Reason Magazine - Staff > Michael Young > Hit & Run Posts

Is ElBaradei playing us for suckers?

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:21:00 EDT

The ongoing mystery over a Syrian nuclear program continues to interest the international media. In September 2007 Israel destroyed what appeared to be a nuclear facility in Syria, and in April 2008 the CIA released photographs suggesting that what had been destroyed was a clandestine reactor built in collaboration with North Korea.

The French daily Le Monde has just published a piece saying it has information from "several non-American sources" corroborating the CIA revelations. The newspaper says that among its sources of information are "satellite photos provided by various countries" and other information from "[International Atomic Energy Agency] investigations of North Korean nuclear activities" and "from research carried out by the IAEA on clandestine networks for acquiring nuclear equipment throughout the world."

More disturbing however, is the apparent contradiction between the report in Le Monde and what the IAEA director general, Mohammed ElBaradei, told the Al-Arabiya satellite channel. In a report on the interview from Reuters, ElBaradei is quoted as saying: "We have no evidence that Syria has the human resources that would allow it to carry out a large nuclear program. We do not see Syria having nuclear fuel."

Perhaps, but the article in Le Monde tells us that "two central questions will occupy IAEA inspectors: Where was the fuel for the Al-Kibar reactor [in Syria] supposed to come from? And is there a secret facility in Syria that allows the retreatment of spent fuel? Retreatment is a technology that permits the production of plutonium that can be used in the manufacture of a nuclear weapon. It is by this method that the North Koreans built an atomic weapon which they tested in 2006."

In other words, ElBaradei in his Al-Arabiya interview said that the IAEA did not see Syria as having nuclear fuel, whereas the Le Monde report suggests that the IAEA is investigating whether the fuel may, in fact, have been retreated at a facility inside Syria. I don't pretend to be an expert here, and perhaps ELBaradei is cleverly walking between raindrops in being vague. Perhaps, as Le Monde suggests, he is even protecting the IAEA from accusations that its inspection regime is ineffective. However, if Syria has the means to retreat spent nuclear fuel, or if the IAEA is still looking into that possibility, that's quite different than the more affirmative statement by ElBaradei underlining that his institution does not believe Syria has nuclear fuel.

Obama: It's All About Me, Me, Meeeee

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:24:00 EDT

Is it me, or did you also feel that Barack Obama's responses to the series of comments by Reverend Jeremiah Wright were overly focused on, well, how Wright had personally dissed Barack Obama and his campaign?

Here are some samples:

The fact that Reverend Wright would think that somehow it was appropriate to command the stage for three or four consecutive days in the midst of this major debate is something that not only makes me angry, but also saddens me.
At a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough. That's a show of disrespect to me. It's also, I think, an insult to what we've been trying to do in this campaign.
Whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed as a consequence of this. I don't think that he showed much concern for me. More importantly, I don't think he showed much concern for what we're trying to do in this campaign and what we're trying to do for the American people.

Of course, Obama is entitled to defend himself, especially when Wright basically accused Obama of being a hypocrite in his so-called "race speech" in Philadelphia. However, for the candidate to repeatedly suggest that the problem with Wright is one of personal affront, of disrespect for Obama and his campaign, is to miss the point that voters will see things in a decidedly less self-centered light. For them, what Wright says reflects a worldview, a worldview Obama apparently managed to live with for some 20 years. They won't see the episode as just a thing between Obama and Wright.

In fact, Obama might have inadvertently confirmed what Wright told the National Press Club audience a few days ago, when he spoke about how Obama had distanced himself from the reverend: "He didn't distance himself. He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."

Obama's latest comments echo those very same thoughts: His priority is clearly (and understandably) to save his campaign, but much less to determine what Wright's comments really tell us about the relationship between blacks and whites in America. But that's what many voters are interested in, because Obama's attitude on race relations will say a lot about whether he's presidential material. Instead, all they see today is someone nonplussed that Wright showed so little personal concern for him.

A fall victory for Barack, or just a fall?

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 01:04:00 EDT

A few months ago, the conventional wisdom was that if Hillary Clinton were nominated by the Democrats, this would considerably enhance John McCain's chances of winning in the fall, on the grounds that it would mobilize an "anti-Hillary" vote. Now, the New York Times wonders (better late than never, eh?) whether Barack Obama would not be more of a liability to Democrats come the November election.

Barack's New Deal

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:52:00 EDT

Over at Powerline, there is an interesting post on how Barack Obama backtracked in his Indiana speech yesterday to counter "his elitist disparagement of ‘small town' voters" in an earlier speech in San Francisco.

In San Francisco, Obama had said: "So it's not surprising then that [when voters] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

In Indiana, he polished this, so that it came out:

People don't vote on economic issues because they don't expect anybody is going to help them. So people end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. They take refuge in their faith and their community, and their family, and the things they can count on. But they don't believe they can count on Washington.

While Obama is indeed engaging in spin, there is a far more disturbing aspect to his interpretation. He misses the essential nature of modern culture. People don't end up focusing on issues like the right to bear arms, gay marriage, faith-based and family-based issues, and the like, because of bitterness against Washington or a sense that they can't effect change there. People focus on these issues because modern American political culture is, effectively, about subcultures, variety, pursuing parochial aims, and shaping one's identity and personal agendas independently of the state.

What Obama implicitly regards (in both his statements) as signs of disintegration, as reflections of popular frustration, are in fact examples of a thriving culture. Exceptions to this, of course, are anti-immigration sentiment and bigoted protectionism, both of which Obama conveniently dropped in his Indiana comments. Yet Obama's approach betrays a very suffocating vision of the state as the be-all and end-all of political-cultural behavior. Outside the confines of the state there is no salvation, only resentment. This is nonsense, but it also partly explains why Obama is so admired among educated liberals, who still view the state as the main medium of American providence.

Understanding Osama

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:51:00 EDT

Over at The Guardian, do read an extraordinary commentary by the former British spy Alistair Crooke on how the West must engage radical Islamists, even if it means to an extent accepting them as they are. Crooke is director of the Conflicts Forum, an organization that advocates dialogue with Islamist groups. Once you've finished, however, you'll see how Crooke has provided hefty ammunition to his foes. The reason is that he fails to properly define his subject, and throws into the same pot Muslims in general, political Islamists, and murderous Islamists.

What are the premises of Crooke's argument? That there is a "discourse" in the West holding that radical Islam is the enemy. And what is radical Islam? Crooke quotes Henry Kissinger to the effect that it is Islam practiced by those who "are not ‘moderates.'" This definition, Crooke points out, "sounds no more than a projection of the Christian narrative after Westphalia, by which Christianity became a private matter of conscience, rather than an organisational principle for society."

Nothing surprising until this point, given that Crooke opened his commentary by quoting the French philosopher Michel Foucault. We're paddling around in the familiar flotsam of Edward Said here, whereby the West defines the "other" on its own terms, then uses that "discourse" to justify dominating the other. But then Crooke leaps off the interpretational cliff, and the last we see of him is a cloud of dust rising from the canyon floor.

The reason for this is that Crooke writes:

If radical Islam, with which these experts tell us we should be at war, encompasses all those who are not enamoured of secular society, and who espouse a vision of their societies grounded in the values of Islam, then these experts are advocating a war with Islam--because Islam is the vision for their future favoured by many Muslims.
Mainstream Islamists are indeed challenging western secular and materialist values, and many do believe that western thinking is flawed--that the desires and appetites of man have been reified into representing man himself. It is time to re-establish values that go beyond "desires and wants", they argue.
Many Islamists also reject the western narrative of history and its projection of inevitable "progress" towards a secular modernity; they reject the western view of power-relationships within societies and between societies; they reject individualism as the litmus of progress in society; and, above all, they reject the west's assumption that its empirical approach lends unassailability and objective rationality to its thinking--and universality to its social models.

Crooke engages here in the same dishonesty he accuses alleged opinion enforcers in the West of engaging in: He defines the problem in a conveniently erroneous way, then uses that as the basis for a flawed assertion. First of all, radical Islamists do not encompass all those "who are not enamoured of secular society, and who espouse a vision of their societies grounded in the values of Islam", so Crooke's opening thrust is a splendid dud. In fact, many Muslims who would agree with both those conditions are not radical Muslims at all. But even if that unrestrained proposition were true, then Crooke would be presenting the issue so benevolently, in fact so deceptively, as to make it laughable. After all, is not being enamored of secular Western society and advocating Islamic values anywhere near a sufficient definition of radical Islam?

Many Muslims may indeed reject the West's "narrative of history" and its individualism (though Crooke, by making such attitudes seem pervasive, is engaging in the worst kind of "Orientalist" stereotyping here), but the only relevant definitional break-off point between most practicing Muslims, political Islamists, and murderous Islamists, at least with regard to the ambient discussion on political Islam taking place today worldwide, is their attitude toward the use of violence. And many Islamists, and an even greater number of Muslims in general, don't support resorting to violence to advance their social or political aims. They might even resent being so loosely shoehorned in with those who do.

Yet, on violence, Crooke has nothing of merit to say. The reason is that if you begin sharply differentiating between violent and non-violent Islamists, suddenly it becomes much more difficult to justify talking to those Islamists who do employ violence. By keeping the categories blurred, you can portray any dialogue with the violent Islamists--which is what Conflicts Forum does--as a dialogue with Islam.

But just when you thought that Crooke would stop cold and not pursue his logic down a blind alley of self-defeating argumentation, he's already there. That's because he goes on to endorse what a former advisor to Tony Blair, Jonathan Powell, recently said about the need to talk to Al-Qaeda.

People may, or may not, agree, but the point is that this is a dispute about ideas, about the nature of society, and about equity in an emerging global order. If western discourse cannot step beyond the enemy that it has created, these ideas cannot be heard--or addressed. This is the argument that Jonathan Powell made last week when he argued that Britain should understand the lessons of Northern Ireland: we should talk to Islamist movements, including al-Qaida. It has to be done, because the west needs to break through the fears and constraints of an over-imagined "enemy."

You might have expected that after 9/11, Crooke would remove the quote marks from the word "enemy". But there is a larger problem at work here, one transcending the legitimate protest, "And what precisely should we talk to Al-Qaeda about?" It is that those who advocate engaging Islamists over-emphasize their importance and often ignore the myriad narratives in Muslim societies opposed to those of the militant groups.

For instance, neither Hezbollah nor Hamas, groups Crooke deals with frequently, speaks for a majority of Lebanese or Palestinians on most issues of the day, let alone issues relating to Islam (even if their strictly nationalist "discourse" might appeal to many). Most Lebanese Shiites do not agree with the wilayat al-faqih doctrine of religious-political leadership advocated by Ayatollah Khomeini and embraced by Hezbollah; and it's fair to say that most Palestinians do not consider the doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood as their reference point, though Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood. But Crooke pays scant attention to such nuances. He confuses the Islamists' alleged religious appeal with their political-nationalist appeal; their religious discourse with their political-nationalist discourse. But such jumps are often illegitimate.

As for Al-Qaeda, Crooke should tell us which Muslims consider the mass murder of innocent civilians a legitimate expression of Islamic values. Perhaps, once he has chatted with bin Laden we will learn that the 9/11 attacks were just a case of Osama crying out to be understood, nothing a good heart-to-heart couldn't help resolve. Meanwhile, we can thank Crooke that his commentary has just made it much easier for those who oppose dialogue with violent Islamists to insist that they are right.

Harvard Hypocrite

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:14:00 EST

In Salon, Barack Obama advisor, Harvard professor, and author Samantha Power on how the United States needs to get out of Iraq:

We need to be incredibly sensitive as we leave Iraq to the welfare of Iraqis who are going to be left in our wake. That potentially entails the idea of sectarian or ethnic relocation if people are in a mixed neighborhood and feel that they'd be safer in a more homogenous neighborhood. Also, [it entails] massive support for neighboring countries that have taken in 2 million refugees, and some very systematic effort between now and the time we begin leaving to build funding and resource streams to internally displaced people.
We have shown again and again that we care about Iraq only insofar as it serves our interests. But I think it's time to show not only Iraqis but the rest of the world that at least as we leave, we're leaving with a very vigilant eye on how to mitigate the consequences of our actions.

Quite remarkable. So here's the plan from the author, incidentally, of a book on genocide. Accept the realities imposed by ethnic cleansing; give plenty of money to several of the neighboring countries that have been responsible for sustaining the fighting in Iraq; and pay off displaced Iraqis so that the U.S. can feel less guilty about abandoning them to their sad fate.

I exaggerate? Not much. Power wants to have her cake and eat it too. Essentially, her solution is a grand buy-off. Drop some money into everyone's cup, call it "mitigating the consequences of our actions", and, with vigilant eye closed, blame everything on the Bush administration if the U.S. leaves chaos and death in its wake.

I would be able cynically to stomach her scheme if it were not couched in the hypocritical language of moral self-righteousness. Power knows enough about killing to know that she really needs to answer the question: What happens if an American withdrawal leads simultaneously to mass murder? But the egghead smells a foreign policy post. She's not about to jeopardize that by possibly straying off the reservation.

Threatening Spain

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 13:12:00 EST

Over at the Across the Bay blog, Tony Bey is following the details of an interesting story picked up by the wire services.

A Spanish police memo evidently leaked to the Spanish daily El Mundo says that the head of Syrian military intelligence, Assef Shawkat (who is also the brother in law of Syrian President Bashar Assad), threatened Spain (and, by inference, Spanish troops in southern Lebanon) if a Syrian arms dealer living in Spain, Munzer al-Kassar, was extradited to the United States. (The original Spanish article is here.)

According to an AFP story: "General Assef Shawkat [...] wrote to his opposite number in Spain: 'If you think we are going to ignore the affront inflicted by north-American henchmen on our brother (Kassar), you don't really know us and [you] are no friends of the Syrian people.'"

More alarming was the information that Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, had assured the Syrians that Kassar would not be extradited. Moratinos has long tried to maintain good ties with Damascus, to the extent that he refused to even privately admit that Syria had played a role in the bomb attack against the Spanish contingent of the United Nations force in Lebanon last June that killed six peacekeepers. At the time, U.N. officials were privately saying the exact opposite, noting that there was anger with Syria at the U.N. because of the attack.

Knowing this, you have to wonder if the memo was leaked to negate Moratinos' promise.

Ike Turner R.I.P.

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:04:00 EST

Ike Turner has died at the age of 76 at his home near San Diego. He often expressed frustration that he was mainly remembered as Tina's abusive husband-Svengali, but I never listened to a song for as many successive times as I did River Deep, Mountain High, from the Phil Spector-produced album of the same name.

My greatest regret was not seeing Ike play live at, of all places, some lounge at the Meridien Hotel in Paris two or three years ago. So bizarre a venue had considerable appeal, even if those kinds of places were perhaps a fitting final act for so splendidly flawed and talented a musician.

Did Ali Reza Asgari's disappearance have anything to do with the NIE's conclusions?

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 08:30:00 EST

The New York Times is reporting today that U.S. intelligence officials "reversed their view about the status of Iran's nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program."

This revelation came after Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, disagreed two days ago with the National Intelligence Estimate's conclusion that Iran had suspended its weapons program. In expressing his doubts, Barak cryptically said: "We are talking about a specific track connected with their weapons building program, to which the American connection, and maybe that of others, was severed."

The fact is that no one really knows what new information, or combination of new information, the intelligence services used to reach their conclusions in the 2007 NIE. However, one hypothesis worth considering is that this could somehow be related to reports last March of the disappearance, or defection, in Turkey of a senior Revolutionary Guards officer, Ali Reza Asgari, who had also had served as Iranian deputy defense minister. I wrote about his disappearance here, and since then the matter has gone completely off the radar.

Barak's phrase is interesting in this regard. Given the fact that Israel was said to have been involved in the Asgari affair, was Barak making reference to the fact that the Iranian official, by disappearing into thin air, had effectively "severed" the information flow to U.S. intelligence? And by "others" was Barak referring to Israel? Was Asgari the source, or one source, for the notes on the deliberations of Iranian officials?

Again, this is a hypothesis, nothing more. However, an investigative reporter I know at one of the U.S. television networks has been following the story, and told me several months ago that none of his intelligence sources knew anything about the case. The Asgari disappearance was significant enough, however, that it at least merited leaks of self-satisfaction. None came. Does this mean anything?

Is Ali Reza Asgari one reason why the U.S. intelligence agencies shifted so dramatically on Iran's nuclear program?

Useless in Basra

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 05:07:00 EDT

Britain's Sunday Telegraph has published a scathing indictment of how British forces have handled the situation in Basra, effectively "losing" the city. Whereas a few years ago U.S. officers would have listened respectfully to their British counterparts describing how their experiences in Northern Ireland made them experts in counter-insurgency, today the Americans are not taking any of it:

"It's insufferable for Christ's sake," said one senior figure closely involved in US military planning. "He [Major General Jonathan Shaw, Britain's senior officer in Basra] comes on and he lectures everybody in the room about how to do a counter-insurgency. The guys were just rolling their eyeballs. The notorious Northern Ireland came up again. It's pretty frustrating. It would be okay if he was best in class, but now he's worst in class. Everybody else's area is getting better and his is getting worse."

With British Prime Minister Gordon Brown sticking to a timetable to completely withdraw his forces from Iraq next year, the Bush administration will be trying to do two things: fill the vacuum, but also, if there is carnage in the wake of the British departure, use that as leverage to show why American forces must remain in Iraq longer. That will probably not float with Congress, but the military is still assuming the war is not lost. As one officer remarked about the British:

"Quite frankly what they're doing right now is not any value-added. They're just sitting there. They're not involved. The situation there gets worse by the day. Americans are disappointed because, in their minds, this thing is still winnable. They don't intend to cut and run."

An officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq recently told me that, while the situation in Iraq could probably not be reversed "because the war will be lost in Washington", U.S. forces were on a very sharp learning curve in understanding better how to fight the insurgency. So much so that British soldiers were openly expressing their admiration. That's why it must hurt when Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution says "Basra has gone far towards revising the common American image of British soldiers as perhaps the world's best at counter-insurgency."

The Saudis are getting mad

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:17:00 EDT

Saudi-Syria relations have sunk to new lows, with a Saudi spokesman yesterday issuing a stinging rebuttal to Syria's vice president, Farouq al-Sharaa, who earlier this week had criticized the Saudis, describing them as "paralyzed." Here in Beirut, Syria's allies have been particularly relentless in heaping scorn on the Saudis of late.

The isolated Syrians have been trying to get their foot back into the mainstream of Arab politics, two-and-a-half years after the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. But the Saudis aren't playing ball. They didn't attend a security conference held in Damascus just over a week ago, and have refused to coordinate regional policy within the context of a Syrian-Egyptian-Saudi triangle, as in the past.

Now the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Seyassa has published a story (link in Arabic) listing the three conditions that Saudi King Abdullah imposed on Syrian President Bashar Assad at the Riyadh Arab League summit last March for Syria to break out of its isolation. Al-Seyassa is a notoriously anti-Syrian paper, and not always reliable. But it also happens to be an accurate mouthpiece for King Abdullah.

The three conditions were: non-intervention in domestic Lebanese affairs once and for all, and an end to incitement against the government of Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora; an end to involvement in Palestinian affairs, the shaping of Hamas' policies, and the arming of the group; and a reduction in Syrian cooperation with Iran which has allowed Iran to set up bases on Syrian territory near the Lebanese and Iraqi borders.

The article went on to note that Abdullah set down his conditions in the presence of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, as a witness.

The deterioration in Saudi-Syrian relations will have significant implications for American policy in the Middle East. First of all it will only make a regional consensus on Iraq more complicated, with the additional complicating factor that the Saudis now regard Syrian collaboration with Iran almost as an existential threat to their regime.

Second, it means that U.S. engagement of Syria or Iran, for all the brouhaha the idea has raised in Washington, will only further alarm the Saudis, making it more likely that they will continue to support and even probably escalate their backing for the Sunnis in Iraq.

Third, it means that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia will continue to fight tooth and nail against Syria and Iran (and Hezbollah) in Lebanon, meaning the country will remain a front line for regional animosities.

And fourth, it means that the Palestinian issue, precisely because it has become a Middle Eastern tennis ball between the Americans, Saudis, Syrians and Iranians, will remain as deadlocked as ever, regardless of how much assistance Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas receives from the international community. Where there is deadlock, there is also a tendency of states to abandon ship. If nothing happens on the Palestinian front, expect the Europeans to begin increasingly calling for a dialogue with Hamas, against the wishes of the Bush administration.

Say it ain't so, Dominique

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:29:00 EDT

Just when you thought French politics were back to flat-lining after the presidential election, this news in from Paris: the former French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, may soon be investigated for trying to frame his onetime rival and current French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the so-called Clearstream affair.

I wrote about Clearstream in Reason more than a year ago. This comes amid reports that Sarkozy may appoint one of two Socialist Party bigwigs to replace Rodrigo Rato at the International Monetary Fund (link in French). With Villepin already a political corpse on the right and a powerful Socialist perhaps on his way to Washington, Sarkozy will have fewer headaches in Paris.

No wonder the French take six weeks of vacation a year.

Piling into Pelosi

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 05:04:00 EDT

Here was Nancy Pelosi pretending to be Gertrude Bell, but now, it seems, she can hardly make it to the bell. The criticisms of her trip to Damascus earlier this week, but also of what is being seen as the Democrats' effort to hijack U.S. foreign policy, are piling up so high that all I can really offer here is a selected, annotated index of abuse.

The Los Angeles Times wonders if we really need a General Pelosi. The Washington Post confirms that we do not. USA Today says it's not the speaker's role to unfreeze relations with Syria's dictator, Bashar Assad. And the Wall Street Journal mentions a major foreign stake involved, namely that Syria saw the Pelosi visit as a means of wriggling out of the investigation into the murder of the late Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, which Syria's leadership almost certainly masterminded.

After failing to mention the trip for several days, the New York Times editorial board, which supports engagement with Syria, finally took a position on the Damascus visit, and hedged. The editors repeated the canard that engaging Syria might break it away from Iran (a position the Syrians have scoffed at), but nevertheless managed to agree that Pelosi's "job is to spur the Bush administration to pursue active diplomacy, not to attempt to conduct that diplomacy herself."

Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Claudia Rosett observed that Pelosi was "nuts" to visit Damascus. In the National Review, the editors thought the speaker raised "the white flag all over the Middle East." In the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes got a few good licks in. Here is my own contribution in the Daily Star, which Little Green Footballs was kind enough to link to. The comments section makes it interesting. In another post, LGF pointed to Pelosi's growing fan club in the Middle East.

Among the first bloggers to savage Pelosi, in several successive posts from his pen in Bayside, was Tony Badran, who hosts the Across the Bay blog. Lee Smith, writing in Across the Bay, spills his bile all over Tom Lantos, who accompanied Pelosi and, almost magically, seemed to forget how openly critical he had been of the Syrian regime in the past. On his blog, Syrian dissident Ammar Abdulhamid explained what was at stake in Pelosi's trip with respect to human rights in Syria, and he linked to this commentary published in the Daily Star on Pelosi's silence on human rights issues while she toured Assad's domain. IraqPundit described Pelosi as "blundering" around Damascus, in a visit that is "a dream come true for the desperate Assad regime; she might as well be reading from a script provided by Assad's public relations people."

The saga will continue, and you can follow all the blogs here. No need for Pelosi to search for eggs in her back yard this Easter weekend; they're mostly dripping from her face.

Homage to Catalonia

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 05:42:00 EST

A Catalan separatist leader probably put it best: "Any normal language is able to penetrate the most obscure places."

He was reacting to the heated debate over the decision of the Catalan regional government to fund erotic films in Catalan, in order to spread the Catalan language. The grants of almost $20,000 were made to a local film-maker for what he described as "erotic films for women", such as Laura is Not Alone, The Memory of Fish and The Sea Isn't Blue.

Makes sense. Who doesn't want to speak in tongues?

A Step Backward in Cairo

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 09:50:00 EST

Remember this statement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in June 2005? It was made at the American University in Cairo, and for many people represented a fundamental American reassessment of past U.S. policy in the Middle East.

We should all look to a future when every government respects the will of its citizens -- because the ideal of democracy is universal. For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East-- and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.

Well, Rice is back in Cairo, and we might want to reassess that supposed reassessment.

The Not So Fabulous Baker Boy

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 14:57:01 EDT

According to The Times of London, here are the general outlines of what the Iraq Study Group, a commission co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker, might be offering the administration as a plan to resolve the imbroglio in Iraq.

The Baker commission has grown increasingly interested in the idea of splitting the Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish regions of Iraq as the only alternative to what Baker calls "cutting and running" or "staying the course" ...

His group will not advise "partition", but is believed to favour a division of the country that will devolve power and security to the regions, leaving a skeletal national government in Baghdad in charge of foreign affairs, border protection and the distribution of oil revenue.

The Iraqi government will be encouraged to hold a constitutional conference paving the way for greater devolution. Iran and Syria will be urged to back a regional settlement that could be brokered at an international conference.

Several ideas come to mind. First, far from being an alternative to "cutting and running", the plan seems an effort to prepare the ground for precisely that. How? Once the Kurds and the Shiites fully take in hand their security, the rationale goes, and they will do so once they have "states" to protect, then the U.S. can cut back its troop levels radically and pull out, or more likely withdraw to safe areas, probably to Kurdistan. But Washington's effective control over broad Iraqi policy would be largely over.

Second, the plan, whatever the denials that it is partition, is partition if it turns out as the article suggests. Nothing suggests a majority of Iraqis want partition, quite the contrary, or that this plan will resolve anything. In fact, it may lead to a new Yugoslavia type situation, where communities fight over mixed areas. This time Baker won't be able to say "we have no dog in this fight" as he did when Yugoslavia collapsed. Historically, partitions have been terribly traumatic, whether in India, Korea, Vietnam, Cyprus, Palestine, and elsewhere, and it will very probably be the same in Iraq.

Third, is it really up to the U.S., after it screwed up postwar normalization in Iraq, to compound this with a plan that would only be perceived by Iraqis as a further effort to break them apart? Almost certainly this plan would be depicted by Iraqis and most Arabs as an effort to break up the Middle East into statelets to ensure that Israel remains strong, whatever the truth of that claim. At this stage, with everything that has gone on in the country, it seems far preferable to let the Iraqis decide their own future. The U.S. owes them patience and time to arrive at a solution by themselves.

Fourth, asking Iran and Syria to guarantee this process means asking the two states most responsible for destabilizing Iraq to oversee its stabilization. That's a typical realist habit of course, and Baker has long made deals with those who screwed the Americans the most. Hafiz Assad was responsible for allowing Shiite Islamists to kill American soldiers and civilians in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and was rewarded by Baker and George H.W. Bush when the U.S. granted Syria total hegemony over Lebanon in 1990.

Let's await the final plan before judging it, but I have very little faith that James Baker is the man who can shape an imaginative policy toward Iraq; not the man who has so thoroughly embodied the set ways of the traditional foreign policy curia in the Middle East, with its devotion to "reliable" thugs and indifference to liberal democracy. George W. Bush may have made a hash of things in Iraq, but the solution is not to fall back on the lubricated facilitators of the sordid relationship with Middle Eastern dictators--those who more than others made 9/11 a reality.

Osama Dead, Again?

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 10:17:40 EDT

A French regional newspaper has published what it says is a French intelligence report suggesting that the Saudis believe Osama bin Laden died of typhoid in Pakistan earlier this month. Bin Laden has a knack for surviving his "deaths", so handle with care.

Update: More doubts being expressed here.

Left Out

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 09:52:32 EDT

What is it that has led so many members of the secular political left today to sympathize with Islamist groups, particularly Hezbollah and Hamas? Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics answers the question, and manages to do so without abandoning his own roots on the political left. He writes:

The most recent manifestation of this trend arrived during the Lebanon war of July-August 2006. The Basque country militant I witnessed who waved a yellow Hizbollah flag at the head of a protest march is only the tip of a much broader phenomenon. The London demonstrators against the war saw the flourishing of many banners announcing "we are all Hizbollah now", and the coverage of the movement in the leftwing press was notable for its uncritical tone.

All of this is--at least to those with historical awareness, sceptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory--disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the US-declared "war on terror" and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against "the west".

This claim is a classic example of how a half-truth can be more dangerous than an outright lie. For while it is true that Islamism in its diverse political and violent guises is indeed opposed to the US, to remain there omits a deeper, crucial point: that, long before the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadis and other Islamic militants were attacking "imperialism", they were attacking and killing the left--and acting across Asia and Africa as the accomplices of the west.

Halliday goes on to investigate the relationship between the left and militant Islam, and while he sees parallels in their rhetoric, approach to political action, and organization, he underlines that these only conceal a more fundamental rift. He concludes, "It does not need slogans to understand that the Islamist programme, ideology and record are diametrically opposed to the left--that is, the left that has existed on the principles founded on and descended from classical socialism, the Enlightenment, the values of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848, and generations of experience."

The article provided an apt echo to my reading of a nutty piece of writing by Norman Finkelstein, introducing an even nuttier one by his friend Samah Idriss, Lebanese editor of the literary magazine Al-Adab. Finkelstein writes, "In the U.S. Congress yesterday one of our "representatives" said we are all Israelis now. I beg to differ, and I say this without fear: for those who believe in freedom and dignity, We are all Hezbollah now." Quite why Finkelstein should imply that fear is appropriate here is beyond me. The worst he risks by such a phrase is an extra half hour of earnest debate in the faculty lounge.

However, it is Idriss' text that merits a lengthy reading, for precisely the reasons that Halliday outlines. In his zeal for militancy, for ideological purity of action, Idriss drifts into the messianic, never able to separate between what is of the left and those who have systematically demolished the left in Lebanon in recent years: "What I pity about you, Lebanon, is your class of phony leftists (specifically the "Democratic Left") who have no other concern but to suspect everything redolent of dignity and to seek out anything with which they can denounce the Syrian and the Iranian regimes, HizbAllah, Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP-General Command--anything, even that which might result in the ultimate release of heroes who paid the price of their freedom to attain ours."

You have to wonder about someone who implies that the Syrian and Iranian regimes, as well as Islamic Jihad and the PFLP-General Command, qualify as being "redolent with dignity." You have to wonder, too, why Idriss, like Finkelstein on a visit to Lebanon several years ago, never mentions that the Syrians and Hezbollah at one time participated actively in the killing of leftists fighting Israel, because Syria wanted Hezbollah to seize control of the anti-Israeli resistance. Should you have any doubts, ask one of the leaders of the "Democratic Left", Elias Atallah, a former member of the Communist Party, who was among the first to bear arms against Israel in the 1980s, yet is now taken to task by Idriss (who has never taken up arms against anyone).

That Idriss and his many comrades worldwide should find themselves on the side of the anti-humanitarians, on the side of religious intolerance, on the side of the gun and the totalitarian slogans; that they do so and still claim to be of the left shows a lack of direction not at all visible on the other side. Here is what Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah had to say about his teenage years in his village of Bazzouriyeh:

But, later on, when we moved back to [Bazzouriyeh], I joined the ranks of the Amal movement. That was a choice that I made very eagerly, because I deeply admired Imam Musa al-Sadr. At that time, I was just 15-years-old and the Amal movement was ... known as the movement of the underprivileged. I was becoming less interested in the village of [Bazzouriyeh], because that village was turning into an arena for the activity of intellectuals, Marxists, and especially supporters of the Lebanese Communist Party.

At least Nasrallah knew who his enemies were.

Was Dave Weigel Fair with Niall Ferguson?

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 04:49:41 EDT

ABC News has picked up on the John McCain-Niall Ferguson connection, long after "Hawkeye" Dave Weigel did here and in an entry on Andrew Sullivan's website. Dave called Ferguson a "brilliant financial historian turned foaming-at-the-mouth national greatness conservative," and went on to observe that McCain, in particular, was "a class-A neoconservative and more hawkish than Bush. A president with Niall Ferguson on his shoulder is a president who'll stretch our military even thinner across the globe."

I beg to differ with Dave, if very belatedly. As an economic historian, Ferguson is more aware than most that "stretching the military even thinner around the globe" could bring financial calamity. Forgive my quoting myself here, but as I wrote in a Reason review of Ferguson's Colossus,

Ferguson ends his book with an intriguing hypothesis: that America's decline will come not from outside but "as it came to Gibbon's Rome, from within." He argues the empire is more likely to collapse because of a ballooning fiscal crisis nourished by the American propensity to consume much and save little than because of motley "barbarians at the gates." The U.S., he warns, faces an impending Social Security crisis because Americans are living longer and the fiscal system remains entirely inadequate to pay for future generations. The self-defeating ways to deal with this, he continues, are to engage in massive increases in income and payroll taxes, to slash Social Security benefits by equally dramatic amounts, or to cut discretionary spending to zero.

That's not to say that Ferguson is not for an American empire, but he's aware of how spending a lot of money can bring empires to their knees. His argument is not normative or ideological: what he essentially argues is that an American empire already exists (a view that jars with that of the neoconservatives, who do not generally subscribe to the "imperial America" argument), therefore that it had better act like a successful one, or the international system will suffer from U.S. incompetence. His criticism of the conduct of the Iraq war is very much in line with this rationale. The left doesn't care for Ferguson because he leans their way in admitting there is an imperial America, but undermines their views by saying that the U.S. can be a cornerstone of international stability. The American right is uneasy, because they have trouble accepting the implications of America's taking on an imperial burden.

I find that Ferguson's argument is convincing inasmuch as, like many a libertarian, I agree with his reading of imperial American power, but also appreciate the deft way he works himself out of the dilemmas implicit in the arguments of the left and right, as described above.

(Since disclaimers are necessary when agreeing with anybody, I must add that I consider Ferguson a friend, if not a sufficiently close one: I recall that he graciously sent me the first piece I edited for the Daily Star's opinion page, for a pittance, and was a delightful drinking partner one evening in Beirut. I can add more, but won't.)

Che Gue-Hassan

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 11:37:59 EDT

From the website of the Federation of American Scientists, a very interesting translation of an article from a conservative Iranian publication, in which Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, describes himself and his rise to power. There are unexplainable errors in the piece (after 1982, the National Salvation Front Nasrallah mentions could not have tried to make Bashir Gemayel president of Lebanon, because it bitterly opposed him and his party; Nasrallah could have meant Amin Gemayel, Bashir's brother and successor, though in no way was the front "planning to make [him] president of Lebanon").

Two intriguing tidbits. In one passage Nasrallah mentions how, during his religious studies in Najaf, he went through a five-year study program in just two years, thanks to Abbas Musawi, his teacher and predecessor as Hezbollah secretary general. It could be true, but I suspect the reason Nasrallah mentioned this was to counter an argument that he has little scholarly learning, and therefore does not have proper religious authority. His prestige will also have been helped by Nasrallah's mentioning that he was sent to Najaf with a letter of recommendation for Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, the revered cleric later murdered by the Baath regime.

A second interesting passage is Nasrallah's description of how he took over from Musawi, who was assassinated in 1992 by Israel. Though Nasrallah was not next in line--Naim Qassem was then Musawi's deputy--he was promoted over Qassem's head. Some argue, plausibly, that the Iranians intervened because they preferred Nasrallah, and that Qassem was displeased. If so, Nasrallah makes the point that Qassem was initially his assistant before Nasrallah went to Qom to pursue his studies, underlining, therefore, that he was entitled to be chosen as secretary general.

(Hat tip, Martin Kramer's blog)

Curt Cobban and Hassan Nasrallah

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 17:33:23 EDT

I've always found Helena Cobban tiresome, grating in her moral assertions, and utterly naive on Hezbollah. I know the affection is mutual and recently, in response to a reader linking to my piece titled "Hoodwinked by Hezbollah", Cobban had this to say on her blog:

Vadim, I have to say your use of Michael Young is hilariously off the mark. His piece you link to there gives zero data about the attitudes of Lebanese except to write that most of them do (in his view, misguidedly) claim that Hizbullah won a victory in the war.

You want data about Lebanese attitudes? Well, you'll need to read Arabic to read this report from the respected Beirut Center for Research and Information. It presents the results of an opinion poll carried out by the Center between August 18 and August 20, with 800 respondents chosen for their representativity [sic] ...

But the first question was "Do you consider that the resistance emerged victorious from this war?" The responses were: 72% yes. (Broken down, if you're interested, as: 79.8% of Sunnis saying yes; 96.3% of Shias, 62.8% of druze, and 59.7% of Christians.)

So this looks a little more authoritative than Michael Young's desperate and as always heavily ideologized rantings, wouldn't you say?

The Beirut Center for Research is the organization that carried out a poll last July that alleged that over 80 percent of Lebanese supported Hezbollah. I happen to believe that that poll was responsible for the greatest single bit of disinformation to come out of the recent Lebanon conflict. The head of the center is Abdo Saad. His daughter is Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, who has written a book on Hezbollah. But before discussing the earlier poll, let's first turn to Cobban's point.

Cobban's criticism is that my "desperate" and "ideologized rantings" (and I'll spare you, dear readers, the business about the pot calling the kettle black) provide zero data about the attitudes of Lebanese toward Hezbollah's victory. Indeed, my piece gave no data about Lebanese attitudes because I did not write about Lebanese attitudes. I selfishly offered my own reading of whether Hezbollah had scored a victory. That's why Cobban's opinion poll was off topic. All she proved was that my reading and that of a majority of Lebanese differed. Big deal.

Then again, let me add that idly throwing out numbers does not turn conclusions into hard truths. The poll Cobban cites says only that BCRI questioned "800 respondents chosen according to a technique that takes heed of religious and geographical distribution." That may be true, but this kind of vagueness makes me suspicious. Which areas were people chosen from? What was the age distribution of the respondents? Why weren't the respondents broken down into categories other than religious group, given that geographical distribution was a criterion differentiating them? We don't know. In fact the poll is so slipshod in its presentation, regardless of the veracity of the information, that I can only presume Cobban was so pleased with her (faulty) Arabic translation of the introduction that she forgot to be critical.

Given Hassan Nasrallah's admission on Sunday that, had he known the capture of two Israeli soldiers would lead to such destruction, he would never have gone through with the operation, I think I'm entitled to restate that Hezbollah must re-evaluate its "victory". If it was a victory, then why did Nasrallah apologize? All the more so as he had claimed that the present war happily preempted a far bigger Israeli onslaught planned for later this year. Worse, if he predicted such an onslaught, then why didn't he suspect that a strong Israeli response might come sooner? If he was surprised, then he was catastrophically negligent; and if he was not surprised, then he was responsible for a terrible disaster that befell Lebanon. Either way he merits blame.

Yet Cobban, in a later posting, sees all this as a sign that "Nasrallah's eagerness to reassure his compatriots that Hizbullah intends to to [sic] act very cautiously in the coming period is evidently connected to his continued desire to work very closely indeed with the lawful government of Lebanon." Perhaps I'm bent in half by ideology, but Cobban is better off using ideology as an excuse for such a cretinous conclusion. That a man who has systematically refused to disarm his militia in line with the clear preference of a majority of the Lebanese government and of non-Shiites should now be seen as wanting to sincerely collaborate with that government is, well, delicious. Oh, to live in Charlottesville.

Now back to that earlier BCRI poll on Lebanese attitudes toward Hezbollah. In an interview in July, Saad-Ghorayeb announced this:

I've recently taken part in devising an opinion poll, along with a local think tank here, and the results have been published today. Basically, 87% of all Lebanese support Hezbollah's resistance against Israel today. And that includes 80% of all Christian respondents, 80% of all Druze respondents, and 89% of all Sunnis. And this, of course, is non-Shiite groups, so those which have supported the March 14 pro-American--the March 14, sorry, alliance, which is seen as being pro-American, pro-French, anti-Syrian.

I have made it clear in several articles that I think these results are bogus. I will ignore Saad-Ghorayeb's Freudian slip in primarily depicting the March 14 coalition as a pro-American grouping, before her deft rephrasing. I'm not accusing her or her father of having consciously skewed the results. However, I saw such massive evidence of the contrary in my month of the war, across the board, that I have grave doubts about the findings, and now, in light of the poll cited by Cobban, its methodology.

But there is more. When the primary worry of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt (to name only them) in the first weeks of the conflict was to avoid sectarian tension at all costs between their communities and the Shiites; when Hassan Nasrallah, at the end of his Al-Jazeera interview early in the war, threatened those who supposedly failed to side with Hezbollah; when we now see people much more open in their hostility to Hezbollah, particularly Christian and Sunni villagers in the South, for example those in Ain Ebel and Marwaheen, then I think it's time to cast a critical eye on a poll that showed such widespread backing for Hezbollah. Had that backing existed, there would have been little sectarian tension, no threats from Nasrallah, no consistent condemnation of the party's actions from Sunnis, Christians, Druze, and even some Shiites.

And I can go on. But I really wouldn't want Helena to think I was desperate...

Note: Thanks to reader Kamal Bakhazi, my link on the majority of the Lebanese government and non-Shiites supporting Hezbollah's disarmament was corrected, after a faulty link. I would like to add that since this post went up, I received an irate email from Saad-Ghorayeb. So, for clarity's sake, I would like to reproduce the question in the initial poll that led to so high a percentage of respondents saying that they supported Hezbollah's resistance against Israel.

The question was:

Do you support the resistance's [Hezbollah's] opposition to the Israeli aggression against Lebanon?

Given the hardly neutral wording and the context of the poll, does that question offer any real alternative to saying that one is with Hizbullah, though respondents may have had quite a few reservations about the party and its behavior? Substitute, let's say, the "Republican Party" for "resistance", and 9/11 for "Israeli aggression", and you'll get an equally skewed answer allowing for no subtlety, but that would still allow you to claim:

87 percent of Americans support the Republican Party in opposing 9/11.

Many might protest against suddenly being turned into supporters of the Republican Party, when all they really agree with is that they oppose 9/11. Saad-Ghorayeb's poll falsely created a sense that there was widespread support for Hezbollah when the question left respondents little latitude to expose their true feelings.

The Latest from Lebanon

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 15:46:12 EDT

More than two weeks into the Lebanon war several thing are becoming slightly more obvious. The first is that the dynamics of the conflict are changing. Whereas for the first two weeks the Israelis imposed a blockade on all ports and systematically destroyed roads, bridges, Beirut's Shiite southern suburbs, and large areas of the mainly Shiite south and the northern Bekaa Valley, now we seem to have moved to a ground war focused in the border region. After the heavy casualties the Israelis took yesterday in Bint Jubail, I imagine Israel will escalate its air campaigns and essentially try to grind down and overcome the entrenched Hezbollah combatants through massive firepower. That will mean heavy civilian casualties.

Can it do so before a cease-fire? Because of the relative (and I mean very relative) normalization in the rest of the country, and the imminent opening of so-called humanitarian corridors to allow supplies and aid into Lebanon, it seems to me that Israel has bought several more weeks in which to hit Hezbollah, particularly in the south. There is also an embarrassed understanding, both inside Lebanon and out, that if things were to stop now, Hezbollah would emerge much stronger from the fight, and would be in a position to stage an effective coup against the Lebanese state, by virtue of its weapons and its ability (and visible desire today) to seek retribution against its critics.

Where will this lead? That depends on how well Hezbollah fights back. But the Israeli government has two contracts to fulfill: one toward its own people (and PM Ehud Olmert needs to prove that he can defend Israel, particularly if he goes through with a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank in the future); and a contract with the Bush administration, which has asked Israel to cut down Hezbollah. Both objectives mean this is a fight Israel cannot afford to lose; and one Hezbollah cannot either.

On the diplomatic front, Condoleezza Rice's visit to Beirut earlier this week showed two things: that the U.S. doesn't have a clear idea how to deploy an international force in the border area; and that Rice is open to ideas. In a lunch session with representatives of political forces opposed to Syria, and critical of Hezbollah, she initially said that her plan called for clearing out a 20 kilometer area in the south where an international force would deploy. When the assembled politicians said this was ridiculous, since Hezbollah would only fire at Israel from behind the peacekeepers, Rice backtracked, saying that hers was only a proposal. She reportedly told assistant secretary David Welch to note that the plan had to be changed, and that the U.S. would aim for a demilitarization of the south. Quite how the U.S. intends to do this remains utterly unclear.

My own view is that this is a long work in progress, so that it is senseless to draw too many conclusions today. This is going to last for several more weeks, and the diplomacy will only really begin making inroads if Hezbollah agrees to compromise. We're far from that yet, but facing 500,000-700,000 displaced people, mounting economic costs estimated at $2 billion, the displeasure of much of Lebanese society, Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, needs his militia to come out of the Israeli land operation looking more or less intact, otherwise his margin to delay on a compromise will become narrower and narrower.

Most alarming, however, is that there are increasing calls in the U.S. for the Bush administration to engage Syria, so that it can help control Hezbollah, on the assumption that if you deal with Syria, you can isolate Iran. One wonders if those peddling the idea have any memory at all: it was under Syria that Hezbollah became a military power, and what the Syrians will demand, or maneuver to achieve, in exchange for "helping" would be onerous. They will want the international investigation of Rafiq Hariri's murder to be dropped, to save their regime that ordered the crime; and they will want oversight power over Lebanese affairs, which, with an armed Hezbollah as Praetorian Guard, would effectively mean they would again rule the country.

My own suspicion is that this is also Israel's Plan B if the international peacekeeping force project doesn't work out. The Israelis have always preferred dealing with predictable Syria in Lebanon than with a weak state that cannot control Hezbollah and is open to myriad outside irritants. Because the Israelis have no confidence in Lebanon's innate stability, they have no qualms about making that stability increasingly impossible.

Another Hot Beirut Summer

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 12:05:59 EDT

A week into the Israeli onslaught in Lebanon, all I can really say is that I imagined summer rather differently. Many tens of thousands of refugees are on the roads, living in schools, public facilities, convents, etc. Lebanon will have a reconstruction bill in the billions of dollars, not to mention what it has lost in terms of short-term opportunity cost of a summer tourist season up in smoke. I wonder if the Lebanese economy, with a GDP of around $20 billion and a public debt twice that, can escape financial meltdown.

Beirut was mostly quiet today, though the Israelis rocketed some trucks near my home because they looked like missile launchers. In fact they were devices used to dig holes in properties ready for development, to drain water. That closed the neighborhood down even earlier than usual. In the South, along the Israeli border, fighting has been intense, and my friend Nicholas Blanford of the Christian Science Monitor, who is in the southern city of Tyre, told me he saw Hizbullah launch rockets apparently directed at Haifa.

This seems like it will last at least another week or so, by which I mean this intensity of violence. Once negotiations begin, I imagine things will continue, but at a more irregular pace. Israeli generals say that they will complete their operations in 10 days to two weeks. My feeling is that they won't be able to make it: U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should be in the region by the end of the week, and while the bombing will continue beyond that, Rice can't discredit her mission by allowing it to go on for too long. There is also the slight matter of casualties. Very soon the green light given to Israel by many in the international community will turn orange, then red, because the death rate is unsustainable: nearly 250 dead in a week of attacks--almost all of them civilians.

As I type, thousands of foreigners are on their way out of Lebanon, heading for Cyprus. I remember such scenes from the war years between 1975 and 1990. The Americans have had the toughest time, it seems, because there are quite a few of them--some 25,000 in Lebanon, though not all are leaving. No one yet knows when their evacuation will be finished, but I suspect there will be some angry citizens when this is all over, even though I know that embassy staff is working 24/7, without much food or sleep.

A final word on political realism. I chatted with a prominent Lebanese politician the other day, who argued that if a ceasefire came too soon, this entire affair would be a victory for Hizbullah. This, he dreaded. Amid all the carnage there is another story: Lebanon is paying the price of a militia that has decided to build a state within a state and to pursue a conflict with Israel, regardless of what the Lebanese majority wants. The result is this calamity.

The Israeli strategy? Simply to make sure the Lebanese, in particular the Shiites, never bomb them again. It's not subtle; it won't disarm Hizbullah; but it will be hard to forget. And the Israelis are proving ruthless in targeting areas.

Not-So-Secular Turkey

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 14:26:36 EDT

Turkey, America's secular, democratic ally among Muslim nations? A poll says, "Not so fast."

On-Air Arrests in Zarqa

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 07:43:29 EDT

As a follow-up to the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killing, I was watching Al-Jazeera a few minutes ago while the station's correspondent was broadcasting from Zarqa, Jordan, Zarqawi's hometown. While on air interviewing Zarqawi's brother-in-law, Jordanian security forces intervened and put an end to the exchange. The brother-in-law was arrested and so too was the correspondent.

The Jordanians reportedly helped the U.S. in finding Zarqawi, but the relationship between the Hashemite regime and the Islamists has long been a delicate one, blending confrontation and collaboration. The security services probably did not want too many people asking what a person like Zarqawi's brother-in-law--an Islamist who fought in Afghanistan, who referred to Osama bin Laden as "Sheikh Osama", who was apparently in regular contact with Zarqawi, and who in the television interview condemned the "Crusader" onslaught of the Americans--was still doing on the streets.

I wager he'll be released before long, but told to do no more interviews.