Let’s not forget Lebanon

Two essential pieces on Lebanon appeared in the last few weeks. The first, a review piece by Max Rodenbeck in the NYRB, looks at the last two-three years and draws a convincing portrait of what happened. Considering how confusing Lebanon’s politics are, that’s quite a feat. Plus Max gets the way I react to Lebanese food (esp. when consumed with copious amounts of arak, as it must be) exactly right:

Yet it is true that while Lebanon whets appetites with its gorgeous landscapes, clement weather, energetic people, and wonderful food, trying to consume too much of it tends to bring on heartburn. Just ask the Ottoman Turks, the imperialist French, the US Marine Corps, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Syrians, or any number of Lebanese would-be overlords. The country’s infernally complex ingredients seem chemically incapable of melding into a digestible dish.

The second piece, by Jim Quilty for MERIP, focuses on the recent confrontation between the Lebanese army and an Islamist group operating out of the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli:

If Lebanese politicians on both sides of the government-opposition divide have emphasized support for the army over empathy for human suffering in the camps, their rhetoric betrays the marginality of the refugee community. It also reflects the centrality of the Lebanese army in the ongoing contest over the future direction of state policy. At the end of the day, it is entirely likely that the Palestinians in Lebanon will be three-time losers in this bloody episode: enduring the humanitarian crisis that grows out of it, shouldering the burden of containing it and suffering a backlash in Lebanese political opinion for being seen as somehow responsible for it. The anti-Palestinian feeling in Lebanon is all the more bitterly ironic since so few of the radical Sunni Islamists battling the Lebanese army in Nahr al-Barid are themselves Palestinian.

Another key paragraph, on whether March 14 is financing Salafist-Jihadists groups (as famously but unconvincingly alleged by Seymour Hersh), is this one:

Whether or not the Hariris and their Saudi supporters have a soft spot for salafis is not the point. Rather, it is the culture of cooptation that has marked the Lebanese government’s approach to the challenges confronting the country since the Syrian withdrawal. Rafiq al-Hariri deployed his financial resources to great effect during his political career, but his purchase of loyalties was embedded in the Syrian occupation’s security regime. With the Syrians gone, and with Sunnis set against their Shi‘i countrymen — and with them the specter of Hizballah, the militants who stopped the Israeli army, Lebanese find the line between purchased loyalties and militant outsourcing a fuzzy one.

Although Quilty, like Rodenbeck, highlights the fact that some Syrian support for Fatah al-Islam operatives was probably necessary, he does not satisfactorily answer the various conspiracy theories about its origin — except to say that whatever help they may have secured, the members of the group appear to be genuinely nasty Jihadists, not just hired guns.

Read it all for the nitty-gritty detail of Palestinian camp politics.

Azimi on US democracy-promotion in Iran

Negar Azimi has a long piece on US democracy promotion efforts in Iran called Hard Realities of Soft Power. It includes reference to US policymaking, the misguided attacks on VOA Persian (widely considered to be an excellent service, both as a radio station and a program that increases esteem for the US in Iranian eyes) — something similar happened with VOA Arabic as discussed several times in this blog), the arrests of activists who have links to the US, the debate over the “kiss of death” theory of American democracy-promotion, and more.

Many Iranians have grown paranoid about anything vaguely linked to the West. Conference and workshop attendance, travel and even e-mail and phone contact with foreign entities is suspect. In the last three months, at least three prominent NGOs have been shut down indefinitely. Kayhan, the semiofficial newspaper, editorializes almost daily about an elaborate network conspiring to topple the regime. Called “khaneh ankaboot,” or “the spider nest,” the network is reportedly bankrolled by the $75 million and includes everyone from George Soros to George W. Bush to Francis Fukuyama to dissident Iranians of all shades. In this vision, the network gets its “orders” from the Americans.

It is particularly telling, perhaps, that some of the most outspoken critics of the Iranian government have been among the most outspoken critics of the democracy fund. Activists from the journalist Emadeddin Baghi to the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi to the former political prisoner Akbar Ganji have all said thanks but no thanks. Ganji has refused three personal invitations to meet with Bush. A member of a U.S.-based institution that has received State Department financing and who works with Iranians told me that the Iranians had expressly asked not to have their cause mentioned in presidential speeches. “The propaganda campaign surrounding the launch of this campaign has meant that many of our partners are simply too afraid to work with us anymore,” she told me on condition of anonymity. “It’s had a chilling effect.”

One thing that strikes me among the many issues raised in Negar’s piece is that one does not get the impression that the “believers” among the democracy promotion crowd have really done a “lessons learned” from policy Iraq. Or that there is much of plan beyond providing $75 million to whoever will take it.

Anyway, the debate over democracy promotion apparently continues — for more lofty-minded types, here is Francis Fukuyama’s latest position on the issue. Read it quick before he changes his mind.

The “Fatah never fought” theory

Some interesting discussions of the “Fatah never thought” theory, in preparation for a later post:

Conflict Blotter:

Fatah never fought. Gaza was essentially handed over to Hamas. Soldier after soldier said they felt betrayed and abandoned by their leadership. There was a seemingly willful lack of decision making by the senior most political leadership. Up and down the Gaza Strip from the first moments of fighting, the military leadership disintegrated while the political leadership remained eerily silent.

Ousted Fatah loyalists in Gaza widely suspect a political decision was made early on in Ramallah to surrender the Gaza Strip to Hamas in order to extricate Abbas, Israel and the US from the seeming intractable pickle they were facing as infighting spiraled, living conditions worsened, and the peace process seemed hopelessly stuck. With the Palestinian territories now split, the US, Israel and Abbas suddenly have way forward, without compromising to Hamas.

The Economist:

Why did Hamas go for broke this time? And why was its victory so quick and total? Mouin Rabbani, a Jordan-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, a lobby in Brussels, thinks the combination of economic boycott, domestic discontent, criticism from radical groups abroad, the growing threat from Fatah and splits within Hamas itself meant that people who used to think time was on their side began to think it was working against them.

Fatah, meanwhile, seemed unprepared. Some of its top people in Gaza were away, Mr Dahlan among them. Mr Abbas, sitting in the West Bank, did not declare a state of emergency until Hamas militants were ransacking his Gaza home. Mid-level Fatah officers complained bitterly about lack of leadership. “We had orders not to fire except in self-defence,” says one, whom Israel allowed to flee to the West Bank. Now he sits in the lobby of Ramallah’s smartest hotel, nervously smoking with his fellow fugitives and endlessly repeating stories of Hamas’s brutality.

Indeed, some Fatah officers suspect their leaders’ apathy was deliberate. Letting Hamas win Gaza has a certain logic to Fatah. No sooner had Mr Abbas sworn in a new government under Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official well-liked in the West, than America, the European Union and Canada lifted their 15-month-old boycott, and Israel said it would consider releasing frozen PA tax revenues, removing some of the internal checkpoints that stifle the West Bank’s economy, and holding more meaningful talks with Mr Abbas. Thus, runs the theory, Mr Abbas will reap the praise for a better life in the West Bank, while Gazans’ well-being will be at the mercy of a now-isolated Hamas.

So it was all planned, was it? Qaddoura Fares, one of Fatah’s younger leaders in Ramallah, lets out a short, dry laugh. “If only!” More likely, agrees Diana Buttu, a former adviser to Mr Abbas, the famously diffident Palestinian president wanted to avoid a showdown, and simply did not expect Hamas to go so far.

The Observer, in an interview with Hamas military commander Abu Obieda:

Despite his months of planning for such a war, Abu Obieda was surprised by the speed of the victory: ‘I expected it to take one month. That is what we planned for and trained for. But then at the beginning, all the Fatah commanders escaped their compounds in ambulances and left for Egypt. They left their men to die. Who could do that?’

At one battle, for a security compound – where his men later found weapons, ammunition and food that would survive a three-month siege – he listened on a radio to Fatah fighters on nearby rooftops begging their commanders for more ammunition that never came. ‘They all had left,’ Abu Obieda said. ‘The Fatah fighters are brave but would you fight for a commander who left you alone to die for his war?’

McClatchy:

In five days of fighting, Fatah never put up a real fight. The question is why not.

In interviews with McClatchy Newspapers during and after the fighting, Fatah foot soldiers said they felt abandoned as they realized that there’d be no counterattack, not even a last-ditch defense.

Some of them thought incompetent political leaders had done them in. But this land has long been fertile soil for conspiracy theories, and others wondered whether Abbas had deliberately ceded the Gaza Strip to Hamas in an attempt to isolate the radical Islamic group and consolidate his power in the much larger West Bank.

“There was total frustration and disappointment,” said one Abbas security officer who was among the last to abandon the presidential compound on Thursday night, June 14, and asked to be identified only as A.R. because of fear of retaliation. “We felt like there was a conspiracy to hand over Gaza to Hamas.”

Whether it was conspiracy or collapse, Fatah’s downfall in Gaza has created an unexpected opportunity for Israel, the United States and others to re-establish full relations with Abbas and the pro-Western emergency cabinet he’s installed to replace the elected, Hamas-dominated Palestinian government.

Got any more?

The Quranists

I haven’t had time lately to look into the arrests of several members of a “Quranist” group — people who reject the hadith and present a reformist practice of Islam based entirely on the Quran — but as well as being a blatant violation of freedom of belief, there seems to be several other overlapping elements here. One is that at least one of the Quranists, Amr Tharwat, is involved in the pro-democracy NGO Ibn Khaldun Center, run by the prominent Egyptian-American liberal Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Tharwat was involved in election monitoring.

The other is that the arrests could be a response to the Quranists’ mockery of al-Azhar recent fatwas about urine-drinkling and adult breastfeeding, which cause a furore here last month and put the august institution on the defensive. By al-Azhar’s Sunni standards, the Quranists’ beliefs are highly unorthodox if not downright sacrilegious (I don’t know enough about the Quranists to be sure). So what we are seeing here is yet another form of the state Islamism that has become rampant in Egypt since the 1970s. Who needs to worry about the Muslim Brotherhood when you already have bigots in power?

I’ve pasted some statements about this case below, with links to the Quranists’ website.

Continue reading The Quranists

ZOA still wants to hold PA funding

The Zionist Organization of America did not get the memo:

ZOA says Abbas is not a moderate, and wants his Fatah Party to reform its charter to remove what ZOA says are articles calling for Israel’s destruction. The Palestine Liberation Organization, where Fatah predominates, has already had such articles removed from its charter.

Earlier this week, a pro-Israel dovish group, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, lobbied lawmakers to fund Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.

But the “doves” did. And do check out the ZOA press release with the quotes from American lawmakers attacking Fatah, calling for the US embassy to be moved to Jerusalem, calls for “repudiating the ‘right of return'” etc.

Jim Crow tourism

The Sinai peninsula–sight of Egypt’s booming Red sea tourism, of presidential palaces and international conferences, of disenfranchised Bedouin tribes, arms and drugs smuggling, and several terrorist bombings–is a weird place. (Scott Anderson pointed this out in an excellent article in Vanity Fair a while back.)

Driving to a beach in Sinai last weekend, I ran the usual gamut of road-blocks and nosy police officials. I also saw something (to me, at least) new. At a gas station and road stop near the Suez Canal, I went in to use the restrooms. But I was shooed away from the WC inside–where Egyptians were going–and directed next door, where a large, gleaming building was labelled, in large gold letters, “Tourist toilets” (“Hamamaat El-Siaaha”). These toilets cost 1 pound (the Egyptian toilets cost 50 piastres) and were spotless, furbished with large gilded mirros, faux-jewelled hangers and plentiful toilet paper. Next to the signs for “women” and “men” there were also two technicolor portraits of Western movie stars, mounted in oval frames. I didn’t recognize the male actor, but the patroness of the women’s tourist bathrooms was none other than Charlize Theron.

Anyway, I’m all for clean new bathrooms but there is something deeply disturbing about the level of enforced segregation between Egyptians and foreigners that seems to be spreading across the tourism industry. An argument can be made for making foreigners pay a higher fee at the Egyptian museum or at the pyramids. But what argument can be made for having a two-tiered system in which foreigners and Egyptians are actually banned from using each other’s facilities?

CIA to release decades of classified files

The WaPo reports:

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency’s worst illegal abuses — the so-called “family jewels” documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency’s opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of “unwitting” tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

“Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history,” Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

Hopefully there’ll be tons of information on the Middle East. Some things I’d like to see:

  • Details of CIA involvement in the coup against Mussadeq
  • CIA contacts with Saddam Hussein in Cairo in the late 1960s
  • CIA covert action against the Nasser regime
  • CIA covert action in support of Morocco’s Hassan II in the 1970s
  • Whether there’s any truth to the weird conspiracies you hear about the CIA and the Church of Scientology in the 1970s in the Middle East, and other bizarre stories
  • CIA information about the Israeli nuclear program in the 1960s (long alleged to have been repressed)
  • CIA intelligence on Saudi and other Arab royals

Now that would be fun.

Egypt bans smoking (partially)

ClopesEgypt Passes National Anti-Smoking Law:

Smoking will now be prohibited in health and educational organizations, youth centers, legislative associations and all governmental authorities and clubs. A fine between 1,000 EGP ($175 USD) and 50,000 EGP ($9,000 USD) was also added to the new law for violations of the new tobacco law.

According to a report by the Health Committee, Egyptians smoke roughly 19 million cigarettes each year, spending around 3 billion EGP ($520 million USD). It added that smokers in the country increase by six to nine percent every year as compared to only one percent in the West.

Yeah right — civil servants and MPs are going to stop smoking in public buildings. I’d like to see how this will be inforced, particularly with such high fines.