It was said that Lebanese democracy is on the way to being a model for the Arab world—Sunni, Christian, and Shi’ite—sans Syrian Sunni domination and sans Shi’ite Hezbollah (that Iranian conglomerate) making itself a warlordland on the Mediterranean coast. (It’s all about geography.)
Lebanese democracy alone was reason enough for Iran to bankroll Hezbollah. But the EuroAmerican “Israel,” justly created by the UN that now threatens sanctions against Iranian ambitions, made Hezbollah the necessary arm of what seems to be aspiration for a new Persian empire leading an Islamic caliphate against the legacy of Athens and Jerusalem represented by the UN (seen as an arm of the Great Satan). Homer would be amused, while the evolutionary anthropologist might mark his story as only yesterday in the still-tribal scheme of things.
Speaking of perspective, Tom Friedman recently wrote from the Amazon (before “Lebanon”) about the scheme of things “and looking at the world through this dense jungle has given me new perspectives....”
Israel has evacuated Gaza, and what does Hamas do? It doesn't put all its energy into building a nest for its young there — a decent state and society, with jobs. Instead, it launches hundreds of rockets into Israel....Species that behave that way in the rain forest become extinct. (NYTimes, July 5)
...unless the competing species can be presumed to be weak-willed about its UN-legitimated sense of things. Says David Makovsky, Project on the Middle East Peace Process:
Olmert feels he's being tested by Hamas and by Hezbollah at a time that he wants to move Israel in a moderate direction.
He’s being tested by a warlordland living by a tribal honor code that only respects fights to the finish. John Tierney, NYT, writes:
In the West we’ve redefined “honorable” as being virtuous, fair, truthful and sincere, but that’s not the traditional meaning. Honor meant simply the respect of the local “honor group” — the family, the extended clan, the tribe, the religious sect. It meant maintaining a reputation for courage and loyalty, not being charitable to enemy civilians. Telling the truth was secondary to saving face.
Friedman saw this ethos also in upscale Damascus this week
I sat at a swank rooftop restaurant the other night with some young Syrian writers and listened to a discussion between a young woman dressed in trendy clothes, talking about how she would prefer to see Israel disappear, another writer who argued that Nasrallah was an Arab disaster, and an Arab journalist who described the “pride” and “dignity” every Arab felt at seeing Hezbollah fight Israel to a standstill.
When will the Arab-Muslim world stop getting its “pride” from fighting Israel and start getting it from constructing a society that others would envy, an economy others would respect, and inventions and medical breakthroughs from which others would benefit?
Immediately after the Hezbollah incursion, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. properly proclaimed on CNN that
The international-recognized border was endorsed by the U.N., which also called for the Lebanese government to exercise its sovereignty over the southern border with us, namely to disarm the Hezbollah....
But UN order meets threatened illusions of Persion caliphate: The next day, according to Reuters, “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday [July 30] an Israeli strike on Syria would be considered an attack on the whole Islamic world that would bring a ‘fierce response,’ state television reported.”
Some in Sunni-ist Al Qaeda see illusions of Persion caliphate, too:
Several of Al Qaeda’s ideologues have issued official statements [on Web sites] explaining Hezbollah’s actions and telling followers how to respond to them. The gist of their argument is that the Shiites are conspiring to destroy Islam and to resuscitate Persian imperial rule over the Middle East and ultimately the world. The ideologues label this effort the “Sassanian-Safavid conspiracy,” in reference to the Sassanians, a pre-Islamic Iranian dynasty, and to the Safavids, a Shiite dynasty that ruled Iran and parts of Iraq from 1501 till 1736.
In local news: How could Arabs file their complaints in a forum of international law about the Shebaa Farms area and Palestinian prisoners in Israel, if the whole idea of international law is rejected by theocratic longing; and Shi’ites in the region have no credibility? Says Hisham Melhem (Washington Bureau Chief, An-Nahar, Lebanon):
[Israel] had an exchange, major [prisoner] exchange with the Lebanese three or four years ago, but they left three of them in Israel. Hezbollah used them as an excuse, because Hezbollah needs excuses to maintain its control of weapons and to maintain its current status as a state within a state.
And Iran needs its outpost to threaten Israel. But Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations (and director of policy planning at the U.S. State Dept., 2001-2003), says:
I actually would be willing to have American representatives sit down with Iran and have an across-the-board dialogue, dealing with Lebanon, dealing with the Hamas situation in Gaza, obviously dealing with Iran's nuclear situation, dealing also with Iraq and Afghanistan. I think what we're seeing here is Iran sending a message, two messages. One is that nothing in the Middle East now can happen without Iran playing a significant role. And, secondly, it's reminding the United States that, if the United States is to use force ever against Iran's nuclear program, Iran retains many different avenues for countervailing pressure.
Ergo, Israel has to do all it can to take out Hezbollah before the U.S.-UN can effectively curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which could include eventully selling weapons-grade nuclear know-how to other organizations, if only for the sake of a willfully Shi’ist Allah.
So, with Saddamism out of Iraq and Hezbollah out of Lebanon, Israel has a straight arrow of air space to Iran, and UN sanctions against Iran can work economically, without the U.S. having to get military against Iran from Iraq.
But that’s just the nuclear problem. Social evolution of democracy has a long way to go against theocratic history throughout the region. “Yes, basically free and fair elections were held in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Iraq,” writes Friedman.
“Yes, millions turned out to vote because the people of the Arab-Muslim world really do want to shape their own futures. But the roots of democracy are so shallow in these places and the moderate majorities so weak and intimidated that we are getting the worst of all worlds. ....The world needs to understand what is going on here: the little flowers of democracy that were planted in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories are being crushed by the boots of Syrian-backed Islamist militias who are desperate to keep real democracy from taking hold in this region and Iranian-backed Islamist militias desperate to keep modernism from taking hold.
According to a senior Jordanian intelligence official, “For the Islamic fundamentalists, democratic reform is like toilet paper,” he said. “You use it once and then you throw it away.”
It’s all a tragedy of social evolution, as the region has been on “the eve of madness” for some time. “And I mean madness,” writes Friedman:
We’ve seen Sunni Muslims in Iraq suicide-bomb a Shiite mosque on Ramadan; we’ve seen Shiite militiamen torture Sunnis in Iraq by drilling holes in their heads with power tools; we’ve seen Jordanian Islamist parliamentarians mourning the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, even though he once blew up a Jordanian wedding; we’ve seen hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli cafes and buses; and we’ve seen Israel retaliating by, at times, leveling whole buildings, with the guilty and the innocent inside.
“What this debate is really about,” writes David Brooks, “is the mother of all chicken-and-egg problems. Can we use political reform to spark cultural change, or do we have to wait for cultural reformation before we can change politics?”
Amotz Asa-El, of the Jerusalem Post, writes that
“The gap between Beirut and south Lebanon [is] not about attitudes toward Israel, but about attitudes toward life itself, about whether Lebanon should join or defy the non-Islamist world's quest for self-empowerment, mobility and prosperity....For Islamism, the Lebanese conflict is today what the Spanish Civil War was for fascism in the 1930s: a testing ground for the free world's willingness to fight for its beliefs and interests. The industrialized powers, all of which except Japan now have their own Islamist headaches, clearly saw it this way in their summit last week in St. Petersburg.
There will be no new Middle East,” writes Friedman
—not as long as the New Middle Easterners, like Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, get gunned down; not as long as Old Middle Easterners, like Nasrallah, use all their wits and resources to start a new Arab-Israeli war rather than build a new Arab university; and not as long as Arab media and intellectuals refuse to speak out clearly against those who encourage their youth to embrace martyrdom with religious zeal rather than meld modernity with Arab culture.
Without that, we are wasting our time and the Arab world is wasting its future. It will forever be “on the eve of modernity.”
Meanwhile, both Syria and Iran are client states of Russia, who not only reaps great profits in the energy market by oil and gas price instability caused by inflamed conflict in the Middle East, but also competes with the U.S. for control of energy resources in central Asia, and gains geopolitical market power by looking like a power broker in the current crisis—which coincidently started while it hosted the G8. Start a fire, then offer to heroically save the victims. “We have ... two-way communication with all the parties involved in the conflict," Putin said at the G8. "We have normal, lively contacts almost constantly."
But Russia can’t hope to repair the blunder of Arab militarism. Writes Friedman,
What both Hamas and Nasrallah have done — by dragging their nations into unnecessary wars with Israel — is to prove that Islamists will not be made more accountable by political power. Just the opposite; not only will they not fix the potholes, they will start wars, whenever they choose, that will lead to even bigger potholes....All Arab dictators say, “Thank you, Nasrallah.”
And so, too, Bush, Inc. may be thankful. “Israel's campaign to destroy Hezbollah is a foreign policy windfall for the Bush administration,” writes Reuters (July 20), "which hopes it will boost the U.S. war on terrorism and heap pressure on its nemesis Iran, analysts say,” as the U.S. enters mid-term elections, and Republicans are at risk of losing control of Congress. But also, Hezbollah’s blunder has provided an opportunity for the world to force the disarming of Hezbollah, which Lebanon can’t do.
"Everyone agrees it must be done. But who to do it? No one,” write Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. “The Lebanese are too weak. The Europeans don't invade anyone. After its bitter experience of 20 years ago, the United States has a Lebanon allergy.”
So, Israel is, in effect, disarming Hezbollah, who seem to justify Israel’s activity daily by Hezbollah’s contempt for the laws of war, instead targeting civilians and securing their positions in civilian neighborhoods. Yet, the tide of Arab opinion turns to support for Hezbollah.
“America should be galvanizing the forces of order — Europe, Russia, China and India — into a coalition against these trends,” writes Friedman.
But we can’t. Why? In part, it’s because our president and secretary of state, although they speak with great moral clarity, have no moral authority. That’s been shattered by their performance in Iraq.
The world hates George Bush more than any U.S. president in my lifetime. He is radioactive — and so caught up in his own ideological bubble that he is incapable of imagining or forging alternative strategies.
In part, it is also because China, Europe and Russia have become freeloaders off U.S. power. They reap enormous profits from the post-cold-war order that America has shaped, but rather than become real stakeholders in that order, helping to draw and defend redlines, they duck, mumble, waffle or cut their own deals.
This does not bode well for global stability. A religious militia that calls itself “the party of God” takes over a state and drags it into war, using high-tech rockets — mullahs with drones — and the world is paralyzed. Those who ignore this madness will one day see it come to a theater near them.
So goes the network war.
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