Totten Takes The Beirut Tour

Michael Totten's been wandering around Lebanon again, and is his usual articulate and informative self, relating his experiences in a way that puts you right there with him. His latest post is a continuation of his experiences in Beirut, as Hezbollah was still drawing supporters to the city center in an attempt to overturn the duly elected Lebanese government. He talked with locals, and the "Party of God" recruits. Exploring the gathering as an obvious foreigner, he couldn't blend into the crowd. (He looks much more like an Irish Catholic than an Arab Islamist.) He's had run-ins with Hezbollah before, and the testosterone tends to run pretty high when thousands of Arab men gather to overturn a government, so this time he donned a bit of Hezbollah apparel, a scarf, and found that the effect was quite remarkable. The scarf didn't completely overcome the fact he's American, but did garner him a much less hostile reception from the watchdog thuggery that had heretofore followed him with suspicion. Wearing the thing made him uncomfortable, but gave him a slightly different view into the world of Hezbollah.

I find his reports fascinating. One of the things which struck me very forcefully as I was reading this one was what Totten pointed out about the shift in Arab relations throughout the Middle East, as illustrated by regional reactions to the war this past summer between Israel and Hezbollah/Lebanon. He writes of a conversation he and his friend Noah Pollak had with a couple of Hezbollah supporters:

An older fat man in a red shirt interjected himself into our conversation. He had the wide open eyes of an agitated extremist. He got into a mildly heated political argument with Noah, who remained calm and collected throughout. I was having my own conversation with the more civil and interesting young man named Jad. I did catch two telling points from the enraged man in red, however, and they bear repeating.

“Gulf Arabs give bombs to Israel to kill my people!”

This, of course, is nonsense on stilts. Israel does not receive weapons from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or any other Arab country. Don’t write off what he said as just another Middle Eastern conspiracy theory, though. He is aware that an important geopolitical shift has occurred.

Sunni Arab regimes – most notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia – took Israel’s side during the opening of the July War. And every Arab government in the world except for Syria’s supports Lebanon’s government against Hezbollah’s “resistance.”

I remember when this happened; it was like gravity had reversed itself. That any Arab regime would take Israel's side in anything shows that there have been some radical changes in the Arab political landscape. Totten goes on to note that fellow Muslims rank higher on Arab "things to worry about" lists than does the hated nation of Israel:

Six Arab governments – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, and Tunisia – say they will pursue nuclear weapons programs now because Iran’s atomic bombs need to be countered. None of these Arab countries sought nuclear weapons to offset those acquired by Israel. They fear and loathe the Shia of Lebanon and Iran (and most likely Iraq, as well) more than they worry about the Zionists regardless of what they may say.

This doesn't necessarily bode well for Israel in the short term, however:

The wider Sunni-Shia war in the Middle East, whose epicenter now is in Baghdad, may supplant the Arab-Israeli conflict some time in the future. For now, though, the Arab-Israeli conflict is used by both sides of the inter-Islamic divide to score propaganda points against the other.

Oh great. Just what Israel needs, to be the ball in a game of Arab propaganda polo. Lovely. Most of Totten's post isn't about the Arab/Israeli issue, but this part did really catch my eye. Anyway, if you'd like another look into Lebanon, read the rest of what Totten has to say. It's very interesting.

Jumping On Three: One...Two...

Is Kurdistan an inevitability? It seems to be. The northern section of modern Iraq was never a natural part of that country, ethnically or politically, but was cobbled onto it at the end of World War II, by the British, over the objections of the Kurds, whose territory was divided between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. My information comes from Michael Totten, writing at Reason Online, who says that it's only a matter of waiting for the right moment to jump, because Iraqi Kurds have already made up their minds to declare Kurdish independence. Kurdistan is already a reality in practice, if not in name. It has its own government, military, security, and state of being. It is safe, new, and optimistic, highly pro-American, highly pro-democracy, and does not see itself as having a bond with other Iraqis. In an informal referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan in January of 2005, in which there was 80% voter turnout, 98.7% of those casting a ballot voted to secede. Totten says it's not a matter of what the people intend to do; it's a matter of when they intend to do it. Their hunger for independence isn't a transient thing:

It’s hard to overstate just how long and how badly the Kurds have wanted out. Barzani’s father, the guerilla leader Moula Mustafa, once told Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post, “We can become your 51st state and provide you with oil.” That was back in 1973.

Read Totten's whole article. It's fascinating, and explains exactly what the Kurds are waiting for, and gives some perspective on what the rest of Iraq thinks of the idea of an independent Kurdish state splintering off from the Arab one. Hint: The main point of contention is oil.

Cease-Fire Holding--For Now

I read in Michael Totten's blog last night, and posted accordingly, that a potential cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon was dead--that's the call he got when standing in the free fire zone on the Israeli border, but I got a different story from the Associated Press this morning. According to the AP, the cease-fire is in place:

Israel's defense minister said Monday that barring isolated skirmishes with Hezbollah, the U.N.-imposed cease-fire is holding in southern Lebanon, and Israel is coordinating with the United Nations to relinquish captured territory.

From everything I've read the Israelis definitely don't want to get stuck in another occupation of southern Lebanon, and while they may have some reservations about whether the engagement with Hezbollah accomplished what it needed to, they will go ahead with the handing over of captured Lebanese territory to the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, hoping that UNIFIL will help the Lebanese army to gain control of the territories once occupied by Hezbollah.

The question I've seen the most redundantly over the last few days is whether the U.N. force will be of any use toward that end. After all, there was a U.N. peace-keeping force in southern Lebanon before the war broke out, supposedly keeping guard over Hezbollah. However, in some cases the U.N. and Hezbollah actually operated next door to each other. This cozy arrangement resulted in the death of four U.N. officials in July, when the Israelis bombed the village of El Khiam, apparently targeting Hezbollah. According to World Net Daily, there were strong indications Hezbollah was using the U.N. post as a shield from which to fire rockets. That's not very effective peace keeping on the part of the U.N., I'd say. Other sources I've read have claimed that, before the war broke out, the U.N. forces in Southern Lebanon did nothing to stop Hezbollah activities occurring in plain sight of their stations. That's not really a good sign that Israel will be able to count on the U.N. to enforce the cease-fire from the Lebanese end. Another concern is that with Iran providing ever longer range missiles, Hezbollah can fire from deeper inside Lebanon, basically over the heads of UNIFIL, and any Lebanese Army forces that move into the south.

This U.N. mandated cease-fire may or may not be in the best interest of Lebanon, or Israel. It's in both their interests for all the devastation wrought in both countries not to be in vain. What would make the damage easier to take from Israel's perspective, and that of many Lebanese, would be the dismantling of the militia that started all the turmoil in the first place. Neither of them benefit by the existence of an active Hezbollah inciting violence between two of the region's very small number of democracies. Whether it is in vain will depend largely on how much Hezbollah in Lebanon has been damaged by the Israeli Defense Force, and whether the legitimate Lebanese military can take back all of its own territory and hold it. If Hezbollah merely falls back to regroup with the aid of Syria and Iran, or to keep firing rockets from a safer distance, unhindered by either the Lebanese military, or UNIFIL, Israel will have no choice but to resume hostilities. I hope, for Lebanon's sake, that doesn't happen. If the U.N. wants what's best for Lebanon, regardless of how little concern the world body has for Israel, they need to take the task of preventing the return of Hezbollah aggression against Israel seriously--more seriously than they did the last time around. They had also better keep an eye on Iran.

Update: I understand now why Michael Totten said the cease-fire was scrapped, when it is, at this point, in effect. He was writing about August 11th, which wasn't clear from the post I referenced, but is clear from this follow-up. Once again, it's a good source of on-the-ground perspective--and pictures, lots of pictures--and nobody writes like Michael Totten. Really, he puts you there with him.

Totten In Israel

Michael Totten is in Israel, and took a drive up north, to where the war is active and ongoing. His latest post is full of eyewitness information, pictures, and experiences from being in the midst of a live fire zone with little to no cover. When he headed up, it looked like a cease-fire was on the way. He interviewed IDF Spokesmen Michael Oren and Dan Gordon and got their reaction to the pending cease-fire, as well as their reaction to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's claim that he had won the war, and whether they thought any actual good had come from the conflict. There's a lot worth reading in that conversation. One thing I particularly noted from that interview that I hadn't known before was the extent of Hezbollah's initial incursion into Israel. Gordon makes the statement that most reporters aren't telling what Hezbollah tried to do in that first attack:

“Hardly any journalists have mentioned this,” Dan said. “But at the very beginning of this thing, when Hezbollah captured our soldiers, they also tried to invade, conquer, and hold the town of Metulla along with two other towns. And they were repulsed.”

Of course Hezbollah was repulsed. They’re a guerilla/terrorist army, not infantry.

“We do have one serious asset from this war,” Dan said. “Hassan Nasrallah got his ass kicked. And he knows it.”

“Did he really get his ass kicked?” I said. “The IDF fought Hezbollah to a standstill for more than ten years before. What made you think it would be easy to get rid of them this time?”

“This time it’s different,” Dan said. “This time we’re going in there to kill them. We are not trying to hold on to territory. This is actually working. We are not stuck in the mud. Oh, and here’s another tangible…Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon no longer exists.”

So, they do see some good coming out of it all, from their persective. There's so much to this piece, and things were shifting even as Totten stood there. By the end of the interview he got a call saying the cease-fire was dead, and the ground invasion beginning. The war goes on. Read the rest for yourself. You probably won't get this clear a view of what it's like on the ground there from many other places. After the post, read the comments for even more perspective. Totten's got more to say, as do his readers.

A Tale Of Two Minds

Michael Totten pointed me to a fascinating post by Lebanon Profile at Lebanese Political Journal. It's a look at the many facets of thought in Lebanese political life--the many facets of thought in individual Lebanese, actually. Michael Totten says that Lebanon has more opinions than people. The conclusion I draw from reading both his writing and Lebanon Profile's is that many Lebanese hold what we would think are extremely conflicting ideas very comfortably in one brain. LP examines how it's possible for someone to genuinely support Hezbollah, and yet not hate Israelis or want to destroy Israel at the same time. He looks at individual Lebanese who have close relationships with Israeli Jews, and yet vote for Hezbollah in elections. Confused? I am still a bit confused myself, even after reading the post. Western thought and Middle Eastern thought simply are not the same animal, but Lebanon Profile does explain it well, and I understand the truly foreign politics of Lebanon a lot better than I did. As the conflict between Israel, Hezbollah and Lebanon continues, it can only help the situation for as many people as possible to gain insight into the thinking of "the other." It may not change conditions on the ground now, but it holds hope for the future, and if ever there was a situation that needed some hope...

War, continued...

Michael Totten blogs about Lebanon and Israel.

Moderation In All Things

"Islamist moderate" sounds to most westerners like an oxymoron--for good reason. Not that Islam can't be compatible with secular government, but the idea of Islamists running the government conjures up images of authoritarian regimes bent on forcing the entire world to conform to a very narrow view of Shari'a law. Iran springs to mind. Michael Totten's (you know Michael Totten--one of my favorite bloggers/independent journalists) quest for moderate Islamists seemed to be in vain, until he discovered The Kurdistan Islamic Union, and interviewed some people who claim to be Islamists, but don't want to kill you if you don't convert to Islam, or make women wear a burkha, hiding in the house while men run the world; they don't want to force you to give up wine with dinner, or material possesions, or any of the other standard "life would be better if we all revert to the seventh century" talking points. Isn't that refreshing? I hope the moderate Islamist bug is catching. Totten, who at first doubted these people could really be Islamists, came around to believing that they are the real deal:

If all the world’s Islamists were like these mellow Kurdish Islamists there would be no Terror War and there would be no talk of any clash of civilizations. It’s no accident, nor is it merely a convenience, that the Kurds of Iraq are American allies.

Take the time to read the article. It's fascinating, and encouraging--the best of both worlds.

Sonic Boom

See Michael Totten's very brief post about Syria's leader, Bashar Assad, and what happened recently with Israel. Make sure you read the update. It's short, but makes a very good point.

Who Are The Good Guys?

What a tangle the Middle East is, with countries composed of tribal and ethnic rivalries in which many of the factions tolerate each other at best, and openly form battle lines, or resort to terrorist strategies when the best cannot be achieved; and the best frequently cannot be achieved. Here in the U.S. there are ethnic tensions as well, with some places seeing more discord than others, but generally, the concept of a complete breakdown of law and order is totally foreign. Most of us can't even imagine living in a place where one terrorist group controls one area of a country or city, another may hold a different section, and the official government, which may or may not be legitimate, has its lines drawn to stake out yet another. To most Americans, gang activity in some of our more dangerous city neighborhoods may be an approximation of the uncertainty and danger of living in some Middle Eastern regions, but it's on a much diminished scale. We know there is conflict here, spawned from longstanding grievances, but we do not base our entire world view on the notion of us and them, nor expect us and them to roam the streets armed with automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades.

I've been doing a smattering of reading on various ME countries for a long time. Writers like Michael Totten and Michael Yon have taken me into such strongholds of ethnic and religious strife as Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, and one of the things that always amazes me is how blurred the lines are between good guys and bad guys, or at least how much each side in these age-old conflicts thinks that they are in the right, and thinks that being in the right justifies any action they may take. Maybe it's because these conflicts are so very old, and the origins of the hatred are so buried in tradition, but the hatred itself seems to become a virtue to the poor souls indoctrinated with the poison of self-righteousness from the cradle.

What I read today was an essay by Peter Church, in The Weekly Standard, on the Kurdish people, and the way things stand for them in the countries where they currently live, especially Turkey, where approximately half of them reside. I learned from Church that the Kurds are a people mostly spread through one region, but divided among four countries. They live where Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria meet, and have faced rejection and persecution from all of the governments that have claimed dominion over them. In 1920 they were briefly offered autonomy, via the Treaty of Sevres, but in 1923 it was snatched away by the Treaty of Lausanne before that self-governance ever came to fruition. So, they are a people who are separated by borders--the borders of countries with which they feel little affinity. They have occasionally rebelled in search of independence, but have suffered the consequences. Here's an example:

Under both Attaturk and the Turkish nationalists (following the 1980 military coup), Kurds had their language and ethnicity denied in Turkey. Rather than "Kurds," they were called "Mountain Turks" and speaking Kurdish became a crime. In the 1970s there was a revival of the Kurdish nationalist movement under Abdullah Ocalan, who eventually formed the PKK. The group took up arms in earnest in 1984 and continued their fight until Ocalan's arrest in 1998.

They are a people with which one can truly sympathize. Any people denied the right to their identity has the claim to compassion. The rub comes when that claim manifests itself in ways that deny compassion to others, when it leaps the boundaries of rebellion and crosses into the darkly selfish terrain of terrorism, when it puts its own claim above all others' rights to the same compassion they long for themselves. The PKK, referred to in the quote above is the Kurdish Workers Party, and is acknowledged by the U.S. as a terrorist organization:

The Turkish response to the Kurdish rebels was harsh, crippling the southeast, where today unemployment tops 50 percent. But the PKK were no angels. They targeted teachers throughout the southeast (who they considered "agents of the state") and are known to have slaughtered entire Kurdish villages for not cooperating. Yet, despite its classification as a terrorist organization, the PKK continues to enjoy broad Kurdish support in Turkey. In Van a man told me that without the PKK, Kurds would be unable to speak their own language today--which conveniently ignores the fact that Turkey's pro-Kurd reforms were enacted only after violence ceased following Ocalan's arrest.

Church's article goes on to discuss the PKK and its "political face", the Democratic Society Party (DTP). They are not letting go of the concept of terrorism as a way of achieving their ends, which are laudable on their face, but tempered by their method. Singer interviewed the DTP's Van provincial party minister, Ibrahim Sunkur:

Publicly, the relationship between the DTP and PKK has been somewhat akin to that between Sinn Fein and the IRA: They are known to be linked, but while the DTP does not publicly endorse the PKK, it doesn't disavow it either.

So I asked, "Is the government correct to call the PKK a terrorist group?" Sunkur's response was evasive: "DTP works for all Turkish people," he said. "PKK works only for Kurds."

I asked what the DTP is trying to achieve for the broader Turkish people. Sunkur replied, "Kurdish language rights and the right to practice Kurdish culture, human rights for Kurds, and an economic plan that includes Kurds."

"Is that everything?" I asked.

"And amnesty for PKK," Sunkur added. "The Turkish government must stop attacking PKK and let them enter politics at the negotiating table."

The exchange was instructive. Rather than being a program "for all Turkish people," Sunkur's list of political goals was Kurd-specific. And including amnesty for the PKK in the party platform seems, on the face of it, unrealistic, if not outright antagonistic to the Turkish government. On the other hand, the DTP's reluctance to distance itself from the PKK likely does have broad support amongst its constituents.

"If PKK is fighting after Kurds are given rights to practice their culture, then we will say they are terrorists," said another man I spoke to in Van. "But for now PKK is trying to do something Kurds support."

So what I am reading here is that as long as the people support it, it's not terrorism, that as long as they are being denied their rights, they have the right to kill innocents. Where does that kind of standard come from? From everything I have read in Michael Totten's accounts of his travels, the Kurds are a lovely people, generous and kind, at least the ones in Iraq, and have suffered greatly under intolerant regimes. So what makes a lovely, generous, kind people, who know what it is like to be treated unfairly, willing to support people who target teachers for assassination and slaughter entire villages of their own people who don't cooperate? Perhaps the latter has a fair bit to do with it, fear, but I can't believe that's the sum of it.

This whole situation between the Kurds and the Turkish government puts the U.S. in a very awkward spot. Turkey is an ally, with a terrorist group working within their borders . Kurdish Northern Iraq is an ally, with sympathy for their fellow Kurds who have suffered under harsh oppression. They are on different sides of the argument, but both share what appears to me to be a common Middle Eastern state of mind: "If I do it, it is justified, and comes at the end of my long-suffering patience. If you do it, you are a villain, and in my retribution you are only getting what you deserve." All the major players seem to see themselves in the role of martyr or victim, and the conflicts go back so far that everyone can latch onto a list of grievances, while conveniently ignoring their own culpability. Why do the Turks continue to deny the Kurds the right to their own cultural expression? Do they only see themselves as victims of terrorism, and not as perpetrators of injustice? Why do the Kurds see terrorism as a justifiable means to end their subjugation? Do they not see how they become the thing they hate when they hurt others in the name of their own freedom? I don't know enough to answer these questions, but I do know that what the whole region needs is a lot more grace and mercy. Who are the good guys here?

A Totten's Eye View Of Israel

Michael Totten's been back from the Middle East for a little while, and is writing about his wanderings. Yesterday's installment began a recap of his trip to Israel. As usual, his discoveries are surprising, and I highly recommend him as a travel guide. Let me add, however, that this is not a "things you've got to see while you're in the country" kind of travel journal. It's more about the tone of the country, and what it's like after years of armed conflict. He's insightful and observant. His site is a must-read from my perspective. If you head over to his site, stick around awhile. He's got fascinating tales of his time in Lebanon, and Northern Iraq, and Turkey. (Someday my husband and I are going to Istanbul, and it's going to be because of Michael Totten.) Enjoy.