the human province

I've been missing in action for a while, even after my trip to Ethiopia, which I'll have a lot more on later.

Since I've been back, however, a lot has happened. Imad Mughniya was killed in a car bomb in Damascus (shortly after Michael Totten said I was one of the "notorious leftists who endlessly excuses Hezbollah" and accused me of spreading propaganda when I mentioned that car bombs were used by the American side as well in the comments here). Yesterday was the third anniversary of Hariri's assassination. And finally, there was just a small earthquake (more of a tremor, really) here in Beirut.

I don't have much to say about the first topic, but I will say that I always feel uncomfortable with any kind of extra-judicial killing and assassination, no matter whom it's done by. Also, this seems to be either a very serious breach of Syrian security or evidence that Damascus gave the Israelis or Americans the ok to carry out the attack as part of a larger deal. In any case, it signals an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's an external (outside of Lebanon and Israel) attack against Israeli (or even American) interests. After all, the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing in Argentina was retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Abbas al-Musawi, who was replaced by Nasrallah. Such escalation is always a bad thing for all parties involved.

As for the February 14 event, I went downtown to give it a look as Geagea was speaking, and it wasn't too big, although I didn't show up until about noon. One big reason for this was that it was rainy and cold. I was a bit worried about clashes arising last night between mourners of Hariri and Mughniya, but the cold rain was probably a blessing in disguise in that it's hard to get riled up to go out looking for trouble when you're soaking wet.

Finally, the earthquake: I didn't feel it, but I heard a rumble. All of my colleagues seem to have felt it, which might just mean that I'm insensitive, so to speak.

It's just occurred to me that there aren't very many places in the world where I could post about an earthquake, a car bomb and a protest against an assassination in the same piece. How's that for potpourri, Alex Trebek?

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Nir Rosen has a piece on Palestinians in Lebanon in the Post. It doesn't mention the economic discrimination against Palestinians here, who make up around 10% of the population in Lebanon. Nor does it go much into the politics of the camps (NGOs, PLO, Damascus and jihadi groups). But it does give a good overview of Palestinian scapegoating, which reminds me of a conversation with a friend during the Nahr el-Bared fighting when we wondered why it is that whenever Lebanon wants to come together as a country, it's usually at the expense of the Palestinians.

I was in Damascus last week for a long weekend of shopping, and the trip gave me the chance to talk to some Syrians about the political situation in Lebanon. Not a single person I spoke to believed that Syria was responsible for killing Hariri. They all thought it was a plot hatched by Israel and the US in order to kick the Syrians out and use Lebanon as knife in Damascus's heart. Many Syrians asked why the Lebanese hated them and seemed generally supportive of Syrian policies overall. Of course during such a short trip it's hard to truly judge Syrian opinion, since although things have gotten better since Hafez died, the average Syrian is still somewhat hesitant to criticize the government to a stranger in public.

Another thing that I noticed this time, was that Damascus is like an oriental Prague: a beautiful and impressively old city in the center surrounded by the hideously drab and gray monstrosities that only the people's architecture is capable of constructing.

Otherwise, Damascus is full of Iraqis, and the rise in prices is noticeable, even in comparison to just a year ago. The Syrian capital now has an Aishti in addition to the United Colors of Benetton stores that are sprinkled throughout the city. Overall, there's been a lot of progress since the last time I was in the Arab Republic a year ago.

I love Syria, but it's got a long way to go, and as the taxi crossed the border back into Lebanon, I remember sighing a breath of relief and feeling glad to be back home.

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

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.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

Al Jazeera reports on the upcoming first high-level visit by a US official to Damascus since 2005:

The United States is to send a high-ranking official to Syria for the first time in two years.

Ellen Sauerbrey, the assistant secretary of state, will travel to Damascus "in coming weeks" as part of a regional tour dealing with "humanitarian issues related to Iraqi refugees," Sean McCormack, US state department spokesman, has said.

Sauerbrey will be the highest-ranking US official to visit Syria since early 2005, when Richard Armitage, then-deputy secretary of state, travelled to Damascus.

Walid Jumblatt has found some new friends at the American Enterprise Institute, where he spoke on Monday. I've just listened to the recording of the event, and I was amazed at the panting idiocy of many of the questions and the self-righteous sycophancy of Comrade Kamal Bey's son.

First of all, the fact that Jumblatt's talk was at the AEI is in and of itself a pretty good bellwether of where his loyalties lie these days. Then there are the analogies to Nazi Germany (as noted by apokraphyte), with his talk of a looming threat of a pan-Syrian Anschluss (I'm not kidding, he really said Anschluss).

He then made some ridiculous remarks about how there is already a fair distribution of power in Lebanon, whereas we know that the Lebanese demographics are constantly changing (in favor of the Shi'a and against the Christians), and that as long as there is a sectarian power sharing plan in place, there will be periodic unrest, when one group realizes that they are getting the short end of the electoral stick considering how much of the Lebanese population their sect includes. (And this is obviously why there will be no census so long as the system is in place, since one group's numerical strength can always be discounted as speculation, since there are no statistics.)

So Jumblatt's remarks about Hezbollah wanting to "change the rules of the game" are disingenuous at best, particularly when we take into consideration how his father wanted to punish the Maronites during the civil war, because after all, Christian hegemony was part of the rules of the game then, right?

He does come clean, though, and talk about how everyone, from the Americans during their revolution to Allied Europe in WWII, needs political and military assistnace from time to time from outside powers. If anything, his political career shows that he has been a firm believer in this verity. The disgusting part is when he tries to give his request for American (and Western) aid a veneer of righteousness: "I will do anything to liberate my country from indirect Syrian occupation."

Well, the part about him doing anything is certainly true, it's just that the only thing you can truthfully say he'll do anything for is trying to stay on top of the Lebanese political dog pile.

Finally, there are his unmasked calls for the toppling of the regime in Damascus. When I heard him talking about this, I couldn't help but think back to the portrait of Jumblatt by Charles Glass in March's Harper's, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be available online:

...I wanted to talk about the recent war and Jumblatt's challenge to Hezbollah, but he was preoccupied with Washington. Was Condaleeza Rice more influential than Dick Cheney? How could he persuade the Bush administration to help depose Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, weed out Syrian moles in Lebanon's army and intelligence services, and overthrow the regime in Syria? Having abandoned his Syrian partnership in 2004, Jumblatt was without an outside backer to match Hezbollah's friends in Damascus and Tehran. Israel was obviously not an option. The only viable counterweight, then, was the United States. He didn't seem to mind that Washington had supported the Israeli invasion or that most Lebanese were opposed to its war in Iraq. When I asked how he could turn to a power that, in 1983, had shelled Druze villages in the Chouf Mountains from the battleship New Jersey, all he did was shrug, as if to say, "This is Lebanon. What do you expect?"

...At age twenty-seven [after the assassination of his father], Walid, whose political experience was limited to a stint as a journalist, found himself supreme leader of the Druze, chief of the Progressive Socialist Party, and nominal head of the combined forces of Lebanon's leftist and Muslim militias. The Druze called him "the son of the pillar of the sky." His first political choice was between vengeance, the feudal lord's prerogative, and pragmatism, the duty of the modern politician. Walid sacrificed revenge. In June 1977, he made a pilgrimage to Damascus to meet President Assad. Assad said to him, "It's strange how you look like your father." "I still had my hair," Walid told me, laughing a little as he patted his bald head. "I looked at him," Walid continued, "and I felt, to tell you the truth, I knew that he killed my father, and he knew that I knew that he killed my father. And it was quite a strange feeling. And we sat. I didn't feel hatred."

How could he do it? He believed he had no other choice. "I knew that the war was not over," Walid said. The right-wing Maronite militias were still powerful, so he had to find a way to strengthen his own forces. "In Damascus, we had a good friend, Hikmet Shihabi, the chief of staff," he explained. "And I convinced Hikmet slowly to convey messages to Hafez al-Assad that I need weapons, that I need to be trained." Syria provided Jumblatt with arms and trained his militia. Through the Soviet Union's ambassador in Beirut, Druze fighters also went to Russia for military instruction. Walid estimated that the Russians supplied him, over the years, with some $500 million worth of weapons, ammunition and training. They even let Walid open a restaurant in Moscow. And thus Walid found himself becoming an enemy not only of the Maronites, but of Israel and the United States as well.

So all of Jumblatt's self-righteous bluster should be taken for what it is, a gamble on which way the political wind is blowing in Lebanon. It's especially ironic to hear him scoff at Aoun's alliance with Hezbollah, proclaiming to not understand how Aoun could betray his previously impeccable anti-Syrian credentials.

I was hoping that the question and answer session would be more interesting than Walid's speech. And in a way it was, if you're interested in the ignorant questions of American foul-weather groupies. There was at an attempt by Danielle Pletka to get Jumblatt to vilify Hamas as he's vilified Hezbollah, but he was smart enough to side-step the conclusion she wanted to hear. (Incidentally, a much more interesting question would be why it was all right for him to participate in the resistance against Israel in a "state within a state" headed by the PLO but not for Hezbollah to do the same thing. And speaking of states within a state, it would be interesting to hear him defend his decision to ban the Lebanese flag and national anthem in the Chouf and his "war of the two flags" in West Beirut when Amal refused to take down the Lebanese flag.)

But the most idiotic question came from Stephen Morris from Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, who said that he had just gotten back from Lebanon and was told that journalists could not go downtown to the opposition campground without the permission of the "illegitimate Hezbollah authority." He then wanted to know if they were carrying weapons downtown and whether there was "any way in which people visiting Lebanon in the future can resist the power of Hezbollah thugs to detain them."

I might be able to chalk this sort of thing up to not having been to Beirut, but Dr. Morris assures us that he's just returned from Lebanon. So the only thing I can think of that would explain such a question is that he didn't even bother to go downtown to look for himself. Since the sit in started in December, I've spent a fair amount of time at the protest and routinely cross it whenever I go from my apartment in East Beirut to West Beirut. (I usually cross by foot and get a cab on the other side.) And I can assure you that while I've seen more than my fair share of Hezbollah walkie talkies, I've never seen a single gun, and I've never been hassled or questioned by anyone there. On the contrary, I've been invited to sit down for tea or nargileh. But, one might argue, it's different when you're a journalist. Well, not in my experience, because I've gone on several occasions with a foreign photojournalist and a print journalist. We never asked for permission and were never stopped by anyone. So rather than actually, I don't know, walking over to downtown to see for himself, Dr. Stephen Morris of the prestigious SAIS at Johns Hopkins decided to rely on other people's accounts. This wouldn't be such a sin if he had never been here, but seeing as how he was in Lebanon, it seems like pure laziness to me.

Finally, there were questions by two audience members asking about Chapter 7 intervention, presumably to forcibly disarm Hezbollah. Luckily this is such an outlandish and idiotic idea that I won't even have to lose any sleep wondering if the UN would be stupid enough to try it. (Remember how difficult it was to beef up UNIFIL this fall, when all parties involved knew that the mandate would not include disarming Hezbollah? Can anyone think of any country, besides Israel of course, that would be willing to fight the party of God on its own turf? Neither can I.)

At the end of the day, though, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised by how uninteresting and uninformed most of the questions were. Considering the talk's venue, that is.

The Times reports that Rice is ready to talk to Damascus and Tehran about Iraq:

American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.

The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.

The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush's avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.

..."We became convinced that the Iranians were not taking us seriously," said Philip D. Zelikow, who until December was the top aide to Ms. Rice. "So we've done some things to get them to take us seriously, so now we can try diplomacy."

In a perfect world, I'd be able to admit that my fears of escalating talk about hitting Iran was all for nothing, because the wise and judicious leaders of those united states had been using their saber rattling to give themselves a better spot at the negotiating table.

Unfortunately, the current administration is much more likely to use these talks as a veneer of diplomatic respectability so that later this year, before the bombs rain over Persia, they can say, "we tried diplomacy, but all these people understand is violence, so now the brutes have forced us to exterminate them in a magnanimous show of shock and awe."

I hope that I'm wrong, though, and that this is a step, albeit small, in the right direction and away from belligerence.

I've just read two interesting pieces on Iran. The first is in Foreign Affairs, penned by Ray Takeyh and argues for US détente with Iran. He argues for normalized relations as a starting point and not an end to negotiations, which should be direct and conducted on four tracks:

1. setting a timetable for resuming a diplomatic relationship, gradually phasing out U.S. sanctions, and returning Iran's frozen assets
2. nuclear negotiations
3. stabilizing Iraq
4. Israel-Palestine

The article is much more detailed than I can relay in a short post, so it's worth reading his outlook on the situation in Tehran and why past strategies on Iran are no longer appropriate and are likely to fail.

The second article is a piece by Sy Hersh on the Bush administration's redirection in the Middle East:

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The "redirection," as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

This seems like an obviously bad idea and reflects how the many in Washington are incapable of looking at the region in a nuanced way: either the Sunnis are evil or the Shi'a are. As anyone who lives here (or even has a fleeting interest in Middle Eastern politics) knows, the region is much more complicated than that. And the childish idea of throwing one's weight fully behind radical Saudi-backed Sunni elements against a mutual foe (the Soviets at the time) has already been tried, to disastrous results, in Afghanistan.

Hersh mentions working with Saudi-sponsored Sunni islamists in covert actions in Lebanon to undermine Hezbollah and Tehran:

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. "We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can," the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money "always gets in more pockets than you think it will," he said. "In this process, we're financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don't have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don't like. It’s a very high-risk venture."

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting "to hijack the state," but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. "Salafis are sick and hateful, and I'm very much against the idea of flirting with them," he said. "They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly."

So there is a decision to realign US policy in the region to fit even more tightly with Sunni interests, including in Iraq. It looks like the US is so blinded by the idea of getting at Iran that it's willing to target Iraqi Shi'a groups even when they (including al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi) are aligned with the US-backed government of al-Maliki. (Cleverly enough, it looks like al-Sadr is going to let the US forces do his dirty work by cleansing his militia of elements that are not firmly under his control.)

Likewise, they're stepping up their support here in Lebanon to include arming salafi Sunni groups that are allied only temporarily with the government in Beirut but whose long-standing alliances are with groups like al-Qaida. So this means that the US is effectively funding some of the "foreign jihadis" who are leaving places like Tripoli in northern Lebanon kill Americans in Iraq.

Moreover, it looks like Washington might be flirting with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in hopes of overturning the Assad regime in Damascus -- the goal of at least part of the government in Beirut (Jumblatt and Geagea, and maybe Hariri too).

Now the Brotherhood is, in my mind, probably closer to Hamas and Hezbollah than it is to al-Qaida in terms of the possibility of it being reformed into a governing party as opposed to being just a terrorist group. But the fact remains that we've already followed the Saudis (who are now telling us that they can control these Sunni groups) when they took the lead with Pakistan in financing the Taliban, and look where that got us. At the end of the day, these radical Sunni groups hate the Shi'a and they hate Iran, but they hate us even more, and when they're done with what they consider the near enemy, they'll inevitably come looking for the far enemy: us.

Otherwise, the rest of the Hersh article addresses a lot of different issues in the region right now and is definitely worth reading, particularly as concerns Lebanese politics. Also, Hersh has managed to get an interview with Nasrallah, although he doesn't seem to have gotten many interesting quotes.

Apparently the US is stepping up its rhetoric in discouraging Israel from even exploring Syria's overtures to peace talks. Ha'aretz reports that the Israeli government is split:

Israeli officials, including those in the intelligence community, are divided over the degree to which Syrian President Bashar Assad is serious and sincere in his call for peace talks with Israel.

One view describes Assad's call as a propaganda campaign, and insists that the Syrian leader is not serious. Among those holding this view is Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

In Military Intelligence the view differs. There are those who say that Assad is serious in his call for peace talks, but also say that this does not mean that those talks would be easy for Israel. They even suggest that there is a very good chance that the talks would fail.

I've mentioned this before and still think that peace talks between Israel and Syria would be a good thing. Furhtermore, although I have my doubts about the exact offer and whether Assad will accept it, I have the feeling that Assad is ready to make a deal if he can get the Golan Heights back, maybe even if it means turning the land into a demilitarized park under Syrian sovereignty but open to Israeli picnickers.

I've been missing in action for a while, even after my trip to Ethiopia, which I'll have a lot more on later.

Since I've been back, however, a lot has happened. Imad Mughniya was killed in a car bomb in Damascus (shortly after Michael Totten said I was one of the "notorious leftists who endlessly excuses Hezbollah" and accused me of spreading propaganda when I mentioned that car bombs were used by the American side as well in the comments here). Yesterday was the third anniversary of Hariri's assassination. And finally, there was just a small earthquake (more of a tremor, really) here in Beirut.

I don't have much to say about the first topic, but I will say that I always feel uncomfortable with any kind of extra-judicial killing and assassination, no matter whom it's done by. Also, this seems to be either a very serious breach of Syrian security or evidence that Damascus gave the Israelis or Americans the ok to carry out the attack as part of a larger deal. In any case, it signals an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's an external (outside of Lebanon and Israel) attack against Israeli (or even American) interests. After all, the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing in Argentina was retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Abbas al-Musawi, who was replaced by Nasrallah. Such escalation is always a bad thing for all parties involved.

As for the February 14 event, I went downtown to give it a look as Geagea was speaking, and it wasn't too big, although I didn't show up until about noon. One big reason for this was that it was rainy and cold. I was a bit worried about clashes arising last night between mourners of Hariri and Mughniya, but the cold rain was probably a blessing in disguise in that it's hard to get riled up to go out looking for trouble when you're soaking wet.

Finally, the earthquake: I didn't feel it, but I heard a rumble. All of my colleagues seem to have felt it, which might just mean that I'm insensitive, so to speak.

It's just occurred to me that there aren't very many places in the world where I could post about an earthquake, a car bomb and a protest against an assassination in the same piece. How's that for potpourri, Alex Trebek?

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Nir Rosen has a piece on Palestinians in Lebanon in the Post. It doesn't mention the economic discrimination against Palestinians here, who make up around 10% of the population in Lebanon. Nor does it go much into the politics of the camps (NGOs, PLO, Damascus and jihadi groups). But it does give a good overview of Palestinian scapegoating, which reminds me of a conversation with a friend during the Nahr el-Bared fighting when we wondered why it is that whenever Lebanon wants to come together as a country, it's usually at the expense of the Palestinians.

I was in Damascus last week for a long weekend of shopping, and the trip gave me the chance to talk to some Syrians about the political situation in Lebanon. Not a single person I spoke to believed that Syria was responsible for killing Hariri. They all thought it was a plot hatched by Israel and the US in order to kick the Syrians out and use Lebanon as knife in Damascus's heart. Many Syrians asked why the Lebanese hated them and seemed generally supportive of Syrian policies overall. Of course during such a short trip it's hard to truly judge Syrian opinion, since although things have gotten better since Hafez died, the average Syrian is still somewhat hesitant to criticize the government to a stranger in public.

Another thing that I noticed this time, was that Damascus is like an oriental Prague: a beautiful and impressively old city in the center surrounded by the hideously drab and gray monstrosities that only the people's architecture is capable of constructing.

Otherwise, Damascus is full of Iraqis, and the rise in prices is noticeable, even in comparison to just a year ago. The Syrian capital now has an Aishti in addition to the United Colors of Benetton stores that are sprinkled throughout the city. Overall, there's been a lot of progress since the last time I was in the Arab Republic a year ago.

I love Syria, but it's got a long way to go, and as the taxi crossed the border back into Lebanon, I remember sighing a breath of relief and feeling glad to be back home.

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

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.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

Al Jazeera reports on the upcoming first high-level visit by a US official to Damascus since 2005:

The United States is to send a high-ranking official to Syria for the first time in two years.

Ellen Sauerbrey, the assistant secretary of state, will travel to Damascus "in coming weeks" as part of a regional tour dealing with "humanitarian issues related to Iraqi refugees," Sean McCormack, US state department spokesman, has said.

Sauerbrey will be the highest-ranking US official to visit Syria since early 2005, when Richard Armitage, then-deputy secretary of state, travelled to Damascus.

Walid Jumblatt has found some new friends at the American Enterprise Institute, where he spoke on Monday. I've just listened to the recording of the event, and I was amazed at the panting idiocy of many of the questions and the self-righteous sycophancy of Comrade Kamal Bey's son.

First of all, the fact that Jumblatt's talk was at the AEI is in and of itself a pretty good bellwether of where his loyalties lie these days. Then there are the analogies to Nazi Germany (as noted by apokraphyte), with his talk of a looming threat of a pan-Syrian Anschluss (I'm not kidding, he really said Anschluss).

He then made some ridiculous remarks about how there is already a fair distribution of power in Lebanon, whereas we know that the Lebanese demographics are constantly changing (in favor of the Shi'a and against the Christians), and that as long as there is a sectarian power sharing plan in place, there will be periodic unrest, when one group realizes that they are getting the short end of the electoral stick considering how much of the Lebanese population their sect includes. (And this is obviously why there will be no census so long as the system is in place, since one group's numerical strength can always be discounted as speculation, since there are no statistics.)

So Jumblatt's remarks about Hezbollah wanting to "change the rules of the game" are disingenuous at best, particularly when we take into consideration how his father wanted to punish the Maronites during the civil war, because after all, Christian hegemony was part of the rules of the game then, right?

He does come clean, though, and talk about how everyone, from the Americans during their revolution to Allied Europe in WWII, needs political and military assistnace from time to time from outside powers. If anything, his political career shows that he has been a firm believer in this verity. The disgusting part is when he tries to give his request for American (and Western) aid a veneer of righteousness: "I will do anything to liberate my country from indirect Syrian occupation."

Well, the part about him doing anything is certainly true, it's just that the only thing you can truthfully say he'll do anything for is trying to stay on top of the Lebanese political dog pile.

Finally, there are his unmasked calls for the toppling of the regime in Damascus. When I heard him talking about this, I couldn't help but think back to the portrait of Jumblatt by Charles Glass in March's Harper's, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be available online:

...I wanted to talk about the recent war and Jumblatt's challenge to Hezbollah, but he was preoccupied with Washington. Was Condaleeza Rice more influential than Dick Cheney? How could he persuade the Bush administration to help depose Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, weed out Syrian moles in Lebanon's army and intelligence services, and overthrow the regime in Syria? Having abandoned his Syrian partnership in 2004, Jumblatt was without an outside backer to match Hezbollah's friends in Damascus and Tehran. Israel was obviously not an option. The only viable counterweight, then, was the United States. He didn't seem to mind that Washington had supported the Israeli invasion or that most Lebanese were opposed to its war in Iraq. When I asked how he could turn to a power that, in 1983, had shelled Druze villages in the Chouf Mountains from the battleship New Jersey, all he did was shrug, as if to say, "This is Lebanon. What do you expect?"

...At age twenty-seven [after the assassination of his father], Walid, whose political experience was limited to a stint as a journalist, found himself supreme leader of the Druze, chief of the Progressive Socialist Party, and nominal head of the combined forces of Lebanon's leftist and Muslim militias. The Druze called him "the son of the pillar of the sky." His first political choice was between vengeance, the feudal lord's prerogative, and pragmatism, the duty of the modern politician. Walid sacrificed revenge. In June 1977, he made a pilgrimage to Damascus to meet President Assad. Assad said to him, "It's strange how you look like your father." "I still had my hair," Walid told me, laughing a little as he patted his bald head. "I looked at him," Walid continued, "and I felt, to tell you the truth, I knew that he killed my father, and he knew that I knew that he killed my father. And it was quite a strange feeling. And we sat. I didn't feel hatred."

How could he do it? He believed he had no other choice. "I knew that the war was not over," Walid said. The right-wing Maronite militias were still powerful, so he had to find a way to strengthen his own forces. "In Damascus, we had a good friend, Hikmet Shihabi, the chief of staff," he explained. "And I convinced Hikmet slowly to convey messages to Hafez al-Assad that I need weapons, that I need to be trained." Syria provided Jumblatt with arms and trained his militia. Through the Soviet Union's ambassador in Beirut, Druze fighters also went to Russia for military instruction. Walid estimated that the Russians supplied him, over the years, with some $500 million worth of weapons, ammunition and training. They even let Walid open a restaurant in Moscow. And thus Walid found himself becoming an enemy not only of the Maronites, but of Israel and the United States as well.

So all of Jumblatt's self-righteous bluster should be taken for what it is, a gamble on which way the political wind is blowing in Lebanon. It's especially ironic to hear him scoff at Aoun's alliance with Hezbollah, proclaiming to not understand how Aoun could betray his previously impeccable anti-Syrian credentials.

I was hoping that the question and answer session would be more interesting than Walid's speech. And in a way it was, if you're interested in the ignorant questions of American foul-weather groupies. There was at an attempt by Danielle Pletka to get Jumblatt to vilify Hamas as he's vilified Hezbollah, but he was smart enough to side-step the conclusion she wanted to hear. (Incidentally, a much more interesting question would be why it was all right for him to participate in the resistance against Israel in a "state within a state" headed by the PLO but not for Hezbollah to do the same thing. And speaking of states within a state, it would be interesting to hear him defend his decision to ban the Lebanese flag and national anthem in the Chouf and his "war of the two flags" in West Beirut when Amal refused to take down the Lebanese flag.)

But the most idiotic question came from Stephen Morris from Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, who said that he had just gotten back from Lebanon and was told that journalists could not go downtown to the opposition campground without the permission of the "illegitimate Hezbollah authority." He then wanted to know if they were carrying weapons downtown and whether there was "any way in which people visiting Lebanon in the future can resist the power of Hezbollah thugs to detain them."

I might be able to chalk this sort of thing up to not having been to Beirut, but Dr. Morris assures us that he's just returned from Lebanon. So the only thing I can think of that would explain such a question is that he didn't even bother to go downtown to look for himself. Since the sit in started in December, I've spent a fair amount of time at the protest and routinely cross it whenever I go from my apartment in East Beirut to West Beirut. (I usually cross by foot and get a cab on the other side.) And I can assure you that while I've seen more than my fair share of Hezbollah walkie talkies, I've never seen a single gun, and I've never been hassled or questioned by anyone there. On the contrary, I've been invited to sit down for tea or nargileh. But, one might argue, it's different when you're a journalist. Well, not in my experience, because I've gone on several occasions with a foreign photojournalist and a print journalist. We never asked for permission and were never stopped by anyone. So rather than actually, I don't know, walking over to downtown to see for himself, Dr. Stephen Morris of the prestigious SAIS at Johns Hopkins decided to rely on other people's accounts. This wouldn't be such a sin if he had never been here, but seeing as how he was in Lebanon, it seems like pure laziness to me.

Finally, there were questions by two audience members asking about Chapter 7 intervention, presumably to forcibly disarm Hezbollah. Luckily this is such an outlandish and idiotic idea that I won't even have to lose any sleep wondering if the UN would be stupid enough to try it. (Remember how difficult it was to beef up UNIFIL this fall, when all parties involved knew that the mandate would not include disarming Hezbollah? Can anyone think of any country, besides Israel of course, that would be willing to fight the party of God on its own turf? Neither can I.)

At the end of the day, though, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised by how uninteresting and uninformed most of the questions were. Considering the talk's venue, that is.

The Times reports that Rice is ready to talk to Damascus and Tehran about Iraq:

American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.

The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.

The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush's avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.

..."We became convinced that the Iranians were not taking us seriously," said Philip D. Zelikow, who until December was the top aide to Ms. Rice. "So we've done some things to get them to take us seriously, so now we can try diplomacy."

In a perfect world, I'd be able to admit that my fears of escalating talk about hitting Iran was all for nothing, because the wise and judicious leaders of those united states had been using their saber rattling to give themselves a better spot at the negotiating table.

Unfortunately, the current administration is much more likely to use these talks as a veneer of diplomatic respectability so that later this year, before the bombs rain over Persia, they can say, "we tried diplomacy, but all these people understand is violence, so now the brutes have forced us to exterminate them in a magnanimous show of shock and awe."

I hope that I'm wrong, though, and that this is a step, albeit small, in the right direction and away from belligerence.

I've just read two interesting pieces on Iran. The first is in Foreign Affairs, penned by Ray Takeyh and argues for US détente with Iran. He argues for normalized relations as a starting point and not an end to negotiations, which should be direct and conducted on four tracks:

1. setting a timetable for resuming a diplomatic relationship, gradually phasing out U.S. sanctions, and returning Iran's frozen assets
2. nuclear negotiations
3. stabilizing Iraq
4. Israel-Palestine

The article is much more detailed than I can relay in a short post, so it's worth reading his outlook on the situation in Tehran and why past strategies on Iran are no longer appropriate and are likely to fail.

The second article is a piece by Sy Hersh on the Bush administration's redirection in the Middle East:

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The "redirection," as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

This seems like an obviously bad idea and reflects how the many in Washington are incapable of looking at the region in a nuanced way: either the Sunnis are evil or the Shi'a are. As anyone who lives here (or even has a fleeting interest in Middle Eastern politics) knows, the region is much more complicated than that. And the childish idea of throwing one's weight fully behind radical Saudi-backed Sunni elements against a mutual foe (the Soviets at the time) has already been tried, to disastrous results, in Afghanistan.

Hersh mentions working with Saudi-sponsored Sunni islamists in covert actions in Lebanon to undermine Hezbollah and Tehran:

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. "We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can," the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money "always gets in more pockets than you think it will," he said. "In this process, we're financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don't have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don't like. It’s a very high-risk venture."

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting "to hijack the state," but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. "Salafis are sick and hateful, and I'm very much against the idea of flirting with them," he said. "They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly."

So there is a decision to realign US policy in the region to fit even more tightly with Sunni interests, including in Iraq. It looks like the US is so blinded by the idea of getting at Iran that it's willing to target Iraqi Shi'a groups even when they (including al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi) are aligned with the US-backed government of al-Maliki. (Cleverly enough, it looks like al-Sadr is going to let the US forces do his dirty work by cleansing his militia of elements that are not firmly under his control.)

Likewise, they're stepping up their support here in Lebanon to include arming salafi Sunni groups that are allied only temporarily with the government in Beirut but whose long-standing alliances are with groups like al-Qaida. So this means that the US is effectively funding some of the "foreign jihadis" who are leaving places like Tripoli in northern Lebanon kill Americans in Iraq.

Moreover, it looks like Washington might be flirting with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in hopes of overturning the Assad regime in Damascus -- the goal of at least part of the government in Beirut (Jumblatt and Geagea, and maybe Hariri too).

Now the Brotherhood is, in my mind, probably closer to Hamas and Hezbollah than it is to al-Qaida in terms of the possibility of it being reformed into a governing party as opposed to being just a terrorist group. But the fact remains that we've already followed the Saudis (who are now telling us that they can control these Sunni groups) when they took the lead with Pakistan in financing the Taliban, and look where that got us. At the end of the day, these radical Sunni groups hate the Shi'a and they hate Iran, but they hate us even more, and when they're done with what they consider the near enemy, they'll inevitably come looking for the far enemy: us.

Otherwise, the rest of the Hersh article addresses a lot of different issues in the region right now and is definitely worth reading, particularly as concerns Lebanese politics. Also, Hersh has managed to get an interview with Nasrallah, although he doesn't seem to have gotten many interesting quotes.

Apparently the US is stepping up its rhetoric in discouraging Israel from even exploring Syria's overtures to peace talks. Ha'aretz reports that the Israeli government is split:

Israeli officials, including those in the intelligence community, are divided over the degree to which Syrian President Bashar Assad is serious and sincere in his call for peace talks with Israel.

One view describes Assad's call as a propaganda campaign, and insists that the Syrian leader is not serious. Among those holding this view is Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

In Military Intelligence the view differs. There are those who say that Assad is serious in his call for peace talks, but also say that this does not mean that those talks would be easy for Israel. They even suggest that there is a very good chance that the talks would fail.

I've mentioned this before and still think that peace talks between Israel and Syria would be a good thing. Furhtermore, although I have my doubts about the exact offer and whether Assad will accept it, I have the feeling that Assad is ready to make a deal if he can get the Golan Heights back, maybe even if it means turning the land into a demilitarized park under Syrian sovereignty but open to Israeli picnickers.

I've been missing in action for a while, even after my trip to Ethiopia, which I'll have a lot more on later.

Since I've been back, however, a lot has happened. Imad Mughniya was killed in a car bomb in Damascus (shortly after Michael Totten said I was one of the "notorious leftists who endlessly excuses Hezbollah" and accused me of spreading propaganda when I mentioned that car bombs were used by the American side as well in the comments here). Yesterday was the third anniversary of Hariri's assassination. And finally, there was just a small earthquake (more of a tremor, really) here in Beirut.

I don't have much to say about the first topic, but I will say that I always feel uncomfortable with any kind of extra-judicial killing and assassination, no matter whom it's done by. Also, this seems to be either a very serious breach of Syrian security or evidence that Damascus gave the Israelis or Americans the ok to carry out the attack as part of a larger deal. In any case, it signals an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's an external (outside of Lebanon and Israel) attack against Israeli (or even American) interests. After all, the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing in Argentina was retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Abbas al-Musawi, who was replaced by Nasrallah. Such escalation is always a bad thing for all parties involved.

As for the February 14 event, I went downtown to give it a look as Geagea was speaking, and it wasn't too big, although I didn't show up until about noon. One big reason for this was that it was rainy and cold. I was a bit worried about clashes arising last night between mourners of Hariri and Mughniya, but the cold rain was probably a blessing in disguise in that it's hard to get riled up to go out looking for trouble when you're soaking wet.

Finally, the earthquake: I didn't feel it, but I heard a rumble. All of my colleagues seem to have felt it, which might just mean that I'm insensitive, so to speak.

It's just occurred to me that there aren't very many places in the world where I could post about an earthquake, a car bomb and a protest against an assassination in the same piece. How's that for potpourri, Alex Trebek?

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Nir Rosen has a piece on Palestinians in Lebanon in the Post. It doesn't mention the economic discrimination against Palestinians here, who make up around 10% of the population in Lebanon. Nor does it go much into the politics of the camps (NGOs, PLO, Damascus and jihadi groups). But it does give a good overview of Palestinian scapegoating, which reminds me of a conversation with a friend during the Nahr el-Bared fighting when we wondered why it is that whenever Lebanon wants to come together as a country, it's usually at the expense of the Palestinians.

I was in Damascus last week for a long weekend of shopping, and the trip gave me the chance to talk to some Syrians about the political situation in Lebanon. Not a single person I spoke to believed that Syria was responsible for killing Hariri. They all thought it was a plot hatched by Israel and the US in order to kick the Syrians out and use Lebanon as knife in Damascus's heart. Many Syrians asked why the Lebanese hated them and seemed generally supportive of Syrian policies overall. Of course during such a short trip it's hard to truly judge Syrian opinion, since although things have gotten better since Hafez died, the average Syrian is still somewhat hesitant to criticize the government to a stranger in public.

Another thing that I noticed this time, was that Damascus is like an oriental Prague: a beautiful and impressively old city in the center surrounded by the hideously drab and gray monstrosities that only the people's architecture is capable of constructing.

Otherwise, Damascus is full of Iraqis, and the rise in prices is noticeable, even in comparison to just a year ago. The Syrian capital now has an Aishti in addition to the United Colors of Benetton stores that are sprinkled throughout the city. Overall, there's been a lot of progress since the last time I was in the Arab Republic a year ago.

I love Syria, but it's got a long way to go, and as the taxi crossed the border back into Lebanon, I remember sighing a breath of relief and feeling glad to be back home.

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

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.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

Al Jazeera reports on the upcoming first high-level visit by a US official to Damascus since 2005:

The United States is to send a high-ranking official to Syria for the first time in two years.

Ellen Sauerbrey, the assistant secretary of state, will travel to Damascus "in coming weeks" as part of a regional tour dealing with "humanitarian issues related to Iraqi refugees," Sean McCormack, US state department spokesman, has said.

Sauerbrey will be the highest-ranking US official to visit Syria since early 2005, when Richard Armitage, then-deputy secretary of state, travelled to Damascus.

Walid Jumblatt has found some new friends at the American Enterprise Institute, where he spoke on Monday. I've just listened to the recording of the event, and I was amazed at the panting idiocy of many of the questions and the self-righteous sycophancy of Comrade Kamal Bey's son.

First of all, the fact that Jumblatt's talk was at the AEI is in and of itself a pretty good bellwether of where his loyalties lie these days. Then there are the analogies to Nazi Germany (as noted by apokraphyte), with his talk of a looming threat of a pan-Syrian Anschluss (I'm not kidding, he really said Anschluss).

He then made some ridiculous remarks about how there is already a fair distribution of power in Lebanon, whereas we know that the Lebanese demographics are constantly changing (in favor of the Shi'a and against the Christians), and that as long as there is a sectarian power sharing plan in place, there will be periodic unrest, when one group realizes that they are getting the short end of the electoral stick considering how much of the Lebanese population their sect includes. (And this is obviously why there will be no census so long as the system is in place, since one group's numerical strength can always be discounted as speculation, since there are no statistics.)

So Jumblatt's remarks about Hezbollah wanting to "change the rules of the game" are disingenuous at best, particularly when we take into consideration how his father wanted to punish the Maronites during the civil war, because after all, Christian hegemony was part of the rules of the game then, right?

He does come clean, though, and talk about how everyone, from the Americans during their revolution to Allied Europe in WWII, needs political and military assistnace from time to time from outside powers. If anything, his political career shows that he has been a firm believer in this verity. The disgusting part is when he tries to give his request for American (and Western) aid a veneer of righteousness: "I will do anything to liberate my country from indirect Syrian occupation."

Well, the part about him doing anything is certainly true, it's just that the only thing you can truthfully say he'll do anything for is trying to stay on top of the Lebanese political dog pile.

Finally, there are his unmasked calls for the toppling of the regime in Damascus. When I heard him talking about this, I couldn't help but think back to the portrait of Jumblatt by Charles Glass in March's Harper's, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be available online:

...I wanted to talk about the recent war and Jumblatt's challenge to Hezbollah, but he was preoccupied with Washington. Was Condaleeza Rice more influential than Dick Cheney? How could he persuade the Bush administration to help depose Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, weed out Syrian moles in Lebanon's army and intelligence services, and overthrow the regime in Syria? Having abandoned his Syrian partnership in 2004, Jumblatt was without an outside backer to match Hezbollah's friends in Damascus and Tehran. Israel was obviously not an option. The only viable counterweight, then, was the United States. He didn't seem to mind that Washington had supported the Israeli invasion or that most Lebanese were opposed to its war in Iraq. When I asked how he could turn to a power that, in 1983, had shelled Druze villages in the Chouf Mountains from the battleship New Jersey, all he did was shrug, as if to say, "This is Lebanon. What do you expect?"

...At age twenty-seven [after the assassination of his father], Walid, whose political experience was limited to a stint as a journalist, found himself supreme leader of the Druze, chief of the Progressive Socialist Party, and nominal head of the combined forces of Lebanon's leftist and Muslim militias. The Druze called him "the son of the pillar of the sky." His first political choice was between vengeance, the feudal lord's prerogative, and pragmatism, the duty of the modern politician. Walid sacrificed revenge. In June 1977, he made a pilgrimage to Damascus to meet President Assad. Assad said to him, "It's strange how you look like your father." "I still had my hair," Walid told me, laughing a little as he patted his bald head. "I looked at him," Walid continued, "and I felt, to tell you the truth, I knew that he killed my father, and he knew that I knew that he killed my father. And it was quite a strange feeling. And we sat. I didn't feel hatred."

How could he do it? He believed he had no other choice. "I knew that the war was not over," Walid said. The right-wing Maronite militias were still powerful, so he had to find a way to strengthen his own forces. "In Damascus, we had a good friend, Hikmet Shihabi, the chief of staff," he explained. "And I convinced Hikmet slowly to convey messages to Hafez al-Assad that I need weapons, that I need to be trained." Syria provided Jumblatt with arms and trained his militia. Through the Soviet Union's ambassador in Beirut, Druze fighters also went to Russia for military instruction. Walid estimated that the Russians supplied him, over the years, with some $500 million worth of weapons, ammunition and training. They even let Walid open a restaurant in Moscow. And thus Walid found himself becoming an enemy not only of the Maronites, but of Israel and the United States as well.

So all of Jumblatt's self-righteous bluster should be taken for what it is, a gamble on which way the political wind is blowing in Lebanon. It's especially ironic to hear him scoff at Aoun's alliance with Hezbollah, proclaiming to not understand how Aoun could betray his previously impeccable anti-Syrian credentials.

I was hoping that the question and answer session would be more interesting than Walid's speech. And in a way it was, if you're interested in the ignorant questions of American foul-weather groupies. There was at an attempt by Danielle Pletka to get Jumblatt to vilify Hamas as he's vilified Hezbollah, but he was smart enough to side-step the conclusion she wanted to hear. (Incidentally, a much more interesting question would be why it was all right for him to participate in the resistance against Israel in a "state within a state" headed by the PLO but not for Hezbollah to do the same thing. And speaking of states within a state, it would be interesting to hear him defend his decision to ban the Lebanese flag and national anthem in the Chouf and his "war of the two flags" in West Beirut when Amal refused to take down the Lebanese flag.)

But the most idiotic question came from Stephen Morris from Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, who said that he had just gotten back from Lebanon and was told that journalists could not go downtown to the opposition campground without the permission of the "illegitimate Hezbollah authority." He then wanted to know if they were carrying weapons downtown and whether there was "any way in which people visiting Lebanon in the future can resist the power of Hezbollah thugs to detain them."

I might be able to chalk this sort of thing up to not having been to Beirut, but Dr. Morris assures us that he's just returned from Lebanon. So the only thing I can think of that would explain such a question is that he didn't even bother to go downtown to look for himself. Since the sit in started in December, I've spent a fair amount of time at the protest and routinely cross it whenever I go from my apartment in East Beirut to West Beirut. (I usually cross by foot and get a cab on the other side.) And I can assure you that while I've seen more than my fair share of Hezbollah walkie talkies, I've never seen a single gun, and I've never been hassled or questioned by anyone there. On the contrary, I've been invited to sit down for tea or nargileh. But, one might argue, it's different when you're a journalist. Well, not in my experience, because I've gone on several occasions with a foreign photojournalist and a print journalist. We never asked for permission and were never stopped by anyone. So rather than actually, I don't know, walking over to downtown to see for himself, Dr. Stephen Morris of the prestigious SAIS at Johns Hopkins decided to rely on other people's accounts. This wouldn't be such a sin if he had never been here, but seeing as how he was in Lebanon, it seems like pure laziness to me.

Finally, there were questions by two audience members asking about Chapter 7 intervention, presumably to forcibly disarm Hezbollah. Luckily this is such an outlandish and idiotic idea that I won't even have to lose any sleep wondering if the UN would be stupid enough to try it. (Remember how difficult it was to beef up UNIFIL this fall, when all parties involved knew that the mandate would not include disarming Hezbollah? Can anyone think of any country, besides Israel of course, that would be willing to fight the party of God on its own turf? Neither can I.)

At the end of the day, though, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised by how uninteresting and uninformed most of the questions were. Considering the talk's venue, that is.

The Times reports that Rice is ready to talk to Damascus and Tehran about Iraq:

American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.

The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.

The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush's avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.

..."We became convinced that the Iranians were not taking us seriously," said Philip D. Zelikow, who until December was the top aide to Ms. Rice. "So we've done some things to get them to take us seriously, so now we can try diplomacy."

In a perfect world, I'd be able to admit that my fears of escalating talk about hitting Iran was all for nothing, because the wise and judicious leaders of those united states had been using their saber rattling to give themselves a better spot at the negotiating table.

Unfortunately, the current administration is much more likely to use these talks as a veneer of diplomatic respectability so that later this year, before the bombs rain over Persia, they can say, "we tried diplomacy, but all these people understand is violence, so now the brutes have forced us to exterminate them in a magnanimous show of shock and awe."

I hope that I'm wrong, though, and that this is a step, albeit small, in the right direction and away from belligerence.

I've just read two interesting pieces on Iran. The first is in Foreign Affairs, penned by Ray Takeyh and argues for US détente with Iran. He argues for normalized relations as a starting point and not an end to negotiations, which should be direct and conducted on four tracks:

1. setting a timetable for resuming a diplomatic relationship, gradually phasing out U.S. sanctions, and returning Iran's frozen assets
2. nuclear negotiations
3. stabilizing Iraq
4. Israel-Palestine

The article is much more detailed than I can relay in a short post, so it's worth reading his outlook on the situation in Tehran and why past strategies on Iran are no longer appropriate and are likely to fail.

The second article is a piece by Sy Hersh on the Bush administration's redirection in the Middle East:

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The "redirection," as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

This seems like an obviously bad idea and reflects how the many in Washington are incapable of looking at the region in a nuanced way: either the Sunnis are evil or the Shi'a are. As anyone who lives here (or even has a fleeting interest in Middle Eastern politics) knows, the region is much more complicated than that. And the childish idea of throwing one's weight fully behind radical Saudi-backed Sunni elements against a mutual foe (the Soviets at the time) has already been tried, to disastrous results, in Afghanistan.

Hersh mentions working with Saudi-sponsored Sunni islamists in covert actions in Lebanon to undermine Hezbollah and Tehran:

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. "We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can," the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money "always gets in more pockets than you think it will," he said. "In this process, we're financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don't have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don't like. It’s a very high-risk venture."

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting "to hijack the state," but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. "Salafis are sick and hateful, and I'm very much against the idea of flirting with them," he said. "They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly."

So there is a decision to realign US policy in the region to fit even more tightly with Sunni interests, including in Iraq. It looks like the US is so blinded by the idea of getting at Iran that it's willing to target Iraqi Shi'a groups even when they (including al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi) are aligned with the US-backed government of al-Maliki. (Cleverly enough, it looks like al-Sadr is going to let the US forces do his dirty work by cleansing his militia of elements that are not firmly under his control.)

Likewise, they're stepping up their support here in Lebanon to include arming salafi Sunni groups that are allied only temporarily with the government in Beirut but whose long-standing alliances are with groups like al-Qaida. So this means that the US is effectively funding some of the "foreign jihadis" who are leaving places like Tripoli in northern Lebanon kill Americans in Iraq.

Moreover, it looks like Washington might be flirting with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in hopes of overturning the Assad regime in Damascus -- the goal of at least part of the government in Beirut (Jumblatt and Geagea, and maybe Hariri too).

Now the Brotherhood is, in my mind, probably closer to Hamas and Hezbollah than it is to al-Qaida in terms of the possibility of it being reformed into a governing party as opposed to being just a terrorist group. But the fact remains that we've already followed the Saudis (who are now telling us that they can control these Sunni groups) when they took the lead with Pakistan in financing the Taliban, and look where that got us. At the end of the day, these radical Sunni groups hate the Shi'a and they hate Iran, but they hate us even more, and when they're done with what they consider the near enemy, they'll inevitably come looking for the far enemy: us.

Otherwise, the rest of the Hersh article addresses a lot of different issues in the region right now and is definitely worth reading, particularly as concerns Lebanese politics. Also, Hersh has managed to get an interview with Nasrallah, although he doesn't seem to have gotten many interesting quotes.

Apparently the US is stepping up its rhetoric in discouraging Israel from even exploring Syria's overtures to peace talks. Ha'aretz reports that the Israeli government is split:

Israeli officials, including those in the intelligence community, are divided over the degree to which Syrian President Bashar Assad is serious and sincere in his call for peace talks with Israel.

One view describes Assad's call as a propaganda campaign, and insists that the Syrian leader is not serious. Among those holding this view is Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

In Military Intelligence the view differs. There are those who say that Assad is serious in his call for peace talks, but also say that this does not mean that those talks would be easy for Israel. They even suggest that there is a very good chance that the talks would fail.

I've mentioned this before and still think that peace talks between Israel and Syria would be a good thing. Furhtermore, although I have my doubts about the exact offer and whether Assad will accept it, I have the feeling that Assad is ready to make a deal if he can get the Golan Heights back, maybe even if it means turning the land into a demilitarized park under Syrian sovereignty but open to Israeli picnickers.

I've been missing in action for a while, even after my trip to Ethiopia, which I'll have a lot more on later.

Since I've been back, however, a lot has happened. Imad Mughniya was killed in a car bomb in Damascus (shortly after Michael Totten said I was one of the "notorious leftists who endlessly excuses Hezbollah" and accused me of spreading propaganda when I mentioned that car bombs were used by the American side as well in the comments here). Yesterday was the third anniversary of Hariri's assassination. And finally, there was just a small earthquake (more of a tremor, really) here in Beirut.

I don't have much to say about the first topic, but I will say that I always feel uncomfortable with any kind of extra-judicial killing and assassination, no matter whom it's done by. Also, this seems to be either a very serious breach of Syrian security or evidence that Damascus gave the Israelis or Americans the ok to carry out the attack as part of a larger deal. In any case, it signals an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's an external (outside of Lebanon and Israel) attack against Israeli (or even American) interests. After all, the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing in Argentina was retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Abbas al-Musawi, who was replaced by Nasrallah. Such escalation is always a bad thing for all parties involved.

As for the February 14 event, I went downtown to give it a look as Geagea was speaking, and it wasn't too big, although I didn't show up until about noon. One big reason for this was that it was rainy and cold. I was a bit worried about clashes arising last night between mourners of Hariri and Mughniya, but the cold rain was probably a blessing in disguise in that it's hard to get riled up to go out looking for trouble when you're soaking wet.

Finally, the earthquake: I didn't feel it, but I heard a rumble. All of my colleagues seem to have felt it, which might just mean that I'm insensitive, so to speak.

It's just occurred to me that there aren't very many places in the world where I could post about an earthquake, a car bomb and a protest against an assassination in the same piece. How's that for potpourri, Alex Trebek?

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Nir Rosen has a piece on Palestinians in Lebanon in the Post. It doesn't mention the economic discrimination against Palestinians here, who make up around 10% of the population in Lebanon. Nor does it go much into the politics of the camps (NGOs, PLO, Damascus and jihadi groups). But it does give a good overview of Palestinian scapegoating, which reminds me of a conversation with a friend during the Nahr el-Bared fighting when we wondered why it is that whenever Lebanon wants to come together as a country, it's usually at the expense of the Palestinians.

I was in Damascus last week for a long weekend of shopping, and the trip gave me the chance to talk to some Syrians about the political situation in Lebanon. Not a single person I spoke to believed that Syria was responsible for killing Hariri. They all thought it was a plot hatched by Israel and the US in order to kick the Syrians out and use Lebanon as knife in Damascus's heart. Many Syrians asked why the Lebanese hated them and seemed generally supportive of Syrian policies overall. Of course during such a short trip it's hard to truly judge Syrian opinion, since although things have gotten better since Hafez died, the average Syrian is still somewhat hesitant to criticize the government to a stranger in public.

Another thing that I noticed this time, was that Damascus is like an oriental Prague: a beautiful and impressively old city in the center surrounded by the hideously drab and gray monstrosities that only the people's architecture is capable of constructing.

Otherwise, Damascus is full of Iraqis, and the rise in prices is noticeable, even in comparison to just a year ago. The Syrian capital now has an Aishti in addition to the United Colors of Benetton stores that are sprinkled throughout the city. Overall, there's been a lot of progress since the last time I was in the Arab Republic a year ago.

I love Syria, but it's got a long way to go, and as the taxi crossed the border back into Lebanon, I remember sighing a breath of relief and feeling glad to be back home.

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

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.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

Al Jazeera reports on the upcoming first high-level visit by a US official to Damascus since 2005:

The United States is to send a high-ranking official to Syria for the first time in two years.

Ellen Sauerbrey, the assistant secretary of state, will travel to Damascus "in coming weeks" as part of a regional tour dealing with "humanitarian issues related to Iraqi refugees," Sean McCormack, US state department spokesman, has said.

Sauerbrey will be the highest-ranking US official to visit Syria since early 2005, when Richard Armitage, then-deputy secretary of state, travelled to Damascus.

Walid Jumblatt has found some new friends at the American Enterprise Institute, where he spoke on Monday. I've just listened to the recording of the event, and I was amazed at the panting idiocy of many of the questions and the self-righteous sycophancy of Comrade Kamal Bey's son.

First of all, the fact that Jumblatt's talk was at the AEI is in and of itself a pretty good bellwether of where his loyalties lie these days. Then there are the analogies to Nazi Germany (as noted by apokraphyte), with his talk of a looming threat of a pan-Syrian Anschluss (I'm not kidding, he really said Anschluss).

He then made some ridiculous remarks about how there is already a fair distribution of power in Lebanon, whereas we know that the Lebanese demographics are constantly changing (in favor of the Shi'a and against the Christians), and that as long as there is a sectarian power sharing plan in place, there will be periodic unrest, when one group realizes that they are getting the short end of the electoral stick considering how much of the Lebanese population their sect includes. (And this is obviously why there will be no census so long as the system is in place, since one group's numerical strength can always be discounted as speculation, since there are no statistics.)

So Jumblatt's remarks about Hezbollah wanting to "change the rules of the game" are disingenuous at best, particularly when we take into consideration how his father wanted to punish the Maronites during the civil war, because after all, Christian hegemony was part of the rules of the game then, right?

He does come clean, though, and talk about how everyone, from the Americans during their revolution to Allied Europe in WWII, needs political and military assistnace from time to time from outside powers. If anything, his political career shows that he has been a firm believer in this verity. The disgusting part is when he tries to give his request for American (and Western) aid a veneer of righteousness: "I will do anything to liberate my country from indirect Syrian occupation."

Well, the part about him doing anything is certainly true, it's just that the only thing you can truthfully say he'll do anything for is trying to stay on top of the Lebanese political dog pile.

Finally, there are his unmasked calls for the toppling of the regime in Damascus. When I heard him talking about this, I couldn't help but think back to the portrait of Jumblatt by Charles Glass in March's Harper's, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be available online:

...I wanted to talk about the recent war and Jumblatt's challenge to Hezbollah, but he was preoccupied with Washington. Was Condaleeza Rice more influential than Dick Cheney? How could he persuade the Bush administration to help depose Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, weed out Syrian moles in Lebanon's army and intelligence services, and overthrow the regime in Syria? Having abandoned his Syrian partnership in 2004, Jumblatt was without an outside backer to match Hezbollah's friends in Damascus and Tehran. Israel was obviously not an option. The only viable counterweight, then, was the United States. He didn't seem to mind that Washington had supported the Israeli invasion or that most Lebanese were opposed to its war in Iraq. When I asked how he could turn to a power that, in 1983, had shelled Druze villages in the Chouf Mountains from the battleship New Jersey, all he did was shrug, as if to say, "This is Lebanon. What do you expect?"

...At age twenty-seven [after the assassination of his father], Walid, whose political experience was limited to a stint as a journalist, found himself supreme leader of the Druze, chief of the Progressive Socialist Party, and nominal head of the combined forces of Lebanon's leftist and Muslim militias. The Druze called him "the son of the pillar of the sky." His first political choice was between vengeance, the feudal lord's prerogative, and pragmatism, the duty of the modern politician. Walid sacrificed revenge. In June 1977, he made a pilgrimage to Damascus to meet President Assad. Assad said to him, "It's strange how you look like your father." "I still had my hair," Walid told me, laughing a little as he patted his bald head. "I looked at him," Walid continued, "and I felt, to tell you the truth, I knew that he killed my father, and he knew that I knew that he killed my father. And it was quite a strange feeling. And we sat. I didn't feel hatred."

How could he do it? He believed he had no other choice. "I knew that the war was not over," Walid said. The right-wing Maronite militias were still powerful, so he had to find a way to strengthen his own forces. "In Damascus, we had a good friend, Hikmet Shihabi, the chief of staff," he explained. "And I convinced Hikmet slowly to convey messages to Hafez al-Assad that I need weapons, that I need to be trained." Syria provided Jumblatt with arms and trained his militia. Through the Soviet Union's ambassador in Beirut, Druze fighters also went to Russia for military instruction. Walid estimated that the Russians supplied him, over the years, with some $500 million worth of weapons, ammunition and training. They even let Walid open a restaurant in Moscow. And thus Walid found himself becoming an enemy not only of the Maronites, but of Israel and the United States as well.

So all of Jumblatt's self-righteous bluster should be taken for what it is, a gamble on which way the political wind is blowing in Lebanon. It's especially ironic to hear him scoff at Aoun's alliance with Hezbollah, proclaiming to not understand how Aoun could betray his previously impeccable anti-Syrian credentials.

I was hoping that the question and answer session would be more interesting than Walid's speech. And in a way it was, if you're interested in the ignorant questions of American foul-weather groupies. There was at an attempt by Danielle Pletka to get Jumblatt to vilify Hamas as he's vilified Hezbollah, but he was smart enough to side-step the conclusion she wanted to hear. (Incidentally, a much more interesting question would be why it was all right for him to participate in the resistance against Israel in a "state within a state" headed by the PLO but not for Hezbollah to do the same thing. And speaking of states within a state, it would be interesting to hear him defend his decision to ban the Lebanese flag and national anthem in the Chouf and his "war of the two flags" in West Beirut when Amal refused to take down the Lebanese flag.)

But the most idiotic question came from Stephen Morris from Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, who said that he had just gotten back from Lebanon and was told that journalists could not go downtown to the opposition campground without the permission of the "illegitimate Hezbollah authority." He then wanted to know if they were carrying weapons downtown and whether there was "any way in which people visiting Lebanon in the future can resist the power of Hezbollah thugs to detain them."

I might be able to chalk this sort of thing up to not having been to Beirut, but Dr. Morris assures us that he's just returned from Lebanon. So the only thing I can think of that would explain such a question is that he didn't even bother to go downtown to look for himself. Since the sit in started in December, I've spent a fair amount of time at the protest and routinely cross it whenever I go from my apartment in East Beirut to West Beirut. (I usually cross by foot and get a cab on the other side.) And I can assure you that while I've seen more than my fair share of Hezbollah walkie talkies, I've never seen a single gun, and I've never been hassled or questioned by anyone there. On the contrary, I've been invited to sit down for tea or nargileh. But, one might argue, it's different when you're a journalist. Well, not in my experience, because I've gone on several occasions with a foreign photojournalist and a print journalist. We never asked for permission and were never stopped by anyone. So rather than actually, I don't know, walking over to downtown to see for himself, Dr. Stephen Morris of the prestigious SAIS at Johns Hopkins decided to rely on other people's accounts. This wouldn't be such a sin if he had never been here, but seeing as how he was in Lebanon, it seems like pure laziness to me.

Finally, there were questions by two audience members asking about Chapter 7 intervention, presumably to forcibly disarm Hezbollah. Luckily this is such an outlandish and idiotic idea that I won't even have to lose any sleep wondering if the UN would be stupid enough to try it. (Remember how difficult it was to beef up UNIFIL this fall, when all parties involved knew that the mandate would not include disarming Hezbollah? Can anyone think of any country, besides Israel of course, that would be willing to fight the party of God on its own turf? Neither can I.)

At the end of the day, though, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised by how uninteresting and uninformed most of the questions were. Considering the talk's venue, that is.

The Times reports that Rice is ready to talk to Damascus and Tehran about Iraq:

American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.

The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.

The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush's avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.

..."We became convinced that the Iranians were not taking us seriously," said Philip D. Zelikow, who until December was the top aide to Ms. Rice. "So we've done some things to get them to take us seriously, so now we can try diplomacy."

In a perfect world, I'd be able to admit that my fears of escalating talk about hitting Iran was all for nothing, because the wise and judicious leaders of those united states had been using their saber rattling to give themselves a better spot at the negotiating table.

Unfortunately, the current administration is much more likely to use these talks as a veneer of diplomatic respectability so that later this year, before the bombs rain over Persia, they can say, "we tried diplomacy, but all these people understand is violence, so now the brutes have forced us to exterminate them in a magnanimous show of shock and awe."

I hope that I'm wrong, though, and that this is a step, albeit small, in the right direction and away from belligerence.

I've just read two interesting pieces on Iran. The first is in Foreign Affairs, penned by Ray Takeyh and argues for US détente with Iran. He argues for normalized relations as a starting point and not an end to negotiations, which should be direct and conducted on four tracks:

1. setting a timetable for resuming a diplomatic relationship, gradually phasing out U.S. sanctions, and returning Iran's frozen assets
2. nuclear negotiations
3. stabilizing Iraq
4. Israel-Palestine

The article is much more detailed than I can relay in a short post, so it's worth reading his outlook on the situation in Tehran and why past strategies on Iran are no longer appropriate and are likely to fail.

The second article is a piece by Sy Hersh on the Bush administration's redirection in the Middle East:

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The "redirection," as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

This seems like an obviously bad idea and reflects how the many in Washington are incapable of looking at the region in a nuanced way: either the Sunnis are evil or the Shi'a are. As anyone who lives here (or even has a fleeting interest in Middle Eastern politics) knows, the region is much more complicated than that. And the childish idea of throwing one's weight fully behind radical Saudi-backed Sunni elements against a mutual foe (the Soviets at the time) has already been tried, to disastrous results, in Afghanistan.

Hersh mentions working with Saudi-sponsored Sunni islamists in covert actions in Lebanon to undermine Hezbollah and Tehran:

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. "We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can," the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money "always gets in more pockets than you think it will," he said. "In this process, we're financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don't have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don't like. It’s a very high-risk venture."

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting "to hijack the state," but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. "Salafis are sick and hateful, and I'm very much against the idea of flirting with them," he said. "They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly."

So there is a decision to realign US policy in the region to fit even more tightly with Sunni interests, including in Iraq. It looks like the US is so blinded by the idea of getting at Iran that it's willing to target Iraqi Shi'a groups even when they (including al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi) are aligned with the US-backed government of al-Maliki. (Cleverly enough, it looks like al-Sadr is going to let the US forces do his dirty work by cleansing his militia of elements that are not firmly under his control.)

Likewise, they're stepping up their support here in Lebanon to include arming salafi Sunni groups that are allied only temporarily with the government in Beirut but whose long-standing alliances are with groups like al-Qaida. So this means that the US is effectively funding some of the "foreign jihadis" who are leaving places like Tripoli in northern Lebanon kill Americans in Iraq.

Moreover, it looks like Washington might be flirting with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in hopes of overturning the Assad regime in Damascus -- the goal of at least part of the government in Beirut (Jumblatt and Geagea, and maybe Hariri too).

Now the Brotherhood is, in my mind, probably closer to Hamas and Hezbollah than it is to al-Qaida in terms of the possibility of it being reformed into a governing party as opposed to being just a terrorist group. But the fact remains that we've already followed the Saudis (who are now telling us that they can control these Sunni groups) when they took the lead with Pakistan in financing the Taliban, and look where that got us. At the end of the day, these radical Sunni groups hate the Shi'a and they hate Iran, but they hate us even more, and when they're done with what they consider the near enemy, they'll inevitably come looking for the far enemy: us.

Otherwise, the rest of the Hersh article addresses a lot of different issues in the region right now and is definitely worth reading, particularly as concerns Lebanese politics. Also, Hersh has managed to get an interview with Nasrallah, although he doesn't seem to have gotten many interesting quotes.

Apparently the US is stepping up its rhetoric in discouraging Israel from even exploring Syria's overtures to peace talks. Ha'aretz reports that the Israeli government is split:

Israeli officials, including those in the intelligence community, are divided over the degree to which Syrian President Bashar Assad is serious and sincere in his call for peace talks with Israel.

One view describes Assad's call as a propaganda campaign, and insists that the Syrian leader is not serious. Among those holding this view is Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

In Military Intelligence the view differs. There are those who say that Assad is serious in his call for peace talks, but also say that this does not mean that those talks would be easy for Israel. They even suggest that there is a very good chance that the talks would fail.

I've mentioned this before and still think that peace talks between Israel and Syria would be a good thing. Furhtermore, although I have my doubts about the exact offer and whether Assad will accept it, I have the feeling that Assad is ready to make a deal if he can get the Golan Heights back, maybe even if it means turning the land into a demilitarized park under Syrian sovereignty but open to Israeli picnickers.

I've been missing in action for a while, even after my trip to Ethiopia, which I'll have a lot more on later.

Since I've been back, however, a lot has happened. Imad Mughniya was killed in a car bomb in Damascus (shortly after Michael Totten said I was one of the "notorious leftists who endlessly excuses Hezbollah" and accused me of spreading propaganda when I mentioned that car bombs were used by the American side as well in the comments here). Yesterday was the third anniversary of Hariri's assassination. And finally, there was just a small earthquake (more of a tremor, really) here in Beirut.

I don't have much to say about the first topic, but I will say that I always feel uncomfortable with any kind of extra-judicial killing and assassination, no matter whom it's done by. Also, this seems to be either a very serious breach of Syrian security or evidence that Damascus gave the Israelis or Americans the ok to carry out the attack as part of a larger deal. In any case, it signals an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's an external (outside of Lebanon and Israel) attack against Israeli (or even American) interests. After all, the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing in Argentina was retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Abbas al-Musawi, who was replaced by Nasrallah. Such escalation is always a bad thing for all parties involved.

As for the February 14 event, I went downtown to give it a look as Geagea was speaking, and it wasn't too big, although I didn't show up until about noon. One big reason for this was that it was rainy and cold. I was a bit worried about clashes arising last night between mourners of Hariri and Mughniya, but the cold rain was probably a blessing in disguise in that it's hard to get riled up to go out looking for trouble when you're soaking wet.

Finally, the earthquake: I didn't feel it, but I heard a rumble. All of my colleagues seem to have felt it, which might just mean that I'm insensitive, so to speak.

It's just occurred to me that there aren't very many places in the world where I could post about an earthquake, a car bomb and a protest against an assassination in the same piece. How's that for potpourri, Alex Trebek?

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Nir Rosen has a piece on Palestinians in Lebanon in the Post. It doesn't mention the economic discrimination against Palestinians here, who make up around 10% of the population in Lebanon. Nor does it go much into the politics of the camps (NGOs, PLO, Damascus and jihadi groups). But it does give a good overview of Palestinian scapegoating, which reminds me of a conversation with a friend during the Nahr el-Bared fighting when we wondered why it is that whenever Lebanon wants to come together as a country, it's usually at the expense of the Palestinians.

I was in Damascus last week for a long weekend of shopping, and the trip gave me the chance to talk to some Syrians about the political situation in Lebanon. Not a single person I spoke to believed that Syria was responsible for killing Hariri. They all thought it was a plot hatched by Israel and the US in order to kick the Syrians out and use Lebanon as knife in Damascus's heart. Many Syrians asked why the Lebanese hated them and seemed generally supportive of Syrian policies overall. Of course during such a short trip it's hard to truly judge Syrian opinion, since although things have gotten better since Hafez died, the average Syrian is still somewhat hesitant to criticize the government to a stranger in public.

Another thing that I noticed this time, was that Damascus is like an oriental Prague: a beautiful and impressively old city in the center surrounded by the hideously drab and gray monstrosities that only the people's architecture is capable of constructing.

Otherwise, Damascus is full of Iraqis, and the rise in prices is noticeable, even in comparison to just a year ago. The Syrian capital now has an Aishti in addition to the United Colors of Benetton stores that are sprinkled throughout the city. Overall, there's been a lot of progress since the last time I was in the Arab Republic a year ago.

I love Syria, but it's got a long way to go, and as the taxi crossed the border back into Lebanon, I remember sighing a breath of relief and feeling glad to be back home.

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

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.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

Al Jazeera reports on the upcoming first high-level visit by a US official to Damascus since 2005:

The United States is to send a high-ranking official to Syria for the first time in two years.

Ellen Sauerbrey, the assistant secretary of state, will travel to Damascus "in coming weeks" as part of a regional tour dealing with "humanitarian issues related to Iraqi refugees," Sean McCormack, US state department spokesman, has said.

Sauerbrey will be the highest-ranking US official to visit Syria since early 2005, when Richard Armitage, then-deputy secretary of state, travelled to Damascus.

Walid Jumblatt has found some new friends at the American Enterprise Institute, where he spoke on Monday. I've just listened to the recording of the event, and I was amazed at the panting idiocy of many of the questions and the self-righteous sycophancy of Comrade Kamal Bey's son.

First of all, the fact that Jumblatt's talk was at the AEI is in and of itself a pretty good bellwether of where his loyalties lie these days. Then there are the analogies to Nazi Germany (as noted by apokraphyte), with his talk of a looming threat of a pan-Syrian Anschluss (I'm not kidding, he really said Anschluss).

He then made some ridiculous remarks about how there is already a fair distribution of power in Lebanon, whereas we know that the Lebanese demographics are constantly changing (in favor of the Shi'a and against the Christians), and that as long as there is a sectarian power sharing plan in place, there will be periodic unrest, when one group realizes that they are getting the short end of the electoral stick considering how much of the Lebanese population their sect includes. (And this is obviously why there will be no census so long as the system is in place, since one group's numerical strength can always be discounted as speculation, since there are no statistics.)

So Jumblatt's remarks about Hezbollah wanting to "change the rules of the game" are disingenuous at best, particularly when we take into consideration how his father wanted to punish the Maronites during the civil war, because after all, Christian hegemony was part of the rules of the game then, right?

He does come clean, though, and talk about how everyone, from the Americans during their revolution to Allied Europe in WWII, needs political and military assistnace from time to time from outside powers. If anything, his political career shows that he has been a firm believer in this verity. The disgusting part is when he tries to give his request for American (and Western) aid a veneer of righteousness: "I will do anything to liberate my country from indirect Syrian occupation."

Well, the part about him doing anything is certainly true, it's just that the only thing you can truthfully say he'll do anything for is trying to stay on top of the Lebanese political dog pile.

Finally, there are his unmasked calls for the toppling of the regime in Damascus. When I heard him talking about this, I couldn't help but think back to the portrait of Jumblatt by Charles Glass in March's Harper's, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be available online:

...I wanted to talk about the recent war and Jumblatt's challenge to Hezbollah, but he was preoccupied with Washington. Was Condaleeza Rice more influential than Dick Cheney? How could he persuade the Bush administration to help depose Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, weed out Syrian moles in Lebanon's army and intelligence services, and overthrow the regime in Syria? Having abandoned his Syrian partnership in 2004, Jumblatt was without an outside backer to match Hezbollah's friends in Damascus and Tehran. Israel was obviously not an option. The only viable counterweight, then, was the United States. He didn't seem to mind that Washington had supported the Israeli invasion or that most Lebanese were opposed to its war in Iraq. When I asked how he could turn to a power that, in 1983, had shelled Druze villages in the Chouf Mountains from the battleship New Jersey, all he did was shrug, as if to say, "This is Lebanon. What do you expect?"

...At age twenty-seven [after the assassination of his father], Walid, whose political experience was limited to a stint as a journalist, found himself supreme leader of the Druze, chief of the Progressive Socialist Party, and nominal head of the combined forces of Lebanon's leftist and Muslim militias. The Druze called him "the son of the pillar of the sky." His first political choice was between vengeance, the feudal lord's prerogative, and pragmatism, the duty of the modern politician. Walid sacrificed revenge. In June 1977, he made a pilgrimage to Damascus to meet President Assad. Assad said to him, "It's strange how you look like your father." "I still had my hair," Walid told me, laughing a little as he patted his bald head. "I looked at him," Walid continued, "and I felt, to tell you the truth, I knew that he killed my father, and he knew that I knew that he killed my father. And it was quite a strange feeling. And we sat. I didn't feel hatred."

How could he do it? He believed he had no other choice. "I knew that the war was not over," Walid said. The right-wing Maronite militias were still powerful, so he had to find a way to strengthen his own forces. "In Damascus, we had a good friend, Hikmet Shihabi, the chief of staff," he explained. "And I convinced Hikmet slowly to convey messages to Hafez al-Assad that I need weapons, that I need to be trained." Syria provided Jumblatt with arms and trained his militia. Through the Soviet Union's ambassador in Beirut, Druze fighters also went to Russia for military instruction. Walid estimated that the Russians supplied him, over the years, with some $500 million worth of weapons, ammunition and training. They even let Walid open a restaurant in Moscow. And thus Walid found himself becoming an enemy not only of the Maronites, but of Israel and the United States as well.

So all of Jumblatt's self-righteous bluster should be taken for what it is, a gamble on which way the political wind is blowing in Lebanon. It's especially ironic to hear him scoff at Aoun's alliance with Hezbollah, proclaiming to not understand how Aoun could betray his previously impeccable anti-Syrian credentials.

I was hoping that the question and answer session would be more interesting than Walid's speech. And in a way it was, if you're interested in the ignorant questions of American foul-weather groupies. There was at an attempt by Danielle Pletka to get Jumblatt to vilify Hamas as he's vilified Hezbollah, but he was smart enough to side-step the conclusion she wanted to hear. (Incidentally, a much more interesting question would be why it was all right for him to participate in the resistance against Israel in a "state within a state" headed by the PLO but not for Hezbollah to do the same thing. And speaking of states within a state, it would be interesting to hear him defend his decision to ban the Lebanese flag and national anthem in the Chouf and his "war of the two flags" in West Beirut when Amal refused to take down the Lebanese flag.)

But the most idiotic question came from Stephen Morris from Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, who said that he had just gotten back from Lebanon and was told that journalists could not go downtown to the opposition campground without the permission of the "illegitimate Hezbollah authority." He then wanted to know if they were carrying weapons downtown and whether there was "any way in which people visiting Lebanon in the future can resist the power of Hezbollah thugs to detain them."

I might be able to chalk this sort of thing up to not having been to Beirut, but Dr. Morris assures us that he's just returned from Lebanon. So the only thing I can think of that would explain such a question is that he didn't even bother to go downtown to look for himself. Since the sit in started in December, I've spent a fair amount of time at the protest and routinely cross it whenever I go from my apartment in East Beirut to West Beirut. (I usually cross by foot and get a cab on the other side.) And I can assure you that while I've seen more than my fair share of Hezbollah walkie talkies, I've never seen a single gun, and I've never been hassled or questioned by anyone there. On the contrary, I've been invited to sit down for tea or nargileh. But, one might argue, it's different when you're a journalist. Well, not in my experience, because I've gone on several occasions with a foreign photojournalist and a print journalist. We never asked for permission and were never stopped by anyone. So rather than actually, I don't know, walking over to downtown to see for himself, Dr. Stephen Morris of the prestigious SAIS at Johns Hopkins decided to rely on other people's accounts. This wouldn't be such a sin if he had never been here, but seeing as how he was in Lebanon, it seems like pure laziness to me.

Finally, there were questions by two audience members asking about Chapter 7 intervention, presumably to forcibly disarm Hezbollah. Luckily this is such an outlandish and idiotic idea that I won't even have to lose any sleep wondering if the UN would be stupid enough to try it. (Remember how difficult it was to beef up UNIFIL this fall, when all parties involved knew that the mandate would not include disarming Hezbollah? Can anyone think of any country, besides Israel of course, that would be willing to fight the party of God on its own turf? Neither can I.)

At the end of the day, though, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised by how uninteresting and uninformed most of the questions were. Considering the talk's venue, that is.

The Times reports that Rice is ready to talk to Damascus and Tehran about Iraq:

American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.

The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.

The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush's avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.

..."We became convinced that the Iranians were not taking us seriously," said Philip D. Zelikow, who until December was the top aide to Ms. Rice. "So we've done some things to get them to take us seriously, so now we can try diplomacy."

In a perfect world, I'd be able to admit that my fears of escalating talk about hitting Iran was all for nothing, because the wise and judicious leaders of those united states had been using their saber rattling to give themselves a better spot at the negotiating table.

Unfortunately, the current administration is much more likely to use these talks as a veneer of diplomatic respectability so that later this year, before the bombs rain over Persia, they can say, "we tried diplomacy, but all these people understand is violence, so now the brutes have forced us to exterminate them in a magnanimous show of shock and awe."

I hope that I'm wrong, though, and that this is a step, albeit small, in the right direction and away from belligerence.

I've just read two interesting pieces on Iran. The first is in Foreign Affairs, penned by Ray Takeyh and argues for US détente with Iran. He argues for normalized relations as a starting point and not an end to negotiations, which should be direct and conducted on four tracks:

1. setting a timetable for resuming a diplomatic relationship, gradually phasing out U.S. sanctions, and returning Iran's frozen assets
2. nuclear negotiations
3. stabilizing Iraq
4. Israel-Palestine

The article is much more detailed than I can relay in a short post, so it's worth reading his outlook on the situation in Tehran and why past strategies on Iran are no longer appropriate and are likely to fail.

The second article is a piece by Sy Hersh on the Bush administration's redirection in the Middle East:

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The "redirection," as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

This seems like an obviously bad idea and reflects how the many in Washington are incapable of looking at the region in a nuanced way: either the Sunnis are evil or the Shi'a are. As anyone who lives here (or even has a fleeting interest in Middle Eastern politics) knows, the region is much more complicated than that. And the childish idea of throwing one's weight fully behind radical Saudi-backed Sunni elements against a mutual foe (the Soviets at the time) has already been tried, to disastrous results, in Afghanistan.

Hersh mentions working with Saudi-sponsored Sunni islamists in covert actions in Lebanon to undermine Hezbollah and Tehran:

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. "We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can," the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money "always gets in more pockets than you think it will," he said. "In this process, we're financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don't have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don't like. It’s a very high-risk venture."

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting "to hijack the state," but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. "Salafis are sick and hateful, and I'm very much against the idea of flirting with them," he said. "They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly."

So there is a decision to realign US policy in the region to fit even more tightly with Sunni interests, including in Iraq. It looks like the US is so blinded by the idea of getting at Iran that it's willing to target Iraqi Shi'a groups even when they (including al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi) are aligned with the US-backed government of al-Maliki. (Cleverly enough, it looks like al-Sadr is going to let the US forces do his dirty work by cleansing his militia of elements that are not firmly under his control.)

Likewise, they're stepping up their support here in Lebanon to include arming salafi Sunni groups that are allied only temporarily with the government in Beirut but whose long-standing alliances are with groups like al-Qaida. So this means that the US is effectively funding some of the "foreign jihadis" who are leaving places like Tripoli in northern Lebanon kill Americans in Iraq.

Moreover, it looks like Washington might be flirting with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in hopes of overturning the Assad regime in Damascus -- the goal of at least part of the government in Beirut (Jumblatt and Geagea, and maybe Hariri too).

Now the Brotherhood is, in my mind, probably closer to Hamas and Hezbollah than it is to al-Qaida in terms of the possibility of it being reformed into a governing party as opposed to being just a terrorist group. But the fact remains that we've already followed the Saudis (who are now telling us that they can control these Sunni groups) when they took the lead with Pakistan in financing the Taliban, and look where that got us. At the end of the day, these radical Sunni groups hate the Shi'a and they hate Iran, but they hate us even more, and when they're done with what they consider the near enemy, they'll inevitably come looking for the far enemy: us.

Otherwise, the rest of the Hersh article addresses a lot of different issues in the region right now and is definitely worth reading, particularly as concerns Lebanese politics. Also, Hersh has managed to get an interview with Nasrallah, although he doesn't seem to have gotten many interesting quotes.

Apparently the US is stepping up its rhetoric in discouraging Israel from even exploring Syria's overtures to peace talks. Ha'aretz reports that the Israeli government is split:

Israeli officials, including those in the intelligence community, are divided over the degree to which Syrian President Bashar Assad is serious and sincere in his call for peace talks with Israel.

One view describes Assad's call as a propaganda campaign, and insists that the Syrian leader is not serious. Among those holding this view is Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

In Military Intelligence the view differs. There are those who say that Assad is serious in his call for peace talks, but also say that this does not mean that those talks would be easy for Israel. They even suggest that there is a very good chance that the talks would fail.

I've mentioned this before and still think that peace talks between Israel and Syria would be a good thing. Furhtermore, although I have my doubts about the exact offer and whether Assad will accept it, I have the feeling that Assad is ready to make a deal if he can get the Golan Heights back, maybe even if it means turning the land into a demilitarized park under Syrian sovereignty but open to Israeli picnickers.

I've been missing in action for a while, even after my trip to Ethiopia, which I'll have a lot more on later.

Since I've been back, however, a lot has happened. Imad Mughniya was killed in a car bomb in Damascus (shortly after Michael Totten said I was one of the "notorious leftists who endlessly excuses Hezbollah" and accused me of spreading propaganda when I mentioned that car bombs were used by the American side as well in the comments here). Yesterday was the third anniversary of Hariri's assassination. And finally, there was just a small earthquake (more of a tremor, really) here in Beirut.

I don't have much to say about the first topic, but I will say that I always feel uncomfortable with any kind of extra-judicial killing and assassination, no matter whom it's done by. Also, this seems to be either a very serious breach of Syrian security or evidence that Damascus gave the Israelis or Americans the ok to carry out the attack as part of a larger deal. In any case, it signals an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's an external (outside of Lebanon and Israel) attack against Israeli (or even American) interests. After all, the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing in Argentina was retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Abbas al-Musawi, who was replaced by Nasrallah. Such escalation is always a bad thing for all parties involved.

As for the February 14 event, I went downtown to give it a look as Geagea was speaking, and it wasn't too big, although I didn't show up until about noon. One big reason for this was that it was rainy and cold. I was a bit worried about clashes arising last night between mourners of Hariri and Mughniya, but the cold rain was probably a blessing in disguise in that it's hard to get riled up to go out looking for trouble when you're soaking wet.

Finally, the earthquake: I didn't feel it, but I heard a rumble. All of my colleagues seem to have felt it, which might just mean that I'm insensitive, so to speak.

It's just occurred to me that there aren't very many places in the world where I could post about an earthquake, a car bomb and a protest against an assassination in the same piece. How's that for potpourri, Alex Trebek?

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Nir Rosen has a piece on Palestinians in Lebanon in the Post. It doesn't mention the economic discrimination against Palestinians here, who make up around 10% of the population in Lebanon. Nor does it go much into the politics of the camps (NGOs, PLO, Damascus and jihadi groups). But it does give a good overview of Palestinian scapegoating, which reminds me of a conversation with a friend during the Nahr el-Bared fighting when we wondered why it is that whenever Lebanon wants to come together as a country, it's usually at the expense of the Palestinians.

I was in Damascus last week for a long weekend of shopping, and the trip gave me the chance to talk to some Syrians about the political situation in Lebanon. Not a single person I spoke to believed that Syria was responsible for killing Hariri. They all thought it was a plot hatched by Israel and the US in order to kick the Syrians out and use Lebanon as knife in Damascus's heart. Many Syrians asked why the Lebanese hated them and seemed generally supportive of Syrian policies overall. Of course during such a short trip it's hard to truly judge Syrian opinion, since although things have gotten better since Hafez died, the average Syrian is still somewhat hesitant to criticize the government to a stranger in public.

Another thing that I noticed this time, was that Damascus is like an oriental Prague: a beautiful and impressively old city in the center surrounded by the hideously drab and gray monstrosities that only the people's architecture is capable of constructing.

Otherwise, Damascus is full of Iraqis, and the rise in prices is noticeable, even in comparison to just a year ago. The Syrian capital now has an Aishti in addition to the United Colors of Benetton stores that are sprinkled throughout the city. Overall, there's been a lot of progress since the last time I was in the Arab Republic a year ago.

I love Syria, but it's got a long way to go, and as the taxi crossed the border back into Lebanon, I remember sighing a breath of relief and feeling glad to be back home.

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

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.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

Following Sy Hersh's write-up including Alastair Horne's comments that Fatah al-Islam is being funded indirectly through Saad Hariri by the US, there has been more interest in the new group in the American media.

The NY Times has an interview with the group's leader, Shakir al-Abssi, and the LA Times has an article on accusations by the Lebanese government that Fatah al-Islam was involved in the bus bombings last month.

Neither article mentions Hersh's article or Crooke's comments, although both mention the claim that the group is sponsored by Damascus to start trouble in Lebanon.

Al Jazeera reports on the upcoming first high-level visit by a US official to Damascus since 2005:

The United States is to send a high-ranking official to Syria for the first time in two years.

Ellen Sauerbrey, the assistant secretary of state, will travel to Damascus "in coming weeks" as part of a regional tour dealing with "humanitarian issues related to Iraqi refugees," Sean McCormack, US state department spokesman, has said.

Sauerbrey will be the highest-ranking US official to visit Syria since early 2005, when Richard Armitage, then-deputy secretary of state, travelled to Damascus.

Walid Jumblatt has found some new friends at the American Enterprise Institute, where he spoke on Monday. I've just listened to the recording of the event, and I was amazed at the panting idiocy of many of the questions and the self-righteous sycophancy of Comrade Kamal Bey's son.

First of all, the fact that Jumblatt's talk was at the AEI is in and of itself a pretty good bellwether of where his loyalties lie these days. Then there are the analogies to Nazi Germany (as noted by apokraphyte), with his talk of a looming threat of a pan-Syrian Anschluss (I'm not kidding, he really said Anschluss).

He then made some ridiculous remarks about how there is already a fair distribution of power in Lebanon, whereas we know that the Lebanese demographics are constantly changing (in favor of the Shi'a and against the Christians), and that as long as there is a sectarian power sharing plan in place, there will be periodic unrest, when one group realizes that they are getting the short end of the electoral stick considering how much of the Lebanese population their sect includes. (And this is obviously why there will be no census so long as the system is in place, since one group's numerical strength can always be discounted as speculation, since there are no statistics.)

So Jumblatt's remarks about Hezbollah wanting to "change the rules of the game" are disingenuous at best, particularly when we take into consideration how his father wanted to punish the Maronites during the civil war, because after all, Christian hegemony was part of the rules of the game then, right?

He does come clean, though, and talk about how everyone, from the Americans during their revolution to Allied Europe in WWII, needs political and military assistnace from time to time from outside powers. If anything, his political career shows that he has been a firm believer in this verity. The disgusting part is when he tries to give his request for American (and Western) aid a veneer of righteousness: "I will do anything to liberate my country from indirect Syrian occupation."

Well, the part about him doing anything is certainly true, it's just that the only thing you can truthfully say he'll do anything for is trying to stay on top of the Lebanese political dog pile.

Finally, there are his unmasked calls for the toppling of the regime in Damascus. When I heard him talking about this, I couldn't help but think back to the portrait of Jumblatt by Charles Glass in March's Harper's, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be available online:

...I wanted to talk about the recent war and Jumblatt's challenge to Hezbollah, but he was preoccupied with Washington. Was Condaleeza Rice more influential than Dick Cheney? How could he persuade the Bush administration to help depose Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, weed out Syrian moles in Lebanon's army and intelligence services, and overthrow the regime in Syria? Having abandoned his Syrian partnership in 2004, Jumblatt was without an outside backer to match Hezbollah's friends in Damascus and Tehran. Israel was obviously not an option. The only viable counterweight, then, was the United States. He didn't seem to mind that Washington had supported the Israeli invasion or that most Lebanese were opposed to its war in Iraq. When I asked how he could turn to a power that, in 1983, had shelled Druze villages in the Chouf Mountains from the battleship New Jersey, all he did was shrug, as if to say, "This is Lebanon. What do you expect?"

...At age twenty-seven [after the assassination of his father], Walid, whose political experience was limited to a stint as a journalist, found himself supreme leader of the Druze, chief of the Progressive Socialist Party, and nominal head of the combined forces of Lebanon's leftist and Muslim militias. The Druze called him "the son of the pillar of the sky." His first political choice was between vengeance, the feudal lord's prerogative, and pragmatism, the duty of the modern politician. Walid sacrificed revenge. In June 1977, he made a pilgrimage to Damascus to meet President Assad. Assad said to him, "It's strange how you look like your father." "I still had my hair," Walid told me, laughing a little as he patted his bald head. "I looked at him," Walid continued, "and I felt, to tell you the truth, I knew that he killed my father, and he knew that I knew that he killed my father. And it was quite a strange feeling. And we sat. I didn't feel hatred."

How could he do it? He believed he had no other choice. "I knew that the war was not over," Walid said. The right-wing Maronite militias were still powerful, so he had to find a way to strengthen his own forces. "In Damascus, we had a good friend, Hikmet Shihabi, the chief of staff," he explained. "And I convinced Hikmet slowly to convey messages to Hafez al-Assad that I need weapons, that I need to be trained." Syria provided Jumblatt with arms and trained his militia. Through the Soviet Union's ambassador in Beirut, Druze fighters also went to Russia for military instruction. Walid estimated that the Russians supplied him, over the years, with some $500 million worth of weapons, ammunition and training. They even let Walid open a restaurant in Moscow. And thus Walid found himself becoming an enemy not only of the Maronites, but of Israel and the United States as well.

So all of Jumblatt's self-righteous bluster should be taken for what it is, a gamble on which way the political wind is blowing in Lebanon. It's especially ironic to hear him scoff at Aoun's alliance with Hezbollah, proclaiming to not understand how Aoun could betray his previously impeccable anti-Syrian credentials.

I was hoping that the question and answer session would be more interesting than Walid's speech. And in a way it was, if you're interested in the ignorant questions of American foul-weather groupies. There was at an attempt by Danielle Pletka to get Jumblatt to vilify Hamas as he's vilified Hezbollah, but he was smart enough to side-step the conclusion she wanted to hear. (Incidentally, a much more interesting question would be why it was all right for him to participate in the resistance against Israel in a "state within a state" headed by the PLO but not for Hezbollah to do the same thing. And speaking of states within a state, it would be interesting to hear him defend his decision to ban the Lebanese flag and national anthem in the Chouf and his "war of the two flags" in West Beirut when Amal refused to take down the Lebanese flag.)

But the most idiotic question came from Stephen Morris from Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, who said that he had just gotten back from Lebanon and was told that journalists could not go downtown to the opposition campground without the permission of the "illegitimate Hezbollah authority." He then wanted to know if they were carrying weapons downtown and whether there was "any way in which people visiting Lebanon in the future can resist the power of Hezbollah thugs to detain them."

I might be able to chalk this sort of thing up to not having been to Beirut, but Dr. Morris assures us that he's just returned from Lebanon. So the only thing I can think of that would explain such a question is that he didn't even bother to go downtown to look for himself. Since the sit in started in December, I've spent a fair amount of time at the protest and routinely cross it whenever I go from my apartment in East Beirut to West Beirut. (I usually cross by foot and get a cab on the other side.) And I can assure you that while I've seen more than my fair share of Hezbollah walkie talkies, I've never seen a single gun, and I've never been hassled or questioned by anyone there. On the contrary, I've been invited to sit down for tea or nargileh. But, one might argue, it's different when you're a journalist. Well, not in my experience, because I've gone on several occasions with a foreign photojournalist and a print journalist. We never asked for permission and were never stopped by anyone. So rather than actually, I don't know, walking over to downtown to see for himself, Dr. Stephen Morris of the prestigious SAIS at Johns Hopkins decided to rely on other people's accounts. This wouldn't be such a sin if he had never been here, but seeing as how he was in Lebanon, it seems like pure laziness to me.

Finally, there were questions by two audience members asking about Chapter 7 intervention, presumably to forcibly disarm Hezbollah. Luckily this is such an outlandish and idiotic idea that I won't even have to lose any sleep wondering if the UN would be stupid enough to try it. (Remember how difficult it was to beef up UNIFIL this fall, when all parties involved knew that the mandate would not include disarming Hezbollah? Can anyone think of any country, besides Israel of course, that would be willing to fight the party of God on its own turf? Neither can I.)

At the end of the day, though, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised by how uninteresting and uninformed most of the questions were. Considering the talk's venue, that is.

The Times reports that Rice is ready to talk to Damascus and Tehran about Iraq:

American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.

The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.

The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush's avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.

..."We became convinced that the Iranians were not taking us seriously," said Philip D. Zelikow, who until December was the top aide to Ms. Rice. "So we've done some things to get them to take us seriously, so now we can try diplomacy."

In a perfect world, I'd be able to admit that my fears of escalating talk about hitting Iran was all for nothing, because the wise and judicious leaders of those united states had been using their saber rattling to give themselves a better spot at the negotiating table.

Unfortunately, the current administration is much more likely to use these talks as a veneer of diplomatic respectability so that later this year, before the bombs rain over Persia, they can say, "we tried diplomacy, but all these people understand is violence, so now the brutes have forced us to exterminate them in a magnanimous show of shock and awe."

I hope that I'm wrong, though, and that this is a step, albeit small, in the right direction and away from belligerence.

I've just read two interesting pieces on Iran. The first is in Foreign Affairs, penned by Ray Takeyh and argues for US détente with Iran. He argues for normalized relations as a starting point and not an end to negotiations, which should be direct and conducted on four tracks:

1. setting a timetable for resuming a diplomatic relationship, gradually phasing out U.S. sanctions, and returning Iran's frozen assets
2. nuclear negotiations
3. stabilizing Iraq
4. Israel-Palestine

The article is much more detailed than I can relay in a short post, so it's worth reading his outlook on the situation in Tehran and why past strategies on Iran are no longer appropriate and are likely to fail.

The second article is a piece by Sy Hersh on the Bush administration's redirection in the Middle East:

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The "redirection," as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

This seems like an obviously bad idea and reflects how the many in Washington are incapable of looking at the region in a nuanced way: either the Sunnis are evil or the Shi'a are. As anyone who lives here (or even has a fleeting interest in Middle Eastern politics) knows, the region is much more complicated than that. And the childish idea of throwing one's weight fully behind radical Saudi-backed Sunni elements against a mutual foe (the Soviets at the time) has already been tried, to disastrous results, in Afghanistan.

Hersh mentions working with Saudi-sponsored Sunni islamists in covert actions in Lebanon to undermine Hezbollah and Tehran:

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. "We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can," the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money "always gets in more pockets than you think it will," he said. "In this process, we're financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don't have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don't like. It’s a very high-risk venture."

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting "to hijack the state," but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. "Salafis are sick and hateful, and I'm very much against the idea of flirting with them," he said. "They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly."

So there is a decision to realign US policy in the region to fit even more tightly with Sunni interests, including in Iraq. It looks like the US is so blinded by the idea of getting at Iran that it's willing to target Iraqi Shi'a groups even when they (including al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi) are aligned with the US-backed government of al-Maliki. (Cleverly enough, it looks like al-Sadr is going to let the US forces do his dirty work by cleansing his militia of elements that are not firmly under his control.)

Likewise, they're stepping up their support here in Lebanon to include arming salafi Sunni groups that are allied only temporarily with the government in Beirut but whose long-standing alliances are with groups like al-Qaida. So this means that the US is effectively funding some of the "foreign jihadis" who are leaving places like Tripoli in northern Lebanon kill Americans in Iraq.

Moreover, it looks like Washington might be flirting with the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in hopes of overturning the Assad regime in Damascus -- the goal of at least part of the government in Beirut (Jumblatt and Geagea, and maybe Hariri too).

Now the Brotherhood is, in my mind, probably closer to Hamas and Hezbollah than it is to al-Qaida in terms of the possibility of it being reformed into a governing party as opposed to being just a terrorist group. But the fact remains that we've already followed the Saudis (who are now telling us that they can control these Sunni groups) when they took the lead with Pakistan in financing the Taliban, and look where that got us. At the end of the day, these radical Sunni groups hate the Shi'a and they hate Iran, but they hate us even more, and when they're done with what they consider the near enemy, they'll inevitably come looking for the far enemy: us.

Otherwise, the rest of the Hersh article addresses a lot of different issues in the region right now and is definitely worth reading, particularly as concerns Lebanese politics. Also, Hersh has managed to get an interview with Nasrallah, although he doesn't seem to have gotten many interesting quotes.

Apparently the US is stepping up its rhetoric in discouraging Israel from even exploring Syria's overtures to peace talks. Ha'aretz reports that the Israeli government is split:

Israeli officials, including those in the intelligence community, are divided over the degree to which Syrian President Bashar Assad is serious and sincere in his call for peace talks with Israel.

One view describes Assad's call as a propaganda campaign, and insists that the Syrian leader is not serious. Among those holding this view is Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

In Military Intelligence the view differs. There are those who say that Assad is serious in his call for peace talks, but also say that this does not mean that those talks would be easy for Israel. They even suggest that there is a very good chance that the talks would fail.

I've mentioned this before and still think that peace talks between Israel and Syria would be a good thing. Furhtermore, although I have my doubts about the exact offer and whether Assad will accept it, I have the feeling that Assad is ready to make a deal if he can get the Golan Heights back, maybe even if it means turning the land into a demilitarized park under Syrian sovereignty but open to Israeli picnickers.