Watch for the Bush in Barack Obama

Only days are left before the departure of George W. Bush, and already the word out is that, in the Middle East, the new boss, Barack Obama, may be like the old boss. The only disagreement is who that old boss is. Is it Bush himself, or is it Bill Clinton, in whose administrations many of those now expected to decide the region's affairs once served?

Barack Obama's enthusiasm for change only seems to extend to the Clinton years. We will again hear familiar names such as Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, and Daniel Kurtzer, critics point out, all of whom served in some capacity on Middle Eastern affairs during the 1990s, mainly in the peace process. Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Dayton Peace Accord for Bosnia-Herzegovina, is another former Clinton official who might get the call to deal with broader regional matters. He is being tipped as Obama's envoy to deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

That this recycling of old faces should seem odd is itself odd. There has been only one Democratic president since 1980, so you would expect Obama to reach for expertise in his administrations, even if this makes fresh ideas less likely. For our misfortune, the president-elect has also relied on the counsel of castaways from the Jimmy Carter shipwreck, notably Zbigniew Brzezinski. If in Hollywood you're only as good as your last movie, in Washington you're only as bad as the media's attention span. Few journalists today ask how Carter's failures in Iran and Afghanistan entitle Brzezinski to be considered a sage on the Middle East.

Let me offer a hypothesis: The old boss that Obama will end up imitating most is not Bill Clinton, regardless of the fact that Mrs. Clinton will be secretary of state, but George W. Bush. Even the idea that Bush was unique as a war-monger may have to be adjusted once Obama escalates American military intervention in Afghanistan, and once he discovers that taking to Iran "without conditions" (his delusion, not mine) is unlikely to stop it from developing a nuclear weapons capacity.

Obama will not channel Bush because he's a closet neoconservative. Rather, he will do so because the Bush we watched during his second term displayed few neoconservative instincts at all. And what are these major neoconservative instincts? If we examine Bush's first-term behavior and pair that with a reading of the National Security Strategy of 2002, an essential vessel of neocon thought (though it also contains plenty of conventional "realist" wisdom), we could pair it down to a few loud ideas: reliance on American pre-emption to neutralize emerging global threats; the retention of American predominance over other states or group of states; and a willingness to rely on power, particularly military power, in a unilateral way if necessary, to advance American interests.

The writer Paul Berman caught another essential aspect of the neoconservative moment when he drew attention to its style, remarking that it embodied a great many things, not least "a kind of nationalist swagger." That swagger could be heard in Bush's cretinous "Bring 'em on" phrase goading the Iraqi insurgents in July 2003. The president, far too scattered an individual to be tied down by doctrine, was never really a neocon, but he had certainly internalized their triumphalism.

As we look back on Bush's second term, however, almost all the neocon foreign policy guidelines have evaporated – as has the swagger. In the Middle East the United States has been so pervasively multilateral in its actions, that it has been unable to get very much done. On Iran, working through the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations has gone nowhere. If a prop of neocon thought was to act against growing threats preemptively--and Iran's nuclear program would seem to qualify as such a threat--then in 2007 the Bush administration undermined that rule by releasing a National Intelligence Estimate that derailed the chances of a military attack against Iran's nuclear facilities. Indeed, the US went further and warned Israel against launching an attack.

In Afghanistan, American cooperation with the UN and its military efforts through NATO have also faltered. Recall that the Afghan intervention came in the heyday of neocon affirmation in Washington. Yet the US went about it multilaterally, with all the right certificates of international good behavior. And in Lebanon, as of 2004, the US created a bodyguard of UN resolutions to protect the country from Syria and to contain Hezbollah. Yet that hasn't prevented Damascus from systematically violating those resolutions and undermining Lebanese sovereignty; nor has it prevented Hezbollah from doing the same by rearming via Syrian territory.

In none of these countries – Iran, Afghanistan, and Lebanon – did the US go it alone. The Bush administration locked itself into an international consensus that left room open for others to limit American actions. That squared little with the neocon yearning that no state or group of states should balance America off in the pursuit of its national objectives.

On the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, too, the US has been militantly multilateral, and the net result has again been stalemate. The so-called Quartet, including the US, the UN, Russia, and the European Union, has been ineffectual largely because domestic Palestinian and Israeli dynamics have thwarted a breakthrough. The sad irony is that Obama may finally inherit some movement on the track because of the butchery in Gaza, which may weaken Hamas. The conflict, for all the death it has rained down, especially on Palestinians, may yet turn into a meeting point between neocons, who favor the transformative possibilities of military ventures like Israel's, and the peace process mavens of the Obama administration, who seek to renew Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

The reason Barack Obama will resemble George W. Bush in the Middle East is that Bush hardly resembled himself during his second term; in fact, he resembled what Obama claims he will become: a president who worked with other states consensually; who made use of international law and institutions; who dealt with emerging threats through diplomacy; and, less openly, who ignored all the above when the US could do better for itself that way. Obama's first test will be Gaza. Does he allow Hamas to be beaten, and then cash in on the results? Or does he step in and demand an immediate ceasefire? My money is on Obama's George W. Bush reflex.

Tiptoeing around death in South Lebanon

The rocket attacks yesterday across Lebanon's southern border with Israel were a worrying sign that the conflict in Gaza may escalate into a wider conflagration. Hizbullah, or whichever group it allowed to fire the weapons from its territory, sought in some degree to push a fearful international community into imposing a cease-fire in Gaza, where the Israeli stranglehold may lead to the imposition of an Egyptian-French plan whose outcome is the military neutralization of Hamas.

Hizbullah must have also found intolerable its immobility in the past two weeks, reduced as it was to providing Hamas with verbal encouragement. For a party that claims to be the vanguard of the armed struggle against Israel, cheerleading from the sidelines was surely mortifying. However, at this early stage it seems that neither Hizbullah nor Israel wants to go to all-out war. Responsibility for the attack on the Lebanese side was kept ambiguous, while Israel's response was limited in scope, with some officials there preferring to put the blame on unidentified Palestinians.

The reality is that Hizbullah's secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, is facing constraints as he ponders what to do next. For starters, he must evaluate the consequences of Hizbullah's two pyrrhic victories, in 2006 and 2008, which he and his followers still insist are incontestable.

The first is Hizbullah's purported victory in summer 2006. Presumably, victories over Israel are so desirable that the Lebanese in general, and the Shiites in particular, would care to turn them into an annual event. If so, then why are the Shiites so reluctant to repeat what happened that year? Perhaps they sense that the brutal displacement of 1 million people, and the killing of 1,200 others, only qualified as a victory in the narrowest and most counterintuitive of ways. Nasrallah, for all his bravado two years ago, must now factor in the Shiite refusal to be similarly punished once more, and the refusal of a Lebanese majority to suffer his whims.

The second victory Nasrallah must consider is that of early May 2008, when his men overran western Beirut and humiliated the Sunni community. In the short term, that episode gave the opposition veto power in the government and an election law that will preserve Hizbullah's share in Parliament. But in the context of the party's long-term struggle against Israel, it may have been catastrophic. A reason why Nasrallah has hesitated to intervene more publicly over Gaza is that last May he squandered any national consensus behind the idea of resistance that Hizbullah once enjoyed, and today the party cannot even be certain of protecting its rear if Israel again devastates Lebanon.

An interesting subplot is playing itself out in the local media. Most Lebanese want to be seen as on the Palestinians' side, but there is marked competition between the Hariri camp, through its Future satellite television channel and Al-Mustaqbal newspaper, and Hizbullah's media outlets, over who can best express outrage when it comes to the Palestinians' plight. In Lebanon's polarized sectarian atmosphere, the Future movement and other Sunni political groups, particularly the Jamaa Islamiyya, have done everything but say what is really on their minds: that Palestine is, above all, a Sunni concern, regardless of Hizbullah's efforts to place itself at the center of the battle against Israel; therefore, Nasrallah should not repeat what he said in 2006, when he accused his local rivals of colluding with Israel against Hizbullah.


If Nasrallah feels pressed domestically, he can't be much very more reassured by what is happening regionally. What, for example, are Syria's calculations? It's quite possible that the rocket attack on Thursday was carried out, with Hizbullah's acquiescence, by pro-Syrian Palestinians. Like all good merchants in carrion, the Assad regime will probably emerge from the Gaza confrontation stronger. If Hamas is neutralized, the Syrians will doubtless see one of their cards devalued, but they will also be able to compensate for that because the United States and the Europeans will embrace Syria as an ally in containing troublesome non-state actors such as Hamas and Hizbullah. That Syria helped arm these groups in the first place will be stubbornly ignored. President Bashar Assad will be given a chance to bargain over the dead of Gaza in the same way that his father bargained over the dead of Qana in April 1996.

Nasrallah knows that any Hizbullah move on Israel's northern border would only give Assad a stronger hand to offer his services abroad, at the expense of the party. In that complicated minuet, Iran, too, must be careful of the consequences if a broader conflict ignites in southern Lebanon. Syria would use this to better sell its Lebanese return to the Americans; Hizbullah could find itself isolated domestically in the run-up to parliamentary elections in June; and Iran risks not only seeing its Hamas ally in Gaza diminished, but Hizbullah as well. And this time Tehran's ability to throw money around to placate Lebanon's Shiites might not be what it was two years ago. The results in Lebanon would feed into Iran's presidential election, so that what happens here could determine the political fate of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

These concerns notwithstanding, Nasrallah also faces a more profound problem if he comes across as a helpless prisoner of Lebanese realities. By showing he can do nothing on the Israeli border, for fear of heightening tensions at home, he undermines Hizbullah's deterrence capability in the event Israel strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. From the start of the war in Gaza, Iran's containment has hovered over Arab decision-making. That explains why Hizbullah could not remain idle indefinitely. Nasrallah had to establish that, even in the most unpropitious of times, he could still use his weapons, or allow others to do so, against Israel.

As the abduction of Israeli soldiers in July 2006 showed, however, attacks too carefully calibrated can easily get out of hand. Israel and Hizbullah may not want to return to those days, but they will fight a new war with relish if one becomes unavoidable. More bothersome, Lebanon is back to being a hostage to the choices of one man, who in order to defend his party, and particularly its standing with its regional sponsors, needs to engage in brinkmanship at the expense of his own compatriots.

A New Middle Eastern Cold War

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- The term "Arab cold war" was popularized by the late American scholar Malcolm Kerr, who in 1971 published a book of the same name. A deserving classic at a concise 166 pages (with index), The Arab Cold War examined how the Arab world of the 1950s and 1960s was governed by "urgent appeals to Arab unity," when the reality was that "its governments and parties [were] dominated by bitter rivalry."

Arab rivalries have not diminished, but the stakes have greatly changed in the new Middle East. Kerr (whose assassination in 1984, as president of the American University of Beirut, by a precursor of Lebanon's Hezbollah presaged what we have today) was describing the post-colonial Arab state system. However, that system, characterized by the declining standing of its aging and despotic rulers, is under pressure as the fighting in Gaza continues. At one level, the conflict is between Israelis and Palestinians; yet in many respects that is only a façade for a new Middle Eastern cold war in which a rising Iran, likewise a Syria pursuing its own ends, (not to mention Qatar, filling the vacuum left by Saudi diplomacy), uses non-state actors such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad to put on the defensive Arab regimes seeking to accommodate Israel.

Tehran's ambition is simple. If the Arab regimes are weakened, so too will be their ally, the United States. Iran could then play a dominant role in the Middle East, presumably backed by a nuclear weapons capacity in a few years, and compel Washington to accept this fresh reality. Syria's goals are more complex. The Assad regime, too, wants leverage over the Obama administration, but mainly to prepare for an impending normalization with the U.S. This would allow Damascus to re-impose its hegemony over Lebanon, bargain favorably with Israel over the Golan Heights and induce the international community to find an exit for Syria from the tribunal that will soon consider the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, which Syria almost certainly ordered.

In the coming days, America's Arab partners, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas leading the way, will try to contain Hamas through a United Nations resolution on Gaza, and by so doing also contain Iran and Syria. It may not look that way, but Israel's ground incursion is the muscle behind that effort, assuming it succeeds. Abbas will tell his countrymen that he stopped the carnage, but his pull in negotiations with Hamas over the future of Gaza will be his ability to bring about an Israeli withdrawal on terms favorable to him and unfavorable to his Hamas rivals.

In the weeks before the outbreak of violence in Gaza, Egypt had tried to renew the truce between Hamas and Israel. By most accounts, Iran and Syria pushed Khaled Meshaal, the Damascus-based head of Hamas's political bureau, to undermine any accord by continuing to fire rockets at Israel, making the Gaza confrontation virtually inevitable. The idea was not only to discredit the Egyptians, but also to welcome Barack Obama with a crisis making any American opening toward Iran and Syria more costly for the United States. That should sober up those in the upcoming administration who speak of engaging Iran and Syria without conditions.

Throughout the Middle East, the eroding credibility of Arab states in the Arab-Israeli conflict has breathed new life into non-state actors, particularly militant Islamist groups. As Arabs watch events in Gaza, their first impulse is to condemn their own leaders. For decades, Arab regimes diverted valuable resources to build up vast security apparatuses justified as necessary to combat Israel. Yet Israel won all its wars, some Arab states made peace with it, but the security apparatuses remain.

Iran's allies are trying to profit from this discontent by playing domestic Arab politics. A day after the bombing of Gaza began, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, condemned Egypt for keeping the Rafah crossing between Gaza and the Egyptian Sinai closed to Palestinians. He called on Egyptians to take to the streets and force the Mubarak regime to open the passage and allow both aid and weapons through to Hamas. He also accused Arab states, by which he meant Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but also Abbas's Palestinian Authority, of colluding with Israel.

Nasrallah's appeal partly compensated for the fact that he could do little to relieve his comrades in Gaza. However, his interference in the affairs of an Arab state, and a major one, was above all an Iranian-sanctioned effort to de-legitimize Egypt and other Arab allies of the U.S. who view the Gaza conflict as a way of debilitating Hamas. Nasrallah was less vociferous about Jordan, but only because the Jordanians have recently improved their ties with Hamas, fearing mounting support for the movement among Jordan's own increasingly powerful Muslim Brotherhood.

Judging from the limited Egyptian reaction to his injunctions, Nasrallah overplayed his hand. The Arab states, mediocre as they are, are more solid than their enemies imagine. Militant Islamist groups may be better at fighting Israel, but they cannot substitute for what states offer. However, the traditional Arab powerhouses are being marginalized by the more dynamic non-Arab states on their periphery--Iran, Turkey and Israel--as well as by some Arab states, such as Syria and Qatar, that have profited from the widening rifts provoked by the new Middle Eastern cold war.

What lessons are there for the United States here? The Obama administration should recognize these dynamics and accept that its allies are less credible because they are undemocratic, have narrow legitimacy, and offer no hope of amelioration to their peoples, while Israel further undermines them by denying a political horizon to the Palestinians.

Arab democratization is a bad word for many Obama Middle East hands, who seek a return to a political realism justifying making deals with America's foes. Democracy-building smacks too much of George W. Bush. Yet unless the Arabs open their societies up in states that are more than monuments to intimidation, America's allies will continue to lose ground, and America with them. In the realism game, Iran and Syria, like the militant Islamists, are better than Washington. The Americans won one cold war, but victory in this Middle Eastern version may be dodgier.

Gaza hides a war over the Arabs' future

Amid the carnage in Gaza, it's not immediately obvious that what is taking place has less to do with Israelis versus Palestinians than with Arabs versus Arabs, principally to define the future of the Middle East. The Gaza conflict has become part of an ongoing confrontation between regimes emerging from the Arab state system established over six decades ago, and, with one exception, new regional players vying to take their place.

Whether it is Hamas, or some groups in Hamas, that sought out this latest battle with Israel; whether it is the Israelis who picked a fight in a pre-election period; or whether it is some combination of both, the outcome of what is happening in Gaza today is not difficult to guess: Israel is helping Hamas undermine any peaceful settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which will only guarantee a condition of long-term war.

What we see developing in the Middle East is an accelerating counterattack by non-state actors such as Hamas, Hizbullah and the Islamic Jihad, all backed by a rising Iran, against the majority of Arab states committed to a negotiated peace with Israel. Manipulating the emotions that the fate of the Palestinians invariably release among Arabs, Tehran above all, but also the militant Islamist groups, are attempting to redraw the regional balance of power through a normalization of the armed struggle against Israel and a delegitimization of Arab states opposed to this. As Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah declared on Sunday, Arab countries that have signed a peace treaty with Israel are to be discredited not because they won't fight Israel, but because they collude with it.

An exception to this rule is Syria. Whereas Iran and the militant Islamists hope to emasculate the old stalwarts of the Arab state order - Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan - by accusing them of participating in a purported "American-Israeli project for the region," Syria, no less a traditional stalwart of the Arab political order, is in the peculiar position of being on the side of Iran and the non-state rebels while also seeking an accommodation with the United States and Israel. In fact, Syrian spokesman often argue, whenever they are invited to foreign capitals and conferences, that Syria is a vital American ally in containing non-state Arab actors - the same ones that Syria arms, shelters and incites.

Awash no less in self-serving ambiguity is Qatar, never a major pillar of the Arab older, but a state increasingly effective in filling the diplomatic vacuum left by Saudi Arabia. Like the Syrians, the Qataris are on good terms with Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hizbullah, even as they host the largest American military base in the Middle East and preserve an open, if discreet, relationship with Israel. Playing all sides to its advantage, the tiny emirate benefits from a population that doesn't revolt, neighbors who take too much time to act, and an emir who doesn't blush.

Yet it's Nasrallah who on Sunday somehow showed what was really at stake for the Arab states, and both Syria and to a lesser extent Qatar might consider his meaning. In focusing his anger on Egypt, in effectively calling on Egyptians to mount a civil protest campaign at home against Cairo's behavior in Gaza, the secretary general crossed a red line in his dealings with the Arab regimes: With considerable boldness, even impudence, he tried to play domestic Egyptian politics. In so doing Nasrallah may have overplayed his hand. His message was mainly an Iranian one, another echo of Tehran's recent efforts to put the Egyptian regime on the defensive when it comes to Gaza, so that Iran's ally Hamas might more easily rearm and prepare for a war of liberation against Israel.

However, Nasrallah's audacity is something no Arab state can readily tolerate. Not even Syria, in fact especially Syria, wants to hear the leader of a foreign armed group calling on Syrians to disregard their leadership in support of the Palestinians. Recall that Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 to contain the Palestine Liberation Organization, fearing its victory in the Lebanese Civil War might lead to a conflict with Israel that would engulf Syria. Arab states may be much weaker and less credible than ever before, but the region still remains a redoubt of national sovereignty.

Nasrallah not only may have overestimated his capacity to challenge such sovereignty in Egypt, he may have also overestimated the weakness of the states he opposes. Hizbullah and Hamas err in assuming that the Arab regimes can be as easily overcome as were their own national authorities - the Palestinian Authority in Hamas' case, the Lebanese government in Hizbullah's. The Arab state system has doubtless lost a great deal of its vigor in the last two decades, a result of regimes proposing nothing new, stifling their own people, and seemingly incapable of either fighting Israel or convincing it to cede to the Palestinians their most basic national rights. However, most Arabs won't abandon their states for the pull of non-state military actors that promise only a project of war.

This is where Israel comes in, specifically its consistent miscalculations when it comes to the Palestinians. Far from strengthening the hand of the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority, the Israelis have only ensured that Iran and the non-state Islamist actors gain strength. By systematically humiliating the Palestinian Authority and displaying little genuine willingness to follow through on territorial compromises, the Israelis have denied the Palestinians any political horizon. At this stage, talk of a negotiated solution to the Palestinian conflict seems naive. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians are capable of reaching a mutually acceptable solution to their dispute, and that pleases Hamas to no end.

Iran, and with it Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah, have also prepared a welcoming present for Barack Obama. The US president-elect once said that resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would be a priority. Good luck. The Arab peace plan of 2002 lies in tatters; Mahmoud Abbas will be the Palestinian president only until late January, when what remains of his legitimacy will evaporate; and Israel is likely to vote for a right-wing government even less prepared to arrive at a deal with the Palestinians than the present government. What a wonderful new year's gift this bloody Gaza attack has been for Hamas and its partners, above all for Iran and Syria, who now have great leverage to bargain with the Obama administration.

Meanwhile the Arab states and their regimes hang on, but without offering any prospect of rejuvenation, let alone a realistic peace scheme that could tilt the new Arab cold war in their favor.

Our Mideastern future: a pair of shoes and a gun

What do the recent shoe-throwing incident with Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, the uncertain truce in Gaza, and Lebanon's national dialogue all have in common? Very little, except that the three offer up a vision of the Middle East as a place largely devoid of constructive ideas, where the rule of the gun looms large on the horizon.

There is little new to say about the Zaidi incident. Yes, we really do know that the shoe expresses contempt in the Arab world, and if we had doubts about that, then Zaidi clarified matters by calling President George W. Bush a "dog." We know that the Iraqi blamed Bush for all the woes that his country had suffered in recent years, and we also know that he would have never thrown his shoes at Saddam Hussein, who was responsible for Iraqi woes until April 2003. And we know that the Zaidi affair became a giant funnel of interpretation, which many outraged Arabs fell into to make the journalist's shoe-toss a personal statement of their own.

Not many Arabs saw irony in the fact that Zaidi's action is now a game circulating on the Internet. Hit Bush on the head and you can score points. But that detail summed up the sheer mediocrity of this Arab moment, with its earnest demonstrations in support of the journalist, when few Arabs ever bothered to demonstrate on behalf of the countless Iraqi journalists executed by their country's armed gangs. As Tunku Varadarajan wrote so appropriately in Forbes: "The Arabs, who once upon a time boasted Averroes and Avicenna, are now reduced to eulogizing a boorish act of agitprop as a heroic achievement."

Somehow, missed in all this was Iraq itself. For too long the Iraqi conflict has only been about America. When Iraqis were being slaughtered by suicide bombers arriving from Syria, all the Arab world could do was applaud the murderers as "resistance" against American imperialism. Yet when many members of that resistance turned against the murderers in Al-Qaeda, appalled by their sadism, the Arab world became silent because the narrative had changed and the Americans and their former foes suddenly seemed to be in accord. The obsession with America, the pervasive desire to see Bush fail in Iraq, has been the running theme of Arab and much Western commentary on the Iraqi conflict. Only a minority observed that American failures would also be Iraqi failures, and that while the Americans could always pick up and leave, the Iraqis would have to endure the consequences of that failure for a long time afterward.

Zaidi's act came at the worst moment for Iraq. Here was Bush on a farewell trip to acknowledge that Iraq had gradually broken free from the United States, after the administration's ambition in 2003-2004 to run the country as a protectorate. Far from being the leader Washington considered removing from office a few years ago, here, too, was Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, now in greater control of his country. Bush made his trip to Baghdad to burnish his own legacy by saying that Iraq could stand on its own two feet. That was the stated aspiration of many Arabs not so long ago. And yet Bush's final visit ended up not being about Iraq's emergence from the nightmare of dictatorship and war; it ended up being about a man whose feat became a computerized entertainment.

No less demoralizing are the events in Gaza. The callousness of the Israeli blockade has been the focus of much justified attention in the Arab world. In the absence of any clear policies on achieving peace with the Palestinians, Israel tends to resort to brutality. However, it is also worth questioning what Hamas has made of Gaza, a territory that could have once served as an encouraging example of what Palestinians could achieve when Israeli occupation ended. Instead, what we have is a failed political order, and one cannot blame this solely on Israeli pressures. Hamas has chosen the armed struggle, which required overcoming Fatah in Gaza before transforming the area into a garrisoned statelet.

Will the truce in Gaza be renewed, or won't it? Hamas last week said the truce was over because Israel had not abided by its conditions. However, that seemed to be hypocritical bluster, an effort to cover for the fact that the Islamist movement has been unable to give Palestinians a normal life despite the cease-fire. In fact, Hamas' pursuit of the armed struggle requires extending the truce so the movement can build up its weapons arsenal and prepare for a long war. That's why it was no surprise to hear Hamas' leader in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahhar, tell Egypt's Al-Ahram that the movement might agree to renew the truce under the previous conditions.

Even if Israel lifts its siege, the only things Palestinians in Gaza can look forward to is the prospect of more carnage ahead. Hamas is not a state-building enterprise, it is a military movement that plays politics to retain the military option. The dystopia it offers is many decades more of the gun, and like Zaidi's shoes, the gun has left no room for discussion of an alternative, more desirable Palestinian future.

Much the same can be said of Lebanon's Hizbullah, as it engages in a bogus national dialogue on its weapons, which the party has already indicated it will not give up. At what stage will the Lebanese throw up their arms and admit to the absurdity of finding common ground between the logic of a sovereign Lebanese state and the logic of a sovereign armed group in the midst of that state? Hizbullah, like Hamas, offers only a project of open-ended war, apparently now tied in to developments in Palestine, if we are to believe the party's deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, who declared a few days ago: "We are responsible, like all Arabs and Muslims, to completely liberate Palestine, from the river to the sea."

Who is looking flexible these days, amid such maximalism? Oddly enough the dictator in Syria, with Bashar Assad having declared on Monday that he would move to direct talks with Israel at some stage. Assad may be pulling the wool over American eyes as Barack Obama prepares to take office, but the truth is a grim one for the Lebanese. On the one side we have Hizbullah promising open-ended conflict, while on the other the Syrians are hoping that a new beginning with Washington will allow them to re-impose their hegemony over Lebanon, that rare society in the region with spaces of liberalism between its imperfectly applied despotism.

If you live by the gun you will probably die by the gun. That's the promise of the Middle East today, where weapons have become the ornaments of men, and where the foulest dictatorships end up looking like a good bet.

Let's not be crushed by the Syria train

"Don't panic," the former US ambassador to Lebanon, Jeffrey Feltman, told his Lebanese friends at a conference organized jointly last week by the Lebanon Renaissance Foundation and the Aspen Institute. And the Lebanese panicked, because the March 14 majority doesn't know how to make itself relevant as the transition in Washington accelerates, amid signs the Obama administration intends to engage Syria.

There is disconcerting haziness whenever American officials, past, present, or future, explain why it is time to talk to Syria. The principal argument is that the Syrians can be broken off from Iran and Hizbullah, that now is the time to pry Bashar Assad away from his dangerous liaisons. That reasoning, when not utterly na•ve, happens to be counter-intuitive. Assad knows that it is his dangerous liaisons that make engaging Syria desirable; the Syrians' strong card is their ability to dance with Iran and Hizbullah and Hamas and manipulate the Lebanese and Palestinian scenes while continuing to oversee mayhem in Iraq. For Assad to give all that up as a prerequisite for dealing with Washington is a non-starter. It would mean surrendering his leverage before getting down to the serious business of negotiations. Why should he do that?
Assad can read the dynamics as well as anybody. The reality is that it is the Americans who want a new relationship with Syria, so the onus is on them to make the concessions. Nor are the Syrians blind to the lessons of recent history. Hafez Assad spent decades playing the spoiler in the Middle East, many Americans were killed thanks to his efforts, but that only induced successive US administrations to pursue him with greater vigor. Syria has violated United Nations resolutions on Lebanon that the Bush administration considered vital, most damagingly Resolution 1701, but the fact is that Bashar Assad has paid no price for this and may soon be rewarded with heightened attention from the Obama administration.

Assad is under no great pressure from the US to give up anything significant. So why does the mood in Washington become so animated whenever the subject of dealing with Syria is brought up? Why does so potentially bad an arrangement seem high on the agenda of those in the Obama transition team dealing with Middle Eastern affairs?

The only convincing explanation is that the Americans are pining for the 1990s, when states rather than non-state actors happened to be more dominant in the region. As US policymakers look around these days, they see a disconcerting vista. In Lebanon, Hizbullah seems more powerful than the state; in the Palestinian areas, Hamas has a decisive advantage over the Palestinian Authority; in Egypt and Iraq, groups outside the reach of the state, or alienated from or inadequately integrated into the state, are challenging governments or ruling regimes. On the margins of the region, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Islamist movements, sometimes sponsored by state organs but also able to resist state authority, seem to be proliferating. A natural reaction of American diplomats and policymakers used to dealing with formal state structures is deep unease.

This the Syrians have skillfully understood. At a recent conference in Venice, I sat next to a Syrian doctor who several months ago was sent with colleagues to Washington to explain why Syria was worth opening up to. If one could distill his argument into a single phrase, it was this: "Syria is a state; it's best for everyone to bolster states in the Middle East against non-state actors." For many policymakers, the Syrian dictatorship remains attractive because it wards away the prospect of non-state Sunni Islamists taking over in Damascus. That Syria has been at the epicenter of efforts to arm and assist non-state actors such as Hizbullah, Hamas, and Al-Qaeda seems largely irrelevant to Western policymakers and opinion-shapers. In the absence of a desirable alternative to the Assad regime, the Syrians are making headway in marketing themselves abroad.

Which leads us back to the Lebanese panic - or at least the panic of those who understand that there are those in Washington who would welcome going back to the time when Syria could control Hizbullah. If the US preoccupation is with the growing power of non-state actors, then what better way to contain Hizbullah than by allowing a new form of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon? Reinforcing that argument is the fact that Israel has no real problem with it. According to reports, Israel and Syria advanced quite far over Lebanon in their talks in Turkey. If Benjamin Netanyahu becomes Israel's prime minister after his country's elections next February, one of the ways he might avoid making concessions on the Golan Heights is to cut Assad more slack in Lebanon.

Some US officials argue that Washington's engagement of Syria will help assure that Lebanon is not on the block in future Syrian-Israeli discussions. Perhaps, but if the Obama administration's priority is to inhibit Hizbullah, then we must be realistic: The sovereign Lebanon that emerged from the 2005 Independence Intifada is expendable, because that Lebanon has been unable to prevail over Hizbullah. Even within the US bureaucracy, those defending an independent Lebanon will have to persuade colleagues that a Lebanese state backed by Syria is less attractive to Washington and Israel than a weaker government that has been unable to extend its authority over all its national territory.

Does that mean an independent Lebanon is finished? Not necessarily. There are fundamental difficulties in a Syrian return to Lebanon, whichever form it might take: The Syrians need Hizbullah as leverage in their own talks with Israel. That means that far from weakening the party, they may only ensure that Hizbullah resumes its cross-border attacks. At the same time, Syria is incapable of fully imposing its writ on the party in the same way it could before 2005. Iran is now a major player on the scene, and there are many ways for the Iranians and Hizbullah to show that Syrian power in Lebanon is not what it used to be. This would make even less likely a Syrian-Iranian rift, however, since Syria could neither defeat Hizbullah militarily in that event, nor would it see any benefit in breaking with a party that has been its de facto enforcer in Beirut.
In other words, the Obama administration may soon come to realize that Syria doesn't have the means to give the US what it seeks in Lebanon. The Lebanese March 14 majority must see to it that while Obama is experimenting, an independent Lebanon survives. The majority has another strong suit, namely that it represents a far more desirable, pluralistic, even liberal Lebanese future than the despotism of Syria or the religious militancy of Hizbullah. However, March 14 has displayed crying incompetence in adapting to change in Washington, or shaping American attitudes in this transition period - for example by pushing for a delay in US engagement of Syria before the parliamentary elections next spring.

If the majority loses, alas we all lose. There is still a policy vacuum to be filled in Washington. There is still time for March 14 to fill that vacuum with practical proposals to ensure the US does not throw out the Lebanese independence baby with the bathwater when it chats up Assad. The Syria train is moving out in Washington, and the majority must ensure it will be on board.

Giving peace in Palestine no chance

Rarely a day goes by without someone offering new advice to the incoming Obama administration on how to deal with the Middle East. This advice is usually based on a simple principle: If George W. Bush pursued a specific policy, Barack Obama must do the opposite.
Much of the counseling has focused on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The lines of argument are familiar. The conflict lies at the heart of the Arab world's traumas, therefore resolving it is the key to unlocking many of the region's other problems. Peace is achievable because the outlines of an agreement were almost agreed to during the 1990s, after the Oslo Accords were signed. And Bush didn't do enough for Palestinian-Israeli peace, while Obama can succeed by compensating for that failing.

The difficulty with the three premises is that each is questionable. The problem of Palestine doubtless requires an urgent settlement, but all the signs are that we may be beyond that stage - past midnight on the kind of peace with which we would have been familiar in 2000, when talks collapsed and new leaders took over in the United States and Israel.

Is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict the Gordian knot that needs to be cut in order for other regional crises to be resolved? The bitter fate of the Palestinians is a significant factor in how Arab populations view themselves and their relationship with the West. However, when one looks more closely, the centrality of the Palestinians' humiliation is also, perhaps even mainly, the result of the Arabs' humiliation at the hands of their own leaders and their alienation from politics in general. In supporting the Palestinians, Arabs also denounce the illegitimacy of those governing them. That is why Palestine, as much as it is about Israeli behavior, is also about the abject failure of the Arab state.

Arab citizens are the victims of despots who neither respect them nor afford them the bare essentials of a political life. Citizens are permitted only indifference, only to express themselves in favor of the tyrannical fathers ruling over them. What is the role of Palestine in such a context? Arab regimes have used the conflict with Israel to maintain suffocating security establishments and to deflect popular anger away from their own shortcomings. However, that could mean that if Arab societies become more open, Palestine will recede as a prime shaper of Arab attitudes.

Taking this a step further, if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is resolved but Arab despotisms are left in place, it is doubtful that we would see deep changes in the nature of Arab societies. Peace with Israel will not mean that fewer young men join militant Islamist groups (probably the contrary would happen), nor that Arab citizens will be able to voice their opinions more liberally. No one doubts the importance of Palestine, but as the Lebanese showed at the end of their 15-year civil conflict, just as the Kuwaitis showed after the 1991 Gulf war and the Iraqis did at the end of the 2003 war, Arab societies will turn against the Palestinians, often in very unreasonable ways, when they feel that they themselves have paid an onerous domestic price for having backed the Palestinians.

The second assumption about a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, namely that the outlines of a final agreement are known and were defined during negotiations in the 1990s, is equally problematic. All the evidence today suggests that Palestinian-Israeli dynamics are changing so rapidly that the Oslo framework may have become a distant anachronism.

The reason is that on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli divide those unwilling to make the required concessions for peace are in a position to veto a final settlement. On the Israeli side we are likely heading after the February 2009 parliamentary elections toward a center-right government, one either led by the Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu or in which he will have a decisive say. Given that the present center-left Kadima-led government has been incapable, when not unwilling, to take steps bolstering the credibility of President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, it seems illusory to expect better next spring.

Similarly, Hamas has no interest in a peace settlement, believing the armed struggle can deliver the Palestinians much more. The Islamist movement may soon have as its main Israeli adversary Netanyahu, who, like Hamas, welcomes an open-ended truce that ultimately resolves nothing. Meanwhile, the Palestinians' condition will only consolidate the divisions between the West Bank and Gaza. However, not before very long this stalemate might only further undermine the credibility and negotiating strategy of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, creating openings for Hamas in future elections. This coming January, Hamas and Fatah are likely to clash over whether Abbas should remain in office as president, and this week's fighting in the Mieh Mieh camp in southern Lebanon was a worrying omen that Palestinian refugees may soon be caught up in their political animosities.

So, did George W. Bush err in not doing enough to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? His administration blundered in isolating the late Yasser Arafat, pushing for Palestinian elections, and doing nothing to persuade Israel to suspend settlement-building - all steps that strengthened Hamas and discredited Fatah. But Bush's lethargy in the past year, despite the Annapolis conference, was only a symptom of the dynamics at play: Washington is basically unable to impose peace on the Israelis and Palestinians, and nothing suggests this will soon change.

Few in the US want to admit that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may be irresolvable for now. That's understandable, since doing nothing to address the conflict may be worse than doing something, even if that something is futile. The danger is that Palestine has become a diplomatic quandary where it is better for the Americans to oversee negotiations that merely delay the inevitable descent into violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Such negotiations present no prospect of peace, but keep alive an empty process that is better than no process at all. If so, Barack Obama may soon find himself as ineffective as George W. Bush was.