We’re Screwed! So Say Hussein Agha and Robert Malley

Done with the first draft of my post (Let’s Talk Turkey!) a few nights ago, I came upon the New York Review of Books’ tweet on Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s The Arab Counterrevolution. Theirs has been the very useful habit of dispersing the hot air on which every once in a while floats a new Palestinian-Israeli solution. So I thought, plenty of hot air around now, might as well read on for added insight from two judicious men before I send off my post.

Well, it must be the times, because I don’t recall I have come across such a confused perspective about the Arab uprisings written with such self-assured clarity, and by such normally fastidious analysts. It’s not Malley and Agha’s insistence on debunking the moment and its potential that’s bewildering—evidence abounds about a counterrevolution at work—but the sense the reader gets that even the flimsiest signs of trouble over the horizon would have been more than enough for them to doom the Arab revolts to failure. In fact, as far as the two authors are concerned, the “Arab Revolution” ended on February 11, barely five weeks after it had started. Alas, that’s when pristine turned to murky, and innocence—apparently, for Agha and Malley, a most essential prerequisite for a successful revolution--lost out to the Middle East’s usual medley of local hatreds and external plots.

There are many hints in the exposé about the duo’s dyed-in-the-wool skepticism about 2011 as a year with deep positive reach, but it’s this sentence that really clinched it for me: “The popular uprisings were broadly welcomed, but they do not neatly fit the social and political makeup of traditional communities often organized along tribal and kinship ties, where religion has a central part and foreign meddling is the norm.”  In blunter words, none of this was supposed to happen, but since it did, clearly it will come to nothing. Or blunter still: since we didn’t predict any of this, better second-guess it than second-guess ourselves. 

So, on the one hand, we have a revolution that somehow has managed to topple two entrenched dictators and unleash a “complex brew” that threatens to overturn a decades-old regional order. On the other, this is actually nothing more than a spontaneous if genuine “public rebuke” by various amorphous groups, which is destined to sputter out and die in societies that are too traditional, too tribal, too sectarian and too religious to allow for the possibility of a new era that is in any way an improvement over the old one. Add to this mix, foreign busybodies, organized parties with hostile agendas and militaries averse to change as a matter of temperament, and you’ve got yourself a dud.

As for the conundrum as to how these groups, composed largely of “young demonstrators,” succeeded in overcoming such seemingly insurmountable odds and pushing history in a direction that these societies, by their sheer makeup, and these regimes, by their sheer repressive nature, and these foreign meddlers, by their sheer meddling, should not have allowed in the first place, Agha and Malley opt for the very original “revolutions devour their children,” at the end of eleven pages that expend much energy explaining why this isn’t a revolution. Besides, what’s to devour if you’re already dead?

Extraordinarily, Agha and Malley resort to historical precedence to demonstrate why nothing good will (not could, not may) come out of this fury, and identify none other than Gamal Abd al Nasser and the uproarious, ideologies-driven 1950s and ‘60s, to prove the point.

That this time around the Gamals are conspicuously absent, the army is not in “the vanguard” of change, the ideologies of old are in tatters and counterrevolution itself is walking around practically naked for all to see is acknowledged by the authors but certainly none of the lessons of the past. It’s never made clear why these differences don’t count for much, but Agha and Malley offer this at least by way of an answer: “Although the military was the vanguard then, the rebellions of 2011 arose from similar emotions and are inspired by similar aspirations.” See! Keep wishing for the same damned thing and you’re condemned to never achieving it.

It’s as if the two experts are saying we’ve been here before, but it doesn’t make a difference either way, because this is where we’re going to end up anyway. Why? Well, because we’ve been here before.  It’s sort of like being in the Amazonian jungles, this Arab world: it really matters where you’ve been, but then again, what does it matter where you’ve been if where your heading pretty much looks the same, even if it is an entirely different place?

As for what compelled the two to devote so much ink to making a truckload of insights that are so patently obvious, it is simply to make sure that we know what we already know: “Things are not as they seem.” Which is kind of funny because their article argues exactly that: things are bad, and they are just as they seem.

Now, if you wanted to have a bit of fun with this, here’s an additional small sample of wisdoms, with some comments in italics to guide you through the nuance:

·      It started out so nice but then it turned ugly. I guess that counts for a bad omen, because, for Agha and Malley, in order for revolutions to be good they have to be “peaceful, homegrown, spontaneous, and seemingly unified,” or they’re not—good revolutions, that is.

·      Old regime elements are resilient and will hang on. That was the biggest surprise in the piece.

·      There are “two relatively untarnished” groups--the army and the Islamists—which are poised to sweep the deck should they choose (or have) to, even if at times and in many places they act positively senile or stupid, because, for God’s sake, look at the rest of the lot.  

·      The Islamists, for one, stand to gain the most from this Arab Spring, but, come to think about it, the season may prove a little too nippy for them: infighting within the Muslim Brotherhood, and/or competition with Salafists, and/or tensions between hostility to and close relations with the West, and/or people’s suspicion and/or support…

·      Islamists are “the only significant political force with a vision and program unsullied, because untested, by the exercise of, or complicity in, power.” But wait, they know “the alarm they inspire at and home and abroad,” and they are on a mission to reassure.” Well, I mean, if they are untarnished, unsullied and untested, why in God’s name are they bending over backward to reassure, I wonder?

·      Oh, no, this is not happening in a vacuum--“interlopers are legion.” La?...Bala! (No, really?”), was all I could muster for that one.

·      This could be good or bad for each or a combination of the following: Iran, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, America, you name it… Which, thankfully, narrows it down a bit.

For the record, I am not pissed because Agha and Malley have argued an Arab counterrevolution; I am pissed because they’ve argued it so badly. They should stick to woe-is-me Palestine, because—this is just a gut feeling, mind you—it “neatly fits [their] social and political” outlook.

Let's Talk Turkey

Just in case some of us are still skeptical about the sheer audacity of these times, give this a try: rummage in your mind’s attic for the year 1956 and a picture of Gamal Abd al Nasser, dust both off, and then tack them on that busy clipboard of history next to 2011 and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

(Aside: this is not a partial response to Robert Malley and Hussein Agha’s The Arab Counterrevolution in NRB; although we do touch on some similar themes, this post was written before I read the two gentlemen. In any case, my view on the piece will come in two days.)

Actually, I am going out on a limb here on regional winners and losers in this Arab Spring, however reminiscent of the past the future threatens to become.

Now tick them sixty years and their collapsing vistas off: the bygone days of military coups that could prance around as do revolutions; the general-cum-father-cum-savior; the roar of an Arab Umma on the rise; ideologies in their Sunday suits with the rhetoric to match; Islamism, present, certainly, but lurking much like that quiet, awkward kid in the corner of the class…Palestine! Real and graspable.

Turkey, Iran and Israel, three cubs nursing on the sidelines…The Soviet Union and the United States, two giants with plenty of zest and way early in the fight.

It’s hardly necessary to keep revisiting the harsh elements that reduced an interesting prospect into a figment of a people’s overactive imagination. Besides, there is no better tonic for the heart’s pain than fast-forward.  

So, a new century, a new Arab moment, a new painting in the making. It’s fascinating to watch the 21^st century opting to pick up where it left off in the early years of the last and rejigging the old chosen path.  There was a hint of an Arab Awakening then rising in the shadows of warring empires—the Ottoman one dying to stay alive, the European one literally sharpening the knife.

And here we are, almost one hundred years after the fact, with a few of us seemingly resurgent again, battered and arguably all the more sober because of it--and with such uncanny if unplanned timing--helping Turkey to recapture some of that glorious past. But, frankly, even before the Tunisians first rose, Turkey in the three way regional race against Iran and Israel, was looking more and more like a stud: a country oozing with testosterone, while Israel acts like an overwrought menopausal has-been and Iran runs around grabbing its crotch.

Or think of it this way: Sunni in a sea of Sunnis; a “respectable” (as in we don’t do murder and beards) Islamist model in a world desperate for one; an economic powerhouse; a government with electorally validated popular appeal versus a seriously dysfunctional Jewish democracy and a seriously dysfunctional Shiite theocracy; a solid member of NATO; a strong ally of an overburdened US willing to cede some of the chores of empire; strategic location; all the right rhetoric on Palestine, muscle flexing with Israel like no Iranian or Arab can.

Or think of it this way: Erdogan is about to make a visit to Egypt and (last I heard) speak in Tahrir Square. Can you imagine any Arab or Iranian leader daring even to propose that outing without bringing down the house? Can you think of any power, say, China and Russia, trying to reach a deal with Syria’s Bashar in the absence of Erdogan? And, conceivably, if it ever musters the strength, a so-called Palestinian solution without Turkey as part of the plan?

There are, as with everything in life, the downsides: a far too confident Turkish leadership overreaching, an EU yet to put out the welcome mat; Iran and Israel outdone, joining hands here and there to overturn the cart; the Kurdish problem reasserting itself through Syria, Iraq and Iran… But all things are relative, and in this regional competition for influence, the era is certainly Turkey’s for the taking. 

Hezbollah’s Quandary

A friend of mine is a bank manager in Beirut’s Southern Suburbs, Hezbollah’s own dominion in Beirut. Neither she nor I have any proof of it, but her appointment to that location most probably was a clear concession to Lebanon’s sectarian method. Well educated (an MBA from the very French USJ, Universite De San Joseph), tough and, yes, above all Shiite, her superiors must have figure she would navigate the terrain as “natives” would.

In Hezbollah’s playbook, my friend is a difficult number: a supporter of the Resistance against Israel and a skeptic everywhere else. She will, on many occasions, cut it some slack in the very confessional politics of Lebanon, but she will do it with eyes wide-open, ears perked up and a mouth poised to ask all the awkward questions. The iffiest kind of supporter, you might say, for an organization that prefers its lovers of the diehard variety.

I can’t be sure of this woman’s strength on the ground--most opinion polls point to strong Shiite support for Hezbollah, but none attempts to gauge the quality of it. However, I think I can get away with proposing that the nature and intensity of the battles the group often has to wage make her count. As prized as Hezbollah’s ardent supporters are, the Hezb knows only too well that loneliness in Lebanon’s sectarian wilderness is not exactly smart positioning, especially for a party whose ambitions are way grander than and too audacious for the country to which it presumably belongs. If Hassan Nassrallah indulges his quarrelsome Maronite ally Michel Aoun a tad bit too much, he indulges him precisely for that.

A while ago, my bank manager friend told me that her most annoying days at the bank are typically those that come in the immediate aftermath of a Nassrallah speech. Everything and everyone grows to sizes bizarrely larger than life—the muscles, especially those around the chest area, the swagger of peacocked-men into the branch, the demands for fee discounts, easier access to loans, bigger overdrafts… I am, so to speak, the shadow of my master.

None of that now. Of course, the theatrics of defiance are imperative for a group that always stands accused of (or is often up to) something, but listen harder and you will notice that the boys’ mood has in fact turned quieter. The indictments of four Hezbollah men in the murder of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005 (“circumstantial” though evidence might be) and the trouble in Syria are conspiring to keep normally high heads down. And just because it’s such a delicious Gotcha! moment for its detractors, the air is abuzz with Hezbollah’s double standard in embracing revolt in Egypt, Libya and Bahrain while shunning it in Syria.  

No doubt, the sight of holier-than-thou warriors having to openly pick their way through the Arab uprisings, much like their hypocritical nemesis the West, is the perfect setup for a smirk. But as embarrassing as the nitpicking is to Hezbollah, the true source of its discomfort is more disquieting still.

For a while now, the Party of God has been wrestling with the headaches that attach to an enterprise that juggles, with insistence, its multiple identities as a military resistance, a political party and a social movement whose devotion to Persia’s Wilayat al Faqih (Khomeini’s Guardianship of the Jurist) is at once an unabashed show of supranational loyalties (normal among Lebanese sects) and an explicit statement about political orientation if not intent.  

Call it the heavy price of success. It is no small feat to start out fringe, Islamist and Shiite and grow within two decades into a military powerhouse with a track record of credible wins against Israel, a thriving local operation and region-wide appeal even in the staunchest Sunni quarters. Everything its progenitors dearly wanted it to achieve, Hezbollah did, for unlike Lebanon’s other sectarian bosses, its business, from the outset, was never really meant to be strictly Lebanese and, as unavoidably Shiite as it is, its concerns were never merely parochial.

But now, arguably for the first time in its 30-year life, Hezbollah is being forced to choose between its precious identities. Worst still, for the first time since its signature label—the resistance against Israel--won it faithful followers in ideological camps not particularly keen on any of its other titles, it’s being called upon to spell out the definition of this resistance.  

Rhetoric aside, the real tension between love of freedom and indifference to democracy is common among many a liberation movement. The nature of the battle compels it: the do-and-die climate, the feverish passion for the cause, the need for a stealth existence, absolute secrecy, unwavering discipline, total loyalty… For Hezbollah especially, it’s always been just as much about politico-religious beliefs as it is about the struggle itself.

But until the Arab uprisings, none of this really mattered: the Israeli menace--even after the 2000 withdrawal from South Lebanon--remained real to enough people, the region’s authoritarianism hard-wearing to enough people, Lebanon’s democracy a joke to enough people, society’s sectarianism agreeable to enough people, Hezbollah itself flexible to enough people… Although, mainly due to the party’s increasing potency over the past ten years, friction began to appear between its different priorities, the situation was more or less manageable—that is until the Arab uprisings.

In Hezbollah’s defense, a few commentators (not all sympathetic to it) have been arguing that the Arab rebels are asking too much from a force whose overriding mission is the fight against Israel. For all of Hezbollah’s pretensions and talents, these commentators add, democracy is one particular practice it was never interested in mastering, let alone embracing as part of its cause.

All true. And all irrelevant. However persuasive the fine points and nuances, Nasrallah never thought he would actually have to tiptoe around them. And now he has to—all the time. Finally, Freedom for Palestine, in Arab discourse, is no more an orphan. To love it is to love all its other long lost sisters--democracy, dignity, justice…—everywhere, for the sake of Palestine and us Arabs as well.

Hezbollah’s diehards don’t care one way or the other, but my bank manager friend does, along with all those who were happy to lend the Resistance plenty of good will in the name of Arab and Palestinian dignity.

The extraordinary irony in this singularly challenging regional circumstance is that the American-Israeli conspiracy, real or not, is actually tangential to this part of Hezbollah’s quandary. In fact, pretty much like Nasrallah, Khamenei and Bashar, neither the US nor Israel, each for its own patently obvious reasons, is particularly happy to see Palestine reunited with its sisters.

The indictments, Syria’s anguish and the threat to strategic depth and breathing space, the Sunni-Shiite fault lines in the Persian Gulf, Iran’s own delicate internal power politics, the emergence of Turkey and its   clever game plan for Palestine and the Arab revolts: all these make for an unusually demoralizing suite of challenges for Hezbollah. But the pressures on it to come forward and own up on the critical question of resistance, in its full, unbridled meaning, may yet prove the most daunting of them all.

Is Everything Up in the Air in the Arab Spring?

To blog or not to blog? It has been this kind of month. If your site is not in the business of archiving and commenting on the day’s happenings—or, as a friend volunteered, if you’re knitting your way through history--it makes little sense to join the hysteria. With the detritus of theories and scenarios clogging up the view and numbing the senses, you find yourself rhapsodizing about the wisdom of silence in the throes of frenzy.

I suppose it’s time for more knitting.

Moods here have this lull in their swing: the ebb and flow of euphoria as doubts accumulate about the uprisings’ ability to sustain their original sprint. The odds were great to begin with, they say, and now, after the initial shock, stasis and the many forces that love it are rebuilding stamina again, threatening to turn the race for deep change into a tedious push and shove game. Ironically, both those who are reveling in and squirming from the moment are sounding the same alarms, the former warning of sabotage, the latter rooting for it.

So, here we are, seven months into rebellion. Outrage still in Tahrir Square. Frustrated fury in Yemen and Syria. A not so quiet simmer in Bahrain, while Libya roils, as Qaddafi and the rebels, inch by inch, fight for precious terrain. 

Conspiracy talk, dire predictions, accusations from the left huffing and puffing about the West, rants from the right pissing on the brash audacity of the East are giving the uprisings the run around, by turns pumping them up and smacking them down. Adding to the noise are those with seriously offended sensibilities or wounded ideologies, who, like drunkards, are stumbling their way through events, at whim applauding or fulminating against the revolts.

And, pray tell, the skeptics are asking: Where do the region’s age-old maladies fit in all of this tumult? The sectarianisms that are supposed to divide us; the colonial legacies that mar us; the greed that stalks us; the feeble democratic impulse that cripples us; that religion that shackles us… 

Opinions are colliding, but the same overarching question wraps up almost every argument: Will we find ourselves starting afresh a few years down the line, or will we be stomaching more of the same under a different name? As in, is this for real, or is fate just pulling our leg?

Bizarrely, lost in the storm of words and actions is the heavy baggage that the uprisings have already dumped from the surface of these realities. True, the systems in Tunisia and Egypt were only too happy to decapitate tottering heads if only to save themselves; worse, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria—each for its own set of reasons--have yet to begrudge their people even this fleetingly gratifying gift. But a look back at the past seven months, however hasty, is enough to remind us that had the old narrative been that sturdy we wouldn’t be struggling for the ground in these tectonic shifts.

In 2007, Annia Ceizadlo, a correspondent with a remarkable feel for the region’s politics, wrote this: “Once again, Lebanon is facing the oldest, saddest choice in the modern Arab world: between undemocratic religious militants and a greedy, corrupt elite whose biggest selling point is its dubious ability to keep the militants at bay.”

The revolts, nascent though they are, have already damaged much of the area’s political fabric, none more severely than this storyline by which we have lived and been smothered to near death in the last 40 years. And with it, the parts that have made it strong and whole are coming under severe pressure to evolve: the authoritarianism that enveloped it; the Islamism that was nurtured by it and thrived because of it; more recently the neoliberal economic policies that were supposed to shore it up but ended up undermining it; the geopolitics of the area that drew its rationale from it…

The impression among many is that the current fight is about how much of the old status quo can be saved, when in actual fact it’s about how much of the new one can be tamed and made to deliver.

Hence the rise in accolades waxing lyrical about the Turkish model that has married the least noxious brand of political Islam with the most believable type of democracy to the most robust market-friendly economy. Equally conspicuous is the distance between Turkey and the region’s other masters in capitalizing on the potential windfalls of the Arab Spring.

In Turkey’s growing shadow, you are sure to glimpse Iran’s nervous swagger in the hard knuckle race for regional influence. Not far from both are the tensions between a miffed and recalcitrant Saudi Arabia, with suddenly so much and so many to buy off and nothing to sell, and the US, which has caught the trend and is looking for the most effective way of sublimating it to its dynamic interests.

Witness the openness being expressed towards an Arab Muslim Brotherhood whose credentials appear most appropriate to the moment: their innate capitalist instincts; their strong fealty to the army and/or strong channels of contact with the powers that be; their strength in the mainstream and their eagerness to deal; conveniently, their newfound willingness to graciously (if always clumsily) give and take with society’s other constituencies…

Note as well the pace and nature of dissent coming from within these movements in places like Egypt, which, for the first time in decades, are having to compete and reinvent themselves in a deregulated marketplace of political parties and ideas.*

Nothing about this emerging status quo is neat or even remotely irreversible, all thanks to the popular stirrings, which ironically were the ones to let loose the forces that made the previous one so indefensible. Nothing in the Turkish experiment—not the stubbornness of the state and army’s secularism, not the particularities and size of its economy, not the tactical and wily pragmatism of its Justice and Development Party--finds its likeness anywhere in the Arab world. Moreover, we have yet to figure out where to place in the looming panorama the extraordinary sight of a “democratic” Israel turning more illiberal and more bigoted still, law by law, settlement by settlement, Netanyahu by Lieberman, as its Arab neighbors, for the first time in recent memory, clamor for a freer future.

But if the details pack the devil in them and the contradictions and uncertainties are littering the path to the new order, the vision and intent, for those who like to think of themselves as the deciders, is this. And in their efforts to put together the nuts and bolts of the new Middle East, perhaps the biggest challenge will be the single most significant realization by the rebels yet: that their voice matters and it is at its most effective when it is relentless and ground up.

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*  For some of the best reporting on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood follow Yasmine Al Rashidi in The New York Review of Books.

On Being Lebanese

In this Arab Spring

If you have any hope in you, you would throw back your head in ecstasy as you read this description by James Wood of the role of Pat, VS Naipaul’s late wife, in Peter French’s The World Is What It Is:

Her presence in this biography is a hush around Vidia’s noise; her job is merely to hold the big drum of his ego in the right position, the better for him to strike the vital life rhythm.

Every once in a while, you come across a thread of words, a thought, or an image that thieve from a whole archive of wisdom to lay before you an epic of a tale. Very few approach Wood's absurdly beautiful turn of the pen, but they don’t need to in rendering suddenly stark clear and simple the tortuous tangibles of the act of living.

Even a passing comment can stop you in your tracks. Years ago, sometime in the late 1980s, a very famous Lebanese basketball player went to Jordan to attend the wedding of a friend. He was gracious enough, star that he was, to play in a show game with Jordanian players. As he entered the hall, he started chatting with an official who asked him if he is Arab. “Lebanese,” the famous one answered, prompting the usual, “Well, we’re all Arab, right?” from the official. The honored guest quickly shot back, “Yes, but we’re a bit faster.”

There, in a split second of a comeback, crowed that Lebanese specialness vis-à-vis the rest of the Arab crowd: to the hip, more with it and quicker; to the journalist, the standard for which all other Arabs pine; to the deal maker, more nimble and canny--to boot, way more suave; to the politician, more lightweight and all the better for that…

On and on, this story has played itself out, part real, part stereotype, part truth, part bluff, in every other drawing room in this city. The implicit identity here, of course, is Beiruti, the sense of belonging at once very particular and incessantly unattached.

Through turmoil and war, bedlam and breakup, debauchery and grime, the many precious years during which every special bit about this assaulted country gave in and then up, the impression has been that when other Arabs look ahead, they are sure to find us Lebanese, however roughed up we are. That is until this Arab Spring gave all this the lie, and we finally had to admit that we are very far behind.

All too predictably the laments have started. The novelist Elias Khoury let out a bizarre cry last week, “Why does Beirut commit suicide through silence?” as if Beirut’s children had not hushed it into stillness decades back. That was, after all, the point of the war, wasn’t it? Discovered only when the debris had finally settled and the profundity of the destruction was revealed to all. Silence! Silence to all the pretence--or hope for those who dared believe—that there was special meaning in being Lebanese.

But Khoury should be forgiven his wishful thinking, for never have a people been this rich with individual talent and this starved of collective enterprise. Never has a leadership been less aware of the destructiveness of political genius if not tempered by a sense of ethics and decency. Never has a country been this susceptible to success and this bent on failure.

Lubnan al Rissalah, Lebanon the Example! You can’t Google it, but it’s the cliché that our politicians always use to spin the ugliness. It’s the idea that our thinkers fall back on when they desperately want something to look forward to. It’s certainly the name by which other Arabs like to hail us when they want to lull our demons to sleep. And we have, indeed, become the example for Arab tyrants in their fight against an Arab people rising. Beware, the message says: with change, chaos; with chaos, anarchy; with anarchy, sectarian strife; with strife, disintegration. “Lebanonization” (labnant), then, is a short heaving moment away. Or to put it more simply, as dictators are want to do: “Is that what you want? Another Lebanon!”

A cautionary tale, that’s who we are: this is not the kind of nation you want to be, not the kind of state you want to have, not the kind of hate you want to feel, not the kind of politics you want to play, not the kind of business you want to do… Sure, Beirut is fun enough, especially after dark, but why be one when you can have your way with it and then fly back home to safety?

If the whole idea was for us to lead by example, we certainly have.

And so, we wait out this Arab Spring with barely anything on offer or anything to add. Or we react, each brood, of course, for its own sake. We wait for the Saudis to decide which way they want to play the Sunni card. We wait for bloodshed here should the Assads fail there. We wait for Iran to figure out how it might adapt. We wait to see how Hezbollah will mind its kneecaps. We wait for Israel to pounce. We wait for governments to form, and then we wait for them to fall. We wait for the summer to get hotter, for the mountains of garbage to rise higher, for the lights to go out, for the sea to get murkier, for our youth to pack up and leave, for the trees to become even lonelier…

But I’ve already written this so many times in so many different ways. Better wrap it up with somebody else’s words. Here’s Khaled Saggieyh’s for the road: ”Never has Lebanon been more washed out, more hobbled, more devoid of any meaning than it appears now.” (Akhbar Newspaper, June 6, 2011).

Towards a New Narrative

A mob of ifs, buts and maybes has been let loose in the region.

The Middle East hasn’t been this prickly since that grab fest at the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire gasped its last and the Arabs were about to breathe their first. It wasn’t in the stars then, alas: new overlords, new states, nations, borders, flags, anthems…The 1950s, however exciting, don’t even compare. Tested as the colonial map was, it more or less held firm; only ruling heads swayed or fell.

But it’s not only dictators that are tumbling now. Entire landscapes, once tamed and mastered, want to rewrite the future as planned. The people, who had been pretty much deleted out of every power’s playbook, are making a dash for it with a long list of demands, and, frankly, neither they nor the systems they want brought down are familiar with this kind of tumult.

The furious tempo and nature of the turmoil have made a mess of things for forces that had long lined up across this area’s countless divides. Colliding interests are suddenly mixing it up and deeply held beliefs are having to contend with very inconvenient facts.

The reference here is not to the obvious. It’s always been hilarious but never extraordinary to catch feuding countries in one-night stands or even elicit tangles of the more passionate and lasting kind. Not that Hezbollah and Iran stumbling over Syria much like the US over Yemen and Bahrain is not worth a pause. But what deserves more than a passing thought is the way this upheaval has forced out into the glare of light the unvarnished pragmatism that has long held court among the Arab world’s supposedly die-hard camps. We are used to vilifying the US--and rightly—for putting narrow interest before lofty ideals, but it’s not everyday that we get to witness the most “principled”, not to mention righteous, of us Arabs owning up to and questioning their own handshakes with unsavory regimes.   

So far, this serious blow to the decades-old understanding between (let’s call it) the traditional resistance front and “rejectionist” states is one of the Arab uprising’s more interesting if underreported achievements. “‘Resistance’ against Israel [and the US] was for the longest time a pass for savagery against one’s own people, now it has become the very argument against it,” I wrote in an April post. What was deemed, for many in this influential front, a matter of priorities for 60 years has become a blatant contradiction in a mere five months.

Perhaps no intellectual symbolizes this break better than Azmi Bishara, the more thought-full among Arab nationalists and a former Knesset member, who was good enough to dwell on this hardnosed quid pro quo, at long last according the Syrian people precedence over all other considerations. Even journalists and pundits, like the staunchly populist Ibrahim Amin of the Lebanese Akhbar, who remain hopeful (and confident) that Bashar Assad will in fact champion change and lead it in Syria, have had to narrow the gap between their convictions and their politics, emphasizing the imperatives of reform while engaging in the usual conversation about conspiracy.

It is hard to overstress the extent to which “rejectionist” countries, and movements allied with them, relied on these sources of external legitimacy in covering for domestic cruelty and delegitimizing internal dissent. Now the logic no longer holds for those who helped such states make this case to the Arab masses.

Already the question of legitimacy is demanding answers beyond that of Palestine, casting an eye towards those of governance and citizenship. And soon, the discourse on resistance is sure to ponder a more meaningful definition than the longtime favorites of loud posturing and cynical belligerence, neither one of which was ever remotely credible in confronting the daunting challenge of Israel.  

Marrying the quest for freedom from occupation to that of freedom from oppression finally has become both urgent and feasible. To the Arab revolt goes the credit for bringing together two pursuits that should have never been apart.  

Extraordinarily, this momentous shift is taking place at a critical juncture in the Arab-Israeli impasse. Never has Israel suffered from such an utter lack of imagination, and never has it been so utterly wrong about its many existential quandaries. Never have the Palestinians’ grasp of the utility of nonviolent resistance been sharper and more sensitized to its pull. Never have the Arabs been more keenly aware of the power of their reach and the possibilities of a more dignified life.

But, remarkably, if the Arab Spring and the evolving Palestinian story are threatening to render moot Israel’s strategies of confrontation, they certainly have done the same to Iran and Hezbollah’s. It’s not only the Islamist movement and the Republic’s strategic depth that is endangered by the changing Syrian circumstance; their brand of rejectionism is quickly becoming less convincing as they pick their way through the Arab uprisings.

Hamid Dabashi said it in his piece on “The Dilemma of the Islamic Republic”: “This is the season of exposing hypocrisies, overcoming public secrets, opening the democratic veins of young and robust societies, exposing the clogged arteries of decrepit rulers bereft by their own moral senility.”

Which paradoxically takes us back to that essential matter of pragmatism in the way that we, as a coveted, embattled and now erupting East, deal with powerful forces, local and foreign, whose foothold and interests here are real, deep and pervasive.

Western analysts, Professor Michael Hudson argues, have to revisit their false conceptions of an Arab people who have defied stereotype and expectation. The pressure as well is on their Arab counterparts to move beyond the old paradigms that have placed foreign connivance and hostile encirclement as immovable screens in our interaction with those who mean and have the capacity to influence our region.

Talk of counterrevolution and conspiracy is rampant today, no doubt for good reasons, but we Arabs have just snatched opportunity from the jaws of history, and against such odds. Had we been doomed to a marionette-life, the last five months wouldn’t have been so damned riveting to live and inspiring to watch. One of the more instructive lessons of these revolutionary times is that we are capable of leading and forcing others to cede the initiative.

But practically nothing in the recent literature comes close to a reasonable proposition on how to take Arab aspirations forward in the context of an international arena that simply won’t take no for an answer. Beyond ideology, beyond the narrative of empire, which is as matter of fact as life itself, however dearly we wish it were otherwise, how do we engage with a world that is unavoidably intrusive? To this paramount question, we as Arabs need some serious thoughts that are as rich with nuance and skepticism as they are free of paranoid sloganeering.

The Trouble with Syria

No country quite like Syria embodies the complexities and contradictions that run through the Arab world the way threads bind a garment of screaming patchworks. But forget for a minute that this is a republic with a crown on its head. Forget that this bastion of resistance never could see the irony in championing Palestinian rights while withholding those of its own people. Forget even that this is a Syria that prides itself on being the beating heart of an Arabhood that never quite came to life and that pines for Lebanon much like an amputee yearns for a severed leg.

As interesting as all this is, it’s not what makes Syria so special. Love it or hate it, Syria matters because for the past 40 years, ever since Hafez Assad seized power, the country has turned from patsy to regional player. War by other means, sabotage as a preamble to diplomacy, or dreaded afterwards should it fail, playing footsy with the forces that inhabit our underworld while shaking hands with the beau monde above: this has been the stuff of Syria’s success in a very tough neighborhood, where the tightest of alliances are drawn in quicksand and the enemy is just as often friend as adversary. It has helped, of course, that Syria itself is the jewel of the Levant, home to the most thorny problem in the area: the Arab-Israeli dilemma. What the geography lacks in resources and wealth, it more than compensates for in trouble.

But Hafez Assad would not have been able to play the outside so confidently, had he not controlled everything and everyone on the inside so well. How else could he have bequeathed it all to his son Bashar, and without so much as a feather daring to ruffle?

Rumor has had it that Bashar is not Hafez. True. The glaring mistakes early in his tenure are proof enough. And yet, for all of his shortcomings, by the time Bashar reached his tenth year in office, Syria had become at once a strategic portal for Turkey, Iran and Israel. In Lebanon, it has proved practically impossible to sidestep or dislodge, even in the worst days of 2005, when its army was ushered out. In Iraq, it has refined the role of spoiler-cum-fixer into a high art. In Palestine, it has given Hamas backbone, denying Mubarak control over that crucial card. With Israel, it has maintained the quietest border on the front and conveniently consolidated all the push buttons of the resistance in Damascus. For Hezbollah and Iran, it has acted like a gaping hole in an Arab Sunni wall. 

No, not Jekyll and Hyde, more like Batman this side up, the Joker that side down.

Barely a month ago, President Assad was so sure of his exceptionalism, he boldly declared, “If you did not see the need for reform before what happened in Egypt and in Tunisia, it is too late to do any reform. This is first. Second, if you do it just because of what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, then it is going to be a reaction, not an action; and as long as what you are doing is a reaction you are going to fail.”

He didn’t know it then, but he was actually the first to call it right before Syria actually flared up.

Like all the other masters of this Arab house, Assad thought he knew his people better than anyone else. He turned out to be dangerously misguided. But surely the Syrians must know one or two things about him and the Family. They are no pushovers. They won’t fade into the sunset or retire to Qardaha, from whence they hark. More to the point, they are convinced that, for them and their sect, after defeat comes certain death. Hafez Assad once famously quipped, “Min al qassr ila al qabr,” from the palace to the grave. That’s because, for the Alawites, life only recently has been pretty much exactly the reverse: from the grave to the palace. Call this sect’s centuries-long destitution what you like, but its tormented history is key to understanding its psyche, however different Syria’s present circumstance is.

By way of a peek into a distressingly murky future, most commentators are guessing regime collapse and/or civil strife. But the Assads have more than enough firepower and grit to last for a long time, and in order for civil war to become full-fledged, the opposition will have to be very well armed and financed. So far, and all conspiracy talk aside, neither Saudi Arabia, nor Israel and the US, the oft-cited culprits, are keen on wreaking this kind of havoc or on seeing the back of Assad. Not because they love him so much, but because they cannot imagine Syria and the Levant without him—literally. There’s just too much mayhem in the pipeline, too big of a forest fire to put out (to paraphrase from Nessim Taleb and Mark Blyth’s Black Swan of Cairo) and too many frightening regional eventualities should Syria totally breakdown.

However, this threesome is certainly eager to downsize the country, but getting Assad to compromise over the hot files doesn’t appear achievable now; he’s in combat mode and once more a pariah.  So, if there is malicious intent of a sort, it is to sap him, bog him down, deny him that which gave his family’s reign so much strength for the larger part of the past four decades--a very tight grip on Syria itself. Neither killing the regime nor civil war will do the job. But a tired, wobbly and constantly worried Bashar: now that’s something they can live with until he’s finally ready to bargain away his trophies. 

As for the Assads, the primary objective is, of course, to stay at the helm. From there, analysts have to walk backwards and see how much they and their faction are willing to give up in order for them to retain the levers of power. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is plenty of incentive for them to negotiate their way out of this impasse. Time, though, is running out, and so are their options. The more they wait, the more creative they will have to be with a people fast running out of fear or good will.

Before you waste your time searching the past for clues, precedents, in this case, don’t count for much. This is the first time in 40 years that Syria faces this kind of popular discontent.  Back in 1982, it was a very aggressive generation of Muslim Brothers that stirred the pot. They could be cornered, isolated and then snuffed out. This time around, it is the people who first rose up in arms. This time around, the leadership knows there really are no foreign conspiracies, just internal heartbreak. The remedies for it may be very costly, but they are as obvious as they are unavoidable.