Why Israel might attack...paint by the numbers

My friend Rico and I have been in conversation over the last few days about the situation in the region, and yesterday I made the following comment: 'the fact that the US has decided to attack Syria has just made a war with Israel measurably more likely.' He shot me back an email asking why Israel would enter into a conflict in Lebanon, and my answer went on for so long and in such excessive detail that I decided it deserved blog status. Here it is:

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Interesting question. My answer might surprise you: Israel is looking for any excuse to attack Lebanon and if they get one it will be very, very bad for us because they will hit Lebanon very hard.

Hezbullah basically owns the south of Lebanon. They claim to have 50,000 rockets of various kinds aimed at Israel, and this is probably pretty accurate. They also claim not to want a fight with Israel at the moment (Why would they? They've got 10,000 men committed to Syria.), but Israel couldn't care less. They want to get rid of those missiles at almost any cost.

Israel traditionally has very good intelligence in all the surrounding countries. It's probably about right to estimate that they know where 2/3 of those rockets are located. Knowing where they're stored and being able to get at them are two different things, however. And then there are the other 15,000 or so they have no idea about. That's a lot of rockets, some of which are quite large and can certainly hit Haifa and Tel Aviv.

Iran is Hezbullah's supplier. That's why Hezbullah went to war in Syria and thus dragged us several steps closer to the edge of the cliff. They desperately need to keep open their supply pipeline to Iran. The moment Assad falls in Syria they are vulnerable. Hezbullah is a Shia' organization. The opposition in Syria - whether moderate or crazy jihadist - is overwhelmingly Sunni. Although everyone claims solidarity in the fight against Israel, this solidarity would probably not survive a change in regime in Syria. At least, for a while. This would be the moment for Israel to attack in order to try to wipe Hezbullah out at a minimum cost to themselves. Minimum doesn't mean small, they'd probably take very big hits, too. Just smaller than if they let Hezbullah determine the date and time of the battle.

The ONLY way to really hit Hezbullah in Lebanon is to hit it everywhere, including Beirut. Also, the Israelis have always - who knows this in the West? - hit everybody and everyplace whenever they feel threatened. Particularly in Lebanon.

To this day I remember an interview I had back in the 80s with US Marine officers out at the airport. This was the encampment ordered into Lebanon by Reagan, and this was the encampment about to be hit a few days later by a truck bomb that killed over 250 Marines. What nobody knew - and what nobody still knows - is that the Marines had been trading fire, NIGHTLY, with Israeli forces located less than a quarter mile away. I was dumbfounded - weren't we allies? The Marines explained: every nite the Israelis fired indiscriminately in the direction of the poor Shia' neighborhoods next to the airport. The Marines even had a term for this: they called it 'recon by fire'. In other words, fire at everything and see where the return fire comes from! In the course of this, they invariably came a little too close to the Marines, who were under orders to return fire when fired upon. Thus, every night US forces and the Israeli army were trading fire in the suburbs of Beirut! Boys from New York and LA were firing at each other on behalf of allied armies in a third country!

With regard to Lebanon, Israel has for decades had an explicitly ennunciated policy of holding all Lebanese responsible for any incidents that occur on its northern border. Since the 60s this has resulted in repeated destruction of entire villages, of infrastructure and uncounted killed and wounded.

If this happens in coming days the south of Lebanon will be devastated again, Beirut's southern suburbs will again be reduced to smoke and ruin, and even the north will likely get hit. During the 2006 war with Hezbullah, Israel also hit the electricity grid all over the country and lots of other infrastructure that had absolutely nothing to do with Hezbullah. If this happens we'll have no water and no electricity for a while, an unpleasant prospect.

But wait, there's more! The US has decided to hit Syria in the next few days. Many people who know a lot over here think when (not if, the decision has been made) this happens either Syria or Hezbullah may strike out against Israel in retaliation. Poof! Instant war!

What worries me in all this..well, all that is pretty worrisome by itself...but what worries me is that if there is open fighting in Lebanon with anyone, the jihadis, supported by our good friends Saudi Arabia and Qatar (there's another blog post!), will try to take over the battle as they have tried in Syria, Mali, Libya and so on.  It will be a long time before Lebanon recovers from that, if it happens.

Postscript, Sept 1, 2013: It appears the decision to attack Syria may not be as firm as it appeared 2 days ago. As of today the UK has voted not to participate and Reuters reported a short while ago that President Obama has asked Congress to debate the action before a final decision is made. Whether he's trying to spread the blame or hoping for a way out of a very dicey situation is unclear - for the moment I'm betting on the latter. I also heard a report yesterday that the US and Iran may have reached some kind of understanding. Whether this includes agreement about an Iranian response to a US strike, or perhaps Iranian pressure on Assad on the use of chemical weapons, I don't know. But, clearly, it's a complicated board and the pieces are all in motion.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop....on your damn head!

I wrote what I thought was a pretty good - albeit rather atmosheric - dispatch from Beirut a couple of days ago, and sent it off to Pacifica News. As far as I know they didn't pick it up. Whatever. I thought I'd stick it up here since it gives a pretty good feeling of where we are at the moment, in our hot, steamy city.

Beirut, August 27 2013
by Michel Bogopolsky

As summer comes to an end in Beirut, things are fast heating up rather than cooling down. The cinders of the war next door in Syria are falling ever more frequently on Lebanon, and closing in on the capital, Beirut. What residents of this city have feared for months seems to be happening, and no one appears able to figure out how to prevent it.

Animosity between Sunnis in the southern city of Sidon and the Shia' party Hezb Allah who control most of the rest of the south have led to repeated violent incidents. The latest was in June, when the Lebanese Army engaged the forces of the 'mad sheikh' Ahmad el Assir and his followers in a battle that lasted several days.

In Tripoli, the main city of the north, there have been repeated, extremely violent, clashes between Sunni residents of the Bab Tabanneh neighborhood and the Alawi area known as Jabal Mohsen over the last several months.

In the last two months two bombs have gone off in Beirut's southern suburbs, also controlled by Hezb Allah. The most recent, on August 15, killed 27 people and wounded hundreds. This attack was claimed by a previously unknown group calling themselves 'Aisha, Um al Muimeen', a specifically religious reference to some of the most inflammatory differences between Shia' and Sunni Muslims. This attack and a previous, unclaimed, attack in May, are both believed to be revenge for Hezb Allah's intervention on the side of the Syrian regime.

Last week, things got dramatically worse, when two car bombs exploded in Tripoli in front of two of the city's main Sunni mosques just as Friday prayers were letting out. At least 42 were killed and hundreds were wounded by attacks clearly aimed at sending a message to the Sunni community. The local English-language paper Daily Star is reporting today that one suspect in these bombings has confessed to working with Syrian intelligence services to plan and carry out these two attacks.

Until now, Beirut's central zones have been spared. Last week, however, Lebanon's beleagured security services were able to locate a car bomb factory and dismantle a vehicle packed with TNT and nitroglycerin. So far, we have no information about where that attack was supposed to occur.

In the last day there are rumors and somewhat more than rumors of coming attacks in Beirut. Yesterday, friends and family of one of Lebanon's most prominent politicians (unnamed to protect the identities of others involved) received calls warning of attacks in downtown Beirut in the days to come. As it happened, through the chain I was one of the recipients of this particular warning.

Apparently other warnings have gone out, as many of Beirut's streets were nearly empty today, and residents stayed home in droves.

As of three or four days ago, the army is out in force, encamped on street corners and actively patrolling many neighborhoods. Cars that appear suspicious are cordoned off and checked, and a new system of neighborhood surveillance over parked cars is being introduced. One of my friends, who had left her car parked for four days, was warned that in the future she risked having her car taken and dismantled. At the entrances to the city cars are being stopped and searched.

The mood in the city is tense and anxious, and everyone waits, as one resident said 'for the other shoe to drop'.

 -0-

Addendum: As of today, Sunday, September 1st, there has been no incident. Opinions vary as to why that is ('each side has bombed the other twice, so they're even until further notice', 'Friday was too obvious, they're waiting until people relax a bit, then they'll do it'), but no one has decided we're in the clear. For the last several days, the streets have been amazingly empty, and parking in many areas is suddenly possible again. I.E., many people have packed up and gone to the mountains or flown away for the time being.

The Returnees

In her book, Returning Home, A Post-War Lebanese Phenomenon, Professor of Psychology Dr Amal Malek discusses the experiences of Lebanese returning to their homeland after the civil war. Among those returnees was Dr Malek herself, along with her family. In an interview I did with them recently, she and her husband, Rene, elaborated on the experience and how it affected their family. Some of what I learned in that interview shows up below.

The return of any emigrant is inevitably compounded of nostalgia, trepidation and hope. As Dr Malek points out in her book, the returnee comes back to some degree a changed person: "...a process of reintegration into one's own culture has to take place." Things that used to be second-nature no longer come naturally; behaviors that may have been unacceptable before departure have now become normal to the point of becoming unconscious. How will the returnee fit, and how will he/she be received by those who didn't leave?

In the case of Lebanon other factors come into play. A vicious civil war intervened and changed the society in important ways - deepening the rifts that already existed, creating new ones, changing behaviors both within and across those rifts, and profoundly changing people's experience of life itself. Again quoting from Malek: 'We were home, but the war had changed our country from the way we knew it.'

Explaining what I mean by all this starts by pointing out (again) that Lebanon is a profoundly schizophrenic society in some ways. Like a drought-stricken terrain, it is riven by cracks and splits of all kinds. Sectarian and tribal differences are only the most obvious. Traditional social distinctions based on social position, profession, rural or city origin and so on abound. In the hinterland, and even in the majority of agglomerations, social organization is still very conservative and this web of social positioning is still very strong. All this doesn't merit the term 'schizophrenia', of course. That aspect comes from the war and the effects it had on already serious sectarian and communal divisions. What were previously bridgable divides became progressively less so, and in some cases have become, or are in the process of becoming, chasms.

But...what my 10-word synopsis of Lebanese social structures obscures is that, for all its divisions, Lebanese society before the war was deeply social, and very intimate. This is very important in the evolution of things during and after the civil war. Here's some annecdotal evidence to give a flavor.

In the 'good old days' I very frequently took long 'service' rides. If I had business in Beirut I'd usually catch a ride down the mountain with a friend, and then grab a service to get back to the village in the evening. The ride - a fairly torturous mountain road - would take the average American an hour and a half or so. In other words, it usually took my service about 45 minutes. Services to other locations were equally hair-raising, but also very convenient. I once went from Aleppo (poor Aleppo!) to Damascus and came pretty close to arriving before I'd left.

In those days, the services waited on designated street corners depending on their destination. The driver would read the newspaper, eat sandwiches or chat with other drivers until his car was full. Prospective passengers got in the car and waited patiently until it filled up. With the fifth passenger the driver would jump in, gun the motor, and  dive into traffic with an acceleration that left your stomach at the curb. That same acceleration normally continued all the way up the mountain until we finally shot into the village somewhere near escape velocity.

Other than the driving, what was interesting about those service rides was the social experience. Sometimes one or two of the passengers would have an acquaintance or even a family relation. Most often, however, that wasn't the case. No matter: within moments a lively conversation was inevitably en route. The fact that we were travelling at warp speed, skidding along cliff overhangs, making dents in the roof with our heads was of no concern. Our 45 - or, with traffic, 47 minutes went by in a congenial atmosphere of jokes, stories, challenges, assertions, counter-assertions and whatnot. If someone needed vegetables or a watermelon, we all stopped. If someone got out before the final destination we had a little more room to breathe and the conversation resumed. I learned a LOT of Arabic in services.

The contrast between then and now could not be more stark. Service rides are now a good time to reflect on one's life, since no one is talking. The reason is simple: no one wants to exchange self-identifying information. In a country where your name, your clothes, your haircut and even the way you pronounce certain letters can instantly identify your origins, everyone is trying to avoid broadcasting more than the absolute minimum of information.

This is not a trivial matter. During the war services were often stopped and passengers either lived or died according to what community they were from. This hasn't happened recently, but - and especially with the spillover of the sectarian war next door in Syria - this is never far from anyone's mind.

Here's an annecdote that demonstrates the starting point - the degree of mutual separation and ignorance that already existed before the war, and which blossomed during the war into the poisonous atmosphere of today. Soon after my first wife and I accepted the teaching job that brought us to the Druze village of Baaqline, we were invited to lunch by a Christian family of our acquaintance. The lunch took place at the family's mountain home, probably 20 miles as the crow flies from Baaqline. During the meal we were asked innocently by someone what village we were going to be living in. Our answer was met with a moment of stony silence. Finally, a member of the family cleared his throat and said the following: 'Didn't anybody tell you that's a Druze village? You should move out immediately. The Druze cannot be trusted; they kill Christian children and use their blood in their secret rituals!'

I'd heard the blood libel before, of course. Until that day I had no idea it had a whole other life that didn't involve the Jews!

Despite this, before the war people of all backgrounds mixed quite freely in Beirut. Marriages between Druze and Christians were reasonably frequent, and created ties between nearby villages. Muslim-Druze marriages occurred too, although I rarely, if ever, heard of a Muslim-Christian marriage. However, there's probably a different reason for that: Christian-Druze marriages were facilitated to a degree by the fact that the Druze enforce no conversion process on a spouse from outside. There simply is no way to convert to Druzism. Christian communities, being quite European in orientation, also were reasonably tolerant of marriages outside the faith. Therefore, once the inevitable family objections had been dealt with these marriages were fairly well accepted. Marriages involving a Muslim partner, however, often ran aground on the requirement that the non-Muslim member accept Islam - and thus effectively leave his or her community of origin. For this reason, these marriages were generally between very secularized couples. Since there was (and still is) no civil marriage in Lebanon, these couples would often fly to Cyprus or elsewhere to get married in a civil ceremony which would be recognized as legal upon their return. Such marriages are still quite common: I've heard of and met several couples who've had to resort to this approach in just the few weeks since I arrived.

War always dismantles societies to some extent. If there's anything good to be said about war, it might be that sometimes the society that emerges afterwards is better in important ways than what came before. For example, post-war Japanese society was quite different than what existed before, and probably much better suited to the challenges of the post-war period. England also experienced a discontinuity; the Victorian society of the Empire gave way to a much more fluid post-war environment.

Lebanon is a different case. And it seems to me that many people returned not fully realizing this fact. In a sense, they were drawn in by false hope and an idea that something new and wonderful could be built on the foundations of the pre-war past.

What happened here in Lebanon - in another sweeping generalization - is that society became less, not more, fluid. Each community retrenched behind its boundaries, mistrust continued to build and cooperation became ever harder to find.

When returnees arrived at the airport, they were prepared to deal with physical hardship, damaged roads, bad plumbing, occasional electricity. It seems to me from my conversations that many of them must not have realized that the very social issues that had caused the war had actually deepened. My friends May and Muhammad returned to help rebuild the cultural and artistic life of the country. And to demonstrate that creative work could be done here and thrive. Amal Malek returned, as she told me, 'to reconstruct minds.'

What they found when they got here was a much more challenging environment than post-war Britain or Japan. How does one rebuild when there's no trust, no shared discourse, no feeling of being together in a common enterprise?

How does one rebuild when each moment of quiet is another calm before the storm? When even in the absence of battles, one group is tearing down what another is building? When decades of war and mutual self-destruction have not yet proved to everyone's satisfaction that zero-sum only ends up bringing zero to all; instead of shared progress, shared destitution?

This is my take on the topic and I'll be curious to see what feedback I get from those who've talked to me about this issue. As I wrote it I sensed that I wasn't going exactly where I'd expected when I started typing, that I was coming to a darker conclusion than I had originally intended. The weight of dozens of conversations with many people seemed to be narrowing my options. Not all of these were with returnees; there are also those who stayed behind and resent the returnees for their freedom while being dumbfounded at their choice to come back.

Personally, I have nothing but admiration for the Returnees. I just wish I could say that their country had met them halfway. Or half of halfway. Or half of that.

Lebanon....the confidence game

"And so began the great confidence game in Lebanon. The game involved a succession of devious transactions between players who invariably pretended to stand for nationalist ideals and principles aimed at the common good, while they strove to outwit and overturn one another, motivated by atavistic loyalties and insecurities for which the professed ideals and principles normally served as a mere cover.

...Although the parties to the game were religious communities, the game itself did not involve debates on points of religion, except among the marginal class of the clergy who played a game which was exclusively their own. 

...The plain fact remained that the religious communities in Lebanon were essentially tribes, or in any case behaved as tribes, and the game that came to be played between them was a tribal game."

Lebanese Historian Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions

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So here I continue a series of reflections on the country I lived in and knew so well 40 years ago, and to which I've returned. So much is the same and yet so much isn't. Sometimes what is the same masks what isn't.

My new bible on the question of Lebanon - thanks, Amal! - is Kamal Salibi's work I quoted above. Salibi captured better than ever I could the interplay of forces and the subtety of their interactions that form the politcal and social entity known as Lebanon. I chose the quote above because, to me, it summarizes with simplicity and very clearly what Lebanon was, what it is, and what faces it at the beginning of the 21st century.

Salibi's explanation of the forces that led to the Civil War is stark. And these forces are still very much in play - in fact, in some ways they have thrived, multiplied, infected new generations, and fostered a kind of social degeneration that leaves Lebanon with less to hold it together than it had before the war started back in 1975.

Pulling the operative terms out of Salibi's text we get more or less the following: 'confidence game', 'devious transactions', 'pretended', 'outwit and overturn', 'atavistic loyalties', and 'tribal game'. To the despair of thousands of Lebanon's best minds and hearts, these are still the rules of  the game today. And underlying all these mechanics is one fundamental law of politics and social interaction: there can be only one winner. I call this zero-sum politics, probably not new with me.

Zero-sum politics stems from a deep-seated belief that the goal of politics is rule, that rule proceeds from complete control of the governing apparatus (or as close to that as you can get), and that the point of ruling is to gain control of resources while barring others from access. Barring others in turn requires force, so now we have a politics of violence. In a non-tribal environment zero-sum politics might lead to the Nazis or Josef Stalin. In a society like Lebanon it leads to chaos and repeated cycles of violence aimed at either overthrowing the current winners or avoiding overthrow. As Salibi says, the game is to outwit and overturn.

I'm going to go out on a limb here (not being an historian and making sweeping generalizations is like painting a target on your chest!) and propose that this region has traditionally been very hospitable to this form of politics and social interaction. The expansion of populations out of the Arabian peninsula into the Levant, both pre and post-Islamic, was fundamentally tribal in nature. As were population movements from the east and the west, including Africa and those mentioned in the Bible. Above the tribal structure there has been since the beginning of recorded history a succession of imperial super-authorities wielding absolute, but often distant, power. These empires, up to and including the Ottomans and even the English and French, were generally very tolerant of the tribal organization below them. In fact, they often encouraged and used it as a means of ensuring the supremacy of their rule.

Kamal Salibi notes that the exception to this is Egypt, where, since the time of the pharaohs, the population has been quite de-tribalized. It's a commentary on the persistence of history into the present that this is still true and very visible in the events that have been going on there recently.

The consciousness of the uniqueness of Egypt has been fundamental in Arab society for decades, and never more than today. Here in Lebanon many people see the only chance for salvation coming out of Egypt.

Getting back to my original point, one that Salibi makes: because the tribal structures in the area were indigenous to the population and useful to the rulers they never dissolved. In what the British charmingly used to call 'the Lebanon' they thrived, as incoming groups jockeyed for space and access to resources. In historical terms, the country is made up of a high proportion of 'newcomers'. I mean that relatively, over centuries. In many cases, of course, the newcomers melded with existing populations, but the end result always seems to have been to encourage differences rather than soften them. Religion plays a role, but it seems that tribal allegience is usually paramount, with religion serving as the 'cover'under which struggles for power have played out.

So, for example, the Druze are originally an Egyptian phenomenon from a thousand years or so ago, with a strong component of northern Syrian and Kurdish influence. Salibi, Sami Makarem and others have pointed out that the original Druze presence must have come from an existing population, since the religion began as a conversion faith. However, the call to conversion was soon closed entirely (there's literally no way to become Druze now other than to be born into the community), leaving a mixed population with a unique identity and an essentially tribal allegiance which only grew stronger over the centuries. Over the last hundred and fifty years or so the Druze have repeatedly demonstrated a cohesiveness and a willingness to go to any lengths to maintain their communal security that mark them as one of the most redoutable 'tribes' in the Arab world.

The Christians in Lebanon display a similar process of development, with the exception of the fact that their religious identity is much older and precedes the arrival in the area of both Druzism and - much more significantly - Islam. The short story about the Christians in Lebanon is that since long before the crusades they have seen Christian Europe as their allies and protectors. Many Christians will tell you today that nothing significant has changed and in some ways things are as dire as they've ever been. With the flight of Iraqi Christians from the homeland they've inhabited since the early days of Christianity, and with the increasingly vulnerable situation of Christian communities in Syria and Egypt they see themselves as the last bulwark of their faith in the region. This feeling of having your back to the wall doesn't encourage ecumenical and non-sectarian feelings. Some of my Christian friends see no option but a Christian protectorate in Lebanon, essentially cut off from its natural hinterland and guaranteed by Western powers. However, even they acknowledge the enormous price that solution would incur: even greater suspicion and animosity from the other communities in Lebanon and the Islamic world generally, as well as a very dicey reliance on notoriously fickle Western powers prone to dither until problems go away of their own accord - usually through war, massacres and destruction.

The Christians face an additional obstacle: they are not a single 'tribe'. When I returned to the US during the Lebanese Civil War I always had a difficult time explaining the cross-overs and dis-continuities between the warring factions. The tendency then, as now, was to see the war as a Muslim-Christian battle, with the Palestinians cast as the evil fomenters. Reality was much more complicated. The Christians, for example, were bitterly divided, with one faction - generally Maronite - fighting on what we called the 'right' against the Palestinians and their various Muslim and Druze allies. The Greek Orthodox, however, sided with the 'left', which led to internecine battles, massacres and counter-massacres between the Christian forces.

The same could be said of the Muslims to some degree, though not of the Druze. Various Sunni and Shia' factions and militias fought at various times with or against each side, until, by the end of the war's first decade it became impossible to clearly identify who the sides were. By that point, the original debate about Lebanon as a shared home - the facade, as Salibi would have it - had pretty much evaporated, leaving behind a zero-sum struggle in which every faction and militia seemingly had to engage every other in a tribal battle for turf and power.

The results are manifest everywhere in Lebanon today, from the built and natural environment to the world of personal and social interactions. To some degree, as I mentioned earlier, attempts to rebuild and reconstruct a polity have acted to mask this fact, but anyone who knew Lebanon in the days before the war remembers and knows. One result: an ongoing exodus of the young and the engaged, who refuse to accept the limits placed on them by the constant struggle to assert their view of life against the rising waters of communitarian, mutually antagonist worldviews. As my friend Karma, who's in her twenties, phrased it: 'it's like swimming underwater and never being able to come up for air. You can only do it so long, then something has to give.'

From one perspective, Salibi's confidence game has run out of steam, in the sense that a confidence game depends on fooling the marks. Lebanon's confidence game consisted of pretending to have an inclusive vision of national life, while actually striving for narrow, sectarian dominance. At this point, almost no one here seems interested to talk of social regeneration or debate the virtues of socialism vs the free market. In the current environment all that is now utterly beside the point. The masks worn by the major players in the civil war which served to encourage and attract followers have fallen away, and what's left is very ugly, indeed. Until the outbreak of the Syrian war next door, a certain stasis had been reached. No one had given up on the zero-sum game, but everyone had agreed to abide, more or less, by certain rules as generally specified in the 1989 Taif agreement that officially put an end to the civil war. With Syria now aflame next door, allegience to those rules is evaporating. Inter-communal messages are once again being sent via car bombs and areas of the country are essentially off-limits to one sect or another. However, the map varies according to what sect or community you belong to. Thus, everyone's map of Lebanon is different, when it comes to freedom of movement and everyday life. Even Beirut, where everyone still meets to do business, is being infected by this cancer. For the moment, it is still navigable, but the general feeling is that it's only a matter of time before Beirut, too, succumbs to sectarian dissection.

Stir the soup and thicken The Plot

The last 48 hours haven't been good for the Mideast, and they haven't been good for anyone who believes in the perfectibility of human society.

For believers in The Plot and for enemies of secular democracy it's been a pretty good couple of days.

From east to west: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. It's late, and I'm only going to talk about the last two.

___________________

I happened to be doing an interview yesterday evening when both of the other people in the room got simultaneous phone calls from worried family members. A massive car bomb had just gone off a couple of miles from where we were sitting.

A couple of miles in this town can mean a lot. In this case, it means a different place entirely on the communal map of Beirut, and across the lines of sectarian control. The bomb went of in a Shia' area under the control of Hezbullah, clearly meant to 'punish' it for its support of the Assad regime in Syria.

The people who were killed and injured were just plain men, women and children. Complete innocents in every sense of the term. They were simply the people who happened to be shopping or chatting or driving by at that exact instant.

This, to tell the truth, is what I still get stuck on, even after all these years. The idea that one sends 'messages' by massacring at random, that one seeks justice by acting as if human life had no value whatsoever - this seems like the ultimate proof that man is unfixable at the core.

Be that as it may, the message was sent, and received. As one would expect, it only served to redouble the resolve of the targets, who will almost certainly now find some way to strike back. Hezbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a speech today basically vowed to increase the group's support for the Syrian regime. Behind the scenes, it's likely that revenge is on the menu, especially as this is the second bomb in just over a month to go off in that neighborhood.

Syria may be weakened, but its arm is still long enough to reach any part of Lebanon. And in the last several decades it has never hesitated when some opponent or rival required elimination. Lately, its preferred method has also been the car bomb, but any method that works is an option.

In another indication of the deeply sectarian nature of the conflict, the group claiming responsibility for the bombing - which may have been a suicide operation - calls themselves the 'brigade of 'Aisha, mother of the believers'. Here's their self-portrait:

The drapery says 'There's no god but
Allah and Muhmmad is his prophet'. In
other words, a creed common to both
Sunni and Shia'.

This is a reference to one of the prophet's wives, who was involved in the early battles that split Shia' from Sunni Islam. Sunnis hold her in reverence, while Shia's tend towards the opposite view. It's as if since the founding of Christianity one group had considered the Virgin Mary as chosen by god for a divine mission, while another group considered her a prostitute.

So, instead of a disagreement over, say, socialism vs capitalism - in other words, something where a compromise might be hammered out - or even between a Shia' and a Sunni view of Shariah law, we have a bitter bloodfeud over the honor of a woman who died a millenium and a half ago.

Thus, Lebanon takes one step closer to the brink, beyond which lies the chaos and collective insanity of its own not-too-distant past, and Syria's present.

As the Brits like to say, we are really in the soup.

___________________

Meanwhile, what is to be said of the killing of hundreds in Cairo, all in the name of democracy?

Let me be entirely clear: I have absolutely no political sympathy for the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood). I have no political sympathy for any religio-political organization that proposes to rule by fatwa, scripture, torah, gospel or veda. To me, every single time in human history when some guy has suddenly gone cross-eyed and thought the angel of god was speaking inside his head has only served to make things worse than they already are.

But, inconveniently, the Ikhwan just happened to win the first democratic election in the known history of Egypt. And, as we know, the known history of Egypt goes back quite a ways. The pyramids were already ancient tourist traps when the people we call the 'ancient Greeks' were wandering around in togas. That's a long time without an election.

Those opposed to Morsi - certainly a clear majority - have been saying for the last couple of months that elections and democracy are not the same thing. Of course they're not. One can have elections without democracy. But can one have democracy without elections? If democracy is the 'rule of the demos' - the people - how can that rule be exercised, if not through clear and transparent structures? The whole point of the election process is to maximize clarity and transparency. Running a country via rival demonstrations and sit-ins is neither democracy nor workable. Annuling elections because the results aren't acceptable - even when done by the majority - is a dangerous precedent to set. Mob rule is an ever-present danger, and can be reliably expected to lead directly to dictatorship.

In a previous post I made reference to the secular forces retaking control of Egypt after having understood that the Ikhwan were never going to promote any politcal and social vision but their own. At the time I felt guardedly positive, reasoning that the process hadn't yet been irredeemably broken. This was just a few days ago. What a difference a few days makes! It is certainly broken now.

Those who argue that there was no other choice or that the bloodshed was instigated or that the pro-Morsi demonstrators somehow 'deserved' what they got have not been paying attention, or are arguing from prior conviction. Virtually all the live reporting from the scene is unanimous regarding the overwhelming imbalance of power and the apparent decision by the government to use lethal force from the outset. Meanwhile, a process that really looked like it had a chance to lead to a secular, democratic outcome has been broken, and no one seems to have an idea how it might be fixed.

Worse - if worse is possible - the US once again comes under suspicion of sabotage. Online and in conversation the question keeps being repeated: why didn't Obama prevent this? Why did he keep mumbling about human rights while shoveling money at the Egyptian army? And, as always, there's only one answer: Israel. The US doesn't care about democracy in Egypt. What it cares about is ensuring the peace agreement with Israel, for which $1.5 billion is the annual premium. That's why we didn't put the brakes on the Egyptian army.

Remaking the Middle East

I thought it might be interesting to explore visually what a Mideast newly-divided along sectarian lines might look like. This exercise follows the general theory I've mentioned in other posts, which asserts that the US and Israel have a common goal in redrawing the map of the region into sectarian mini-states in order to ensure military dominance and control of resources well into the future. And to place the Jewish state squarely in a context friendly to its exercise of 'sectarian democracy'.

I've already said more than enough about that theory in previous posts, and I've given some pro and con arguments. I'll just add here that Israel's desire to break up Lebanon and gain control of its south is well-documented and goes back to the founding of the Israeli state. In addition, the Israeli idea that 'Jordan is Palestine' has a long history, and was asserted in my presence some 30 years ago by none other than Ariel Sharon.

The weakness of the theory, if there is one, is on the question of the degree of US/Israeli collusion. To what degree are the two countries seeking the same outcome? How long have they been doing so? How effective has this collaboration been over time and multiple governments in both countries? For analysis of these questions I would refer readers to Jonathan Cook's book mentioned in an earlier post, to the writings of Robert Fisk, and to Noam Chomsky.

That said, here's a map of the current borders in the Mideast:

Mideast political, click to enlarge

And here's a notional version of what the area might look like following the transformation that already appears to be underway in more than one country:

Mideast post-partition, click to enlarge

My 'notional map' requires some comment. First of all, the new 'borders' make no pretense to more than approximate accuracy. In any case, none of the new lines can be closely predicted, since nowhere in the Mideast is demarcation of sectarian/communal boundaries clear and straightforward. Tragically, there's every reason to believe that most or all will be drawn in blood, at least at the outset. This, of course is what is currently happening in Iraq and Syria, and what has been happening on and off in Lebanon since 1975.

Some other points:

• Syria could break up in any number of ways. Jonathan Cook, citing Israeli and US neocon planners, supposes two Sunni areas - Aleppo in the north and Damascus (Sham) in the south. I've followed this approach.
• Equally, Lebanon - already functionally divided into zones in all but name - could be redrawn in multiple ways. The core realities are probably: Sunni Tripoli united with Beirut, the Christian and Druze mountain heartlands in some form of alliance, Alawi areas in the north likely joined to the Syrian Alawi coast, the Shia' south probably under some form of Israeli control. Israel has sought this for decades, due to the presence of important water resources.
• Egypt divided into Muslim and Christian mini-states seems rather unlikely at the moment. However, it does constitute part of the plan, so I've included it
• Jordan-Palestine becomes the fulfillment of Ariel Sharon's claim that 'Jordan is Palestine', and provides a venue for the final 'dumping' of all Palestinian refugees in a new 'homeland'. Israeli leaders since Ben Gurion have proposed forcing the Palestinians across the Jordan river into Jordan.
• Saudi Arabia's eastern province is largely Shia'. Similarly (or oppositely), a large area of southern Iran is ethnically Arab. Both these areas are traditionally what journalists like to call 'restive'. Conveniently, they are both oil-rich. Breaking them away would open them to more effective outside dominance and control of those resources.

As I type this I have an uncanny sensation: this must have been what Sykes, Picot, Balfour and all the rest felt like (and, in fairness, regional leaders were often party to this process). Sit at a table, discuss matters of state and economics, draw lines on maps, voila! Break for dinner. Unfortunately, for the peoples of the region, the costs over the last 100 years or so have been incalculable. There isn't a single bullet point above that doesn't come with an enormous pricetag in lives and misery.

Stalked by the ghosts of the past

From A House of Many Mansions, by Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi, published in 1988:

"...the present civil war in Lebanon is being fought between Lebanese groups flying different historical banners...(i)f the various factions are to lay down their arms and live in peace and full co-operation as citizens of one country, the Lebanese will first have to reach a consensus on what makes them a nation...(and) manage to agree on a common vision of their past."

In the Lebanese public school system curriculum, teaching of the modern history of Lebanon stops at 1975, the year the civil war broke out. This is because no one can agree on which version of the subsequent years should be taught...

John McCain - the quack doctor visits the Mideast.

I promise I'm quickly coming to the end of my contributions to the evil plot theory of Mideast history. There's a little more to go, however, and it more or less brings things up to date. And it concerns our present policies and our present leaders.

It also concerns the other enormous - or, since we're talking contemporary events, let's use contemporary language...ginormous - transformation going on in the region. This, of course, is what we called a while back The Arab Spring.

The state of play in the entire region, including North Africa, can be viewed - with some oversimplification, obviously - as a monumental struggle between two powerful and diametrically opposed worldviews. Since I'm in Beirut it's convenient to personify them as Syria vs Egypt.

Syria, in this schema, represents the process of state dissolution - also going on in Iraq and elsewhere - fuelled by a wave of sectarian warfare, part of a spreading civil war between Shia' and Sunni. In short, it represents the exponential growth of an anti-secular, rigidly religious worldview, which, by its very nature, has to battle all other worldviews for supremacy. This is the process I've been discussing in other posts, along with the suspicion around here that the whole thing is neither homegrown nor accidental.

Egypt represents the other pole in this bi-polar world. It represents the sudden and unexpected emergence of a vast secular movement demanding an end to both political and doctrinal dictatorship. It wasn't just the dictators in western suits that had to go during the Arab Spring, it was also the dictators in black and white hats, turbans, various shawls and other Deuteronimical accoutrements whose reach goes beyond this world into the next.

Using Syria and Egypt in this way does violence to the realities of both countries, and I'm well aware of it. The Syrian revolution started as a peaceful expression of exactly the same sentiments as in Egypt. Its descent into blood and intercommunal strife was the result of a cynical calculation by the regime that responding with violence would be politically beneficial. And, if we believe in the Grand Plot, was somehow part of  that process, as well. Meanwhile, Egypt, having successfully toppled its dictator, then went and elected a bunch of Islamists to run the place before coming to its senses a year later.

Nevertheless, as a snapshot of where we are today, the image is reasonably good. Syria is descending into the maw of chaos while in Egypt secular forces have come to their senses and realized that if they don't stand for their worldview no one else - and definitely not the Islamists - will do it for them.

Now, what of the US and its policies towards all these events? I had to lead with John McCain because his recent contribution to the debate was so utterly laughable that people are still doubled over in the streets around here. But our real concern has to be the Obama Administration and its policies on the ground. And here, the news is not good.

I well remember how, when Obama was first elected, we were all led to believe that here, finally, was an American leader that would be 'even-handed' in the Mideast. A guy who understood the issues, had listened to both sides, and could be relied on to enact reasonable policies. Hell, he even had long, intimate dinners with Palestinian academics...or, in the parlance of his enemies (John McCain), terrorists!

Well, the food may have been good, but it seems the discussions were for naught. US support for Israel - right, wrong or wronger - has only become more automatic. Dwight Eisenhower would not believe his eyes.

But I don't want to dwell on that aspect, at the moment. What we're interested in here is US response to what's going on TODAY in Syria and in Egypt, and what that can tell us about where the US sees its interests. And, incidentally, maybe another brick in the Plot Wall?

From here on, I'm basing myself not upon my own speculations, but upon the opinions of the people I've been talking to since I got to Beirut. And what's fascinating is how unanimous they are. My conversations have been with people who were on opposite sides during the Lebanese Civil War. Whose opinions on Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims - the whole gamut - are diametrically opposed. And, yet, they all agree on the role of the US in Syria and Egypt, and the polarities they represent.

And they all start with the same, simple question: in a battle between secular democracy and religious fundamentalism you'd expect the US to be firmly in the secular camp, wouldn't you?

Wrong. Or, at least, the view from here certainly makes it seems so.

In Syria, the US has dithered for two full years. And while it dithered, the rebellion went from dream to nightmare. In Beirut, everyone asks me, 'why didn't Obama help the peaceful, secular forces and strengthen them when he could? Why did he say nothing while US allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey built an Islamist/jihadist force and positioned it to take over the revolt? Why was no effort made prevent this, and with it the almost certain dissolution of Syria as we know it?

Speaking as a 'representive' of the US government (for the purposes of discussion only!) I have no possible answer to these questions, other than 'it was a complicated situation that developed in unexpected ways, and the US (and here it comes again...the old excuse!) simply didn't understand or wasn't able to forsee developments.'

And some people here would actually accept that premise, IF. If it wasn't for Egypt. And here, the situation is really quite damning:

• Barack Obama is the first US President in decades who is supposed to 'understand' the Arab world.
• Barack Obama leads off with wonderful speeches to the Arabs about how the US will always support freedom and democracy in the region.
• The Arab Spring breaks out. Millions - nay, tens of millions - descend into the streets in the name of democracy. The US contribution: nil. Unless you consider that at every juncture unthinking US support of Israeli occupation and settlement further enflames the anti-secular forces and opens the secularists to the serious charge of being dupes of Israel and the US.
• A year after the Egyptian elections (i.e., right now) millions of people descend into the streets and force the Islamic government out in the name of, again, secularism, separation of church and state, and true democracy. In the wonderful words of an Egyptian I spoke with the other day: 'an umbrella of equity'. The US response: we back the Islamist minority against the secular majority!

To all appearances, when John McCain made his typically nuanced and subtle duck analogy, he was completely in lockstep with Administration policy. Obama's erstwhile rival might as well have been speaking as his Secretary of State, from the point of view of people here.

The conclusion, people here are  telling me, is clear: for the first time in modern Mideast history the US has the option to back a truly regional groundswell of secularism...and fails? This can only mean one thing; that secular democracy is inimical to US interests in the region. What serves US interests? Apparently - and here we're back to the Grand Nefarious Plot whether we like it or not - civil war, death and the dissolution of the map of the region as we have known it.

Le Complot - Redux

Today I've been thinking about the issue I wrote about a few days ago in the post entitled 'Who Benefits'. In conversations with people from all walks of life and all political persuasions since that post I've been struck by how all-pervasive the 'complot' (nefarious plot) theory is here in Lebanon.

I'd like to be able to write a few more paragraphs about how totally misguided this propensity is, how inimical to rational political discourse, how disempowering it is to its own adherents. And, in fact, I did say some of that last time, didn't I? And I'm sure I'm right about all of that. More, I'm far from being the first to lecture the 'Arabs' about their suspicious nature and the evils thereof. After all, even Bernard Lewis has done so, so I must be in good company, right?

The problem is: the more I think about it, the more rational "the plot's" contours seem to become. Is it the air? The food? Am I becoming unbalanced from being woken one too many nights at 3 AM by the call to prayer? (It is unbelievably loud. To paraphrase from Spinal Tap, those guys definitely have amps that go all the way to 11.)

Nope, it's none of that. What it IS, is a process of assembling in my mind, like slowly adding bricks to a wall, relevant data, things that have bothered me and niggled, sometimes for years, without ever being analyzed into place.

In my other post I mentioned, in passing, the US invasion of Iraq. Let's take a more careful look. For those of us who opposed, nay despised, the misunderestimated GW Bush, it was easy to take him for a buffoon. I well remember laughing about how he, we were told, began his presidency without knowing what the words Shia' and Sunni signified. Why were we told that? Or, rather, allowed to know that. Boy, did we ever misunderestimate George W Bush!

We knew he was a frontman, yet we were taken in anyway by his act. And from that sprung a whole series of misunderstandings - convenient ones - about US actions and policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. By convenient misunderstandings I'm trying to say that we allowed ourselves to be fooled. At least some of us did, and I have to admit to being one of 'us'. For the most part I figured we botched everything from the day we invaded onwards because 'the US is just incompetent, never knows what it's doing and doesn't understand the realities on the ground.' Poor United States, we tried, we got it wrong...and we failed.

What if we didn't fail?

Just a peek behind the frontman in this charade would instantly tell anyone (I did have suspicions, I'll give myself that much) that the incompetence theory was pretty shaky. After all, who was really calling the shots, Georgie? Ha!

A 10 second review of the chain from Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on down instantly reveals that these were not buffoons, nor were they part-timers. These guys all had spent years in and around the Mideast, its history and its issues. True, Bremer might not have been the brightest bulb on the tree, but anyone who's read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City understands that Bremer was not the 'decider' in Baghdad. He was, in fact, a flunky.

With all this in mind, let's review in another 10 seconds what actually happened in Iraq. We invaded under false pretenses, toppled the dictator due to our overwhelming military superiority (shock and awe!), completely and utterly failed to stem a tsunami of chaos and violence despite that same military presence, botched what was billed as a fantastic plan to create a US-style democracy in the Mideast, fostered a nightmarish new reality of sectarian hatred and bloodshed that continues unabated to this day, and quite literally gave the country to our supposed worst-enemy-but-one (North Korea was too far away), Iran. Yet, somehow, despite all that, up north we managed to nurture a new Switzerland in Kurdish Iraq, independent in all but name, and - conveniently - very friendly to Israel.

And this was all by mistake?

Today Iraq is essentially three mini-states. Kurdistan is already functioning de facto as a state of its own, while the other two are still entangled, spilling each other's blood while they sort out the mess we left behind.

What are we supposed to draw from this? If you read the mainstream media the message is clear, if not quite so baldly stated: Kurdistan works because the Kurds are more like us, not irrational savages like the Arabs.

Well, hang on...until not too long ago it was the Kurds who were terrorists, endlessly blowing up places and threatening the well-being of sovereign nations! Those who know a bit of history will also remember the role of the Kurds in the Armenian Genocide. I guess it must be the American influence that has wrought this marvelous tramsformation.

Or maybe this is what the Cheney cabal had in mind all along? Maybe the Kurds get their state because they've agreed to make nice with the Israelis, while the rest of the Iraqis, not yet ready for this concession, get thrown to the wolves of sectarian division which will now tear the Arab Mideast to shreds for years to come, leaving it too weak to face Israel militarily and too bereft of moral legitmacy to challenge the idea of a state for and by Jews on land that has been taken by force?

While thinking about Iraq, I recalled something from the invasion of Afghanistan that had always bothered me at the time. Eventually, like all today's news, it moved off the screen and was forgotten, but I bring it up now because it might be relevant to this discussion.

Recall that the invasion of Afghanistan was run by the same not-so-stupid-as-we-might-think group of plotters. Recall that after 9/11 we, as a nation, had only one goal: get Bin Laden. Recall that we decimated any opposition almost instantly. Recall that we quickly cornered Bin Laden, his donkey and his dialysis machine in Tora Bora. Recall that we have the best generals in the world, the best special forces, the best eyes in the sky, the best of everything!

So why did we leave the back door open? Why did we push him up against the wall and then open the escape hatch? I recall how, even from a casual reading of my local non-newspaper it was absolutely clear what was happening. I even recall screaming at Rumsfeld on TV, to no avail. We knew what we knew, or we knew what we didn't know. Or whatever.

Postscript: By the way, just today I ran across Jonathan Cook's Israel and the Clash of Civilizations, which I'd heard of but never cracked open. Looking at the intro, it appears his thesis is along the lines of what I've briefly stated above. Cook is a longtime journalist based in Israel, who's worked for numerous publications but whose natural home is probably the Guardian, where he was previously on staff. Another way of saying that he writes from a 'left' perspective, à la his colleague at the Independent, Robert Fisk.

Hamra, bi service?

Here in Beirut there are three classes of taxi transportation - well, four, actually. In descending order:

1. A hired private taxi, usually ordered by phone. What shows up is a new car with great air conditioning, for a set price that is usually quoted without negotiation. Cost is pretty similar to normal cab costs in NYC.
2. A roving 'taxi'. This is one of the thousands of taxis that roam the streets looking for fares. For a long journey, they demand 'taxi', which means you will be the only passenger. You will also pay more, but the price is negotiated at the curb (or in the middle of the street, if that's where the driver had to or felt like stopping). You have to work fast, as the traffic building up behind you will quickly get furious at the delay.

Then there are two classes of 'service', or communal taxi. Often called 'jitney' in other countries.

3. 'Servicein'. That's the best I could come up with. It sounds like 'ser-vees' followed by our word 'ain't' without the 't'. It means, literally, 'two services'. You'll pay twice the fixed 'service' price, which is currently about $1.30. For your $2.60 you'll share with other passengers if the driver already has some or can find some along the way, and you don't get the luxury of two seats, but you'll get to go farther than you would by paying a single fare.
4. 'Service' (the 'i' sounds like 'eee' since it comes from the French, not English). The cost, as I mentioned, is just over a dollar, and doesn't vary. What happens is this: you stand on the street looking like you might like to be somewhere else. Every cab with at least one free seat will slow down and honk. If you were actually just looking at the building across the street, you indicate 'no', by moving your head brusquely in an short upward motion. This is universal 'no', not to be confused with shaking your head sideways, which means 'yes'. Of course, westerners are always confounded at the outset, since these gestures look very much like the opposite of ours.
   
   If, on the other hand, you actually were trying to get a cab, you then lean down to where you can see the driver. You start by stating your destination. Since there are no addresses as such, you indicate some landmark within walking distance of your actual destination. You then add, declaratively, 'b service'. The 'b' sound means 'by' or 'for', depending on context. Here it means, for example, 'ABC Mall for the price of a single service'. IOW, you want to get there for $1.30 and no more. The driver may assent by shaking his head or refuse by nodding it. If he says no, you are now free to suggest, 'b servicein' (for twice the price). Again, either yes or no. If his car is empty, he might then suggest, 'b taxi', i.e., as a taxi. At which point you must ask, 'bi kem?', how much?. This is where the negotiation begins, and tempers start to flare behind you. If your driver is intent on getting a fare, he will prefer to turn back and scream at the other drivers rather than cut off negotiations. If the negotiations conclude succesfully, you can then climb into the vehicle, which is generally more or less what we would call a 'beater' without much in the way of creature comforts and certainly without air conditioning.

No matter what condition it may be in, it's infintely preferable to the so-called 'buses', beaten-up vans with three rows of 3 seats in the space normally occupied by 5 seats. To be in the back row of one of these is to be trapped with no exit until people in the two rows in front of you fully exit the vehicle so that the seats they were occupying can be folded up!

A few moments in a Beirut 'service' (jitney, or communal cab):

Power corrupts, but blackouts kill you in a stuck elevator

This morning I was just reaching for my laptop when the fan on my table suddenly died. It was 10:47 AM.

Power cuts here in Beirut are ubiquitous and omnipresent. As I type this I'm sitting in a borrowed office on the American Univeristy of Beirut campus, and a few moments ago the power went out. It took a surprising couple of minutes or so for the generators to kick in. Supposing, instead of typing, I were doing a science experiment of some sort. Two minutes without power, and with no warning? One can imagine some bad outcomes!

But there are worse. Power in the neighborhood where I live generally goes out for 3 hours a day. This is supposed to happen on a rolling schedule, something like this:


Day 1: 3-6 PM
Day 2: 12-3 PM
Day 3: 9-12 AM
Day 4: 6-9 AM

More or less. As I understand it, power should not go out before 6 AM or after 6 PM. "Should" and "does" are two different things, however. This morning power failed around 8 AM - not at the top of the hour, and not at 6 AM, which would have been 'normal'.

To be fair, it came back on at some point before 9. Again, to be fair, only to fail again at 10:47. After which it stayed off for about a half hour, then came back.

Presumably, neither of these were our 'designated' dark hours, since they neither began nor ended on the stipulated top of the hour. I have no idea when that might  be, power may be out again when I return to the apartment.

In our neighborhood, power is 'supposed' to go out for 3 hours each day. In others, according to my friends, it may be 6 or even on occasion 12. In any case, those are just the 'officially designated' blackouts. The others are similar in that there is no power, but they are, happily, unofficial.

How does one live in a city apartment block, sizzling in the sun, without power for 12 hours? When power fails, lights go out, fridges start to warm, air conditioners stop purring, TVs go black, internet dies, email stops, nothing gets charged, and - worst of all - elevators stop instantly.

No one in Beirut steps into an elevator and presses the button at the top of the hour. No one. More people enjoy Russian Roulette as a pastime.

Not the cause of our blackouts, but it sure
can't help. I could fill a blog with nothing
but pictures like this.

But what happens when power goes out at 10:47 AM? Or 11:23 PM? Suppose you just took an elevator, and you are between floors 12 and 13 when your elevator stops. What then? What if the power stays off, not for a few minutes, but for an hour or more? What if you are an elderly woman for whom the elevator was your only choice because you can barely walk anymore? What if, in addition to being elderly, you are in poor physical health and now have to survive several hours in a tiny, unbearably hot, box? Shall we have a bet on how often this has happened?

If I sound indignant, it might be because as I write this I'm sitting in an office on AUB campus, looking out at the sea and watching the motorboats cruise back and forth. Not many, it's true. But there's lots of money in Lebanon. Piles of it.

And it might be because yesterday I heard an interview with a former High Banking Guy in Lebanon (who quit in disgust), and learned to my astonishment that Lebanon has $15 billion in reserves. $15 billion! And here I was thinking that, after all the war and fighting and assassinations and attacks by Israel and no tourists Lebanon was on the very brink of bankruptcy.

$15 billion! It's true that the civil war destroyed and degraded much of the city's infrastructure. And it's true that the Israelis helped finish the job, including gratuitously bombing the power grid in 2006.

It's all true. Still. $15 billion will buy a lot of infrastructure, bring back clean water, create an actual sewage system, save a lot of old ladies in elevators!

$15 billion!

Born Again

May and I decided to take a drive the other night up to 'Aley (the apostrophe indicates that the word starts with the letter 'ain - which, itself, must start with 'ain, and so on, ad infinitum - not the letter A) and have a snack while looking down on Beirut from the hills. The drive took us through the southern suburbs of Beirut. We drove down the dividing line between Shiyah and Ein ar-Romaneh, Shia' and Christian respectively, which was on the front line during the civil war. Vast numbers of buildings were so badly damaged that bulldozing them was the only option. In their place stand row upon row of new apartment blocks as far as the eye can see.

The road up (and down) the mountain alternates between brand-new highway and under-construction-with-foot-deep-potholes-but-open-for-traffic-anyway. Which is to say, between perfectly fine and hair-raising, particularly going down in the dark.

Once past that we threaded our way through 'Aley itself, packed with the only tourists actually in Lebanon this summer, visitors from the Gulf. At one point that I realized that I recalled the road we were on, and, casting back in my ever-more-feeble memory, I realized the recollection came from a moment in 1982 when, reporting for Pacifica, I stood on an Israeli tank and watched airstrikes on the very neighborhoods I'm now staying in.

At the top we pulled into a parking area to take in the view, which turned out to be entirely fog-shrouded. In about 45 minutes we'd gone from hot and wet to cold and wet.

While we stood contemplating the fog, a voice called out from behind. I turned and saw a police officer and wondered whether May was going to be in trouble for some violation of parking regulations. In Beirut, there are none - or none that one need bother about, at any rate. But here, in well-organized 'Aley one could conceivably encounter one.

But, as soon as May turned, she and the policeman recognized one another, and here began an interesting and completely unexpected story. And one which connected back to my days in the Druze village of Ba'aqline (another 'ain).

Prerequisite to the story: Druzism 101

As I think I've mentioned previously, the Druze (not their own name for themselves, but never mind that for the moment) are technically an offshoot of Ismaili (i.e., Shia', in the sense that Anglicans are an 'offshoot' of the Catholic Church) Islam. Among the sects of Lebanon they are generally grouped along with other Muslims or entirely by themselves. Among the scholars and sheikhs of mainstream (Sunni) Islam there has been for many, many years disagreement about whether they are Muslims or kuffar, with the weight of opinion generally coming down on kuffar.

One of the reasons for this is that the Druze, virtually alone among Muslims, believe in reincarnation. With some important differences, their views on reincarnation resemble - and clearly stem from - Hinduism. Indeed, their belief system as a whole is an amalgam of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and even ancient Greek philosophy. From this much information alone, it's easy to see why Sunni Islam might have trouble with their heterodox beliefs.

So much for the very (very!) brief recap of Druzism! For more, I can suggest the reincarnation studies of Dr. Ian Stevenson and the books on the Druze by Dr. Sami Makarem. Wikipedia also has a pretty good article on the Druze.

Moving right along, there's also some brief backstory to this meeting in 'Aley. When I lived in Ba'aqline, I became quite fascinated with the reincarnation beliefs of the Druze, and set out to document what stories I could. And what stories they were! As the Druze like to say, reincarnational beliefs happen in all cultures - usually to children. But in most cultures they are denied or explained away as childhood fantasies. Among the Druze, they are taken very seriously and frequently followed up on.

For example, I interviewed participants in a case where a small boy, just beginning to talk, insisted on physically pulling his parents to the house of another family, where he announced that he was the (recently deceased) son of the family. As the Druze often do in similar cases, he was challenged to prove his statement. At which point he broke away and ran into the room of the deceased son, and tried to push a dresser away from the wall. When the adults helped him pulled it forward, he dove behind it, thrust his hand into a hole no one else had noticed in years, and pulled out a handful of trinkets and childhood toys.

From that moment on, he was recognized and accepted by both families as a legitimate member of the family. This, also, is very common among the Druze.

A second story, which I documented in an extensive series of taped interviews, was even more astonishing. In this case, it involved a young woman who had begun to have reincarnational memories at the age of 3 or 4. Because she was about 20 when I met her, and because her English was quite good, I was able to get a very detailed account of her experience. Her case started out quite similarly. As the memories began to appear, she started incorporating them into her play. She 'invented' an entire invisible family, complete with parents, siblings, cousins, and so forth. At some point her parents took notice and began to note what was going on. Sometime later, she began expressing a desire to leave the house for an unknown destination. When restrained, she would begin to cry and insist that she needed to go 'home'. Finally, her parents decided to let her go and follow her. Apparently without hesitation she walked completely across the village - which is located on a mountain; walking across it requires navigating a complex series of byways and alleys - and arrived in front of a house, which she declared to be 'home'. She then pounded on the door, and - with her parents watching in amazement - when the door was answered by a woman in her thirties, cried out 'don't you recognize me? I'm your mother!' Again, the entry into the house and, again, the tour of the recently deceased mother's bedroom. More importantly, she sat for hours with her 'children', effortlessly recounting events that had happened in her life as their mother.

This story has a coda, a twist, which for me was quite revelatory. As she became somewhat older, the memories of her past life, rather than receding as they generally seem to do, became ever stronger and more detailed. Her former children now fully accepted her position as their mother and treated her as such. At the same time, she was still a child, in a new body, in a new life. Eventually, the invasion of her past life into the present became unbearable. As I recall her telling me (this is from memory, not from my tapes): 'It became impossible to separate my two lives. I would have committed suicide at times, but I was too afraid of what would then happen to me. Would I then have three lives simultaneously? I felt trapped, with nowhere to turn, no solution. I came very close to going mad. Then, slowly, the memories tapered off and became weaker. Now I still have them, but I no longer feel invaded by them, they have their place and I have mine.'

In thinking about reincarnation, such a situation had never occured to me. From this story I concluded that, if reincarnation is real, there is a very good reason why we don't remember our past lives.

Other than occasionally recounting these events to friends and family, I hadn't really thought about them for years. Until the other evening, when we ran into Fuad the Police Officer. It turned out May and he had met before and May turned to me and said, 'he's a very interesting man, he remembers his past life.' Fuad was kind enough to recount it to me, and here it is. You will notice the themes common to many Druze reincarnation stories:

Fuad and May. He requested we photo him
from the rear, as he was in uniform and
should have gotten permission for the pic.

As a young boy of 3 or 4 Fuad began to experience reincarnatonal memories. Eventually, he led his parents to another house in the village, where he announced that he was the father who had recently died. He was able to prove this by walking unerringly through the house to his former bedroom, where he removed a lamp from a window niche and extracted some money and other things he had deposited there in his previous life. He was also able to remember and recount episodes from his former life. His children, at this point nearly adult, accepted him from this point on as their dead father, and dealt with him exactly as if he had not died. At the same time, in his current life he remained a child in the house he had been born into. This is not at all uncommon in Druze villages, though a little thought shows how complicated this extra 'dimension' of affiliation can easily become. For example, Fuad told us that the hardest time in his life occured a few years ago, when two of his 'children' - many years his senior! - died of separate causes. He told us, 'this was the hardest period of my life, I didn't want to live any more. My children were dead!' And yet, in his 'new' life, Fuad is married and has 'new' children! When asked he pulled out his phone and, beaming proudly, showed us photos of his children...in his current life!

Fostering Chaos

Beirut has one of the craziest, nuttiest, looniest traffic laws in the history of....well, everything.

This law can be summarized in five words: motorbikes can do no wrong.


This statement is strictly, legally true here. One would imagine (mistakenly, it appears) that somewhere, somehow, sometime the driver of a motorcycle or scooter could possibly be guilty of an error of judgement. Or worse, be the direct cause of a serious accident.

This turns out not to be true. According to everyone I've talked to (and I really felt I had to double-check this), once perched upon a motorbike any fool becomes quite literally lord of the roads. And the byways. And the sidewalks.

He (I've yet to see a female driving a motorbike) can dodge between cars, ignore red lights, cross lanes of traffic at right angles to the direction of traffic. No matter.

He can drive the wrong way down one-way streets, cruise up or down sidewalks at any rate of speed, block intersections. All perfectly legal.

He can stack any amount of freight anywhere on his machine. He can carry anything in his hands and drive with one, or none, hands. He can (and this is terrifyingly common) put his wife behind him and his two tiny chidren on the handlebars and tear through traffic at any breakneck speed he likes.

He can cause any accident you can imagine, and, no, he is not the cause. He can sue for damages after having caused a fatal accident involving other persons who were obeying all the laws.

Everyone I talk to assures me this is in fact all true. And, judging by the conduct of the drivers of motorbikes, they clearly think so, too. Meanwhile, I've discovered - in time, thank God - to always check for motorbikes coming the wrong way down one-way streets before crossing. As if crossing Beirut's streets weren't already challenge enough.

______________________________________________

Are we crazy enough, yet?

Addendum: I've been trying, and failing, for days to get a shot like this one. Fortunately, my friend Albert managed to get one. For the record, I've seen larger families on smaller bikes, not once, but dozens of times.

(Thanks to Albert Casanovas for the pic!)

Who Benefits???

Any good police procedural reminds us over and over again: who's got the motive? Who benefits from the crime?

When I first arrived here nearly 40 years ago Beirut was a more European, secular city in outlook. People dressed and acted pretty much as they did in Paris or Geneva.

Forty years ago we discussed the advent of civil marriage in Lebanon, imagined a single, secular state in Palestine, debated socialism vs capitalism in the Arab world. Today the barriers against civil marriage are still in place, no one sees clearly how a secular state in Palestine could happen, and all forms of secularism are under sharp attack from explicitly religious world views.
Who benefits?

Forty years ago Israel had to mask its explicitly sectarian project of a state for Jews. It advertised itself as the 'only democracy in the Mideast'. In the West, this worked. No one knew, or cared, that less than a third of the population of Palestine had taken over from the other two-thirds, expelling hundreds of thousands in the process...to achieve this apparently 'Jewish' polity. The Arab world was grappling with the residues of colonialism, Nasser had scared the West, and the Arab dictators had begun their rise.

Still, secular forces seemed poised to challenge Israel's copyright on the word 'democracy'. Lebanon, for example, was a messy but, functionally speaking, reasonably democratic state, with pretty good prospects. In comparison to the Jewish state next door, whose 'democracy' depended on expelling vast numbers of Palestinians and making the rest second-class citizens, Lebanon tried to accommodate a bewildering array of sects and communities into one state. At the time, things actually looked pretty good.

Then the war came. Messy democracy and relative freedom turned into sectarian enclaves and the end of what the french would call 'cohabitation'. Lebanon over time became the hotbed of inter-communal obstructionism, sectarian hatred and functional chaos that it is today. The vision of democracy that relies on cooperation and shared resources, and on a common loyalty, evaporated, leaving only the democracy of materialism and the 'free market'.
Who benefits?

In the last two decades the process has expanded exponentially, and the whole world is now involved. Bin Laden, Jihad, al Qa'eda, Salafists, the Ikhwan - all these terms now belong to our common vocabulary. And they all carry an explicit threat, a menace that leaves us uneasy no matter how far from the Mideast we live. More than 2 years after the Arab Spring, Egypt teeters on the edge of chaos and non-secular regimes still rule in most of the region. The democratic project in the Mideast seems more distant than ever and here people talk of the forthcoming emergence of even smaller sectarian states carved out of the dissolution of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and so on.
Who benefits?

I bring all this up because here I discover an answer that seems self-evident to nearly everybody. Back in the US I doubt it could get a serious hearing. As a theory, it's not without problems. But it's also not without important strengths. As scientists like to say: it's infuriatingly hard to falsify. The theory is simple: this whole historical process benefits Israel and has been engineered by Israel and its sometime patron/sometime lapdog the US. Let's take a look:

In the US we tend to see all the developments I alluded to above as largely independent of US volition and policy. Even if we know that US policy has to have had something to do with events, it's not clear to us that the US is in any fundamental sense actually responsible for fomenting the exact events that have ultimately given rise to the very things we claim to be fighting, including the 'war on terror'. So, for example, the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic/Mullahcracy was an Iranian event. The war in Lebanon was the result of the inability of the Lebanese to get along. The fact that Saudi Arabia is a theocracy where no one is his/her right mind would want to live is because of the manifest flaws in Arab/Islamic culture. The rise of Jihadi Islam and of indiscriminate, pointless terror all over the world is because 'they're crazy'.

To the utter disappointment and disgust of my friends here in Lebanon, let me state that I have some sympathy for this point of view. Every historical trend, in my opinion, has multiple causes. Some are internal, some are external. The Iranian revolution was carried out by Iranians, to an Iranian conclusion. The rise of fundamentalist, explicitly violent, theology in the Mideast is in important ways a product of its region and culture. (For those who find this objectionable, let me point out that it's no different than saying that the rise of Nazism and Fascism were a product of European culture and history.) And so on.

That said, let's take a look at why this theory isn't 'falsifiable' - i.e. if it's difficult to prove, it's even more difficult to disprove. It turns out there's lots of evidence for it.

• The Iranian revolution was a direct result of our deposing the elected Prime Minister (Mossadegh) and replacing him with a manufactured 'Shah'. By 'our' I mean the....CIA.

• The Lebanese Civil War was, in very large part, fomented by Israel. Israeli involvement became quite open in the war's later stages. Earlier on, you had to be there to see it. I was. From a friend's house near the town of Jounieh I used to watch at night as Israeli boats would arrive and disgorge arms and supplies for the rightwing militias. Persistent rumors flew that Israeli officers were actually staying in town and working very closely with these groups. At the time these were just rumors: later revelations showed they were entirely true. Even Ariel Sharon seems to have spent time in Jounieh on at least one occasion.

• I didn't mention Hamas in the intro above, but it needs to be added to the list. This is because I personally witnessed - and reported on - Israel's secret support for Hamas in the years before the first Intifada. No, that's not a typo. Israel encouraged the rise of a militant group opposed to its very existence. Why would it do that? See below for the answer. (Hint: think how the Bolsheviks subverted and eventually ran the organizations created to oppose them.) (Hint number 2: How must the Israeli governement have felt when the PLO explicitly offered to cooperate in a single, secular state for Arabs and Jews?)

• The slow motion breakup of Iraq into sectarian mini-states, with the endless death and misery it has entailed, is the direct result of....well, I don't even need go further. We all know how that happened.

• The rise of al Qaeda and the 'crazy Islamists' began in Afganistan, during the war against the USSR. Who gave these guys their start, supplied weapons and training, encouraged their militancy? One guess. You win!

The Algerian, Libyan, Tunisian, Egyptian and Syrian cases are perhaps more complicated. One is tempted to ask immediately what possible advantage might accrue to Israel from the rise of fundamentalist movements and regimes in North Africa and the Arab world. Answer immediately below.

____________________________

So, why would, why could, all these things actually prove that Israel and the US have conspired for years to increase tensions in the Mideast, to promote sectarianism and violence, to force the dissolution of the post-colonial states into warring statlets, to encourage a gathering showdown between Shia' and Sunni which, if it breaks out, will cost untold lives? Why?

PR. The answer boils down to, essentially....PR. Here's how: Israel knows it can't gloss over forever the fact that 'Jewish democracy' is a contradiction that is incompatible with Western notions of democracy. And the more secular and successful the surrounding countries become, the harder it is to maintain this fiction, to have a democracy for one part of the population while subjugating another. Eventually, European support will dry up and even the reliable old US may begin to experience doubts.

This theory stipulates that at some point in the last few decades the Israelis realized that, since there was no question of changing Israel into a true democracy, they needed to make the rest of the region look like what they were trying to create: states in which one group or religion is given absolute priority over all others. Israel in the midst of a democratizing Mideast made up of multi-confessional states looks bad. Israel in the midst of a chaotic jumble of sectarian mini-states endlessly feuding and squabbling looks very, very good. IOW, PR.

Of course, like any good policy, there are other benefits beyond just PR. Under the theory above Israeli military dominance of the region would be assured, and the ability of Israel's enemies to ally and mount a coordinated attack would be virtually nil. Economic dominance would be another plus, as Israel would clearly be dominant in all but oil resources. Those resources which it didn't own outright would eventually come under its control via trade or political penetration.

As good as it sounds, I see several problems with this theory. Just to mention one: Saudi Arabia. The fundamental flaws in Saudi society, and, from my point of view, they are numerous, stem not from some by-product of US policy, but from an interpretation of a book sent by God. And this interpretation was already well-established in the Mideast when Thomas Jefferson was sworn in. So, when we see Saudi and Qatari money at play in every conflict, revolution and uprising throughout the region, we might need to acknowledge that other factors and players are very important in determining developments and outcomes.

Still, it has a lot going for it.