New Format at Joshualandis.com

Dear all,
Please go to my new Syria Comment format:

http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/

My latest article: "Bayanouni Improves on Alawi Question" is posted there.

September 24, 2006

Al-Qaida Plans for Syria

Here is a note I received from Massoud Derhally of Arabian Business about a documentary al-Jazeera is showing on al-Qa`ida in the Levant. It explains how al-Qa`ida leaders hope to open a new front in Syria and the states surrounding Palestine.

Al Jazeera ran on Sept 18 the second part of a documentary by Yusri Fouda on Al Qaeda in "Bilad al Sham". The thesis is that inherently Al-Qaeda has a forward looking plan that was to attack the US, draw America to the Middle East and then fight it (i.e. in Iraq) and then exploit that conflict to get to the Palestinian front using Damascus and Lebanon.

The documentary interviews among others the son of Azzam who I am sure you know was instrumental in indoctrinating OBL in his early days before he jumped ship to Zawahri. It also interviews the founder of Junood Al Sham, and several Jihadi veterans from the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The seminal point the documentary makes is that "the youth are jaded with the corruption in the Arab world and an impotent leadership" so much so, that bright, educated people like Mohammad Atta (this is the documentary's assessment not mine) turn to religion as a means to an end.

In fact the founder of Junood Al Sham is on record saying the only way to fight Israel is to turn to religion and that when you do so as a fighter, you are fearless.

This zealous fervor invariably is the panacea to the "Zionist-American-Western" axis, several of the interviewees hold.

An interesting and worrying dimension to all this was the existing and growing Salafist movement in Lebanon, namely in mountainous areas and even places like Baalbak where one of the 19 hijackers that carried out the Sept.. 11 attacks was from.

The documentary goes on to narrate how Al Qaeda's man in Lebanon was arrested and then 'died' in detention. His supporters claim he was tortured and killed.

This all really is put in the context of a prophetic turn of events, where on the one hand there is a literal reading to Quranic texts to explain what is taking place on the ground in the ME region and on the other hand, a blue print of Al Qaeda's greater plans, that in many ways is at the other end of say the Christian Right ideology, that is actively trying to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah.

The exception is that Al Qaeda and the Salafists don't really see their struggle as part of preparing for such a showdown, but in essence more as confronting the infidel and crusaders.

There are some alarming clips in the documentary, where Azzam's son says there will be something like 960,000 fighters in Damascus, specifically Halab, where there will be a battle against the invading forces.

Anyway the punch line which I think you will be interested in is that the documentary assesses Syria, Lebanon and other countries can turn to America, as they have, and point to this ominous and growing radicalization, and say we can help you in this war on terror, and that if you think for a moment that there is an alternative to the status quo it lies in the nexus of this fanaticism that spreads from Iraq, to Jordan, Egypt to Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.

Best, Massoud

Lawrence Wright, who has recently published his block buster book on al-Qa`ida, The Looming Tower, which is the best al-Qa`ida book to date, has written about these plans in his latest New Yorker article: (I am copying less than half the original article. It is all worth reading.)

The Master Plan, by Lawrence Wright
For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning.
From the Issue of 2006-09-11

Suri believed that the jihadi movement had nearly been extinguished by the drying up of financial resources, the killing or capture of many terrorist leaders, the loss of safe havens, and the increasing international coöperation among police agencies. (The British authorities were pursuing him as a suspect in the 1995 Paris Métro bombings.) Accordingly, he saw the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, in 1996, as a “golden opportunity,” and he went there the following year. He set up a military camp in Afghanistan, and experimented with chemical weapons. He also arranged bin Laden’s first television interview with CNN. The journalist Peter Bergen, who spent several days in Suri’s company while producing the segment, and who recently published an oral history, “The Osama bin Laden I Know,” recalled, “He was tough and really smart. He seemed like a real intellectual, very conversant with history, and he had an intense seriousness of purpose. He certainly impressed me more than bin Laden.”

In 1999, Suri sent bin Laden an e-mail accusing him of endangering the Taliban regime with his highly theatrical attacks on American targets. And he mocked bin Laden’s love of publicity: “I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans, and applause.” In his writings, Suri rarely mentioned Al Qaeda and disavowed any direct connection to it, despite having served on its inner council. He preferred to speak more broadly of jihad, which he saw as a social movement, encompassing “all those who bear weapons—individuals, groups, and organizations—and wage jihad on the enemies of Islam.” By 2000, he had begun predicting the end of Al Qaeda, whose preëminence he portrayed as a stage in the development of the worldwide Islamist uprising. “Al Qaeda is not an organization, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be,” he writes. “It is a call, a reference, a methodology.” Eventually, its leadership would be eliminated, he said. (Suri himself was captured in Pakistan in November, 2005. American intelligence sources confirmed that Suri is in the custody of another country but refused to disclose his exact location.) In the time that remained to Al Qaeda, he argued, its main goal should be to stimulate other groups around the world to join the jihadi movement. His legacy, as he saw it, was to codify the doctrines that animated Islamist jihad, so that Muslim youths of the future could discover the cause and begin their own, spontaneous religious war.

In 2002, Suri, in his hideout in Iran, began writing his defining work, “Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistance,” which is sixteen hundred pages long and was published on the Internet in December, 2004. Didactic and repetitive, but also ruthlessly candid, the book dissects the faults of the jihadi movement and lays out a plan for the future of the struggle. The goal, he writes, is “to bring about the largest number of human and material casualties possible for America and its allies.” He specifically targets Jews, “Westerners in general,” the members of the NATO alliance, Russia, China, atheists, pagans, and hypocrites, as well as “any type of external enemy.” (The proliferation of adversaries mirrors Al Qaeda’s hatred of all other ideologies.)

And yet, at the same time, he bitterly blames Al Qaeda for dragging the entire jihadi movement into an unequal battle that it is likely to lose. Unlike most jihadi theorists, Suri acknowledges the setback caused by September 11th. He laments the demise of the Taliban, which he and other Salafi jihadis considered the modern world’s only true Islamic government. America’s “war on terror,” he complains, doesn’t discriminate between Al Qaeda adherents and Muslims in general. “Many loyal Muslims,” he writes, believe that the September 11th attacks “justified the American assault and have given it a legitimate rationale for reoccupying the Islamic world.” But Suri goes on to argue that America’s plans for international domination were already evident “in the likes of Nixon and Kissinger,” and that this agenda would have been pursued without the provocation of September 11th. Moreover, the American attack on Afghanistan was not really aimed at capturing or killing bin Laden; its true goal was to sweep away the Taliban and eliminate the rule of Islamic law.

In Suri’s view, the underground terrorist movement—that is, Al Qaeda and its sleeper cells—is defunct. This approach was “a failure on all fronts,” because of its inability to achieve military victory or to rally the Muslim people to its cause. He proposes that the next stage of jihad will be characterized by terrorism created by individuals or small autonomous groups (what he terms “leaderless resistance”), which will wear down the enemy and prepare the ground for the far more ambitious aim of waging war on “open fronts”—an outright struggle for territory. He explains, “Without confrontation in the field and seizing control of the land, we cannot establish a state, which is the strategic goal of the resistance.”

Suri acknowledges that the “Jewish enemy, led by America and its nonbelieving, apostate, hypocritical allies,” enjoys overwhelming military superiority, but he argues that the spiritual commitment of the jihadis is equally formidable. He questions Al Qaeda’s opposition to democracy, which offers radical Islamists an opportunity to “secretly use this comfortable and relaxed atmosphere to spread out, reorganize their ranks, and acquire broader public bases.” In many Arabic states, there is a predictable cycle of official tolerance and savage repression, which can work in favor of the Islamists. If the Islamists “open the way for political moderation,” Suri writes, they will “stretch out horizontally along the base and spread. So they once again exterminate and jihad grows yet again! So then they try to open things up once again, and Islam stretches out and expands again!”

The Bush Administration has declared a “war of ideas” against Islamism, Suri observes, and has had some success; he cites the modification of textbooks in many Muslim countries. This effort, he writes, must be countered by the propagation of the jihadi creed—and this is what his book attempts to do, offering a minutely detailed account of the tenets of Salafi jihadism. Suri urges his readers to reject their own repressive governments and to rise up against Western occupation and Zionism. Although the leaders of Al Qaeda have long excused the slaughter of innocents, and many of its attacks have been directed at other Muslims, Suri specifically cautions against harming other Muslims, women and children who may be nonbelievers, and other noncombatants.

Suri addresses the issue of Israel, writing that “the Zionist presence in Palestine” is an insult to Muslims; but he also excoriates the secular Palestinian National Authority that governs the country. “Armed jihad is the only solution,” he advises. “Every mujahid must wage jihad against all forms of normalization—its institutions, officials, and advocates . . . destroying them and assassinating those who rely on them . . . while paying attention not to harm Muslims by mistake.”

There are five regions, according to Suri, where jihadis should focus their energies: Afghanistan, Central Asia, Yemen, Morocco, and, especially, Iraq. The American occupation of Iraq, he declares, inaugurated a “historical new period” that almost single-handedly rescued the jihadi movement just when many of its critics thought it was finished.

The invasion of Iraq posed a dilemma for Al Qaeda. Iraq is a largely Shiite nation, and Al Qaeda is composed of Sunnis who believe that the Shia are heretics. Shortly before the invasion, in March, 2003, bin Laden issued his own list of targets, which included Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—not Afghanistan or Iraq. Presumably, he regarded the chances of a Taliban resurgence as remote; moreover, he was aware that an Iraqi insurgency could ignite an Islamic civil war and lead to ethnic cleansing of the Sunni minority.

The American occupation posed a major opportunity, however, for a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi....

Zarqawi and his men were putting into action the vision that Abu Musab al-Suri had laid out for them: small, spontaneous groups carrying out individual acts of terror in Europe, and an open struggle for territory in Iraq.

Suicide bombings became a trademark of Zarqawi’s operation, despite Maqdisi’s condemnation of the practice....

Within radical Islamist circles, Zarqawi’s gory executions and attacks on Muslims at prayer became a source of controversy. From prison, Maqdisi chastised his former protégé. “The pure hands of jihad fighters must not be stained by shedding inviolable blood,” he wrote in an article that was posted on his Web site in July, 2004. “There is no point in vengeful acts that terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them.” Maqdisi also advised jihadis not to go to Iraq, “because it will be an inferno for them. This is, by God, the biggest catastrophe.”

Zarqawi angrily refuted Maqdisi’s remarks, saying that he took orders only from God; however, he was beginning to realize that his efforts in Iraq were another dead end for jihad. “The space of movement is starting to get smaller,” he had written to bin Laden in June. ...

In July, 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chief ideologue and second-in-command, attempted to steer the nihilistic Zarqawi closer to the founders’ original course. In a letter, he outlined the next steps for the Iraqi jihad: “The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or emirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate. . . . The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq. The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before—the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.”

Zawahiri advised Zarqawi to moderate his attacks on Iraqi Shiites and to stop beheading hostages. “We are in a battle,” Zawahiri reminded him. “And more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”

Zarqawi did not heed Al Qaeda’s requests. As the Iraqi jihad fell into barbarism, Al Qaeda’s leaders began advising their followers to go to Sudan or Kashmir, where the chances of victory seemed more promising. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, was confronting a new problem, which one of its prime thinkers, Abu Bakr Naji, had already anticipated, in an Internet document titled “The Management of Savagery.”

Naji’s identity is unknown. Other Islamist writers have said that he was Tunisian, but a Saudi newspaper identified him as Jordanian....

In 2005, Hussein produced what is perhaps the most definitive outline of Al Qaeda’s master plan: a book titled “Al-Zarqawi: The Second Generation of Al Qaeda.” Although it is largely a favorable biography of Zarqawi and his movement, Hussein incorporates the insights of other Al Qaeda members—notably, Saif al-Adl, the security chief.

It is chilling to read this work and realize how closely recent events seem to be hewing to Al Qaeda’s forecasts. Based on interviews with Zarqawi and Adl, Hussein claims that dragging Iran into conflict with the United States is key to Al Qaeda’s strategy. Expanding the area of conflict in the Middle East will cause the U.S. to overextend its forces. According to Hussein, Al Qaeda believes that Iran expects to be attacked by the U.S., because of its interest in building a nuclear weapon. “Accordingly, Iran is preparing to retaliate for or abort this strike by means of using powerful cards in its hand,” he writes. These tactics include targeting oil installations in the Persian Gulf, which could cut off sixty per cent of the world’s oil supplies, destabilizing Western economies.

In an ominous passage, Hussein notes that “for fifteen years—or since the end of the first Gulf War—Iran has been busy building a secret global army of highly trained personnel and the necessary financial and technological capabilities to carry out any kind of mission.” He is clearly referring to Hezbollah, which has so far focussed its attention on Israel. According to Hussein, “Iran has identified American and Jewish targets around the world. This secret army is led by two professional Lebanese men who have pledged full allegiance to Iran and who hold enough of a grudge against the Americans to qualify them to inflict damage on Jewish and American interests around the world.”

Iran, he continues, has been cultivating good relations with other Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas. “Iran views these parties as its entrenched wings in occupied Palestine,” Hussein writes, asserting that the peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians at the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh in February, 2005, were secretly aimed at countering Iranian influence on the Palestinian resistance. “Al Qaeda interpreted this as the first step toward launching an attack on Iran,” Hussein claims. Both the U.S. and Israel view Hezbollah, the Islamist group in Lebanon, as a creature of the Iranian state, and are intent on eliminating it. “The military campaign against Iran will begin when the United States and Israel succeed in disarming Hezbollah,” Hussein predicts.

Hussein claims, without offering evidence, that Iran already has thirty thousand intelligence agents in Iraq. “Since the Americans have not succeeded in eliminating the Sunni resistance, how can they deal with the situation if the Shiites join the resistance? Iran plans to incite its proponents in Iraq to join the anti-U.S. resistance in the event that the United States or Israel launches an attack on Iran. Iran plans to open its border to the resistance and provide it with what it needs to achieve a swift and major victory against the Americans.” Al Qaeda, he writes, also expects the Americans to go after Iran’s principal ally in the region, Syria. The removal of the Assad regime—a longtime goal of jihadis—will allow the country to be infiltrated by Al Qaeda, putting the terrorists within reach, at last, of Israel....

Al Qaeda’s twenty-year plan began on September 11th, with a stage that Hussein calls “The Awakening.” The ideologues within Al Qaeda believed that “the Islamic nation was in a state of hibernation,” because of repeated catastrophes inflicted upon Muslims by the West. By striking America—“the head of the serpent”—Al Qaeda caused the United States to “lose consciousness and act chaotically against those who attacked it. This entitled the party that hit the serpent to lead the Islamic nation.” This first stage, says Hussein, ended in 2003, when American troops entered Baghdad.

The second, “Eye-Opening” stage will last until the end of 2006, Hussein writes. Iraq will become the recruiting ground for young men eager to attack America. In this phase, he argues, perhaps wishfully, Al Qaeda will move from being an organization to “a mushrooming invincible and popular trend.” The electronic jihad on the Internet will propagate Al Qaeda’s ideas, and Muslims will be pressed to donate funds to make up for the seizure of terrorist assets by the West. The third stage, “Arising and Standing Up,” will last from 2007 to 2010. Al Qaeda’s focus will be on Syria and Turkey, but it will also begin to directly confront Israel, in order to gain more credibility among the Muslim population.

In the fourth stage, lasting until 2013, Al Qaeda will bring about the demise of Arab governments. “The creeping loss of the regimes’ power will lead to a steady growth in strength within Al Qaeda,” Hussein predicts. Meanwhile, attacks against the Middle East petroleum industry will continue, and America’s power will deteriorate through the constant expansion of the circle of confrontation. “By then, Al Qaeda will have completed its electronic capabilities, and it will be time to use them to launch electronic attacks to undermine the U.S. economy.” Islamists will promote the idea of using gold as the international medium of exchange, leading to the collapse of the dollar.

Then an Islamic caliphate can be declared, inaugurating the fifth stage of Al Qaeda’s grand plan, which will last until 2016. “At this stage, the Western fist in the Arab region will loosen, and Israel will not be able to carry out preëmptive or precautionary strikes,” Hussein writes. “The international balance will change.” Al Qaeda and the Islamist movement will attract powerful new economic allies, such as China, and Europe will fall into disunity.

The sixth phase will be a period of “total confrontation.” The now established caliphate will form an Islamic Army and will instigate a worldwide fight between the “believers” and the “non-believers.” Hussein proclaims, “The world will realize the meaning of real terrorism.” By 2020, “definitive victory” will have been achieved. Victory, according to the Al Qaeda ideologues, means that “falsehood will come to an end. . . . The Islamic state will lead the human race once again to the shore of safety and the oasis of happiness.”

Al Qaeda’s version of utopia has drawn the allegiance of a new generation of Arabs, who have been tutored on the Internet by ideologues such as Suri and Naji. This “third generation of mujahideen,” as Suri calls them, have been radicalized by September 11th, the occupation of Iraq, and the Palestinian intifada. (Suri wrote this before the current struggle in Lebanon.) Those jihadis fighting in the conflict in Iraq have been trained in vicious urban warfare against the most formidable army in history. They will return to their home countries and add their expertise to the new cells springing up in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and many European nations....

Although American and European intelligence communities are aware of the jihadi texts, the work of these ideologues often reads like a playbook that U.S. policymakers have been slavishly, if inadvertently, following....

As the writings of Abu Musab al-Suri, Abu Bakr Naji, Fouad Hussein, and others make clear, the tradition of Salafi jihad existed before bin Laden and Al Qaeda and will likely survive them; yet, from the beginning of the war on terror, the strategy of the Administration has been to decapitate Al Qaeda’s leadership. Bruce Hoffman, who is the author of “Inside Terrorism” and a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, told me, “One of the problems with the kill-or-capture metric is that it has often been to the exclusion of having a deeper, richer understanding of the movement, its origins, and our adversaries’ mindset. The nuances are absolutely critical. Our adversaries are wedded to the ideology that informs and fuels their struggle, and, by not paying attention, we risk not knowing our enemy.”

Al-Qaida Plans for Syria

Here is a note I received from Massoud Derhally of Arabian Business about a documentary al-Jazeera is showing on al-Qa`ida in the Levant. It explains how al-Qa`ida leaders hope to open a new front in Syria and the states surrounding Palestine.

Al Jazeera ran on Sept 18 the second part of a documentary by Yusri Fouda on Al Qaeda in "Bilad al Sham". The thesis is that inherently Al-Qaeda has a forward looking plan that was to attack the US, draw America to the Middle East and then fight it (i.e. in Iraq) and then exploit that conflict to get to the Palestinian front using Damascus and Lebanon.

The documentary interviews among others the son of Azzam who I am sure you know was instrumental in indoctrinating OBL in his early days before he jumped ship to Zawahri. It also interviews the founder of Junood Al Sham, and several Jihadi veterans from the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The seminal point the documentary makes is that "the youth are jaded with the corruption in the Arab world and an impotent leadership" so much so, that bright, educated people like Mohammad Atta (this is the documentary's assessment not mine) turn to religion as a means to an end.

In fact the founder of Junood Al Sham is on record saying the only way to fight Israel is to turn to religion and that when you do so as a fighter, you are fearless.

This zealous fervor invariably is the panacea to the "Zionist-American-Western" axis, several of the interviewees hold.

An interesting and worrying dimension to all this was the existing and growing Salafist movement in Lebanon, namely in mountainous areas and even places like Baalbak where one of the 19 hijackers that carried out the Sept.. 11 attacks was from.

The documentary goes on to narrate how Al Qaeda's man in Lebanon was arrested and then 'died' in detention. His supporters claim he was tortured and killed.

This all really is put in the context of a prophetic turn of events, where on the one hand there is a literal reading to Quranic texts to explain what is taking place on the ground in the ME region and on the other hand, a blue print of Al Qaeda's greater plans, that in many ways is at the other end of say the Christian Right ideology, that is actively trying to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah.

The exception is that Al Qaeda and the Salafists don't really see their struggle as part of preparing for such a showdown, but in essence more as confronting the infidel and crusaders.

There are some alarming clips in the documentary, where Azzam's son says there will be something like 960,000 fighters in Damascus, specifically Halab, where there will be a battle against the invading forces.

Anyway the punch line which I think you will be interested in is that the documentary assesses Syria, Lebanon and other countries can turn to America, as they have, and point to this ominous and growing radicalization, and say we can help you in this war on terror, and that if you think for a moment that there is an alternative to the status quo it lies in the nexus of this fanaticism that spreads from Iraq, to Jordan, Egypt to Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.

Best, Massoud

Lawrence Wright, who has recently published his block buster book on al-Qa`ida, The Looming Tower, which is the best al-Qa`ida book to date, has written about these plans in his latest New Yorker article: (I am copying less than half the original article. It is all worth reading.)

The Master Plan, by Lawrence Wright
For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning.
From the Issue of 2006-09-11

Suri believed that the jihadi movement had nearly been extinguished by the drying up of financial resources, the killing or capture of many terrorist leaders, the loss of safe havens, and the increasing international coöperation among police agencies. (The British authorities were pursuing him as a suspect in the 1995 Paris Métro bombings.) Accordingly, he saw the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, in 1996, as a “golden opportunity,” and he went there the following year. He set up a military camp in Afghanistan, and experimented with chemical weapons. He also arranged bin Laden’s first television interview with CNN. The journalist Peter Bergen, who spent several days in Suri’s company while producing the segment, and who recently published an oral history, “The Osama bin Laden I Know,” recalled, “He was tough and really smart. He seemed like a real intellectual, very conversant with history, and he had an intense seriousness of purpose. He certainly impressed me more than bin Laden.”

In 1999, Suri sent bin Laden an e-mail accusing him of endangering the Taliban regime with his highly theatrical attacks on American targets. And he mocked bin Laden’s love of publicity: “I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans, and applause.” In his writings, Suri rarely mentioned Al Qaeda and disavowed any direct connection to it, despite having served on its inner council. He preferred to speak more broadly of jihad, which he saw as a social movement, encompassing “all those who bear weapons—individuals, groups, and organizations—and wage jihad on the enemies of Islam.” By 2000, he had begun predicting the end of Al Qaeda, whose preëminence he portrayed as a stage in the development of the worldwide Islamist uprising. “Al Qaeda is not an organization, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be,” he writes. “It is a call, a reference, a methodology.” Eventually, its leadership would be eliminated, he said. (Suri himself was captured in Pakistan in November, 2005. American intelligence sources confirmed that Suri is in the custody of another country but refused to disclose his exact location.) In the time that remained to Al Qaeda, he argued, its main goal should be to stimulate other groups around the world to join the jihadi movement. His legacy, as he saw it, was to codify the doctrines that animated Islamist jihad, so that Muslim youths of the future could discover the cause and begin their own, spontaneous religious war.

In 2002, Suri, in his hideout in Iran, began writing his defining work, “Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistance,” which is sixteen hundred pages long and was published on the Internet in December, 2004. Didactic and repetitive, but also ruthlessly candid, the book dissects the faults of the jihadi movement and lays out a plan for the future of the struggle. The goal, he writes, is “to bring about the largest number of human and material casualties possible for America and its allies.” He specifically targets Jews, “Westerners in general,” the members of the NATO alliance, Russia, China, atheists, pagans, and hypocrites, as well as “any type of external enemy.” (The proliferation of adversaries mirrors Al Qaeda’s hatred of all other ideologies.)

And yet, at the same time, he bitterly blames Al Qaeda for dragging the entire jihadi movement into an unequal battle that it is likely to lose. Unlike most jihadi theorists, Suri acknowledges the setback caused by September 11th. He laments the demise of the Taliban, which he and other Salafi jihadis considered the modern world’s only true Islamic government. America’s “war on terror,” he complains, doesn’t discriminate between Al Qaeda adherents and Muslims in general. “Many loyal Muslims,” he writes, believe that the September 11th attacks “justified the American assault and have given it a legitimate rationale for reoccupying the Islamic world.” But Suri goes on to argue that America’s plans for international domination were already evident “in the likes of Nixon and Kissinger,” and that this agenda would have been pursued without the provocation of September 11th. Moreover, the American attack on Afghanistan was not really aimed at capturing or killing bin Laden; its true goal was to sweep away the Taliban and eliminate the rule of Islamic law.

In Suri’s view, the underground terrorist movement—that is, Al Qaeda and its sleeper cells—is defunct. This approach was “a failure on all fronts,” because of its inability to achieve military victory or to rally the Muslim people to its cause. He proposes that the next stage of jihad will be characterized by terrorism created by individuals or small autonomous groups (what he terms “leaderless resistance”), which will wear down the enemy and prepare the ground for the far more ambitious aim of waging war on “open fronts”—an outright struggle for territory. He explains, “Without confrontation in the field and seizing control of the land, we cannot establish a state, which is the strategic goal of the resistance.”

Suri acknowledges that the “Jewish enemy, led by America and its nonbelieving, apostate, hypocritical allies,” enjoys overwhelming military superiority, but he argues that the spiritual commitment of the jihadis is equally formidable. He questions Al Qaeda’s opposition to democracy, which offers radical Islamists an opportunity to “secretly use this comfortable and relaxed atmosphere to spread out, reorganize their ranks, and acquire broader public bases.” In many Arabic states, there is a predictable cycle of official tolerance and savage repression, which can work in favor of the Islamists. If the Islamists “open the way for political moderation,” Suri writes, they will “stretch out horizontally along the base and spread. So they once again exterminate and jihad grows yet again! So then they try to open things up once again, and Islam stretches out and expands again!”

The Bush Administration has declared a “war of ideas” against Islamism, Suri observes, and has had some success; he cites the modification of textbooks in many Muslim countries. This effort, he writes, must be countered by the propagation of the jihadi creed—and this is what his book attempts to do, offering a minutely detailed account of the tenets of Salafi jihadism. Suri urges his readers to reject their own repressive governments and to rise up against Western occupation and Zionism. Although the leaders of Al Qaeda have long excused the slaughter of innocents, and many of its attacks have been directed at other Muslims, Suri specifically cautions against harming other Muslims, women and children who may be nonbelievers, and other noncombatants.

Suri addresses the issue of Israel, writing that “the Zionist presence in Palestine” is an insult to Muslims; but he also excoriates the secular Palestinian National Authority that governs the country. “Armed jihad is the only solution,” he advises. “Every mujahid must wage jihad against all forms of normalization—its institutions, officials, and advocates . . . destroying them and assassinating those who rely on them . . . while paying attention not to harm Muslims by mistake.”

There are five regions, according to Suri, where jihadis should focus their energies: Afghanistan, Central Asia, Yemen, Morocco, and, especially, Iraq. The American occupation of Iraq, he declares, inaugurated a “historical new period” that almost single-handedly rescued the jihadi movement just when many of its critics thought it was finished.

The invasion of Iraq posed a dilemma for Al Qaeda. Iraq is a largely Shiite nation, and Al Qaeda is composed of Sunnis who believe that the Shia are heretics. Shortly before the invasion, in March, 2003, bin Laden issued his own list of targets, which included Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen—not Afghanistan or Iraq. Presumably, he regarded the chances of a Taliban resurgence as remote; moreover, he was aware that an Iraqi insurgency could ignite an Islamic civil war and lead to ethnic cleansing of the Sunni minority.

The American occupation posed a major opportunity, however, for a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi....

Zarqawi and his men were putting into action the vision that Abu Musab al-Suri had laid out for them: small, spontaneous groups carrying out individual acts of terror in Europe, and an open struggle for territory in Iraq.

Suicide bombings became a trademark of Zarqawi’s operation, despite Maqdisi’s condemnation of the practice....

Within radical Islamist circles, Zarqawi’s gory executions and attacks on Muslims at prayer became a source of controversy. From prison, Maqdisi chastised his former protégé. “The pure hands of jihad fighters must not be stained by shedding inviolable blood,” he wrote in an article that was posted on his Web site in July, 2004. “There is no point in vengeful acts that terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them.” Maqdisi also advised jihadis not to go to Iraq, “because it will be an inferno for them. This is, by God, the biggest catastrophe.”

Zarqawi angrily refuted Maqdisi’s remarks, saying that he took orders only from God; however, he was beginning to realize that his efforts in Iraq were another dead end for jihad. “The space of movement is starting to get smaller,” he had written to bin Laden in June. ...

In July, 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chief ideologue and second-in-command, attempted to steer the nihilistic Zarqawi closer to the founders’ original course. In a letter, he outlined the next steps for the Iraqi jihad: “The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority or emirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate. . . . The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq. The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before—the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.”

Zawahiri advised Zarqawi to moderate his attacks on Iraqi Shiites and to stop beheading hostages. “We are in a battle,” Zawahiri reminded him. “And more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”

Zarqawi did not heed Al Qaeda’s requests. As the Iraqi jihad fell into barbarism, Al Qaeda’s leaders began advising their followers to go to Sudan or Kashmir, where the chances of victory seemed more promising. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, was confronting a new problem, which one of its prime thinkers, Abu Bakr Naji, had already anticipated, in an Internet document titled “The Management of Savagery.”

Naji’s identity is unknown. Other Islamist writers have said that he was Tunisian, but a Saudi newspaper identified him as Jordanian....

In 2005, Hussein produced what is perhaps the most definitive outline of Al Qaeda’s master plan: a book titled “Al-Zarqawi: The Second Generation of Al Qaeda.” Although it is largely a favorable biography of Zarqawi and his movement, Hussein incorporates the insights of other Al Qaeda members—notably, Saif al-Adl, the security chief.

It is chilling to read this work and realize how closely recent events seem to be hewing to Al Qaeda’s forecasts. Based on interviews with Zarqawi and Adl, Hussein claims that dragging Iran into conflict with the United States is key to Al Qaeda’s strategy. Expanding the area of conflict in the Middle East will cause the U.S. to overextend its forces. According to Hussein, Al Qaeda believes that Iran expects to be attacked by the U.S., because of its interest in building a nuclear weapon. “Accordingly, Iran is preparing to retaliate for or abort this strike by means of using powerful cards in its hand,” he writes. These tactics include targeting oil installations in the Persian Gulf, which could cut off sixty per cent of the world’s oil supplies, destabilizing Western economies.

In an ominous passage, Hussein notes that “for fifteen years—or since the end of the first Gulf War—Iran has been busy building a secret global army of highly trained personnel and the necessary financial and technological capabilities to carry out any kind of mission.” He is clearly referring to Hezbollah, which has so far focussed its attention on Israel. According to Hussein, “Iran has identified American and Jewish targets around the world. This secret army is led by two professional Lebanese men who have pledged full allegiance to Iran and who hold enough of a grudge against the Americans to qualify them to inflict damage on Jewish and American interests around the world.”

Iran, he continues, has been cultivating good relations with other Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas. “Iran views these parties as its entrenched wings in occupied Palestine,” Hussein writes, asserting that the peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians at the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh in February, 2005, were secretly aimed at countering Iranian influence on the Palestinian resistance. “Al Qaeda interpreted this as the first step toward launching an attack on Iran,” Hussein claims. Both the U.S. and Israel view Hezbollah, the Islamist group in Lebanon, as a creature of the Iranian state, and are intent on eliminating it. “The military campaign against Iran will begin when the United States and Israel succeed in disarming Hezbollah,” Hussein predicts.

Hussein claims, without offering evidence, that Iran already has thirty thousand intelligence agents in Iraq. “Since the Americans have not succeeded in eliminating the Sunni resistance, how can they deal with the situation if the Shiites join the resistance? Iran plans to incite its proponents in Iraq to join the anti-U.S. resistance in the event that the United States or Israel launches an attack on Iran. Iran plans to open its border to the resistance and provide it with what it needs to achieve a swift and major victory against the Americans.” Al Qaeda, he writes, also expects the Americans to go after Iran’s principal ally in the region, Syria. The removal of the Assad regime—a longtime goal of jihadis—will allow the country to be infiltrated by Al Qaeda, putting the terrorists within reach, at last, of Israel....

Al Qaeda’s twenty-year plan began on September 11th, with a stage that Hussein calls “The Awakening.” The ideologues within Al Qaeda believed that “the Islamic nation was in a state of hibernation,” because of repeated catastrophes inflicted upon Muslims by the West. By striking America—“the head of the serpent”—Al Qaeda caused the United States to “lose consciousness and act chaotically against those who attacked it. This entitled the party that hit the serpent to lead the Islamic nation.” This first stage, says Hussein, ended in 2003, when American troops entered Baghdad.

The second, “Eye-Opening” stage will last until the end of 2006, Hussein writes. Iraq will become the recruiting ground for young men eager to attack America. In this phase, he argues, perhaps wishfully, Al Qaeda will move from being an organization to “a mushrooming invincible and popular trend.” The electronic jihad on the Internet will propagate Al Qaeda’s ideas, and Muslims will be pressed to donate funds to make up for the seizure of terrorist assets by the West. The third stage, “Arising and Standing Up,” will last from 2007 to 2010. Al Qaeda’s focus will be on Syria and Turkey, but it will also begin to directly confront Israel, in order to gain more credibility among the Muslim population.

In the fourth stage, lasting until 2013, Al Qaeda will bring about the demise of Arab governments. “The creeping loss of the regimes’ power will lead to a steady growth in strength within Al Qaeda,” Hussein predicts. Meanwhile, attacks against the Middle East petroleum industry will continue, and America’s power will deteriorate through the constant expansion of the circle of confrontation. “By then, Al Qaeda will have completed its electronic capabilities, and it will be time to use them to launch electronic attacks to undermine the U.S. economy.” Islamists will promote the idea of using gold as the international medium of exchange, leading to the collapse of the dollar.

Then an Islamic caliphate can be declared, inaugurating the fifth stage of Al Qaeda’s grand plan, which will last until 2016. “At this stage, the Western fist in the Arab region will loosen, and Israel will not be able to carry out preëmptive or precautionary strikes,” Hussein writes. “The international balance will change.” Al Qaeda and the Islamist movement will attract powerful new economic allies, such as China, and Europe will fall into disunity.

The sixth phase will be a period of “total confrontation.” The now established caliphate will form an Islamic Army and will instigate a worldwide fight between the “believers” and the “non-believers.” Hussein proclaims, “The world will realize the meaning of real terrorism.” By 2020, “definitive victory” will have been achieved. Victory, according to the Al Qaeda ideologues, means that “falsehood will come to an end. . . . The Islamic state will lead the human race once again to the shore of safety and the oasis of happiness.”

Al Qaeda’s version of utopia has drawn the allegiance of a new generation of Arabs, who have been tutored on the Internet by ideologues such as Suri and Naji. This “third generation of mujahideen,” as Suri calls them, have been radicalized by September 11th, the occupation of Iraq, and the Palestinian intifada. (Suri wrote this before the current struggle in Lebanon.) Those jihadis fighting in the conflict in Iraq have been trained in vicious urban warfare against the most formidable army in history. They will return to their home countries and add their expertise to the new cells springing up in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and many European nations....

Although American and European intelligence communities are aware of the jihadi texts, the work of these ideologues often reads like a playbook that U.S. policymakers have been slavishly, if inadvertently, following....

As the writings of Abu Musab al-Suri, Abu Bakr Naji, Fouad Hussein, and others make clear, the tradition of Salafi jihad existed before bin Laden and Al Qaeda and will likely survive them; yet, from the beginning of the war on terror, the strategy of the Administration has been to decapitate Al Qaeda’s leadership. Bruce Hoffman, who is the author of “Inside Terrorism” and a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, told me, “One of the problems with the kill-or-capture metric is that it has often been to the exclusion of having a deeper, richer understanding of the movement, its origins, and our adversaries’ mindset. The nuances are absolutely critical. Our adversaries are wedded to the ideology that informs and fuels their struggle, and, by not paying attention, we risk not knowing our enemy.”

Apologies to David Schenker

My apologies to David Schenker. Several days ago I wrote: "David Schenker of WINEP and Tony Badran of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies are pushing [a] conspiracy theory.” The conspiracy theory I was referring to is the notion that the Syrian government was behind the terrorist attack on the American embassy.

In fact, Tony Badran argues that Syria was behind the attack, not David Schenker. I incorrectly lumped the two together because this is what Guy Darst of the Boston Herald did in his misleading article, cited as the source of my remarks.

I have since communicated with David Schenker. He sent me two articles about the embassy bombing, one of which Darst borrowed from. By taking Schenker's remark out of its original context and plopping it in with Badran's more serious accusations, Schenker was done an injustice and I compounded it.

The two articles that give a full account of David Schenker's argument about the Damascus bombing make clear that he stops short of arguing that the government set up the bombers. Eli Lake of the New York Sun, quotes Schenker as follows:

"A couple of things like this have happened before," Mr. Schenker said. "The embassy was stormed with the facilitation of the government, once in 1998 and once in 2000. The Syrians have been a welcoming environment for any number of terrorists for decades, so it should come as no surprise that unauthorized terrorists have taken up residence there and would be able to pull off this kind of attack."

Schenker himself writes at counterterrorism.org :

In terms of context, though, the key point is that if this attack was indeed perpetrated by Islamists, it is the direct result of the double game being played by the Asad regime. The regime supports Sunni and Shiite Islamist militants in Lebanon, Palestinian Authority, and Iraq, and in the past has not acted against terrorists entering Jordan. Syria no longer cooperates with the US on Al Qaida, either. Given the regime's friendly disposition toward terrorists, it would be no surprise if some unauthorized terrorist organizations were setting up shop in Damascus.

As these quotes make clear, Schenker did not suggest that Syrian authorities authorized the bombings. He argues that Syria was burnt by the fires it has started and keeps aflame. This is very different from Badran's argument.

As for Badran and Vox's claims that I contradict myself by not subscribing to the notion that the Syrian government was behind the bombing, this is specious. Tony quotes an article published by me on Syria Comment, but written by Abdulla Ta'i, which argued that Syrian authorities had set jihadists up to be arrested last year. In the incident that Abdullah was describing, the authorities apprehended the extremists before an attack was carried out. I cannot say whether Abdulla's informant was correct, but the likelihood of it being correct seemed higher to me than much of the speculation done by people with no contact with Syria. Vox quotes a second article written by a friend, which explained how Syrian authorities allowed and managed the demonstration which ended with the burning of the Danish embassy.

The implications of both articles are provocative, but they don't add up to Syria staging the embassy attack in which quite a few people were hurt, almost all Syrians. There is a big difference between staging the capture of jihadists or encouraging a crowd to attack the Danish embassy when no one is in it and trying to blow up the US embassy when it is full of people. In the same light, it is easy for Americans to understand why the US armed and funded jihadists in Afghanistan to fight Russia, but they don't think America is behind jihadism when it doesn't serve its interests or kills Americans. Syrians commonly use the Afghan connection to argue that the CIA was running Zarqawi as an agent in Iraq.

I gave four reasons why it doesn't make sense for Syria to stage the jihadist bombing of the embassy. I think Syria genuinely wants to engage the West if the West is willing to compromise. I don't believe Asad wants the American embassy in Damascus to be shuttered, halting the very limited means of communication that remain open between him and Washington.

One final remark about the articles written by other people that I publish. All I find interesting. Most I see the sense in. Some I don't believe, for example, I don't think it is likely that Hariri was killed by Islamic extremists. All the same, given the importance of the Hariri trial and the fact that most Syrians with whom I discussed it are not convinced that Syria did it, I publish alternative views, if they are backed up with an argument. The comment section is the best place to shoot down such speculation. Sometimes I make mistakes, as I did with David Schenker. I am happy to apologize when I know I am wrong.

"The UN Report will be a Bust," by Idaf

"The UN Report will be a Bust"
by Idaf, published on Syria Comment
September 16, 2006

The most interesting paragraph for me in Kaplan's article was this:

This is a lot to bite off. It's not at all an appealing idea, whatever the trade-offs, to legitimize the resumption of Syrian influence in Lebanese politics or the stiffening of Hezbollah's political power. But those things are going to happen anyway. Should they happen with Syria in an alliance with Iran—or in a security arrangement that involves the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union?

I agree with Kaplan that this seemingly is going to happen anyway. I'm betting that Mr. Brammertz's upcoming report would be more focused on Al-Qaida's role in the assassination. Two reasons for my assumption:

1 - Two days ago, the former interior minister Suleiman Franjieh said in a TV interview that the 13 Al-Qaida suspects held by Lebanese security forces HAVE CONFESSED to plotting to kill Hariri and working with Abu-Adas.

The newly formed Information Branch of the Lebanese security (which was formed specifically to investigate the Hariri assassination, under the direct political influence of Saad Hariri) has admitted to torturing them. Franjieh said in the interview that he spoke to the head of the branch about whether this was true. The answer he got was: “it is not credible as the confession was made under torture”! The head of the branch also admitted that the suspects confessed that they sneaked Abu Adas into Syria through the normal border crossing point with Syria (as per the records of the Lebanese border point). When asked why the Syrians did not smuggle Abu Adas across the "military line" when they still controlled it, the answer was that he was snuck into an Al-Qaida stronghold! Hence the growing insistence today that the Syrian authorities control Al-Qaida! Personally, I think that this is pathetic. Franjieh continued with a bombshell: “The 14 February group has refused to allow the Brammertz team to meet with the 13 suspects so far!!!”

2- Saudi and Egypt seem to have decided to reach out to Syria, despite the deterioration of relations during the Lebanon War. The Syrian information minister visited Saudi a few days ago, met with his counterpart, and gave a very friendly press conference following the meeting in Saudi. Mubarak recently said that Egypt's relations with Syria would always be "brotherly," no matter what. Bilal (the Syrian information minister) also gave an interview to the very pro-Mubarak Al-Ahram (which had attacked Assad after his famous speech of August 15). Furthermore, if anyone is following the Saudi media recently, he/she will have noticed that attacks on Syria were halted about a week ago. (read Al-Sahrq Al-Awsat and Al-Arabiya in the last week).

My interpretation of this is that the Saudis and the Egyptians have received information that the Brammertz report is a bust (or maybe that it is re-focusing on Al-Qaida). If so then this might strengthen the pro-Syria political powers in Lebanon and they most likely will be back in power very soon, or will at least join the government. I recently spoke to the head of a polling company in Lebanon, which is regularly commissioned by Zogby International and he said that post-war polling showed that the so called March 14 group's popularity is at an all time low. Nasrallah tops the "national leader" poll followed by Michel Aoun. Saniora comes fourth!

Posted by Idaf

Also don't miss t_desco's comments about the meaning of the embassy bombing here
It begins:

Don't miss the symbolic dimensions of this attack:

1. It says "look, we are able to strike in the heart of the Syrian capital."

2. The Syrian security forces are seen defending Americans, thus undermining (at least symbolically) "President Asad's policy of opposing the United States."

3. had the attack been successful, it would have increased tensions between Washington and Damascus.

Don't forget that al-Qa'ida wants the US to attack Iran and Syria. See, for example, the excellent article by Lawrence Wright, "The Master Plan, For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning." (continue...)

"Let's Make a Deal," by Fred Kaplan

Fred Kaplan at Slate has written an excellent article explaining what it would take to make a deal with Syria. I have copied a bit of the article below. (Warning: he quotes me.) One of the important questions that weighs on all those pushing engagement is what Syria really wants. Here is a bit of Fred's article.

I also appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio for an half an hour interview, Thursday, September 14, 2006, about Syria. (Slide the bar to the second half hour).

Here is the Kaplan article:

Let's Make a Deal
It's time to talk to Syria.
Fred Kaplan
posted Sept. 15, 2006

It's a golden moment for a diplomatic overture to Syria.
This week's armed assault on the U.S. Embassy in Damascus should have shown Syrian President Bashar Assad that his country isn't as immune to the region's terrorism as he might have thought.

The Syrian security guards' successful repulsion of the attack and defense of the embassy should have shown President George W. Bush that the two countries might share some interests—and that the terrorist threat isn't as monolithic as he's made it appear in recent speeches.

The incident comes in the wake of the summer's disastrous war between Israel and Hezbollah, which should have shown all concerned that military power alone—even when unfurled by the once-invincible Israel Defense Forces—cannot resolve the region's political conflicts.

It's worth trying to strike a deal with Assad because: 1) He can be bought off (he's offered to be bought off before, on several occasions); 2) yanking him away from Iran will pull the rug out from under Iran; 3) getting him to temper his support of Hezbollah will defang Hezbollah.

But to buy off Assad requires buying him—giving him something in exchange for his switch. And that's something George W. Bush is loath to do.

An alliance with Iran gets Assad security, economic aid, and investment. Supplying arms to Hezbollah gets him leverage in Lebanon and street cred with Arabs. If he changes policies and does what Tony Snow wants him to do, what does he get in return?

Joshua Landis—whose blog, Syria Comment, is the most informative clearinghouse of analysis on the country—thinks that Assad wants better relations with the United States; that he turned to Iran in part because he needed to turn somewhere and had no alternative.

Assad is a secular leader, faces his own Islamist threats from within (as the embassy assault dramatized), and must wonder how durable his alliance with the mullahs of Iran might be. Even before George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq, Assad tried to revitalize relations by offering the administration intelligence on Saddam's plans and forces—but he was rebuffed.

In other words, it's a big mistake to regard Syria as an implacable foe—much less to lump it along with the myriad regimes and movements (Iran, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, North Korea, and so on) that Bush views as a monolithic force of darkness in the global war on terrorism. (This Manichean view may be Bush's most unfortunate misconception. By not understanding the nature of his enemies, he cannot defeat them; and by failing to detect the fissures that divide them, he passes up opportunities to play them off against one another.)

What would Assad need to change his ways? Landis and others suggest a few incentives: a guarantee that neither the United States nor Israel would attack Syria; excision from the official list of nations that sponsor terrorism (a step that would permit aid and investment from the West); some liberty to flex political influence in Lebanon; and negotiations with Israel to get back the Golan Heights.

In exchange, Assad would have to earn Syria's removal from the terrorism list (that is, he would really have to stop sponsoring terrorism); he would have to stop funneling arms to Hezbollah and, instead, support Hezbollah strictly as a political party; and he would have to accept Israel's existence within the framework of a two-state accord with the Palestinians (which—though it's always dangerous to be optimistic about such things—a new, possibly unified, government in the Palestinian territories seems on the verge of doing).

This is a lot to bite off. It's not at all an appealing idea, whatever the trade-offs, to legitimize the resumption of Syrian influence in Lebanese politics or the stiffening of Hezbollah's political power. But those things are going to happen anyway. Should they happen with Syria in an alliance with Iran—or in a security arrangement that involves the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union?

We need allies to maintain influence and stability in the Middle East, and we hardly have any these days. It may be time to resume the practice of "realism" and build up some allies to help do our dealings, even if it means trading favors with the lesser and more malleable of evils.

Megan Stack of the L.A. Times quotes me in an article entitled, Syrians Foil Strike on U.S. Embassy. I like Megan Stack and she has written many good stories on Syria and Lebanon this past year; however, her editors must have cut a paragraph because it sounds like I support the notion that the Syrian government was behind the embassy bombing, which I explained to her was a silly notion. Here is how she quotes me:

But questions linger: Why have militants never struck Syria with the force and skill brought to bear against Arab neighbors such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia? Is Syria given a pass by armed groups because of Assad's reputation as an anti-American figure?

"The speculation has been that the Assad regime has put people up to this," said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma who spent last year living in Damascus. "Are they in league? Have they cut a deal?"

David Schenker of WINEP and Tony Badran of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, are pushing this conspiracy theory. Tony said, "Every time the regime wants to show that it is embattled or that it shares the same enemy as the United States, there is an incident like this." This is spin - and then these guys claim Arabs always see conspiracy theories. Both these guys repeat ad naseum that Asad is a bumbler and hardly in control of Syria - then they describe him a superman who can manipulate every jihadist in Syria. If the 5 or 6 jihadist events in the last three years in Syria were all sham events, we must conclude that Syria has no jihadism or extremist presence working against the regime. This means that the other leaders of the Middle East are out of control and bumblers because they cannot police their countries as Bashar al-Asad can. We must conclude that they should all be taking lessons in leadership and in providing security in the countries from Asad.

House Cleaning and Format Suggestions

Dear Readers,
I am preparing to move Syria Comment to another site and to migrate to Word Press instead of blogger. Here is the new site I am preparing http://joshualandis.com.

I would appreciate it if anyone interested would take a look and send me any ideas for how to format it or what to add - that would be a great help.

Word Press offers a more powerful software package than blogger. I will be able to categorize my posts - i.e. list them under key words, such as "opposition," "Asad," "Alawites," "Kurds," "Islam," "Economics," "Culture," etc.

One can easily appreciate the advantages of such an archiving mechanism. Researchers will easily be able to access articles of interest to them by following a category. If you have suggestions for categories that will help you or that you think I should include, please post them in the comment section.

Also, if you know of interesting or better gizmos than those I use or have other suggestions about formatting or look, please write them in the comment section or send them directly to me: landis@ou.edu. I have a tech person helping me with this for the time being, so I can add stuff and change things for another week or so before I am left to my own primitive devices.

It will cause a little turbulence as I switch over, which will not be for some time as I don't really know how to use it properly and am still adjusting things.

I will also be able to block IP addresses on Word Press, which will help to control the amount of spam, Inshaallah. Many of you have complained about the nasty comments that get reposted many times a day. Hopefully, we will be able to zap those.

I will also be able to have recent comments listed on the sidebar.

If you know of other sites you think are particularly format friendly or after which I should model my own, send me a link. I have already admired From Beirut to the Beltway's formating.

Liberals And The Chances For Democracy In The Middle East - By EHSANI2

Liberals And The Chances For Democracy In The Middle East – Third In line?
By EHSANI2
September 14, 2006


It has often been suggested that the Arab world is not ready for western style liberal democracy. One often hears that there is something unique or intrinsic about the Arab culture that inhibits democratic governance. Such sentiments have made it possible for the region’s dictators to widely suppress all basic principals of individual freedom, civil liberties, accountability and free elections.

While a culture of tribalism is often sited as a reason, other traditional interpretations of authoritarianism in the region point the blame at its colonial past. One can argue that just like the French and British before them, American foreign policy has invested and promoted military-security institutions at the expense of civil-legal ones in order to maintain control over the region’s restive societies and its vast energy resources.

During the 1950’s and 1960’s, young army officers used military coups to reach power at the expense of a number of the regimes that were affiliated with the British and French colonialists. Regrettably, the new Arab leaders over promised and under achieved.

The old colonial rule simply gave way to a traditional brand of authoritarian tyranny. Almost without exception, the new military regimes have had little respect for human rights and have come to use whatever means necessary to silence political opponents.

The above course of events is not dissimilar to the experience of Latin America. Just like the Arabs, the Hispanic world was thought to be naturally more authoritarian and hierarchical than western Anglo-Saxon cultures. It was long argued, therefore, that the continent would never be ready to part with its own brand of authoritarianism that has followed its own colonial past. Indeed, during the second half of the twentieth century, a number of countries in the region became hostage to authoritarian regimes that were unparalleled in their brutality and suppression of civil society and political movements.

U.S foreign policy did not help. By favoring dictators like Pinochet over the democratic (Socialist) government of Salvador Allende in Chile, the U.S. government put its weight behind dictators that promised stability, anticommunism, and economic trade and investment opportunities. In “Thank God they’re on our side: The U.S. and right wing-Dictatorships”, David Schmitz, notes how this policy conflicted with a theoretical embrace of the principles of liberal democracy and human rights. U.S. officials viewed Latin Americans as racially inferior and strong authoritarian leadership as necessary for economic modernization.

Just like all others in history, the Latin American Authoritarian regimes performed poorly in terms of economic development, and together with extensive human rights violations, they ultimately lost legitimacy internally. Democracy soon emerged. Economic growth soon followed. Note how this took place in spite of, rather than because of, U.S. policies.

But if democracy emerged in Latin America in spite of U.S. policies, should one therefore be optimistic about the prospects of a similar scenario in our own region?

As I will explain below, I think that the Islamists of our region will prove a major obstacle in this endeavor. Latin American liberals benefited from the fact that they did not have to compete with their own religious fundamentalists for power as the vacuum emerged. We do.

Enter Islam and the Middle East:

As the Latin American dictators fell from power, it was that region’s liberals that filled the vacuum. Regrettably, the liberals of our region come a distant third behind their current dictators and the Islamists who are waiting second in line. Unless something is done, if and when our dictators are removed (military regimes rarely leave power unilaterally), it is most likely going to be the Islamists rather than the Arab liberals who will be the next winners in our region. This should not come as a surprise.

With most other political and social groups decimated by the state, Islamists have had the exclusive benefit of building large constituencies, thanks to the social and economic services they provide to a suffering population (Hamas and Hezbollah are perfect examples). The secular Arab rulers have in the meantime masterfully used the fear of Islamism to perpetuate their absolute control.

Arab liberals, in the meantime face a catch 22 situation. Were their dictators to fall from power, the Islamists who aim to abolish secular, social and political order and replace it with an Islamic one will be their new masters. Otherwise, were their current dictators to remain at the helm, one can only expect more human rights abuses, arbitrary arrest and detention, fundamentally unfair trials in security courts, infringements on privacy rights, police corruption, restrictions on freedom of speech, press, assembly and association.

Some hopeful commentators and scholars have argued that mainstream Islamists have changed. They point to signs that these Islamists have now come to conclude that democracy is the most effective mechanism to guard dictatorships and protect the human rights of the Muslim populace. This writer is hardly as optimistic.

The liberals of our region face a massive uphill battle because their third position in line renders them a target from both the dictators and the Islamists. In the minds of many Muslims, liberal democracy is synonymous with western political hegemony and domination. As the scholar Fawaz Gerges argues, democracy tends to be seen as a manipulative tool wielded by Western powers to intervene in Arab/Muslim internal affairs and to divide and conquer.

Some Islamic movements have tried to reengineer the traditional western liberal democratic values to give them a more Islamic look. This effort is unlikely to succeed.
Islamicizing liberal democracy does not work. Indeed, Islam and western liberal democratic principals are incompatible.

Our dictators in the meantime have masterfully exploited the parties that lie behind them in the pecking order.

In the case of Syria, the risks of the Islamists have been more than hypothetical. The only serious challenge to the country’s authoritarian rule arose in the late 1970’s from the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood who rejects the basic value of the secular Baath and object to rule by the Alawis, whom they consider heretical. In response to the uprising, the government crushed the insurgency of course. Syria’s liberals have paid the price since then. All calls for democracy and civil rights have been implicitly and explicitly rejected as the regime presented itself both internally and externally as the sole political force that can rescue the country from the threat of “dangerous ideologies”. This is a form of threat construction. In Latin America, the threat of communism or capitalism. In Syria and other parts of the Middle East, the desire to oppose Israel and later Islamic fundamentalism proved an important motivating factor.

Had it not been for the Islamic fundamentalists, one can argue that the Syrian regime and others in the region will sooner or later lose their legitimacy in a world dominated by the reemergence of democratic governments throughout the world. It is the opinion of this writer that the inability of our liberal voices to occupy the second spot constitutes a major hurdle that has dramatically slowed democracy in our region. The Islamists need to give way. The notion that our present dictators are our only choice against “dangerous ideologies” is a card that needs to be taken away from them.

In the meantime, those that condone the actions of our region’s dictators and make excuses for their horrendous track record should be exposed and put to shame. On the other hand, the liberals amongst us who risk their lives as they oppose the current status quo deserve our utmost respect. Progressive forces in our region are regrettably a small minority. The international community ought to identify them and support them at the expense of the autocratic regimes that have crushed the aspirations of their citizens and drove them into poverty and despair. In the meantime, Islamists need to be constantly reminded that they have no room in politics and civil society. Rather than holding banners proclaiming that “Islam is the solution”, they have to be reminded that they have been one of the main obstacles that have slowed our region’s march from authoritarianism towards liberal democracy.

Bombing the US Embassy - What Does it Mean?

The attempted bombing of the US embassy in Damascus has stirred up a debate over whose fault it is that the attack took place.

On Sept 12, four militants attempted to bomb the US embassy with a car bomb, which did not go off. One Syrian officer was killed; three of the attackers were killed and the forth wounded in a shoot out with Syrian guards. He has since died in hospital of his wounds.

Eleven innocents were wounded including seven Syrian telephone company employees working in the area, as well as an Iraqi man and woman. A senior Chinese diplomat was hit by shrapnel while standing on top of a garage within the Chinese Embassy compound.

Imad Mustapha, Syria's ambassador in Washington speculated that Jund al-Sham may have been responsible for the attack because it has been involved in several previous botched attacks over the past two years. Here is a bit of background on the group published by the Toronto Star. But we don't know what the group represented.

According to the NYTimes, one of the attackers first tried to gain access to the embassy by brandishing a bouquet of flowers and telling the guard that he wanted to deliver them to the embassy staff as a gesture of condolence for the September 11 attacks. When the ruse didn't work, the attackers began to yell, "God is Great" and opened fire with machine guns and grenades. My good friend Ayman Abdelnour witnessed the attack and describes what happened to the NYTimes.

Although secretary of State Rice thanked Syria for helping to save American lives, the usual enmity between Syria and the US quickly returned. Imad Mustapha blamed the US for "fuelling extremism" in the region. US officials shot back that Syria supports terrorist and must stop it.

Mr. Bush's "policies in the Middle East have fuelled extremism, terrorism and anti-U.S. sentiment," the Syrian government said in a statement issued by its embassy in Washington. It said Syrian security forces fought bravely to defend the U.S. embassy.

Describing it as "a heinous terrorist attack by an extremist group," Damascus also said it was about time the Bush administration reassessed its Middle East policies.

The White House shot back, suggesting it was up to Damascus to change.

"Syrian police forces did their job, and they were professional about it," said Mr. Bush's spokesman Tony Snow. "Now the next step is for Syria to play a constructive role in the war on terror: Stop harbouring terrorist groups, stop being an agent in fomenting terror and work with us to fight against terror."

Mohammad Habash, an MP and head of the Islamic Studies Center, said it was not surprising that extremist groups would emerge to fight 'the US project in the (Middle East) region' and that there was widespread exasperation over the 'absolute US bias towards Israel' in that country's recent fighting with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.

Time Magazine's Scott McCloud has a good article, explaining that this event really means that Syria has a growing terror problem like all the other states of the region. But in the conclusion he adds a paragraph pitched to please his US readers. He says the attack can be read as "reaping what you sow" or chickens coming home to roost. As he writes:

Another way to look at it is that the Syrian regime may be reaping what it sows. Among Arab leaders, Assad is alone in his outspoken support for Islamic militant groups like Hizballah in Lebanon, and the Palestinian factions, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. U.S. officials believe that the Assad regime has secretly aided the three-year-old Sunni insurgency in Iraq, providing passage for jihad volunteers and funds, and safe haven for insurgency leaders.

But this doesn't make much sense. The al-Qaeda type jihadist groups are not emerging in Syria because Syria encourages them in other countries.

Syria has been one of the most skillful and successful opponents of al-Qaeda related jihadists. There have been no successful jihadist operations in Syria in the last 20 years. This is an excellent record when compared to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Morocco, and we won't mention American occupied Iraq. Are all these states sowing what they reap? I think not.

Why has Syria been successful against al-Qaeda-type groups? Either it is because the Syrian mukhabarat (security services) are better and more skillful then their counterparts in neighboring countries, or it is because President Asad's policy of opposing the United States has been popular and has protected Syria from the wrath of takfiri groups, despite the regime being secular and dominated by Alawites, who are considered Kufr by Salafis. It is probably a combination of both. Syria is a stricter and controlled police state than its neighbors, which gives the mukhabarat wider latitude to impinge on civil society. Also, Asad’s policies have generally been lauded by the public. Both have protected Syrians from terrorism.

If we are to follow the logic of "chickens coming home to roost." We would have to conclude that Syria has fewer chickens than other Arab regimes, the United States, Britain, Spain, Indonesia and Turkey, which have all been subject to more devistating attacks than Syria.

As for the conspiracy theorists who suggest that the attack on the Embassy was a Syrian government inspired job, it doesn't make sense.

1. Why would Syria allow a police officer to be killed and seven other Syrians to be wounded, in an unsuccessful attack?

2. To assume that the recrudescence of jihadist groups in Syria over the last two years is inspired by the regime doesn't make sense. The spread of jihadist groups throughout the region has been dramatic. Why would one assume that Syria was somehow magically spared this same phenomenon?

3. Since the end of the Lebanon War, Asad and his entire cabinet have been insisting that it is time for the peace process to be set into motion. Asad has been asking for engagement with the US and land for peace. Why would he blow up the US embassy?

4. The entire axis of "bad," or whatever it is being called these days, is lying low and trying to attenuate tensions with the West. Iran is talking with the Europeans and trying to be accommodating. Hizbullah has not made a peep in 3 weeks as it tries to get its feet back on the ground. It is complying with the ceasefire much better than Israel is. Hamas has just created a government of national unity with the PLO so that it can speak to the Israelis through a veil. Syria is insisting it wants negotiations with Israel and has accepted 1701 and accommodated Kofi Annan. There is a pattern of accommodation among the anti-American countries in the region. They are trying to patch up relations that were frayed during the war. It does not make sense for Syria to diverge from what is clearly a unified game plan on the part of the anti-American front. Why would it bomb the US at a time that it is pushing for engagement?

The success of the Syrian authorities in thwarting the terrorist operation against the American embassy underlines the usefulness of the Syrian regime in the fight against al-Qaeda and takfiri organizations. We the regime to be toppled, there would be a lot more of them in Syria.

Americans like to say that Syria is one of the worst supporters and proliferators of terrorism because it supports Hizbullah, Hamas, and other militant Palestinian organizations, lumping both al-Qaeda type jihadists in with Hizbullah and the like. This is one of the great weaknesses of American policy. It represents the blindness of American analysts.

Like it or not, there is a big difference between Salafist groups and Hizbullah or even Hamas. The latter two have fairly concrete goals that are limited to liberating land they claim as theirs. Bin Laden and associates are much more radical and have global scope and goals. Syria is not wrong to distinguish between the two. Washington would be well served to do the same. That does not mean that Washington need grant Hizbullah and Hamas all their demands - of course not. Nonetheless, Washington is foolish to believe that it cannot bargain with them and must destroy them rather than search for a political solution. There is a political solution to Hizbullah and Hamas. Bin Laden would be much more difficult to satisfy.

Farid Zakaria explains why this is a big mistake in his excellent article:

Mao & Stalin, Osama & Saddam
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

Bush is starting to repeat one of the central errors of the cold war: treating our enemies as one entity.

Sept. 18, 2006 issue - I'm glad George W. Bush is using the bully pulpit to clarify the war on terror. Many of Bush's basic ideas—such as the need for reform in the Arab world—are sensible; it's their simplistic and botched execution, coupled with a mindless unilateralism, that have derailed his foreign policy. But in the past week the president, seeking to shore up domestic support for his policies, has been redefining the nature of the enemy. In doing so he is making a huge conceptual mistake, one that could haunt American foreign policy for decades. (Continue)

News Round UP (11 September 2006)

A number of noteworthy articles have appeared this past week debating the pros and cons of engaging Syria. The most hard hitting on the con side are articles by Michael Young and Lee Smith.

On the pro side is Flynt Leverett. "Illusion and Reality: The violence in the Middle East shows the negative consequences of the administration’s contempt for engagement. But the tough talk has failed," in The American Prospect, 09.12.06.

Needless to say, I find Leverett, much more convincing than I do either of the con articles. They never explain how they are going to stop Syria from meddling, without regime change, and they don't explain how they hope to change the regime, which, at the end of the day, is the only solution for them.

The Daily Star's editorial blasts Blair on the occasion of his Lebanon visit. They laud the Lebanese statesmen who refused to meet him, claiming, "Blair openly positioned himself as Hizbullah's enemy - and therefore Lebanon's."


This small article on how Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from even discussing an Iraq postwar plan is revealing.

Army official: Rumsfeld forbade talk of postwar
By Stephanie Heinatz
Daily Press (Newport News, Va.)

FORT EUSTIS, Va. - Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a postwar plan.

Rumsfeld did replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, after Shinseki told Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure postwar Iraq.

Scheid, who is also the commander of Fort Eustis in Newport News, made his comments in an interview with The Daily Press. He retires in about three weeks.

Scheid's comments are further confirmation of the version of events reported in "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," the book by New York Times reporter Michael R. Gordon and retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor.

In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.

On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.

On Sept. 11, he said, "life just went to hell."

That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to "get ready to go to war."

A day or two later, Rumsfeld was "telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.

"Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan, Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq."

Scheid said he remembers everyone thinking, "My gosh, we're in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It's just going to be too much."

Planning was kept very hush-hush in those early days.

"There was only a handful of people, maybe five or six, that were involved with that plan because it had to be kept very, very quiet."

There was already an offensive plan in place for Iraq, Scheid said. And in the beginning, the planners were just expanding on it.

"Whether we were going to execute it, we had no idea," Scheid said.

Eventually other military agencies like the transportation and Army materiel commands had to get involved.

They couldn't just "keep planning this in the dark," Scheid said.

Planning continued to be a challenge.

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like security, stability and reconstruction.

Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

Even if the people who laid out the initial war plans had fleshed out post-invasion missions, the fighting and insurgent attacks going on today would have been hard to predict, Scheid said.

"We really thought that after the collapse of the regime we were going to do all these humanitarian type things," he said. "We thought this would go pretty fast and we'd be able to get out of there. We really didn't anticipate them to continue to fight the way they did or come back the way they are.

"Now we're going more toward a Civil War. We didn't see that coming."

While Scheid, a soldier since 1977, spoke candidly about the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, he remains concerned about the U.S. public's view of the troops. He's bothered by the nationwide divide over the war and fearful that patriotism among citizens will continue to decline.

"We're really hurting right now," he said.

Cyprus finds air defense systems on Syria-bound ship: Washington Post. Interpol told Cypriot authorities the ship, the Gregorio I, which had been loaded in China and North Korea and was destined for Latakia, was carrying ballistic missile components. Cyprus searched the ship only to discover that it contained air defense systems and not weapons. They are trying to figure out what to do with it now. This is the first indication of the power of UN resolution 1701.

Assad, Lahoud ordered Hariri murder: former Syrian officer
Agence France Presse

BEIRUT, Sept 10, 2006 (AFP) - An exiled former Syrian intelligence officer has claimed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Lebanese counterpart, Emile Lahoud, ordered the assassination last year of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri.

"Bashar al-Assad and Emile Lahoud gave the orders for Hariri's murder," Mohammed Zuhair as-Saddiq was quoted by the Beirut daily An-Nahar Sunday as saying in an interview with the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite television channel.

"No other Syrian or Lebanese officer could have done this," he said in the interview broadcast Saturday night.

Saddiq also claimed that "former Lebanese officials and certain Arab officials", whom he did not identify to Al-Arabiya, "also participated in this crime".

Saddiq, a former colonel in Damascus' intelligence service who was speaking from Paris, also claimed that he had seen the car used to kill Hariri and 22 other people in a massive explosion on the Beirut seafront on February 14, 2005.

"I saw it with my own eyes," Saddiq said of the car, which he said had been prepared for the attack at a camp in Zabadani, near Damascus.

"I gave photos of it to Detlev Mehlis," who was the first head of a United Nations probe into the assassination, widely blamed on Syria and its allies in Lebanon, and roundly denied by both. "I kept the negatives."

Saddiq also claimed to have a tape recording of a conversation in which a Damascus official had encouraged him to recant.

He said he had been promised "better arrangements" than those offered to Hassam Taher Hassam, another Syrian who had retracted similar claims to those of Saddiq in testimony to the UN panel.

Saddiq, whose extradition Syria is seeking from France, also refuted Syrian media claims that there were 64 arrests warrants pending against him.

He was arrested by French police at the request of Lahoud but was later released.

"The French judiciary was convinced that I was a witness and not a criminal," he claimed.

The UN probe has already implicated senior officials from Syria, which for decades was the power broker in its smaller neighbor.

The United Nations is currently working with the Lebanese government to create an international court to try suspects in the case.

UN Under Secretary General for Legal Affairs Nicolas Michel was in Beirut this week to discuss the mechanics of that proposal. He left on Friday, saying progress had been made but that a number of issues had been identified that still needed clarification.

Abdul Halim Khaddam's National Salvation Front has published a condemnation of Farid Ghadry's Syria Reform Party circular, demanding that Alawites head for the hills. Ghadry has latched onto a new strategy of late, which is to exploit the sectarian mistrust in Syria. He has condemned the Alawite religious sect for most of Syria's problems and is warning that the Alawite led regime will be toppled by November 8. He insists that Alawites must resign from their positions in government and head for the Coastal Mountains, should they wish to save their lives. Why November 8th? We don't know.

Khaddam' group claims that this effort to provoke sectarian civil war in Syria goes against national interest and plays into the hands of Israel. Here is his full report. بيان صادر عن جبهة الخلاص الوطني

نشرت بعض وسائل الإعلام تصريحات تضمنت دعوة المواطنين السوريين الذين
ينتمون إلى الطائفة العلوية بمغادرة المدن والعودة إلى مناطقهم، كما تضمنت الطلب من
المسؤولين العسكريين والمدنيين الذين ينتمون لهذه الطائفة، بمغادرة مراكز عملهم قبل
الثامن من تشرين الثاني القادم، موعد سقوط النظام كما حددته هذه التصريحات التي
زعمت أنها معلومات استقتها من أرفع المصادر الأميركية.

إن جبهة الخلاص
الوطني في سورية إذ تستنكر هذه التصريحات، وتدينها جملة وتفصيلاً.. لتؤكد مايلي :

أولاً - إن إطلاق مثل هذه التصريحات يضرّ بالمصلحة الوطنية العليا، ومن
شأنه إثارة فتنة طائفية في البلاد تخدم المصالح والأهداف الإسرائيلية.

ثانياً - إن المواطنين السوريين، بغض النظر عن الطائفة التي ينتمون إليها،
هم جزء أصيل من مكونات الشعب السوري ومن حقهم أن يعيشوا في أي مكان من وطنهم، وأن
يتبوّأوا أيّ منصب يصلون إليه نتيجة الاختيار الشعبيّ الحر. وليس من حق أحد، كائناً
من كان، فرداً أو دولة، أن يتجاوز هذا الحق الدستوري، ويمليَ على السوريين مكان
إقامتهم أو طبيعة عملهم.

ثالثاً - إن جبهة الخلاص الوطني في سورية، تطالب
الحكومة الأميركية بإعلان موقفها من هذه التصريحات التي زعم صاحبها أنه استقاها من
مصادر أميركية رفيعة المستوى .

إن جبهة الخلاص الوطني في سورية، إذ تؤكد أن
التغيير الديمقراطي في سورية، مشروع وطنيّ خالص، وترفض أيّ تدخّل أجنبيّ في الشأن
الوطني السوري.. لتأمل من كلّ البعثيين ورجال النظام الشرفاء، أن يكونوا على مستوى
الوعي والمسئولية، فيقفوا في صف الشعب، إلى جانب القوى الوطنية، للمشاركة في عملية
التغيير الديمقراطي

10 أيلول (سبتمبر) 2006 جبهة الخلاص الوطني في سورية

Some Lebanese Want to be More Like Iraq

The last few days have seen Italy's PM Prodi claim that Syria would allow foreign border guards along its Lebanon frontier only to have it denied by Syria.

Prodi says Syria's Assad has agreed 'in principle' to EU presence on border with Lebanon

Syria denies Assad has agreed to European guards on border with Lebanon

Prodi's spokesman, Silvio Sircana, said later Saturday that Syria's denial was accurate, adding that Prodi had not said "border guards" would be deployed and that ANSA and the premier's office were mistaken.

"I confirm that Prodi and Assad did not discuss troops or guards, but only EU personnel without uniforms or arms that will be at the disposal of the Syrian forces," Sircana said.

Meanwhile, Israel's outspoken MK Bishara is visiting Damascus with other Israeli MK's. He warns Syria of Israeli attack.
Roee Nahmias 09.09.06

Arab MK arrives in Damascus with his party members, sends alarming message that 'Israel may launch onslaught in bid to restore deterrence'
Roee Nahmias Published: 09.09.06, 19:46

National Democratic Assembly chairman, Knesset Member Azmi Bishara, arrived in Damascus on Friday and immediately began making public statements condemning the Israeli occupation of the territories.

Bishara joined his party members, MKs Jamal Zahalka and Wasil Taha, as well as former MKs Muhammad Kanan and Mohammed Miari, who have been in the city since Thursday.

In the course of his meeting with senior members of the ruling Baath party, Bishara warned Syria of the possibility that "Israel launch a preliminary offensive in more than one place, in a bid to overcome the internal crisis in the country and in an attempt to restore its deterrence capability."

During the meeting, Bishara lauded Syria's support for the national rights of the Palestinians and Lebanon, and stressed that the motivation
for the "American-Israeli attack" against Syria lies in Damascus' firm stances. "Syria is the last barrier standing before the strike," MK Bishara said. "The Palestinians living under the occupation have long realized the importance of adhering to the Arab option, in light of the scope of adventurous attempts to hurt their cultural and Arab identity," he added.

In an interview with the Syrian news agency SANA, Bishara expressed support for Syria's position and the struggle it was conducting for "the liberation of its occupied lands." Bishara also stated that Syria had been put "under pressure due to the fact it has stood by the resistance and rejected the American hegemony in the region, because it insisted on freeing the occupied Arab outside the 1967 lines, and because it has stood up for the nations' right o resist the occupation."

During the interview, Bishara declared: "We are Syria's allies and will continue to be in contact with it on the national level, through our well-known views."

MK Zahalka explained that the visit in Damascus "was aimed at expressing solidarity with Syria, as well as discussing the recent developments in the region, particularly following the wild Israeli aggression against Lebanon."

This has predictably provoked outcries in Israel that he is a traitor. (See the comment section on the above article.)

Lebanon is in the full throws of post-war debate. This NY Times article quotes two major Maronite za`ims - Gemayel and Chamoun. They believe the war has demonstrated the power of Hizbullah. Their answer to growing Muslim power is to advocate greater federalism a la Iraq, so Christians can protect themselves from Hizbullah, which they expect to gain greater parliamentary power. As Hizbullah makes its way into the center of Lebanese politics, the Maronites want to move toward the fringes. Washington can take some satisfaction from the fact that the Iraqi democratic example is having some impact.

Lebanon Left to Face Most Basic of Issues
War Exposes Deep Conflicts About the Nation's Identity and Its Future
By Edward Cody
Washington Post
September 10, 2006; Page A20

Perhaps more important, they noted, was Nasrallah's postwar assertion that Hezbollah must be taken into account in government deliberations from here on out. The party ran for office in the last elections, gaining seats in parliament and two ministers in Siniora's cabinet. But Nasrallah seemed to be saying his group will be seeking more power now that, in his words, it has fought a war on Lebanon's behalf.

A share of power that reflects the Shiites' true place in the population would probably change Lebanon's orientation significantly, the Sunni and Maronite observers predicted. But a refusal to acknowledge the demographic change and Hezbollah's enhanced status after the war, they said, would be a recipe for more intercommunal conflict. As a result, the timeless view from Gemayel's terrace may be in for a change.

"I don't see Lebanon surviving as it is today," said Dori Chamoun, leader of the Maronite-based National Liberal party and son of a former president and longtime political figure, the late Camille Chamoun. "It is inevitable that the Christians will have a smaller share of the country. I only see one solution, cantonization. Everybody wants it. Nobody says it out loud."

In a recent book, Gemayel proposed abandoning Lebanon's current system and replacing it with election of the president by popular vote and decentralization along the geographical lines that largely define where Muslims and Christians live in any case. "The institutions of Lebanon are tired," he said. "They are drained of their blood."

The losers in such a change would largely be Sunni Muslims, Chamoun pointed out, because by and large they have not carved out sections of the country as theirs. Public Works Minister Mohamad Safadi, a Sunni who lives in Beirut, said he was discussing the problem with his wife recently and reassured her that, if worse comes to worst, they could always live in their weekend house -- in the quintessentially Christian port of Byblos.

General Aoun - the other Maronite leader is hoping to ride the Hizbullah wave right over the walls of Baabda.
INTERVIEW-Christian leader flays Lebanon's "mafia" cabinet
By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent
RABIYEH, Lebanon, Sept 10 (Reuters) -

Lebanon's government is clinging to power so it can steal foreign aid meant for reconstruction after Israel's war with Hizbollah guerrillas, Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun said on Sunday....

Aoun said he was not demanding at the moment that the incumbent, Syrian-backed President Emile Lahoud, resign. Parliament, which elects the president, has been dominated by an anti-Syrian coalition led by Saad Hariri, the son of slain former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, since the election. Aoun says the results were skewed by an unfair electoral law.

"We can dissolve parliament and we can do elections," he said. "If not, okay, it will favour conflict and confrontation."...Some of Aoun's sympathisers found this baffling, while his critics accused him of political opportunism, but he dismisses as a "media plot" the suggestion that there is anything incongruous about his relationship with Hizbollah.

He says his discussions with the group prompted it to tone down rhetoric about liberating Palestine and limit its demands to the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israel and an end to Israeli occupation of the disputed Shebaa Farms area. His accord with Hizbollah, which has resisted U.N. demands for its disarmament, calls for the issue to be solved in the context of a national defence strategy for Lebanon.

"Since we don't have force to solve the problem, we have to develop trust and then to have an honest broker to build confidence between Hizbollah and (Saad) Hariri," Aoun said....With the war over, Aoun says the need for political change is urgent, though his critics say it would be disruptive.

"We need to have a government really representative of the people, sharing power and decision-making," he declared. Reuters

More leaders in the States are beginning to speak out about the wrong direction the US is heading in:

Top military leaders insist new U.S. strategy is desperately needed in Iraq...to Revive American diplomacy in the Middle East.

"Everything we are doing brings Iran and Syria closer together when we ought to be doing everything we can to split them apart," said the senior general. "We need a U.S. ambassador in Syria. (The Bush administration recalled the U.S. ambassador, who hasn't returned.) It would help in Iraq and have spin-off benefits in Lebanon. You can't exert influence if you are not there. We need to be talking to the Syrians. Hell, we need to be talking to the Iranians. This whole axis of evil thing is bull! All it did was drive our enemies closer together.

"Wilkerson said the administration should "bring in the surrounding states, not just Iran, though it is the most important one, and get them to share the load moneywise and diplomatically. The Bedouins have got to stop putting their money on all sides, hoping that one will win. They must put their money exclusively on the government in Baghdad. They have to understand that the U.S. is not leaving until the situation is stable."

Wilkerson said the United States also has to start a "rational dialogue" with Iran that encompasses everything from the MEK guerrillas to al-Qaeda to nuclear weapons to Hezbollah, Iraq and the Persian Gulf. He said the administration also should start negotiations to settle, once and for all, the Israel-Palestinian situation, including talks with Syria on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, with Lebanon and with the Palestinians themselves.

"The U.S. must be an honest broker in all of these talks — not Israel's lawyer," Wilkerson said. "The U.S. must be willing to bang heads, all of them if necessary."

Finally, Wilkerson argued that the United States must ask international institutions such as the United Nations to help. "You have to cajole and wheedle and coerce your allies to do likewise. If this means eating a little crow, you just ask for the pepper and the cayenne," he said. Joseph L. Galloway

Syria wants peace on basis of relevant UN resolutions -- official
DAMASCUS, Sept 10

(KUNA) -- Syria expressed hope that the US administration and other western nations would acknowledge the keenness of Arab countries, including itself, to achieve comprehensive and just peace in the Middle East.

Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad said in statements published Sunday in Al-Thawra newspaper that his country hopes that America's efforts would head in the right direction and would reach practical solutions for the conflicts that face the people of the Middle East.

Mekdad said "the recent victory in Lebanon encourages us to be optimistic...we cannot remain silent about losing rights...and the occupation of our lands." Syria wants comprehensive peace in the region based on the UN Security Council's resolutions 242, 338 and 497 which was issued 1981 regarding the occupation of the Golan heights and which declares Israel annexation of the heights as illegal.

Syria wants peace according to the land-for-peace accord reached during the Arab-Israeli peace conference, held in Madrid in the early 90s, as well as the Arab peace initiative that genuinely calls for establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

On the investigative committee of the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafic Al-Hariri, he said those who planned the plot aimed at destroying the special relationship between Syria and Lebanon and at creating instability in the region, he added. He expressed Syria's keenness on cooperating with the investigative committee in order to show that Israel was the one to benefit from assassinating Al-Hariri.

On terrorism, he said, Syria condemns and combats international terrorism and it differentiates between terrorism and people who fight for their rights and freedom.
KUNA

جنرال امريكي: لا دليل على ان ايران تدعم متشددين في شمال العراق An American General announces that their is no evidence that Iran is supporting extremists in the North of Iraq.

The Wall Street Journal writes that Bush was behind the Khatami visit. Is he looking for a way to climb down?

WSJ: Bush personally signed off on Khatami visit to U.S.
By Reuters 10/09/2006

U.S. President George W. Bush personally signed off on a visa allowing former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami to visit the United States because he wanted to hear his views, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Khatami, Iran's president from 1997 to 2005, is the most prominent Iranian in decades to visit the United States, outside of the United Nations' New York headquarters.

His five-city speaking tour is controversial given U.S. accusations that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, sponsors terrorism and arms Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

"I was interested to hear what he had to say," Bush told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. "I'm interested in learning more about the Iranian government, how they think, what people think within the government."

The INDEPENDENT, 10 September 2006, explains that:

The "war on terror" - and by terrorists - has directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor nation on earth.

If estimates of other, unquantified, deaths - of insurgents, the Iraq military during the 2003 invasion, those not recorded individually by Western media, and those dying from wounds - are included, then the toll could reach as high as 180,000.

"Hizbullah in the Eyes of Syrians during the War," by Hassan Hassan and Abdullah Taa`i

Hizbullah in the Eyes of Syrians during the War
Hassan Hassan and Abdullah Taa’i
Written for Syria Comment
Sept. 6, 2006

No sooner had the flags in support of the Brazilian World Cup team begun to be taken down than did Hizbullah flags start going up in streets of Damascus. The colour did not change, I hasten to add. Every car had the yellow flag and the picture of Hassan Nasrullah. Smokers carried lighters with the photo of the ‘Leader of the Resistance’. Everybody was talking cheerfully about Sheikh Nasrullah. People in front of the TV often reiterated “Verily, the party of God is the victorious’’ (A Quranic verse). The Syrian people were acting and talking as if Hizbullah were the military wing of Syria.












Astonishingly enough, there was complete harmony between the Syrian government and the people when it came to their attitude towards the war. This harmony was not enforced by the Syrian media this time. The war seemed to unite the two which is something other means could not do for a long time. Even some liberal youth and critics of the government started to say: “Let the government do whatever it likes as long as it supports our national cause. We are willing to die of hunger rather than die with humiliation.” Cutting off electricity for a long period of time and using private establishments were most welcome on the Syrian people’s part.

You could find the influence of the war on every detail of the Syrian life: take the bus, go to hospitals, visit any public centre, talk to anybody in the street and you would be flabbergasted at how Hizbullah is idolized. The way the Syrian people were enthusiastic about the war was even more extreme than that of the government. I admit that I was taken aback by this. The vast majority of people believed that Israel would have invaded Lebanon even had Hizbullah not taken Israelis hostage or carried it its provocative cross border raid. All believed that Israel would lose is an article of faith and just a matter of time.

More astonishingly, people were fired up with the idea that Syria should get involved in the war and that they should follow the example of the Lebanese resistance in Syria, particularly in the Golan Heights. The Syrian people, however, had a gut feeling that nothing of that sort would happen, perhaps thanks to the long silence on the Syrian front.

Let us elaborate and talk about the Shi`i-Sunni relationship during the war, and maybe after. Perhaps because Hizbullah tends to address the whole Muslim community, the vast majority of Sunni Muslims wholeheartedly supported them. I hardly met a Sunni who didn’t support the party. Those Sunnis who were not supporting it were those who are strongly adherent, and usually fanatic, in their Sunni Islam. Shiites, on the other hand, seemed to be ecstatic with their new-found fame. The war feed their egos. They started to swagger with the idea of ‘I belong to this doctrine’.

As a whole, the Syrian people started to see Israel as a weaker version of its former self. Previously Israel seemed to have had an all-encompassing power that could challenge all external influence; it seems that Hizbullah has revealed a tender under belly. "In this mishmash of appeasement and retreat, Syrian people rapidly lost their fears and came to see Israel as a paper tiger”, as Dr. Daniel Pipes put it, and “weaker than a spider's web.", as Hassan Nasrallah put it.

During the war, it was the first time that a great number of people in Syria spoke in bad terms about Saudi Arabia and in good terms about Iran and the government. The position that Saudi Arabia adopted during the war surprised many Syrians. Many people now believe that the war was very revealing about Saudi Arabia’s and Egypt’s real position. The leading Sunni countries were against Hizbullah and practically pro-Israel, while Iran and Syria (Shi`i states) were with Hizbullah, the only surviving power that stands against ‘the USA-supported enemy’. This war, seemingly, has discredited Saudi Arabia quite a lot.

In reality, the only thing that has deprived Sunni Muslims of sleep is Iran. They want to be with Hizbullah but they are afraid that that would only make Iran stronger and stronger until it has the strength to devour them. They all believe that Iran has a certain agenda for Sunnis. They cite examples of Shi`itization of certain areas of Syria. Al-Jazira - the East and North East of Syria - has witnessed Iranian activities to convert Sunnis to Shiism. Those sorts of activities infuriate Sunnis.

During the World Cup, everyone in Syria was obsessed with his or her team and acted as if he or she were a footballer, but when the final match ended, people came back to their normal lives. Likewise, with the Lebanon War, every Syrian became obsessed with it, but when it ended, they returned to their normal lives. There are parts of Syria, however, that are still bearing the burden of the war. A distant and God-forsaken place, such as Abu Kamal, more vulnerable to the cynical abuse of power than other districts of Syria, cannot restrain the authorities from taxing its poor inhabitants. Every bus in Abu Kamal must pay 3 USD, every employee 2 USD, every family or extended family must pay 140 USD, in order to support ‘the resistance’ – that is not to mention those who must process government paperwork in a governmental centre; they must pay 2 USD to boot.

Why are other areas not asked to carry the burden of the resistance? Do high authorities know this? Being but a humble Syria, I am not the best to answer this question. While all the rest of Syria is coming back home, the poor people of Abu Kamal must foot the bill. Syrian Shi`is are taking pride in their Sheikh – and why not? But the people of Abu Kamal, who are Sunnis to the man, are the ones who pay the price. The question now, though, is: Is this money - which is estimated to be hundreds of thousands of dollars - going to go to the hands of Hizbullah …?

Written by Hassan Hassan and Abdullah Taa’i

Addendum by Joshua Landis

I just got off the phone with Druze friends, who have recently returned to Canada after having spent the summer in Suwayda' in the Jabal Druze. I asked them about the war and how it was perceived in Suwayda'.

Ghada told me that it was quite extraordinary to be home during the war. “Every one was rooting for Hizbullah and the Lebanese,” she said. “We were so happy to see that there were some Arabs who were smart enough and technologically and strategically advanced enough to give the Israelis what they deserve and what they have been dishing out to us for so long.” But then she explained that every household in Suwayda’, including hers, had filled up with cousins and relatives from Lebanon, who had fled the Shouf. They were not happy. They supported Junblat and complained that they would lose their jobs and livings and that they would have to eat ka`ak and tea.

I asked her if the Druze were taxed as people were in Abu Kamal. She responded in some consternation, “Tax? I thought it was a donation. My family donated and everyone from our neighbourhood did as well. I don’t know if it was a tax. Maybe it was. I will have to ask my husband.”

She said that the one perplexing event was the mass demonstration organized by the state. Schools and work were stopped for a day and everyone was called out onto the streets for a large demonstration. The speakers were sounding with silly slogans and other things that no one believes in. “That was humiliating and disturbing,” she said. “The young people seemed to enjoy it and entered into the spirit of the occasion, but for the older people, who know better, it was just humiliating. Up to that point everyone had handled themselves with such dignity." But she added, “that is the Syria I belong to.”

She ended by explaining how scary and sad it was too. She explained, "In the beginning many men in the reserves were called up for duty, when the government feared that the war might expand, but in the end they were sent home. The saddest part was during Kana, when we saw all the pictures and TV coverage of the children who were needlessly killed.” Ghada explained how she had been at neighbours with eight or nine other people watching and there was not a dry eye in the house. Everyone was weeping. It was so horrible. Those are the poor people who paid the price. I kept on trying to turn off the TV, but all the men wanted it on all day."

Syria Fights for Control of Palestine File

Reinoud Leenders, who was International Crisis Group's man in Lebanon for many years, has written up his opinion of the Lebanon War and how it will effect Hizbullah, "MIT's Electronic Journal for Middle East Studies soon.

Syria is doing everything to show that there will be no progress on the Palestine front without engagement. It is obstructing Egyptian efforts to take back the Palestine portfolio as this article makes clear.

No Egyptian mediation between Syria and Saudi Arabia (from mideastwire.com)

Elaph, a pan Arab website, reported in the September 6 issue about the latest developments in the diplomatic row between Saudi Arabia and Syria. The website wrote: “Diplomatic sources in Damascus denied to Elaph the existence of any Egyptian mediation between Syria and Saudi Arabia with the charged atmosphere between the two countries and the media campaigns launched by Syria in the last two days through websites. But the sources considered that it is ‘natural in case there is any dispute and in case the crisis escalated that one of the Arab sides might interfere to calm things down’. The sources considered that ‘Qatar is not qualified to play this role because it doesn’t have good relations with Saudi Arabia while Jordan is not on good terms with Syria so the only candidate for the job is Egypt’.”

The website added: “The sources confirmed that ‘Egypt had already mediated between Syria and Turkey before and Syria and the United States as well as other western countries’. The sources pointed to the unlimited support presented by the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to the young Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad and stressed that it is not hidden from those close to Mubarak that the Egyptian president wants to repeat the successful Syrian experiment in Egypt as he wishes to surrender his position as president to his son Jamal even though he has denied it repeatedly’. In answer to a question about the collapse of the Saudi-Egypt-Syria axis, the sources announced ‘The Saudi-Egypt-Syria axis is frozen now as a result of the dispute, but that doesn’t mean that it collapsed’. They added ‘when things get better and if Syria emerges ‘intact’ from the investigation into the assassination of the ex Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, the three countries will reactivate it’.”

The website continued: “The sources stressed that the latest speech by president Al-Assad caused a deterioration in the Syrian relations with the Arabs and that if not for the speech then relations would have returned to normal with Damascus with the end of the Israeli aggression on Lebanon which stalked up the differences in the last period…” - Elaph, United Kingdom

Syria is also backing up Khalid Mishaal, the Hamas leader living in Damascus, in his efforts to keep Haniyya, the Hamas PM in Palestine, from concluding a deal with Israel without Syrian participation, as this article explains: Syria disrupting Shalit negotiations
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH, Ramallah

At the same time, Syria is insisting to Annan that if it is engaged, it is willing to help as Ibrahim al-Hamidi explains in this al-Hayat article:
Damascus: total commitment to what Annan heard from Al-Asad...

On September 5, the daily Al Hayat reported: "High-level Syrian sources told Al-Hayat yesterday that Damascus "is totally committed" to what President Bashar al-Asad told UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday and that "tangible steps" would be taken in the coming few days "to translate this on the ground". Annan had announced that President Al-Asad informed him that Syria would take "as soon as possible measures to control the borders" with Lebanon that include increasing the number of, and training, the border guards and increasing the road blocks with the possibility of forming joint patrols with the Lebanese army. Remarks by some Syrian officials after Annan's announcement raised some questions about the extent of Damascus' compliance with these "promises". Al Hayat learned yesterday that Syria "during the past two days held contacts with international parties and foreigners to confirm the commitment to what was agreed upon".

"The sources asserted that "Syria has not backed down and is committed to what President Al-Asad told Annan" and pointed out that the coming days would see "measures to tighten the border control and stop the smuggling". Asked about Information Minister Dr Muhsin Bilal's statement to Al-Hayat last Friday that his country "will not agree to the demarcation of occupied territories", the sources answered that Damascus "did not promise the UN secretary-general to approve the demarcation of the Shab'a Farms so as to say that it has backed down on this. Annan heard the same words." But they pointed out that Syria "is open to establishing diplomatic relations with Lebanon in accordance with a sovereign decision by the two countries" and that it "is ready" to receive Prime Minister Fu'ad al-Sanyurah in accordance with the "official invitation" that Qatari Emir Shaykh Hamad Bin-Khalifah conveyed to him. Al Hayat, United Kingdom

Most Lebanese hail Hezbollah chief for war conduct (AFP)
7 September 2006

BEIRUT - A majority of Lebanese believe their country and Hezbollah won the month-long war with Israel and applauded the militant group’s chief Hassan Nasrallah, a poll published on Thursday suggested.

The poll in the English-language Daily Star newspaper said 78.7 percent of respondents thought Nasrallah had demonstrated a good or excellent performance during the war, launched by Israel after Hezbollah staged a cross-border raid and captured two Israeli soldiers on July 12.

The poll showed that 57 percent approved of Hezbollah’s action in snatching the soldiers while 34 percent were against it.

Fifty-nine percent of those questioned said Hezbollah and Lebanon won the war, with some 30 percent saying no one had.

Israel’s stated goals in its offensive were to recover the two captured soldiers and to drive Hezbollah and its weapons out of southern Lebanon. The soldiers are still being held, and the question of Hezbollah’s weapons has not been resolved.

Among politicians’ approval ratings, Nasrallah was followed by parliament speaker Nabih Berri at 71.2 percent and Christian former general Michel Aoun at 58.1 percent. Prime Minister Fuad Siniora came in fourth with only 49.1 percent.

The poll, which surveyed 27,800 Lebanese in August, also said a majority of the people were determined to stay in the country despite the further blow to the economy dealt by Israel’s offensive.

A total of 58.9 percent of respondents said they planned to stay in Lebanon, while 15.3 percent said they intended to leave and 21.5 percent were waiting to see if the situation settles after the August 14 UN-brokered ceasefire.

Lebanon has a population of around four million.

Hariri Trial:
Lebanese law makers seem anxious not to give up control over the Hariri trials to an international body. Although Lebanese Justice Minister Charles Rizk says there is consensus for an international court to be set up to decide on who killed Hariri, he insists it be put to a vote in the Lebanese parliament. This means trouble.

Lebanon seeks clarification of UN Hariri tribunal plan (AFP)
7 September 2006

BEIRUT - Lebanese Justice Minister Charles Rizk said on Thursday a UN proposal to set up an international court to try suspects in the 2005 murder of former premier Rafiq Hariri needed clarification.

Rizk was speaking after a meeting with the UN under secretary general for legal affairs, Nicolas Michel, who was in Beirut to present an outline of the plan, first suggested by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in March.

“We received the proposal, and it needs clarification before the final version” is adopted, the minister told journalists, without elaborating.

Rizk said the idea was for the tribunal to be composed of two chambers.

The first, a trial court, would have a panel of three judges, one of which would be Lebanese. The second, an appeals court, would have five judges, including two Lebanese.

He also said there was a “national consensus” over forming the tribunal.

“This is a working visit. (Michel) will inform us about the procedures to be followed, then I will present a proposal to the government and a decision will be taken. That will be submitted to parliament for a vote.”

Michel Chossudovsky believes preparations are being made for "World War Three." In his article, The Next Phase of the Middle East War 09/05/06 "GlobalResearch" he argues that "Israel's war on Lebanon is an integral part of a US sponsored "military roadmap".

Issa Touma, the inveterate regime wrestler and brave Syrian artist is being hassled by the Baathist authorities in Aleppo yet again. W.J.T. Mitchell writes about Issa's latest run in: The Continuing Saga of Government Interference with the Arts in Syria

Robert Kaplan - Why He is Wrong about Syria

SHELDON KIRSHNER in his "War may bring Israel to talks with Syria"has written one of the best arguments for why Israel should reverse its policy toward Syria and sit down at the negotiating table. It has a lot to gain. Syria has a lot to offer. Syria also has a lot to gain and there is every reason to believe it is serious. Even Abdel Halim Khaddam, the ex-vice President who is not fighting against Asad, maintains that Syria was serious about peace in the 1990s. President Bashar has made it clear in every major speech that Peace remains Syria's strategic first choice.

He quotes Sharon's famous last remark about the Golan - "in November 2005, Sharon ruled out engagement with Syria categorically, saying that he wished to retain the Golan: “I will not negotiate with Syria because I will never leave that area.”

Sharon backed up his rejection with two arguments. One, Sharon chose to ignore Syria because it is "too weak" to sign an agreement. Has the Lebanon War changed that calculation?

Two, Sharon, in common with his predecessors, argued that the Golan is absolutely vital for Israel’s security. "But Israel’s former chief of staff, Gen. Moshe Yaalon, a hawk who may soon join the ranks of Likud, has said that Israel could defend itself without maintaining a grip on the Golan." What is more, Israel's vulnerability does not come from the Golan, but from Hizbullah and Hamas. If Israel can attenuate that vulnerability by returning the Golan, is it worth it?

Shaul Arieli in his Threatening Syria comes with price: Military threats come at expense of socioeconomic pledges," reminds Israeli politicians that opinion polls show that Israelis want guns over butter. By going to war against Syria, the government would have to scupper social programs that Israelis say are more important to them than increasing the defense budget.

These arguments for engaging Syria do not convince either Shmuel Rosner or Robert Kaplan. I will comment following the article. Here is Rosner:

How Syria Survives
Bashar Assad may be stupid, but he has a very smart survival strategy.
By Shmuel Rosner in Slate
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2006, at 1:27 PM ET

It was mid-1957 when President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles started to worry seriously about the fate of Syria. "There is evidence in Syria of the development of a dangerous and classic pattern," Dulles wrote. Soviet aid was rolling in, and Washington got nervous about what would follow: "The country will fall under the control of international Communism and become a Soviet satellite."

A lot has changed since those days. The Assad family came to power in Syria, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the domino theory no longer applies. But some striking similarities still pertain: Syria is a weak player in a tough neighborhood, making itself visible by aligning itself with troubling trends. Now it's the Iranians helping them, it's Lebanon and Iraq they are destabilizing (and not Jordan, as was frequently the case in the past), and its Islamist terrorism and not Communism that makes the United States worried and angry. The headache is similar, as is the failure to find the right remedy.

"By most indicators of strategic importance … Syria would seem destined to be no more than a minor player, relatively easy for greater powers … to marginalize and ignore," writes Flynt Leverett of the New America Foundation in his new book, Inheriting Syria. Nevertheless, Syrians have been able to show, again and again, that taking them lightly is a big mistake. The disruptive power they apply—by supporting terrorists in Palestine and Iraq, by trying to sabotage any attempt to achieve peace between Israel and the Arab world, by defying U.N. resolutions, by meddling in Lebanon's affairs—is something U.S. administrations, including the current one, have been unable to overcome.

For the United States, Syria is a constant reminder of the limitations of a superpower. President Bashar Assad, ridiculed by many as an imbecile—in Washington three weeks ago, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres called him "the son of a clever man"—is a constant reminder of an even more troubling phenomenon: You can be a "stupid" leader and survive. That is, if you believe Assad really is stupid.

The evidence is not as overwhelming as you might think. Assad was patient enough to make the U.N. inquiry into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri a waste of time; Syria was found guilty but didn't pay a price. He was smart enough to support Hezbollah in Lebanon, defying threats by the international community, and was able to claim victory when the outcome of the Israeli-Hezbollah war was, even by favorable accounts, uncertain.

Like an acrobat on a tightrope, Assad meticulously walks the fine line between two losing strategies: He is not enough of a nuisance to make it necessary to deal with him urgently (Iran, the much stronger country in his camp, and the Syrian circus' safety net, plays that role), but not quiet enough to make himself negligible and marginalized. Assad is a fine acrobat—a joy to watch—as long as he doesn't fall. And he understands the ways of the tumbler, knows that the only way for him to stay above the rest of the crowd is to keep moving in the same direction. One stop, even a minor hesitation, will be the end of his journey.

In the West, many think he is dumb, because he doesn't do what the international community wants him to do. But Assad has other bosses: He looks up to Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, and to the rulers of Iran. If he positions himself between these two, he is safer. The world has tried—is still trying—to defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon. And it is also struggling to deal with the mullahs in Tehran, with zero success so far. Syria is always the country we can deal with "later" or "after" the one we are really busy with.

In a January 2002 piece in the National Journal, Jonathan Rauch reported, "When I asked how high Syria would be on the Bush Administration's post-Afghanistan … agenda, [the official] replied that the Administration is still sorting out its priorities, but that Syria 'is going to be on the list, and it's not going to be at the bottom.' " Right after U.S. troops entered Baghdad in 2003, Time magazine reported, "A group of the President's top foreign-policy advisers … gathered in the White House to discuss the road ahead. Only half the meeting was devoted to developments in Iraq. The rest of the session was spent debating how to tackle a fresh target: Syria." In the July 2003 London Review of Books, Charles Glass asked, "Is Syria Next?"—a headline so tired it shouldn't even be sold in a used-book store. But there it was, popping up again in 2004, when Timothy Garton Ash asks "Next Stop Syria?" in Britain's Guardian.

Fast-forward to 2006, and Israel has decided to target Hezbollah rather than the Assad regime. Meddling behind the scenes wasn't provocative enough to justify a frontal attack, Jerusalem calculated. Some think it was the wrong decision. At the Pentagon, senior officials insisted on asking why Israel didn't take the opportunity to deal, once and for all, with Damascus. They asked, but the answer never came, and the moment has passed.

So, now, again, Syria is next in line. But first come: dealing with Iran's nuclear weapons, stabilizing Lebanon, the massacres in Darfur, the insurgency in Iraq, the opium crops in Afghanistan, and the midterm elections. If Assad keeps moving along his tightrope, he might prove that the next station is the one that never comes.

Rosner makes two arguments here. One is that smart Americans going back to Secretary of State Dulles have recognized that Syria is the problem. It should be at the top of US foreign policy concerns. Two, is that Bashar al-Asad is really dumb. He only seems smart because his cowardice had allowed him to hide behind Iran, Hizbullah and others, thus allowing him to dupe the smart Americans. In short, America should start with regime change in Syria; it would be easy.

Of course Rosner conveniently forgets to explain that "smart" Dulles tried regime change in Damascus by organizing a coup in 1957. What was the result? He failed. Rather than bringing Syria into America's orbit, he pushed it into the arms of Nasser and Russia, which ultimately led to the Baathist take-over. Dulles, who Rosner uses as his example of a smart American, was actually stupid and mistaken about America's ability to change the regime in Syria. Syria's most pro-American and able politicians, who were implicated in the failed coup effort, were jailed or discredited. It was a fiasco and still colors Syrian attitudes toward the US.

Robert Kaplan, like Rosner, believes that the US should do some major surgery on Syria and is a proud neoconservative. Unlike Rosner, Kaplan is able to use history to good effect to present a sweeping understanding of the region. Just because he is smart, however, doesn't mean he is right. Here is his article - comments to follow.

Setting History in Motion
By Robert D. Kaplan
6 September 2006
The Wall Street Journal Europe

No leader since Napoleon has roiled the Middle East as has George W. Bush. By invading Iraq, President Bush set history in motion. By doing so without a strategy for governing it afterwards, he did not plan for the worst, and so the worst has happened. Iraq has become the pivot for strengthening the radical forces that the invasion should have weakened. Yet to assume history follows a straight path is fatalism; not analysis.

A strengthened Shiite world was not an unintended consequence of the Iraq war. Toppling a Sunni dictator in predominantly Shiite Mesopotamia had to do that, whether the invasion resulted in stable democracy, benign dictatorship or chaos. People forget that moving history forward after 9/11 required shaking up the suffocating complacency of the Sunni Arab police states from where the terrorists originated.

Back then, Iran seemed to offer an opportunity for regional change. It was among the Muslim world's most sophisticated populations, a significant portion of which was pro-American, embarrassed by their own regime. In late 2001, when the seemingly reformist president, Mohammed Khatami, was in power, a gradual political shift in Teheran without military action seemed possible, particularly if somewhat stable, somewhat pro-American governments emerged on Iran's borders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But ideas, particularly bold ones, are hostage to the quality of their execution. There was indeed a political shift in Iran -- for the worse. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of the Islamic Republic in June 2005, in the wake of the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the withdrawal of Syrian troops from that country, and historic elections that saw millions of Iraqis hold up the purple finger against tyranny. In the dynamic environment that Mr. Bush had unleashed, even a flawed occupation led to encouraging developments -- however superficial -- to which Iran's radicals reacted. Iran's advantages were these: Though Iraqis had voted, they had no governing authority worth the name; likewise, the Syrian troop withdrawal from Lebanon could not erase the fact of Lebanon's demographically ascendant and militarized Shiite community.

Statements by the Arab League and the governments of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia initially blaming the violence in Lebanon on Hezbollah, rather than on Israel, stood as evidence that a heightened fear of Shiism had indeed shaken these states out of their complacency. Arab support proved short-lived, though, because of Israel's dragged-out and bungled operation. But while Iran is strengthened, it is not dominant: The radical Islamic universalism that it once sought to represent has been narrowed to sectarianism with no appeal beyond its own Shiite community. Iran plays the spoiler in Iraq. But Iranian politics will become gnarled by its interaction with a more pluralistic, ethnically Arab, Shiite southern Iraq. Americans are tearing their hair out over Iraq. The Iranians will be too, if there is a full-scale civil war.

What if Iran's former diplomatist president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, had won the election against Mr. Ahmadinejad? Iran's nuclear program, which Mr. Rafsanjani did so much to develop, would be quietly chugging along, without the need for chest-thumping theater or threats to annihilate Israel; so would be the continued Iranian arming of Hezbollah, without the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. Because Mr. Rafsanjani would be whispering sweet-nothings into the ears of America's European allies, Iranian power would be in full ascendance, with only the U.S. and Israel complaining.

But a strengthened Iran, ruled by a hothead, has frightened the Sunni world out of its lethargy, making it realize, potentially, the usefulness of the U.S. in adjusting the balance of power against a threat greater than Israel. Meanwhile, this hothead, having aroused both Sunni Arab and European states against him to a degree unprecedented in Iran's post-revolutionary history, has fostered certain unease at home.

Here I pause to recollect the cost of the Cold War's end. Full-scale civil wars erupted in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The breakup of Yugoslavia led to 200,000 deaths and a million refugees. Sectarian violence in the southern region of the former Soviet Union resulted in an additional 150,000 dead and 1.5 million refugees, with rivers of blood in Georgia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. In Tajikistan alone, 50,000 people died violently. Russia teetered on the edge of chaos. Its soaring crime rate -- the result of Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization and the crumbling of the Soviet police state -- resulted in 100,000 additional murders, when the murder rates of the 1980s are subtracted from later ones. Applying the same formula to South Africa suggests perhaps over 100,000 extra murders and a larger number of extra rapes as the price of dismantling the apartheid system.

As for the cost of invading Iraq, the sanctions regime before the war killed at least 500,000 malnourished Iraqi children. There were, too, the deaths from Saddam's desultory bureaucracy of repression and torture. Of course, the decision to dismantle government authority in Iraq put the Bush administration under the obligation to engage in intensive planning for the post-invasion phase -- with the emphasis on worst-case scenarios.

But worst-case scenarios were considered only for the invasion itself. The problem with Ahmed Chalabi was not that we supported this secular, pro-American Shiite -- no sleazier than any other politician who has since emerged in Baghdad -- but that the U.S. trusted his opinions about how Americans would be greeted in Iraq, and what they would find (or not find) there. That was irresponsible not because Mr. Chalabi turned out to be wrong, but because he was optimistic. Military planning should never depend on optimism.

To assume things in Iraq had to turn out as they did, no matter the strategy or degree of planning, is fatalism. But that doesn't mean local conditions don't exert an influence on outcomes. Europe's recent past should warn the U.S. about the Middle East: recall the violence that ensued when authoritarian regimes unraveled in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, where populations were divided on the basis of sect and ethnicity, and kept poor by a mafia state socialism. The states closest to Central Europe, blessed by the enlightened imperial legacy of the Prussian and Habsburg empires, have enjoyed a much easier transition to democratic rule than those under the rule of the Ottoman Turks. And while the Balkans constituted among the most advanced parts of the Turkish Empire, much of the Arab world, greater Syria and Mesopotamia especially, constituted its most backward region.

The countries that lie between the Mediterranean Sea and Persia had little meaning before the 20th century. Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq were but vague geographical expressions. Jordan wasn't thought of. When we remove the official lines on the map, we find a crude finger-painting of Sunni and Shiite population clusters that contradict national borders. Inside these borders, the governing authorities in Lebanon and Iraq barely exist. The one in Syria is tyrannical but fundamentally unstable; the one in Jordan rational but under quiet siege. If there is a part of the Middle East that dimly approximates the former Yugoslavia it is the region from Lebanon to Iran. We face the unraveling of the state system that for a century was the solution to the demise of the Ottoman Empire.

Take Syria, at once a Brezhnev-style dictatorship, a land of Web logs and Islamic revivalism, of on-again off-again clampdowns, with rapidly diminishing oil reserves, and with no real history as a state, unlike Egypt or Iran. Syria's future is problematic. The broad desert reaching between the Anti-Lebanon range and the Zagros Mountains, encompassing Damascus and Baghdad, Aleppo and Mosul, Homs and Fallujah, will be a semi-chaotic meeting ground of ideas and ideologies, liberalism and terrorism, commerce and crime, where Turks, Kurds, Persians, and Sunni and Shiite Arabs engage and affect each other as never before since the late 19th century. In this most backward realm of the Ottoman Empire, the transition away from the Cold War-era Arab police states will make that in Central Europe and the Balkans away from communism seem effortless by comparison.

With its ethnic and sectarian divisions, any democracy in Syria will be a shambles. To wit, what the Lebanese, Palestinian and Iraqi governments all have in common is that they can't get anything done. But this democratic failure is happening alongside an authoritarian one. Iran appears strong, in part, because Sunni Arab dictatorships like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are in tired phases of transition. Given the leadership crisis in the Sunni world, imagine how Saddam Hussein might have dominated the Arab masses -- with rising oil prices, the $50 billion ongoing Oil for Food coverup, a leading-nowhere regimen of no-fly zones, and European and Chinese intrigues to restore his legitimacy in return for energy concessions. Saddam as the new Nasser is a plausible alternative history for Iraq.

So instead of Saddam bestriding a vast and frenzied Sunni mob, we will see a string of messy, Mexico-style scenarios (the replacement of decisive one-party states with far more chaotic multi-party ones), but without Mexico's level of institutionalization that, as low as it is, remains ahead of most countries in the Middle East. To say that George Bush has been among the greatest agents of freedom in the region is a nebulous historical statement. It avoids the harder question: Did he go about it prudently? Given that good planning is the better part of valor in any decision-making process, the provisional answer is "no."

Next year could see the beginning of a massive draw-down in Iraq, from 140,000 to 40,000-or-so troops: a number by which the military manpower strain becomes alleviated. An increase in troops above 140,000, coupled with the willingness to destroy Shiite militias, could dramatically improve the situation. But outside the universe of some policy journals there is no appetite for that. The political calculus is disturbingly inexorable: No more troops in Iraq now or ever, and the bulk out before the 2008 presidential season. Without immediate, demonstrable progress in Baghdad, the Republican Party will overtake the White House on this issue.

U.S. Marines, special operations forces and air assets will remain in a few staging posts to strike at international terrorists, to balance against Iran and Syria, and to try to prevent all-out war between what is emerging as three institutionally separate parts of the country. Gen. George Casey's assertion that the Iraqi Army will be ready to stand up in 12 to 18 months disregards the fact that there are no reliable civilian institutions for it to represent. How these soldiers perform in the field is one thing; the social pressures they face quite another. Rather than democracy, the Bush administration may have to settle for mere governance of almost any sort. Think of late medieval maps, with no bold lines, only indistinct regions of Persian influence shading Kurdistan, Mesopotamia and elsewhere.

The carnage caused by Mr. Bush's shattering of the post-Ottoman state system is minor compared to that in the former Soviet Union and its shadow zones after the Berlin Wall fell. Can he keep it that way? Can he undermine Iranian hegemony even as he reduces whatever control he has in Iraq?

The president may need to pull closer to the Saudi royals, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah. Weakened by America's response to 9/11, terrified by Israeli incompetence in defending their interests in Lebanon, these regimes still demonstrate more enlightenment than their populations. They fear Iran more than do the Europeans. Whatever America's ultimate decisions in regards to a nuclearizing Iran, it requires all the help it can get. That is what comes of bold ideas, poorly executed.

Mr. Kaplan is a national correspondent of the Atlantic Monthly and Class of 1960 distinguished visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.

For over a decade, Kaplan has been hammering away at his comparison between the Balkans and the Greater Syria region. There are similarities - both were Ottoman lands, both encompass fragmented populations, divided by religion and ethnicity, both suffered dictatorial regimes.

Because of these common traits, Kaplan then argues, they must share a common fate. Like the Balkans, the Levant states will know horrible civil war and be divided up and rearranged. Its future is the Balkans. He goes so far as to say that this is what Syrians secretly yearn for, even if they don't say it in so many words or don't even know it themselves.

Here is an extract from a 2005 article of his in which he prophesizes that Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon will lead to the collapse of Syria's Alawite-led regime and division of the country.

Nonstop Turbulence
Rather than Iraq, it could be Syria that ends up collapsing.
BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Sunday, March 20, 2005; Wall Street Journal

Rather than Iraq, it could be Syria that ends up collapsing. Syria's pan-Arabism was a substitute for its weak identity as a state. Greater Syria was an Ottoman era geographical expression that included present-day Lebanon, Jordan and Israel-Palestine, to which the truncated borders of the current Syrian state do great violence. Ever since France sundered Lebanon from Syria in 1920, the Syrians have been desperate to get it back. The total Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon--that President Bush is demanding--will undermine the very political foundation of the minority Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, whose own ethnic group spills over into both countries and whose political survival depends on proving that he is a better Syrian nationalist than the majority Sunnis.

Syria is but a Levantine version of the former Yugoslavia--without the intellectual class which that other post-Ottoman state could claim at the time of its break-up (since Hafez al-Assad's rule was so much more stultifying than Tito's). In Syria, as in the former Yugoslavia, each sect and religion has a specific geography. Aleppo in the north is a bazaar city with greater historical links to Mosul and Baghdad than to Damascus. Between Aleppo and Damascus is the increasingly Islamist Sunni heartland. Between Damascus and the Jordanian border are the Druze. Free and fair elections in 1947, 1949 and 1954 exacerbated these divisions by dividing the vote along sectarian lines. Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 after 21 changes of government in the previous 24 years. For three decades he was the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world, staving off the future while failing to build a national consciousness by virtue of a suffocating and calcifying tyranny. The question is: As President Bush humiliates Assad's son-and-successor into weakness, will Syria become a larger version of Civil War-era Lebanon?

We can go even farther back to 1993 and this article, in which he explains to us what Syrians yearn for:

Syria: Identity Crisis
The Atlantic Monthly February 1993

Hafez-al Assad has so far prevented the Balkanization of his country, but he can't last forever...

Shishakli publicly lamented in 1953 that Syria was merely "the current official name for that country which lies within the artificial frontiers drawn up by imperialism." Unfortunately for him, he was right.

Syria will not remain the same. It could become bigger or smaller, but the chance that any territorial solution will prove truly workable is slim indeed. Some Middle East specialists mutter about the possibility that a future Alawite state will be carved out of Syria. Based in mountainous Latakia, it would be a refuge for Alawites after Assad passes from the scene and Muslim fundamentalists -- Sunnis, that is -- take over the government. This state would be supported not only by Lebanese Maronites but also by the Israeli Secret Service, which would see no contradiction in aiding former members of Assad's regime against a Sunni Arab government in Damascus. Some Syrians, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, look forward to the collapse of both Israel and Jordan and their reintegration into Syria, as they waited in the 1940s for the incorporation into Syria of the autonomous states in Latakia and Jabal Druze. Should Assad's death lead to chaos in Damascus, it is not out of the question that the region of Jabal Druze would break away from Syria and amalgamate itself with Jordan. Because Lebanon's current stability rests upon Syrian military domination there, a weakening of government institutions in Syria could result in a renewal of the Lebanese civil war.

What Syria deep down yearns for -- what would assuage its insoluble contradictions -- is to duplicate the process now under way in the Balkans. That is, it wishes to repeal the political results of the twentieth century -- in Syria's case, the border arrangements made by Great Britain and France after the First World War.

Kaplan is undoubtedly correct when he argues that most Syrians, throughout most of the last century, were unhappy with the way the French and British divided up the Ottoman lands. But that does not mean there is a better way to divide it up now or that the US would be well advised to try to turn the clock back 90 years in order to try its hand at redrawing the map of the region. Kaplan argues that American can do a better job than the French and British did back in 1918. I doubt it.

His presumption and argument is that because we can see the future -- which is that there will be even great death and destruction in the Syrian lands than in the Balkans -- we should intervene now and short-circuit the process. Because the US is more clairvoyant and smarter than others, it can mitigate the death and destruction, which is inevitable, by fixing the problem sooner, rather than waiting for the big bang later. He is convinced that even with all America's bungling in Iraq, it has saved lives there compared to what "history" had in store for it. History for Kaplan is the Balkans.

One obvious error in Kaplan's logic is that he insists that more developed regions (the Balkans) kill fewer people when they go to war over national issues than do poorer and less nationally developed regions (Syria or Iraq). The opposite would seem to be true. Europe, the most developed region of the world engaged in a 30 year war from 1914-1945, motivated by dreams of expanding national borders and rearranging the map. 50 million Europeans were killed. The Balkans in the 1990s, less developed than Europe, killed fewer than either Germany or France. Why shouldn't Syria be able to sort out its national problems with even fewer deaths yet. It's backwardness is advantageous. Not only have Syrians had more incapable armies because of their poverty, but their loyalties when national borders were drawn were largely limited to clan, village and sect. Building national consciousness and solidarity is not easy in any context. Being poor and less literate does not make one more likely to kill.

The lesson of this is that we don't know what history intends. We don't know what Syrians yearn for. We don't know if America would do better than France. We cannot use historical analogies with confidence. We are almost always wrong when we do.

Kaplan, who got his training serving in the Israeli army, is right to council pessimism when trying to intervene in the Middle East, but he is too optimistic in believing that the Israeli model will work for the rest of the Middle East. Like a number of Israeli neocons, Kaplan presumes that because Jews have successfully used their religious bonds to confirm their ethnic and national identity, so should Alawites, Shiites, Maronites, Druze and the other religious groups among Arabs.

Many Alawites and Druze did dream of having their own state during the first half of the 20th century, but they have largely given up on this dream and substituted another – which is to be happily integrated into Syrian society. Neither sect wants to return to its traditional mountain villages. Sunnis also dream of a properly integrated society and have always refused to accept dividing the mountain regions from the Sunni heartland. They did not like the other regions of Greater Syria being separated from French Syria, but, by and large, they have learnt that instant unity schemes will not work and that romantic nationalism has been costly. Pan Syrian, Arab, and Islamic dreaming is not dead, but most Syrians know that such reverie will remain frustrated until some EU type unity can be built on the back of international law and deals struck by sovereign and secure Arab states. Religion remains the big barrier to national integration. But redrawing Arab borders based on religion would create more problems than it would solve and destroy more lives than it would uplift. Giving into religious prejudice for the sake of exploiting the loyalties religion can provide is not the solution to Middle Eastern problems.

The best path forward for the United States is not to presume that it can redraw the map of the Middle East, but to insist that internationally recognized borders are preserved and respected. It should not compound the mistakes of the French and British by making even more mistakes; rather, it should remain committed to seeing through the success of the borders that were agreed upon by the League of Nations and confirmed by the UN. There were no “correct” borders in 1918 or 1922. A century of history has given some legitimacy to the necessarily artificial borders and propagated hundreds of national institutions that are defined by them. To erase all this in a fit of arrogance would be foolish.

Addendum:

EHSANI2 said... (Wednesday, September 06, 2006)

Growing up in Syria, the country’s education system had drilled into our heads that the Sykes-picot agreement was an absolute disaster for our nation and region.

I could not help but notice how the conclusion of your article differs from the country’s education curriculum. I always thought that changing the curriculum is long due for a major overhaul anyway. Perhaps the education ministry and the Baath higher ups can use your line of thinking as a starting point.

Joshua Landis said... (Wednesday, September 06, 2006)

Ehsani, Baathist schoolbooks have changed little since they were first codified in the mid 1960s at the acme of Pan-Arab dreams. They still sing the Arabist romantic nationalism line, alas.

I believe that most Arabs - even Syrian Arabs - have largely rewritten those books in their own minds. Some have substituted Pan-Islamism for Pan-Arabism, but even the Muslim Brotherhood has agreed to allow each regional branch to pursue its unique regional methods and policies, giving a bow to local national realities.

The official Baathist mind has changed even if the textbooks have not. This last year at the height of the Mehlis report anxiety, Foreign Minister Mu`alim and two other senior Syrian officials held a round table covered by al-Hayat during which they decried the prospect of a second Sykes-Picot treaty for Syria, following the lines of the US division of Iraq.

The subtext was that Syria didn't like the original Sykes-Picot treaty, but that today, all it wants is to hang on to the national borders it has.

Kaplan is right when he argues that the invasion of Iraq has caused a major shift in consciousness among Arabs. The shift is not the one that Kaplan thinks it is however. It is to make Arabs appreciate the borders they have and to fear rash adventurism. This is one of the reasons that Bashar al-Asad is eager to sign a peace agreement with Israel and to get Syria's borders nailed down for good.

Bashar has been nailing down Syria's borders one after the other. He jettisoned Syria's claims to Antochia in order to patch up relations with Turkey. He handed back the thin sliver of Jordanian land snatched in 1970 in order to gain Jordanian support. He pulled out of Lebanon in order to preserve stability in Syria. He built a wall along the Iraqi border in order to seal its troubles off from Syria. Now he is casting about for peace with Israel.

Syrians have not complained about this border clarifying because they understand that it is better for them. They are tired of adventures and have given up on getting back lost land. The Golan seems to be the one region they care about.

This all promotes some hope that Syrian borders are becoming real and may lead to an eventual consolidation of Syrian national consciousness.

Maybe the textbooks are out-dated?

Kanaan Speaks from the Grave? & Syria in Iraq

Mideastwire.com has translated a few stories of interest. The first is the al-Seyassah story reporting that Ghazi Kanaan, the Minister of interior and long time intelligence chief and master of Lebanon who committed suicide last fall at the time of the UN's release of its first interim report on the Hariri investigation, recorded all he knew about the Hariri murder. Although plausible, this sounds like black propaganda timed to build suspense before the release of the final UN report, which is due. The source was a "Gulf diplomat," who also described how Kanaan was murdered and where he was shot. How he could know this information, which was surely not included on a pre-recorded video by Kanaan, is a mystery and hard to figure. Sounds like gory detail thrown in for a little extra sensation, but which ultimately is unbelievable. Here is the article.

“Ghazi Kanaan in videotape before his assassination reveals names...”

In its September 4 edition, Al Seyassah, an independent daily, reported that: “According to diplomatic information at the UN in New York, there was ‘a possibility that a dramatic surprise might emerge in the investigations into the assassination of former Lebanese Premier Rafik Al-Hariri, which might give the Syrian regime in Damascus a deadly blow’, in light of the increasing talk about ‘finding the most truthful evidence which proves that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad himself, along with a few members of his family and close aides, have supervised, minute by minute, the course of the assassination operation since its early stages and months before it occurred, in terms of planning, preparation and execution, in collaboration with Lebanese political, military and security leaders, as well as groups affiliated to a number of parties, factions and Salafi groups’.

“A Gulf diplomat at the UN headquarters in New York, stated that the information – the source of which he preferred to keep out of the spotlight for the time being – pointed out that ‘this mind-blowing surprise was due to the possible existence of a videotape, recorded in picture and sound, by the head of the Syrian military intelligence and former minister of interior…, Major General Ghazi Kanaan, a few weeks before his suspicious ‘suicide’’.

“[The diplomat continued:] ‘In this tape, he revealed the plot to assassinate Al-Hariri from A to Z, with names, dates and the details of the crime from its planning stages until its execution in February 2005, in addition to the reasons which made the head of the Syrian regime make such a move, the most prominent of which is the fact he received false information which claimed that Al-Hariri was planning with foreign and Arab sides to overthrow the Ba’thist regime in Damascus, and that these plans had reached very advanced stages since the issuance of resolution 1559, which called on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon’.

“The Gulf diplomat added in a phone conversation with Al Seyassah in Paris, that ‘the intelligence bodies of Major General Asef Shawkat, Al-Assad’s brother-in-law and the second men in the state today, had information according to which Ghazi Kanaan was planning to leave the regime and resort to the US with all the documents and information regarding the assassination of Al-Hariri, as well as the assassination and attempted assassination plans which preceded and followed it in the ranks of Lebanese politicians and journalists’.

“Also, according to the information of the Gulf diplomat, ‘the Syrian minister of interior (Kanaan), had been placed along with his family members, his aides and followers outside of the security circle of the Ba’th party politicians and businessmen, and under strict observation… He realized that his plans to leave the regime and resort to the US were uncovered, and he was determined to elude [them] sooner. However, everything got out of his control’.

“According to the information, ‘on October 12 2005, and as he had just arrived to his office at the Ministry of Interior, he might have received a phone call or a warning from one of his close aides, regarding the fact that Asef Shawkat and his people were heading personally to confront him with the information they had about his plan to escape and his relations with the Americans. He realized that it was all over, which would justify why he left his office and went home for 45 minutes then came back to the Ministry: he smuggled out the videotape and surrendered it to someone that is not necessarily a member of his family…’

“According to the information of the Gulf diplomat: ‘The regime of Bashar Al-Assad and his brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat, might not know about the existence of Ghazi Kanaan videotape…’ The diplomat expressed his belief that Kanaan might have resisted Shawkat and his people when they confronted him in his office with the information they had about ‘his betrayal of the party and the president’ and that after he realized what was going to happen to him following his arrest, he desperately attempted to use his personal weapon. However, they beat him by shooting him all over his body, then gave him a mercy bullet in the head…” - Al Seyassah, Kuwait

“Riyadh whispers to Damascus: this is the end between us”

Elaph, a pan Arab website, reported in its September 5 issue about the diplomatic differences between Saudi Arabia and Syria. The website reported: “It seems that the silent crisis between Riyadh and Damascus is on its way towards escalation after the servant of the two holy shrines, king Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz, refused to receive one of Al-Assad’s delegates who came to Jeddah last week in an attempt to explain his president’s speech which aroused the anger of the Saudi government according to what Arab sources told Elaph. This practically marks the end of the time of ‘low voices’ in what relates to conflicts inside the Arab house. In an indirect reply to the criticisms that came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan against Hezbollah for capturing two Israeli soldiers which led to the war in Lebanon, the Syrian president announced: ‘If the resistors are adventurers then do we say that Sultan Basha Al-Atrash and Ibrahim Hananu (Syrian indepen! dence heroes) and Sa’d Zaghloul (Egyptian patriotic leader during British colonization) were adventurers’. The Saudi government was the side that described Hezbollah’s operation as an ‘uncalculated adventure’.”

Iraq
Ex-Iraqi Prime Minister Ja`fari in a long interview with al-Hayat explains why Iraqis are unhappy with Syria, claiming they are involved with the insurgency. He denied that Iran plays any part in hurting Iraq or the helping insurgents. "There are detainees who confessed on television screens that they were trained in Lattakia. When infiltrators come from Syria, we believe there is a bad intention," he said. Here is a bit of the article:

Ja'fari to Hayat: Sunni & Al-Sadr movements spared country

On September 1, the daily Al Hayat reported: "Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja'fari has disclosed that the inclusion of Shi'i leader Muqtada al-Sadr's movement and the Arab Sunni one in the Iraqi government and the entire political process spared the country a "destructive war" after the bombing of the golden domes of Imams Ali Al-Hadi and Hasan al-Askari shrines in Samarra. Speaking during a long interview with Al Hayat in London, the former Iraqi prime minister stressed that personal differences and not political ones were behind his departure from government, that they originated from the other side, and that this was done "in a way which contravened the democratic process".

"While rejecting Washington's accusations against Tehran of involvement in backing the Iraqi insurgency, he accused Syria of involvement in the violence and said: "There are detainees who confessed on television screens that they were trained in Lattakia. When infiltrators come from Syria, we believe there is a bad intention." Asked about these countries' motives, Al-Ja'fari talked about "their fears from the democratic process that is beating the drums of the danger of the peoples' moves against the regimes they did not elect. For some of them the sectarianism complex went to their heads", while "others feared the international factor and turned Iraq into a stage for settling accounts on its territories and at the expense of its people and not their people".

One Syria Comment reader wrote yesterday to ask: "Can somebody explain to me why Syria and Iraq are not friends even though Syria and Iran are friends and Iran and Iraq are friends, so how come Syria and Iraq are not friends?" Here is the answer I posted yesterday in the comment section.

At Monday, September 04, 2006, Joshua Landis said...
Norman, It is confusing. My best guess is that competition between Sadrists and SCIRI is at the root of this. Muqtada al-Sadr traveled to Damascus and established good relations there. He is also opposed to Iraqi federalism, which wins him support in Damascus as well. He is considered less beholden to Iran than SCIRI. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution has increasingly backed the federal idea and the creation of a Southern Shiite State. The militias of both Shiite groups have been clashing and will vie for leadership in Iraq.

British intelligence claims that Damascus is still the jumping off point for British recruited for Jihad in Iraq. Al-Qaida in Iraq flies people to Damascus and ferrets them into Iraq. Syria seems to have arrested some of these folks, but not all. Why and to what extent it is willfully closing its eyes to this traffic? I don't know.

Syria has also resisted arresting and turning over top Saddam regime figures living in Syria. It made a small gesture in this direction last year, but when the US, refused to offer Syria anything in return for this help, Damascus called a stop to its cooperation and has not budged since.

It would seem that Syria is keeping as many cards on the table in Iraq as it can. It is trying to cultivate connections with the Sunnis, Secular Arab nationalist Shiites, the Sadrists, and even with the Kurds. In the meantime, Damascus is trying to frustrate the Americans and PM Maliki, who Syria sees as America's man in Baghdad. It is also siding with Sadr against SCIRI.

This means that PM Maliki and SCIRI will refuse to reward Syria with better official relations. They understand that Syria, in order to target the US, will target them. Iraqi authorities have become much more polite about their objections to Syrian policy than they were even a year ago. Should the US begin to withdraw from Iraq, Syrian policy might change rapidly. Syria and Iran will become competitors in Iraq, once their primary interest in pushing America out is accomplished and no longer unites them.

Also see t_desco's coverage of the assassination attempt on the Lebanese Police Officer involved in the probe into Hariri's murder.

Finally, James Denselow sent me a summary of Syria's Information Minister Muhsin Bilal's press interview in London this weekend:

Visit of Syrian Minister of Information Dr. Mohsen Bilal
Tuesday 5 September 2006

Yesterday saw the visit of the Dr Bilal, Syrian Minister of Information, to London. During a morning press conference chaired by the Director of the Syrian Media Centre Mr Armanazi, Dr Bilal described the reason for his visit, which is unofficial due to the current state of UK-Syrian relations, as an opportunity to ‘talk directly’ to British and EU public opinion and try and improve a better understanding of Syria in the West.

Dr Bilal highlighted that public opinion in Syria and the greater Middle East is wracked by questions over the West’s interference in Arab internal affairs, support given to Israel and political insults directed at regional leaders.

Following the 34 day conflict in Lebanon, the Minister was clear in expressing Syria’s position on the future of the Middle East; put simply the Lebanese experience has shown that resistance is a legitimate reaction to occupation and that without addressing the Israeli occupation of Arab lands the region will experience a ‘hurricane’ of violence every few years. The trans-national connections and globalised world that we live in today means that such hurricanes inevitably impact beyond sovereign borders.

Dr Bilal warned that while Syria is determined to peacefully regain the Golan Heights, that the Lebanese and Palestinian experiences in resistance have shown that there exists ‘another road’ to achieving ones aims.

In respect to Lebanon-Syria relations the Minister confirmed what was discussed in the meeting between President Assad and UN Secretary General Koffi Annan, that a positive outcome of UNSCR 1701 could see Lebanese and Syrian forces in respective control of their joint border. In respect to questions of border demarcation Dr Bilal said that such an act could only occur following complete Israeli withdrawal from the Sheeba farms.

In response to a question concerning Syria’s potential role in mediating the release of Israeli soldiers held by Hizbullah the Minister stated clearly that ‘Syria cannot be a mediator in prisoner release’. Instead Dr Bilal suggested that a neutral mediator such as Germany, could play such a role.

When asked to talk on US-Syrian relations the Minister, Dr Mohsen bemoaned the fact that relations were completely nought, in slight contradiction to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s assertions that channels of sorts are still open. Dr Mohsen stressed that Syria is at ‘the heart of the Middle East’ with influence ‘beyond its borders’ and welcomed future visits from any European leaders to Damascus.

The press conference was attended by representatives from Reuters, BSN, BBC, Syria Media Centre, UPI, The Independent, The Guardian, CNN, Al Jazeera

Iraqi, Lebanese and Israeli Authorities Criticize Syria

Elaph has printed an interview with Iraq's Ali al-Dabagh, the official spokesperson for the Iraqi government in London, in which he explains that Iraq wants good relations with Syria, but Syria is not reciprocating. He explains that Iraq's relations with Syria are tied to Syria's willingness to hand over the supporters of terrorism in Iraq who have taken refuge in Syria. They also demand that Syria stop Jihadists from coming into Iraq. So far Syria has not done this, he explains. It is not America which prevents Iraq from developing better relations with Damascus, he insists, but Syria's unwillingness to improve security measures and cooperate with Iraq's leaders.

Here is the article:

علي الدباغ : علاقتنا مع سوريا مرتبطة بتسليمنا رموز الارهاب

الناطق باسم الحكومة العراقية علي الدباغ ل"ايلاف":
علاقتنا مع سوريا مرتبطة بتسليمنا رموز الارهاب

علي الدباغ
أسامة مهدي من لندن: قال الناطق الرسمي باسم الحكومة العراقية الدكتورعلي الدباغ ان الرئيس السوري بشار الاسد يطلق تصريحات تؤلم العراقيين واشار الى ان رئيس الوزراء العراقي نوري المالكي لن يزور سوريا مالم تتعاون مع العراق امنيا وتسلمه جميع رموز القتل ممن يمولون الإرهاب ويدعمونه ويقودونه ".


ايلاف :
اعلن اكثر من مسؤول عراقي في اوقات مختلفة عن قرب استئناف العلاقات مع سوريا او زيارة وزير الخارجية السوري وليد المعلم لبغداد لكن شيئا من ذلك لم يتحقق لحد الان فما هو سبب ذلك وهل ان الولايات المتحدة تقف مانعة لذلك كما تشير بعض المعلومات ؟ ومتى سيزور المالكي سوريا وهل هناك مطالب عراقية من سوريا لتنفيذ هذه الزيارة ؟

الدباغ :
كان مقرراً أن يزور السيد وليد المعلم العراق خلال مؤتمر المصالحة في شهر تموز (يوليو) الماضي ضمن الوفود العربية الداعمة لمشروع الجامعة العربية ولم تتم الزيارة بسبب تأجيل المؤتمر، نحن بالتأكيد في الحكومة نرحب بزيارة الأشقاء والأصدقاء وسيجدون كل الود والتقدير لأننا بحاجة لدعمهم السياسي، لكن العلاقة مع سوريا هي حب من طرف واحد، فنحن نحب سوريا وشعبها ورئيسها المرحوم حافظ الأسد لمواقفه مع شعبنا أيام محنته ومن الوفاء أن نتذكر كل ذلك، لكن الآن سوريا لا اتبادلنا هذا الحب بل تأتي الينا عبر سوريا مجموعات سوداء تقتل شعبنا ويتم تهريب السلاح للإرهابيين عبر سوريا ويصول ويجول في سوريا أعداء شعبنا ممن يمولون الإرهاب ويدعمونه ويقودونه وقد قلنا ذلك لهم مرارا وتكراراً ولدينا الأدلة والبراهين على ذلك، لكننا نتصرف بحكمة وتعقل ولانريد ان نسلط ضغوطا اضافية على نظام الرئيس بشار الأسد الذي يمر بأزمة في علاقاته الدولية ويطلق أحيانا تصريحات تؤلمنا في العراق عن عمليات الذبح والقتل اليومي لشعبنا. نحن نريد علاقات وثيقة مع سوريا على أن تتعاون معنا امنيا وتسلم لنا كل رموز القتل والإرهاب وان تمتنع عن دعمهم تحت عناوين المقاومة، وعند ذلك سيجد السوريون اننا سنكون الحصن المانع لأي خطر يتهدد شعب سوريا ولن نكون مقرا أو ممرا لأي قوات ضد سوريا فدماؤنا اختلطت بدماء السوريين عبر كل حقب التأريخ.

نحن نريد علاقة وثيقة مع كل الدول الإقليمية وايران بضمنها وليس للولايات المتحدة اثر في منع هذا التوجه فنحن نتصرف بناءا على مصلحة شعبنا وليس هناك نية لزيارة السيد رئيس الوزراء قبل أن تستكمل فصول حل هذه الملفات مع سوريا الشقيقة.

Another story that has been circulating in the Arab press is that Syria, Iran and Hizbullah have a three step plan to bring down the Lebanese government with the help of General Aoun and other anti-Hariri politicians. The basic idea is: Stage one, stay cool while Israel withdraws its troops. Stage two, create paralysis in the government by opposing all Siniora measures. Stage three, begin large scale demonstrations which will give cover for special inciters to provoke clashes with the police and get people shot. Then push for a vote of no-confidence in parliament and force new elections. The only source quoted in this story is a "high placed" government official. There can be little doubt that opposition figures in Lebanon and their supporters further a field are strategizing to bring down the Hariri coalition that presently governs Lebanon, and which many have already accused of being complicit with Israel and the US during the war. Whether this is their plan is hard to say, but it is hard to think of a different plan.

Two articles extolling Syria for taking in Iraqi Christians have recently appeared. One by GABE HUCK in the National Chatholic Reporter, "The Statue of Liberty belongs in Syria," September 1, 2006. The other is by William Dalrymple, "The final place of refuge for Christians in the Middle East is under threat," in the Guardian, September 2, 2006. "As Iraq and Lebanon are torn apart by sectarian mayhem and war, only Syria's religious tolerance offers refugees shelter."

Syrian president offers to rebuild 3 south Lebanon villages
International Herald Tribune, France

Skepticism abounds about Syria's promises to AnnanYa Libnan, Lebanon - Sep 2, 2006Beirut- Lebanon's media on Saturday dismissed pledges secured by UN chief Kofi Annan from Syria to respect an arms embargo against Hezbollah and help implement ...

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday it would exert its maximum force if it had to go to war with Syria. "Syria knows that we limited ourselves in our operations in Lebanon, and it knows that in an operation against Syria, against Damascus, Israel won't limit itself,"

Iran: Iranian news claims Mottaki: Iran, Syria foil plots hatched by American, Zionists Tehran, Sept 4, IRNA

Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Farouq Taha conferred here Monday with Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on regional developments.

According to the Information and Press Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the meeting, Mottaki said that continued consultations between Iran and Syria has foiled sections of plots hatched by the Americans and the Zionists.

Political death of former Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon, victory of Hamas and Islamic resistance in Lebanon are regarded as new phenomena in regional equations, Mottaki pointed out.

The more the pressure exerted by the Americans, the people will become firmer to defend their sovereignty and independence, he said.

Deployment of troops to Afghanistan and Iraq under the guise of campaign against terrorism is to deceive world public opinion, he said.

After several years, lack of security is the main problem in Afghanistan and Iraq and continued presence of occupying forces in Iraq has fomented spread of terrorism in this war-stricken country, Mottaki said.

Lauding the bold stance of Syrian president in dealing with regional development, he said the Americans are in a very weak position and are not in a position to ignite another war for American taxpayers.

Highlighting Iran's peaceful nuclear activities which is in total conformity with international rules and regulations and under IAEA supervision, he criticized scientific apartheid and monopoly of technological know-how of the West.

The Americans and Zionists try through illogical means to retrieve their disgraceful defeat by Lebanese resistance movement, he said adding that the world Muslims view Iran and Syria as heros and respect them.

The Syrian deputy foreign minister arrived in Tehran to attend the third Iran-Syria Joint Consulate Commission meeting.

Whither Arab Shiites

Vali Nasr has written very persuasively that the US must accommodate Iran as a new Middle East leader and deal with the new Shiite bloc which is beginning to flex its muscles. Scott Sullivan takes issue with Nasr in this article, copied below, arguing that Nasrallah, Asad, and Muqtadda al-Sadr will emerge as a new Arab bloc within the Shiite alliance to counter-balance Iran's drive for leadership in the region.

The implication is that Arab nationalism remains a galvanizing force, even in the face of religion. If Bashar al-Asad emerges as the leader of such an alliance (he is the only one who heads a state among them), Syria would gain important leverage in mediating the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It would also potentially make him a key player in mediating the conflict between Israel and Iran.

This is very provocative, but little suggests that either Washington or Israel has the foresight to assist the emergence of such an Arab-Shiite bloc, not to mention the diplomatic skill to then accommodate it sufficiently in order to dull the force of Iranian meddling in the region. Two headlines in today's papers make it clear that Israel is heading in the opposite direction: Israeli Foreign Minister Rules Out Peace Talks With Syria and the London Times article this Sunday entitled, "Israel plans for war with Iran and Syria," suggesting Israeli leaders are coming up with contingency plans for attacking both Syria and Iran.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt will have to take the lead in feeling out Asad and Nasrallah to see what possibility exists for their trimming Iran's sails. That will be the only way to preserve a modicum of Arab unity in the region. Massoud Derhally argues in his article, "The Rise of Shiites" that Saudi Arabia has been reforming its anti-Shiite, Wahhabi doctrine in order to ensure that its Shiite citizens remain loyal to the monarchy and resist Iranian temptations. Is it possible that Riyadh may generalize this policy to the rest of the Arab World in order to keep Arab nationalism a more powerful loyalty than religion?

Here is Scott Sullivan's interesting but flawed (see comment section remarks by Raf and Why-discuss on this - I had called it "smart" since retracted!) article:

Syria and Hezbollah Will Stop Iran
by Scott Sullivan
The Conservative Voice
September 03, 2006

Normal and inevitable checks and balances are coming into play in the Middle East that will defeat Iran’s efforts to dominate the region. This development should be more widely understood as it will refute the scaremongers who say the region will inevitably fall into Iran’s orbit. The scaremongers use this reality of growing Iranian/Shia power in the region to justify a policy of appeasement of Iran.

The most recent proponent of appeasing Iran is Vali Nasar, author of “The Shia Revival,” who appeared on Meet the Press last Sunday and who has met with President Bush. In meeting with President Bush, Vali Nasar was preaching to the choir, as certain of President Bush’s policies -- such as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, as well as Bush’s continuing acceptance since early 2006 of Hezbollah hegemony in Lebanon and Iranian hegemony in Iraq -- were the primary cause of the Iranian/Shia revival.

Vali Nasar makes a strong case for the US and the Arabs to talk to Iran, in other words, to make more concessions to Iran. Nasar’s assessment of Middle East realities, however, goes off the mark when he says Iran will shape the region. This is because Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, whose genuine interests move in the direction of opposing Iran, will shape the region.

In fact, the reality of rising Iranian power in the region puts power increasingly into the hands of Syria and Hezbollah, as well as the anti-Iran Shia in Iraq such as Muqtada al-Sadr. Both Iran and the West are appealing to them for support, which puts them in the middle position as regional power brokers.

Moreover, President Assad of Syria, Sheik Nasrallah in Lebanon, and Muqtada al-Sadr are natural allies because they agree on the necessity of a unified Iraq and a unified Lebanon. They also represent the forces of Arab nationalism. Iran, in contrast, seeks a new Persian empire and is relentlessly sectarian. To this end, Iran perceives opportunities for spreading its influence in the breakup of Iraq and Lebanon into small and vulnerable states. The entire concept of democratic multi-ethnic and multi-confessional states as found in Iraq and Lebanon is foreign to Tehran, which views its own Azeri and Kurdish populations as major threats.

Noted Middle East authority Juan Cole captured the reasons for the rise of Muqtada al-Sadr and a revived Arab cohesion with this prescient observation about Iraq, written in 2004. “The Iraqi rebellion in April,” he observed, “signals the re-emergence of Iraqi nationalism, and perhaps even of Arab nationalism, as am important factor in the post-Ba’ath period.” See “Iraq: All together against the Occupation,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2004.

Such a revival of Iraqi nationalism on a new basis is anathema to Tehran, which is cooperating with Iraq’s Kurdish parties to suppress Muqtada al-Sadr, expel Iraqi Sunnis from Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk, and partition Iraq into three separate states, one for the Kurds, one for the Shia, and one for the Sunnis. Just last month, Iraq’s SCIRI party, 100 percent under Iranian influence, announced plans to set up a separate Shia state in southern Iraq, modeled after the existing Kurdish state.

Iran’s Annexation Plan for Iraq is Failing.

Iran has stumbled badly with its plan to annex Iraq. First, Iran’s power grab in southern Iraq is meeting fierce resistance on the part of local Shia. The Washington Post covered this issue in detail last week. In brief, forces loyal to Sheik al-Hasani in Karbala, which is a Holy City for the Shia, are fighting back against the SCIRI and its Iranian sponsors. Meanwhile in Basra, southern Iraq’s most important city, forces hostile to Iran control local government.

Second, the Iranian-US “Operation Baghdad,” nominally intended to improve security in Iraq’s capital but in reality aimed at suppressing anti –Iran elements such as Muqtada al-Sadr and some of the Sunni groups, has backfired. Rather than eliminate al-Sadr’s influence, it has boosted his influence. Iraq’s current government deserves credit for supporting al-Sadr during this critical period.

Third, Sheik Nasrallah’s victory in Lebanon could bring bad news for Iran. For one thing, Iran will be obliged to pour money into Lebanon, which will weaken Iran’s economy and render it more vulnerable to Western sanctions. Second, Iran’s money will be used to build the prestige of Sheik Nasrallah, who competes with Iran’s president Ahmadinejad to lead the Shia communities in the Middle East. As noted earlier, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad have quite different objectives in Iraq and Lebanon.

Fourth, Syria is unhappy with Iran’s attempted takeover of Iraq and Lebanon (as well as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority). Should Iran succeed with this imperial project, Syria would likely bear the brunt of Israeli counterattacks while gaining nothing in return. Syria could kiss goodbye to the Golan Heights forever. Lebanon, once a wealthy colony for Syria, would be turned into a basket case that would further drain the already weak Syrian economy. Moreover, Iran’s success in Iraq and Lebanon would marginalize Syria and turn it into a dependency of Iran, much as Hamas is today. In addition, the establishment of Shia theocracies in Iraq and Lebanon would threaten the legitimacy of President Assad’s Ba’athist regime, and would lead Syria down the path of confrontation with Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. President Assad is too intelligent to fall into Iran’s trap for Syria. Finally, Syria has much more to gain by coming to terms with Israel. As goes Syria, goes Hezbollah.

Outlook

Iran will push hard to steer events in the Middle East with minimal consultations with its partners Assad, Nasrallah and al-Sadr. Most likely, Iran will escalate against Israel, which maximizes Iran’s leverage over its partners as well as the Sunni states. Iran’s partners must realize, however, that if Iran wins, they lose by becoming marginalized and victims of Israeli counterattacks. Yet if Iran loses, they also lose, and will be dragged down unto a whirlpool of perpetual conflict. Assad, Nasrallah, and al-Sadr will find a third way, one that leads to their own victory.

“Moral Clarity and the Middle East," by Amb. James Dobbins

“Moral Clarity and the Middle East”

Ambassador James Dobbins, Director, International Security and Defense Policy Center, RAND Corporation, was also the Bush Administration's first special envoy for Afghanistan.

Gave this speech at
The American Strategy Program, New America Foundation
August 24, 2006

Amb. Dobbins:

“Either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” that’s how George W. Bush divided humanity a few weeks after 9/11 in his address to the U.S. Congress. And at the time it made sense, because the world was with us. China, Russia had voted for a resolution endorsing the American attack on Afghanistan. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Iran, all the countries that surrounded and had influence had offered to help. We could say with confidence that the world was with us.

It was a moment very like the moment in 1989 after Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. There too we were able to gather an immense coalition. Syria provided troops that fought under American command. The Soviet Union voted for a resolution authorizing the United States to lead in the liberation of Kuwait.

Now, neither of these coalitions outlasted the wars for which they had been called together to fight, but throughout the 1990’s, American leadership did remain in demand. United States foreign policy remained quite popular. In fact, when they left office, George H. W. Bush and then Bill Clinton were both more popular abroad than they were in the United States.

By contrast if you look today five years after 9/11, the coalition that we were able to assemble has been almost entirely dissipated. American leadership in terms of its acceptability in the world at large is probably at a nadir. And the United States is probably more isolated than at any time in its modern history.

What went wrong? The easy answer is Iraq. If you invade a country by mistake, you have to expect a certain loss of faith in your prudence. And it’s true that the decision to intervene in Iraq on the basis of flawed intelligence and then the mismanagement of the occupation lost the United States a great deal of the respect and sympathy that it had spent 60 years in garnering. But it’s only true as far as it goes.

Well before the intervention in Iraq, American policy had turned down a road that few were likely to follow.

I see this story in 3 chapters: first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then Lebanon.

Chapter 1 begins with brilliant success, not just the success of the conventional war. After all, for most of the past half century, Western armies have won nearly every conventional war quickly and, for the Western army, relatively bloodlessly.. So it wasn’t exactly remarkable that the United States was able to prevail over Afghanistan, particularly with the support of the entire world.

But what was surprising was the degree to which the United States was able, so rapidly, to replace the Taliban with a broadly based representative government with wide legitimacy in that country. Which raises the question ‘Why did things go so smoothly in Afghanistan in the post-conventional combat phase and so badly Iraq?’

I’d say that there were three reasons for the rapid transition in Afghanistan.

First- as I already noted, we had broad international support.

Secondly, we went in with a modest set of objectives. The United States didn’t invade Afghanistan with the stated intention of turning that country into a model for Central Asia, following which we intended to change the form of government of every one of its neighboring states. That wasn’t our objective. Our objective was to ensure Afghanistan didn’t again become a base for international terrorism, to achieve which we sought to install a broadly based government that would be a threat neither to its own citizens nor to its neighbors.

This was a proposition for which we could get support from those neighbors. This was the third difference between Afghanistan and Iraq. We did get the support of every one of Afghanistan’s neighbors, not just in the war to overthrow the Taliban but in the process of replacing it with something better.

There’s a popular perception in the United States that in the aftermath of 9/11, the United States formed a coalition and overthrew the Taliban. Wrong. In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States joined an existing coalition which had been trying to overthrow the Taliban for a decade. The coalition consisted of India, Russia, Iran and the Northern Alliance. And with the addition of American airpower, that coalition succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban. That’s what happened.

Now in terms of post-conflict success in forming a government, that too was successful because of the broadly based coalition that came together for the political purposes of forming a new government in Afghanistan. As the American representative to the Afghan opposition, I represented the US at the Bonn conference that met for that purpose. The conference had representation from all of the major elements of the Afghan opposition and from all of the principal regional states—the countries that had been playing the great game and tearing Afghanistan apart for 20 years—Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, and a few others.

At one point the U.N. had circulated the first draft of the Bonn declaration, which is essentially Afghanistan’s interim constitution. It was the Iranian envoy who noted that there was no mention of democracy. “Maybe a document like this ought to mention democracy” he suggested. I allowed as how that was probably a good idea. I have to note that my instructions didn’t say anything about democracy. We weren’t on a democracy campaign at that stage. We wanted a government that would work with us to track down remaining al Qaeda elements and we sought to construct a broadly-based, representative government that could keep the country in peace.

It was also the Iranians delegation who proposed that the document should commit the Afghans to cooperate against international terrorism..

At one point, I reproached my Iranian colleague because his foreign minister had been quoted the day before as saying that he didn’t think any peacekeeping troops were necessary for Kabul. I said to my Iranian colleague, “Well you and I have agreed that we really need a peacekeeping force in Kabul. Why is your foreign minister being quoted to the contrary?”

And he replied, “Jim, you can consider this a gesture of solidarity with Don Rumsfeld,” who was known to be somewhat skeptical about the utility of peacekeeping. “After all Jim, you and I are both way out in front of our instructions on this one, aren’t we?” Which was true.

On the last night, we’d agreed on everything except who was going to govern Afghanistan. So we had a document, we had the interim constitution, but we were still arguing about who was going to govern Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance was insisting upon occupying 18 of the 24 ministries and everyone else agreed that was too many. It wasn’t going to be broadly based if the Northern Alliance, which represented maybe 30 or 40% of the country, got 80% of the ministries.

And so at my suggestion, we got together all of the foreign ambassadors who were still awake—it was about 2 in the morning—which was a kind of self-selective process. If they were still awake, they cared a lot. And so it consisted of myself, the Iranian, the Russian, the Indian, and the German, the host, and Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN chair of the meeting. We worked over, for two hours, the Northern Alliance representative, each of us arguing, in turn, that he should agree to give up several Ministries. And this culminated finally in the Iranian representative taking him aside and whispering to him for a few moments, following which the Northern Alliance envoy returned to the table and said, “Okay, I give up. The other factions can have two more ministries.” Four hours later the German Chancellor arrived and the Bonn agreement was signed. And that was how the final breakthrough in the negotiation was achieved.

Iran had the most senior delegation to Karzai’s inauguration. Their foreign minister came. There had been some doubt about whether Ismail Khan, a warlord in the area closest to Iran, was going to support this settlement. The Iranian foreign minister landed in Herat, picked Khan up, put him on the plane and brought him to Kabul just to make sure no one doubted that he was going to support the conclusion.

In the Tokyo donors conference that came a few weeks later, Iran pledged $500 million worth of assistance to Afghanistan, assistance which by and large they’ve since delivered, which is a staggering amount for a non first-world country and was by far the largest of any of the non-OECD countries at the pledges.

Several weeks thereafter, the Iranians came to me at another multilateral meeting we were having about Afghanistan in Geneva, and said they were prepared to help rebuild the Afghan army and that they would do so under US leadership. They introduced me to the Iranian general who had been the commander of their security assistance efforts for the Northern Alliance throughout the war. And he said, “We’re prepared to house, pay, clothe, arm and train up to 20,000 troops in a broader program under your leadership.”

So I said, “Well gee, if you train them and we train them, they’d end up having a different doctrine.”

The general just laughed and he said, “Don’t worry, we’re still using the manuals you left behind in 1979.”

So I said, “Okay, so maybe they might have compatible doctrines but they might have incompatible loyalties.”

And he said, “Well, we trained, we equipped, and, by the way, we’re the ones who are still paying for the Afghan troops you’re still using in the southern part of the country.. Are you having any difficulty with their loyalty?”

So I said, “No, not as yet..” I said I’d go back and report that to Washington.

I did and there was no response and the offer was never taken up.

And this brings us to Chapter 2, which begins only a few weeks after the fall of Kabul and the installation of the Karzai government. It opens with the President’s State of the Union address in January 2002, in which he lumps Iran, Iraq and North Korea into the axis of evil. Now, that all three were evil is a defensible proposition. But that there was an axis between them is completely indefensible. Iran and Iraq were bitter enemies. It was a bit like suggesting that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany should be treated equally after Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Churchill, at that point, was criticized by someone for welcoming Stalin into the Grand Alliance. Churchill responded, “You know, If Hitler invaded hell, I’d make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”

George Bush was apparently not prepared for that degree of moral ambivalence only a month after Iran had been quite helpful in the campaign in Afghanistan and its aftermath.

A few months later, the second shoe dropped with the issuance of the Administration’s National Security Strategy. It had a couple of key points, both of which were unnecessarily provocative. Analytically defensible but unnecessarily provocative.

One was the statement that the United States was never going to allow a peer competitor to emerge. That not only could nobody expect to be superior to the United States, we weren’t going to allow anybody be equal. And the second was the preemption doctrine.

Now the first assertion, that we weren’t going to allow any peer competitors to emerge, was as I said analytically defensible, but what was the point? There was never a time in our entire national history than a peer competitor had been more distant. There was never a period in our national history—over 225 years—where we had less risk of facing a peer competitor than in 2002. So what was the point?

And of course, pre-emption again was defensible as a last resort, as an option, but it’s very poor as a basis for declaratory policy. Of course the United States isn’t going to wait to get attacked. The United States has fought many wars in its history, but the only time prior to 9/11 that it was attacked first was in World War II. Just look at the last several decades. The United States went twice into Lebanon, it went into the Dominican Republic, it went into Grenada, went into Panama, went into Somalia, went into Haiti, went into Bosnia. Of those countries, how many of those had attacked the United States? How many had attacked anybody? None! They had all been civil wars and the United States had chosen to intervene.

So, stating that the United States wouldn’t wait to attack wasn’t exactly news. But making it a central part of your declaratory policy is just designed to antagonize the rest of the world. And that’s what it did, making it much more difficult to rally a coalition around the conflict in Iraq a year later because to do so would seem to be approving a principle of international conduct which the international community simply wasn’t prepared, as a matter of principle, to endorse.

The axis of evil and preemption ultimately led, and were used to justify the intervention in Iraq.

Anyone examining the American occupation of that country could be forgiven for thinking this was the first time the United States had ever done anything like this. It was one unanticipated challenge after another, one improvised response after another.

In fact of course, this was the seventh time the United States had liberated a country and tried to reconstruct it in little more than a decade. We’d gone into Lebanon, then Somalia, then Haiti, then Bosnia, then Kosovo, then Afghanistan, and then Iraq in a little more than 10 years. And by the way, of those seven countries, six are Muslim. The only one of those countries that’s not Muslim is Haiti.

So in 2003, when we went in to Iraq, there was no country in the world with more experience in nation building. There was no western army in the world with more experience operating in a Muslim society than the American army. So, one has to ask oneself, how could we do this so often, and yet do it so poorly? The answer has to do with the controversy which surrounded nation building in the 90’s and a consequent refusal to learn lessons from those experiences. The result was what I call calculated ignorance, that is a calculated decision to exclude a body of knowledge or experience, which if applied would have yielded better results.

I’ll give you two examples:

One was the decision to model the American occupation on Iraq on the occupations of Germany and Japan rather than the multilateral peace enforcement actions in Bosnia and Kosovo. This was an explicit element of the American rhetoric in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Now there would seem a couple of reasons why the American occupations of Germany and Japan might appeal to the Administration more than the peace enforcement actions in the former Yugoslavia as reference points for the upcoming reconstruction of Iraq.

First, Germany and Japan were unequivocal successes whereas the American led efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo were at best equivocal successes. But the big difference is that those successes had nothing to do with Bill Clinton and therefore they were politically safe. You could embrace them. It wasn’t embarrassing to say, “We’re going to do just like Douglas MacArthur did.”, where it would have been embarrassing to say, “We’re going to do just like Bill Clinton did, maybe a little better.”

So there was a decision to think of this as an occupation. And of course we think of occupation in relatively benign terms. We think, Germans and Japanese, they didn’t do too badly did they? The only occupation anybody in the Middle East has ever heard of, however, is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. That’s virtually the only occupation that’s actually technically occurred since 1945 and it’s naturally the one they refer to. So the very use of the term was bound to make it more controversial than it needed to be.

In retrospect, it would have made much more sense to apply the more recent and relevant lessons of the Balkans to Iraq than the more distant and less relevant ones of the post WWII occupations. Japan and Germany had been highly homogenous countries with first world economies. And they had both surrendered after extended and horrifically destructive wars. Iraq like Yugoslavia was made up of disparate ethnic and linguistic groups, some of which preferred not to live in the same state if they could avoid it. They were not first world economies, and they had not surrendered. So all in all, Iraq in 2003 looked a lot more like Yugoslavia in 1995 than Germany or Japan in 1945.

The second example of this calculated ignorance was the decision to take all of the responsibilities for the non-military elements of nation-building—that is to say for holding elections, rebuilding the economy, building political parties, building a free press—take all those responsibilities from the agencies of government that had been doing them for 50 years, maybe not terribly well, but increasingly better in the 90’s as they did more and more of it, and turn them all over to the Department of Defense which had no experience whatsoever in these various fields since 1952 when the German and Japanese occupation ended.

Now whether this was a good or bad idea in the abstract, doing this a few weeks before the war began meant imposed immense startup costs as thousands of dedicated an courageous young Americans went to take up positions in Iraq for which they had not the slightest preparation. It is amazing in retrospect that this exercise in heroic amateurism achieved as much as it did given the startup costs and difficulties in doing something so poorly prepared.

Chapter three opens in January, 2005, with the President’s Second Inaugural address. Suddenly we find that stability is out and democratization is in. Peacemaking and mediation are out. Transformational diplomacy is in.

Now it’s easy to see why, at that stage, the Administration would embrace democratization so firmly. It was after all, the last possible excuse for having invaded Iraq. Nevertheless, democratization offers poor basis for organizing our entire Middle Eastern diplomacy.

Secretary Rice is right to criticize previous American administrations for having given the Middle East a pass from American democratization efforts which had been broadly successful in Latin America, in East Asia, throughout Eastern Europe and even in parts of Africa. These policies should have been applied in the Middle East, and should be applied. Nevertheless you’re not going to fix fifty years of neglect in two or three months or even in two or three years.

In the months that followed the Inaugural Address we’ve seen other changes in the administration’s rhetoric. The enemies list has continued to grow. It has ceased to be just Al Qaeda and is now Islamic fascism. A terrorist criminal conspiracy has given way to a global jihadist insurgency. And the global war on terror has become the long war, which recently became the wide war, extending from Lebanon through Afghanistan

Nearly five years after 9/11 American diplomacy had succeeded in isolating, not the terrorists, but the United States. How did this occur? I’d say there are three underlying difficulties in the way we explain ourselves to ourselves and to others.

First, we use highly polarizing rhetoric in describing the challenges we face. Second, we’ve had an excessive concentration on democratization as a one source fix for the problems of the region. And third, we tend to employ martial terminology and military analogies to describe what we’re about.

In a search for moral clarity the Administration has tried to divide the Middle East into good guys and bad guys. America tends to treat Middle East diplomacy as a win/lose or zero-sum game in which Syrian, Iranian, Hezbollah or Hamas gains are by definition American losses and vice-versa. The result of course is the United States always loses, because if you insist that the population of the region choose between Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, on the one hand, or the United States and Israel, on the other, they are going to chose the other side every time.

America and Israel are now so deeply unpopular in the region that the support of either is a liability for the other. The Israeli attack on Lebanon was certainly not going to be well-received in the Arab world, but it was probably even worse received when it got Washington’s endorsement. Similarly American efforts to pursue the war on terror are resisted to the degree that they are perceived to advance Israeli interests.

I’ve mentioned the excessive concentration on democratization. We’ve discovered in the Middle East that democracy can mobilize populations, but it can’t unite them. The results in Iraq, in Lebanon, in the Palestinian Authority have all been destabilizing. It’s true that many people of the Middle East want democracy, but the fact is that they want other things more.

They don’t see themselves primarily divided into radicals, democrats and conservatives. For most of them, whether they’re Muslims, Jews or Christians, religion tends to be more important than ideology and nationalism tends to be more important than religion. Consequently, the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim regimes is seen by most populations in the region as more significant than the division between authoritarian and democratic.

And as the United States has discovered in Iraq, the divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims is wider than the difference between adherence of the old regime and supporters of a democratic alternative.

And finally throughout the region, the gulf between occupier and occupied is the most important distinction of all. The credibility of American democracy campaign in the region has not been helped by having its trial runs in what’s perceived as occupied Iraq, occupied Afghanistan, and occupied Palestine. The fact is that we’ve given democracy a bad name by associating it with some enterprises that are, in the region, extremely controversial. As a result of this excessive emphasis on democratization the U.S. has managed to position itself on the wrong side of the two issues people in the region care much more about. One is the distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims and the other is between occupier and occupied.

Finally, there is our reliance upon martial terminology to describe what we are about in the world. If Al Qaeda has a historic antecedent that one can usefully point to, it’s probably the anarchist movements of the 19th and early 20th century. But that’s really too obscure a reference point to help explain what’s going on to most Americans. And so we’ve chosen a more familiar set of analogies, largely military ones: “We’re in a war,” “The enemy are Islamic fascists”. “They are mounting a global insurgency”.

These are somewhat useful analogies, but they’re not fully accurate descriptions. There are certainly wars underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. But most of the terrorists we care about are in Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Saudi Arabia, not countries the United States is likely to invade. Bin Laden bares only the most remote resemblance to Benito Mussolini. Al Qaeda is not actually trying to take over the United States, or even Iraq. So the global war on terrorism isn’t really a war, our enemy are not really fascists, and they’re not really mounting a global insurgency.

These labels do convey some important and useful information, but they also convey a good deal of misinformation. The main value in using hot, loaded terms such as these is their utility in mobilizing domestic opinion by constructing an easily assimilable and emotionally gripping narrative. The main disadvantage is that by employing such inexact terminology, it makes precise distinctions, insightful analysis and subtle policy much more difficult to achieve.

So what’s the solution? I’d suggest it consists of trying to find a new narrative, a more sophisticated analytical framework and a more precise vocabulary for describing what’s going on. Secondly, a somewhat greater discretion and sense of restraint in choosing our enemies. Thirdly, we need to craft our message for an external as well as an internal audience. And finally, we need a return to traditional as opposed to transformational diplomacy.

First, as regards the need for a new narrative, the ‘war on terror’ as a phrase, as a slogan, has clearly outlived its usefulness. Both the Department of Defense and the Department of State have asked the White House to stop using it. The White House has refused.

If we’re in a war on terrorism, the central front isn’t Iraq, it’s Pakistan. The British terrorists who were going to blow up half a dozen planes flying across the Atlantic didn’t fly to Iraq for inspiration and guidance. They flew to Pakistan. Pakistan backed the Taliban. Pakistan allied itself with Al Qaeda. Pakistan assisted the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. Bin Laden is in Pakistan, he’s not in Iraq. And terrorists who are looking for guidance and inspiration are going to Pakistan, not to Iraq. They go to Iraq if they want to get killed. Therefore the central front’s in Pakistan. But if Pakistan’s the central front, it’s not one that’s susceptible to a military solution. We’re not going to invade Pakistan. We’re not going to bomb Islamabad. So there’s no point in thinking of it as a war. Martial terminology is fine if we want U.S. troops to patrol the Afghan side of the Northwest frontier for another generation. But if we’re going to do something about Pakistan, we’re going to have to have a different term of reference because what we need to do there is pump hundreds of millions maybe billions of dollars into their educational system. That’s the kind of solution that’s needed if we’re going to address the real problem.

Now I’ve already talked about a greater discretion in choosing our enemies. The problem with thinking of Al Qaeda as a global insurgency, which has some value as an intellectual construct, is that it tends to confuse this virtual insurgency that’s being mounted by Al Qaeda and the actual insurgencies that are being mounted by nationally motivated Muslim groups in a dozen places around the world.

The people who are mounting these real insurgencies couldn’t care less about a new caliphate. They’re fighting to gain control of a territory, to secure autonomy or independence or some rights that they believe have been transgressed in one way or another, sometimes against Muslim governments, sometimes against non-Muslim governments. Their objectives are almost purely nationalist, not ideological in nature.

Al Qaeda of course is a parasite, that seeks to attach itself to these insurgencies in order to gain strength, to gain adherence, to gain credibility, and it will continue to do so. There isn’t a single insurgency in the world involving Muslims in which Al Qaeda isn’t going to pick sides and identify itself with one side or another.

Now sometimes, this means that we need to pick the other side. But it doesn’t always mean that. Sometimes the best way of dealing with nationalist Muslim insurgencies is to co-opt them, to support them. I mean, there isn’t an insurgent in the world who wouldn’t choose American support over Al Qaeda’s support if he could get it.

Those were the strategies that we adopted in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and by the way fifteen years ago, in Afghanistan. That is, we supported the Muslim insurgents. We supported the Muslim insurgents in Bosnia despite the fact that Al Qaeda was already fighting on their side. We supported the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army, in Kosovo despite the fact that it was a terrorist organization and was conducting terrorist attacks. But we decided the other side was even worse, and the result of our support was that the more extreme elements of the insurgency immediately became marginalized, and largely irrelevant in terms of the politics of those societies. And of course that was the case in Afghanistan when the United States supported fundamentalist Muslim insurgency against a modernizing, in that case, Soviet-backed regime. And the United States would have continued to dominate and influence that society if we hadn’t simply abandoned the country and left it to Pakistan and to Al Qaeda.

This is not to suggest that we should embrace every Muslim insurgency. But we do have to make sure that we don’t wind up on the side of every Buddhist, every Hindu, every Jewish, every Christian and every Communist government that’s fighting a Muslim insurgency just because Al Qaeda happens to have chosen the other side. We need to choose our enemies and our friends based on some broader criteria of national interest rather than simply allowing Al Qaeda to choose our alignment by virtue of its own.

Finally, we need more traditional and less transformational diplomacy. We need to work with our friends, we need to talk to our adversaries. We need to speak less about war and more about peace.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about from a decade of nation-building is that security is an absolute prerequisite for political and economic reform. This means that in places like Iraq or Lebanon or the Palestinian Authority, stabilization needs to precede democratization if the later is to bear beneficial results. This in turn requires of the United States an effort to mediate conflicting claims, balance competing forces, and tamp down sectarian passions. This has been the traditional American role but its one the current administration has largely abandoned. In Lebanon, the United States ceded its traditional role to others, most notably France. The result has been a cessation of hostilities on terms upon which large-scale fighting could probably have been averted in the first place, if the United States had chosen to exert itself at an earlier point.

On Iraq on the other hand, there’s nobody to whom the United States can turn over the task of mediating the disputes. Nobody’s going to step in like France in Lebanon and play that mediating role.

Like any failing state, Iraq can only be held together if its neighbors cooperate in the effort. You only have to think back to the experiences of Bosnia and Afghanistan to know this is true.

In 1995, the United States decided that it couldn’t hold Bosnia together unless it engaged Milosevic and Tudjman -- the two men who were personally responsible for the genocide we were trying to stop -- bring them to the conference table, give them a privileged position and allow them to participate, both in a settlement and the implementation of a settlement. There was simply no other way.

In Afghanistan as I’ve noted, the United States decided it wasn’t going to be able to install a broadly based representative government in Kabul that would hold unless it did so with the support of the very countries that had been tearing Afghanistan apart for 20 years, that is to say Russia, India, Iran, and Pakistan.

The United States’ objectives in those cases were certainly morally clear enough, but its diplomacy was extremely pragmatic. The more unhelpful, the more objectionable, the more “evil” any regional actor might be, the more important it was to engage him, to bring him to the conference table, and to secure his cooperation in ending the civil war and rebuilding the shattered society.

There is not the slightest prospect of being able to hold Iraq together unless we engage in a similar effort to engage its neighboring states, no matter how objectionable we find their behavior. These neighbors simply have too much influence and too much at stake to be ignored or excluded from the process.

To conclude, what our diplomacy needs is a little more nuance and a little less certainty, a little more sophistication and a little less simplicity, a little more cooption and a little less coercion. It may be a bit difficult to sell a policy based on these principles to the American people. But such a policy is more likely to succeed. And in the end the American people are more likely to support policies that succeed than those that fail.

Thank you.

News Round UP (2 September 2006)

Is Europe gearing up to push for a major Arab-Israeli peace initiative?

It is too early to be hopeful that the root causes of this conflict will be addressed, even in part; nevertheless, there are positive signs coming out of Europe. The major question mark is Washington. Europe has never been able to make a dent in Arab-Israeli affairs without US backing. How will it do it now, especially when Syria and Israel are so distrustful of each other and when Iran is in US cross hairs?

The signs that Europe may be weaning itself from Washington's take-no-prisoners policy toward the Arabs are numerous.

The Times of London has revealed that Tony Blair has backed away from supporting the US hawks on the Lebanon crisis. This is thanks to Britain's ambassador to the US, Sir David Manning, who wrote a highly critical letter to Blair warning against Blair's support for Washington's role in the Lebanon war. Here is what the Times writes:

Last night the Foreign Office threatened to seek an injunction against The Times if it published Sir David’s letter, but no further contact was made.

As the Middle East conflict intensified in July, Mr Blair was already under fire from Cabinet colleagues and the media. But sources said that the hardest hitting criticism came from Sir David. “It had a huge impact in Downing Street,” one source said. “It was as candid as the letter by the outgoing Ambassador to Baghdad [William Patey]” who had given warning of civil war in Iraq.

After the letter from Sir David, Mr Blair shifted quickly from solid support of President Bush, and a refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in the fighting, to calling openly for an urgent ceasefire. Mr Blair hopes now to rehabilitate his damaged reputation at home and abroad by launching a peace mission to the Middle East next weekend, in time to face his critics at the Labour Party conference on September 24.

Sir David is more than just Britain’s most senior envoy, with close relations to Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State. He was Mr Blair’s top foreign policy adviser over 9/11 and through the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Previously he was Ambassador to Tel Aviv.

In the first two weeks of the Lebanon war Britain mirrored US policy, insisting that it would be pointless to demand an end to the fighting until a mechanism was in place to keep the peace. In the region this approach was regarded widely as allowing Israel a free hand to step up its assault on Hezbollah and destroy Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Mr Blair was keenly aware of the damage being done to his international standing. Nevertheless he reiterated the policy side by side with President Bush on July 28 at the White House, when the two men refused pointedly to call for an immediate ceasefire.

But according to British diplomats, Sir David then made a second attempt. This time the two men spoke alone and at length as Mr Blair traveled to California for public engagements without his normal No 10 retinue. “The Downing Street aides went home leaving Manning to work on Blair,” a British official said. “Manning urged Blair to be more robust in calling for a ceasefire and criticizing US policy.”

Britain, which has never played a leading role in Lebanese affairs, was being damaged unnecessarily. Also, Sir David feared that the conflict could grow and that hardliners in the Bush Administration could push Israel to extend its campaign to Syria. Mr Blair was told he must bolster the position of Dr Rice and moderates at the State Department.

The result was dramatic. On July 30 Mr Blair called for “an urgent cessation of hostilities” and spoke about the need for a new peace initiative. Two days later at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council he called for a “complete renaissance” of foreign policy. He said that the battle against militant Islam could not be won by force alone.

Today Mr Blair privately concedes that he has been damaged by his stand on the war in Lebanon, but believes that he can salvage his reputation. Next Saturday Mr Blair travels to the Middle East when he hopes to revive the peace process.

So Blair spoke about the need for "a new peace initiative." Unfortunately this is not new. Blair has promised the British people many times that he would get Washington to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict as the price for Britain's backing on Iraq. This never materialized. Why would it happen now that Blair is so weakened and perhaps on his way out?

Other Europeans are also talking about a major peace initiative. Italy's foreign minister has explained that Italy will now try its hand at leading a European effort to make peace. That is his explanation for why Italian troops are being committed to lead the UNIFIL presence in Southern Lebanon.

EU foreign ministers have been meeting to develop a strategy for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
EU pushes for revival of Middle East peace talks - Euronews.net
E.U. ready to talk to Syria and HamasFinancial Times

German governing party to send delegation to Syria

The Russian Foreign minister is also headed to the region for visits in Beirut, Damascus, West Bank, and Israel.

The Economist sums up the possibilities of a European move like this:
Just a moment, or possibly more
2 September 2006
The Economist

The failure of other players has given Europe a Middle Eastern opportunity: Europe now has a chance to play more than a marginal role in the Middle East

"IT'S Europe's moment in the Arab-Israeli arena," says Martin Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel and head of the Saban Centre, a Washington DC think-tank. If true, that may mean a big change in one of the world's most dangerous spots.

Europeans have been marginal in the Middle East for years. Too pro-Palestinian to be trusted by Israel, they have not had much power or influence over the Arabs either. For many Americans, Europe's current involvement in Lebanon continues the tradition of irrelevance. It has been rather like a "three-stooges" show in which Jacques Chirac grandiloquently announces that France will save the world, offers to send three men and a popgun, and is finally shamed by—of all nations—Italy into sending 2,000 troops, which still won't be enough. Given an opportunity to show leadership in the region, Europe fluffs it. Again.

Is that too harsh? Of course, Europe's intervention may yet go horribly wrong, as have so many previous efforts. But to dismiss what is happening in advance is to miss its potential importance. Europeans are sending 7,000 soldiers to the United Nations' peacekeeping force in Lebanon. This, as it happens, is the number of British soldiers in Iraq—not a negligible force. Two or ten years ago, it would have been hard to imagine Europeans taking such a role. Something has clearly changed. Two things, in fact.

So long as America was trying to broker an Arab-Israeli peace (that is, under Bill Clinton), there was no room for more interlocutors; Europeans were relegated to the role of silent paymaster. But George Bush never picked up where Mr Clinton left off.

More immediately, almost everyone in the region is suffering stings of self-doubt—and a crisis of confidence can chasten people into thinking the previously unthinkable. Israel has clearly suffered a shock in Lebanon. But so has Hizbullah, to judge by the admission on television by its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, that he would never have ordered the cross-border kidnapping of Israeli soldiers if he had known what Israel's response was going to be. Coincidentally, a spokesman for the Palestinians' Hamas joined in the self-recrimination. He complained, in a newspaper, that "Gaza is suffering under the yoke and anarchy and the swords of thugs" (he didn't mean Israel, for once).

And while it would be too much to claim the Bush administration has been shaken by comparable anxiety (at least in public), America's scope for action in the region is limited, partly by choice and partly by the fall-out from the occupation of Iraq.

That puts Europe into the unfamiliar position of being the one who hasn't messed up recently. The European-led UN force should give Israel an exit strategy from its Lebanese misadventure. In another European accomplishment, France last year helped America push Syria out of Lebanon—a feat Mr Bush hailed as a triumph (though that was before Israel's war against Hizbullah rained destruction on parts of this model state).

Less well known, but not entirely trivial, the European Union, under an Italian carabinieri general, monitors the only land crossing between the Gaza strip and the Arab world, preventing, or at least limiting, weapons smuggling to Hamas.

How sharp are your claws?

The question is whether this activity can amount to anything substantial. Can it, for example, move Israelis and Palestinians towards some sort of peace talks? The European Union is already in the so-called "quartet", the body that with America, Russia and the UN presides over the so-called "road map" to peace. As part of the quartet, the Europeans have been party to the controversial decision to suspend aid to the Palestinian Authority until Hamas, which now controls the Palestinian legislature, recognises Israel's right to exist and agrees to honour previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. The road map, however, is going nowhere, and the isolation of Hamas has so far added to Palestinian misery without persuading it to comply with the quartet's demands.

Mr Chirac says the time is right to relaunch the peace process. But how? European diplomats say that in Lebanon Europe should use its troops, influence and money to help the government of Fouad Siniora bring Hizbullah under control, making it a normal part of the Lebanese polity and less of an instrument of Iran and Syria. In the Palestinian territories the Europeans want to nudge Hamas and the more secular and accommodating Fatah movement towards some sort of coalition agreement, which may in turn help to break the impasse between the Palestinians and Israel.

To do these things, however, the Europeans will have to overcome tough opponents. Hizbullah does not intend to disarm, and neither Syria nor Iran wishes it to stop being a state within a state. Hamas's ideological objection to accepting Israel's right to exist is deeply held. As for Israel, it will not quickly overcome an instinctive distrust of Europe, or its preference for dealing with a superpower that has long been seen as the only outsider with a genuine understanding of the Jewish state's security needs. On that last score, much will depend on how seriously the Europeans in Lebanon are seen to take their job of policing the south and preventing arms transfers to Hizbullah.

Only if the Europeans pass these rather difficult tests will the European moment in the Middle East really amount to something. Italy's foreign minister, Massimo D'Alema, argues that co-operation over Israel, Lebanon and Palestine could help to improve ties with America, by showing that the Europeans and Americans can work together in the Arab-Israeli conflict just as they have already done in their efforts to stop Iran's suspected development of nuclear weapons. It is worth noticing, however, that close transatlantic co-operation on Iran, backed up by a resolution from the Security Council, has not yet persuaded the Islamic Republic to stop uranium enrichment. As Europe is about to rediscover, they play rough in the Middle East.

This quote about Israeli attempts to get negotiations moving shows the difficulties that Europe will face not only in Israel, but particularly from the US. "Debate about Syria within Israel is interesting. People are slowly reconsidering their position toward Damascus. It will take a lot of arm-twisting, however, to convince the United States to talk with Assad," one diplomat said.
Haaretz

Here is some old news about Khaddam that I neglected to post earlier. I post it here just for the record.

Khaddam reiterates charge that Damascus killed Hariri
Daily Star staff
Tuesday, August 29, 2006

BEIRUT: The former vice president of Syria said Monday that a UN investigation into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri would point the finger at Syrian President Bashar Assad. In a live interview late Sunday with Future Television, Abdel-Halim Khaddam once more launched a flurry of accusations at his former allies.

"The Syrian regime wants to lead Lebanon into internal strife in order to avoid the investigation," the exiled Khaddam said from his Paris residence.

Speaker Nabih Berri has been "marginalized" by the Syrian regime, he added, and threatened repeatedly by Syrian intelligence.

Khaddam said the third report from the UN investigation team, expected in mid-September, would highlight "Assad's involvement" in the assassination.

"Any security act in Syria cannot be achieved without the approval of the president," he said. "Can Rustom Ghazaleh take 1,000 kilograms of explosives from the Syrian Army warehouse, as well as the team that perpetrated the crime, without Assad's knowledge]?" Khaddam asked in reference to the former head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon who has also been accused of involvement in the February 2005 attack.

Khaddam said Hariri's murder was meant to silence the five-time premier.

"Those who dismantled the May 17 Agreement [with Israel] were Hariri, [Druze leader MP] Walid Jumblatt and Berri. One of them was killed, the other threatened and the third was marginalized," he said.

"I know very well how the Syrians dealt with Berri: They treated him the same way they treated Hariri - they threatened him," he added. "I know that he will deny it, but I'm telling you this is what happened."

Khaddam said Assad had "harmed Hizbullah" by claiming "a Lebanese party" was made in Israel and wanted peace with the Jewish state.

He also claimed that late Syrian President Hafez Assad had wanted to "fight Israel from Lebanon" and had "ordered his intelligence services to prohibit any attack against Israel from the occupied Golan Heights in order to avoid any security instability" in Syria.

Khaddam dismissed harsh words from Assad last week in which he described Arab leaders as "half-men," saying: "The Syrian regime's life is short."

Commenting on the recent war between Israel and Hizbullah, Khaddam said: "Israel has achieved its main goal, which is the destruction of Lebanon."

Regarding the disputed Shebaa Farms, Khaddam said: "Saying that the farms are occupied, and hence cannot be demarcated, is nothing but a pretext. The demarcation would not take more than an hour if there was a political will."

Khaddam denied Iran has forged a strategic alliance with Assad. The Syrian regime is facing "Arab and international isolation," he said. - The Daily Star

Interpol "agrees to hand over former Syrian vice president Khaddam," Deutsche Presse Agentur. [ This is clearly a case of Syrian spin]

Interpol has agreed to hand over former Syrian vice-president Abdul Halim Khaddam to Syrian judicial authorities to face prosecution on treason and corruption charges, a Syrian attorney claimed Monday.

On Monday, attorney Hossam al-Deen Habash, who filed the lawsuit against Khaddam, said the Interpol office in Damascus had received a response "agreeing to monitor, and launch periodical monitoring" of Khaddam.

When asked what that meant, he said that "Interpol will follow and monitor Khaddam and when he is spotted it will arrest him and hand him over to Damascus office to be turned to Syrian judicial authorities."

Nasrallah's claim that he would not have kidnapped Israelis had he known war was in the offing generated considerable commentary. Here is the article
Nasrallah: I would not have kidnapped troops had I known the outcome.

Even Robert Fisk takes a few swipes at Nasrallah for his speech - of course he nails Israel too in his "The lies, the threats, the hypocrisy..."
ROBERT FISK
2 September 2006
The Independent

After the war comes the hypocrisy, the mendacity, the threats, the sheer brazen lies. ... Now get this from Sayed Nasrallah. "If I knew that the capture of the soldiers would have led to a war on such a scale, had Hizbollah had known even 1 per cent, we definitely would have not carried it out." This, folks, is what I call a whopper. If the Hizbollah had no idea what Israel was going to do to Lebanon - and they are intelligent, disciplined people who knew full well Ehud Olmert's political situation at the time (it is certainly worse now due to his army's failure in Lebanon), then why did Hizbollah build all those concrete bunkers in caves and rocks and hillsides for years before the war?

By HERB KEINON AND JPOST.COM

After the War, Nasrallah Takes to the Airwaves Sami Moubayed Bio 29 Aug 2006

Syria denies permit to rights groupSunday Times - The National Organisation for Human Rights in Syria said it was denied an operating permit by the social affairs ministry.

Brammertz brings probe back to Beirut
The Daily Star Staff
30 August 2006
BEIRUT: The United Nations investigation into the 2005 assassination of former Premier Rafik Hariri was thrust back into the limelight on Tuesday after unconfirmed reports that important new evidence had been collected from officials here and abroad.
The head of the UN probe, Belgian prosecutor Serge Brammertz, who returned to Beirut this week from the temporary headquarters he established in Cyprus during the war with Israel, is expected to present a third report on the investigation to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in mid-September.

According to judicial sources, Brammertz recently flew to Paris to take two separate statements from former Syrian Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam and question another key witness, Syrian national Mohammad Zuheir Siddiq.

The sources added that Brammertz recently traveled to Damascus, where he met "a top-level Syrian official," said to be president Bashar Assad.

Brammertz also interrogated several Syrian witnesses while in Damascus in an attempt to verify some important facts which are to be included in his upcoming report.

Brammertz, who met with Annan in Beirut on Monday as both arrived in the capital, held talks Tuesday with State Prosecutor Said Mirza; Elias Eid, the judicial investigator handling the Hariri case; Justice Joyce Tabet; and the judiciary's liaison to the international investigation committee, Justice Ralph Riashi.

Discussions focused on the measures taken during the past 45 days and continuing efforts to form an international court to prosecute suspects in the Hariri assassination.

According to the sources, Eid will interrogate several witnesses next week and settle two requests for the release of Ayman Tarabey and Mustafa Misto, the owners of pre-paid mobile-line shops arrested almost a year ago.

Concerning the four imprisoned security chiefs - Mustafa Hamdan, Ali Hajj, Raymond Azar and Jamil Sayyed, who were arrested based on a statement given by Siddiq a year ago - sources said that the generals would only be released if new evidence surfaced to prove their innocence.

The judicial sources also said that Brammertz met on Wednesday with Justice Minister Charles Rizk.

"Brammertz and Rizk discussed the international probe into former Premier Raifk Hariri's assassination and other judicial matters related to the probe."

Here is a WINEP report on Asad's August speech to Journalists. Winep has a new analyst covering Syrian affairs, who is promising. See the interesting article he wrote about the three remaining Jews in the Jazira, linked below.

The Damascus-Hizballah Axis: Bashar al-Asad’s Vision of a New Middle East
By Seth Wikas: August 29, 2006 - WINEP

Three Remaining Jews of Northern Syria Intend to Stay

Syria Says "Yes" to 1701. Why?

According to Kofi Annan, Syria has agreed to uphold UN resolution 1701. He said on Friday that "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had promised to enforce an arms embargo on Hizbollah under a U.N. resolution that halted Israel's war with the Lebanese group." According to Reuters,

Annan did not say if he had pressed Assad to comply with other U.N. demands on Syria. These include demarcating its border with Lebanon, including in the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms area, claimed by Beirut, with Syria's verbal backing, but viewed by the United Nations as Syrian territory.

The Syrian president has previously ruled out any demarcation in Shebaa Farms while it is occupied by Israel.

Annan, who had told the Lebanese government earlier that he would press Syria to open diplomatic ties with Lebanon, said Assad had accepted this in principle, but had told him it was a sovereign issue to be worked out with the Beirut authorities.

Syria has long argued the two closely linked neighbors do not need diplomatic ties, prompting Lebanese suspicions that Damascus refuses to acknowledge as fully sovereign the country it dominated until it ended a 29-year troop presence last year.

Annan's spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said the talks with Assad had covered "all tracks of the peace process", referring to Israel's stalled negotiations with Syria and the Palestinians over territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 war.

"Out of this tragedy of war there is a real opportunity for peace that we all must not miss," Annan declared.

European Union foreign ministers were set to push for a revival of Middle East peace efforts with a greater EU role.

Ministers meeting in Finland will study how to leverage their growing military presence as peacekeepers in southern Lebanon to bring about regional talks, which EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana wants to be based on a return to Israel's 1967 borders "plus or minus agreed minor adjustments".

This is anathema to Israel which, with the acquiescence of the United States, wants to retain swathes of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Arab East Jerusalem.

Syria also says it is ready to hold direct peace negotiations with Israel with certain conditions, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said in an interview published Aug. 30 by the Austrian Press Agency. Al-Moualem set conditions for peace as resolution of the status of the Golan Heights, Shebaa Farms and the West Bank, and complete Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

David Schenker, in a National Review on Line article entitled, "Syria’s Answer: Bashar Assad has set his country firmly against the interests of peace and civility," tries to preempt European efforts to open a dialogue on regional peace. He claims that Bashar's August 15 speech to Arab Journalists gave a clear answer of "No" to US attempts to make peace. What the US did offer Bashar was a demand to unilaterally disarm. Bashar said "No" to this. The main thrust of his speech, however, was to say "Yes" to land for peace. This has been the consistent demand of both the Syrian foreign minister and Syrian ambassador in Washington. Washington refuses to acknowledge this and insists that Europe refuse as well.

By telling Annan that Syria will respect UN resolution 1701 and stop smuggling illegal arms, Bashar is trying to give Annan a chance to get a European initiated dialogue off the ground. Annan must have given Asad some assurances this would happen. Asad undoubtedly has little faith that the Europeans can deliver, even if they have shouldered new responsibilities in southern Lebanon and claim a willingness to get more involved in regional problems.

But Asad must show a good faith effort not to gum up the works. Chirac made a wide ranging speech a few days ago in which he put the onus on Syria. I understood him to be warning Syria that there was little France or any European power could do to stop the US from getting nasty towards Syria if it didn't make some positive gestures. But he counter-balanced this with his statement that he would be on the side of a comprehensive peace and would meet Asad half way. He said:

"The choice is between a resumption of hostilities, creating a permanent rift between two neighboring peoples, and the political option of a global and lasting settlement," Chirac said.

Painting a bleak picture of the Middle East, he added violence in the region might get out of control unless the peace process was revived.

"Everyone can clearly see that in the Middle East, the fracture lines join up and the crises grow," Chirac said, adding the key issue was the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

"Over and above these clashes, there is a bigger danger, that of a divorce between worlds. East against West, Islam against Christianity, rich against poor," Chirac said. "The gamble for peace and security also concerns Iran and Syria," he added, urging Damascus to "abandon its insular mentality."

"[Syria] has the calling to retake its place at the table of nations, respecting the international legality and sovereignty of its neighbors. The Middle East needs Syria to be working actively for peace and stability in the region," he said, adding he wanted a rapid meeting of the "Quartet" of Middle East peace brokers - the US, the UN, the EU and Russia - to look at ways of resuming peace talks.

Europe is gearing up for a major push to apply resolution 242 - land for peace - in the region. "European Union foreign ministers meeting in Finland will study how to leverage their growing military presence as peacekeepers in southern Lebanon to bring about regional talks, which EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana wants to be based on a return to Israel's 1967 borders "plus or minus agreed minor adjustments," writes Reurters.

Many of the realists in both the US and Israel have been calling for just such region-wide negotiations. All Arab heads of state have said they will back land-for-peace and reiterated their support for the Saudi-led peace plan of 2002.

Undoubtedly Annan told Bashar not to be the fly in the ointment as the UN and Europe tries to push forward such a peace initiative. Asad probably told Annan, I will give you some time to see if there are results. Annan then stood up and told reporters that "Asad has accepted 1701." Asad did not say this himself and was silent at Annan's side. We do not know exactly what the quid pro quo was, but we can be sure there was one.

The fear that must haunt Asad is that the US is preparing to stab him in the back. Europe will go to Washington and say something along the lines of - "We will help you place sanctions on Iran, if you back us in settling the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all."

Washington will give a qualified "yes" because President Bush has insisted that Iran must pay a price for continuing with nuclear development. All the same, Bush and Olmert will scuttle the possibility of land for peace. Washington, however, is willing to allow for a peace process in order to nail Iran. But it will not allow for actual peace on these terms.

If Sryia plays along with this and helps keep the Lebanon front quite and weakens Hizbullah while Iran gets sanctioned, he could end up with nothing and a much weakened alliance. This will be the case if European promises to deliver the Golan go nowhere, as they are likely to.

The notion of giving land back to Syria and a Hamas led Palestinian state is anathema to the Bush White House. They would consider it a defeat, giving in to blackmail, and emboldening Islamo-fascism. They may, however, play along just long enough to get European support against Iran, expecting that any peace initiative on the Arab-Israeli front will founder without considerable American backing and arm twisting.

Asad is in for a tough few months.

He has shown that Syria has teeth. Israeli intelligence has stated that many of the missiles shot into Israel have Syrian serial numbers on them and were made in Syria and not Iran. If this is true, it shows that Syria did play a vital role in helping Hizbullah stand up against the full brunt of the IDF. The LA Times writes:

New postwar intelligence indicates that the militant group Hezbollah had broader access to sophisticated weaponry than was publicly known — including large numbers of medium-range rockets made in Syria, said U.S. and Israeli government officials and military analysts.

The size of the Hezbollah arsenal and the direct role of Syria in supplying it will complicate the daunting task of keeping Hezbollah from rearming, the officials said.