Posts
The Islamists really are true believers
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Recently, we've heard Hizbullah's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, pick up on a theme dear to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It goes something like this, to borrow from Nasrallah's speech last Monday commemorating Imad Mughniyeh, Hizbullah's operations chief: "Now we are left with one question: Will Israel cease to exist one day? ... Yes ... Israel will cease to exist."
Nasrallah has often mentioned Israel's eventual evaporation. In 1992, following his appointment as head of Hizbullah, he described the party's long-term strategy as "fighting against Israel and liberating Jerusalem, as well as Imam Khomeini's proposal - namely ending Israel as a state."
One can debate the merits or demerits of such a pledge at great length. But the more interesting question, at least in this interregnum between thought and practice, between promise and fulfillment, is whether Nasrallah himself believes what he says. And then to ask what this tells us about armed Islamist movements located in Israel's neighborhood.
First, does Nasrallah believe? The answer would seem to be obvious. Rarely does the Sayyed utter a phrase that analysts will not quote with a rider firmly informing us that he says what he means and means what he says. One can certainly find quite numerous exceptions to that rule, particularly when Nasrallah pronounces on the slippery substance of Lebanese domestic politics. But when it comes to Israel, where the lines are far clearer, Nasrallah actually does mean what he says, and has been saying it with considerable consistency for quite a long time.
For example, in an interview with the newspaper Al-Wahda al-Islamiyya in February 1989, when Nasrallah was still only a Hizbullah field commander, he remarked: "The future is one of war [against Israel], not settlement; the line that [Yasser] Arafat is pursuing will only lead him to a closed door, and the day will come when warfare and the elimination of Israel will be the only options." (For a rundown of Nasrallah's statements translated into English, read the indispensible "Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah", edited by Nicholas Noe.)
Why is the topic important? Because over the years academics, analysts, journalists, and others, particularly the Westerners among them, who write about militant Islamist groups, have tended to project their own liberal attitudes and desires onto such groups, misinterpreting their intentions and largely ignoring what these groups say about themselves. Inasmuch as most such observers cannot really fathom the totalitarian strain in the aims and language of armed Islamists, totalitarian in the sense of pursuing a total idea, total in its purity, they cannot accept that the total idea can also be apocalyptic. Where Nasrallah and the leaders of Hamas will repeat that Israel's elimination is a quasi-religious duty, the sympathetic Westernized observer, for whom the concept of elimination is intolerable, will think much more benignly in terms of well-intentioned "bargaining." Hamas and Hizbullah are pragmatic, they will argue, so that their statements and deeds are only leverage to achieve specific political ends that, once attained, will allow a return to harmonious equilibrium.
This argument, so tirelessly made, is tiresomely irrelevant. No one has seriously suggested that Hizbullah or Hamas are not pragmatic. But one can be pragmatic in the means and not in the ends. If anything, pragmatism is obligatory in the pursuit of an absolute idea. And what characterizes those pursuing the absolute idea? In his essay "Terror and Liberalism", Paul Berman provides a partial answer, writing how French author Albert Camus noticed that out of the French Revolution and the 19th century had grown a modern impulse to rebel. That impulse, Berman wrote, "mutated into a cult of death. And the ideal was always the same. It was not skepticism and doubt. It was the ideal of submission ... it was the ideal of the one, instead of the many. The ideal of something godlike. The total state, the total doctrine, the total movement."
Hizbullah and Hamas are themselves products of rebellion - rebellion against what they took and still take to be a foul, unjust political order in Lebanon or Palestine or the Middle East in general. That drive has, naturally, even necessarily, pushed them to advocate the absolute negation of everything embodying that allegedly unjust order. Their motivating force is submission to the pursuit of the just idea, and this goes to the very heart of Islam itself, indeed denotes its very meaning, which is based on the embrace of total submission to God. Nasrallah may rarely employ religious terminology, but everything about the way he structures his thoughts, contentions, or vows reflects a deeply religious mindset.
One thing eternally confusing outside observers is that Hamas and Hizbullah are what have come to be described as "nationalist Islamists." Because nationalism started essentially as a Western notion, because its reference point is something reassuringly tangible like territory, not Armageddon, the Westernized writer will see something of himself or herself in such Islamists groups, and will resort to the terminology of modern nationalism to describe their actions. Hizbullah liberated South Lebanon, Hamas is trying to do the same in Palestine; their goals are no different than those of courageous patriots everywhere who have fought against foreign occupation. The American professor Norman Finkelstein recently went on Lebanese television to compare Hizbullah with the Red Army during World War II. Others liken Hamas to the National Liberation Front in Algeria - or why not its namesake in South Vietnam?
But what the observers won't grasp is that nationalism does not necessarily disqualify religion; time and again the two have advanced hand in hand, even in unlikely settings. Take the avowedly atheistic Vietnamese communists, for instance. Did they not pray at the secular altar of communism, so that their nationalist triumph was part of a higher historical movement toward the classless millennium? By the same token, when Hamas describes the land of Palestine as an endowment handed down from God (and in this agree with their foes, the religious Zionists), is it not terribly na•ve to suppose that the group's refusal to recognize Israel is just a ploy to strengthen its hand for a Camp David II or III?
One has to be careful in reading the statements of Islamist groups - or any political group for that matter. The flexibility of tactics counts for much. When Nasrallah argues that he will continue negotiating with Israel for the release of Arab prisoners, he's temporarily replacing his long-term undertaking to hasten Israel's demise with short-term gain. Ultimately, Hizbullah may fail in making Israel vanish, but it's what Hizbullah and Hamas say about themselves, the way they define their aspirations, that determines their behavior. For outside observers to ignore or reinterpret their words in order to justify a personal weakness for these groups' revolutionary seductions is both self-centered and analytically useless.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Reading between the lines of Detlev Mehlis
Reading between the lines of Detlev Mehlis
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Detlev Mehlis did not say much that was new on Tuesday evening, when he was interviewed by May Chidiac on her weekly program for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. The German judge repeated much of what he told me in an interview for The Wall Street Journal What-Murdoch-Must-Do-With-Dow-Jones published last January. However, it was Mehlis' first real opportunity to speak directly to the Lebanese public, and the exchange provided a useful occasion to revisit some of his more significant recent disclosures.
The Mehlis who spoke with Chidiac was awkwardly diplomatic about the advances made by his successor, Serge Brammertz, in the Hariri investigation. In his earlier interview with me, the German had been far blunter: "I haven't seen a word in his reports during the past two years confirming that he has moved forward." On LBC, while Mehlis repeated his misgivings, he added that "maybe [Brammertz's] way is the right way. He is an experienced prosecutor, so he may have had his reasons" for failing to provide more information on his progress.
Even if Mehlis carefully danced around the issue to avoid undermining the ongoing UN inquiry, a crucial question today that no one has been able to adequately answer is the following: How did Brammertz build up his case without having publicly identified a single new suspect in two years? After all, to unravel networks of decision-making and participation in a crime, it is generally necessary to arrest one person, who then leads an investigator to another, who will point the finger at a third, and so on. And if Brammertz did find new suspects, why did he not name and arrest them?
Mehlis' skepticism has been heightened by Brammertz's reference to "persons of interest" in his reports. A "person of interest" is definitely not a suspect, the German insists. That is unless Brammertz used that vague, antiseptic formulation to avoid being forced to order arrests, in the belief that this would complicate his investigative strategy.
But what strategy sidesteps employing arrests to open new doors of exploration? Mehlis didn't tell Chidiac this, but he told me that had he known earlier that the former Syrian vice president, Abdel-Halim Khaddam, was about to defect from Syria and turn against the Assad regime, he would have extended his stay as commissioner for some months. Mehlis did interview Khaddam, but didn't have enough time to use his revelations to recommend the arrest of Syrians other than those he had expected Brammertz to detain. Khaddam's break with the regime came after his late December 2005 tell-all interview with Al-Arabiyya, by which time Mehlis was preparing his return to Berlin.
So while Brammertz had a very different approach than Mehlis, the nagging uncertainty remains. Because Brammertz didn't arrest anyone in two years, did he miss golden opportunities to discover more? Did he allow suspects to roam freely? Did he inordinately rely on technical and forensic evidence, as well as witnesses, in building his case, to the detriment of uncovering facts about those involved in the killing itself? We won't know until the new investigator, Daniel Bellemare, hands his findings over to the Hariri tribunal and it decides whom to accuse.
Mehlis did mention the four generals who are still in prison, and one could immediately see why Akram Azoury, the lawyer of one of the four, Jamil al-Sayyed, was so displeased with the interview being aired. Mehlis essentially backed the continued detention of the generals, arguing that according to his reading of Lebanese law, a judge had the right to keep suspects in preventive detention if that was deemed necessary. He went on to tell Chidiac that the four were arrested because there were strong indications that they were preparing to flee Lebanon. That rationale still applies today, implicitly justifying their continued incarceration. Mehlis also reminded Chidiac that a Palestinian extradited from Lebanon in 1991 for his involvement in the LaBelle discotheque bombing was detained for seven years while awaiting sentencing in Berlin, and that the decision was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.
One issue Chidiac did not develop, however, was the matter of jurisdiction. In his Wall Street Journal interview, Mehlis stated, "I fear that suspects will end up in a judicial no-man's land, with Lebanon claiming they are under the UN's jurisdiction, and the UN saying that they must remain under Lebanese jurisdiction." This phrase is not as anodyne as it sounds. If the UN fails, for example, to take the four generals into custody before their sentencing, then the Lebanese judiciary will have to continue to legally validate detaining them. That may be doable in the case of most suspects, but perhaps not all, bringing about the latter's temporary release. In the case of the more important suspects, this potentially can harm the investigation.
A third idea Mehlis developed was that of responsibility. He remarked that the Hariri assassination was a case where we have a clear picture of who ordered the crime, but not of those on the ground who planned and triggered the fatal explosion. Chidiac correctly interpreted this as an accusation directed against Syria. But in his earlier interview, Mehlis made a broader point by noting, "As a prosecutor you can't prosecute governments and countries; you prosecute individuals." In the end, it is what Daniel Bellemare can prove in court that will stand - not what most people think about who killed Rafik Hariri. That is why it seems unrealistic to expect the beginning of a trial soon after the June deadline set for the UN commission's work. Bellemare is still connecting the dots, and it is not clear that he can finish doing so within three months.
Mehlis expressed optimism that the tribunal would identify the guilty, adding that even heads of state would not be protected. Amid recent press reports that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was still waiting for Syrian President Bashar Assad to present him with proposals on the Hariri tribunal (itself a worrying sign that Arab leaders care little about justice in the Hariri case), you have to wonder why that alleged delay? It could mean there is no political deal on the tribunal the Syrian regime would ever be able to contemplate short of the institution being abolished.
If so, that might explain why Mehlis is adamant that the culprits will be punished. Such Syrian intransigence would be thoroughly suicidal. But even if Mehlis is hopeful that the case he worked on in 2005 can yet be salvaged, plainly his effort to speak directly to the Lebanese people on Tuesday evening was his way of improving the odds.
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Detlev Mehlis did not say much that was new on Tuesday evening, when he was interviewed by May Chidiac on her weekly program for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. The German judge repeated much of what he told me in an interview for The Wall Street Journal What-Murdoch-Must-Do-With-Dow-Jones published last January. However, it was Mehlis' first real opportunity to speak directly to the Lebanese public, and the exchange provided a useful occasion to revisit some of his more significant recent disclosures.
The Mehlis who spoke with Chidiac was awkwardly diplomatic about the advances made by his successor, Serge Brammertz, in the Hariri investigation. In his earlier interview with me, the German had been far blunter: "I haven't seen a word in his reports during the past two years confirming that he has moved forward." On LBC, while Mehlis repeated his misgivings, he added that "maybe [Brammertz's] way is the right way. He is an experienced prosecutor, so he may have had his reasons" for failing to provide more information on his progress.
Even if Mehlis carefully danced around the issue to avoid undermining the ongoing UN inquiry, a crucial question today that no one has been able to adequately answer is the following: How did Brammertz build up his case without having publicly identified a single new suspect in two years? After all, to unravel networks of decision-making and participation in a crime, it is generally necessary to arrest one person, who then leads an investigator to another, who will point the finger at a third, and so on. And if Brammertz did find new suspects, why did he not name and arrest them?
Mehlis' skepticism has been heightened by Brammertz's reference to "persons of interest" in his reports. A "person of interest" is definitely not a suspect, the German insists. That is unless Brammertz used that vague, antiseptic formulation to avoid being forced to order arrests, in the belief that this would complicate his investigative strategy.
But what strategy sidesteps employing arrests to open new doors of exploration? Mehlis didn't tell Chidiac this, but he told me that had he known earlier that the former Syrian vice president, Abdel-Halim Khaddam, was about to defect from Syria and turn against the Assad regime, he would have extended his stay as commissioner for some months. Mehlis did interview Khaddam, but didn't have enough time to use his revelations to recommend the arrest of Syrians other than those he had expected Brammertz to detain. Khaddam's break with the regime came after his late December 2005 tell-all interview with Al-Arabiyya, by which time Mehlis was preparing his return to Berlin.
So while Brammertz had a very different approach than Mehlis, the nagging uncertainty remains. Because Brammertz didn't arrest anyone in two years, did he miss golden opportunities to discover more? Did he allow suspects to roam freely? Did he inordinately rely on technical and forensic evidence, as well as witnesses, in building his case, to the detriment of uncovering facts about those involved in the killing itself? We won't know until the new investigator, Daniel Bellemare, hands his findings over to the Hariri tribunal and it decides whom to accuse.
Mehlis did mention the four generals who are still in prison, and one could immediately see why Akram Azoury, the lawyer of one of the four, Jamil al-Sayyed, was so displeased with the interview being aired. Mehlis essentially backed the continued detention of the generals, arguing that according to his reading of Lebanese law, a judge had the right to keep suspects in preventive detention if that was deemed necessary. He went on to tell Chidiac that the four were arrested because there were strong indications that they were preparing to flee Lebanon. That rationale still applies today, implicitly justifying their continued incarceration. Mehlis also reminded Chidiac that a Palestinian extradited from Lebanon in 1991 for his involvement in the LaBelle discotheque bombing was detained for seven years while awaiting sentencing in Berlin, and that the decision was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.
One issue Chidiac did not develop, however, was the matter of jurisdiction. In his Wall Street Journal interview, Mehlis stated, "I fear that suspects will end up in a judicial no-man's land, with Lebanon claiming they are under the UN's jurisdiction, and the UN saying that they must remain under Lebanese jurisdiction." This phrase is not as anodyne as it sounds. If the UN fails, for example, to take the four generals into custody before their sentencing, then the Lebanese judiciary will have to continue to legally validate detaining them. That may be doable in the case of most suspects, but perhaps not all, bringing about the latter's temporary release. In the case of the more important suspects, this potentially can harm the investigation.
A third idea Mehlis developed was that of responsibility. He remarked that the Hariri assassination was a case where we have a clear picture of who ordered the crime, but not of those on the ground who planned and triggered the fatal explosion. Chidiac correctly interpreted this as an accusation directed against Syria. But in his earlier interview, Mehlis made a broader point by noting, "As a prosecutor you can't prosecute governments and countries; you prosecute individuals." In the end, it is what Daniel Bellemare can prove in court that will stand - not what most people think about who killed Rafik Hariri. That is why it seems unrealistic to expect the beginning of a trial soon after the June deadline set for the UN commission's work. Bellemare is still connecting the dots, and it is not clear that he can finish doing so within three months.
Mehlis expressed optimism that the tribunal would identify the guilty, adding that even heads of state would not be protected. Amid recent press reports that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was still waiting for Syrian President Bashar Assad to present him with proposals on the Hariri tribunal (itself a worrying sign that Arab leaders care little about justice in the Hariri case), you have to wonder why that alleged delay? It could mean there is no political deal on the tribunal the Syrian regime would ever be able to contemplate short of the institution being abolished.
If so, that might explain why Mehlis is adamant that the culprits will be punished. Such Syrian intransigence would be thoroughly suicidal. But even if Mehlis is hopeful that the case he worked on in 2005 can yet be salvaged, plainly his effort to speak directly to the Lebanese people on Tuesday evening was his way of improving the odds.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Samantha Power and Democratic evasion on Iraq
There is a passage in Samantha Power’s "A Problem from Hell," her Pulitzer Prize And-the-Winner-Is-Them-Again -winning book on how the United States dealt with genocide throughout the 20th century, worth pondering for what it says about hypocrisy in the formulation of foreign policy. It is also worth pondering for what it tells us about Power herself, an academic who resigned last week as an advisor to Barack Obama Clinton-and-Obama-Economic-Plans Mar-08 after calling his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an exchange with a Scottish newspaper.
Here, Power is writing about Anthony Lake, who in 1970 resigned from the National Security Council in protest against the Nixon administration’s expansion of the Vietnam War to Cambodia. A year after his departure, Lake and a colleague published an article describing what they viewed as a problem in the way America shaped its overseas behavior. Power quotes a paragraph from that article in the context of her own chapter on the war in Bosnia, management of which landed in Lake’s lap after he became national security adviser to President Bill Clinton in 1993.
In their article, Lake and his colleague argued, "A liberalism attempting to deal with intensely human problems at home abruptly but naturally shifts to abstract concepts when making decisions about events beyond the water’s edge. ’Nations,’ ’interests,’ ’influence,’ ’prestige,’ - are all disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end."
Power follows this observation with an admonition. She reminds us that "[w]hen Lake and his Democratic colleagues were put to the test" - in other words when Lake was appointed a senior Clinton administration official - "although they were far more attentive to the human suffering in Bosnia, they did not intervene to ameliorate it."
You have to wonder how Lake feels about Power’s phrase today, because if Power was an adviser to Obama, Anthony Lake happens to still be one. In reading her criticism, what comes to his mind? That Power, even if what she said was partly justified, had gone a bit overboard in picking Lake as the exemplar of American lethargy in Bosnia? That she had misleadingly depicted him as an armchair moralist, when the fact is he had written his earlier article after years of being "put to the test" at the State Department, and had even interrupted a promising career out of a sense of moral compunction? That Power, though a journalist in the former Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996, was herself perhaps something of an armchair moralist for having distributed stern moral verdicts from a safe perch at Harvard B-School-Isnt-What-It-Used-To-Be University, where she wrote her book - the kind of uncompromising verdicts she would later slice and dice and measure and dilute once she had stepped into the pit of political calculation as an Obama confidante?
The dilutions notwithstanding, weeks before her resignation Power had become a lighting rod for criticism directed against Obama. Her outlook on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had provoked the ire of supporters of Israel, amid signs that Obama was having trouble with Jewish voters. Obama’s case was not helped any by the unearthing of a comment Power made in 2002, seemingly advocating American military intervention on the Palestinians’ behalf. So bizarre was her proposal that Power later told an Israeli reporter, "Even I don’t understand it ... This makes no sense to me."
Power’s self-immolating comment on Clinton was made during a trip to the United Kingdom. She had the good grace to end it all quickly, though another Obama adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, insisted an apology would have been enough. However, Power showed more political acumen than he did. By hanging on, she would have only remained a magnet of controversy, detracting from Obama’s homilies, with the likelihood that the campaign would have eventually jettisoned her anyway.
But Power made a much more significant statement in London, one in which she talked about Obama and Iraq. That the Clintonites brought out their knives in response, that what Power said was valuable only as a weapon in the ongoing pursuit of convention delegates, a weapon doubly lethal for being added to her rash attack on Hillary Clinton, showed how incapable the Democrats are of debating Iraq’s future in a forthright way.
In an interview with the BBC program HARDtalk, Power was asked about Barack Obama’s plan to remove American troops from Iraq. In her response, she described the candidate’s tight withdrawal timetable as "a best-case scenario," which he would "revisit" once elected. That sliced and diced answer prompted the show’s host to inquire whether Obama’s commitment to withdraw most soldiers within 16 months was, actually, no commitment at all. Power’s reply was revealing:
"You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009. He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a US Senator. He will rely upon a plan - an operational plan - that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn’t have daily access now, as a result of not being the president. So to think - it would be the height of ideology to sort of say, ’Well, I said it, therefore I’m going to impose it on whatever reality greets me.’"
Between Power’s "monster" quote and her admission that Barack Obama was being less than candid about his intentions in Iraq, suddenly there was too much light shining onto Obama’s studied ambiguities. Campaign manager David Plouffe denied there was any change in the candidate’s thinking on Iraq, then welcomed Power’s exit. Yet Power had not said anything so very different than Obama himself. For example, asked in February by Steve Kroft of CBS whether he would stick to his withdrawal timetable even if sectarian violence ensued, Obama had responded: "No, I always reserve as commander in chief, the right to assess the situation."
And that was nothing compared to what Obama said in 2004, the day after his keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Boston. Speaking at a lunch sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, he had declared: "The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster. It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died ... It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective."
Power’s sin was to be frank, as the debate over Iraq continues to be distorted by falsehood. What none of the Democratic candidates will admit to, even as they deftly contradict themselves to later justify an about-face, is that there is little prospect of the US leaving Iraq without sectarian conflict ensuing. Allowing this outcome would indeed be the betrayal Obama warned against in Boston, before betraying his rejection of such a betrayal by issuing his promise of a timed pullout that he is again likely to betray.
But thanks to Anthony Lake’s 1971 co-authored essay, we now know that the human implications of withdrawal will carry less weight than the withdrawal’s bearing on US national interests. And what is the appeal to US interests in Iraq? That Washington cannot afford to leave the country because that would favor Iran, which would interpret an American exit as the long-awaited opening to impose itself as the paramount power in the Persian Gulf, possibly with a nuclear weapons capacity in the coming years.
It’s difficult to brand Power a victim, however, because she added to the ambient deceit on Iraq. In an interview with Salon in February, for example, she answered a question as to how the US would get out of Iraq by glutinously suggesting that Washington might have to accept the "idea of sectarian or ethnic relocation if people are in a mixed neighborhood and feel that they’d be safer in a more homogenous neighborhood." She also strongly favored doling out a lot of money - to Iraq’s neighbors for having taken in refugees (though Power failed to consider their contribution to the carnage in Iraq), and to internally displaced people.
It was a pitiful response from someone who had written so effectively about how American inaction, even mendaciousness, had allowed mass murder to go on in such places as Nazi-controlled Europe, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda - not to mention Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Yet here Power was with not a word to say about the possibility of mass murder in a post-American Iraq, proposing instead that the US essentially consent to ethnic cleansing. There was nothing in what she told Salon about ignoring "some plan" that Obama had crafted as a candidate. There was nothing about relying on the sound judgment of people on the ground in Iraq. You could almost hear Tony Lake laughing out loud as Power’s crystal ball of self-righteousness shattered into a thousand little shards of duplicity and elision.
But we have to hand it to Power that she subsequently blundered into coming clean. We have to hand it to her that she realized that coming clean meant she couldn’t last in the Obama campaign. And we have to admit that her BBC comments were about as close to the truth on America’s choices in Iraq as we’re going to hear from any of the Democratic campaigns.
Here, Power is writing about Anthony Lake, who in 1970 resigned from the National Security Council in protest against the Nixon administration’s expansion of the Vietnam War to Cambodia. A year after his departure, Lake and a colleague published an article describing what they viewed as a problem in the way America shaped its overseas behavior. Power quotes a paragraph from that article in the context of her own chapter on the war in Bosnia, management of which landed in Lake’s lap after he became national security adviser to President Bill Clinton in 1993.
In their article, Lake and his colleague argued, "A liberalism attempting to deal with intensely human problems at home abruptly but naturally shifts to abstract concepts when making decisions about events beyond the water’s edge. ’Nations,’ ’interests,’ ’influence,’ ’prestige,’ - are all disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end."
Power follows this observation with an admonition. She reminds us that "[w]hen Lake and his Democratic colleagues were put to the test" - in other words when Lake was appointed a senior Clinton administration official - "although they were far more attentive to the human suffering in Bosnia, they did not intervene to ameliorate it."
You have to wonder how Lake feels about Power’s phrase today, because if Power was an adviser to Obama, Anthony Lake happens to still be one. In reading her criticism, what comes to his mind? That Power, even if what she said was partly justified, had gone a bit overboard in picking Lake as the exemplar of American lethargy in Bosnia? That she had misleadingly depicted him as an armchair moralist, when the fact is he had written his earlier article after years of being "put to the test" at the State Department, and had even interrupted a promising career out of a sense of moral compunction? That Power, though a journalist in the former Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996, was herself perhaps something of an armchair moralist for having distributed stern moral verdicts from a safe perch at Harvard B-School-Isnt-What-It-Used-To-Be University, where she wrote her book - the kind of uncompromising verdicts she would later slice and dice and measure and dilute once she had stepped into the pit of political calculation as an Obama confidante?
The dilutions notwithstanding, weeks before her resignation Power had become a lighting rod for criticism directed against Obama. Her outlook on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had provoked the ire of supporters of Israel, amid signs that Obama was having trouble with Jewish voters. Obama’s case was not helped any by the unearthing of a comment Power made in 2002, seemingly advocating American military intervention on the Palestinians’ behalf. So bizarre was her proposal that Power later told an Israeli reporter, "Even I don’t understand it ... This makes no sense to me."
Power’s self-immolating comment on Clinton was made during a trip to the United Kingdom. She had the good grace to end it all quickly, though another Obama adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, insisted an apology would have been enough. However, Power showed more political acumen than he did. By hanging on, she would have only remained a magnet of controversy, detracting from Obama’s homilies, with the likelihood that the campaign would have eventually jettisoned her anyway.
But Power made a much more significant statement in London, one in which she talked about Obama and Iraq. That the Clintonites brought out their knives in response, that what Power said was valuable only as a weapon in the ongoing pursuit of convention delegates, a weapon doubly lethal for being added to her rash attack on Hillary Clinton, showed how incapable the Democrats are of debating Iraq’s future in a forthright way.
In an interview with the BBC program HARDtalk, Power was asked about Barack Obama’s plan to remove American troops from Iraq. In her response, she described the candidate’s tight withdrawal timetable as "a best-case scenario," which he would "revisit" once elected. That sliced and diced answer prompted the show’s host to inquire whether Obama’s commitment to withdraw most soldiers within 16 months was, actually, no commitment at all. Power’s reply was revealing:
"You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009. He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a US Senator. He will rely upon a plan - an operational plan - that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn’t have daily access now, as a result of not being the president. So to think - it would be the height of ideology to sort of say, ’Well, I said it, therefore I’m going to impose it on whatever reality greets me.’"
Between Power’s "monster" quote and her admission that Barack Obama was being less than candid about his intentions in Iraq, suddenly there was too much light shining onto Obama’s studied ambiguities. Campaign manager David Plouffe denied there was any change in the candidate’s thinking on Iraq, then welcomed Power’s exit. Yet Power had not said anything so very different than Obama himself. For example, asked in February by Steve Kroft of CBS whether he would stick to his withdrawal timetable even if sectarian violence ensued, Obama had responded: "No, I always reserve as commander in chief, the right to assess the situation."
And that was nothing compared to what Obama said in 2004, the day after his keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Boston. Speaking at a lunch sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, he had declared: "The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster. It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died ... It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective."
Power’s sin was to be frank, as the debate over Iraq continues to be distorted by falsehood. What none of the Democratic candidates will admit to, even as they deftly contradict themselves to later justify an about-face, is that there is little prospect of the US leaving Iraq without sectarian conflict ensuing. Allowing this outcome would indeed be the betrayal Obama warned against in Boston, before betraying his rejection of such a betrayal by issuing his promise of a timed pullout that he is again likely to betray.
But thanks to Anthony Lake’s 1971 co-authored essay, we now know that the human implications of withdrawal will carry less weight than the withdrawal’s bearing on US national interests. And what is the appeal to US interests in Iraq? That Washington cannot afford to leave the country because that would favor Iran, which would interpret an American exit as the long-awaited opening to impose itself as the paramount power in the Persian Gulf, possibly with a nuclear weapons capacity in the coming years.
It’s difficult to brand Power a victim, however, because she added to the ambient deceit on Iraq. In an interview with Salon in February, for example, she answered a question as to how the US would get out of Iraq by glutinously suggesting that Washington might have to accept the "idea of sectarian or ethnic relocation if people are in a mixed neighborhood and feel that they’d be safer in a more homogenous neighborhood." She also strongly favored doling out a lot of money - to Iraq’s neighbors for having taken in refugees (though Power failed to consider their contribution to the carnage in Iraq), and to internally displaced people.
It was a pitiful response from someone who had written so effectively about how American inaction, even mendaciousness, had allowed mass murder to go on in such places as Nazi-controlled Europe, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda - not to mention Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Yet here Power was with not a word to say about the possibility of mass murder in a post-American Iraq, proposing instead that the US essentially consent to ethnic cleansing. There was nothing in what she told Salon about ignoring "some plan" that Obama had crafted as a candidate. There was nothing about relying on the sound judgment of people on the ground in Iraq. You could almost hear Tony Lake laughing out loud as Power’s crystal ball of self-righteousness shattered into a thousand little shards of duplicity and elision.
But we have to hand it to Power that she subsequently blundered into coming clean. We have to hand it to her that she realized that coming clean meant she couldn’t last in the Obama campaign. And we have to admit that her BBC comments were about as close to the truth on America’s choices in Iraq as we’re going to hear from any of the Democratic campaigns.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Time may play against Syria in Lebanon
Time may play against Syria in Lebanon
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, March 13, 2008
In recent weeks, a message has been coming out of Iran, one transmitted to Arab leaders and now through proliferating press reports. It is roughly this: Lebanon is in for a prolonged stalemate, but Tehran won't allow the security situation to get out of hand. The Iranians are buying time until a new administration arrives in Washington, but won't cross Syria in Lebanon by pushing for a solution to the political crisis in the country.
If one wants to see the cup as half full, this might be relatively good news. It means Iran is giving the Syrians latitude to return to Lebanon, but also paralyzing them by blocking any recourse to civil war - civil war the Syrians would readily push Hizbullah into were it not for Tehran's insistence on protecting its investment in the party. If one wants to see the glass as half empty, then all the Iranians are saying is that they will do nothing to end the debilitating stalemate in Lebanon, with the terrible consequences this might have for the country's economy and institutions.
But a question that needs to be answered is whether Syria actually benefits from a long Lebanese void. The conventional wisdom is that the regime of President Bashar Assad has nothing to lose. By imposing a vacuum it strengthens its hand; no new administration will be worse for Damascus than the Bush administration; and Arab divisions will, sooner or later, permit the Syrians to return to the center of regional politics, particularly if the situation in the Palestinian areas worsens and Hamas' armed struggle turns Syria into an inevitable interlocutor.
That may be true, but there may be another way of looking at things - one less advantageous to Damascus. For starters, Syria, while it can enforce a vacuum in Lebanon, is proving less able than ever to shape that vacuum. The problem with the Assad regime is that it is both too rigid and too hasty. It refuses to budge on army commander General Michel Suleiman's election, fearing it might lead to normalization Syria could not reverse. At the same time, it has shown itself incapable of presenting any alternative scheme. The Syrian plan is obstruction, nothing less, but also nothing more. Without that alternative - or rather without an alternative different than absolute Syrian rule in Lebanon - Assad will not get very far in advancing what he would like Syria's Lebanese role to be. That's as good a sign as any of the essential weakness in Syrian conduct today.
The second problem, Syrian hastiness, has been just as damaging. Assad is acting today much as he did before the botched extension of President Emile Lahoud's mandate in 2004. He is under the impression that intimidation alone will allow Syria to achieve its aims. Rarely does the Syrian leader bother to carefully prepare the terrain for his policies. Yet in the same way that he provoked a major crisis by forcing Lebanon's Parliament to keep Lahoud on, his insistence now on re-imposing Syrian hegemony in Lebanon has led to a regional and even an international crisis in which everyone is focused on denying Damascus any gains.
Time also plays to Assad's disadvantage in perpetuating a dilemma the Syrian regime never resolved after 2005. The choice, until now, has been a stark one: Lebanon or the Hariri tribunal. It was made clear to Assad in one way or another during the past two years that the only way he could expect a baroque deal on the tribunal sparing the top tier of his leadership was by accepting an end to Syria's domination of Lebanon. What he could not have, however, was Lebanon and the tribunal's disappearance. Yet that is precisely what the Syrians regularly demand, oblivious to the fact that the international community will never sign off on this.
Syria's leeway to choose between the tribunal and Lebanon is quickly evaporating. Within the next 10 months, Syria may well find several of its officials facing legal accusations they could have avoided not long ago. But the Assad regime, by repeatedly trying to thwart the tribunal, actually helped breathe new life into it and is today accelerating its formation. In early 2006, few were the Arab states that wanted to see Hariri's assassination go to trial. Today, the Saudis in particular, but not them alone, view the tribunal as the best means available to bring about a change in Syria's alliance with Iran, but also, and as important, in its destructive approach to Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories.
Time also doesn't play to Syria's favor inside Lebanon. One success of the March 14 coalition was to engineer a smooth transfer of Lahoud's prerogatives to the Siniora government after the president's departure. The Syrian campaign of assassination has partly been destined to alter the balance of forces inside Parliament and the government; but its more pervasive impact has been to prevent the parliamentary majority from engaging in politics on the ground by forcing its representatives indoors. Yet by blocking Suleiman's election and hoping time will take its toll, Syria has allowed Siniora's government to stay in place, engage in politics, and strengthen its hold over key ministries such as defense, interior, justice, foreign affairs, and finance. This has allowed the majority to build up protective networks inside the army and security services, move ahead on the Hariri tribunal, and portray itself as the true representative of the state while Syria and its allies expose themselves as anti-state.
And finally time may be meaningless with respect to the coming administration in Washington. Assad errs if he imagines that a new American president will suddenly reverse course when it comes to Syria. First of all, the Syrian regime is infamous for being a lousy gamble - as US Secretary of State Colin Powell learned to his detriment when Assad lied to him about ending Syria's illicit trade with Iraq in 2001. No new president will make improving relations with Syria a priority issue so early in his or her presidency if the likelihood of embarrassment is high, especially as the more significant aim of opening up to Iran could be difficult to sell domestically if weighed down by a simultaneous opening to Damascus.
Second, Syria is unlikely to agree to minimal American conditions for a dialogue: accepting that its Lebanon interregnum is permanently over and ending Syrian support for Hamas and Hizbullah, but also for Al-Qaeda in Iraq. No administration could realistically enter into serious talks by demanding less than that, regardless of the irresponsible Democratic campaign rhetoric heard today. A new president will have to show something for risking talking to the Syrians, but Assad, as is his way, will doubtless open negotiations by demanding what the US can offer him.
Third, the Syrians shouldn't underestimate that President George W. Bush MBA-Presidents Sep-07 still has 10 months in which to take decisions on Syria that a new administration will have trouble reversing - assuming it wants to reverse anything. That includes economic sanctions, the bolstering of a consensus against Syria internationally, and actions in Iraq's Sunni areas that would make engaging Syria unnecessary. Most important, US efforts also include ensuring that the Hariri tribunal is established as soon as possible, and that Daniel Bellemare, the future prosecutor of the tribunal, issues his act of accusation before the US administration leaves office. This seems likely, according to diplomats in Beirut. As Bush knows, no successor would engage Assad once the Syrian regime is implicated in Hariri's murder, particularly if it rebuffs all cooperation with the tribunal.
So time may not be on Syria's side after all, even if Iran can afford to wait. That poses a question: Are Iran's priorities beginning to undermine those of Damascus, despite their close alliance? There is no obvious answer, but in an odd way Syria has never seemed so far from succeeding in its Lebanese endeavors, and playing out the clock may be its latest blunder.
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, March 13, 2008
In recent weeks, a message has been coming out of Iran, one transmitted to Arab leaders and now through proliferating press reports. It is roughly this: Lebanon is in for a prolonged stalemate, but Tehran won't allow the security situation to get out of hand. The Iranians are buying time until a new administration arrives in Washington, but won't cross Syria in Lebanon by pushing for a solution to the political crisis in the country.
If one wants to see the cup as half full, this might be relatively good news. It means Iran is giving the Syrians latitude to return to Lebanon, but also paralyzing them by blocking any recourse to civil war - civil war the Syrians would readily push Hizbullah into were it not for Tehran's insistence on protecting its investment in the party. If one wants to see the glass as half empty, then all the Iranians are saying is that they will do nothing to end the debilitating stalemate in Lebanon, with the terrible consequences this might have for the country's economy and institutions.
But a question that needs to be answered is whether Syria actually benefits from a long Lebanese void. The conventional wisdom is that the regime of President Bashar Assad has nothing to lose. By imposing a vacuum it strengthens its hand; no new administration will be worse for Damascus than the Bush administration; and Arab divisions will, sooner or later, permit the Syrians to return to the center of regional politics, particularly if the situation in the Palestinian areas worsens and Hamas' armed struggle turns Syria into an inevitable interlocutor.
That may be true, but there may be another way of looking at things - one less advantageous to Damascus. For starters, Syria, while it can enforce a vacuum in Lebanon, is proving less able than ever to shape that vacuum. The problem with the Assad regime is that it is both too rigid and too hasty. It refuses to budge on army commander General Michel Suleiman's election, fearing it might lead to normalization Syria could not reverse. At the same time, it has shown itself incapable of presenting any alternative scheme. The Syrian plan is obstruction, nothing less, but also nothing more. Without that alternative - or rather without an alternative different than absolute Syrian rule in Lebanon - Assad will not get very far in advancing what he would like Syria's Lebanese role to be. That's as good a sign as any of the essential weakness in Syrian conduct today.
The second problem, Syrian hastiness, has been just as damaging. Assad is acting today much as he did before the botched extension of President Emile Lahoud's mandate in 2004. He is under the impression that intimidation alone will allow Syria to achieve its aims. Rarely does the Syrian leader bother to carefully prepare the terrain for his policies. Yet in the same way that he provoked a major crisis by forcing Lebanon's Parliament to keep Lahoud on, his insistence now on re-imposing Syrian hegemony in Lebanon has led to a regional and even an international crisis in which everyone is focused on denying Damascus any gains.
Time also plays to Assad's disadvantage in perpetuating a dilemma the Syrian regime never resolved after 2005. The choice, until now, has been a stark one: Lebanon or the Hariri tribunal. It was made clear to Assad in one way or another during the past two years that the only way he could expect a baroque deal on the tribunal sparing the top tier of his leadership was by accepting an end to Syria's domination of Lebanon. What he could not have, however, was Lebanon and the tribunal's disappearance. Yet that is precisely what the Syrians regularly demand, oblivious to the fact that the international community will never sign off on this.
Syria's leeway to choose between the tribunal and Lebanon is quickly evaporating. Within the next 10 months, Syria may well find several of its officials facing legal accusations they could have avoided not long ago. But the Assad regime, by repeatedly trying to thwart the tribunal, actually helped breathe new life into it and is today accelerating its formation. In early 2006, few were the Arab states that wanted to see Hariri's assassination go to trial. Today, the Saudis in particular, but not them alone, view the tribunal as the best means available to bring about a change in Syria's alliance with Iran, but also, and as important, in its destructive approach to Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories.
Time also doesn't play to Syria's favor inside Lebanon. One success of the March 14 coalition was to engineer a smooth transfer of Lahoud's prerogatives to the Siniora government after the president's departure. The Syrian campaign of assassination has partly been destined to alter the balance of forces inside Parliament and the government; but its more pervasive impact has been to prevent the parliamentary majority from engaging in politics on the ground by forcing its representatives indoors. Yet by blocking Suleiman's election and hoping time will take its toll, Syria has allowed Siniora's government to stay in place, engage in politics, and strengthen its hold over key ministries such as defense, interior, justice, foreign affairs, and finance. This has allowed the majority to build up protective networks inside the army and security services, move ahead on the Hariri tribunal, and portray itself as the true representative of the state while Syria and its allies expose themselves as anti-state.
And finally time may be meaningless with respect to the coming administration in Washington. Assad errs if he imagines that a new American president will suddenly reverse course when it comes to Syria. First of all, the Syrian regime is infamous for being a lousy gamble - as US Secretary of State Colin Powell learned to his detriment when Assad lied to him about ending Syria's illicit trade with Iraq in 2001. No new president will make improving relations with Syria a priority issue so early in his or her presidency if the likelihood of embarrassment is high, especially as the more significant aim of opening up to Iran could be difficult to sell domestically if weighed down by a simultaneous opening to Damascus.
Second, Syria is unlikely to agree to minimal American conditions for a dialogue: accepting that its Lebanon interregnum is permanently over and ending Syrian support for Hamas and Hizbullah, but also for Al-Qaeda in Iraq. No administration could realistically enter into serious talks by demanding less than that, regardless of the irresponsible Democratic campaign rhetoric heard today. A new president will have to show something for risking talking to the Syrians, but Assad, as is his way, will doubtless open negotiations by demanding what the US can offer him.
Third, the Syrians shouldn't underestimate that President George W. Bush MBA-Presidents Sep-07 still has 10 months in which to take decisions on Syria that a new administration will have trouble reversing - assuming it wants to reverse anything. That includes economic sanctions, the bolstering of a consensus against Syria internationally, and actions in Iraq's Sunni areas that would make engaging Syria unnecessary. Most important, US efforts also include ensuring that the Hariri tribunal is established as soon as possible, and that Daniel Bellemare, the future prosecutor of the tribunal, issues his act of accusation before the US administration leaves office. This seems likely, according to diplomats in Beirut. As Bush knows, no successor would engage Assad once the Syrian regime is implicated in Hariri's murder, particularly if it rebuffs all cooperation with the tribunal.
So time may not be on Syria's side after all, even if Iran can afford to wait. That poses a question: Are Iran's priorities beginning to undermine those of Damascus, despite their close alliance? There is no obvious answer, but in an odd way Syria has never seemed so far from succeeding in its Lebanese endeavors, and playing out the clock may be its latest blunder.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
The USS Cole and America's election
The USS Cole and America's election
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, March 06, 2008
The USS Cole has certainly created a ruckus in Lebanon, especially when no one has actually seen the ship. But amid all the howls of "gunboat diplomacy" and dire warnings that the United States cannot impose its will in such a way, most people are missing the broader Bush administration goal: to tie the hands of a successor administration, particularly a Democratic one, in Lebanon and particularly Iraq.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius recently highlighted this point in an article. He observed that US President George W. Bush wanted to maintain a large force in Iraq until the November election, "because that would open the next administration's bargaining on troop levels at a higher level - and allow the next president to cut troops without getting down to a bare-bones level that might be dangerous." He went on to note that Defense Secretary Robert Gates seemed to share Bush's view, and concluded: "[Y]ou get the sense that Bush's biggest concern is that the next president not unravel the gains he has made in Iraq."
That's obvious, as is the fact that what happens with Syria is essential to the success of this strategy. The USS Cole's deployment came in a larger context of heightened American pressure against the regime of President Bashar Assad. Lebanon was one of the intended beneficiaries, but on Tuesday Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was vaguer in describing the vessel's mission: "It is simply to make very clear that the US is capable and willing to defend its interests and the interests of its allies." And when Washington puts the military option on the table, it is probably not because it expects to lob missiles from the Mediterranean; it is to remind Syria that America has 160,000 soldiers in next-door Iraq.
In that sense, one Arabic newspaper may have gotten it right when it compared the USS Cole move to what the late Hafez Assad faced in 1998, when Turkey bullied the Syrians into expelling Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), from their territory. The Turks proved more to the point in that their commandos were routinely operating dozens of kilometers inside Syria in the Kamishli area, while Turkish armor was concentrated along the border. But Assad realized that Ocalan did not merit a war, so he instructed the Syrian intelligence chief in Lebanon, Ghazi Kanaan, briefly imported from Anjar, to say yes to pretty much any of the demands the Turks imposed. The result was the Adana Agreement of October 1998, a pragmatic Syrian capitulation.
Nothing so muscular seems to be taking place today. However, the US Treasury Department Bernanke-Changed-Course Nov-07 recently imposed financial sanctions on Rami Makhluf, the cousin of Bashar Assad, freezing his assets under US jurisdiction and prohibiting Americans from conducting business with him. But Makhluf is more than just a privileged Syrian getting fat through regime clout. He is the most powerful businessman in Syria and a financial leg of the Assad regime. While Makhluf and Syria's Lebanese peons responded, in chorus, that Makhluf had no assets under US jurisdiction, let alone did business with Americans, that wasn't especially relevant. To be placed on an American watch list is the anteroom to hell for anyone conducting financial affairs in the world, and Makhluf's accounts are reportedly already under international scrutiny.
A week after that decision, the Bush administration hit out against another lever of the Syrian regime: its ability to wreak havoc in Iraq. The US Treasury targeted four other Syrians under the same legislation used with Makhluf, particularly one Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih, otherwise known as Abu Ghadiyah, who has played an important role in supporting Al-Qaeda operations in Iraq and in funneling militants via Syria. A primary objective in Washington today is to so cripple Al-Qaeda in Iraq, that a drawdown of US forces in the coming months would not substantially threaten the achievements of the "surge." At the same time, without a serious Al-Qaeda card in Syria's hand, a new American president would have no incentive to engage Damascus over Iraq's future.
To interpret the USS Cole's arrival in isolation of these two events, therefore, would be a mistake. We should add a third, equally appropriate development. While Turkey has of late tried to mediate between Syria and Israel, and is sometimes regarded by the Assad regime as a reliable neighborhood comrade, the fact is that Ankara has largely gotten over its bumpy interregnum with Washington, as shown by American acquiescence in the recent Turkish incursion into northern Iraq. Turkey is also considering buying an Israeli satellite, and selling one was a principal ambition of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on his visit to Ankara in mid-February. As security, particularly security with regard to the Kurds, rises on Turkey's list of priorities, the more reluctant it may be to cross America on its regional priorities - impairing Syria being one of them.
The USS Cole affair will blow over, but it is quite possible (at least if we believe the departing State Department official Nicholas Burns) that more economic sanctions will be imposed on Syria this year. The country's financial system is hardly as invulnerable as many claim. With oil reserves nearing their end and the Syrian government increasingly obliged to lift subsidies on essential products, in the midst of an international increase in prices no less, punitive measures can hurt. They're unlikely to change Syrian behavior much. However, taken in unison with the Hariri tribunal being set up in The Hague, the limited margin of maneuver of Syria's Lebanese allies, the abandonment of Al-Qaeda in Iraq by the country's Sunnis, growing Syrian isolation in the Arab world, Israel's apparent ability to act with impunity in the heart of the Syrian capital, and Turkey's collaboration with the US against the PKK, the Assad regime might at some point have to start overhauling its political calculations.
The Bush administration may already have succeeded in making Lebanon a "red line" in terms of a Syrian return. With its now-usual haste, the Assad regime has achieved precisely what it sought to avoid when it began its bid to reimpose its hegemony in Beirut: It focused the attention of all those in the Arab world and outside who have no intention of allowing this to happen. The mainly Sunni Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, agree that giving Syria and Iran a Lebanese victory would consolidate the "Shiite arc" they are so existentially afraid of. The US has a Lebanon policy today, and it won't be easy for a new president to reverse it if it means that America's Arab allies are harmed.
And what about Iraq? Despite learned analyses in the past two years affirming that Iraq was in a civil war, the violence has stopped short of Armageddon. There are many things the US can do wrong to undermine the pluses of the surge, but that will not change the fact that Al-Qaeda, Syria's sole weapon in Iraq's morass, is not something Iraqis, Arabs, or even Iranians are keen to see revived. If Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Iraq this week did not show Syria that Iranian-Iraqi normalization may come at Al-Qaeda's expense, then nothing will.
That's where US military browbeating comes in. No one bothered to console Syria all the times Israel bombed its territory or murdered someone in its capital; no one approves of Syrian efforts in Lebanon now; Syria is a nuisance in Gaza, so the prospect of a helping hand from Israel is doubtful, even if Syrian diplomats are talking to Israelis. The USS Cole reminds Syria that it is exposed, and that George W. Bush believes a weak Syria is the best means of protecting his policies in the Middle East.
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, March 06, 2008
The USS Cole has certainly created a ruckus in Lebanon, especially when no one has actually seen the ship. But amid all the howls of "gunboat diplomacy" and dire warnings that the United States cannot impose its will in such a way, most people are missing the broader Bush administration goal: to tie the hands of a successor administration, particularly a Democratic one, in Lebanon and particularly Iraq.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius recently highlighted this point in an article. He observed that US President George W. Bush wanted to maintain a large force in Iraq until the November election, "because that would open the next administration's bargaining on troop levels at a higher level - and allow the next president to cut troops without getting down to a bare-bones level that might be dangerous." He went on to note that Defense Secretary Robert Gates seemed to share Bush's view, and concluded: "[Y]ou get the sense that Bush's biggest concern is that the next president not unravel the gains he has made in Iraq."
That's obvious, as is the fact that what happens with Syria is essential to the success of this strategy. The USS Cole's deployment came in a larger context of heightened American pressure against the regime of President Bashar Assad. Lebanon was one of the intended beneficiaries, but on Tuesday Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was vaguer in describing the vessel's mission: "It is simply to make very clear that the US is capable and willing to defend its interests and the interests of its allies." And when Washington puts the military option on the table, it is probably not because it expects to lob missiles from the Mediterranean; it is to remind Syria that America has 160,000 soldiers in next-door Iraq.
In that sense, one Arabic newspaper may have gotten it right when it compared the USS Cole move to what the late Hafez Assad faced in 1998, when Turkey bullied the Syrians into expelling Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), from their territory. The Turks proved more to the point in that their commandos were routinely operating dozens of kilometers inside Syria in the Kamishli area, while Turkish armor was concentrated along the border. But Assad realized that Ocalan did not merit a war, so he instructed the Syrian intelligence chief in Lebanon, Ghazi Kanaan, briefly imported from Anjar, to say yes to pretty much any of the demands the Turks imposed. The result was the Adana Agreement of October 1998, a pragmatic Syrian capitulation.
Nothing so muscular seems to be taking place today. However, the US Treasury Department Bernanke-Changed-Course Nov-07 recently imposed financial sanctions on Rami Makhluf, the cousin of Bashar Assad, freezing his assets under US jurisdiction and prohibiting Americans from conducting business with him. But Makhluf is more than just a privileged Syrian getting fat through regime clout. He is the most powerful businessman in Syria and a financial leg of the Assad regime. While Makhluf and Syria's Lebanese peons responded, in chorus, that Makhluf had no assets under US jurisdiction, let alone did business with Americans, that wasn't especially relevant. To be placed on an American watch list is the anteroom to hell for anyone conducting financial affairs in the world, and Makhluf's accounts are reportedly already under international scrutiny.
A week after that decision, the Bush administration hit out against another lever of the Syrian regime: its ability to wreak havoc in Iraq. The US Treasury targeted four other Syrians under the same legislation used with Makhluf, particularly one Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih, otherwise known as Abu Ghadiyah, who has played an important role in supporting Al-Qaeda operations in Iraq and in funneling militants via Syria. A primary objective in Washington today is to so cripple Al-Qaeda in Iraq, that a drawdown of US forces in the coming months would not substantially threaten the achievements of the "surge." At the same time, without a serious Al-Qaeda card in Syria's hand, a new American president would have no incentive to engage Damascus over Iraq's future.
To interpret the USS Cole's arrival in isolation of these two events, therefore, would be a mistake. We should add a third, equally appropriate development. While Turkey has of late tried to mediate between Syria and Israel, and is sometimes regarded by the Assad regime as a reliable neighborhood comrade, the fact is that Ankara has largely gotten over its bumpy interregnum with Washington, as shown by American acquiescence in the recent Turkish incursion into northern Iraq. Turkey is also considering buying an Israeli satellite, and selling one was a principal ambition of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on his visit to Ankara in mid-February. As security, particularly security with regard to the Kurds, rises on Turkey's list of priorities, the more reluctant it may be to cross America on its regional priorities - impairing Syria being one of them.
The USS Cole affair will blow over, but it is quite possible (at least if we believe the departing State Department official Nicholas Burns) that more economic sanctions will be imposed on Syria this year. The country's financial system is hardly as invulnerable as many claim. With oil reserves nearing their end and the Syrian government increasingly obliged to lift subsidies on essential products, in the midst of an international increase in prices no less, punitive measures can hurt. They're unlikely to change Syrian behavior much. However, taken in unison with the Hariri tribunal being set up in The Hague, the limited margin of maneuver of Syria's Lebanese allies, the abandonment of Al-Qaeda in Iraq by the country's Sunnis, growing Syrian isolation in the Arab world, Israel's apparent ability to act with impunity in the heart of the Syrian capital, and Turkey's collaboration with the US against the PKK, the Assad regime might at some point have to start overhauling its political calculations.
The Bush administration may already have succeeded in making Lebanon a "red line" in terms of a Syrian return. With its now-usual haste, the Assad regime has achieved precisely what it sought to avoid when it began its bid to reimpose its hegemony in Beirut: It focused the attention of all those in the Arab world and outside who have no intention of allowing this to happen. The mainly Sunni Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, agree that giving Syria and Iran a Lebanese victory would consolidate the "Shiite arc" they are so existentially afraid of. The US has a Lebanon policy today, and it won't be easy for a new president to reverse it if it means that America's Arab allies are harmed.
And what about Iraq? Despite learned analyses in the past two years affirming that Iraq was in a civil war, the violence has stopped short of Armageddon. There are many things the US can do wrong to undermine the pluses of the surge, but that will not change the fact that Al-Qaeda, Syria's sole weapon in Iraq's morass, is not something Iraqis, Arabs, or even Iranians are keen to see revived. If Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Iraq this week did not show Syria that Iranian-Iraqi normalization may come at Al-Qaeda's expense, then nothing will.
That's where US military browbeating comes in. No one bothered to console Syria all the times Israel bombed its territory or murdered someone in its capital; no one approves of Syrian efforts in Lebanon now; Syria is a nuisance in Gaza, so the prospect of a helping hand from Israel is doubtful, even if Syrian diplomats are talking to Israelis. The USS Cole reminds Syria that it is exposed, and that George W. Bush believes a weak Syria is the best means of protecting his policies in the Middle East.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Nothing Left- What’s with the lovefest for Hezbollah?
When Hezbollah official Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated earlier this month in Damascus, the collateral damage was felt in academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks, and cafes far and wide. That’s because it quickly became apparent how wrong many of the alleged "experts" writing about the militant Shiite organization had been.
At Mughniyeh’s funeral, Hezbollah leaders placed him in a trinity of party heroes "martyred" at Israeli hands. The secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, vowed "open war" against Israel in retaliation. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, and for days Hezbollah received condolences. Iranian officials stepped over each other to condemn the assassination, many of them affirming that Israel’s demise was inevitable. In the midst of all this one thing was plain: Mughniyeh was a highly significant figure in Hezbollah, and the party didn’t hide it.
And yet over the years, an embarrassing number of writers and academics with some access to Hezbollah dutifully relayed what party cadres had told them about Mughniyeh: He was unimportant and may even have been a figment of our imagination. It was understandable that Hezbollah would blur the trail of so vital an official, but how could those writing about the party swallow this line without pursuing the numerous sources that could confirm details of Mughniyeh’s past? Their fault was laziness, and at times tendentiousness.
Hezbollah is adept at turning contacts with the party into valuable favors. Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources, are regarded as special for penetrating so closed a society. That’s why their writing is often edited with minimal rigor. Hezbollah always denied everything that was said about Mughniyeh, and few authors (or editors) showed the curiosity to push further than that. The mere fact of getting such a denial was considered an achievement in itself, a sign of rare access, and no one was about to jeopardize that access by calling Hezbollah liars.
But there was more here than just manipulation. The Mughniyeh affair highlights a deeper problem long obvious to those who follow Hezbollah: The party, though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners who otherwise share nothing of its values. This reaction, in its more extreme forms, is reflected in the way many on the far left have embraced Hezbollah’s militancy, but also that of other Islamist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad—thoroughly undermining their ideological principles in the process.
The primary emotion driving together the far-left and militant Islamists, but also frequently prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups as well, is hostility toward the United States, toward Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, and, more broadly, toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization.
Fred Halliday, himself a man of the left, wrote scathingly of the dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left based on a perception of shared anti-imperialism: "All of this is—at least to those with historical awareness, skeptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory—disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the U.S.-declared ‘war on terror’ and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against ’the west.’"
A bizarre offshoot of this trend has been the left’s elevation of Islamist "resistance" to the level of a fetish. You know something has gone horribly wrong when the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein volunteers to interpret Hezbollah for you, before prefacing his comments with: "I don’t care about Hezbollah as a political organization. I don’t know much about their politics, and anyhow, it’s irrelevant. I don’t live in Lebanon."
In a recent interview on Lebanese television, Finkelstein made it a point of expressing his "solidarity" with Hezbollah, on the grounds that "there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question."
It is indeed uncomplicated if you remain mulishly unwilling to move beyond the narrow parameters you’ve set for discussion. But the reality is that Hezbollah is an immensely complicated question in Lebanon, where a majority of people are at a loss about what to do with a heavily armed organization that has no patience for state authority, that refuses to hand its weapons over to the national army, that is advancing an Iranian and Syrian agenda against the legal Lebanese government, and that functions as a secretive Shiite paramilitary militia in a country where sectarian religious assertiveness often leads to conflict. That many Lebanese should have seen Finkelstein praise what they feel is Hezbollah’s most dangerous attributes was surpassed in its capacity to irritate only by the fact that he lectured them on how armed resistance was the sole option against Israel, regardless of the anticipated destruction, "unless you choose to be [Israeli] slaves—and many people here have chosen that."
But Finkelstein is no worse than Noam Chomsky, or that clutter of "progressive" academics and intellectuals who, at the height of the carnage during the 2006 Lebanon war, signed on to a petition declaring their "conscious support for the Lebanese national resistance," described resistance as "an intellectual act par excellence" and condemned the Lebanese government for having distanced itself from Hezbollah, even though the party had unnecessarily provoked a devastating Israeli military onslaught that led to the death of over 1,200 people.
This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left’s view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.
Blind faith in the service of total principle is what makes those like Finkelstein and Chomsky so vile. But their posturing is made possible because of the less ardent secular liberal publicists out there who surrender to the narratives that Islamists such as Hezbollah, Hamas, or others peddle to them—lending them legitimacy. That’s because modern scholarship, like liberalism itself, refuses to impose Western cultural standards on non-Westerners. Fine. But as the Mughniyeh case shows, when Islamists dominate the debate affecting them, there are plenty of fools out there dying to be tossed a bone.
At Mughniyeh’s funeral, Hezbollah leaders placed him in a trinity of party heroes "martyred" at Israeli hands. The secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, vowed "open war" against Israel in retaliation. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, and for days Hezbollah received condolences. Iranian officials stepped over each other to condemn the assassination, many of them affirming that Israel’s demise was inevitable. In the midst of all this one thing was plain: Mughniyeh was a highly significant figure in Hezbollah, and the party didn’t hide it.
And yet over the years, an embarrassing number of writers and academics with some access to Hezbollah dutifully relayed what party cadres had told them about Mughniyeh: He was unimportant and may even have been a figment of our imagination. It was understandable that Hezbollah would blur the trail of so vital an official, but how could those writing about the party swallow this line without pursuing the numerous sources that could confirm details of Mughniyeh’s past? Their fault was laziness, and at times tendentiousness.
Hezbollah is adept at turning contacts with the party into valuable favors. Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources, are regarded as special for penetrating so closed a society. That’s why their writing is often edited with minimal rigor. Hezbollah always denied everything that was said about Mughniyeh, and few authors (or editors) showed the curiosity to push further than that. The mere fact of getting such a denial was considered an achievement in itself, a sign of rare access, and no one was about to jeopardize that access by calling Hezbollah liars.
But there was more here than just manipulation. The Mughniyeh affair highlights a deeper problem long obvious to those who follow Hezbollah: The party, though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners who otherwise share nothing of its values. This reaction, in its more extreme forms, is reflected in the way many on the far left have embraced Hezbollah’s militancy, but also that of other Islamist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad—thoroughly undermining their ideological principles in the process.
The primary emotion driving together the far-left and militant Islamists, but also frequently prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups as well, is hostility toward the United States, toward Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, and, more broadly, toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization.
Fred Halliday, himself a man of the left, wrote scathingly of the dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left based on a perception of shared anti-imperialism: "All of this is—at least to those with historical awareness, skeptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory—disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the U.S.-declared ‘war on terror’ and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against ’the west.’"
A bizarre offshoot of this trend has been the left’s elevation of Islamist "resistance" to the level of a fetish. You know something has gone horribly wrong when the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein volunteers to interpret Hezbollah for you, before prefacing his comments with: "I don’t care about Hezbollah as a political organization. I don’t know much about their politics, and anyhow, it’s irrelevant. I don’t live in Lebanon."
In a recent interview on Lebanese television, Finkelstein made it a point of expressing his "solidarity" with Hezbollah, on the grounds that "there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question."
It is indeed uncomplicated if you remain mulishly unwilling to move beyond the narrow parameters you’ve set for discussion. But the reality is that Hezbollah is an immensely complicated question in Lebanon, where a majority of people are at a loss about what to do with a heavily armed organization that has no patience for state authority, that refuses to hand its weapons over to the national army, that is advancing an Iranian and Syrian agenda against the legal Lebanese government, and that functions as a secretive Shiite paramilitary militia in a country where sectarian religious assertiveness often leads to conflict. That many Lebanese should have seen Finkelstein praise what they feel is Hezbollah’s most dangerous attributes was surpassed in its capacity to irritate only by the fact that he lectured them on how armed resistance was the sole option against Israel, regardless of the anticipated destruction, "unless you choose to be [Israeli] slaves—and many people here have chosen that."
But Finkelstein is no worse than Noam Chomsky, or that clutter of "progressive" academics and intellectuals who, at the height of the carnage during the 2006 Lebanon war, signed on to a petition declaring their "conscious support for the Lebanese national resistance," described resistance as "an intellectual act par excellence" and condemned the Lebanese government for having distanced itself from Hezbollah, even though the party had unnecessarily provoked a devastating Israeli military onslaught that led to the death of over 1,200 people.
This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left’s view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.
Blind faith in the service of total principle is what makes those like Finkelstein and Chomsky so vile. But their posturing is made possible because of the less ardent secular liberal publicists out there who surrender to the narratives that Islamists such as Hezbollah, Hamas, or others peddle to them—lending them legitimacy. That’s because modern scholarship, like liberalism itself, refuses to impose Western cultural standards on non-Westerners. Fine. But as the Mughniyeh case shows, when Islamists dominate the debate affecting them, there are plenty of fools out there dying to be tossed a bone.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Strange love between the far left and Hizbullah
Strange love between the far left and Hizbullah
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Recently, when the Hizbullah commander Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated in Damascus, the collateral damage was felt in academic departments, newsrooms, think-tanks and cafes far and wide. That's because it quickly became apparent how wrong had been many of the alleged experts writing about the militant Shiite organization.
At Mughniyeh's funeral, Hizbullah leaders placed him in a trinity of party heroes "martyred" at Israeli hands. The secretary general of Hizbullah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, vowed "open war" against Israel in retaliation. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, and for days Hizbullah received condolences. Iranian officials stepped over each other to condemn the assassination, many of them affirming that Israel's demise was inevitable. In the midst of all this one thing was plain: Mughniyeh was a highly significant figure in Hizbullah, and the party didn't hide it.
And yet over the years, an embarrassing number of writers and academics with some access to Hizbullah dutifully relayed what party cadres had told them about Mughniyeh: that he was unimportant and may even have been a figment of our imagination. It was understandable that Hizbullah would blur the trail of so vital an official. But not that those writing about the party should swallow this line without bothering to pursue the numerous sources of information that could have confirmed details of Mughniyeh's past. Their fault was laziness, and at times tendentiousness.
Hizbullah has been adept at turning contacts with the party into a supposedly valuable favor. Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who can lay claim to Hizbullah sources, are regarded as special for having penetrated so closed a society. That's why what they write is so often edited with minimal rigor. Hizbullah always denied everything that was said about Mughniyeh, and few authors (or editors) showed the curiosity to push further than that. The mere fact of getting such a denial was considered an achievement in itself, a sign of rare access, and no one was about to jeopardize that access by calling Hizbullah liars.
But there was more here than just manipulation. The Mughniyeh affair highlighted a deeper problem long obvious to those following Hizbullah: The party, though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners who otherwise share nothing of its values. This reaction, in its more extreme forms, has been reflected in the way many on the far left have embraced Hizbullah's militancy, but also that of other Islamist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad - thoroughly undermining their own ideological principles in the process.
The primary emotion driving together the far left and militant Islamists, but also frequently prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups as well, is hostility toward the United States, toward Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and much else, and, more broadly, toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization.
Fred Halliday, himself a man of the left, scathingly wrote of the dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left based on a perception of shared anti-imperialism: "All of this is - at least to those with historical awareness, skeptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory - disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the US-declared 'war on terror' and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against 'the West.'"
A bizarre offshoot of this trend has been the left's elevation of Islamist "resistance" to the level of a fetish. You know something has gone horribly wrong when the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein volunteers to interpret Hizbullah for you, before prefacing his comments with: "I don't care about Hizbullah as a political organization. I don't know much about their politics, and anyhow, it's irrelevant. I don't live in Lebanon."
In a recent interview on Lebanese television, Finkelstein made it a point of expressing his "solidarity" with Hizbullah, on the grounds that "there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question."
It is indeed uncomplicated if you remain mulishly unwilling to move beyond the narrow parameters you've set for discussion. But the reality is that Hizbullah is an immensely complicated question in Lebanon, where a majority of people are at a loss about what to do with a heavily armed organization that has no patience for state authority, that refuses to hand its weapons over to the national army, that is advancing an Iranian and Syrian agenda against the legal Lebanese government, and that functions as a secretive Shiite militia in a country where sectarian religious assertiveness often leads to conflict. That many Lebanese should have seen Finkelstein praise what they feel is Hizbullah's most dangerous attributes was surpassed in its capacity to irritate only by the fact that he lectured them on how armed resistance was the sole option against Israel, regardless of the anticipated destruction, "unless you choose to be [Israeli] slaves - and many people here have chosen that."
But Finkelstein is no worse than Noam Chomsky, or that clutter of "progressive" academics and intellectuals who, at the height of the carnage during the 2006 Lebanon war, signed on to a petition declaring their "conscious support for the Lebanese national resistance," described resistance as "an intellectual act par excellence," and condemned the Lebanese government for having distanced itself from Hizbullah, even though the party had unnecessarily provoked a devastating Israeli military onslaught that led to the death of over 1,200 people.
This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hizbullah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.
Blind faith in the service of total principle is what makes those like Finkelstein and Chomsky so vile. But their posturing is made possible because of the less ardent secular liberal publicists out there who have surrendered to the narratives that Islamists such as Hizbullah, Hamas or others peddle to them - lending them legitimacy. That's because modern scholarship, like liberalism itself, refuses to impose Western cultural standards on non-Westerners. Fine, but as the Mughniyeh case showed, when Islamists dominate the debate affecting them, there are plenty of fools out there dying to be tossed a bone.
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Recently, when the Hizbullah commander Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated in Damascus, the collateral damage was felt in academic departments, newsrooms, think-tanks and cafes far and wide. That's because it quickly became apparent how wrong had been many of the alleged experts writing about the militant Shiite organization.
At Mughniyeh's funeral, Hizbullah leaders placed him in a trinity of party heroes "martyred" at Israeli hands. The secretary general of Hizbullah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, vowed "open war" against Israel in retaliation. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, and for days Hizbullah received condolences. Iranian officials stepped over each other to condemn the assassination, many of them affirming that Israel's demise was inevitable. In the midst of all this one thing was plain: Mughniyeh was a highly significant figure in Hizbullah, and the party didn't hide it.
And yet over the years, an embarrassing number of writers and academics with some access to Hizbullah dutifully relayed what party cadres had told them about Mughniyeh: that he was unimportant and may even have been a figment of our imagination. It was understandable that Hizbullah would blur the trail of so vital an official. But not that those writing about the party should swallow this line without bothering to pursue the numerous sources of information that could have confirmed details of Mughniyeh's past. Their fault was laziness, and at times tendentiousness.
Hizbullah has been adept at turning contacts with the party into a supposedly valuable favor. Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who can lay claim to Hizbullah sources, are regarded as special for having penetrated so closed a society. That's why what they write is so often edited with minimal rigor. Hizbullah always denied everything that was said about Mughniyeh, and few authors (or editors) showed the curiosity to push further than that. The mere fact of getting such a denial was considered an achievement in itself, a sign of rare access, and no one was about to jeopardize that access by calling Hizbullah liars.
But there was more here than just manipulation. The Mughniyeh affair highlighted a deeper problem long obvious to those following Hizbullah: The party, though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners who otherwise share nothing of its values. This reaction, in its more extreme forms, has been reflected in the way many on the far left have embraced Hizbullah's militancy, but also that of other Islamist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad - thoroughly undermining their own ideological principles in the process.
The primary emotion driving together the far left and militant Islamists, but also frequently prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups as well, is hostility toward the United States, toward Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and much else, and, more broadly, toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization.
Fred Halliday, himself a man of the left, scathingly wrote of the dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left based on a perception of shared anti-imperialism: "All of this is - at least to those with historical awareness, skeptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory - disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the US-declared 'war on terror' and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against 'the West.'"
A bizarre offshoot of this trend has been the left's elevation of Islamist "resistance" to the level of a fetish. You know something has gone horribly wrong when the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein volunteers to interpret Hizbullah for you, before prefacing his comments with: "I don't care about Hizbullah as a political organization. I don't know much about their politics, and anyhow, it's irrelevant. I don't live in Lebanon."
In a recent interview on Lebanese television, Finkelstein made it a point of expressing his "solidarity" with Hizbullah, on the grounds that "there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question."
It is indeed uncomplicated if you remain mulishly unwilling to move beyond the narrow parameters you've set for discussion. But the reality is that Hizbullah is an immensely complicated question in Lebanon, where a majority of people are at a loss about what to do with a heavily armed organization that has no patience for state authority, that refuses to hand its weapons over to the national army, that is advancing an Iranian and Syrian agenda against the legal Lebanese government, and that functions as a secretive Shiite militia in a country where sectarian religious assertiveness often leads to conflict. That many Lebanese should have seen Finkelstein praise what they feel is Hizbullah's most dangerous attributes was surpassed in its capacity to irritate only by the fact that he lectured them on how armed resistance was the sole option against Israel, regardless of the anticipated destruction, "unless you choose to be [Israeli] slaves - and many people here have chosen that."
But Finkelstein is no worse than Noam Chomsky, or that clutter of "progressive" academics and intellectuals who, at the height of the carnage during the 2006 Lebanon war, signed on to a petition declaring their "conscious support for the Lebanese national resistance," described resistance as "an intellectual act par excellence," and condemned the Lebanese government for having distanced itself from Hizbullah, even though the party had unnecessarily provoked a devastating Israeli military onslaught that led to the death of over 1,200 people.
This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hizbullah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.
Blind faith in the service of total principle is what makes those like Finkelstein and Chomsky so vile. But their posturing is made possible because of the less ardent secular liberal publicists out there who have surrendered to the narratives that Islamists such as Hizbullah, Hamas or others peddle to them - lending them legitimacy. That's because modern scholarship, like liberalism itself, refuses to impose Western cultural standards on non-Westerners. Fine, but as the Mughniyeh case showed, when Islamists dominate the debate affecting them, there are plenty of fools out there dying to be tossed a bone.
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