Dispatches

My latest piece appears in Tablet magazine.

It’s no longer news that the Arab Spring has become unseasonably chilly. The Syrian revolution began as a nonviolent protest movement but is rapidly degenerating into a civil war. Libya is cracking up into a fragmented state controlled by hostile militias. And Egypt is ruled by the same Nasserist military dictatorship that seized power in 1952. (If the army there does step aside, don’t get excited: In last year’s election, two-thirds of Egyptians voted for Islamists—and a third of those chose the totalitarian Salafists, the ideological brethren of Osama Bin Laden.)

For a dash of optimism, though, one could do worse than to look to Libya’s North African neighbor to the west: Tunisia, the country actually responsible for kicking off this season of Arab revolutions. And if current trends in the region persist, it may be the only country of the Arab Spring that doesn’t slip back into winter.

It all started in the economically depressed town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, when a fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi poured gasoline over his head and set himself on fire in front of city hall. Too cash-strapped to purchase a license, he plunged into despair when a municipal employee confiscated his scale and made it all but impossible for him to eke out even the meagerest living. Bouazizi’s suicide galvanized the locals into an uprising that swept across the countryside and eventually reached the capital, Tunis, where, just four weeks later, it toppled the crooked and authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Months of precarious instability followed, but hopes were raised, too. Interim leader Fouad Mebazaa promised “a better political life which will include democracy, plurality, and active participation for all the children of Tunis.” Genuinely free and fair elections were held in October 2011.

As in Egypt, more than 100 political parties stood for election. Also as in Egypt, the Islamists were the best organized. Ennahda, a party led by radical activist Rached Ghannouchi, who spent 23 years in exile in Britain, won 42 percent of the vote.

For secular democrats, the results were both disheartening and encouraging. Disheartening because even though Ennahda ran on a relatively moderate platform—emphasizing jobs and religious freedom rather than political Islam—at the end of the day, the party’s leaders are Islamists, and they won more votes than anyone else. But it was also encouraging because they won less than half the votes and were forced into a coalition government with secular liberal parties.

Though the current government is temporary, it has the critical task of writing the new constitution. And last month, Ennahda’s leaders formally announced that they would not push for Islamic law, or Sharia, to be cited as even a source—let alone the source—of legislation in the new constitution.

This is an enormous step for an avowedly Islamist party, but we’ll see if it’s sincere. Are Tunisia’s Islamists capable of long-term moderation and power-sharing? Or are they simply being shrewd—saying the right things in order to bide their time until next year’s election, when they can consolidate more power? The answer will determine if Tunisia will actually transition to a liberal democracy or if theocracy is boiling slowly.

“Every Islamist in the world has the same ambition—the Islamization of the society,” I was told by Rami Sghayier, a young activist who works with Amnesty International. “A moderate doesn’t mind if it takes 10 or 20 years. An extremist wants it now. That’s the difference.”

Read the rest in Tablet magazine.

I’ll be back with some full-length journalism tomorrow morning, and in the meantime, things are really going to hell in the Eastern Mediterranean. Syria’s civil war will not only suck in the neighbors, it is also, at the same time, reaching out to engulf the neighbors.

Walter Russell Mead:

Tripoli, on Lebanon’s northern coast, witnessed street battles between pro- and anti-Assad groups back in February. Violence erupted again over the weekend, and intermittent fighting continued for a third day today. Rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire echoed through part of the city. Perhaps five people have been killed, and dozens wounded. Lebanon’s Daily Star carried ominous reports (“Tension and fear gripped Tripoli Monday after both political and security efforts failed to maintain a cease-fire”) and photos of men carrying rocket launchers through deserted city streets and ducking into alleys with AK-47s and Lebanese Army tanks rolling past apartment blocks.

This is the clearest sign so far that violence from Syria’s civil war will spill into Lebanon, where Butcher Assad has many allies: some in the national government, others in the “official” security services, still others in community and religious groups, and, of course, Hezbollah.

[…]

The worst case scenario is not difficult to envision: the conflict in Syria reignites civil war in Lebanon and merges with sectarian violence in Iraq to destabilize the Fertile Crescent from Beirut to Basra. Given Turkey’s concerns with the Kurds in this region and the religious divisions inside Turkey itself, Istanbul would have a hard time staying out of this conflict. Tehran also would feel a strong pull to engage. The United States on both humanitarian and geopolitical grounds might also be pulled into a conflict of this kind.

FASCISM: Reactionary Islamist goons attacked Irshad Manji—a young reformist Muslim woman from Vancouver, British Columbia—with sticks and iron bars while she was promoting her new book in Indonesia. She’s okay, sort of, but her assistant was rushed to the hospital and two others are injured.

Here is Paul Berman’s take in The New Republic.

It is fashionable among the Western apologists for the Islamist movement to insist that genuine reformists and liberals have no audience in the Muslim world. The claim is false. Manji’s earlier book, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith, has been published, according to the EFD, in more than 30 countries. Manji runs a website, irshadmanji.com, offering translations in Arabic, Urdu and Farsi, which are said to have been downloaded more than 2 million times. But then it shouldn’t be necessary to cite numbers to demonstrate the ability of the genuinely independent thinkers to make themselves heard. Why else are they attacked, after all? Nor do these attacks occur only in Muslim-majority countries. Manji has lately had trouble in Amsterdam, too—where, as everyone will remember, she is hardly the first person to come under attack.

Who will defend these people, these truest heroes of modern freedom? That is the only question.

LIBYA, FAILING MILITIA STATE: “With the lid of the old regime blown away, a plethora of simmering ethnic and racial tensions suppressed by Gaddafi's policy of Arabization have burst into the open. In southern towns, long-standing tensions between Arab tribes and Black Toubou tribes over control of the smuggling routes into the Sahel degenerated into street fighting at a cost of hundreds of lives. Amazigh, or Berber, revivalists based in the coastal town of Zwara fought Arabs in neighboring Reqdaline for control of the Tunisian border. Graffiti promoting ethnic cleansing scars town walls. The goodwill that sustains support for the NTC in Tripoli has largely evaporated in Benghazi, which has precious little to show for engineering the revolt in February 2011, particularly since the leadership moved to Tripoli and is feeding separatist or anarchic tendencies.”

TYPICAL: The Arab world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism accuses the United States of being a state sponsor of terrorism.

THE MIDDLE EAST’S PROBLEM FROM HELL: The longer the war lasts in Syria, the worse the end result is going to be. I’m primarily concerned about the country imploding like a neutron star and sucking in most of the neighbors, but Adam Garfinkle at The American Interest makes the case that it could explode like a supernova.

I would be worried right now if I were a Lebanese. It is impossible to say if the Assad regime can hold out against a radicalized Syrian opposition, with volunteer support pouring in from neighboring countries. Most likely, in my view, it cannot. But it could take many months, even a year or two, for this bloody drama to play out. In the meantime, the conflict will pour across borders, including the Lebanese border, as it has already begin to do. If, in the fullness of time, a jihadi-led or strongly influenced state arises in Syria, or parts of it, then it is virtually inevitable that the Shi’a-tilted status quo in Lebanon will be upset. Sunni radicals in Damascus will not get along with Hizballah, and there are homegrown Sunni radicals in Lebanon that “friends” in Damascus would encourage and support on their behalf. The likely result? A new civil war, with a beginning epicenter most like in and around Tripoli.

HAMAS: Fine, bomb Iran.

IN THE MAIL: Chasing Demons - My Hunt for War Criminals in Bosnia by former military intelligence officer Rick Francona. He spent most of his career in the Middle East and knows far more than he’s allowed to talk about publicly, but he gave me a great interview anyway last year.

OMRI CEREN: “No one expects the anti-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community to make good arguments.”

THE GOOD NEWS is that schools in Timbuktu have re-opened after being conquered by reactionary Islamists. The bad news—and I probably don’t need to tell you what it is—is that boys and girls are now segregated and the teaching of philosophy and evolution is banned. Oh, and alcohol is banned, too, as are uncovered women. And most of the Christians have fled.

WHAT CENTURY IS THIS AGAIN? Thousands of North Korean women sold as slaves in China.

The following was posted at Instapundit on Thursday.

UGH: Timbuktu falls to radical Islamists.

HUGE EXPLOSIONS IN DAMASCUS: Syrian state television reports two huge explosions in Damascus that killed 55 people and injured 372. The question is, were these attacks mounted by jihadists, which is entirely possible, or were they staged by the Syrian government itself like some in the past?

TO BAN OR NOT TO BAN? Germany considers banning Salafist groups (the ideological comrades of the bin Ladenists) after violent street clashes.

I’m not convinced it’s a good idea to ban political movements. The ideas can’t be banned, after all. Thought cannot be policed. But Germany is already a country that bans totalitarian political parties, so why not add Salafists to the list? Anyone who thinks such a move would be “Islamophobic” should be aware that Tunisia, an Arab country that’s 99 percent Muslim, also bans the Salafist party. When these people reach critical mass they're extraordinarily dangerous.

MASSIVE PROTESTS at Vladimir Putin’s inauguration.

IN THE MAIL: Find, Fix, Finish: Inside the Counterterrorism Campaigns that Killed bin Laden and Devastated Al Qaeda

AN UNLIKELY STREETFIGHTER: Famous hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, who died yesterday, spent his youth fighting fascists in Britain and for Israel’s independence.

In 1947, the fascists again began menacing London, this time under the tutelage of Jeffrey Hamm, head of an organization of thugs calling themselves the “Association of British Ex-Servicemen.” For Sassoon, this was not a fate to be accepted lying down.

As a response to Hamm’s provocations, a gathering of young Jews known as the 43 Group—named for the number of people in the room at their founding—announced that the fight back had begun. Among them was the slender, if wiry, Sassoon. As Hamm’s followers gathered on street corners bellowing that “not enough Jews were burned at Belsen,” Sassoon and his comrades, armed with knives, coshes, and knuckledusters, set about breaking up fascist meetings. In another interview, Sassoon remembered turning up for work one morning with a black eye. “I just tripped on a hairpin,” he explained to the worried customer who had just settled into a barber’s chair for a haircut.

STOP BEING STUPID: There is no “kindler, gentler” Taliban.

THE MONUMENTAL HAMAS MAP OF DENIAL.

1967 REDUX? Israeli historian Benny Morris argues in Tablet that the Middle East could be on the verge of another conflict a la 1967.

Mofaz will join Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak in a three-man kitchen Cabinet or the fuller eight-man “Inner Cabinet,” where the call of whether or not to launch a military strike against Iran will be decided. Both Netanyahu and Barak are on record as pessimists when it comes to the possibility that sanctions or diplomacy will stop Tehran’s march toward nuclear weapons. Both have made it clear that Israel will have to rely on its armed forces to resolve the problem, whether or not Washington gives Jerusalem a green light.

Thinking in Jerusalem is currently focused on the period between July, when a further round of sanctions against Iran will kick in, and the American presidential elections in November. Netanyahu and Barak believe that President Obama will find it very difficult to punish Israel for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities just before the elections, since Obama will need the help of Jewish donors and voters, and other supporters of Israel, to win. On the other hand, an Israeli strike after the November elections will incur Obama’s wrath—and, some fear, could translate into sanctions against Israel.

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD sheds its mask.

Some of us have seen through these guys all along. When I met with Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Essam El-Erian in Cairo he gave me the most bizarre and frankly deranged interview of my entire career so far.

IN THE WAKE OF THE SURGE: The Kindle version of my Iraq book, In the Wake of the Surge, has been reduced in price to 7.99.

NO SURPRISE THERE: Al Ahram reports that the Egyptian military has suspended the upcoming presidential elections.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Are Egypt and Israel gearing up for a fight?

I LINK, YOU DECIDE: World Affairs published two Iran-related pieces today. Elliot Abrams explains the grounds for an Israeli attack against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. Robert Wexler, meanwhile, argues that the Israelis should wait.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Seemingly everyone in Libya has guns. The place is awash not just with AK-47s and the like, but also rocket-propelled grenade launchers, anti-aircraft guns, and lord knows what else.

I posted the following at Instapundit on Tuesday.

OH, PLEASE: The Syrian government says it’s counting ballots.

SOUTH SUDAN'S disastrous first year.

U.S. BOMB EXPERTS are trying to figure out if Al Qaeda’s upgraded and recently seized underwear bomb would have slipped through security if it had gotten that far. There’s no metal in it, so the body scanners would need to catch it. And maybe they wouldn’t. The TSA needs to spend more time looking for terrorists and less time looking for objects. A terrorist without a bomb or even tweezers is much more dangerous than an 80 year-old nun with a snow globe.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD on Israel’s new government.

The new centrist coalition relegates extreme parties to its fringe, increases Netanyahu’s maneuverability on everything from Iran to the economy to the peace process, and allows him to embark on much-needed electoral reform to reduce the influence on small extremist parties. But just as crucially, the new government will also put greater internal pressure on Netanyahu to deal with the Palestinians (Kadima and Mofaz are on record in support of a more conciliatory approach). It is a mixed picture for Obama. On the one hand, this government may be a little easier to work with on Palestinian issues; on the other, it may be politically easier for the Israelis to launch an attack against Iran.

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon admires Mead, but dissents from his conclusion: "It depends on the Palestinians, or a significant component of them, actually wanting a two-state solution. Sadly, there is little evidence of that. Less and less, in fact."

GET REAL: Vladimir Putin is not a victim.

WAAAAAY BEHIND THE CURVE: Kofi Annan warns of possible civil war in Syria.

ASGHAR FARHADI’S Academy Award-winning film A Separation has been released on DVD. It didn’t get a wide theatrical release since it’s in Persian (Farsi), but it’s absolutely worth seeing even if you don’t like reading subtitles. You’ll get a riveting and extraordinarily well-acted view of Iran beyond the politics, but sophisticated viewers will notice subtle political messages that are too understated for Tehran’s monkeyish government censors to notice. Government censors never seem to understand literature and film, and it’s always a pleasure to see what artists can sneak past them. Trailer here.

#COMMUNISMFAIL: Extraordinary photos of East Berlin before and after the wall came down. (Hat tip: Ricochet's Peter Robinson.)

NO SPRINGTIME FOR CAIRO: 61 percent of Egyptians choose Saudi Arabia as a model for religion and politics while only 17 percent would like to emulate Turkey.

I’m filling in for Glenn Reyolds at Instapundit this week, though of course I’m hardly taking on the whole job myself.

Here are some links, then, cross-posted from the good professor’s blog.

YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME: Not only has Iran’s state-run media used Photoshop to make another fake missile launch photo, this time the Mehrs News Agency included Jar Jar Binks in the picture.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN on Holocaust agitprop in Berlin: “[T]he most controversial work of the show is ‘Berek,’ a short film Zmijewski made in 1999 that features a group of smiling, naked people playing a game of tag in a Nazi gas chamber.”

BLIND DISSIDENT CHEN GUANGCHENG will apparently leave China with his family and study in the United States.

SHAM ELECTIONS IN SYRIA: Parliamentary elections are supposedly being held in Syria today, but don’t you believe it. The opposition is boycotting the elections and calling them “a sham,” and they’re right to do so. The amount of nonsense written about this country does not cease to astound me. If you want to know how that place really works, read The Truth about Syria by Barry Rubin, In the Lion's Den by Andrew Tabler, The Strong Horse by Lee Smith, and, if you trust me, check out my own book, The Road to Fatima Gate.

A KURDISH MAJORITY IN TURKEY? The birthrate for ethnic Turks is now below the replacement level while the birthrate for the Kurdish minority is well above it. Some now believe Turkey may have a Kurdish majority within two generations. I rather doubt that will actually happen, but the Middle East will change dramatically if it does.

GREEK NAZIS IN PARLIAMENT are acting like Nazis. As they say, fascism is forever descending on America, but landing in Europe.

MEXICO, ALAS, has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world to work as a journalist. Three were killed this week alone for what they reported.

DINING WITH TURKISH OUTCASTS: Claire Berlinski attends a revealing dinner party in Istanbul.

There was the ancient Greek doyenne in whose honor the party was held. “I don’t like Americans,” she said. I offered a frozen smile. Five minutes later she was introduced to the designated long-suffering Jew. “Tell yourcountry that they need to finalize their borders,” she said.

“Shame on you, you anti-Semite,” I said. Everyone looked uncomfortable for a moment, until they mistakenly decided I was charming and spirited. Later, another guest said to me, sotto voce, “We enjoyed your saying that.”

ANOTHER UNDERWEAR BOMBER is caught.

I’ll be guest-blogging over at Instapundit this week with the usual crew while the professor is away on vacation. At the end of each day I’ll round up my (short) posts over there and re-publish them here.

This can’t be serious:

Russia’s top military officer warned Thursday that Moscow would strike NATO missile-defense sites in Eastern Europe before they are ready for action, if the U.S. pushes ahead with deployment.

“A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov said at an international missile-defense conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.

Barry Blechman at the Stimson Center thinks Makarov must have drunk. It’s entirely possible. Either way, I’d be surprised to learn the veins on Vladimir Putin’s forehead didn’t bulge when he heard that.

Somebody had better walk that talk back.

Israel just began construction of a high cement wall on its northern border between the Israeli town of Metulla and the Lebanese town of Kfar Kila. The wall will only be a kilometer long, so it’s clearly not being placed there to prevent anyone from crossing the border per se. It’s being placed there to prevent anyone from crossing the border—or shooting across the border—at that specific location.

In 2005, I drove down there from Beirut with a Lebanese woman who grew up in the area. I was thunderstruck when we arrived at Kfar Kila. Israeli houses were mere feet from the border fence. Some of those homes are so close to it that a person could walk right up to an Israeli backyard and, while remaining inside Lebanese territory, throw a hand grenade through somebody’s window. And remember, this is the part of Lebanon that’s controlled by Hezbollah.

If you’re an American, how would you feel if the Taliban set up shop a few feet from your yard? Comfy?

Read the rest in Commentary magazine.

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” – Osama bin Laden

Remember after 9/11 when the more pacifist-minded among us wrung their hands and fretted that for every terrorist we killed, ten more would rise up to replace him?

Obviously that didn’t happen. Al Qaeda would have mushroomed in size if it had.

Most of us instinctively understood why the idea was preposterous. Osama bin Laden himself understood why it was preposterous. It’s hard for any organization to recruit new members when it’s being impaled by U.S. Marines and zotted from the sky by Predator drones.

It’s not just that presidents Bush and Obama took all the fun, so to speak, out of terrorism. The Pew Research Center conducted another poll in Muslim-majority countries and found the pool of potential Al Qaeda recruits keeps getting smaller because the group is unpopular.

Leave aside the fact that few feel like supporting gangs of sadistic killers if they think they might be killed next. It’s one thing to support a terrorist organization that murders the denizens of the Great Satan in New York and Washington, but another thing altogether to support a terrorist organization that massacres women and children from Casablanca to Baghdad. Even if Abu Musab al Zarqawi hadn’t rebranded Al Qaeda as a band of Hannibal Lecters whose favorite pasttime seemed to be murdering Arabs by the hundreds, nobody likes a loser.

Well, I shouldn’t say nobody. A little more than 20 percent of Egyptians have a positive view of Al Qaeda, which is a horrendously large figure, actually. The only good news is that it’s lower than it used to be.

In Lebanon only two percent think highly of Al Qaeda. The percentage of Americans who think highly of Osama bin Laden can’t be much lower than that.

No one who follows Middle East conflicts should be shocked to discover that the Syrian government is staging terrorist attacks against itself.

For a year now the Assad regime has claimed it’s fighting our war against radical Islamist terrorist “gangs,” even though we all know Damascus is the biggest state-sponsor of radical Islamist terrorism in the Arab world. And those of us who followed and reported on the 2006 war in Lebanon, Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and the Second Intifada in Israel and the West Bank know chapter and verse how Middle Eastern terrorist organizations and their sponsors manipulate the media by using actors, Photoshop, bogus hysterical claims, etc. It’s de rigueur over there.

I’m not exactly sure who edited this video, but the clips do appear to be from Syria’s state-run TV. These idiots are not even trying to make their ridiculous dramatizations look credible.

UPDATE: I know now who made this video. He's a friend of a friend named Mike Nahum who is a graduate of Damascus University's Arabic program and a media analyst based in Washington, DC.

The Lebanese army seized a Sierra Leone-flagged ship stocked with weapons from Libya that were apparently bound for the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.

Tripoli (not to be mistaken for Libya’s capital) is a mostly Sunni city between Beirut and Syria’s Mediterranean border with Lebanon. Some Sunni residents have been engaging in on-again off-again warfare with the small Alawite minority that lives there. Those Libyan guns were almost certainly intended to be used by Tripoli's Sunnis, shipped over the border to Syria, or possibly both.

But now that the Lebanese army has gotten a hold of them, who knows where they’ll end up?

Blogging is a bit slow at the moment because I’m writing a pair of long analytical essays, one for City Journal and the other for the print edition of World Affairs. I’ll be back here in force shortly and in the meantime will try to post links to interesting material.

I was recently interviewed on the program Real News from the Blaze about the violence in Syria and what the U.S. can do about it. You can watch below. The clip starts in the middle of things when one of the hosts, Buck Sexton, and I misunderstood each other slightly, but we worked it out.