beirut calling

2004-04-21T08:04:00.000+02:00

Blogging over at Reason
Several readers have complained that BC hasn't been updated for months. Indeed, part of the reason is too much work, but also that I've been blogging on Reason magazine's Hit and Run blog.

I'm keeping BC alive, but for the moment the little time I have goes to H&R. Will be back soon, though, when things clear up.

2004-01-03T17:27:00.000+02:00

Golan grab?
Israel's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is denying that the Israeli government has approved a plan to double the population in the occupied Golan Heights. According to Ha'aretz, he told the BBC's Hard Talk program:

"There is no program, there is no policy, there is no expansion of Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights," Olmert told the BBC.

"He [Agriculture Minister Yisrael Katz, who announced the decision] may have declared something... but in terms of the government policy... there is no such approved program..."

The statement comes amid mild hopes that Syria and Israel might resume negotiations on the Golan. While the prospect of serious talks still looks far away, the Syrians and Lebanese are "coordinating". As the Daily Star reported today:

A series of meetings will be held between Syrian and Lebanese officials in the next few days to pave the way for a possible meeting of the Syrian-Lebanese Higher Council in the next few months. The meetings are apparently intended to reinforce the image of complete cooperation between the two countries.

The article suggests the reason for this is increasing American pressure on Syria through the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. However, it is quite possible that it is also, and perhaps mainly, linked to the prospect of progress in talks with Israel. If such talks resume, Syria is very keen to keep a tight rein on Lebanon.

2004-01-03T12:58:00.000+02:00

The Battle of Algiers II
Christopher Hitchens has done a piece on the Battle of Algiers for Slate, the second in the online magazine in a few months. The first was written by Charles Paul Freund.

2004-01-01T09:44:00.000+02:00

Press review
My biweekly review of the Middle East press for Slate is an end-of-year roundup, with some interesting material on Syrian-Israeli relations. Since then, this New York Times story has cast the prospect of Syrian-Israeli negotiations in a new light--and showed where Ariel Sharon's priorities lie.

2004-01-01T09:39:00.000+02:00

We'll borrow this for now
The U.S. contemplated seizing Gulf oil fields in 1973 to break the Arab oil embargo, according to recently released British intelligence memorandum cited by the Washington Post:

It cited a warning from Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger to the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Cromer, that the United States would not tolerate threats from "under-developed, under-populated" countries and that "it was no longer obvious to him that the United States could not use force."

Seizure of the oil fields, the memo said, was "the possibility uppermost in American thinking [and] has been reflected, we believe, in their contingency planning."

Ironically, one danger was that Iraq might, at the USSR's instigation, move into Kuwait:

"The greatest risk of such confrontation in the Gulf would probably arise in Kuwait where the Iraqis, with Soviet backing, might be tempted to intervene," it said, presaging Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Presaging, yes: but the Arab world would have backed that intervention wholeheartedly, and regarded the U.S. as the threat to regional stability.

2003-12-31T07:53:00.000+02:00

My Lebanon 2003 roundup, for the Daily Star of Dec. 27.

A year of living dangerously

Whereas Lebanon could have been an Arab country deriving benefit from the US invasion of Iraq, namely through American appreciation for its free-market consociational model and its relevance in post-war Baghdad, the iron bond with Syria dictated otherwise. As the year closed, the bitter realization was that 2003 was a catastrophic follow-up to that climax of 2002: the Paris II economic summit held to help Lebanon emerge from its virtually insurmountable economic morass.

For much of the year, the Lebanese have had to contend with a virtual lockdown of their political system, provoked by a government of mostly pro-Syrian apparatchiks incapable of advancing a forward-looking policy agenda, grafted onto the more enduring personal rivalry between President Emile Lahoud and Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

This combination has suffocated even the vaguest of aspirations for domestic reform, all because the gentlemen in Damascus thought the new government would prevent Lebanon from turning into a fifth column while American soldiers entered Iraq. What the Syrians did not see, however, was that temporary quietude through a team of political heavyweights would lead to deadlock, and, therefore, threaten an economic revival necessary to ensure long-term Lebanese social stability. Lest we also forget, the Syrians need Lebanon as a safety valve to export hundreds of thousands of their laborers who might otherwise metamorphose into domestic Islamists if forced to rely solely on employment at home.

Lebanon’s Islamists showed a more paradoxical face in 2003. Even as Hizbullah behaved with remarkable pragmatism by mostly keeping the Shebaa Farms front quiet and negotiating a prisoner release with Israel, its Sunni counterparts were active in the shadows of Sidon and Tripoli. One might forget that this was a year in which an American missionary was killed in Sidon and several other foreigners the target of bomb attacks--and when militant Sunni Islamists were at the heart of fighting in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp.

Even as the public’s attention was focused on Hizbullah and its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, the real question was why the state behaved so passively toward the Sunni groups, who have posed a systematic domestic security threat in recent years--dating all the way back to the attempted Balamand bombing of Christian clergymen in the early 1990s.

Lax security and unanswered questions were also obvious in another highlight of the year, namely the rocket attack against Hariri’s Future Television station. It is not often that post-war Lebanon has had to contend with assaults against its politicians, and the general silence that followed the event suggested there was more than met the eye. If the effort was designed to intimidate Hariri, it only partially succeeded. Soon, both the Hariri and Lahoud factions were leaking damaging information on each other, and by year’s end the prime minister was openly drawing attention to his dispute with the president.

Looking ahead to 2004, the next battleground will be municipal elections scheduled for spring. Lahoud would like to extend his stay in office, but knows it will be difficult to justify a deferral of the presidential election in fall if local polls take place beforehand. On that basis alone, Hariri will support elections and, unless the security situation deteriorates dramatically, it is difficult to see him losing. Even Syria might flinch at the thought of postponing local elections that most Lebanese consider as relevant, if not more so, than legislative elections.

Then we must ask what will happen to Lahoud? The president has been peripatetic in recent weeks, even venturing overseas, when his modus operandi had been to avoid travel, except to countries having trivial local importance. If his mandate is to be extended, he must display verve and activity, and he has done so. Ultimately, however, his fate will be in the hands of others.

An extended or renewed mandate will be a tough sell for the president’s friends in Beirut and Damascus. Hariri is opposed to it, so too is Sfayr, and Parliament Speaker Nabih Birri has shown little enthusiasm. The Maronite community has never really been behind Lahoud and now, we hear, the Americans are whispering that whatever the constitution mandates on an election should be respected, although this can be read in contradictory ways. Lahoud will even be hard-pressed to find an ally in Paris, where President Jacques Chirac plainly backs Hariri.

So, will the corpse of 2003 resurrect in 2004? Everything suggests it might, since the alternatives could be disastrous, both for Lebanon and Syria. On the other hand the political leadership has rarely disappointed those predicting disappointment. But why fret? Whatever happens, the cast of characters will stay in office for the coming months; plenty of time to paint your new year black.

2003-12-31T07:49:00.000+02:00

More on the previous post: My article for the Daily Star today, but linked to the version posted on the Reason website, which, unlike the Star at present, actually has an article archive.

2003-12-29T16:06:00.000+02:00

Liberty, equality, fraternity
Alain Hertoghe sees anti-Americanism in French coverage of the Iraq war. His reward? Being fired by his employer, the French Catholic daily La Croix.

2003-12-28T09:03:00.000+02:00

Shammas on Said
Novelist Anton Shammas has written a very subtle short essay on Edward Said for the annual New York Times Magazine stiffs issue. Shammas, who is an Arab-Israeli and who famously and publicly argued that, as an Israeli citizen, he was entitled to full integration into an otherwise Jewish state, is now considerably more pessimistic about a Palestinian-Israeli peace.

He writes:

At the memorial service, a reading from the Arabic translation of his autobiography, ''Out of Place,'' replaced his English original in a moment of sheer magic, giving his life a home of sorts, a posthumous place, a mandate inside his virtual mother tongue. ''In his text,'' the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, in a passage that Said was fond of quoting, ''the writer sets up house. . . . For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.'' Arabic, that night in Beirut, was his house and his mandate.

It is interesting that when I first met Shammas, he felt that Hebrew would provide him with both his house and mandate, and indeed he told me how he did not want his Hebrew-written novel Arabesques to be translated into Arabic. Today I'm not so sure that he would agree with this. Language, for Shammas, may have become a source of betrayal and a symbol of expectations dashed, since it apparently was (as an exchange with AB Yehoshua suggested) and is (as his present pessimism confirms) insufficient to integrate him into Israeli society.

Shammas also writes:

In Said's essay ''On Lost Causes,'' he wrote that ''a lost cause is associated in the mind and in practice with a hopeless cause: that is, something you support or believe in that can no longer be believed in except as something without hope of achievement.'' But unlike some of us, Said never believed that Palestine was ''a lost cause.'' Rather, he believed that the intellectual has an ethical commitment to relentlessly and unflinchingly speak out, against all odds, against all grains and against all hegemonies -- real, imagined and self-proclaimed.

2003-12-28T08:41:00.000+02:00

At sea on O'Brian
Saw Peter Weir's film Master and Commander in a Beirut theater yesterday night, and thought of Christopher Hitchens' criticism, centered around the fact that Dr. Stephen Maturin is transformed into a mostly uninteresting character.

The summa of O'Brian's genius was the invention of Dr. Stephen Maturin. He is the ship's gifted surgeon, but he is also a scientist, an espionage agent for the Admiralty, a man of part Irish and part Catalan birth—and a revolutionary. He joins the British side, having earlier fought against it, because of his hatred for Bonaparte's betrayal of the principles of 1789—principles that are perfectly obscure to bluff Capt. Jack Aubrey. Any cinematic adaptation of O'Brian must stand or fall by its success in representing this figure.

On this the film doesn't even fall, let alone stand. It skips the whole project. As played by the admittedly handsome and intriguing Paul Bettany, Maturin is no more than a good doctor with finer feelings and a passion for natural history ... a superficial buddy movie is born out of one of the subtlest and richest and most paradoxical male relationships since Holmes and Watson.

The point is perfectly relevant. I would add that Maturin in the books is a somewhat menacing figure, for being unknown--Aubrey's equal, if not superior, in the use of weapons, and as capable of hard carnal desire as he is of scientific curiosity.

One note: in the original novel of the film (which I haven't read), the ship hunted down by Aubrey is an American one, not French as here, which would have been vastly more interesting a story in this day and age of allegedly eternal alliance with Britain. Just over a decade after the story takes place, England would burn Washington DC in the War of 1812.

Still, Weir's film is intriguing for returning us to the nautical adventure movie, which has been abandoned in recent years. Like the Western and 18th-century costumers, once-familiar genres, sea films now make only an occasional comeback and then, well, drift away. Expect Hollywood to pay some interest, though: Brad Pitt as Captain Blood.

2003-12-25T00:07:00.000+02:00

Liaison dangereuse
Chuck Freund sends a missive to Ayman al-Zawahiri.

2003-12-23T14:01:00.000+02:00

Silenced by Qaddafi
Last week the Sunday Telegraph in London asked me to pen a piece (along with one by the BBC's John Simpson) on the reaction in the Arab world to Saddam's capture. On Friday, however, Libya decided to give up its WMD, so the Telegraph didn't run my piece, as its priorities suddenly shifted.

So, here it is:

Saddam, alas, was no Hitler

BEIRUT--In the hours after Saddam Hussein appeared on television Sunday, Arab editorial writers scrambled to inject some meaning into the images of a once fearsome man—and former custodian of a state author Christine Moss Helms described in the 1980s as the “eastern flank of the Arab world”—transformed into a bewildered tramp.

A recurring reaction was that the episode, in particular Saddam’s reluctance to play Scarface and dissolve into a hail of gunfire, had somehow disgraced the Arabs. Most commentators in the region, but also Western observers and, even, Cardinal Renato Martino, the president of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace Commission, seemed to have but one word on their lips: humiliation.

Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi in London, reflected this mood by writing: “It was a shock to us, and an insult to millions of other Arabs [to watch]…the Iraqi president submitting to the humiliating [American] medical examination; we would have liked to see him fight to the end and die a martyr like his sons and grandson, or choose the death of Hitler by firing a bullet into his head or swallowing poison.”

Lebanese publisher and journalist Talal Salman, an unrepentant Pan-Arabist whose Beirut paper, Al-Safir, has been among the most strident critics of the American presence in Iraq, also seemed troubled by Saddam’s craven exit: “It was an end worthy of a despot, an oppressor of his people, weak in the face of foreign occupation…Every dictator is a coward, he kills but doesn’t fight.”

However, was Saddam’s capture really a slap to Arabs frustrated at seeing their champions—Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Saddam himself—routinely pushed around by an alien superpower? For many it was, leading to often-voluntary amnesia regarding Saddam’s legacy. As Tunisian journalist Kamel Labidi wrote in Beirut’s English-language Daily Star, describing the reaction in Cairo to the capture: “Egyptian observers did not raise the issue of Saddam’s immense responsibility in bringing to its knees one of the wealthiest of Arab countries [and] in helping weaken an already tattered Arab world…”

However, this discomfort with Saddam’s fate merged with an understanding that he was also a splendid thug. A Damascus shopkeeper encountered on Sunday afternoon hardly seemed dishonoured by the arrest in Iraq. As he watched footage of the former leader, he smiled and remarked: “We got rid of him, but there is one left. Do you know who?” I hesitated: “No, you tell me.” He answered: “Osama bin Laden.” Somehow, I was not absolutely convinced it was bin Laden he had in mind, since the coded language of Arab societies will often substitute one villain for others much closer to home.

The humiliation argument also failed to adequately explain how much Arabs resent the suffocating reach of their autocrats, even if this is offset by powerful antipathy for the United States. In the immediate aftermath of Saddam’s arrest, this combination played itself out in a resort to conspiracy theories suggesting that the Americans had manipulated the incident. Saddam’s sister and daughter both argued he had been drugged, explaining why he had surrendered so quietly. The sister, Nawal Ibrahim Al-Hassan, explained: “If he were in full command of his mental capacities he would have resisted to [the] death.”

Other theories were more prosaic, seeking to explain the conditions leading to Saddam’s arrest. One account had it that Iran had collaborated in locating its old nemesis, in exchange for the Iraqi Governing Council’s expelling from its territory the Iranian opposition Mujahideen Khalq Organization. Another hypothesis was that the Americans had discovered Saddam’s whereabouts by intercepting his telephone calls to his second wife, Samira Shahbandar, who now lives in Lebanon with their son, Ali.

Arab conspiratorial thinking notwithstanding, the theories little approximated in duration those accompanying the fall of Baghdad last April, when it was rumoured that Saddam’s regime had been betrayed by its own security forces. It quickly became clear to all that the broken man on screen was indeed the former Iraqi leader, not one of his illustrious “doubles”, and that it was unlikely for someone in that condition to resist anyone.

But did the Arab world read into Saddam’s capture a general lesson about the fate of its autocratic rulers? Some did, and Arab-American academic Fouad Ajami summed up their argument most eloquently by writing: “Saddam is a crystal ball in which the rulers and the rogues in the region might glimpse the danger that attends them.” Perhaps, but it is doubtful that very many Arabs saw beyond the fact that Saddam’s captors were Americans. In the hierarchy of regional beefs, anti-Americanism still retains far more force than the overthrow of a brutal—yet also somehow palatable, for being home-grown—despot.

Saddam’s capture will not soon lead to an Arab liberal renaissance. However, the establishment of a truly open and democratic order in Iraq does have that potential, all the more so if it is soon transformed into an all-Iraqi venture. In that context, Saddam’s capture may one day take on more resonance in the region, though by then the Arabs will have likely airbrushed the Americans out of the narrative.

2003-12-23T13:52:00.000+02:00

A sheep in Wolfowitz clothing?
The Washington Post has an extended portrait of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The bottom line is that he's one misunderstood man.

Sez in one passage:

But to Wolfowitz, there is no contradiction between calculated policies and idealistic goals. Rather, he contends, they can reinforce each other. Indeed, Wolfowitz is most confrontational when he is most idealistic.

Nowhere is that more evident than in his advocacy of transforming the politics of the Middle East, a policy that frequently is attacked as unrealistically idealistic. As he put it to the Jerusalem Post earlier this year, "The idea that we could live with another 20 years of stagnation in the Middle East that breeds this radicalism and breeds terrorism is, I think, just unacceptable."

But some think Wolfowitz is out of his league:

Some see Wolfowitz's views on the Middle East as dangerously naive. "Wolfowitz doesn't know much about the business he's in," says retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, a former chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the region. "He knows very little about war fighting. And he knows very little about the Middle East, aside from maybe Israel."

Wolfowitz responds, "I think I know a lot about Islam, as a whole, and I know a lot about the Middle East. I've been following it for a very long time." He also notes that the experts frequently have been wrong about whether one Arab state would attack another, as Iraq did to Kuwait in 1990, or what the reaction of the "Arab street" would be to the U.S. invasion of Iraq this year.

But to Wolfowitz, trying to change the Middle East is far from unrealistic. Rather, it is using universal ideals to achieve the practical end of curtailing terrorism. Just as much of East Asia democratized in the 1980s and 1990s, so too is there a chance that the Middle East could change radically. "It could," he says. "And it's certainly worth a try."

If that sounds a trifle Wilsonian, try Tim Cavanaugh's take on Wolfowitz for the Daily Star, which he reprinted on the Reason website.

2003-12-14T22:28:00.000+02:00

The Palestinians, Saddam and a Syrian
Work has made blogging all but impossible, but on the day Saddam Hussein was captured, some resurrection seems called for. Almost 10 days ago, I published an op-ed in the New York Times (the link is now pay only, but you can see a slightly altered version on the International Herald Tribune site here). The basic argument is that the Palestinian issue "for all its centrality to the Arab experience during the past half-century, and for all the justifiable grievances it has aroused...has, in many respects, rendered the Arab world impotent."

The argument is not a popular one in the Arab world, and there was the predictable criticism, including the natural conclusion that I was a Zionist. Yet I did get positive feedback from several Arab readers, and a stern rebuke from a supporter of Israel (indeed several), who could not stomach the fact that I described the Palestinians as "dispossessed."

On Saddam, I was in Damascus, in the office of a senior official when the news came through. He seemed unperturbed. Later on, in a tourist shop, I saw the owner looking at AL-Jazeera watching an American take swab samples from Saddam’s mouth for DNA samples. The Syrian smiled broadly: “We got rid of him, but there is one more. Do you know who?” I responded: “No, you tell me.” He answered: “Osama bin Laden.” And when someone else said: “And George Bush,” he feigned shock and, with a smile, said: “I don’t discuss politics!”

On this day, the Syrian didn’t care about Bush, even though he had just signed the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. All he was enjoying was the collapse of an Arab tyrant.

2003-11-07T22:55:00.000+02:00

Back in town after three weeks of idle bliss. Not much to post, but here are two pieces I published in the past week. The first, for Thursday's Daily Star, urges the Arabs to welcome a second Bush term, since that would greatly enhance the U.S.'s remaining in Iraq; the second is my bi-weekly contribution to Slate's International Papers column.

More to come, though as a tidbit, I would recommend this Q&A session at Georgetown University with Paul Wolfowitz, somehow regarded as the new "dark prince" of the post-Cold War era. Here's a few choice quotes:

"You cited some things that Israelis have to change and you could make a longer list. You could have talked about settlements, for example. The President has talked about settlements, he's talked about the wall, he's talked about the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. There's no question that the President is prepared to put pressure on the Israelis to change. "

And this rather astute observation: "If the Palestinians would adopt the ways of Ghandi I think they could in fact make a more (laughter) - just very quickly - I believe the power of individuals demonstrating peacefully is enormous..."

Some of us who support the creation of a Palestinian state have been arguing that for a long time.

2003-10-06T19:58:00.000+02:00

From the archives
On another theme entirely, my friend Tim Cavanaugh has sent this link to an extravagant article he wrote in the dying days of Suck.com on the Virgin Mary's contribution to the anti-communist crusade, which she had planned to title The God that Failed, before copyright infringement laws prevented her from doing so.

In confession, Cavanaugh noted that the Virgin Mary had done much more than Pope John Paul II to rout the Reds: "Just another case of a man being praised for a woman's job," said he, genuflecting.

2003-10-06T19:41:00.000+02:00

Front line: Upper West Side
After an extended period of catalepsy, be prepared for 3 weeks of occultation. At the end of the week I will be off on what my friends consider a well-deserved, and my enemies a welcome, vacation.

After writing a piece on the death of Edward Said, and comparing him to Fouad Ajami (a piece you can find here or here), I received mixed reviews to this comparison of two different, yet maybe not so different men.

My favorite was this billet doux from a Lebanese admirer:

I was outraged to read in your October 2 issue Michael Young's article on Edward Said and Fouad Ajami. How can anybody in his right mind draw a parallel between Edward Said, the champion of all Arabs, the man who stood for the cause of all Arabs, that of Palestine, and put himself and his family at great risk living and working in New York, the bedrock of Zionism in the world today, to Fouad Ajami, a man who exemplifies to most Arabs the traitor who has sold his soul and mind to Zionism and to everything that is anti-Arab. Shame on you Mr Young , you have truly offended all free minded Arabs.

Well gosh, I am sorry. I didn't realize that Said took such a risk living in New York amid all those zany Zionists. At least he wasn't in the World Trade Center when they flew a couple of airplanes into it.

2003-09-27T20:16:00.000+02:00

Collusion across the southern border
Here is my weekly Lebanon comment from the Daily Star, on the impending (or is it?) prisoner release between Israel and Hizbullah. It argues that though enemies they may be, the Israelis and Hizbullah are united in seeing the deal as a means of screwing Yasser Arafat.

2003-09-27T20:13:00.000+02:00

Uday's failed assassins
An article in the Christian Science Monitor reveals the name of those who tried to kill Uday, Saddam's son, back in December 1996. He was hit by 17 bullets, but survived.

The story is interesting in two ways to me. First it reveals that arguably the most famous account of the attempted hit, the one written by the Cockburns in Out of the Ashes, is apparently wrong in several major details. The Cockburns said a group called Al-Nahda was responsible for the attack, and was founded by well-educated young Baghdadis. It turns out that the real culprit (if the Monitor story is correct) was a group called the 15 Shaaban group, which was made up of Iraqi Shiites from the south.

A second detail is that Saddam managed to find out who had carried out the attack thanks to the Jordanians, who handed over a 15 Shaaban militant to the Iraqi regime. He was tortured and revealed the names of the perpetrators. They were hiding out in the southern marshes, but one was killed and several of their family members were executed.

2003-09-27T19:57:00.000+02:00

Said comments
Among the comments on Edward Said, this one by Charles Paul Freund in the Daily Star (and which picks up on a theme he developed in Reason magazine here) is well worth reading. It's main thesis is that the Orientalist critique, though it survives, has in many of its manifestations hit a brick wall of sorts, so that one of it's primary characteristics today is its transformation into a form of "Occidentalism"--whereby it is the West that is "objectified" and rendered into an Other.

Christopher Hitchens has written a remarkably warm obituary in Slate, which manages to highlight Said's sensitivity and paper over the real differences between the two men in recent months, while also underlining that Said's political views were, at times, wrong. The real story is often in the details, and Hitchens affirms that the two were on speaking terms almost until the end, with Said recently demanding that Hitchens write about a Palestinian organization known as the Palestinian National Initiative.

The merit of both pieces is that they give Said his due without being reverential. It was also with some surprise that I learned in perusing Out of Place, Said's partial autobiography, that the doctor who had diagnosed Said with leukemia is an old family friend of ours--a piece of information surely of no general interest, except to show how small the world of the Christian Levantine is, even if Said often insisted that he did not identify with any such group.

2003-09-25T18:54:00.000+03:00

After the last sky
Edward Said is dead, and for those of us who were often highly critical of him, particularly in his later years, it's surely not a pleasant moment. Dying doesn't make a wrong right, but it does obligate one to look back a bit more closely and see if all the criticism was justified.

Below is the last piece I wrote on Said. He reportedly once asked what I had against him. Nothing at all. I was disappointed to see that the man who should have embodied the highest correlation of the best of East and West (to borrow poorly from Christopher Hitchens) somehow ended up having so little to offer when it came to helping direct the Arab world out of its pervading autocracy and narrow-mindedness.

I believe Said had one thing absolutely right, though: he understood that the only real solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a binational democratic state. Nothing to date suggests he was wrong; only that he got the timing wrong.

Here is the piece:

In praise of surrender?

They were issuing honorary doctorates last Saturday at the American University of Beirut, and you could have pretty much guessed the list of honorees before attending the ceremony, had you been invited.

I wasn’t, and read with trepidation in this newspaper that “hope for the future was a central element in all the recipients’ speeches.” The bane of university award ceremonies is that speakers are under contract to crank out hope, even if there is little to rustle up. The events are too costly to send the public home looking for cyanide or a razor.

However, a comparison of the writings of two of the accomplished literary honorees tells a different story. When university ends, real life begins and what Edward Said and Amin Maalouf represent outside the compulsory optimism demanded by the academy is well worth examining. In different ways, the two men illustrate the difficulties, at times self-inflicted, of the intellectual in a world where doctorates, honorary or real, often mean very little.

Was there ever a doubt that AUB would choose Said, who is on everybody’s short list for some kind of award? With him you’re playing it safe while also putting up a front of daring subversiveness. That’s because Said has convinced everybody he’s dirt in the eye of mainstream America, when in fact he is merely its avatar--both a foil of the American system, and someone who could have achieved pop status nowhere outside of it.

Said will forever be remembered for his book Orientalism, but few people look closely enough at his output as a columnist. Several books have been collated from Said’s commentaries, most often written in English for Arabic newspapers. That the articles preach to the converted is hardly their worst failing, though it is easy telling an Arab readership that the US is overbearing and that Israel abuses Palestinian human rights. Said wastes much time breaking down open doors.

What makes Said’s articles disappointing is that they offer no cures for the maladies he diagnoses. The French sociologist Raymond Aron, himself a columnist, wrote in his memoirs that he realized it was easy in his articles to publicly criticize the behavior of politicians; far more challenging was putting himself in their shoes and proposing realistic alternatives. With Said one gets variations on a single harangue. This intermittent promoter of hopefulness has become that most tiresome of stock figures: a Middle Eastern Cassandra incapable of proposing a way out of the region’s tribulations.

Sitting next to Said was writer Amin Maalouf, far more hazardous an honoree for preferring to speak in French. The message Maalouf brought was different than Said’s, being expressed most prominently in his 1993 novel The Rock of Tanios. One can indefinitely debate the novel’s autobiographical attributes, but even a cursory reading will show the book is very much an expression of the hopelessness of Maalouf’s generation.

When it was published, The Rock of Tanios attracted attention for the wrong reasons. The novel won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt, provoking the usual shrieking from the literati divided over whether the book was worthy of their attention. Though the story was set during the Lebanese conflict of 1840, Maalouf was really thinking about 1975. And like his character Tanios, who, despairing of his own society, literally disappears at the end of the novel, Maalouf and his generation figuratively did so by going into exile once Lebanon’s civil war began.

In different ways, Said and Maalouf speak to the surrender of the intellectual. Where Said sees the intellectual as a vanguard for change and innovation, he uncannily personifies the contrary in his most popular writings. Where Maalouf won a prize celebrating the vitality of writers, he did so on the basis of a book acknowledging the failure of humanism and the futility of the intellectual in his own society.

A thought comes to mind: Are Said and Maalouf, who have fallen under Western eyes since leaving their countries of origin, also lingering victims of the Middle East? Is that part of them that remains attached to the region destined to point out the limitations of the intellectual? Was that high mass at AUB really as hopeful an event as the organizers would have liked to pretend.

2003-09-25T10:40:00.000+03:00

Aoun and Syria
Here's a link to my Daily Star article of today on the Syria Accountability Act, and a second one to an article written last Saturday for the Lebanon section of the paper. Both argue that Syria and the Lebanese government have provided supporters of the legislation with few alternatives.

The key role of Michel Aoun in all this might interest you to go back to this portrait I drew of the general in the Lebanon Report (which I edited) several years ago, after visiting him in his exile outside Paris--the first of two encounters.

I've always been ambiguous about Aoun, have little respect for his political skills, but also recognize that he has the keen instincts of a demagogue when it comes to gauging the public mood, which means he's often in tune with the public's discontent.

2003-09-19T14:08:00.000+03:00

Matt Barganier demands to be read
Received this response from Matt Barganier to my previous posting. Seems only fair to run his more serious points:

...Welch is obsessed with the 500,000 number. That’s fine, but he uses it as a mallet against the antiwar camp:

“[A] New York-based advocacy group called the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) concluded in a May 1996 survey that ‘these mortality rates translate into a figure of over half a million excess child deaths as a result of sanctions.’

“In addition to doubling the Iraqi government highest number and attributing all deaths to the embargo, CESR suggested a comparison that proved popular among the growing legions of sanctions critics: ‘In simple terms, more Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions than the combined toll of two atomic bombs on Japan.’ The word genocide started making its way into the discussion.

“Still, the report might well have ended up in the dustbin of bad mathematics had a CESR fact-finding tour of Iraq not been filmed by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes.”

The dustbin of bad mathematics? As I pointed out, the mere fact that CESR arrived at the figure the wrong way doesn’t debunk the figure. Also, I said that Welch put “most” of his effort into smearing the antiwar crowd; I granted that he throws a few softballs at sanctions. But why spend so much time calling everyone who blames the deaths on sanctions “loonies”?

As for my “sloppy thought”: Welch did mention more than one source for the 500,000 or higher number, including an Iraqi govt. report.

Also, I didn’t blame Welch for adjusting the excess deaths rate to 1989 levels. I merely mentioned that he did so. OK, so Matt Welch says it could be 420,000 dead kids. Garfield says it could be as many as 530,000. So again: Why spend so much time calling those who use the 500,000 “loonies”?

I also said that Welch was correct when he said that UNICEF doesn’t lay sole blame for the deaths on the sanctions. So what? Welch’s alternative culprits don’t make much sense. I spent a few words on that.

On the increased deaths: Did I misquote Welch? In the 2002 article, he said that deaths went down after oil-for-food. Hooray U.S./UN! In the Daily Star article, he said they went up. Bad Saddam! Give me a break, will ya?

Hey, I think you’re doing a good thing with the Daily Star. I read it at least once a week. But you oughta do me the courtesy of reading my stuff more carefully before you pull your guilt by association shit (Alouni) on me. (ouch. ed)

Best,
Matt Barganier

2003-09-19T00:05:00.000+03:00

Bargain analysis
Received this word from one Matt Barganier, at antiwar.com, on Matt Welch's piece of a few weeks ago, and with a snide remark on my comment on Al-Jazeera:

"Speaking of unimpressive reporting (al-Jazeera)--you oughta read Matt Welch's stuff before you print it", with this link.

My response is below:

Hey Matt,

This is Matt Welch’s fight, but since you rather vulgarly instructed me to read what I edit in the Daily Star, let me turn around and tell you to read more closely what you claim to critique in your shoddy text. In your mail you also snidely made an aside on my own column today on Taysir Alouni of Al-Jazeera. I imagine you two would get along very well.

You open: “Welch puts most of his effort into smearing critics of sanctions/war and absolving the U.S./U.N. of primary blame for Iraq's twelve-year humanitarian disaster.”

Maybe that’s how you read this concluding passage by Welch: “Which is an excellent reason to question their [sanctions] continued infliction upon countries such as Cuba, Libya and Myanmar. With the very notable exception of South Africa, the sanction tool’s track record in changing dictatorial behavior (or triggering regime change, which is often the real motivation) has been poor. Surely there must be some option between all-out war and a slap on the wrist, preferably one that doesn’t contribute to thousands of needless deaths.”

I think it’s pretty clear that what you have here is a statement of doubt on sanctions, not a smear of sanctions’ critics.

Second, you write that Welch “claims to debunk the frequently heard statistics about the size of the calamity.” Bullshit. All he claimed to debunk was that, according to UNICEF figures, sanctions alone were directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi children. He never offers a figure of his own--of which more later--and says that UNICEF never cited an absolute figure either. His stats are basically designed to prove that the numbers game is inconclusive.

When you write: "Welch cites the original UNICEF report for the years 1991-1998 as one source for the 500,000 figure," his whole point was that UNICEF did not cite that figure, at least in the way it was understood. (By the way were there any other original sources for the figure? Sloppy thought.) What the report said was: "If the substantial reduction in the under-five mortality rate during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998."

In plain terms, that meant if 1980s trends (read for the entire decade) continued uninterrupted there would have been half a million fewer deaths. What Welch pointed out was simply that if you based the excess death figure just on 1989 figures (and in the Star piece he did not say that a 1989 base year was "more accurate"), the excess deaths figure would be lower. It's not a value judgment he was making, but recognition that throughout the 1980s the stats changed, so that as you moved nearer the end of the decade, the estimates (the 500,000 figure constantly cited) fell somewhat. That’s all.

Then you write: “He then invokes a 1999 study by Richard Garfield, a nursing professor at Columbia University, which sets the 1991-1998 death toll between 106,000 and 227,000. This debunks the myth of a half million, right? Not exactly. Garfield's updated estimate for the entire 1990-2002 period is actually 350,000 to 530,000. In other words, the authority Welch uses to contradict UNICEF and other purveyors of what he calls "the Iraqi babies scam" says that total deaths could be 6% higher than the "scammers" proclaim!”

C’mon Matt, reread what Welch wrote. He doesn’t contradict UNICEF for God’s sake, he makes the case that UNICEF never said what it was wrongly quoted as saying. Welch actually never confirms or denies the 500,000 death figure; in fact if you cite him on the 1989 base year, you’re saying that Welch is closer to believing the 400,000 figure, which is high enough. In fact Welch didn’t cite any figure at all for death estimates. What he did do was say that the deaths were not solely caused by sanctions, and that quote came from UNICEF. His citing of Garfield shows that he’s willing to accept a high death toll, but it’s not an absolute figure he’s after, it’s what caused the deaths?

And as Garfield’s figures showed, deaths actually went up in Iraq when money flowed in after oil-for-food. You never actually disagree with that stat by the way (indeed you cite it), so perhaps you might suggest a reason why it did go up? Why not offer an answer?

Finally you misread what Welch said in this passage: “UNICEF found that under-five mortality actually decreased in the autonomous north, while doubling in Saddam-controlled regions, giving pro-sanctions (and pro-war) advocates evidence that the Iraqi dictator was largely to blame. (It is also true that the north received far more international aid.)”

You make this out to be a cop-out. In fact Welch doesn’t argue this from the perspective of someone who is pro-sanctions or pro-war. He merely observes that pro-sanctions (and pro-war) advocates exploited the figure. His parenthesis I read as an effort to qualify the argument of the pro-sanctions and pro-war crowd. Is Welch pro-war? I don’t know, nor have I ever discussed the matter with him. But he does cite UNICEF to the effect that war was one of the factors in the babies’ deaths, and to the best of my knowledge Welch nowhere has condoned killing babies, so you might find your answer there.

2003-09-18T23:59:00.000+03:00

Taysir Alouni, again
Many readers will have come here through the critical piece I wrote in the Daily Star today on Taysir Alouni, Al-Jazeera's correspondent accused of being an AL-Qaeda operative, which Reason picked up here.