the human province

The garbage men stop coming:

The 8 o'clock news is presented in a flack jacket:

I don't have a picture for this one, but another way you might know that you're in a civil war if there's no more bread at your local stores...

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

I read an article in Al-Ahram Weekly analyzing sectarianism in the Middle East, which seems to argue that the Sunni-Shia rift is, at least in Lebanon, a "temporary and false construct."

One of the recurrent themes in the speeches of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is his insistence that the Shia "cannot be lumped together in one basket". Nasrallah's assertion is commonly interpreted as an attempt to distance the resistance movement from Shia political groups elsewhere, particularly in Iraq, where they maintain an intimate relationship with their occupiers.

...The consensus in both Sunni and Shia circles appears to be that attempts to emphasise Sunni- Shia rivalries are intended to deflect attention from both the US occupation of Iraq and continuing Israeli aggression. That the US is working to fuel such tensions is almost an article of faith for Muslims on both sides. In its attempt to create an anti-Iran alliance, they say, the US is resorting to a strategy which aims to raise the spectre of sectarianism across the Muslim world.

He seems to argue that there is no "Shia crescent" and that the problems in the region are political and not sectarian.

To my mind, though, it seems hard to make a claim like that in countries where practically all political parties are based on sectarianism. Of course this does not mean that all Shia in Lebanon are in the same party, but rather that the fundamental basis of support for parties in Lebanon -- Amal and Hezbollah for the Shia, the Current for the Future for the Sunni, the PSP for the Druze, and the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement for the Christians -- is sectarian. Most political parties are likewise split down sectarian lines in Iraq.

So while there isn't exactly a monolith of Middle Eastern Shia, there is a loose confederation that's held together by Iran. On the face, Iraqi and Lebanese Shia don't have too much in common vis-à-vis their relationship with the US, but what they do share is Iranian sponsorship.

As for the claim that keeps coming up that the US is intentionally spreading sectarianism, I honestly don't see it. Of course American incompetence in Iraq has unleashed a new wave of sectarianism that hadn't been seen since the Iran-Iraq war, but I'm not convinced that America is aiming for sectarian split. It seems to me that American policy in the region involves backing the enemies of the enemies of the US. This is a very shortsighted approach to foreign policy and often leads to many contradictions, like supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria but opposing them in Egypt.

Basically, it seems to me that the US is taking advantage of rifts that already exist in the Middle East. But there is a tendency to not want to believe this. I spoke to a Christian in my neighborhood yesterday who was convinced that the US was trying to split all Arab countries (especially Iraq and Lebanon) into sectarian statelets so that Israel would be the most powerful country in the region.

This, of course, is silly for any number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Israel is already the strongest state in the region. Moreover, the US has been fighting the dissolution of the Iraqi state, and no one reasonable is talking about splitting up the already tiny Lebanon.

In any case, there seems to be a hesitancy in the region to recognize that these sectarian fault lines were not American or Israeli inventions. Much like Iraqis initially refused to believe that it was fellow Iraqis committing sectarian crimes, instead blaming it on foreign terrorists, the Middle East as a whole seems unwilling to take a long hard look in the sectarian mirror.

I'm back in Beirut after some time in Spain and France over the winter holidays. Things are a but tense but not too bad. I came in late at night on the 14th, the day of the Hariri memorial and the day after the bus bombings.

I was happy to see that the Hariri memorial, which was right next to the opposition sit-in, went off without any clashes. (Not least because I didn't want to get stuck at the airport in case the roads were closed.)

Besides that, people are pretty skittish. I've heard on numerous accounts (some from UNRWA employees) that during the clashes last month, there were checkpoints by various groups (not always official) where identity cards were checked to see what sect everyone belonged to. Although I can't confirm it, I've had one account that the Lebanese Forces (Christian leader Geagea's militia) were armed and manning checkpoints not far from Saida. There have been reports coming from Hezbollah that the Lebanese Forces have been rearming, which is not a good sign.

About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

"America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

The garbage men stop coming:

The 8 o'clock news is presented in a flack jacket:

I don't have a picture for this one, but another way you might know that you're in a civil war if there's no more bread at your local stores...

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

I read an article in Al-Ahram Weekly analyzing sectarianism in the Middle East, which seems to argue that the Sunni-Shia rift is, at least in Lebanon, a "temporary and false construct."

One of the recurrent themes in the speeches of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is his insistence that the Shia "cannot be lumped together in one basket". Nasrallah's assertion is commonly interpreted as an attempt to distance the resistance movement from Shia political groups elsewhere, particularly in Iraq, where they maintain an intimate relationship with their occupiers.

...The consensus in both Sunni and Shia circles appears to be that attempts to emphasise Sunni- Shia rivalries are intended to deflect attention from both the US occupation of Iraq and continuing Israeli aggression. That the US is working to fuel such tensions is almost an article of faith for Muslims on both sides. In its attempt to create an anti-Iran alliance, they say, the US is resorting to a strategy which aims to raise the spectre of sectarianism across the Muslim world.

He seems to argue that there is no "Shia crescent" and that the problems in the region are political and not sectarian.

To my mind, though, it seems hard to make a claim like that in countries where practically all political parties are based on sectarianism. Of course this does not mean that all Shia in Lebanon are in the same party, but rather that the fundamental basis of support for parties in Lebanon -- Amal and Hezbollah for the Shia, the Current for the Future for the Sunni, the PSP for the Druze, and the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement for the Christians -- is sectarian. Most political parties are likewise split down sectarian lines in Iraq.

So while there isn't exactly a monolith of Middle Eastern Shia, there is a loose confederation that's held together by Iran. On the face, Iraqi and Lebanese Shia don't have too much in common vis-à-vis their relationship with the US, but what they do share is Iranian sponsorship.

As for the claim that keeps coming up that the US is intentionally spreading sectarianism, I honestly don't see it. Of course American incompetence in Iraq has unleashed a new wave of sectarianism that hadn't been seen since the Iran-Iraq war, but I'm not convinced that America is aiming for sectarian split. It seems to me that American policy in the region involves backing the enemies of the enemies of the US. This is a very shortsighted approach to foreign policy and often leads to many contradictions, like supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria but opposing them in Egypt.

Basically, it seems to me that the US is taking advantage of rifts that already exist in the Middle East. But there is a tendency to not want to believe this. I spoke to a Christian in my neighborhood yesterday who was convinced that the US was trying to split all Arab countries (especially Iraq and Lebanon) into sectarian statelets so that Israel would be the most powerful country in the region.

This, of course, is silly for any number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Israel is already the strongest state in the region. Moreover, the US has been fighting the dissolution of the Iraqi state, and no one reasonable is talking about splitting up the already tiny Lebanon.

In any case, there seems to be a hesitancy in the region to recognize that these sectarian fault lines were not American or Israeli inventions. Much like Iraqis initially refused to believe that it was fellow Iraqis committing sectarian crimes, instead blaming it on foreign terrorists, the Middle East as a whole seems unwilling to take a long hard look in the sectarian mirror.

I'm back in Beirut after some time in Spain and France over the winter holidays. Things are a but tense but not too bad. I came in late at night on the 14th, the day of the Hariri memorial and the day after the bus bombings.

I was happy to see that the Hariri memorial, which was right next to the opposition sit-in, went off without any clashes. (Not least because I didn't want to get stuck at the airport in case the roads were closed.)

Besides that, people are pretty skittish. I've heard on numerous accounts (some from UNRWA employees) that during the clashes last month, there were checkpoints by various groups (not always official) where identity cards were checked to see what sect everyone belonged to. Although I can't confirm it, I've had one account that the Lebanese Forces (Christian leader Geagea's militia) were armed and manning checkpoints not far from Saida. There have been reports coming from Hezbollah that the Lebanese Forces have been rearming, which is not a good sign.

About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

"America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

The garbage men stop coming:

The 8 o'clock news is presented in a flack jacket:

I don't have a picture for this one, but another way you might know that you're in a civil war if there's no more bread at your local stores...

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

I read an article in Al-Ahram Weekly analyzing sectarianism in the Middle East, which seems to argue that the Sunni-Shia rift is, at least in Lebanon, a "temporary and false construct."

One of the recurrent themes in the speeches of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is his insistence that the Shia "cannot be lumped together in one basket". Nasrallah's assertion is commonly interpreted as an attempt to distance the resistance movement from Shia political groups elsewhere, particularly in Iraq, where they maintain an intimate relationship with their occupiers.

...The consensus in both Sunni and Shia circles appears to be that attempts to emphasise Sunni- Shia rivalries are intended to deflect attention from both the US occupation of Iraq and continuing Israeli aggression. That the US is working to fuel such tensions is almost an article of faith for Muslims on both sides. In its attempt to create an anti-Iran alliance, they say, the US is resorting to a strategy which aims to raise the spectre of sectarianism across the Muslim world.

He seems to argue that there is no "Shia crescent" and that the problems in the region are political and not sectarian.

To my mind, though, it seems hard to make a claim like that in countries where practically all political parties are based on sectarianism. Of course this does not mean that all Shia in Lebanon are in the same party, but rather that the fundamental basis of support for parties in Lebanon -- Amal and Hezbollah for the Shia, the Current for the Future for the Sunni, the PSP for the Druze, and the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement for the Christians -- is sectarian. Most political parties are likewise split down sectarian lines in Iraq.

So while there isn't exactly a monolith of Middle Eastern Shia, there is a loose confederation that's held together by Iran. On the face, Iraqi and Lebanese Shia don't have too much in common vis-à-vis their relationship with the US, but what they do share is Iranian sponsorship.

As for the claim that keeps coming up that the US is intentionally spreading sectarianism, I honestly don't see it. Of course American incompetence in Iraq has unleashed a new wave of sectarianism that hadn't been seen since the Iran-Iraq war, but I'm not convinced that America is aiming for sectarian split. It seems to me that American policy in the region involves backing the enemies of the enemies of the US. This is a very shortsighted approach to foreign policy and often leads to many contradictions, like supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria but opposing them in Egypt.

Basically, it seems to me that the US is taking advantage of rifts that already exist in the Middle East. But there is a tendency to not want to believe this. I spoke to a Christian in my neighborhood yesterday who was convinced that the US was trying to split all Arab countries (especially Iraq and Lebanon) into sectarian statelets so that Israel would be the most powerful country in the region.

This, of course, is silly for any number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Israel is already the strongest state in the region. Moreover, the US has been fighting the dissolution of the Iraqi state, and no one reasonable is talking about splitting up the already tiny Lebanon.

In any case, there seems to be a hesitancy in the region to recognize that these sectarian fault lines were not American or Israeli inventions. Much like Iraqis initially refused to believe that it was fellow Iraqis committing sectarian crimes, instead blaming it on foreign terrorists, the Middle East as a whole seems unwilling to take a long hard look in the sectarian mirror.

I'm back in Beirut after some time in Spain and France over the winter holidays. Things are a but tense but not too bad. I came in late at night on the 14th, the day of the Hariri memorial and the day after the bus bombings.

I was happy to see that the Hariri memorial, which was right next to the opposition sit-in, went off without any clashes. (Not least because I didn't want to get stuck at the airport in case the roads were closed.)

Besides that, people are pretty skittish. I've heard on numerous accounts (some from UNRWA employees) that during the clashes last month, there were checkpoints by various groups (not always official) where identity cards were checked to see what sect everyone belonged to. Although I can't confirm it, I've had one account that the Lebanese Forces (Christian leader Geagea's militia) were armed and manning checkpoints not far from Saida. There have been reports coming from Hezbollah that the Lebanese Forces have been rearming, which is not a good sign.

About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

"America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

The garbage men stop coming:

The 8 o'clock news is presented in a flack jacket:

I don't have a picture for this one, but another way you might know that you're in a civil war if there's no more bread at your local stores...

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

I read an article in Al-Ahram Weekly analyzing sectarianism in the Middle East, which seems to argue that the Sunni-Shia rift is, at least in Lebanon, a "temporary and false construct."

One of the recurrent themes in the speeches of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is his insistence that the Shia "cannot be lumped together in one basket". Nasrallah's assertion is commonly interpreted as an attempt to distance the resistance movement from Shia political groups elsewhere, particularly in Iraq, where they maintain an intimate relationship with their occupiers.

...The consensus in both Sunni and Shia circles appears to be that attempts to emphasise Sunni- Shia rivalries are intended to deflect attention from both the US occupation of Iraq and continuing Israeli aggression. That the US is working to fuel such tensions is almost an article of faith for Muslims on both sides. In its attempt to create an anti-Iran alliance, they say, the US is resorting to a strategy which aims to raise the spectre of sectarianism across the Muslim world.

He seems to argue that there is no "Shia crescent" and that the problems in the region are political and not sectarian.

To my mind, though, it seems hard to make a claim like that in countries where practically all political parties are based on sectarianism. Of course this does not mean that all Shia in Lebanon are in the same party, but rather that the fundamental basis of support for parties in Lebanon -- Amal and Hezbollah for the Shia, the Current for the Future for the Sunni, the PSP for the Druze, and the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement for the Christians -- is sectarian. Most political parties are likewise split down sectarian lines in Iraq.

So while there isn't exactly a monolith of Middle Eastern Shia, there is a loose confederation that's held together by Iran. On the face, Iraqi and Lebanese Shia don't have too much in common vis-à-vis their relationship with the US, but what they do share is Iranian sponsorship.

As for the claim that keeps coming up that the US is intentionally spreading sectarianism, I honestly don't see it. Of course American incompetence in Iraq has unleashed a new wave of sectarianism that hadn't been seen since the Iran-Iraq war, but I'm not convinced that America is aiming for sectarian split. It seems to me that American policy in the region involves backing the enemies of the enemies of the US. This is a very shortsighted approach to foreign policy and often leads to many contradictions, like supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria but opposing them in Egypt.

Basically, it seems to me that the US is taking advantage of rifts that already exist in the Middle East. But there is a tendency to not want to believe this. I spoke to a Christian in my neighborhood yesterday who was convinced that the US was trying to split all Arab countries (especially Iraq and Lebanon) into sectarian statelets so that Israel would be the most powerful country in the region.

This, of course, is silly for any number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Israel is already the strongest state in the region. Moreover, the US has been fighting the dissolution of the Iraqi state, and no one reasonable is talking about splitting up the already tiny Lebanon.

In any case, there seems to be a hesitancy in the region to recognize that these sectarian fault lines were not American or Israeli inventions. Much like Iraqis initially refused to believe that it was fellow Iraqis committing sectarian crimes, instead blaming it on foreign terrorists, the Middle East as a whole seems unwilling to take a long hard look in the sectarian mirror.

I'm back in Beirut after some time in Spain and France over the winter holidays. Things are a but tense but not too bad. I came in late at night on the 14th, the day of the Hariri memorial and the day after the bus bombings.

I was happy to see that the Hariri memorial, which was right next to the opposition sit-in, went off without any clashes. (Not least because I didn't want to get stuck at the airport in case the roads were closed.)

Besides that, people are pretty skittish. I've heard on numerous accounts (some from UNRWA employees) that during the clashes last month, there were checkpoints by various groups (not always official) where identity cards were checked to see what sect everyone belonged to. Although I can't confirm it, I've had one account that the Lebanese Forces (Christian leader Geagea's militia) were armed and manning checkpoints not far from Saida. There have been reports coming from Hezbollah that the Lebanese Forces have been rearming, which is not a good sign.

About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

"America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

The garbage men stop coming:

The 8 o'clock news is presented in a flack jacket:

I don't have a picture for this one, but another way you might know that you're in a civil war if there's no more bread at your local stores...

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

I read an article in Al-Ahram Weekly analyzing sectarianism in the Middle East, which seems to argue that the Sunni-Shia rift is, at least in Lebanon, a "temporary and false construct."

One of the recurrent themes in the speeches of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is his insistence that the Shia "cannot be lumped together in one basket". Nasrallah's assertion is commonly interpreted as an attempt to distance the resistance movement from Shia political groups elsewhere, particularly in Iraq, where they maintain an intimate relationship with their occupiers.

...The consensus in both Sunni and Shia circles appears to be that attempts to emphasise Sunni- Shia rivalries are intended to deflect attention from both the US occupation of Iraq and continuing Israeli aggression. That the US is working to fuel such tensions is almost an article of faith for Muslims on both sides. In its attempt to create an anti-Iran alliance, they say, the US is resorting to a strategy which aims to raise the spectre of sectarianism across the Muslim world.

He seems to argue that there is no "Shia crescent" and that the problems in the region are political and not sectarian.

To my mind, though, it seems hard to make a claim like that in countries where practically all political parties are based on sectarianism. Of course this does not mean that all Shia in Lebanon are in the same party, but rather that the fundamental basis of support for parties in Lebanon -- Amal and Hezbollah for the Shia, the Current for the Future for the Sunni, the PSP for the Druze, and the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement for the Christians -- is sectarian. Most political parties are likewise split down sectarian lines in Iraq.

So while there isn't exactly a monolith of Middle Eastern Shia, there is a loose confederation that's held together by Iran. On the face, Iraqi and Lebanese Shia don't have too much in common vis-à-vis their relationship with the US, but what they do share is Iranian sponsorship.

As for the claim that keeps coming up that the US is intentionally spreading sectarianism, I honestly don't see it. Of course American incompetence in Iraq has unleashed a new wave of sectarianism that hadn't been seen since the Iran-Iraq war, but I'm not convinced that America is aiming for sectarian split. It seems to me that American policy in the region involves backing the enemies of the enemies of the US. This is a very shortsighted approach to foreign policy and often leads to many contradictions, like supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria but opposing them in Egypt.

Basically, it seems to me that the US is taking advantage of rifts that already exist in the Middle East. But there is a tendency to not want to believe this. I spoke to a Christian in my neighborhood yesterday who was convinced that the US was trying to split all Arab countries (especially Iraq and Lebanon) into sectarian statelets so that Israel would be the most powerful country in the region.

This, of course, is silly for any number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Israel is already the strongest state in the region. Moreover, the US has been fighting the dissolution of the Iraqi state, and no one reasonable is talking about splitting up the already tiny Lebanon.

In any case, there seems to be a hesitancy in the region to recognize that these sectarian fault lines were not American or Israeli inventions. Much like Iraqis initially refused to believe that it was fellow Iraqis committing sectarian crimes, instead blaming it on foreign terrorists, the Middle East as a whole seems unwilling to take a long hard look in the sectarian mirror.

I'm back in Beirut after some time in Spain and France over the winter holidays. Things are a but tense but not too bad. I came in late at night on the 14th, the day of the Hariri memorial and the day after the bus bombings.

I was happy to see that the Hariri memorial, which was right next to the opposition sit-in, went off without any clashes. (Not least because I didn't want to get stuck at the airport in case the roads were closed.)

Besides that, people are pretty skittish. I've heard on numerous accounts (some from UNRWA employees) that during the clashes last month, there were checkpoints by various groups (not always official) where identity cards were checked to see what sect everyone belonged to. Although I can't confirm it, I've had one account that the Lebanese Forces (Christian leader Geagea's militia) were armed and manning checkpoints not far from Saida. There have been reports coming from Hezbollah that the Lebanese Forces have been rearming, which is not a good sign.

About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

"America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

The garbage men stop coming:

The 8 o'clock news is presented in a flack jacket:

I don't have a picture for this one, but another way you might know that you're in a civil war if there's no more bread at your local stores...

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

I've been away from the computer for a while, which explains the lack of posting. In the meantime, "the situation," as we're fond of calling it here, has not gotten any better. Everyone seems convinced that something (probably something bad) is going to happen on either the 15th or 17th of July. I'm not convinced that anything dramatic will happen next week, either good or bad. I'm hoping that there isn't a war this summer (between Syria and Israel or Lebanon and Israel or between Lebanon and Lebanon).

I am, however, afraid that the grinding stalemate will continue, that the draining status quo that's been depressing everyone will drag on. And that's surely better than war, except that maybe things have to get a lot worse before they can get better. In any case, I'm not optimistic.

My friend Mohamad has a piece in the Nation about the tension building in Lebanon that's worth reading for a recap of what's been going on and what this summer might be in store for us this summer and why the tinkering that everyone wants to do to the system isn't enough to prevent future problems of the same sort:

Confessionalism leads to a weak state. It encourages horse-trading and alliances with powerful patrons. And it's easily exploited by outside powers (Syria, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia being the latest examples). But most of the current players are too invested in this system to really change it. And foreign patrons don't want change, because that could reduce their influence.

"Whenever you talk about a new Taif, people freak out.... Lebanese are always afraid of changing any social contract," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anticorruption watchdog group. "Because the problem is that, in Lebanon, social contracts are changed only in times of violence."

What if the battle over the presidency continues past September, and the country is further paralyzed? There's a real fear that the Lebanese government could once again split into two dueling administrations, as happened in 1988, when outgoing President Amin Gemayel appointed Aoun as a caretaker prime minister because Parliament could not agree on a new president. He created a largely Christian government, while the sitting Sunni prime minister refused to leave and led a rival Muslim administration. The crisis ended in October 1990, when Syrian warplanes bombed the presidential palace, driving Aoun into exile in France. It's remarkable how many Lebanese are talking openly today about the possibility of another government breakup; some are even resigned to it.

Splitting the country into two administrations in 1988 was a logical endpoint of the confessional system. Lebanese leaders are going down the same path once again: They're trying to run the country under a system that's no longer viable and that continues to create a perpetual crisis. Until the Lebanese can agree on a stronger and more egalitarian way to share authority, they will be cursed with instability, their future dictated by foreign powers.

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

I read an article in Al-Ahram Weekly analyzing sectarianism in the Middle East, which seems to argue that the Sunni-Shia rift is, at least in Lebanon, a "temporary and false construct."

One of the recurrent themes in the speeches of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is his insistence that the Shia "cannot be lumped together in one basket". Nasrallah's assertion is commonly interpreted as an attempt to distance the resistance movement from Shia political groups elsewhere, particularly in Iraq, where they maintain an intimate relationship with their occupiers.

...The consensus in both Sunni and Shia circles appears to be that attempts to emphasise Sunni- Shia rivalries are intended to deflect attention from both the US occupation of Iraq and continuing Israeli aggression. That the US is working to fuel such tensions is almost an article of faith for Muslims on both sides. In its attempt to create an anti-Iran alliance, they say, the US is resorting to a strategy which aims to raise the spectre of sectarianism across the Muslim world.

He seems to argue that there is no "Shia crescent" and that the problems in the region are political and not sectarian.

To my mind, though, it seems hard to make a claim like that in countries where practically all political parties are based on sectarianism. Of course this does not mean that all Shia in Lebanon are in the same party, but rather that the fundamental basis of support for parties in Lebanon -- Amal and Hezbollah for the Shia, the Current for the Future for the Sunni, the PSP for the Druze, and the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement for the Christians -- is sectarian. Most political parties are likewise split down sectarian lines in Iraq.

So while there isn't exactly a monolith of Middle Eastern Shia, there is a loose confederation that's held together by Iran. On the face, Iraqi and Lebanese Shia don't have too much in common vis-à-vis their relationship with the US, but what they do share is Iranian sponsorship.

As for the claim that keeps coming up that the US is intentionally spreading sectarianism, I honestly don't see it. Of course American incompetence in Iraq has unleashed a new wave of sectarianism that hadn't been seen since the Iran-Iraq war, but I'm not convinced that America is aiming for sectarian split. It seems to me that American policy in the region involves backing the enemies of the enemies of the US. This is a very shortsighted approach to foreign policy and often leads to many contradictions, like supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria but opposing them in Egypt.

Basically, it seems to me that the US is taking advantage of rifts that already exist in the Middle East. But there is a tendency to not want to believe this. I spoke to a Christian in my neighborhood yesterday who was convinced that the US was trying to split all Arab countries (especially Iraq and Lebanon) into sectarian statelets so that Israel would be the most powerful country in the region.

This, of course, is silly for any number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Israel is already the strongest state in the region. Moreover, the US has been fighting the dissolution of the Iraqi state, and no one reasonable is talking about splitting up the already tiny Lebanon.

In any case, there seems to be a hesitancy in the region to recognize that these sectarian fault lines were not American or Israeli inventions. Much like Iraqis initially refused to believe that it was fellow Iraqis committing sectarian crimes, instead blaming it on foreign terrorists, the Middle East as a whole seems unwilling to take a long hard look in the sectarian mirror.

I'm back in Beirut after some time in Spain and France over the winter holidays. Things are a but tense but not too bad. I came in late at night on the 14th, the day of the Hariri memorial and the day after the bus bombings.

I was happy to see that the Hariri memorial, which was right next to the opposition sit-in, went off without any clashes. (Not least because I didn't want to get stuck at the airport in case the roads were closed.)

Besides that, people are pretty skittish. I've heard on numerous accounts (some from UNRWA employees) that during the clashes last month, there were checkpoints by various groups (not always official) where identity cards were checked to see what sect everyone belonged to. Although I can't confirm it, I've had one account that the Lebanese Forces (Christian leader Geagea's militia) were armed and manning checkpoints not far from Saida. There have been reports coming from Hezbollah that the Lebanese Forces have been rearming, which is not a good sign.

About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

"America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.