Pandemonium

Oh, dear! What did I tell you? Pandemonium! The reports from Nahr al Bared and other corners of the capital are flooding in; the sober ones are few, the idiotic are aplenty. Who would have thought Counterpunch would become as painful to read as the editorial page of the New York Post. That poor sod Franklin Lamb, whoever he is. All this time we’ve been watching out for crap coming from the right; now we have to duck in all directions.

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This Counterpunch man-on-the inside has been reporting from the womb of Nahr al Bared. There is little food, hardly any clean water, not a few innocent victims, too many Fath al Islam fighters, and the man clearly does not know from which end his take on the events is coming, no doubt too grateful that he’s been invited to the party to give sobriety a chance. This is sad—sad because that small space in his piece that does accommodate persuasive speculation about some of the reasons that brought us to this tumult suffocates from the much larger section that sinks into bluster, sensationalism and clichéd conspiracy theories; sad because I was not hearing it from Bill O’reilly on Fox, I was reading it in Counterpunch.

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Lamb starts out sensitively enough. The tragedy that is this forever harassed and abused Palestinian people graces the first part of his May 26 article, (as it should every reporter’s) and then it’s bye-bye from there. Had he stuck to some variation of Seymour Hersh’s argument of unintended consequences, or blow back--as some refer to it—he would have remained on safe ground, still marching close enough to intelligent conjecture and fact. But he quickly attaches himself very confidently to one scenario (obviously the Americans did it), inexplicably dispensing with all the requisite qualifications that typically accompany explanations to very dark and nebulous happenings.

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In his first post, he rambles on incoherently about the Welch Club (named after Assistant Secretary David Welch) and an American-inspired conspiracy against the Lebanese army, in the second he denies that there was a bank robbery or that Lebanese soldiers were beheaded. In neither does he tread carefully around the shadowy world in which Fath al Islam and like-minded extremists thrive or show appreciation for all the menacing (and often competing) forces that steer them within it. By offering only his own political predispositions and Fath al Islam denials to him as support for his suppositions, this very angry, if seemingly well-intentioned, American keeps himself in the dark and his hapless readers with him.

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No sense in jumping to last summer’s war in the midst of this commotion is there? Old news, that sad episode and its residues, now that we are discovering that we have been standing waist-deep in an infinitely larger sewer, and much of it of our own making—as usual.

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Who said stupidity is not fascinating to behold as it reveals itself in real time, mind-numbing in its willful ignorance, tragic in its self-deception? Are we not all mesmerized by the calamity that is about to give birth to its demonic offspring everywhere around us—all because, like the dimwitted midwife in those B-rated horror movies of yesteryear, we have obstinately cared for the pregnant beast, believing it against all evidence to be just the grouchy side of an essentially good woman?

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You think me hysterical?


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As the facts trickle out of Nahr al Bared, as the experts’ once tedious warnings suddenly become worthwhile reading, as once ridiculed investigative analyses about the naughty dealings of the bad boys parading as the good guys enjoy renewed respect, we begin to fathom the extent of the trouble ahead of us and the dearth of solutions.


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Every which way you turn it, the drama of Fath al Islam and all those other groups with equally nifty names--Jund al Sham, Ussbat al Ansar, Ansar al Islam, al Ahbash,…--is all thorns, filth and bad odors. But I have to say, whichever way you actually do turn it, it tickles the senses. The facts have yet to line up naked before us, but they sure are stripping. And the details they are exposing so far--escorted, of course, by all the standard provisos--are these:


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The Salafi Fath al Islam, a very recent (last November to be exact) offshoot of the non-religious Fath al Intifadah, a splinter itself from Yasser Arafat’s Fath, may well have been sponsored by the Saudis and the Hariris and cuddled by the Lebanese government which allowed it to roam relatively free between Palestinian camps. If those who accused the intrepid Seymour Hersh of being sloppy when he first revealed this in the New Yorker’s March 5th issue have not yet sent out their apologies, they should get on with it. Hersh was not right about everything, it is true--especially the very likely role Syria has been playing in this tawdry business—but he is close enough to the facts about Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s grand Shiite containment strategy sold last year to the Americans with a Saudi seal.


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For Bandar, it would seem the main threat to the region’s status quo (i.e. Sunni Arab dominance) is the Shiite resurgence and the Persians’ bourgeoning influence. That both were offered by the Americans to their ecstatic recipients, like dhulma on a silver platter, was especially rankling to the dumb-struck Saudis, and hence Bandar’s obsessive pursuit of a bold plan to reverse what the Bush administration itself had set in motion. Bandar thought and thought, and then thought some more, until one morning it landed on his head: Let the Americans hit Iran, let us Sunnis firmly (but secretly, of course) join hands with Israel against Iran, Syria and Hezbollah and last, but certainly not least, let our Sunni Lebanese protégés sponsor al-Qaeda-like extremists in Lebanon to check Hezbollah’s hegemony and threaten its interests.

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It is not clear whether Bandar, the maverick that he is, was playing solo all along, or whether King Abdullah, finally realizing that his dashing little prince had fallen face-down in his horse shit, abandoned him in mid-gallop. But all those in the know are speaking of the dimming star of a sidelined Bandar. King Abdullah reportedly was not too keen on Bandar’s proposition from the start, preferring a more creative and less combative approach. He, therefore, informed a surprised Dick Cheney that the Kingdom would not back a military hit against Iran, would not enter into an alliance with Israel and would much rather keep the doors open with Hezbollah. It is not that Abdullah is not nervous about the emboldened Iranians and Shiites in the region, especially in Iraq, he is—very—but let’s just say his spirit is not quite as adventurous as Bandar’s. Blame it on age and, thankfully, the bit of wisdom that sometimes comes with it.

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So far, so good? Here’s where things go from moronic to downright dangerous. In those few months Bandar was left to stray, he signals to the Hariri crew to start feeding Fath al Islam as well as other guns for hire and facilitating their armed existence in Palestinian camps. The Hariris, longtime supporters of the similarly hideous Ussbat al Ansar and other Islamist radicals—a few of whom were arrested in the Diniyeh clashes in 2000, and then pardoned due to Sa’ad Hariri and other Sunni leaders’ intercession—begin looking after Fath al Islam, signaling to the Lebanese government to let these gangs trek unhindered between refugee camps.

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This was more than a family affair; this was government policy apparently aimed at bolstering the Sunni community against a heavily armed Shiite Hezbollah. However, as mentioned in my previous post, these bridges between mainstream Lebanese Sunnism and the sect’s fringe elements are old constructions, and the Hariris were not the only active investors in this enterprise. From the outset, and long before this patronage morphed into a specific Saudi and Hariri-endowed political plan, it was obvious that the Sunni establishment was presiding over currents that make Hezbollah look positively angelic.

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The trail grows much colder at this juncture. Three likely scenarios make their case for space. Either the plug was pulled (prompted by a Saudi-American change of mind) on Fath al Islam, provoking it to show its canines; or Syria, the ingenious trickster that it is, drills inroads into Fath al Islam, works them like no master can, and turns them loose on their old patrons; or a combination of both: An unruly Fath al Islam dampens Hariri’s enthusiasm for them and creates a door through which Syria walks in and plays its hand. Nice!

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Whichever scenario is the closest to reality, Hariri and Saniora must be finding it very difficult to sit on their bums right about—oh, say-- this very minute because as we all know once you create a monster you can never be sure when it is going to turn around and bite you—hard.

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This is what I have been able to gather and deduce from the reports and assessments of those with serious insight into and knowledge about the different pieces of this puzzle.

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But, alas, as revelatory as all this is, it is not where the story may prove to be at its most meaningful—and unsettling.

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Spooky, huh?


Al baqiyyah fi al adad al Qadem (roughly, more later)

Contagion

A long break? Unfortunately, work got in the way. Besides, this new entry required—I don’t know?—a bit of thoughtfulness. I realize that, in the midst of the violence in Tripoli and the changing tactics of terror that are bringing the seeds of conflict to the heart of Sunni Beirut, there might be more interest in insights that address the immediate crisis, but, if you bear with me, you might find my contribution not entirely unhelpful.

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I need to dwell a little longer on, stretch a little more, this life of raw deals that we Arabs have been living, this choice we are constantly forced to make between evils. Had this dilemma remained squarely ours, today’s debate would echo yesterday’s. But there is a contagion making its rounds as of late—and not in these already afflicted parts.

As recently as September 10, 2001, Arabs like me who abhor that space between rocks and hard places would seek and find comfort somewhere in the perspectives of informed Western observers who knew enough about us to extract the repressed colors from a predicament dyed heavy for us in black and white. Even when they were very near they stood far enough to distinguish between issues fake and real. They could identify with the Arabs’ plight without buying into the professed credentials of its presumed defenders. They gave primacy to context when they met an apparent fact, and allowed nuance, however inconvenient, to intrude on absolute convictions.

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But the ease with which we, terminally beleaguered Arabs, choose sides is attracting converts from well outside the usual circle of acolytes. In the aftermath of a tragic September 11 that devastated lives, brought consequence agonizingly close to cause and let loose the demons of a very disturbed politics, out there in the West hysteria is harassing sound judgment the way it chased it away in my East. Islam has become the villain, the West a hero, civilizations are colliding and Western enlightenment itself is fighting for its life. The brightest of minds, with such unseemly haste, have joined the fight, long-cherished principles have been dumped and old nemeses have become the best of chums. Clearly panicky and besieged, they have fallen into the worst of our routines: Their political persuasions, pumped-up on noblesse oblige and high on rage, are planting themselves like bouncers at the door of every discourse and arbitrarily picking their way through the facts desperately trying to enter the argument.

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Still, truth be told, you cannot dismiss chagrin when it travels beyond its customary fringe quarters; when it is eloquent and only reluctantly hate filled; when it works so hard to justify and qualify if only to digest its own intolerance more easily. Similarly, you cannot embrace it simply because it cuts you all the slack you want, converts every fishy excuse of yours into a respectable reason and takes your obvious fibs for incontrovertible facts.

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You cannot ignore Martin Amis, one of England’s literary talents and a recovering liberal, when, in a three-part essay in the British Observer back in September 2006, he pronounces the Age of Horrorism, spawned by a maniacal Islamism, upon us. You cannot walk away from his words, which mystify precisely because they come from his pen. As an acquaintance of mine wrote after she read his piece, “Why would a man with his pulsating intellect, a man who seems to know enough and know it well write as if he knows nothing at all?”

And then it dawned on her:

As I read through Amis’s opening act, I quickly realized how forbidding the terrene of Islamism can be to the uninitiated…Before September 11, the West, he tells us, "had no views whatever on Islam," that, before the cruel indecency of that day, Islamism’s immediacy for the West was "…unforeseeable, altogether unknowable." These are confessions that tempt a rueful nod. After all, before September 11, grotesque or not, political Islam spread its poison way over here and therefore invited little Western attention and merited even less of its thought. Before September 11, to the deciders in much of the West, in an even larger slice of the East, and, yes, in Israel, Islamism seemed like an ugly enough of a good idea, a homegrown pit-bull that could harass unwelcome intruders and keep genuine moderation and secularism in check. Before September 11, it was for the East to painfully live through and climb up the steep learning curve about Islamism.
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How can I, then, not feel sympathy for Amis as he takes his first steps into the mind and purpose of Mohammad Atta; into the frightening message from that murderous day in a Madrid train station, that blood-dipped seventh of July in London? How can I not feel sympathy for him as he stumbles through the madness that is suicide-bombing Iraq into non-existence; through Palestinian suicide bombings that have sent a noble cause scampering to the moral low ground; through the blue burka and the black niqab that symbolize Islamism’s dire promise to us Muslim women; through the societies of "half-orphans" conceived by Muslim men given to polygamy and temporary legal pleasure? How can I not feel sympathy for Amis as he sits mortified through the rushes of an "anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualistic, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti rational…" Islam?...

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…Because the monster is within Islam, the search for the external fiends that feed it, although duly noted by Amis, becomes a kind of appeasement. Because of its terrifying methods, of the promiscuity of its rage, Western transgressions and Israeli wickedness, although regrettable, become implicitly rational—a tolerable kind of malevolence. Death that comes in trickles from cluster bombs, death that comes in planeloads of reasonable justification or savvy rhetoric, death that eats its way slowly into its victim’s life, maybe be malevolent but it is certainly way short of "maximum." And moral equivalence in this apocalyptic conflict, relevant though it remains for Amis, does not in any way narrow the "vast and obvious" moral advantage of the West and does not render it any less superior.

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I read and I marvel and I think this is all so sad and so neat…

Indeed! The Age of Horrorism, the way Amis cannot help but see it, is with us and it is horrific in its deathly beliefs, gruesome in its means. However, although my friend is right to feel sympathy for Amis even as she points up the intellectual—and, yes--moral lethargy that send large sections of his article into a deep snore, I am still wondering to myself, How is this any less silly than the paranoiac nonsense thrown on us daily over here? It’s like looking at ourselves in the mirror. We are told that, unlike us, the West, traumatized though it may be, is endowed with liberal traditions and democratic practices entrenched enough to help it withstand and eventually overcome the witch-hunt mentality and jingoism that befall a people in times of crisis. We are told that, unlike ours, the West’s core—its center if you prefer—is elastic enough to let its illuminati run wild on the edge of sensibility before pulling them back, tamed, into the fold. Lovely! It seems to me that we have all the excuses we need for wholesale acquiescence in intimidated, cowering thought. What are the West’s?

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But, as I have just mentioned, this is not only about Amis and others like him who thoughtlessly sprinted to one extreme in search of incondite explanations for and defenses against a disturbingly aggressive strain of Islamic fundamentalism. This is equally about those who woke up on September 12, 2001, no less aware of our rich humanity than they were before Osama became a household name, and no less sensitive to our distress from a medley of incestuous wrongs: from colonialism; from an unforgivably callous American policy; from Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and people; from Israel’s pernicious meddling way past its borders; from our failure in building nations; from the ubiquity of authoritarianism in our region; from the pervasiveness of parochialism among our people; from our free fall to the bottom of that list of developing countries still struggling with illiteracy, shattered potential, lost youth, women’s rights, human right…you name it. I am actually lamenting those Western observers who (with the best of intentions, I am sure) have taken Amis’s jitters and turned them on their head: Incensed by the intellectual upheaval that has seen the defection of the dearest of colleagues and alarmed by a scandalously boorish American interventionism in collusion with unspeakably merciless Israeli practices, they are finding the light in the darkest of forces competing with them.

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If backdrops and diversity, the vibrancy of life itself, were kept out of Amis’s hyperventilating, dark screed on Islam and the East, blind empathy and schmaltzy romanticism have smothered every nuance in the pseudo-Chomskian harangues defending these. If, for Amis, Liz Cheney (of all people) is a heroine and her supposed fight for Muslim women’s liberation is the one thing that counts, for many on the other team, the champ is Hezbollah and its so-called resistance to American and Israeli plans is the one thing that matters. A history rich with super power machinations; the vile nature and atrocious track record of oppressive regimes, the virulent ideologies and questionable agendas of extremist movements; the cynicism and shared interests that make secret friends of ostensible enemies--all these, as guideposts to motives, as paths to context, have fallen by the wayside for both groups as they, like a merry-go-round, rotate obsessively around their one-and-only issue: the terrifying specter of Islamism for this crowd, the unbearable sight of America and Israel for that.

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Even those miserable labels, which were dragged into this chaos already exhausted from too much abuse and bankrupt because of too many thefts, have been indiscriminately deployed in the service of every warring faction across this divide. Moderate, radical, reformist, patriot, crony, terrorist, traitor, defeatist, stooge are embossed like stamps of approvals on supporters or fired like bullets at dissenters in confrontations and spats that are seeing new faces fighting it out with very old hands.

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We all know what makes officialdom and counterfeit ideologues (what I call repeat offenders) everywhere so prone to made-to-fit principles and silly-putty logic that change depending on the issue or the circumstance or the identity of the protagonists and their antagonists. It is not entirely unreasonable for politics to demand from its aficionados a shameless flirtatiousness with inconsistency. In fact, such is the tendency of our human nature: to bend into pleasing shape facts that get in the way of a particularly dear belief or objective. But when such proclivities begin to manifest themselves in those on whom we depend for a measure of sanity and intelligence in momentous discussions about momentous happenings, well, then, where can we possibly go from here.

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Take the recent eruptions in Tripoli’s Nahr al Bared and Syria’s decades-old reign over Lebanon. Welcomed though Syrian hegemony might have been for a very long time by our political class and the powers that be, Syria’s deeds in this country can with total ease and absolute neutrality be described as disgraceful and just as revealing of Syria’s ill-will towards Lebanon as Israel’s own rich record is. In fact, one can very persuasively argue—and many of the best scholars and analysts have with ample evidence in their support—that the two countries, oftentimes in perfect sync, have taken turns in smacking us down. One might even suggest—if one wanted to play with fire—that Syria’s misbehavior in Lebanon was and is infinitely more offensive than Israel’s, because one anticipates the worst of treatments from an enemy but expects the best of care from a sister.

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But the story, as always, does not stop here. And not surprisingly, Islamism today serves as the best example of how labyrinthine and murky this region’s politics can be. Quite a few of those--including every self-righteous March 14th leader— who paint Syria now as a reactionary power presiding over every militant Islamic group, from the almighty Shiite Hezbollah to the Shiite-hating Jihadist Sunni bands, had in the past either actively endorsed or been perfectly indifferent to Syria’s spine-chilling activities. It is a fact that many a self-described moderate, democracy-loving Sunni chief has done his bit in cultivating a base among fanatical Sunni currents. Those of us who have not been living on lala land for the past 20 years did not need Seymour Hersh to tell us about the connection between mainstream Lebanese Sunnism and its radical fringe elements. Our Sunni bosses, from the late Rafiq (and now his son Sa’ad) Hariri to Naguib Mikati to Fathi Yakan to the Mufti himself, have been at it and in on it for a very long time. And so, contrary to March 14's blatantly self-serving contention, monsters in our backyard are not only Syrian created and sponsored. But contrary as well to Hersh’s clueless claim made recently on CNN that Syria is innocent of such relations because of its alliance with Hezbollah, which reveals astonishing ignorance about the exhaustively researched mode with which Syria pursues its interests, a considerable number of our monsters (and very specifically Fath al Islam) have, for some of their bread and butter, Syria to thank. I am not venturing an opinion here, I am stating a fact. Fanaticism may be the common denominator between all these gangs, but their paymasters are different, their loyalties may clash and their agendas may at times compete and at others meet.

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For these very sinister reasons, it is absurd to position oneself reflexively on either side of this explosive fault line. However, in this tumultuous environment of post-September 11 invasions and occupations, unholy alliances, axes of evil, dizzying flip-flops and holier-than-thou rhetoric suddenly all this background fades to black. In the aftermath of every flare-up in the current Lebanese debacle, the same two narratives make the strongest showing. For Syria’s fans or America’s detractors, America and Israel are always to blame. Syria’s treachery in Lebanon, the brutal nature of the regime itself, its proven very intimate links to many of the country’s disruptive forces and, most significantly, its very palpable anxiety about the international tribunal are at best immaterial, at worst a concoction by unpatriotic American stooges. For Syria’s detractors or America’s fans, Syria and Iran are always to blame. America’s own dubious history in Lebanon, its current regional entanglements, Israeli designs and the very shady ambitions and resumes of most of March 14's heroes are at best irrelevant, at worst propaganda by unpatriotic Iranian-Syrian operatives. And, as we used to say back in Arabic class years ago, wa haluma jarran (and so on and so forth.)

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Nary an effort is made, except by the quietly sane and sufficiently detached, to follow the dynamic of the event itself, to identify the players with the highest stakes, to patiently way different scenario, to give fact more weight than sentiment, to read up on matters as yet neglected or unknown, to zoom out for a good look at regional intrigues and zero in on furtive mischief in our back alleys, before making up one’s mind or placing a safe bet.

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You want another example? Take Last summer’s war between Hezbollah and Israel. The rest of this segment in three days’ time—hopefully.