabitants was revealing, and boded ill for the provinces that were the next to be invaded...

You would think that someone would have done their homework before invading Iraq, instead of repeating the same mistakes as the British nearly 100 years ago.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Sorry


I'm currently staying at a friend's place and doing through various job interviews, so I haven't had the time or the internet connection to post on a regular basis.

I should have things sorted out next week, though, which will mean that I'll be back to posting regularly...

Monday, October 02, 2006

Fukuyama's new book


The London Review has an interesting review of Fukuyama's new book.

In administration rhetoric, terrorism (a method for waging asymmetrical war) is routinely opposed to liberty (a principle for organising a modern society). The antithesis of liberty, however, is not terrorism but tyranny. So when the administration tries to place jihadism in the space vacated by Communism, turning it into the new global enemy of liberty, it confuses both itself and others.

Tacitly, the neo-con advocates of Middle Eastern democracy are siding with the young men who might be tempted to join terrorist conspiracies against their clientalistic, kleptocratic and non-democratic governments, which are officially allied with the US. Al-Qaida is less like the KGB than the KGB?s implacable foe, the Afghan mujahidin, ?freedom fighters? supported by Ronald Reagan, among others. Today?s neo-cons no longer want to imitate Reagan by helping resentful young Muslim men regain their dignity through violent insurgency. Instead, they want to give them an alternative path to dignity: namely, liberal democracy. But the basic reason for supporting frustrated Muslim youth, that they deserve American support in their noble search for liberation, is the same.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on this massive contradiction. Although obvious in a way, it is seldom discussed; Fukuyama doesn?t seem to notice it. The neo-cons defend two diametrically opposed propositions: that the jihadists hate freedom at the same time as hating their own lack of it. On the one hand, neo-cons assert that Islamic radicals hate American values, not American policies, and deny that America?s past behaviour has in any way provoked anti-American violence. On the other hand, they imply that the 9/11 plot was inspired and implemented by terrorists radicalised by Arab autocracies allied with or sponsored by the US. This suggests that 9/11-style terrorists hate American policies, not American values. They hate not the principles of American liberty but, rather, America?s unprincipled support for tyranny. To promote democracy in the Middle East is to imply that such hatred is in part justified.

The review goes over this and other contradictions inherent in the Bush administration's strategy in the "War on Terror" and in their rationale for invading Iraq. It is worth reading in its entirety.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

UN to send cartographer to the Shebaa Farms


The last major territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel is the Shebaa Farms. Israel considers the land to be part of the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied after the 1967 war, taking the land from Syria. However, both Syria and Lebanon consider the land to be Lebanese, and this is one of Hizbollah's rationales for maintaining a militia. The is convenient for Damascus, which is afraid of the Lebanese signing a bilateral peace accord with Israel, leaving Syria to be the last remaining neighbor of Israel to not have signed an accord. As things stand, the Israelis -- and the UN, which includes the land under the UNDOF mandate (monitoring the disengagement of Israel and Syria) instead of under the UNIFIL mandate (monitoring the border between Israel and Lebanon) -- have assured that the Israel policies of both Beirut and Damascus are inextricably linked.

The Daily Star reports that the UN is sending a Balkan cartographer to "demarcate the precise location and area of the Shebaa Farms."

The confusion stems from poor French mandate maps, but reasearch by Israeli historian Asher Kaufman (see "Who owns the Shebaa Farms? Chronicle of a territorial dispute" in The Middle East Journal; Autumn 2002; 56, 4 - unfortunately not available online) shows that there is strong evidence for Lebanon's claims based on land ownership, which was registered in Lebanon, not in Syria.

It will be interesting to see what the cartographer comes up with, but it seems strange to me that concurrent official declarations by the two countries involved in the border dispute, Lebanon and Syria, would not be enough to settle the issue once and for all. We'll see if this leads to a Lebanese agreement with Israel, which may or may not be a good thing in the long run. While it seems obvious to me that a comprehensive peace agreement, which is what Damascus is pulling for, that involves Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinians is ideal, perhaps baby steps are in order.

Cole on partitioning Iraq


Juan Cole chimes in giving us his view of partitioning Iraq:

[A]side from the selfish interests of all the political actors inside and outside Iraq, as a practical policy, partitioning Iraq is too risky. It would probably not reduce ethnic infighting. It might produce more. The mini-states that emerge from a partition will have plenty of reason to fight wars with one another, as India did with Pakistan in the 1940s and has done virtually ever since. Worse, it is likely that if the Sunni Arab mini-state commits an atrocity against the Shiites, it might well bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They in turn would be targeted by Saudi and Jordanian jihadi volunteers.

A break-up of Iraq might not stop at Iraq?s borders. The Sunni Arabs could be picked up by Syria, thus greatly increasing Syria?s fighting power. Or they could become a revolutionary force in Jordan. A wholesale renegotiation of national borders may ensue, according to some thinkers. Such profound changes in such a volatile part of the world cannot be depended on to occur without bloodshed. The region is already racked by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the struggle between secular and religious politics.

To my mind, the first problem with partition, which Cole doesn't mention at all, would be the status of highly mixed cities, and especially Baghdad. My second misgiving would be how the Turks, Saudis and Iranians would react to these news states in their backyard.

The end of Iraq?


Zaid Al-Ali, an Iraqi lawyer, reviews Peter Galbraith's book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. The review focuses on Galbraith's idea that a federal division of Iraq (or even a confederation) is the only option that remains. But Al-Ali also take a look at Galbraith's role in advising the Kurds on the issue of the constitution:

"I realized that the Kurdish leaders had a conceptual problem in planning for a federal Iraq. They were thinking in terms of devolution of power - meaning that Baghdad grants them rights. I urged that the equation be reversed. In a memo I sent Barham (Salih) and Nechirvan (Barzani) in August (2003), I drew a distinction between the previous autonomy proposals and federalism: 'Federalism is a "bottom up" system. The basic organizing unit of the country is the province or state. [...] In a federal system residual power lies with the federal unit (i.e. state or province); under an autonomy system it rests with the central government. The central government has no ability to revoke a federal status or power: it can revoke an autonomy arrangement. [...] The Constitution should state that the Constitution of Kurdistan, and laws made pursuant to the Constitution, is the supreme law of Kurdistan. Any conflict between laws of Kurdistan and the laws of or Constitution of Iraq shall be decided in favor of the former.' These ideas eventually became the basis of Kurdistan's proposals for an Iraq constitution."

The question of what such a breakup of Iraq would mean for the country, not to speak of the region, is one that I'm fairly uncertain and ambivalent about, although Al-Ali argues that not only would it be a disaster, but that only the Kurds want such a weakening or even disolution of the state:

It is true that many western policymakers and commentators agree with his characterisation that Iraqis are being made to live together "against their will", but Galbraith, whose ties to Iraq run deeper than most, should know better than to make such a vague and inaccurate assertion.

By way of example, a survey was conducted a few months ago in Karbala, one of Shi'a Islam's most holy cities and main intellectual centres, on the issue of whether the city's residents support the territorial division of the state. Only around 5% of respondents supported the formation of regions, or states, based on ethnicity or religious identity, whereas 91.6% of respondents said that they either favored a centralised form of government or a decentralised system based on administrative divisions that were independent of factors such as religion and ethnicity. Even if Galbraith is right that a majority of Iraqi Kurds are in favour of independence, he fails to mention that their wish is not shared by a large majority of the remaining 82% of the Iraqi population.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Assad: "only America ... can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East"


The Times has reprinted and translated an excellent interview with Syrian president, Bashar Assad, by Der Spiegel. Assad has interesting things to say about the future of Iraq and the consequences of American foreign policy in the region:

SPIEGEL: You are very pessimistic when it comes to Iraq. What can the countries of the Middle East do for Iraq?

Assad: I was already very pessimistic before the war. I told the Americans: There is no doubt that you will win this war, but then you will sink into a quagmire. What has now happened is worse than I expected. The two main problems are, first, the constitution and the issue of federalism, which is at the center of the great dispute between Sunnis and Shiites and, second, Kirkuk and the civil war that is developing between Kurds and Arabs. These problems must be addressed. It doesn't help for the Americans to point to the elections they brought about or to the higher standard of living. Those are cosmetic issues.

SPIEGEL: What would be the consequences of partition into a Kurdish north, a Shiite south and a Sunni region in central Iraq?

Assad: It would be harmful, not just for Iraq, but for the entire region, from Syria across the Gulf and into Central Asia. Imagine snapping a necklace and all the pearls fall to the ground. Almost all countries have natural dividing lines, and when ethnic and religious partition occurs in one country, it'll soon happen elsewhere. It would be like the end of the Soviet Union -- only far worse. Major wars, minor wars, no one will be capable of keeping the consequences under control.

SPIEGEL: So you would be in favor of a strong man who could hold Iraq together?

Assad: Not necessarily one man, but certainly a strong central authority. It has to be left to the Iraqis to determine exactly what this would look like. A secular authority is certainly best-equipped for maintaining stability in this ethnic and religious mosaic -- but it should also be of a strong national character. Those who arrived on America's tanks are not credible in Iraq.

I've often wondered what would be so bad about splitting up Iraq, which since its inception after the First World War. Bashar's pearl necklace metaphor is not unconvincing. It's hard to say how the sectarian division of such a split would be felt in countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Bahrain.

Suprisingly enough, he thinks that the US has a unique role to play in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict:

SPIEGEL: After the cease-fire between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, you gave a much-noted speech on the situation in the Middle East. In your speech, you mentioned a "critical stage of the history of Syria and the region." Wherein lies the opportunity?

Assad: First of all, it's clear to everyone that the status quo of war and conflict and instability is no longer acceptable. Now America enters the picture, because only America, because of its weight, can be the main broker for peace in the Middle East. But the Bush administration is under pressure. It's being accused of not having managed to bring about peace in six years. This pressure is good. Europe's foreign policy role is also growing. We specifically do not want a special role for the Europeans. We expect them to work together with America to achieve peace, and to do so on the basis of a vision America must develop.

SPIEGEL: What is Syria's role?

Assad: There can be no peace in the Middle East without Syria. The Lebanon and the Palestinian conflicts are inextricably linked with Syria. I have already mentioned the 500,000 Palestinian refugees. Were we to resolve our territorial dispute with Israel over the Golan Heights alone, we wouldn't achieve stability. We would only be taking away the Palestinians' hope and would be turning them from refugees into resistance fighters. This is why Syria is so determined to achieve a comprehensive peaceful solution.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading, not only because it is important for the US to hear what its enemies in the region have to say (instead of just talking to its friends), but because Asad has a very reasonable analysis about some of the most important issues facing the Middle East.


The Times also has an op-ed by Fromkin, whose excellent book A Peace to end all Peace I've just finished, on the anniversary of the Suez Canal fiasco.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Syria


I'm back in Beirut from Damascus, and all in all, it was a really interesting trip. I got to see the last days of Ramadan and the first days of al-Eid. I wasn't able to go to the Golan Heights, because the Ministry of the Interior was closed for the holidays, and I think it might be closed anyway because of the heightened tensions between Syria and Israel.

Everyone was extremely nice to me in Damascus, and poor families who ran shops in the old city insisted on sharing their meager rations with me while they broke their fast. Without asking who I was or where I was from or whether or not I was Muslim, one family stopped me in the street and refused to let me leave until I had eaten some of their food. They told me that I was welcome and thanked God that I was there to break the fast with them.

Otherwise, I noticed that the country that has been notorious for not having Coca-Cola has finally joined the Coca club. I was atop a mountain overlooking Damascus when I noticed that instead of Syrian Master Cola, I could actually buy a can of Coca-Cola. Apparently, a month and a half ago the Turkish distributor of Coke, who provides for the rest of the Middle East, finally managed to clear the importation of Coke with the Syrian government.

Here in Beirut, there was another explosion yesterday, but no one seems very concerned, despite the visible increase in Security Forces all over town.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Damascus


I arrived in Damascus last night at around 10 after spending almost 6 hours at the border. Officially, Americans have to get their visa in Washignton, but it's usually possible to get it at the Lebanese border, provied that you're willing to wait a while.

The only other time I've ever been here was on my way out of Lebanon to Jordan during the war this summer. The city seemed lively and teeming with energy, and I was disappointed that I wasn't able to look around. (I spent the night in a UNRWA Palestinian training camp then left the next morning for Amman.)

Damascus reminds me of a cross between Cairo and Beirut, which is a very good combination. These are the last days of Ramadan, so everyone is pretty lethargic during the day. I'm looking forward to celebrating Eid, although it would be nice to do it in a family setting rather than as a tourist. I've spent most of the day in the Souks looking at Iranian manuscripts, which may or may not be fakes, and key chains for my collection.

The last time I was in Syria, I was struck by Assad's cult of personality, with portraits of him all over the place, including in people's car windows. This time though, I've seen more pictures of Nasrallah than anyone else. The support for Hizbollah seems ubiquitous. There are posters, banners, glass etchings, t-shirts, and yes, key chains.

I'm going to try to get permission to take the Syrian tour of a village in the Golan Heights that was abandoned after the Israeli occupation. It should be interesting to see the place that could be the key to enflaming or defusing current tensions in the region.

I'll take pictures, but I won't be able to upload any until I get back to Beirut.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Former Janjaweed fighter tells his story


The BBC has exerpts of an account of a former Janjaweed fighter, who explains how things work in Darfur:

I tell you one fact. The Janjaweed don't make decisions. The orders come from the government...

One very well-known and regular visitor was Interior Minister Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hussein.

We will be split into two groups, one on horses, one on camels...

The aircraft went ahead of the Janjaweed. We saw the smoke, we saw the fire, then we went in...

Whenever we go into a village and find resistance we kill everyone. Sometimes they said wipe out an entire village...

We hear kill! Kill! Kill! And we shoot to kill...

Most were civilians - most were women...

Innocent people running out and being killed including children. And those who escape will die of thirst.

There are many rapes. But they don't do it in front of others. They take the victim away and rape them.

Eric Reeves, has gives us his two cents in the Guardian.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Update on grenade attacks


The Daily Star has a write up of the grenade attack downtown. According to the Minister of the Interior, the two recent attacks were aimed at the Internal Security Forces (ISF) and not the UN.

"The grenades launched were similar to the ones launched on the police barracks last week," acting Interior Minister Ahmad Fatfat told The Daily Star.

Fatfat was referring to two bombs thrown at two police stations last week that caused minor damage but no injuries.

It is suspected the recent attacks on the Internal Security Forces (ISF) have come in retaliation for a deadly clash earlier this month along the airport road outside the southern suburbs that left two boys dead during an ISF operation to clamp down on illegal construction in the area. ...

"While it is still under investigation and nothing is certain yet, the attack seems to be a political one targeting Lebanon's stability, with a special focus on unsettling the Lebanese security apparatus," Fatfat said, dismissing earlier reports the attack had targeted the United Nations building.

"The attackers could have easily hit the UN building with that kind of weapon if that was their intention," he added. ...

"It is the first time that civilian buildings were hit in downtown Beirut, perhaps as an attempt at destabilizing the country and causing security fears to spread," Fatfat said.

Fatfat will convene on Monday an exceptional meeting of the Central Security Council to discuss security.

Meanwhile, local daily newspaper As-Safir quoted security sources on Sunday as saying that the ISF was "punishing" some of its members involved in the deadly riot incident earlier this month.

Fatfat told Reuters in an interview on Saturday that he had recently received a message from someone "close to the Syrians," telling him and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to "take care."

The message had said the Syrians are "more angry than they were before February 14, 2005," the date of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's assassination, Fatfat said.

Regardless of what the source of these attacks is, I'm a little uneasy about recent events.

Conventional wisdom here has it that another civil war is brewing. I really hope that prediction proves to be wrong.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Unsettling explosions


The other night, I heard a noise at about 1:30 a.m. It wasn't clear what the noise was, but it startled me and might have sounded like a loud motorcycle going down the street in front of my friend's apartment. Then it came again, except this time it sounded like someone might have been knocking at the door at the same time.

As it turns out, it was either two bombs or two concussion grenades or two regular grenades thrown at the police station in a neighborhood called Verdun, which is a nice quarter not too far from here.

Last night, I went out with some friends of mine. After a couple of drinks, one of my friends decided that she wanted to go dancing near downtown, so we went to a dance club. Since my other friend is a guy, and a guy who was wearing a t-shirt and jeans at that, they didn't let us in. So we went back to my friend's place to smoke a narguile and then I went home.

I didn't hear any explosions last night or early this morning. But it seems that the building next to the UN building downtown (I think it was Buddha Bar) was attacked with two RPGs. Four people were hurt, but no one was killed. It seems most likely that the UN was being targeted, but I suppose it's also possible that the club was hit on purpose.

I'm going to go downtown and take a look for myself, despite the Beiruti rain.

I don't like the direction things are starting to take.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Borat and Nursultan Nazarbayev


Silverstein and Sosman over at Harper's have a little piece about Nazarbayev's visit to the White House. They wonder if Sacha Baron Cohen's (of Ali G fame) Khazak chararcter Borat might be better:

Since the 2003 Tulyakev Reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to eight years old. Please, captains of industry, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard working labor, and some of the cleanest prostitutes in whole of central Asia.

Cohen's new movie featuring Borat, Cultural Learning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is already gaining lots of press, including an article by the Khazak ambasssador to the UK.

As it happens, I have been (albeit very briefly) to Kazakhstan. While on a trip to Uzbekistan, we stopped briefly in Kazakhstan while driving from Tashkent to Samarkand - the roads, being built during the Stalinist era, pay little attention to the national borders of the Central Asian republics. Also, while I was in Uzbekistan, I met many Tajiks and Kazakhs, as well as Uzbeks. And while the governments of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are reprehensible, the people are hospitable, friendly and open.

Borat does not represent the actual Kazakh people. But that doesn't change the fact that his act is really funny.

A peace to end all peace


While reading David Fromkin's 1989 A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, I came across a passage (pp. 307-8) that seemed awfully familiar:

It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces [Baghdad and Basra]. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi'ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces ... made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.

[Sir Percy] Cox raised other immediate and practical issues that obviously had not been thought through in London. ...

The Mesopotamian Administration Committee had no ready replies, for the Ottoman administration of Mesopotamia had been driven out, and no body of experienced officials ... existed in the provinces to replace it. The war continued, and orders had to be given and administrative decisions taken daily. Public facilities and utilities had to be managed. Who was to do it?

...General Maude ... was put in the position of preaching self-rule while discouraging its practice. The compromise formula at which the British had arrived might have been expressly designed to arouse dissatisfaction and unrest: having volunteered what sounded like a pledge of independence to an area that had not asked for it, the military and civil authorities of the occupying power then proceeded to withhold it.

The Mesopotamian provinces were the first to be captured from the Ottoman Empire by Britain during the war. Whitehall?s failure to think through in practical detail how to fulfill the promises gratuitously made to a section of the local inhabitants was revealing, and boded ill for the provinces that were the next to be invaded...

You would think that someone would have done their homework before invading Iraq, instead of repeating the same mistakes as the British nearly 100 years ago.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Sorry


I'm currently staying at a friend's place and doing through various job interviews, so I haven't had the time or the internet connection to post on a regular basis.

I should have things sorted out next week, though, which will mean that I'll be back to posting regularly...

Monday, October 02, 2006

Fukuyama's new book


The London Review has an interesting review of Fukuyama's new book.

In administration rhetoric, terrorism (a method for waging asymmetrical war) is routinely opposed to liberty (a principle for organising a modern society). The antithesis of liberty, however, is not terrorism but tyranny. So when the administration tries to place jihadism in the space vacated by Communism, turning it into the new global enemy of liberty, it confuses both itself and others.

Tacitly, the neo-con advocates of Middle Eastern democracy are siding with the young men who might be tempted to join terrorist conspiracies against their clientalistic, kleptocratic and non-democratic governments, which are officially allied with the US. Al-Qaida is less like the KGB than the KGB?s implacable foe, the Afghan mujahidin, ?freedom fighters? supported by Ronald Reagan, among others. Today?s neo-cons no longer want to imitate Reagan by helping resentful young Muslim men regain their dignity through violent insurgency. Instead, they want to give them an alternative path to dignity: namely, liberal democracy. But the basic reason for supporting frustrated Muslim youth, that they deserve American support in their noble search for liberation, is the same.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on this massive contradiction. Although obvious in a way, it is seldom discussed; Fukuyama doesn?t seem to notice it. The neo-cons defend two diametrically opposed propositions: that the jihadists hate freedom at the same time as hating their own lack of it. On the one hand, neo-cons assert that Islamic radicals hate American values, not American policies, and deny that America?s past behaviour has in any way provoked anti-American violence. On the other hand, they imply that the 9/11 plot was inspired and implemented by terrorists radicalised by Arab autocracies allied with or sponsored by the US. This suggests that 9/11-style terrorists hate American policies, not American values. They hate not the principles of American liberty but, rather, America?s unprincipled support for tyranny. To promote democracy in the Middle East is to imply that such hatred is in part justified.

The review goes over this and other contradictions inherent in the Bush administration's strategy in the "War on Terror" and in their rationale for invading Iraq. It is worth reading in its entirety.