Freedom in the Air
Mary Madigan
Via Yahoo:
Lebanese Government Resigns Amid ProtestsHooray! Unfortunately, everyone isn't happy about this. From the comments related to this news on Yahoo's message board:Lebanese Prime Minister Omar Karami announced the resignation of his pro-Syrian government Monday, two weeks after the assassination of his predecessor, Rafik Hariri, triggered protests in the streets and calls for Syria to withdraw its thousands of troops.
Bismilaahir-ArRahmaanhir-ArRahiimAnother commenter on the board responded with an anti-Arab slur, then said "the smell of freedom is in the air."Hariri was a man who not only had close ties to the U.S. and Bush, but he was paying millions of dollars in taxes to the U.S. government which has killed over 300,000 Arabs in the last 2 years alone.
In fact, despite the wars of aggression conducted by the U.S. against Arabs in the last 2 years, Hariri was still planning on building a mansion that would have necessitated his paying even more taxes to the U.S. government - taxes that are consistently being used to kill Muslims and Arabs world-wide.
Exactly what type of loyalty to Arabs, to Muslims, does such a person have if they are willing to shake hands with, do business with, and pay for the activities of those people who are harming and killing Muslims???
If you are protesting to get the current government removed in Lebanon then do so on the basis that their ties to Syria need to be made public and strengthened. Do not do so on the basis of the killing of a man who did not seem to have any real loyalty to his region and religion.
On the website Ecce Libano, in a post titled "Why am I not an Arab?", a Lebanese blogger discusses the relationship of Lebanon with the Arab world.
With the recent assassination of Lebanon's former Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, the topicality of Lebanon has resurfaced in academe and in the media, and the debates that had plagued Lebanese politics for the past 90 years of modern Lebanon's existence have re-emerged as areas of interest among analysts and visionaries of the impending New Middle East. This is so primarily because Lebanon, a unique Middle Eastern exercise in multi-ethnic coexistence - failed as it might have been in the eyes of some analysts- could serve as a valuable template for a re-emerging Iraq and a future, more coherent Middle East.more...
Hank Barnes
A friend of mine from Beirut was shaking in rage when he talked to me about Hariri's murder, and his hatred for the Syrian thug government. He told me he hoped America would invade because if America doesn't act to clean up the region, no one will. Lebanese protests against the Syrian government's murder have been heard around the world--and here are these hateful, racist scumbags who want to use it as another excuse to bash the current occupant of the White House.
Well, at least we know who the real anti-humanist reactionaries are these days.
Another Lebanese blogger from Across the Bay, has this comment:
"But let's see if the Syrians take to the streets. The Egyptians did it, the Iraqis did it, and the Lebanese did it, and the Syrians saw all of them do it. As Walid Jumblat put it: Democracy is "coming to our region." "There is no going back."
In that light, Stephen Green's advice is rather apt: "Don't worry about Washington, Baby Assad. Worry about Beirut -- and maybe Damascus."
I think if Assad retreats from Lebanon, his own rule in Syria will be a risk.
Should the democratic revolution succeed I expect we'll hear that Bush had nothing to to with it. They were going to fall anyway and it just happened to occur on his watch.
He may feel, from what he sees on CNN, that Bush is politcally weak and home and cannot afford another battlground.
I was struck by a recent Drudge report in which Putin asked Bush how he (Bush) could question Putin's firing of newspeople, when Bush fired those CBS reports - an Putin was serious.
It's a little scary when I read that and wonder what other myths are floating through our enemie's minds.
1) Assad very much appears to me to be a weakling who does whatever the Baathist thugs who are really in charge tell him what to do.
2) More substantively, they MIGHT make the assumptions you say but I'm not so sure. World opinion was that Bush was unpopular and weak at home and would be repudiated by voters--but Bush refused to back down on a single one of his foreign policy stances, and was re-elected easily. Furthermore, it's all well and good think the U.S. may be overextended, and it's quite another to consider whether you really believe that when over 100,000 of their troops are right next door to you.
I think you'd have to be insane to assume anything in those shoes, wouldn't you?
See my comment over at Roger L. Simon's re a similar discussion of freedom is in the air.
We may be witnessing a "tipping point." Scroll up to the main topic and browse the comments.
We need a blogswarm now to support the Iranian people:
I sincerely hope you are right. But people can do unpredictable things and not always in their best interests. Look at the assasination of Hariri.
I seems the Syrians were behind it and now it has blown up in their faces - so to speak. It was clearly not a smart move. Have they learned their lesson or will them make another miscalculation.
They are sailing in uncharted waters. People that are lost can sometimes flail around and make things worse.
Tyrantical regimes are used to being, well, tyrantical. It is all they know.
If Assad folds like a house of cards, excellent. In the meantime I will hope for the best while preparing for the worst.
I'm not at all convinced that Assad is in the driver's seat here. The recidivist hold-overs from his father's regime, I suspect, are the ones really calling the shots.
Unfortunately for the Syrians, they're the ones who called the shots in Hama, in the early 1980s, when they leveled a city, killing about 20,000 in doing so, to take care of a particular threat. That the threat was from the Muslim Brotherhood may somewhat justify it, but it was still 20K people killed, as mostly collateral damage, on government orders.
I wouldn't be suprised to see a repetition of that, though it would be much harder to accomplish now, than 20 years ago.
Still, Syria has about the worst Internet penetration in the world. The gov't can cut phone communications with a snap of a finger, including cell phones. It would take a while for news of an outrage to travel around the country, never mind the world.
I suspect, though, that in the end the Syrian people would not put up with another Hama. There's too much freedom in the air. And this time, with US troops already on their borders, they could expect something beyond "moral support" were they to attempt an overthrow.
The problem in Syria, though, is that the Ba'athists, with all their criminal faults, have succeeded in keeping most terrorists inactive within the country. By strongly supressing Sunni extremists, they have guaranteed life, if not freedom, for all of the heterodox sects of Islam and Christianity. Those minorities will be in dire straits if the government collapses into a void; a far worse situation than pertains in Iraq.
We need to be careful just what we hope for.
Thanks. I agree - the Ecce Libano piece has a lot of important facts about Arabization.
For instance, there’s this:
"I know that a lot of you are going to jump ten miles high to argue that (according to Arab Nationalists, of the Saddam and Assad persuasion) Arabism is rigorously secular.."
"Landis maintains that:
"The whole notion of a “secular” Ba`th [the main political exponent of Arabism and Arab nationalism. L-N,] needs correcting. Ba`thism is often referred to as a secular movement and non-religious version of Arab nationalism, but this just isn’t true... Ba`thism [...] is a transcendent faith... `Aflaq was so adamant about placating Muslim and religious sensibilities that he became known among his friends as Muhammad `Aflaq (and indeed he converted to Islam before his death). His genius lay in his ability to align Ba`thism with Islam."
The notion that Baathism is entirely ‘secular’ and the notion that Baathism is opposed to ‘Islamist’ terrorism is entirely false. Islamists and Baathists work together, and they have been working together for a long time.
Baathists and Islamist ‘insurgents’ fight side by side in Iraq, Syria supports Islamist terrorism in their war against Israel. The Islamists and the Baathists are both working towards the same end, Arabization.
Inspired by their imperial dreams of Arabization, Baathists/Islamists oppress Christians, Lebanese, Persians, Kurds. Like the Saudis, Syrians try to keep terrorists inactive in their country by exporting them.
We hope for their defeat. We know exactly what we’re hoping for.
But when it comes to power politics, they were not adverse to using whatever tools--from Communism, anti-colonialism, terror or religion--were available.
Even in Iraq, the Ba'ath Party gained the religious minorities' allegence because it promised them--and delivered--religious autonomy. The various Christian sects all signed up on the Ba'ath list to avoid oppression from the majority, which happened to be Shi'a.
Syria was more complicated because it contains just about every Christian or Muslim heresy that ever came down the pike. One of those heterodox sects, the Alawis, came to power with Asad and did extend protection to those who feared oppression by the majority; here, Sunnis.
Landis simply gets his facts wrong on this point.
The Syrians have been happy to use terror as a long-arm of politics, letting various Palestinian break-off groups (PFLP-GC, for instance) to keep their enemies destablilized while maintaining a veneer of deniability. Their neighbors--Israel, of course, but also the Lebanese, Turks, and Iraqis--knew what Syria was up to, but short of declaring war (or, as the Turks once did, threatening to cut off the flow of the Euphrates River via Turkish dams), there wasn't a lot they could do. [Parenthetically, there's a great, unwritten history of political assassinations, conducted around the world, that all center on Syria, as the ultimate perpetrator or victim.]
The Muslim/Arab commenter on Yahoo was also making the same point when he/she slandered Hariri, saying:
Exactly what type of loyalty to Arabs, to Muslims, does such a person have if they are willing to shake hands with, do business with, and pay for the activities of those people who are harming and killing Muslims???
The question is, what are we fighting in the Middle East? Terrorism is, of course, just a symptom of the problem. The actions of the Syrians, and of the 'insurgents' in Iraq show that we're fighting a Ba'thist/Islamist alliance.
Lebanese, Kurds, and Israelis have known about this alliance for years. They know more than we do. We should listen to them.
Knowing what we know, depending on the 'secular' Ba'thists to fight the Islamists would be pretty absurd, wouldn't it.