From the Jaws of Victory - Catching Saddam and giving Iraqis their country back

Last Sunday, as television stations showed footage of a captured Saddam Hussein, a Damascus shopkeeper turned to me and said: "We got rid of him, but there is one left. Do you know who?" I hesitated: "No, you tell me." He answered: "Osama bin Laden." When someone in my group said: "And Bush," the shopkeeper feigned shock and, smiling, replied: "I know nothing about politics!"

On that day, the Syrian didn't care about punishing George W. Bush, even though the US president had just signed the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. He was just enjoying the disgrace of an Arab despot.

The reaction was interesting, because it contrasted with a purportedly more general Arab feeling of humiliation that Saddam had not gone down in a hail of gunfire. Consider this lament from that tragicomic distillation of Arab pathology, Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi: "It was a shock to us, and an insult to millions of other Arabs watching...the Iraqi president submitting to the humiliating (American) medical examination; we would have liked to see him fight to the end and die a martyr like his sons and grandson, or choose the death of Hitler by firing a bullet into his head or swallowing poison."

Leave it to the Arabs, or more specifically to their Pan-Arab publicists, to miss out on history and transform their potential triumphs into perceived failures. The image of a brutal and cowardly thug cowering in a hole should inspire an Arab renaissance and invite Arabs to break free from the patronizing intimidation of their leaders; yet many persisted in seeing Saddam's downfall as an illustration of the region's failings.

Evidently, someone forgot to explain this to the Syrian shopkeeper.

In its often-simplistic belief in core democratic values in the Middle East, the Bush administration may be closer to the truth than its critics give it credit for. Many Arabs will have seen in Saddam's downfall something personally liberating, even if the subtleties of Middle East academia prepare one for more than the unrefined deduction that Arabs, like most other people, don't appreciate regime goons staring over their shoulders, raping their wives, shooting their husbands, brainwashing their children or razing their villages.

Yet it is precisely by reaffirming such core liberal values, by restating its belief in the dictum "live and let live," that the US will emerge successfully from its stumbling Iraqi entanglement. Saddam's capture bought the US valuable time, and his trial will surely cast light on what a service the Bush administration did when it ended the long Baathist nightmare. However, this time must be put to good use as the US lays the groundwork for a truly independent, open and representative Iraq.

But what of the Arab world? Even America's harshest critics showed little nostalgia for Saddam, though many of them had explicitly or implicitly praised him in the days when he was custodian of the "eastern flank of the Arab world," to use author Christine Moss Helms's injudicious phrase. How revealing, and relieving, it was to read Talal Salman, an unrepentant Pan-Arabist, writing in Al-Safir on Monday: "It was an end worthy of a despot, an oppressor of his people, weak in the face of foreign occupation...Every dictator is a coward, he kills but doesn't fight."

And yet many are the dictators still thriving in our region, simultaneously criticized and defended by Pan-Arab intellectuals and polemicists, who regard them as indigenous ills, and, therefore, more palatable than the Americans.

Keeping America out of the Middle East would not be a bad idea if Arab governments didn't invite the contempt that makes outside intervention in their affairs so tolerable. In many a conversation at the start of this year, Arab and Western opponents of an Iraq war insisted that transformations in the Middle East must be homegrown, and that what the US was planning was unacceptable. What they couldn't answer was why Saddam had for so long been deemed acceptable, but also how domestic reform was possible under a near genocidal regime. In their zeal to censure America, the critics were reduced to peddling an absurdity.

That's why Saddam's removal and arrest were a logical conclusion to an illogicality, even if one might question the Bush administration's intentions. At the end of the day, however, these intentions will be checked by the Iraqis' desire to fashion a country that is to their own liking, thanks to the liberal values the US has claimed to be advancing. Saddam's capture will only reinforce such values, and through them the wish of Iraqis to avoid seeing their country turned into an American colony. On Sunday the US told the Iraqis: Saddam is history; your country is now truly yours.

There is a paradox in colonialism—since some insist on seeing the US presence in Iraq as a neo-colonial venture. It is that indigenous elites established by colonizers usually end up leading national liberation struggles. The Americans know this and are also aware that they are giving their Iraqi allies a stake in a new system that will surely reject absolute American control. If you have any doubts, then ask yourself where else could Saddam's delectable televised humiliation lead?

Orient Obsess - A lackluster look at Americans abroad

American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945, by Douglas Little, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 424 pages, $34.95

In his book The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1998), the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami took a page out of Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore (1962) in closing a chapter by describing a son as a coda to his departed father. Wilson did it with Tom Sherman, who epitomized the psychological pathologies of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. (Tom became a Catholic priest, to his father's enduring regret.) Ajami did it with professional basketball player Steve Kerr, whose tenacity on the court replicated that of his father, Malcolm, a Middle East specialist who was president of the American University of Beirut (AUB) when he was murdered in January 1984.

Few Lebanese saw anything seminal in Kerr's death, let alone pondered its meaning in the context of well over a century of U.S.-Arab relations. Lebanon's on-again, off-again war was then in its ninth year, and the loss of this scion of patrician American missionaries was regarded as just another tragedy in a series of similar outrages, though unusual for having infiltrated the sheltered world of the AUB.

For Ajami, however, the murder represented much more. He described Kerr's death as that of "an intimate stranger," born in Beirut "in the very hospital where he was pronounced dead," an American who had sought to understand and address the Middle East on its own terms, and who could do so in its own language. Like Wilson, Ajami saw something transcendent in the contrast between father and son, a generational rupture that spoke to the complexities, moral and political, of the worlds navigated by the fathers. In Kerr's case, a world that devoured him.

Douglas Little, in American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945, provides a practical, competent overview of American relations with the Arab world, but one that will leave you in search of either drama or meaning. Little, a history professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, is good at chronological exposition, has blackened many a note card, and boasts a hefty bibliography. Yet the outcome is a book that will make you marvel at how someone could tackle such an enthralling subject and make it sound so flat.

The title doesn't help. Whenever the word Orientalism is used, people on all sides of the Middle East studies divide reach for their pistols. They will safely pack them away upon scanning Little's tome, however. He never really uses the term in an interesting way, in part because his definition is anemic: American Orientalism, he argues, is "a tendency to underestimate the peoples of the region and to overestimate America's ability to make a bad situation better." One suspects that even the late Edward Said, who famously developed the concept of Orientalism in a 1978 book of the same name, would wince: "What of the nexus of knowledge and power creating 'the Oriental' and in a sense obliterating him," Said might well sneer, citing himself.

Yet there are aspects of the book well worth examining. Little opens with a chapter on America's cultural alienation from the Arab world, where he makes the valid point that perceptions of Arabs in the United States lag far behind those of other ethnic groups in terms of sensitivity. American popular culture is shot through with appalling stereotypes of Arabs and Arab-Americans, though Little's path to this revelation is much too dependent on his reading of National Geographic, which he foolishly treats as the primary vessel for establishing American attitudes toward foreign cultures.

Little falters also in overlooking those sympathetic Americans -- missionaries, academics, and diplomats -- who sought to explain the Arab world to their countrymen. They were the ones who set up educational institutions that trained generations of Middle Easterners, who made understanding the region a cornerstone of their lives, and who, like Malcolm Kerr, paid a high price for embracing cultural ecumenism. Surely they deserve a mention in Little's inventory of American anti-Arab biases, if only to underscore their irrelevance in forming American opinions.

In fact, Little never gauges the impact these Americans of the Middle East played in defining their country's outlook on the region. He prefers sketching the grand policies of U.S. administrations and oil companies to explaining the psychology of the American-Arab encounter. That's fine, but one never gets a sense that Little has experienced his subject at first hand; American Orientalism reads like something crafted in a New England study. Infinitely more immediate is Robert Kaplan's rousing 1993 work, The Arabists (the term used to describe those Americans working in, enamored with, and knowledgeable of the Arab world), with its insights garnered through myriad interviews, lengthy taxi rides, and plodding lunches.

Little didn't need to duplicate Kaplan, but he would have gained by giving a face to his characters. The Arabists will remain valuable, for example, because of its unsparing account of Americans going native in the Middle East, an essential feature of the cross-cultural interaction Little is describing. Consider, for example, Kaplan's account of the mid-'80s kidnapping of American missionary Benjamin Weir in Lebanon by Islamic Jihad. What image could match that of Weir's wife Carol snapping at U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, who had just criticized the kidnappers, that her husband's captors "had some legitimate grievances against the United States"?

The Weirs suffered for their Middle Eastern sympathies, losing their daughter Ann in a bus-train accident in Egypt, where she had gone to teach. Yet their attitude only underlined how the Arabists, often remarkable for their educational, academic, and cultural achievements, were also astonishingly blind and petty when it came to certain issues.

For instance, most Arabists' deep revulsion for Arab Christians, particularly Lebanon's Maronites, was legendary. One explanation is that the mainly Protestant Americans couldn't abide the Eastern Christians' attachment to Catholic France, or their devotion to the outward trappings of religion at the expense of spirituality. That may be true, but it misses the point: What pro-Arab Americans couldn't stomach was that the Christians were often estranged from their Muslim brethren and from the Arab nationalism the region engendered (though minorities were among the first theorists of the ideology). The Arabists believed, particularly during the heady days of "national liberation" in the 1950s and '60s, that archaic Christians were stubbornly resisting the Middle East's future. There was something very American in their reaction: a righteous indignation that the Arab consensus was being bucked, but also a romantic identification with a dogma regarded as modern and progressive. Ironically, a similar motivation shaped the Arabists' outlook on Israel -- always perceived as a foreign body interrupting potential regional harmony.

This is all absent from Little's unadventurous log. The few discernible Americans populating his book are government officials, who for much of the half-century of American-Arab transactions after World War II were preoccupied with the Soviet Union. Throughout the Cold War successive administrations tried to resolve the following conundrum: How far could Arab governments go in expressing their sovereign nationalism without threatening America's position vis-à-vis the USSR? The specter that haunted Washington was that of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was seen by the United States as an anti-communist nationalist until he sought to play the superpowers off against one another, while also developing his relationship with Moscow, which had no qualms about arming him.

A consequence of this anxiety that Arab regimes might tilt the Soviet Union's way was an American quest for stability in friendly states. Little takes an intriguing look at how numerous administrations sought to pursue this goal through a strong dose of Yankee hopefulness, which was much needed since pro-American Arab leaders were often splendid thugs. And they had an incentive to stay that way: Washington was so obsessed with losing ground in the Cold War that the regimes could easily abuse their populations and stifle free expression. The U.S. wouldn't turn up the heat on them as long as they were regarded as anti-communist -- as "sons of bitches, but our sons of bitches."

American policy makers understood this reality but still stalwartly requested that their repressive confederates advance reform, development, and modernization to garner domestic support and ward off coups or revolutions that might harm U.S. interests. The only problem, as Little observes, was that reform raised expectations (he uses the examples of Iraq under the Hashemites, Libya under King Idris, and Iran under Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi), mobilizing populations even more aggressively against their pro-American masters. What Washington could not grasp was that reform and modernization contradicted regime immovability: The U.S. wanted its friends to stay solidly in place as enlightened despots, but Arab populations (not to mention the Iranians in 1979) naturally saw reform as an invitation to oust their leaders -- even if what came afterward was often far worse.

The USSR ultimately collapsed through Mikhail Gorbachev's similarly misguided notion that a sclerotic and largely discredited system could somehow survive political and social renovation. The Soviet leader's efforts provoked much derision in the United States. Yet many forget that American policy in the Middle East was for decades based on similar logic.

Do the Bush administration's actions in Iraq portend change? One paradox, it appears, has been replaced by another very similar one: Where the U.S. had previously sought reformist change by its Arab allies to ensure steadiness, today it claims to spread liberalism through American military might but is so far finding this difficult to manage. The Bush administration is again confronting the familiar problem of introducing positive change and realizing afterward that dynamism can be a headache. In response, the U.S. can revert to familiar behavior, averting its gaze from the illiberal practices of friendly Arab regimes, or it can stick it out and turn Iraq into a liberal-capitalist showcase, whatever the regional fallout.

For the moment the administration is taking both approaches simultaneously, but ultimately only one can prevail. In calling for a new American empire to replace the Pax Britannica of the 19th century, the British historian Niall Ferguson has referred to the U.S. as "an empire in denial, a colossus with an attention deficit disorder." Yet what Ferguson forgot was that for half a century, until the 1991 Gulf War, the United States had it both ways -- managing the region like an imperial power, but doing so from a distance without getting its hands, or conscience, too dirty.

That much has changed. America has virtually become a Middle Eastern state because of its Iraqi presence. More often than not the region has absorbed its conquerors and neutralized them. Against this history stands an American tendency to impose the will of the United States and, as Mark Twain put it in Innocents Abroad, to bear down on the people of the region "with America's greatness, until we [crush] them." A liberal Middle Eastern order will emerge only if America is able to sidestep these two extremes -- absorption into the region or its gradual suffocation.

Missing Persons - America's vision of Iraq misses Iraqis

There is a great deal that is revealing in the American public's rediscovery of Jessica Lynch, months after she was injured during the US invasion of Iraq. The young soldier's slow recovery, embellished by her display of true grit, is only one aspect of a regenerative tale the American media (and Lynch herself) have carefully crafted in recent weeks. More intriguing, however, is that largely absent from the stirring narrative are the Iraqis themselves.

Not that this is new: the peoples America has encountered in its myriad wars have been routinely denied entry into the country's military passion plays. For example, in virtually all of the often stunning Vietnam war films made in the US from the late 1970s onwards—Hal Ashby's Coming Home, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, Oliver Stone's Platoon—the Vietnamese characters were invariably silent substructures to essentially American stories—sometimes meriting compassion, but also pervasively alien.

In a Time magazine article this week, as well as in a book written by Rick Bragg that has just been published, the Lynch saga has been all insular psychodrama. Indeed, Bragg, who couldn't get his volume out fast enough under a publisher's deadline, eschewed traveling to Iraq altogether to check out the details of Lynch's capture. Not that it would have mattered, since by then the Iraqis had been airbrushed out of a fable conceived to buttress contending American spins on the Iraq war.

The difficulty Americans have had in integrating Iraqis into their war narratives should reassure those who worry about US imperialism in the Gulf. One aspect of any genuine imperial urge is the desire to summon up what writer Jan Morris has called the "aesthetic of empire," by which she meant "its feel, its look, its human passions, the metaphysics of its power, the sense of it, the intuition..." And while some in Washington cast ravenous eyes on Iraq's oil or aspire to play regional power games from Baghdad, most Americans remain disinterested in the aesthetic of their Iraqi possession, preferring to focus on the microcosm of Jessica Lynch's recovery.

It would be a mistake to condemn this tendency. Too much knowledge of a conquered people is as likely to earn an occupier opprobrium as too little, since it can be regarded as just another instrument of control. However, specifically in the case of Iraq, the dearth of human and cultural ties binding Americans and Iraqis, which the parochialism of the Lynch narrative has underscored, poses a strategic problem: given such a situation, how solid will America's necessary perseverance in Iraq be, particularly if the going there gets even tougher?

Consider that one of the most determined publicists for Iraqi suffering has been US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Faced with American self-absorption, he has remained defiantly internationalist. At a recent question and answer session at Georgetown University, Wolfowitz was chastised by a student who told him that his Iraq policies were "deplorable," since they were "responsible for the deaths of innocents." In justifying war, the Pentagon official simply described how the former Baath regime had wiped out the Marsh Arabs, so that there "were half a million... in 1991. The estimates today are somewhere between 40,000-200,000."

What Wolfowitz sought to do was take a specifically Iraqi narrative and give it meaning in an American milieu, arguing that moral considerations had shaped his policies. Yet the fact that a student could sympathize in the abstract with Iraqi victims of Wolfowitz's "deplorable" war, while also ignoring the very real, longstanding and brutal repression wrought by Saddam Hussein and his acolytes against millions of innocents, shows what an uphill struggle the Bush administration has to convince Americans that Iraq has personal meaning for them.

It may be too ambitious to ask that Middle America and Middle Iraq find much common ground, nor do the Iraqis have a choice part in the Holy Scriptures, which have been so useful in tying the American Bible-belt to Israel. But if the Bush administration wants to provide more expansive meaning to its democratic efforts in the Middle East, if indeed it wants to convince a majority of people both in the region and outside that it is sincere about opening up Arab societies, then much more must be done to integrate Iraqi and American narratives.

Can it be done? For half a century successive US administrations managed to convince their countrymen that the Cold War was worth its shocking expense, even though the peoples either engulfed or threatened by communism usually had very little in common with an American public willing to wage wars on their behalf. The same is possible in Iraq, though the effort will not be nearly as demanding. As September 11, 2001 showed, the stakes in promoting a more liberal Arab world, if this curbs the frustrations supposedly engendering violent Islamism, are very high.

Some will dismiss this as a recipe for neo-imperialism. Perhaps, but the critique it acts off of was initially defined by liberal Middle East academics, who saw militant Islam as a byproduct of usually pro-America autocracy and economic underdevelopment. The paradigm has its flaws, but also its merits, and if America is to succeed in Iraq and the Middle East, there is no way it can do so without tying the values it is peddling in the region to those of small town America.

Exile and the empire - Edward Said, Fouad Ajami and the immigrants' song

The death of Edward Said, like that of any influential figure, unleashed a flurry of activity. Much was made in particular of the author's approach to the concept of exile, so that, paraphrasing the title of Said's memoir, he felt out of place in a wilderness of parallel worlds: the United States, the Middle East and Europe.

I was never the kindest of commentators to Said, largely because he never seemed to put together what he had exuberantly taken apart. However, in Said's defense, being the product of privileged Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism can be an enthralling, but also a cruel destiny. The admixture of cultures and sensibilities is never easy to manage, let alone rationalize. That is why as one tries to better understand Said's legacy, it is difficult not to also mention his enduring nemesis: Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami.

There was much of the Greek tragedy in the inevitability, but also the consummate symmetry of the Said-Ajami rivalry. On the one side was the left-leaning Palestinian, on the other the increasingly conservative Lebanese Shiite. Where Said regarded Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon as a dark time for the Palestinian national movement, Ajami saw it as a defining moment for Shi'ite affirmation, since it allowed the community to rid itself of the Palestinians, and also to challenge the Maronite-Sunni axis that had until then largely managed power relations in Lebanon.

You could take the contrast further and argue that the antagonism was a foreseeable by-product of the two men's contending attitudes toward Arab nationalism. Maybe Said, as a Palestinian Christian, was always more likely to sympathize with a secular ideology that affirmed the independence of a broad Arab nation. Maybe Ajami, the Shiite, was necessarily predisposed to regard Arab nationalism as little more than a contraption to secure Sunni domination.

More interesting than the two men's overt political differences, however, was how their relationship came to be fed by startlingly different approaches to America and its power. That's because the rivalry between Said and Ajami was, deep down, a conflict over how to integrate into the United States.

It was inevitable that Said would come to view the US with an increasingly critical eye. He, simply, saw the foul destiny of the Palestinians as a consequence of American support for Israel. More fundamentally, by the late 1970s Said had developed a worldview that left little room for gray zones, since he had come to regard the West-East relationship as one between dominator and dominated. In developing this dichotomy, Said was too moved by moral outrage to ever truly reconcile his disapproval of the most powerful dominator, the United States, with a recognition that it could also, in some way, represent transcendent benevolence.

Ajami well understood Said's dilemma, for he sharply rejected its logic. As he perhaps saw it, Said was alienating himself from his environment, and the reason for this was his inability to keep a foot in one world. By being multifaceted, Said had become merely contradictory. Ajami, in contrast, hailed from the desolate world of southern Lebanon, where one didn't look backwards when departing, and where single-mindedness and the obliteration of nostalgia was an emigrant's only true weapon.

By his own admission, Said succumbed to the dangers of partial integration, since he never quite felt at home anywhere. As his more devoted disciples today lament, his tragedy was that he died before the Palestinians could achieve statehood. Yet how very odd to hear such a phrase, which collapses two distinct worlds—the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the Occupied Territories—into a single, essentially Palestinian narrative, while leaving entirely unsaid what Said represented for America.

Ajami had no such difficulties. To his credit—since hardness is a virtue—he has insisted that he is exclusively American and only "originally" Arab. In so doing, he implies that embracing America means saying "yes." Said, in turn, believed it meant saying "no."

This impossible dialogue has led to two great gaps in both Said's and Ajami's works. Said always displayed a prickly unwillingness to delve into the American psyche, perhaps fearing it would erode his indignation with the U.S. Ajami, in turn, has increasingly banished the Palestinians from his writings, so that they have become the elephant in his living room—increasingly obvious for remaining unmentioned.

So, which of the two men better integrated into America? Said always played the outsider, but only in America could his paradoxes have been so well honed, his opposites so well exploited. Ajami, in contrast, decisively cut the umbilical cord with the old country and in recent years has moved steadily toward the center of political power. Yet his not looking backwards means always having to stare ahead. Few play that game well. The temptation to catch a glimpse of one's past can be unyielding.

As they grappled with America, and with each other, Said and Ajami surely came to understand that, aside from their political differences, they were two sides of the same immigrant experience. Neither found the magical formula of America because it was there staring at them, and it said that no single formula exists. Ajami and Said may not have liked each other, but the death of one American cannot have been met with indifference by the other, because the success of one was partly that of the other.

Spanish Inquisition - Defending Taysir Alouni and Al-Jazeera's lies

In a column written during the Iraq war, scholar Edward Said described the Al-Jazeera correspondent Taysir Alouni as "impressible." It was an odd choice of words since the definition of the word—"capable of being impressed; sensitive"—was not quite what Said had in mind given the phrasing of his sentence. What he really seemed to be saying was that Alouni was capable of impressing.

Whatever Said's real meaning, we now know that Alouni may have indeed been impressible when covering Osama bin Laden and his acolytes. If Spanish magistrate Balthasar Garzon is right that Alouni was an active member of Al-Qaeda, his reporting may have been intended to advance the group's agenda.

Alouni's culpability will be determined in a court of law, so there is no need to impart guilt just yet. Though Al-Jazeera and the Arabic media in general have depicted the journalist as an Arab Vaclav Havel, it is difficult to get worked up over his fate. He will surely be accorded more due process than were the victims of the Taleban or former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whose regimes Alouni helped sustain through his systematically biased and unimpressive reporting.

Alouni has become a poster boy for the Occidentalist crowd, those who view the U.S. through the same distorting lens that Western Orientalists allegedly do the East. However, if it is proven he was an Al-Qaeda mole, this might have beneficial consequences for the new Middle Eastern media, forcing Arab publics to demand higher standards from their correspondents. With several members of Al-Jazeera's staff having been accused months ago of working for Iraq's intelligence services, the station might even engage in introspection.

More likely, however, the charges against Alouni will be overtaken by allegations in the Middle East that he fell victim to yet another anti-Arab conspiracy. Instead of reform, the Arab media may opt for stubborn retrenchment.

What makes the Alouni case interesting is the ambiguous role Syria might have played in it (Alouni is originally Syrian), and the double standards employed by the journalist's Arab sympathizers. A day after Alouni's arrest, the daily Al-Hayat reported that Syria's intelligence services had warned the Spanish authorities of the journalist's "suspicious activities" and told them they had been watching him for years. Syria accused Alouni of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which explains why the journalist is barred from visiting Syria.

The story raises a question. It is now established that Syria knew of Al-Qaeda's activities in Germany before September 11, 2001, and handed over to the US valuable information its agents had gathered there. A leading light of Al-Qaeda's German operation was Mamoun al-Darkazanli, a Syrian Muslim Brother. While his relations with Alouni are unclear (the Spaniards have a videotape of a wedding where Darkazanli was present with Alouni's brother-in-law), one can't help but wonder whether Syria played a greater role in Alouni's arrest, and in outing his possible contacts with the German network, than Spain is letting on.

Spain's critics have entirely ignored the Syrian angle to the case. This highlights the double standards implicit in the sharp contrast between Arab outrage at Alouni's detention, and the indifference last December that greeted the arrest of Syrian journalist Ibrahim Hamidi, for writing a story in Al-Hayat the authorities deemed "inaccurate." It's instructive that Alouni's supporters, particularly those in the Arab world, have adopted a high-profile defense of the journalist, under the assumption that in the West such campaigns bear fruit.

When Hamidi was arrested, however, both he and his advocates cautioned against public pressure, fearing this would induce the Syrian authorities to extend his incarceration. The subtle approach worked and Hamidi was released sooner than many people expected. What was remarkable, however, was how sullenly silent the Arab media and public remained throughout his ordeal and afterwards, as if to say it is only acceptable to protest detentions of Arabs in the West.

It is conceivable that Alouni is a pawn in a game bigger than he is. He was always a grating embodiment of what respectable journalists should avoid becoming: a purveyor of propaganda who occasionally got the story right. However, that doesn't necessarily make him a murderer. Nor does his alleged membership in Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, whose obliteration, we might recall, the West placed high up in its inventory of Syrian misdeeds during the 1980s.

But what is apparent is how Alouni has already been declared innocent by an Arab public that has regarded his arrest as more than a mere criminal case. Many in the region realize that if Alouni is guilty, this will discredit their own reading of current Middle Eastern affairs, which Al-Jazeera has played such a prominent role in shaping. If one of their favorite journalists is a con man, Arabs will lose yet another one of their illusions—one holding that Alouni and his comrades proved Arab correspondents could tell the truth, albeit their truth.

The Arab world is too impressible when it comes to Alouni. It was always a mistake to put such faith in a certifiably partisan reporter. But dashed illusions are commonplace in this part of the world, where the propensity is to defend the liar and persecute the truth-teller.

The Man Who Isn't There - Why we shouldn't worry about a Powell vacuum

There was much hand wringing two weeks ago when it was reported that Secretary of State Colin Powell would not be staying on for a possible second Bush term. Though Powell and the White House denied the story, the real question was whether the secretary's departure would be such a great loss.

Powell is one those men who exudes credibility, even when his record tells a different tale. Ever since he became secretary of state in January 2001, the ever-popular Powell has drifted from one slip-up to the next, particularly in the Middle East. Yet many—particularly in the Middle East—continue to regard him as the sole rational official in an administration of kooks. Even as Powell's list of failures increases, so does his standing.

Looking back on what Powell has done in three years, his legacy seems remarkably thin. Indeed, the foreign policy initiative has always seemed to be in the hands of his bureaucratic rivals. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice took point on relations with Russia early on in the administration; later, ties with Europe and NATO were hijacked by the Pentagon; and recently on North Korea, Powell has deserved a hefty share of the blame for the administration's lack of a clear-cut strategy on how to confront Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.

But it's in the Middle East that Powell's futility has been most apparent. The secretary's first overseas visit was to the region, where he sought to impose "smart sanctions" on Iraq. Powell didn't have real support for the plan in Washington, and Iraq's neighbors predictably rebuffed him. Syrian president Bashar Assad did promise to cut off illegal Iraqi oil exports through Syria, and Powell used this to emphasize the success of his tour. However, Assad subsequently ignored the pledge, embarrassing the secretary and helping sink the smart sanctions scheme altogether.

In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Powell was more careful. Like his predecessor Madeleine Albright, Powell sensed the conflict presented him with a lose-lose situation, and initially steered clear. That made sense inasmuch as President George W. Bush had no intention of putting his personal credibility on the line to resolve the imbroglio. However, this allowed Powell to validate his lethargy, as he never sought to use even limited advances on the Palestinian-Israeli track to build up a semblance of Arab and international support for the Iraq war.

Iraq was Powell's Waterloo. He showed that he had lost the initiative within the Bush administration, but also that he was incapable of delivering his erstwhile friends, the Europeans, to a UN resolution sanctioning war. When Paris and Berlin rebuffed him, Powell was livid. He found himself alienated both from Europe's powerhouses and from those in Washington who felt Powell had led them on a wild goose chase at the Security Council.

Unlike another former secretary of state, James Baker, Powell failed to take advantage of the aftermath of the Iraq war. While he understood it was time to move on the "road map," and even pushed the peace plan forward, he never got a hold of the policy: Powell couldn't prevent Bush's dithering when dealing with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, or cut into pro-Israel sympathies at the White House and Pentagon. He brought Bush to the river—or rather the Red Sea—but has been unable to make him drink the waters of true Palestinian-Israeli peace.

A secretary of state who can't get things done, who persistently abides a glass half empty, is better off going home. Powell is a competent man who, like William Rogers, former President Richard Nixon's first secretary of state, will be forgotten a generation hence. And like Rogers, whom Henry Kissinger made irrelevant, Powell has been repeatedly overtaken by more vigorous colleagues. The reason is that he embodies stalemate in an administration that has come to epitomize the contrary.

Where but again in the Middle East has Powell's appetite for the status quo been so evident? The State Department has long favored stolid continuity in its transactions with Arab governments. This has protected relations often painstakingly forged, while also guaranteeing that other Washington bureaucracies wouldn't take advantage of tectonic shifts in regional affairs.

That's one reason why the US has spent decades embracing thugs in the Middle East. Successive administrations did advise friendly Arab despots to reform. However, the State Department never pushed too hard, both because this threatened to disturb otherwise comfortable relationships, and because during the Cold War hard-pressed regimes could always bolt in the Soviet Union's direction.

Powell is merely the latest agent of an inbred State Department aversion to change. It is indeed odd to see how so many Arabs regard him as a friend, though he is the one who has most counseled leaving their regimes alone—the very same regimes most Arabs systematically complain are oppressing them. If Powell and the State Department had their way, the Middle East would remain a redoubt of authoritarian kleptocracies for generations to come.

One needn't approve of Washington neoconservatives to point out that they're the ones who have relocated the foreign policy debate to where it should be: in the realm of innovation. They have welcomed change, not deadlock. If Powell leaves office it may create a dangerous imbalance in a second Bush administration, but it surely won't cost it many new ideas.

Paper Lion - Opening up Syria, but closing a newspaper

At regular intervals we hear of reformist impulses in Syria. President Bashar Assad intends to appoint a new reform-minded government; the Baath party has been barred from interfering in the executive branch; the banking sector is opening up to privatization; Syria's sole privately owned newspaper, Al-Domari, has been closed down. Everywhere, it seems, reform is in the air.

Couldn't slip the Al-Domari line by you, could I? Indeed, even as Damascus was abuzz with talk of a new government to replace that of the forlorn Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa Miro, even as Syria's civil society revival committees cautiously welcomed the decision to reduce the Baath's control over the government apparatus, the country's two-year-old satirical weekly, founded by cartoonist Ali Firzat, saw its license revoked because it stopped publishing in May. Syrian press law mandates license revocations after three months of non-publication.

According to Al-Domari's staff, however, the newspaper wasn't able to publish these past months because of harassment by the regime. When the paper sought to print last week and dodge the three-month condition, the state and security services intervened to ensure it would not be distributed. Firzat has said he would appeal the decision, telling the Associated Press: "The newspaper's closure is a result of a struggle between the reformists and those who stand to lose from reform."

Al-Domari's lawyer, Anwar Buni, a member of Syria's Human Rights Association, was more to the point: "This decision was outrageous and contrary to the law and the constitution. It also runs counter to all that which has been said about media freedom, democracy and slogans of reform and development."

Buni's statement summarized what is really at stake in Syria, namely reducing the wide gap between the regime's often-vacant rhetoric on reform, and the real thing. In his phrase were echoes of Eastern Europe two decades and more ago, where independent-minded voices cut through the falsehoods propping up their autocratic systems to unchain what Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz called the "captive mind."

Firzat and Buni have displayed much courage, affirming that authentic reformers in Syria will not sing to an empty audience. A visit to Damascus will prove that, just as it will show a leadership that has still not resolved the dilemma of how much change is acceptable before the regime itself is threatened. Indeed, the real question Assad must answer is whether he and his fellow modernizers can fine-tune their system into convalescence, or whether the only option is to completely overhaul it.

Assad remembers that the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to renovate his political system from within, only to be swept away by those wondering: "Why the communists if we want improvement?" Assad has been more cautious, ruminating about the so-called Chinese model, which blends dominant state power with economic development. The only problem is that the Chinese model has depended on prosperous capitalism and its restriction to specific geographical areas, prerequisites Syria shows no signs of approximating.

For there to be genuine reform in Syria, the regime must do much more than what it is doing now. A tardy change of government or the modest opening up of the banking sector is hardly enough. Even the decision to bar the Baath from executive power is merely a reheated idea first thought up by the late president, Hafez Assad. Despite his tremendous authority, he was unable to implement it.

True reform must also address an issue the Syrian opposition has ignored: the Syrian military presence in Lebanon. It would be outlandish for a reform-minded Syrian regime to advocate more openness at home while sanctioning continued domination next door. In seeking to transform the Soviet system, Gorbachev rightly felt a need to dismantle the USSR's network of protectorates in Eastern Europe. Assad, if he is sincere, will have to do the same in Lebanon.

Few would welcome Syrian reform more than the Lebanese, who must have a role in helping bring it about. Lebanon, with all its shortcomings, is Syria's primary gateway to a more liberal and tolerant order. Well, that's not quite true if Iraqi democracy takes shape. But Lebanon is manageable, Iraq is not. Both neighboring states demand change from Syria, one that goes beyond ornamental efforts to amend a bankrupt system merely to preserve it.

We'll be certain Syria is changing when Al-Domari returns to Damascus' kiosks, but also when it becomes one of many independent publications that can say what they please about those in power, without paying the ultimate price.